The program Urban Research, curated by Klaus W. Eisenlohr for Directors Lounge 2012, reaches beyond the genre “city films”. Contemporary artists are engaged in local politics, they are concerned with specific urban problems and developments, and they are directly interacting with the public with performances and public interventions. Due to rapid changes of urban environment, place is no more a reliable urban structure connected with consistency and collective memory. Place must be reinvented and newly defined over and over, and this does not only apply for spaces of temporary use. Public space in the sense of social interchange and interaction — as well as just a space free to use — is not a given opportunity any more, which can be taken for granted. International artists address these themes and issues with a variety of forms, experimental, documentary, abstract, and narrative; they intervene directly or they show there visions of public space, and a new urban landscape. For the festival presentation all screening media (besides 35mm projection) and art-related projects are welcome.

Urban Research 2012 will be first presented at Directors Lounge 9–19 February 2012. The program has also been presented internationally in screenings in London, Mannheim, Hannover, Poznan, Freiburg, Essen, Dordrecht, Senigallia, St. Petersburg and Berlin.

We want your work! Please use the online submission form (required!)

And please send your work including 2 video stills to Klaus W. Eisenlohr, Urban Research, Osnabrücker Str. 25, D-10589 Berlin, Germany; klaus [at] richfilm.de

Urban Research 2012 will first be presented at the media art festival Directors Lounge in February 2012.

Nothing Beside Remains is a suite of commissioned public projects, presented by LAND, opening in September 2011 and continuing into 2012. This LAND 1.0 exhibition is sited in Marfa, Texas — rural town of 1,800 residents and a site of seminal art historical import — and features new commissions ranging from large-scale installations to discreet interventions.

Integrated into the boundless West Texas landscape, and connected by the thematic evoked in the exhibition’s titular reference, P.B. Shelley’s Ozymandias, these projects address the beauty and poetry in decay, the inevitable decline of the monumental, and the fleeting presence of legacy in the face of the erosion of time.

This weekend will include performances and programming by exhibiting artists, selected screenings, and guided tours of the exhibition.

Participating artists include Andrea Bowers, Sarah Cain, Sue de Beer, Rob Fischer, Karl Haendel, Ry Rocklen, Mungo Thomson, and Garth Weiser.

For more information on the Nothing Beside Remains Weekend, including a continually updated schedule of activities and information about travel to Marfa and local lodging, please visit here.

About LAND:

LAND was founded in 2009 by Director/Curator Shamim M. Momin, former contemporary curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art, as a non-profit public art organization committed to curating site- and situation-specific contemporary art projects. For more information on LAND, please visit www.nomadicdivision.org.

City Within the City — presented in Seoul, South Korea, and Melbourne, Australia, two of the world’s most urbanized centres — seeks to uncover and interweave fictional, composite, fabricated and re-purposed narratives where human subjectivity encounters the built environment.

City Within the City acknowledges cities and urban areas as a prevalent way of life for a large portion of the world’s population today. Approaching cities not as mere statistical entities, this exhibition examines the issues that arise from regarding them as agglomerations of people established over time. As such, they can be experienced as sites of reciprocal action between built environments — historically, geographically and administratively determined — where human subjectivities appear in constant physical, psychological and intellectual reconfiguration.

This first version of City Within the City presented at Artsonje Center, reflects Seoul’s urban structure. The dynamic metropolis Seoul has become bears traces from the impact of industrialization, the devastation of the Korean War, reconstruction under postwar and Cold War regimes, and its emergence as a world presence due to economic growth. These complex factors influence the dynamics specific to the commercial and industrialized zones of Seoul. Increasingly contained within these governmentally and politically demarcated areas, what possibilities for creativity, transgression and resistance exist for the human body, imagination and memory?

City Within the City charts the remembered, fictional, expected and resisted cities as they are publicly and privately negotiated by the individual. Questioning the consequences of and presenting alternatives to formal governmental configurations of city development, several works in the exhibition provide resources and open platforms to reconsider urban spaces as increasingly active sites for creative investigation and transgression.

The works featuring in City Within the City adopt parallel and tangential ways to address different points of friction, misalignments, and moments open to re-imagining existing circumstances. Through this process, the exhibition offers itself as a site for widening the possibilities for engagement with the cities within our cities.

City Within the City @ Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne :: August 17-September 22, 2012 :: 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy VIC 3065 Australia.

ARTISTS

Abraham CRUZVILLEGAS, Nayla DABAJI and Ziad BITAR, Alicia FRANKOVICH, Emil GOH, Jinyeoul JUNG and Changmo AHN, Yeondoo JUNG, Ash KEATING, KIM Beom, Jooyoung LEE, Minouk LIM, Listen to the City, Andrew MCQUALTER, Part-time Suite, Hyunsuk SEO, Haegue YANG, Jun YANG, Suyeon YUN and Jinyoung KOH

CURATORIUM

Sunjung Kim, Claudia Pestana, Hyejin Lim (SAMUSO) with Alexie Glass-Kantor, Emily Cormack (Gertrude Contemporary)

Urban innovation can mean or refer to many things and there’s no shortage of ideas about how to make cities better. As the theory and more deterministic ‘forecasting’ goes, cities must get better if they are to foster and sustain the types of globalised knowledge and creative economies that will underwrite the future. However, there can be both disagreement and diversity in how to understand what better and development actually mean in and for the urban environments.

Two recent Australian publications reveal some of that diversity by presenting a series of case studies in community engagement, site specificity and place. Edited by Elaine Lally, Ien Ang and Kay Anderson, The Art of Engagement: Culture, Collaboration and Innovation presents results and reflections on C3West, a project that formulated unique arts-business-community collaborations in Western Sydney. Place Making for People: Case studies in delivering community expectations, compiled by the Place Leaders Association, presents major urban developments in Australia and overseas that have sought to recast planning and community engagement paradigms.

Arcipelago Balkani: An Alternative Map, published by Silvana Editoriale and curated by Claudia Zanfi, offers an alternative journey through the ‘New Balkans’, featuring an analysis of the city’s contemporary cultural life and that of the people in this youthful melting pot, through the eyes of both artists and writers.

Public Dialogues Conference: A dialogue with and mapping of the independent cultural scene in Bosnia: ABART, the Abrasevic Cultural Centre, Mostar; the Biennial of Konjic and Kultzona; the MUM Collective, Mostar Urban Movement, Mostar; CID, Center for Informative Decontamination, Banja Luka; Tac.ka, the Prijedor Artists’ Association; the Duplex Gallery, Sarajevo; etc.

The Open City exhibition includes: Marina Abramovic, Albanian Pavillion, Alterazioni Video, Balkan Depot / Tomislav Tarek, Pavel Braila, Yane Calovski, Danica Dakic, Calin Dan, Biljana Djurdjevic, Group Elementi (Biljana Isijanin & Ljupco Isijanin), Thomas Hirschhorn, Hristina Ivanovska, Armin Linke, Rasa Todosijevic – Marinela Kozelj, Borjana Mrdja, Oliver Musovik, Vladimir Nikolic, Damir Niksic, Adrian Paci, Antonio Petrov, Tadej Pogacar, Stefano Romano, Massimo Sciacca, Shoba, Igor Sovilj, Biljana Stefanovska, TooA / Cogni – De Mattia, Zaneta Vangeli, and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss.

Interventions will be made by:

Dunja Blazevic, director of SCCA, Sarajevo;
Daniele Onori, culture manager of the Italian Embassy, Sarajevo;
Igor Sovilj, artist and cultural activist, Prijedor;
Claudia Zanfi, director of aMAZElab Art&Cultures, Milan.

The ARCIPELAGO BALKANI journey thus completes its fourth and final step. After the site-specific projects presented in the town of Modena (Italy), Skopje (Macedonia) and Tirana (Albania), our tour comes to its end in Sarajevo (Bosnia Herzegovina). 20 years after the outbreak of war in the Balkans, (Summer 1991) the project sets out to plot a path no longer through the past – with all its scenes of war and destruction – but to the future of this huge and youthful melting pot which the Balkan area currently represents.

Thus, an opportunity to discuss and create the future together.

Credits:

Project: aMAZElab Art&Cultures, Milan
Original idea and Art Director: Claudia Zanfi
In collaboration with: Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA); Open Society Foundation.
With contributions from: the European Union Culture Commission; The Italian Embassy, Sarajevo; Emilia Romagna Regional Government, Bureau for Cultural Promotion Abroad.
With the patronage of MiBAC, Ministero Beni Artistici e Culturali, Rome
Media Partners: Artribune; Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso; Teknemedia; Studio Pesci.

ph. Igor Sovilj, Mostar Old Bridge Revisited , 2010, courtesy the artist and aMAZElab, Milano

Magnetic Cities – Tallinn is part of a new group of works by German sound artist Christina Kubisch in which she creates portraits of cities using photographs and electromagnetic sounds. Visitors to the photographic installation receive an audio guide, with which they can select and listen to the sound landscape for any given image. The images are not chosen for their touristic attraction but, rather, for their acoustic qualities. We hear the normally inaudible electromagnetic fields of a particular place; Kubisch causes these fields to resonate using specially developed headphones with a built-in induction coil. The resulting sounds can then be played back via the audio guide. The city center of Tallinn, with its staged romantic historical atmosphere, is suddenly overwhelmed with harsh sounds of wireless frequencies; the shopping malls are accompanied by loud beats; and the familiar bus station is filled with strange sounds that seem to come from a science fiction movie. The sounds have a strangely alien effect when connected with an image; they make it seem foreign, often discomfiting. Unlike its role in the classic museum visit, where an audio guide provides explanations for the works on display, here it confronts the visitor with unaccustomed acoustic information about the image, and thus with new associations and perceptual experiences. The visitor is challenged to rediscover the city as a magnetic site.

Tallinn Wall is a physical manifestation of the invisible city all around us, a poetic snapshot of social networking traffic from within a ten kilometer radius of the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn. The artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead manually manufacture a collision between electronic public space and the physical public space of the museum.

In a performance that will last a couple of days, the artists collect and select publicly available status updates from popular websites like Twitter and Facebook. These will then be published as a vast array of standard sized posters and pasted onto a wall in the museum’s foyer, revealing the idle mutterings of ourselves to ourselves as a form of concrete poetry.

Thomson & Craighead work with live digital information, which they manipulate and transfer from its virtual form into a physical manifestation. Tallinn Wall represents a kind of data landscape that is usually not seen outside the digital realm. The artists’ goal is to investigate the interaction of electronic communication and physical space. The installation reflects the live online chats that take place during a certain period of time within a specific geographical space and illuminates the diverse cultural backgrounds of Tallinn’s inhabitants.

PLAND finds its inspiration in a legacy of pioneers, entrepreneurs, homesteaders, artists, and other counterculturalists who – through both radical and mundane activities – reclaim and reframe a land-based notion of the American Dream. While producing open-ended experimental projects that facilitate sustainability, collaboration, and hyper-local engagement, PLAND is a constantly evolving artists outpost in the New Mexican high desert. Participants are encouraged to marry survival-based goals with big ideas and experimental methods through project-based residencies and work parties. People can do amazing things when supported and encouraged in new contexts and there is no context like that of the Taos mesa. Part alternative school, part laboratory, part homestead, part art studio, PLAND is an active solution for merging art into life.

PLAND, 2010 from PLAND.

Want more? Listen here.

Your body of work is Olafur Eliasson’s first solo exhibition in South America. Conceived by the Danish/Icelandic artist especially for, and in response to, the Brazilian city, the exhibition features ten site-specific installations that invite the public to experience the perception of colour, spatial orientation and other forms of engagement with reality.

Eliasson’s work will fill three venues in São Paulo: the SESC cultural centers in Pompeia and Belenzinho, in the west and east of the city, and the Pinacoteca do Estado, a hundred year old state-run museum downtown. “The exhibition proposes a grid of experiences based on a temporary geography for São Paulo, creating a series of narratives that converge in the viewer’s experience,” says Jochen Volz, the artistic director of the Inhotim Institute in Minas Gerais and curator of Your body of work.

According to the artist, the title Your body of work touches upon the vital role of the viewer in creating the meanings of the work, at the same time as it underscores the wide-ranging character of the content. “You work your whole life, and everything you do and learn is etched into your body. You are a viewer/producer of history itself, seen as you contribute, or give, more than you receive,” explains Eliasson.

Vibrant City

Olafur Eliasson is known for interventions that draw the interest of a wider public beyond the circuits of contemporary art, such as his New York City Waterfalls (2008) in Manhattan, New York. He has experimented with propositions that imply increasingly more direct contact with their urban settings. The starting point for the conception of the Brazilian exhibition was the artist’s impressions and curiosities about the different spaces he saw in São Paulo.

“São Paulo is vibrant, it has a very strong physical presence”, says Eliasson. “Though the private sphere remains inaccessible, everything you think and do is perceivable in the streets. In other cities, the public spaces tend to separate very clearly from daily life.” In consonance with the artist’s sensations, the project is drafted as an experience of the city, in dialogue with the architecture of the spaces it occupies.

Three venues

At SESC Pompeia, a former drum factory transformed into a cultural center in the 1980s, Eliasson’s conceptions are met with the generous spaces the Italo-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi designed for the fruition of the local population. The exhibition, which is spread throughout internal and external areas, was devised to dialogue with the various uses of the venue as a spot for reflection, learning, leisure and entertainment.

A set of works involving colour, light and smoke transforms this 1,500 meter-squared center into a labyrinth of sensorial experiences. In the contiguous exhibition area, configured as a cinema theater, Eliasson plays with the concept of the after image—the counter-image that lingers on the retina when exposed to light—and scenes of São Paulo taken by the Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz.

At the recently inaugurated SESC Belenzinho, which caters to a region of the city far less privileged in terms of leisure and cultural equipment, the artist shows a rotating device that projects light stripes onto the surrounding space. At the Pinacoteca, the work focuses on experiments with one of art’s most classic tools _ the mirror_ to dialogue with the building’s architecture, originally classical but reworked a decade ago by the award-winning architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.

SESC_Videobrasil Festival

The Eliasson exhibition will result in a book edited by the artist himself, scheduled for publication through SESC Editions in November. In addition to a photo record of all the works installed and photographic series produced by Eliasson during his field work in São Paulo, the book will also feature essays by Brazilian theorists, establishing relations between different aspects of his work and local production in such fields as art, science and architecture.

Your body of work underlines Videobrasil’s transformation into the only contemporary art festival of its kind in Brazil. In addition to the Eliasson exhibition, the Festival includes a competitive show dedicated to the production of artists from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Oceania, creating an unprecedented forum in São Paulo for the observation of, and reflection on, contemporary artistic output in the geopolitical south.

The 17th SESC_Videobrasil International Contemporary Art Festival is a SESC and Associação Cultural Videobrasil production.