Jonas Mekas

Take Me (I’m Yours) @ The Jewish Museum, Sep 16 – Feb 5

15 September 2016

The Take Me (I’m Yours) group exhibition is on at New York’s The Jewish Museum, opening September 16 and running to February 5.

The show takes its name and idea from the 1995 exhibition organised by Serpentine Galleries artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Christian Boltanski, building on the anarchist idea of ‘property is theft’ and post-60s dematerialisation of the art object to exhibit work by 12 artists that visitors could not only touch but take home.

Features over 40 artists from across generations, including Ian Cheng, Heman Chong, Andrea Fraser, Jonas Mekas, Rachel Rose, and Amalia Ulman, this latest iteration applies the same ethos where visitors are encouraged to engage with and take ownership of the artworks, curating their own collections and directly impacting the exhibition landscape.

Other artists taking part include Gilbert & George, Yngve Holen, Yoko Ono and Tino Sehgal, while James Lee Byars‘ ‘Be Quiet’ (1980) will be running every Saturday afternoon, along with a performance by Sondra Perry, the date and time to be announced.

See The Jewish Museum website for details.**

Ian Cheng, Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, London.
Ian Cheng, Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, London.

Header image:Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled” (USA Today) (1990). Install view. © The Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation. Courtesy Andrea Rosen, New York.

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Jonas Mekas, The Internet Saga (2015) exhibition photos

3 September 2015

Pioneering the evolution of audiovisual language both on and offline since the 60s, cinema legend Jonas Mekas presents The Internet Saga, a solo exhibition running from May 6 to November 22. It’s located at two sites, the Palazzo Foscari Contarini –a sixteenth century building that is now a Burger King restaurant –and video art space Spazio Ridotto.

Curated by curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi in collaboration with Zuecca Projects, the project is dedicated to art on the web and launched on the May 6 and 7 in conjunction with the 56th Venice Biennale. Ragazzi chose the Burger King at the Palazzo Foscari Contarini as an exhibition space to serve “as a metaphor of [the] Internet” representative of the “relationship between eras and materials, history and trade, fake and authenticity which are elements which characterize it”.

The exhibition opened with a Skype performance by Amalia Ulman who phoned in to the Internet Saga press conference at the My Art Guide Meeting Point in Venice on May 7 (you can see an excerpt of the video that screened here). It was organised as a tribute to the influential artist and to launch Ulman’s  own )TITRE( web calendar contribution to the project. Meanwhile, Mekas will continue to broadcast a collection of over 500 videos until the exhibition’s November close; personal entries from an online journal he’s been keeping since 2006. The work is undisruptive as it plays on four screens already present in the building, “juxtaposing itself to Palazzo Foscari Contarini, by modifying it without interfering with its reality, without touching it, as it would at a virtual level”.

Mekas is also exhibiting ‘To Petrarca’ (2009), a seventy-minute sound piece comprised of recordings made in the streets of New York that merge with the sounds of Andy Warhol’s funeral. Photographic transparencies are attached, and filter light like stained glass, to thirty-two windows facing the courtyard. They are 768 reproductions of mostly unpublished frames from Mekas’ body of video work.

Spazio Ridotto functions as a cinema, presenting a selection of Mekas’ video work in the second location. The project also has two official websites to compliment the exhibition, www.internetsaga.com, updated daily, and a web calendar created by Ulman located at www.titre.name, which will be updated irregularly “by artists and intellectuals who reflect on time in the Internet era”. **

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Internet Saga is on at Venice’s Burger King from May 6 to November 22, 2015.

Header image: In an instant it all came back to me (2015). Install view. Photo by Giulio Favotto Otium. EXPERIMENTAL.

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