Archive for the 'Interview' Category

Activist Listening

Friday, October 30th, 2009
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Raqs Media Collective, There Has Been a Change of Plan, 200

Operating from Delhi since the early 1990s, Raqs Media Collective has developed a multifaceted body of work with a unique take on globalized culture. Mixing contemporary art with historical and philosophical theory, their diverse work consists of a wide range of old and new media techniques, including image-text collages, installations, performances, and media objects.

Reflecting on the politics of mobility and dislocation, There Has Been a Change of Plan (2007) is a series of photographs of derelict airplanes. Showing removed noses, damaged wings, or other states of ruin, the work is an invitation to pause and converse about the “debris of the unrealizable.”

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Greg Chadwick’s Paintings for Iran

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

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Artists 4 Freedom ran an interview yesterday with artist Greg Chadwick who has been inspired by the recent protests and political situation in Iran. His most recent series, Neda, which focuses on the young Iranian woman brutally shot during protest. Inspired by the Martin Luther King quote, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”, Chadwick wants to make sure the happenings in Iran, especially the death of the innocent young woman, are remembered. 

In the interview, Chadwick recalls watching Neda in her last moments in this world on TV, and suddenly “the distance between California and that street in Tehran was cut thin and I felt it….I knew her face needed to be remembered…as a human being with personhood, with a face of beauty and of innocence but also with cause”. 

This is yet another example of how art can communicate messages and feelings that words or other media simply cannot. Especially in times of unrest, art connects us and allows us to feel the “personhood” of others, even when they are a million miles away dealing with something that we can’t totally wrap our minds around.  Chadwick has tapped into this and used the intense set of emotions we all deal with when viewing something like this on TV. Except rather than just turning off the TV and returning to his life, he decided to do something about it, to help communicate his emotions and ideas about this crisis to others. I think because of this, you can really sense the feeling in his paintings. To view more of Chadwick’s work, click here. His blog is also available here.

Kehinde Wiley and M.I.A

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

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Interview magazine recently ran a great dialogue between singer M.I.A and painter Kehinde Wiley, discussing both Wiley’s innovative European-inspired representations of young black men and the future of the art world as a whole. In the wake of so many stale “just add water” artists and the reality TV era where it seems everyone truly does have their fifteen minutes of fame, is it possible to create art that is actually fresh? Wiley says it is his desire to “restart the conversation…throw away the old rules. This is something that, as artists, we constantly deal with-throwing away the past, slaying the father, and creating the new.” His portraits revolutionize the way black men and black culture are perceived – drawing inspiration from classic European portraiture, he takes his subjects from the streets of New York City and keeps them as they are, in sneakers, basketball jerseys and tank tops, creating a “mash-up of museum treasure and the urban life outside of its gates.”

M.I.A also discusses her experiences before she was famous, living in Sri Lanka pre-September 11th as a recent film school graduate. She talks about the bizarre influence of money-driven American culture in third world countries, stating “when I would go to Africa I used to get really pissed off that people would listen to 50 Cent in, like, a mud hut and want DVD players…because I realized that you have to teach people in a clichéd way how to be happy in the American media. Achieving happiness is not really about having a flat stomach and the best car.” 

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The conversation between these two highly influential artists is worth a read as they both have something real to say about the often difficult interaction between global and American culture and the influence of that exchange on the artists and the art community.

Interview with creators of Société Réaliste

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Niels Van Tomme writes in Foreign Policy in Focus:

Hungarian-born Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy of France established Société Réaliste (Realist Society) in 2004. Their organization has spawned 10 distinct entities, from a political consulting firm to an almanac publisher, that all mix art and politics in innovative ways.

With EU Green Card Lottery, for instance, they launched a campaign that drove potential migrants to a website to apply for an imaginary “EU Green Card” — a sharp commentary on global immigration management. Their design agency Transitioners specializes in political transitions, and questions the centrality of revolution and transition in Western society.

Balancing art, politics, design, and research, the Paris-based mavericks produce artworks, exhibitions, publications, and conferences that generate a great deal of debate. Consistently taking the side of the excluded and exploited — what the French call tiers-état (the third estate) — Société Réaliste is conquering the art establishment through its radical political agenda.

NIELS VAN TOMME: What is Société Réaliste exactly? Who are you? What do you do?

SOCIÉTÉ RÉALISTE: Société Réaliste is a cooperative, created in Paris in December 2004 by Ferenc Gróf and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. As early as June 2004, we decided to curate an exhibition dealing with the aesthetic relationship between socialist realism and social forms in contemporary art. Socialist Realism being “Réalisme Socialiste” in French, we inverted the term and coined “Société Réaliste” as the title of this curatorial project. After six months of research, we decided to convert our first critical intentions into a positive device. So we created a structure, a cooperative, which produces objects, such as artworks, exhibitions, texts, lectures, etc.

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Transitioners: Le Producteur, exhibition view, Synagogue de Delme, France, 2007.

During the last four years, Société Réaliste has created 10 different enterprises, some already bankrupt, through which it designs lines of production. We are running a political trend bureau (Transitioners), an immigration agency (EU Green Card Lottery), a ministry dealing with the politics of the space (Ministère de l’Architecture), a legislative consulting firm (Cabinet Société Réaliste Conseil), a geopolitical numismatics unit (Marka), an almanac-publishing office working on a Rabelaisian utopia (Almanach de Thélème), and a museum dedicated to the study of urban signs (IGM). Three enterprises have collapsed: our public bank account structure (Over The Counter), our company designing marketing models for the field of contemporary art (Ponzi’s), and our counter-biennial (Manifesta 6.1).

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Get Up and SCREAM!

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

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The ancient social concept of “exchange,” once central to the trade of goods and culture, has been hybridized into complex and volatile systems of speculation and accumulation which reduce humans to consumers, taxpayers, debtors and, increasingly, the unemployed.

As a first step to redress this process, Floating Lab Collective has launched Scream at the Economy, inviting anyone and everyone to call in and scream at the economy, venting desperate and instinctive expressions of survival, warnings of danger, cathartic affirmations of power, explosions of anger and despairing utterances of anxiety and hopelessness (remember Munch!).  The recorded archive of screaming will be transformed by six international composers into new symphonies for the “Screamer,” to be performed in front of relevant financial institutions.

How to participate:

  1. Call 646-402-5686, extension 90514, 24-hours a day.
  2. Scream at the economy (for best results, hold the phone a few inches away from your mouth).
  3. Download scream music after June 25th at: Scream At The Economy.

Upcoming FLC projects will delve further into the state of the global economy by instigating new, alternative forms of community currency.

Floating Lab Collective is the community arts program of Provisons Learning Project.

Seeing Things: Interview with Trevor Paglen

Monday, May 4th, 2009

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Niels Van Tomme writes:

Trevor Paglen is a writer and “experimental geographer” holding a Ph.D. in geography from Berkeley. His thought-provoking visual artworks deliberately blur the lines between social science, contemporary art, political theory, and activism. Constructing unusual but meticulously researched reinterpretations of our world, Paglen is an artist whose work is so radically new that it forces viewers to redefine what constitutes art.

In 2005, he was the first to observe and photograph the airplanes used by the CIA for their “extraordinary rendition” program, the extrajudicial transfer of people from one country to another. Paglen later published his findings in a book called Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights. For his ongoing project The Expeditions, he leads excursions to document the way hidden military activities shape landscapes and to view infrastructure whose very existence is sometimes classified.

NIELS VAN TOMME: In the past years you have been investigating the world of “black” military operations. Can you explain what those are?

TREVOR PAGLEN: I look at military intelligence operations that are undertaken in secret, ranging from surveillance satellites to weapons testing to more operational stuff like the “extraordinary rendition program. There is a wide range of things.

VAN TOMME: Doing this kind of advanced research, uncovering secret worlds, provides you with a remarkable starting point as an artist. How do you represent something that officially does not exist? How do you get access to a world that is totally kept secret?

PAGLEN: Well, I do not gain access more often than I do, which becomes part of my process. It’s something that happens over and over again in my work. In fact that’s something I am trying to capture: the moment when something becomes visible but remains unintelligible, when you find evidence of absence in a certain sense. For my project Symbology, I compiled patches, insignia and symbols referring to secret military programs. Strangely enough, this “black world” is rich with such symbolic imagery, even though it affiliates someone with deeply held secrets. Again, when these patches get displayed they give you clues to what some of these programs might be, but they do not tell you what they are. Nevertheless, you know that there is something.

Continue reading for the full interview.

Reposted from Foreign Policy In Focus

Radical Sound Activism

Wednesday, March 25th, 2009

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Niels Van Tomme writes:

Since 1994, Ultra-red has established a unique position in the world of sound art. Their highly analytical projects, which range from radio broadcasts to art installations, directly link social activism to sound experiments. A global collective, Ultra-red made its mark through electronic music composition, although their practice gradually shifted to a more process-based engagement. Merging aesthetics with politics, Ultra-red has created work that is simultaneously collective and of high artistic quality.

In 2001, Ultra-red joined forces with the Frankfurt chapter of migrant anti-racism activists Kanak Attak, to produce one of their most anticipated releases so far, Ultra-red Play Kanak Attak (2005). With tracks based on site recordings from locations in Frankfurt resonant with the everyday struggles of migrants, the resulting record is a powerful sonic statement ranging from moody soundscapes to minimal house and electro beats. A more recent project, SILENT/LISTEN (2006), was organized to reflect on the state of the global AIDS crisis. In staging participatory performances at art museums, galleries, and art schools across the United States and Canada, Ultra-red performed John Cage’s famous composition of “sheer” silence, 4′33″. After the performance, the invited the audience to respond to the question, “What did you hear?” by entering statements related to AIDS into an audio record.

Ultra-red elaborates on the theoretical underpinnings of the historical avant-garde and brings together art, activism, and public issues. During a long Skype conversation with Robert Sember, one of Ultra-red’s core members and a visiting professor at UCLA, we talked about their work methodology, their artistic strategies, the issues they are involved with and the gesture of making all of their work available for free.

Read the whole interview here.

M.I.A. on the Tamil Crisis

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

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In an interview with Tavis Smiley last Wednesday M.I.A. discussed the systematic genocide occurring in her homeland of Sri Lanka, her experiences growing up as a refugee and her belief that music is a global tool for social change.

Check out the whole interview here.

In an older interview with VBS’s Spike Jones, M.I.A. talks more about the importance of the third world perspective in her music.

‘Spectacles Of Failure’: Michael Rakowitz

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

In his most candid project to date, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Michael Rakowitz unfolds a multifaceted narrative about artifacts stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion; about the current status of their whereabouts and the protagonists involved. The centerpiece of the installation is an ongoing series of sculptures, an attempt to reconstruct more than 7,000 looted archaeological artifacts.

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‘The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist’, 2007 – ongoing

Michael Rakowitz is rapidly catching the attention of the international art world with his socially engaged but highly subversive and conceptual art projects. In between preparing his contribution to the 16th Bienniale of Sydney (Revolutions – Forms That Turn) and discussing his participation in Provisions’ national BrushFire project, we did a long interview with Rakowitz earlier this year in his hometown Chicago.

It sometimes feels as if you wanted to fill a societal void with your work. Would that be a correct way to see it?

Michael Rakowitz: “I’m interested in making things that are invisible visible, which very often happens with the production of a platform where this can take place. My wariness in answering that question is to make it clear that I’m not looking to solve problems; I’m looking to ‘problematize’ problems. I don’t know how much of a void my work actually fills. I’m interested in creating a public discourse so that a work requires active participation. I believe full-heartedly in a public art that enlists its public as vital collaborators in the production of meaning. This is very much a part of the continuous motive I’m engaged in and the value of what I put out there. ‘The Invisible Enemy’ is not going to replace the articles of cultural patrimony and human heritage that have been lost as a casualty of the war. But there is a specific use in the spectacle of failure; it can create a conversation. When you drop a lot of books in front of a building, people will stop and help you to pick them up. That’s the kind of thing that can be a start for a conversation.”

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‘Challenge, dichotomy, aggression, opposition’: Tony Conrad

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

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How to briefly introduce Tony Conrad? You could easily do it yourself by googling his name and come across a string of breathtaking references and countercultural links. You would find out that Tony Conrad is a composer who actually disposes the composer. Ever since the early sixties, he has been on the threshold of the avant-garde, continuously stretching the political and social implications of his radical art. I meet Tony Conrad, the composer, filmmaker, video artist, media activist, writer, and educator, in the context of Washington DC’s best kept secret, Sonic Circuits, a festival of experimental music where he was performing, aggressively but adventurously, with his recent musical companion Violent Raid.

I’ve been fascinated by your view of music as an experiential environment that you create for people to participate in. How do you see that exactly?

Tony Conrad: “I see that in a variety of ways. For example, music has a unique relationship to space, unlike many other forms of cultural expression. It is unrelenting and pitiless in the way that it surrounds people in the space and pokes into their bodies, occupies and causes their bodies to react. It’s a horrifyingly intimate kind of thing. That’s one kind of a relationship, and then another one of course is the political consequence of that. Music can be adopted and used in a veiled way to implement the designs of those who are in authority.”

Isn’t music something abstract? Where does the political element come in?

Conrad: “That’s a very complicated thing, because it happens on different levels and these levels don’t seem to be integrated. It happens in capitalism also. There are people who go to the store and buy things and they think that that is capitalism. Then there are other people who are actually investing money in elaborate corporate systems and they think that’s capitalism. These two levels don’t connect except through money, and this turns out to be very effective. With music, it’s a similar thing. There is the person who is listening to a song, the words, the beat, the music, the nostalgia, and all of the personal reactions it brings forth. This seems completely unrelated to the theoretical conditions in which larger structures sometimes seemingly automatically fulfill those needs. In the European tradition, there is a sense that concerts, music being played by orchestras while the audience is just listening, were always there and that this is almost a fact of nature. We begin to see more clearly now, as this institution is being threatened, that it was a temporary thing that only lasted for a few hundred years. If we look very carefully at it, we can see that there are reasons why this institution was brought into existence and that these reasons have to do with the way the society was organized into powerful states.”

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