This blog is being reorganised, please bear with me while I move material around.
Blog post: Getting the Institutional Hiccups
Blog post: Getting the Institutional Hiccups
A very light overview written for Turn On Art, a new blog launched recently by Ivory Press.
Review: What Are You Doing, Drawing? at Nile Sunset ANnex
Review: What Are You Doing, Drawing? at Nile Sunset ANnex
Review of What Are You Doing, Drawing? at Nile Sunset Annex, Garden City, Cairo, 23 Feb-23 March 2013, for Contemporary And. The review didn’t have space to say that the NSA folks also commissioned a series of sound works in response to each piece in the show, launched on 22 March.
Dogs Devouring Horses
للعربية انظر أدناه . ترجمه إلى العربية: محمد عبدالله
Short discussion of four works by Runa Islam, written for Hamle/The Move catalogue curated by Başak Senova at Arter, Istanbul, October 2012.
In Runa Islam’s Cabinet of Prototypes the camera roves over shelves of objects, almost as if it is searching for something for you to look at. There are few clues as to what this tangle of leggy, sinuous and awkward frameworks in brass and plastic and wood, is for. Occasionally one is singled out, and it becomes a little clearer: they are display stands for museum objects, with small, illegible string tags referring presumably to what they support rather than anything intrinsic. A prototype, in the strict etymological sense, is defined as a ‘first’ or ‘primitive’ form. For these objects, dependent as their form is on the specific qualities of other, highly valued objects, there is no possibility of a Platonic ideal. This slightly pathetic existence is touchingly underscored by their postures, often with their ‘arms’ thrust upwards appealingly, or slouched like adolescents, as if they’re aware of their subordinate status.
Notes on Rana ElNemr’s Giza Threads
للعربية انظر أدناه . ترجمه إلى العربية: محمد عبدالله
Scroll down for Arabic, thanks to Mohammed Abdallah for translation
On reading Rana ElNemr’s statement in Townhouse Gallery I first asked myself ‘what is a thread?’ ‘what is a flow?’ and her interview with Helen Stuhr-Rommereim goes a long way to clarify that. ElNemr realised that her seemingly-random, in-between-proper-projects photographs had an inner thread or logic of their own. This she began analysing, seeking out, and then following up consciously as a photographer. This is the key quote:
‘I had these currents that I followed — something like the tourist route. I would see where the buses went, which routes they took, and follow them. [...] Another was trying to map bureaucracy. When I went to renew my driver’s license, for example, I had to go from one building to another. I went back and retraced those steps, looking for moments of interruption.’
Review of ‘Material’ – Iman Issa solo exhibition at Rodeo, Istanbul
First published in Frieze 2011. Many thanks to Mohammed Abdallah for Arabic translation and Doa Aly for Arabic copyediting. للنص العربي انظر أسفل الصفحة شكر خاص للمترجم محمد عبدالله وللمراجعة دعاء علي
Iman Issa’s exhibition ‘Material’, developed a critical position around monuments quite different to that of the ‘anti-monument’. Anti-monuments, after all, are now part of the mainstream. The British public, for example, not only instantly grasped the critical thrust of the unassuming, feminized, interactive aspects of the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain (2004) in Hyde Park, London, but also fully and instinctively grasped the failures of this very criticality. Monument and anti-monument have a complementary relationship that completes a circle and constitutes – as is the fate of all subversions – only the expansion of a language. Issa maintains her parallel relationship to this language by producing, not monuments or anti-monuments but ‘material for’ sculptures that might address the failings of, or apply alternative possibilities for, existing monuments.
Iman Issa, 'Material for a sculpture recalling the destruction of a prominent public monument in the name of national resistance' 2011. Image courtesy of Rodeo Gallery
Curator with a capital C or Dilettante with a Small d
A response to Greenhouse Tomatoes and Outdoor Tomatoes by Maria Lind in the Attitudes section of The Exhibitionist issue 3, in which she discusses the conditions and tendencies of curatorial education; this response published in issue 4, May 2011.
A convenient generation divide in curating is easily observed, or at least frequently invoked, between those who began curating before the emergence of curatorial programs and those who did so after. Curators advanced in their careers are often heard pronouncing in panel discussions that they never undertook a curatorial program, with the implication that they are proof positive of the superfluity of curatorial education. What is rarely asked in these situations is, had curatorial programs been available at the sprouting of these careers, whether at least some of them might have given it a go?
On Doa Aly’s A Tress of Hair
Written for the Indicated by Signs – Contested Public Space, Gendered Bodies, and Hidden Sites of Trauma in Contemporary Visual Art Practices, eds hamzamolnar, a publication accompanying a group curatorial project of the same name. للغة العربية حرك الماوس لأسفل The bilingual publication will be launched in Cairo on 31st October 2010. Arabic translation (below) courtesy of Lina Attalah and hamzamolnar, with many thanks.
Doa Aly, still from 'A Tress of Hair' (2008) 12'43"
Some images: my cat’s tufty little forelegs are a source of great comfort to me, planted either side of her fat furry stomach. I can barely keep my mind off her for more than a few minutes, particularly given her constant determination to walk across my keyboard. Yet before I can give her insistent paws yet another shove, I’m involuntarily recalling the knees of a horse I saw today in the middle of a market lane, shivering and cringing like a shy supermodel caught in the drizzle. And from that there is the image of a pair of camel legs cut off at the knee, standing neatly and horrifically alone in the unpaved alley as though the rest of the animal had just chosen to detach them and walk away on the stumps.
Stand, I Don’t: an interview with Charles Esche
An interview conducted between de Appel Curatorial Programme 2008/2009 and Charles Esche, Director of the Van Abbemuseum, edited by me. Published 2010 in the anthology Curating and The Educational Turn, eds Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson.
Mia Jankowicz:
When I worked in a small space in South London, my colleague, who was coordinator for education, did a youth workshop about protest. It was themed around participation, speaking up, the right to self expression, and so on. The participants were about ten years old and included a lot of kids with a tendency to misbehave, and the workshop went pretty well. At the end, they were asked to make protest placards, really nice wooden signs with their messages on them. out of all of them, the best one was cryptic and seemed very ‘conceptual’. It said:
And also, what of the sheet? – on Frances Stark
Essay commissioned for catalogue accompanying But what of Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet?, solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary.
Frances Stark, Readying for Reflection. Vinyl paint, collage on panel, 36 × 62 in, 2006.
And also, what of the sheet? - on Frances Stark
But what of Frances Stark, standing by itself, a naked name, bare as a ghost to whom one would like to lend a sheet? does a lot of things as an exhibition title. It is a title and a proposal for a title, a discussion of the idea that ’Frances Stark’ on its own might need some help. It is not as coy as one might think; had the show just been called ‘Frances Stark’ – the title would go uncommented-upon, so it provokes a discussion of the very translucency a sheet might cover up. Continue reading
