Studio visit Martha Colburn

The stop-motion animator takes a brief pause.
By T.J. Carlin

Can you talk about how you make your work, and especially how you come up with your narratives?
I study my topics closely for a year or two, and the scenes take shape. I read historical documents, poetry, watch specific films, talk to people and daydream a lot. In my recent stop-action war film Triumph of the Wild, I take apart 400 years of battles in ten minutes. The film is about lessons not learned and the redemption and regeneration of the human spirit in war. It’s about the invisible line between man and animal. I think it was Hemingway who once said the biggest game is man.

This setup you have here with pieces of glass and cutouts—is that for your films?
Yes, it’s assembled out of found things, mostly, and it’s a 2-and-a-half-D stop-action-animation stand. It’s three layers of auto glass screwed vertically on a table with space between for my hands to reach in and move the artwork, and above it are scrolls and wires hanging for aerial action. Flat paper puppets and other stuff float on the glass and in the air by means of “magic,” and I film it frame by frame on 16mm.

You also make paintings, installations, Polaroids, etc. What’s the relationship, for you, between that approach to working and animation?
All of the work I make gets sucked into or is a result of my stop-action films. My material has a specific order informed by its journey through the films. Some things survive, others not. Sometimes, I’ll make a stunt-double version of a paper puppet (or five) which can suffer any number of mutilations, while leaving the “star” unscathed. Just like in reality, only in paper.

You often incorporate live performance into the screening of your films. When did you start doing this and why?
I’ve been doing live shows with shadows and color filters and multiprojector shows since the mid-’90s. When I’m filming, I’m working at a rate of, like, one second of film per hour. When I finish, I want to create in real time, or even better: double real time, and be my animated “self.” I call together my musician friends who work on my soundtracks, and we play together. When I show in some small town, I’ll invite a high-school band or random people to play.

What do you have upcoming that you are excited about?
I’m excited about my next film, of course! I’ll enjoy my summer inside making art for my next film in wonderful “Asthma Alley,” otherwise known as Long Island City (no thank you, Con Edison).

Colburn’s work is on view in “White Noise” at James Cohan Gallery.

Julika Rudelius

Go see when in Amsterdam !!!
Absolute brilliant video!!!!
more info http://www.rudelius.org/
may 30 - july 4

Eylem Aladogan wins volkskrant art prize

this in my opinion completely justified!!
For more info: Gallery Fons Welters amsterdam
The interview is in Dutch, I´m sorry...

Joep Van Liefland at AMP, Greece

‘Video Palace’ is an open-ended artwork, which the artist has been installing in different locations (art spaces but also the public realm) since 2002 and is based on two activities of the artist: the creation of a massive video collection and the production of his own films, where the protagonist is mostly himself. Van Liefland’s video collection spans from B to Z movies: erotic, horror to promotional tapes for companies, travel, pet movies, propaganda and informational films.

For his own films, Van Liefland uses the iconography of the videos he collects but breaks down their format in order to produce new meaning and reflect thus on the medium. In his own words, his films are ‘poetic de-reconstructions’ of existing media.

His paintings are also referential to the media culture. They deal with serial commodities which were originally produced for media storage and have been transformed. Van Liefland has a has a great interest in media that shift from new to avant-garde commodities and end up being anonymous. His paintings could be seen as mechanically assembled reproductions of serial commodities.

Afterlife is an archaeology, an exploration of the territory of the video medium. Released from any nostalgic concerns, Van Liefland’s work reveals its deep concern in the multifaceted existence of video: its technical development, distribution, content of films, its copy element, its different market segments, the stores and its contextual relation to art.

Crucial to Van Liefland is what the artist calls ‘media-entropy’, a term which refers to the media formats which are in decay. ‘Media-entropy’ refers to the transformations on information, on a cultural level but also to the physicality of the media – video is bound to the body and the changes in infrastructure – video shops and rentals that are gradually disappearing

berlin gallery weekend

norbert schwontowski, robert rauschenberg, georg herold, Amy Sillman, carsten höller, erik van der weijde, geerten verheus.

Luc Tuymans Wiels gallery Brussels

The first solo show of Antwerp-born Luc Tuymans in Brussels’ Wiels gallery presents 22 new paintings, created by the artist especially for this show, in world premiere. This show, titled Against the Day, is the third and last part of a triptych that began with the series Les Revenants, which was referring to the power of the Jesuit Order and Forever. The Management of Magic, which was about the Walt Disney phenomenon. The show will be running until August 2, 2009.

In these new paintings, Tuymans continues his research on virtual reality, utopia and visual language and focuses more specifically on virtual images without any sense of reality. The artist thus expands his work on the illusion and the manipulation of images with new painted proposals.

Luc Tuymans is considered one of the most significant and influential contemporary painters working today. He is one of the key figures of a new generation of figurative painters who have continued to paint during a time when many believed the medium had lost its relevance. In the context of the new information age, many artists felt that painting was a deeply conservative form of expression which did not match the heterogeneous nature of contemporary experience. Tuymans' work specifically addresses the challenge of the inadequacy and 'belatedness', as he puts it, of painting.

Tuymans was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1958 and began to study fine art in 1976. He concentrated on painting but in the early 1980s he lost faith in the medium and gave up for two years. During this time he worked as a film-maker, and when he returned to painting in the mid-1980s, he introduced new techniques such as cropping, close-ups, framing and sequencing, which remain key elements of his work today.Luc Tuymans.

Tuymans' work is a vast repository of data, drawn from photography, television and film, combining a range of different styles and subject matter. His subjects range from major historical events, such as the Holocaust or the politics of the Belgian Congo, to the inconsequential and banal -wallpaper patterns, Christmas decorations, everyday objects.

Tuymans' range of imagery deliberately resists categorization. Events and ideas are not expressed explicitly, but implied through subtle hints and allusions, creating an ambiguous collage of disconnected fragments and details

Michaël Borremans - Kestnergesellschaft Hannover (DE)

The Belgian artist Michaël Borremans (born 1963) has made a name for himself internationally with his paintings and drawings. In recent years Borremans has increasingly worked with the medium of film. In the framework of his solo exhibition in the kestnergesellschaft, an extensive series of his filmic works will be presented, in addition to new paintings and selected drawings.

Michaël Borremans’ work spans a wide arc through the resonance chamber of art history all the way to the present. His painterly, graphic or filmic works present situations of human alienation and isolation, triggered by visible or imagined influences of power. He works here with the depiction of individual persons or groups which seem to be isolated in certain actions or rituals. Upon close scrutiny or through filmic repetition, the scenes become picture puzzles. Borremans’ works may also be read as possible commentaries on visual phenomena of the present which, in their impulse towards legibility, are increasingly coming to resemble each other and are thereby becoming inscrutable.

The graphic works of Michaël Borremans serve as the formal basis for his films, which may be designated as tableaux vivants because of their stage-like and performative aspects. Through a slowly-scanning camera movement, a concentrated and intense atmosphere is built up. With slow zooms, he directs the attention of the viewer to parts of the setting such as faces, bodies and pieces of clothing. Borremans’ films, just like his paintings and drawings, balance between an everyday reality of the ordinary and unfathomable, parallel worlds. In the kestnergesellschaft, his filmic works from the last three years will be shown as 35mm and 16mm spatial projections as well as screen presentations.

Just like his films, Borremans’ paintings live from a pronounced emphasis on light, color and dimension. This method makes numerous references to the paintings of the old masters. In the kestnergesellschaft, new paintings from 2008 and 2009 will be displayed.

Elspeth Diederix-Museum Jan Cunen 5-4-2009 - 28-6-2009 (NL)

"In her work, Elspeth strips everyday objects of their logical form or function and introduces them into a new and surreal world. She brings every variety of material and human character into view in such a way that causes them to lose their original meaning and take on a new one. The illusory image becomes stronger because the objects depicted seem to be suspended in an introverted dream world."

Akram Zaatari at Kunstverein München

In his work the artist Akram Zaatari examines the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon’s postwar society, dedicating parts of his research to the phenomenon of the national resistance movements, as well as underlining the inaccurate representation of territorial conflicts within the media.

As co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, collecting, archiving and analysing the visual history of an uneven modernity in the Middle East forms the basis of Zaatari´s work.

Akram Zaatari´s artistic practice is an ongoing study of historical photographic documents, and their relationship to personal histories - confronting personal with historical political events.

The short film “Saida June 6th 1982” for example, is an animated collage of photos, which Zaartari – when he was just 16 years old – took on the first day of the Israeli invasion from the balcony of his parents’ house. Often his chosen form of presentation can be read as a parable for the political and cultural shifts taking place in Beirut and across the Middle East.

Akram Zaatari (*1966 Saida, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut. He has been showing his work in solo exhibitions (2007, Art Basel; 2005, Grey Art Gallery, New York; 2004 Portikus, Frankfurt; 2002, Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels) and group exhibitions (2008, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; 2007, 52. Biennale, Venice; 2006, Sao Paulo Biennale, Gwangju Biennale,Korea; Sydney Biennale).

Akram Zaatari at Kunstverein München. Munich, Germany, March 27, 2009. Video by Gürsoy Dogtas.

Guido van der Werve-museum de Hallen Haarlem NL

The Dutch artist Guido van der Werve (Papendrecht, 1977) has built an oeuvre of short films in which Van der Werve himself stars. Some of his films show him performing actions in the tradition of the performance art of the 1970s. For 'Nummer acht' (2007), for example, the artist walked out in front of an icebreaker on a frozen arctic sea, and for 'Nummer negen' (2007), Van der Werve stood for exactly 24 hours on the geographic North Pole. Van der Werve portrays a typical Romantic hero in these works: the solitary figure tempting fate by physically subjecting himself to the whims of Nature, in order to experience an intensification of reality.

In the current exhibition, Van der Werve’s latest, most ambitious film, 'Nummer twaalf' (2009), takes centre stage. This film revolves around three unsolvable ‘infinity questions’, which are dealt with in three separate scenes: the romantic King’s Gambit, a chess opening; tuning a piano; and counting the stars in the night sky. The artist filmed these scenes at three locations which symbolise these ‘grand’ subjects: the legendary Marshall Chess Club in Manhattan (where illustrious players like Bobby Fischer and Marcel Duchamp were once members), the active volcano Mount St. Helens in the north-western US and the San Andreas Fault in California. As in a number of earlier films, the ‘sublime landscape’ once again plays an important role in 'Nummer twaalf'.

While classical music always had an emphatic presence in the earlier films, in 'Nummer twaalf', the artist has found an inventive way to integrate the music with the work itself. Basing himself on a personally developed transcription of chess notation into musical notation, Van der Werve constructed a unique ‘chess piano’. In this chess board on top of a piano mechanism, each of the 64 squares of the game board simultaneously serves as a piano key. The moves made during a game of chess are automatically turned into notes, resulting in a composition. As a result, the game of chess played by Van der Werve and a Grandmaster, which serves as one of the film’s leitmotivs, literally produces its own musical score.

The artist seems to be looking for ways to ‘re-enchant’ the world – to effect minor, personal miracles that allow us to briefly escape our hum-drum everyday life and see the world with a fresh sense of wonder. As such he is a representative of a tendency in contemporary art, in which the artist – after a period of impersonal, analytical deconstruction of reality – once again explicitly becomes ‘author’ and the producer of personal and emotional experiences.

Besides 'Nummer twaalf' and the chess piano, the exhibition includes two other films from the museum collection, 'Nummer vier' (2005) and 'Nummer zes' (2006), which have strong thematic and formal ties with 'Nummer twaalf'. These films also make use of long shots and slow camera movements, for instance, and music plays an important role.

Iris van Dongen stedelijk museum schiedam NL

Iris van Dongen (Tilburg, 1975, lives and works in Berlin) is a snake-charmer in art. Her work evokes soft sounds, but also a suspicion of furtive danger. She creates painterly drawings that are dominated by women: monumental, multicoloured and mysterious.
With dual layers of pastels and charcoal over one another, Van Dongen evokes gorgeous heroines in a shadowy environment. They could be sisters or, to put it more imaginatively, modern descendants of the goddesses from classical mythology: eternally young, beautiful and strong, and adorned with the allure of a (tragic) princess, even in their sorrow.
Moreover, reflections of the present day and current surroundings converge with memories of romantic or symbolic painting from the nineteenth century, by English Pre-Raphaelites such as John Everett Millais and Viennese Jugendstil artists such as Gustave Klimt. But even with their entire wealth of history, her women are clearly ambassadors of the twenty-first century.
In a period of five years, between 2003 and 2009, they have developed from melancholy girls to emancipated celebrities, who seem to have stepped directly out of a film noir and subsequently perform as pin-ups. Whereas they once let their minds drift away, as endearing figureheads of gothic subculture, clad in black-and-white sweatbands and scarves covered in skulls, they now stand tall and unflinching before the public: as magical creatures with red flash-light eyes, who can indulge in living dragons as amulets and allow a tangle of snakes to twine around their legs.
These femmes fatales are mistress of themselves, nature and the beast in mankind. At the same time, the snake is their weapon, their jewel and their alter ego. The title given by Van Dongen in 2008 to the series of drawings is Suspicious, and it immediately sounds as if the snake himself is speaking. His hissing ensures us that one cannot mock these heroines, alert and self-conscious as they are. They are the high-priestesses of women-power.
Although Van Dongen's work is appealingly well drawn, delicately coloured and richly decorated almost to the point of decadence, that duality of worlds consistently recurs. The seductive and the treacherous are willing bedfellows. Just as the king, queen and jack are duplicated as inverted busts on playing cards, and on tarot cards the fabulous figures lend themselves for an abundance of interpretations, Van Dongen's drawings are replete with contrast: inner and outer, light and dark, life and death, all revelling in a continuous role-play.
Night has Fallen (2005) displays a young girl cloaked by shadow, carrying her heart in her hands, as if she is offering it – perhaps to us, her public, perhaps to a lover who is out of the picture. Elsewhere she advances side by side with death, in works with significant titles such as She is the Night (2004). Here, she emerges from a garden in which a skull can be seen in the leaves of the trees, as in a vision. Her hypnotizing gaze reinforces the feeling that she is situated in a twilight zone, halfway between the present-day and the hereafter, where a skull is more of an object than a symbol; it is more of a creature, like a snake.
The skull, the snake and the devil. In the latest work, Mephisto appears on the scene, sometimes in the background as a sculptural decoration near to a seated woman, but also in person. We see him half dancing with a woman who is hanging in his arms, drowsy with sleep. Their loose embrace is tender, with elegant gestures, and the threat of a cruel twist of fate hangs eternally above them. The drawing entitled Echo (2008) sublimates a moment in time: the indivisible oneness of light and dark. Or, in the words of Van Dongen: ‘It is as if the woman's spirit has become visible next to her body.' With the skull, the snake and the devil, she has life and death walk side by side in all her drawings, as do good and evil. ‘Because that is simply the way we live: with our demons in and around us.'

To accompany the exhibition Iris van Dongen. Suspicious. Drawings 2003 – 2009 a catalogue with a wide selection of the drawings will be published in conjunction with BnM Uitgevers. This book, with an essay by Sacha Bronwasser, will be available in the Museum Shop for € 25.

Quote taken from a conversation between the author and the artist in her studio in Berlin, 13 November 2008



Iris van Dongen. Suspicious
Tekeningen 2003 – 2009
25 januari – 10 mei 2009