Top Ten of Twenty Eleven doesn’t have the same ring Top Ten of Twenty Ten had to it, plus I wanted to do something a little different than last year. It was hard to pare it down, but I thought I would try to keep it to the Top 5 of 2011 and include some photos. Here goes!

1. This year an exhibition entitled Constellations opened at Cornerhouse in Manchester UK, which I co-curated with my friend and collaborator, Karen Gaskill. The show featured works by Kitty Kraus, Katie Paterson, Takahiro Iwasaki, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and investigated themes of impermanence and flux. I know I’m biased, but I’m very proud of how beautiful and coherent the show was. Karen and I are already scheming about the next project!

Out of Disorder (hair) by Takahiro Iwasaki. Photo by We Are Tape.

Untitled by Kitty Kraus. Photo by We Are Tape.

2. I started my wonderful job as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam and kicked off Blowup, a brand new event and exhibition series there. Over the year I delivered 5 successful editions of Blowup and the organisation’s first e-Book series (in the form of readers that accompany each Blowup event). More exciting things to come in 2012, including the Dutch Electronic Art Festival!

Blowup: The Era of Objects, with Julian Bleecker, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Anab Jain. With me doing my best Oprah Winfrey. Photo by Jan Nass.

Doing my best Vanna White. Photo by Jan Nass.

3. Travel highlights: I was an invited guest of BAM in their International Curator’s Programme and had a blast discovering Flanders; gave 4 talks in 7 days on a whirlwind and magical tour through Ukraine; visited the Venice Biennale during opening week; and enjoyed the IKT (international association of curators of contemporary art) Congress in Luxembourg and Metz. I’m really looking forward to more great trips in 2012, including going to places I’ve not yet been, like Tel Aviv.

Karla Black, Scotland + Venice

Nice to see a queue for contemporary art! Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine

4. I gave lectures in a number of places scattered around the globe, from Durham, Ontario, Canada to Lviv, Ukraine and many spots in-between (including my first Pecha Kucha here in Amsterdam to a packed house at Trouw), and I also picked up a speaking agent — Tessa Sterkenburg at The Next Speaker. Contact Tessa if you want to book me for 2012.

Dan McGee and I, in Durham, Ontario, at the Common Pulse symposium. Photo by David Jhave Johnston.

Lviv, Ukraine

5. I brought on four fabulous international correspondents to help with Curating.info, commissioned a new logo by designer Rita Godlevskis, and kicked off a huge new project: the Curating.info Fellowship, with CCA Glasgow.

New Curating.info logo by Rita Godlevskis

New site look and feel (ideas and implementation by Mikhel Proulx)

 

I have been running Curating.info as a free resource for curators of contemporary art since 2006. It was borne out of a “why not” attitude towards sharing and openness, since I was compiling research on curating anyway. I also thought it would help me make my research more rigorous, as writing on this blog during my Master’s thesis did. A few years later and Curating.info is getting fan mail and picking up a lot of attention. Today I’m able to easily recruit four fantastic interns to share the burden and we have nearly 5000 fans on Facebook. The question was what to do next with this great platform. With thousands of people paying attention, what can you do and what should you do?

I had a vague idea that I’d like to create a Curating.info Scholarship, part funded by donations from the Curating.info community (that I had, thus far, never directly asked for any money) and could think of several good curatorial Master’s programmes that would benefit from a scholarship in place. I went to the IKT Congress in Luxembourg this year, and in the cavernous and highly atmospheric basement of the Casino Luxembourg, ended up chatting with Sally Tallant, Head of Programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Sally, who as it turned out knew and loved the site, listened as I tipsily described the nascent plan for the Curating.info Scholarship. “But why not do even more?” was her response. “Make it an experience in a gallery you love and trust, something where people can get real experience. There are already loads of scholarships out there.” Immediately I saw how right she was, and changed course accordingly. My first thought was to partner with the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, in part because it’s a great institution and a fellowship would fit with its ethos, and in part because its Director, Francis McKee, is both a visionary and a highly trustworthy person. Francis was onboard, and so it was born: the Curating.info Fellowship in collaboration with the CCA in Glasgow.

The Fellowship is a chance for an individual to conduct curatorial research and produce an exhibition at the CCA. The Fellow will work at the CCA four days per week over the six month fellowship, developing a curatorial project or body of curatorial research. Fellows will be paid a flat fee of £8,000. Ideal candidates for the Fellowship are emerging or mid-career curators who can demonstrate passion and fresh thinking in curating and writing about contemporary art, and who have a vision for what the role of the curator means today.

The deadline for applications is October 21, 2011. Applications will be judged by Francis McKee, Sally Tallant, and myself.

We’re really excited about it. I hope you will spread the word, contribute to the crowdfunding campaign, and apply to be our first Fellow.

Contribute to the crowdfunding campaign here.
Apply for the Fellowship here.

 

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of launching the series I have been working on in my capacity as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

The name of the series, Blowup, was inspired not only by Antonioni’s film but by the notion that blowing an image up reveals detail; blowing an inflatable object up creates form; blowing something up explosively can be festive or threatening.

The first event in the series is entitled Wild Things, and is about art for animals to appreciate, inhabit, or interact with. Three incredible speakers: Amy Youngs (US), Wilfried Hou Je Bek (NL), and Elio Caccavale (IT/UK), plus one cat: Barbie (NL), will be presenting over the course of the evening.

If you are anywhere in the Benelux region, you should rush to V2_ tomorrow night (July 7) and get there by 8 PM to enjoy the evening. For most readers, you are far enough away that I cordially invite you to tune in via webstream. V2_’s streams are really excellent, I would almost dare to say it’s even better than being there, because we use multiple cameras and the camera operators are so good. You will miss out on the custom cocktail, the “Wild Zebra”, but you can attempt to replicate this at home by making a White Russian and trying to make chocolate stripes on the side of your glass. Ya, I know — tricky. Just make White Russians and visualise the stripes. You can even participate in the online chatter by Tweeting about the programme using the hashtag #v2_!

So if you are nearby, see you there; and if not, get comfy in front of your computer, and tune in to: http://live.v2.nl tomorrow, July 7, at 8PM Central European Summer Time.

Also — every Blowup event will have an e-Book reader released with it. Keep an eye out, I will amend this post with the download URL for this, the first Blowup reader!

 

I’m delighted to announce the successful launch of Constellations, an exhibition co-curated by myself and Karen Gaskill, at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.

Constellations presents four international artists working with sculpture and installation. Minimalist in their approach, all present ideas on remoteness, fragility, disintegration, melancholy, and transience, together creating a profound and almost palatable sadness.

Adopting its title from the patterns of celestial bodies, the exhibition considers the relationship between ideas and the formation of concept. Drawing on the historic usage of constellations as maps or event atlases of the celestial sphere, this exhibition presents a collection of ideas on ephemerality, impermanence and flux in contemporary art. At its very core is an organic grouping of works that when in relation to one another form new ideas and notions, new constellations, each as fluid and volatile as the other.

The works selected are concerned with the fragility and breakdown of content. This instability not only manifests as a dissolution or reduction, but also as a loss of content, a shift in form, or the temporality of an objects’ existence. Each metaphorically deals with the passage of time, creating its own duration, but ultimately brings the attention back to the present moment. The result is an exhibition that in structure and content is all at once timeless, durational and unstable.

The shift from one form to another is most apparent in the ice lamps of Kitty Kraus (pictured above), household lightbulbs are encased in ice infused with ink, resembling small frosty black cubes, which when plugged in cause the ice to melt haphazardly across the floor. The initial sculpture draws murky trails with inky stained water, leaving the often broken lightbulb and its cable trailing, a testament to its ultimate demise.

Surrounded by the slow dissolution of Kraus’s lonely systems, the delicate landscapes of Takahiro Iwasaki (pictured below) respond in their fragile yet resilient form. The mimicry of permanent geographies such as mountain ranges, using delicate and unstable materials such as cloth and pencil lead, create a contrasting, yet equally delicate infrastructure, reminding us quietly about the fleetingness of time and earth’s instability.

The reduction of form is mirrored in the takeaway poster stacks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (pictured below). Durational in nature, the work slowly diminishes, shifting in form as the audience remove the posters and the tangible aspect of the work disappears. The work is evocative of what once was, of death and passing, and the image of the sea on the posters also invokes a sense of timelessness and strength to contrast the melancholy of the diminishing pile.

Katie Paterson’s two works both deal with space and the universe, and our position as humans in the cosmos is revealed by the works. 100 Billion Suns is a daily colourful explosion of confetti, happening in different parts of the Cornerhouse building each day. Each piece of confetti bears the colour signature of the brightest explosions in the universe. She has shrunk massive events to human scale, and presented them in bursts that will land and be tracked throughout the gallery in unpredictable ways. Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) on the other hand, is a work that transforms Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata using radio waves (pictured below). By bouncing Morse code of the score off of the moon’s surface, errors are created that are reproduced in the version played by the piano in the gallery. The lost information in the score is as a result of some celestial interference, a chance intervention that is not unlike the chance vagaries of the room temperature and floor surface that will impact the final form of Kitty Kraus’ ice lamp works.

The works in this exhibition each work in different ways with form, material, and change. Katie Paterson’s confetti canons are an addition to the environment, while viewers slowly subtract Gonzalez-Torres’ work from the gallery. Kraus’ ice lamps physically transform from 3D to 2D, while Iwasaki’s work plays with scale and form by transforming the idea of a mountain into household materials. The radio waves that Paterson used to send the Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back echo the ocean waves represented on the Gonzalez-Torres poster. Natural materials such as ice, water, soil, and air are present in all the works in either representation or in physical form. The pieces here may be minimal in aesthetic, but they are not abstract, they represent real things, and changes in the real world.

When devising constellations in the sky, people created stories to help understand our natural world, to make sense of it. But these celestial drawings are ultimately arbitrary, fragile, and could be replaced by new mappings or new understandings at any time. The mutability of the works in this exhibition are like the fragile understanding enabled by a constellations’ path. We are drawing edges around materials that we wish to know and to contain, even if ultimately, we cannot. The works in this exhibition provide us with a new poetic template to think about our understanding of time and material.

More info on the show:
Cornerhouse
Sat 25 Jun 2011 – Sun 11 Sep 2011
Mon – Closed, Tue – Sat 12:00 – 20:00, Sun 12:00 – 18:00

 

I’m taking part in an experiment, the Art Amsterdam Medialab, at this year’s Art Amsterdam art fair. The Art Amsterdam Medialab is produced by Art Amsterdam, Domein voor Kunstkritiek, and De Groene Amsterdammer. With 133 galleries from Europe, North America and Asia participating, Art Amsterdam is the largest contemporary and modern art fair in the Netherlands. The mission of the Art Amsterdam Medialab is to utilise a team of bloggers to report on the fair, ask critical questions, and take part in a debate about the definition and positioning of art criticism.

We’ll be posting our interviews and reports on the blog, so keep an eye on it, and also follow my Twitter feed as well as the Twitter accounts for the Medialab project, for Art Amsterdam, and for the Domain for Art Criticism. You can also track the Twitter hashtag #AA11.

If you are in town, a highlight will be the debate we’re holding on Thursday the 12th of May, at 13.00 at the Art Amsterdam fair. The debate is entitled Is Blogging Art Criticism?

The primary reason for the debate is to examine the shift of art criticism from traditional media to blogging and other social media, and another reason for this debate is that the major Dutch arts funder the Mondriaan Stichting rejected financing the Art Amsterdam Medialab experiment, as in their view, blogging is not art criticism.

Fortunately, the Mondriaan Stichting wants to elaborate on that in this debate. Madeleine van Putten of the Mondriaan Stichting will talk about their arguments and visions with director of Nest/reporter Eelco van Lingen, editor-in-chief Kunstbeeld Roos van Put. Yours truly, Michelle Kasprzak, and new media journalist/NRC blogger Ine Poppe represent the active, at-the-coalface side of critical blogging. This quick and dirty debate of an hour will address issues like blogging as a proper medium for art criticism, and the dangers and the possibilities as criticism expands in this manner.

Hope to see you at Art Amsterdam! If there are any angles you think would be interesting for us to cover, please drop me a line or comment on this post.

 

Meme Topology by sosolimited

I’m gutted that I’ll be missing FutureEverything in Manchester next week (11-14 May). For the lucky ones going, I thought I’d highlight the things I’d be bee-lining to if I was there.

OK well hang on, for those of you who have just tuned in, let me back up and say what FutureEverything is: an annual four day extravaganza of live music, art premieres, inspiring talks, club nights and events. In short, Fun with a capital F, but you can also sell it to your bosses as professional development and get them to send you.

On to this year’s programme! I wouldn’t miss talks by Sally Fort, Keri Facer, Chris Speed, Ela Kagel, Juha van ‘t Zelfde, and Kars Alfrink. (More info on the conference here). I’d be sure to check out the Steve Reich and Warpaint gigs, and would also be spotted at the ultra-intriguing Handmade event, a day devoted to contemporary craft, digital hacking, and DIY culture. In fact digital craft and maker communities seem to play a big role in the programming this year, which I think is great.

Anyway. Sigh — I can’t go. Hope you’ll be blogging and tweeting madly so I can have a taste of the experience.

 

Now, some visual goodies from the three masterclass leaders:

 

I think my points on mentioned/not-mentioned and building authority are pretty clear from my presentation (embedded below), but to elaborate on “forked identities” a bit: I have about 5 Twitter accounts, 9 friend groups with varying access to my profile on Facebook, and 2 public blogs plus many other websites that I contribute to now and again. In each of these situations I am presenting a slightly different facet of myself. This is just how it is in our contemporary communications environment. I want the ability to communicate my most colourful opinions to a close circle of 7 friends on Twitter, while highlighting only my professional achievements on my fully public Twitter feed with over 500 followers, or this blog. My identity has been forked into several sub-identities, which is (of course) not unlike how I conduct myself in varying social situations in real life.

Here is my Prezi (I added a few slides to it after the fact, to assist in comprehending it, as I thought it a bit opaque as a stand-alone without these modifications):

 

Pictured: ASIMO the robot, who I didn’t get to meet in the end. Photo courtesy Ars Electronica.

 

I find myself in the same situation time and again when I arrive at a major international festival: too many events happening at once! Spoilt for choice! Unable to decide if I should go to one talk or another, which are of course happening at the very same time in different locations!

The programme for this year’s FutureEverything festival is so overflowing with juicy content, that perhaps you too will suffer this dilemma. In the face of such a cornucopia of content, there is something for everyone, but maybe you want to peek over my shoulder and see what I’ve circled in red on my FutureEverything diary? (Oh and hey, I wouldn’t mind you sharing your picks with me too!)

Music:
Ryoji Ikeda – test pattern [live set] / Mika Vainio [live]: “complex audio-visual terrain” … “analogue warmth and metallic harshness”
Konono No.1 [live] / Bass Clef [live] / Jon K: “a thundering sonic attack of 21st Century African music that sounds like nothing ever heard before”
Moldover [live] / Atau & Adam [live]: “a performer who combines the charisma of a rock star with the mad genius of a basement inventor”

Conference:
GloNet: “an experimental format happening simultaneously in five cities around the globe: Manchester, Sendai, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, and Vancouver”
Shaping the City panel discussion: how are cities shaped by climate, culture, and citizen participation?
Keynote: Ben Cerveny: “taking us from 1960s Situationist ideas to current collaborative interaction in public spaces”
Keynote: Keri Facer: “Learning to live in uncertain times”
New Creativity panel discussion: “How do we play, collaborate, and create in a way that makes a real impact on the world?”
McLuhan in Europe 2011 – inaugural lecture with Darren Wershler: “describing the fascinating connections between McLuhan’s predictions and declarations”

Art:
The Feast of Trimalchio: Stunningly beautiful, UK premiere
Eyewriter: a pair of low-cost glasses & custom software that allow artists and graffiti writers with paralysis to draw using only their eyes
Cu Exhibition: “diverse and experimental contemporary art from both national and international artists”

Get tickets!