The second Cycle Music and Art Festival is taking place at Kópavogur’s Gerðarsafn Museum and various other venues around the Icelandic city, opening October 27 and running to October 30.

Dedicated to the intersection of art and music, the focus of the event is deeply rooted in the natural landscape as “an echo chamber in order to explore questions of deep time and peak futures.”

There is a long line-up of exciting events and exhibitions, including a performance by Rachel de Joode, a live concert by the South Icelandic Chamber Choir, ‘music chess deal #3’ by Curver Thoroddsen, a film screening of Finding Fanon II (2015) by Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, and a synthetic choir by Marguerite Humeau.

There’ll be an inclusion of Constant Dullaart’s media player invention (a product successfully funded Kickstarter campaign of company DullTech™), multi-media work ‘100% OTHER FIBRES’ by Heather Phillipson, a research performance by Johannes Paul Raether, film screening of Kwassa Kwassa (2015) by SUPERFLEX, a new body of sculptural work by Vanessa Safavi, and Alvaro Urbano‘s new He would always leave the window open, even at night (2016).

See the Cycle Music and Art Festival website for the full programme.**

Header image: Marguerite Humeau, ‘FOXP2’ (2016). Digital Image. Courtesy the artist + Le Studio Humain (Benjamin Penaguin) for Marguerite Humeau.

Les ruses de l’intelligence (‘The Stratagems of the Intellect’), which ran from October 10 to December 13, 2015, at Parc Saint Léger in France, brought together a group of artists including Harun Farocki, Jeremy Deller & Alan Kane, Gianni Motti, and SUPERFLEX among others. The premise of the exhibition focused on the idea of ‘work’ and explored the definition, effects and convention of the word in the context of our globalised economy and the power politics associated with the current financial model.

The artists responded to the increasingly abstract idea of work and how value is defined. The title of the show is a reference to a book by Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, translated to English as Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, which questions the established order of stratagems and the know-how models behind practical forms of intelligence. Working across sculpture, photography, neon, books, and other object assemblage, the installation brings together varied relationships to ‘artmaking’ and the economics of the art world that is undergoing rapid change.

Les ruses de l'intelligence (2015) Exhibition view. Courtesy Parc Saint Léger, Paris. — *Les ruses de l’intelligence* (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy Parc Saint Léger, Paris.

Farocki, Deller & Kane, and Jean-Luc Moulène, look specifically at industry and disappearance, while SUPERFLEX and Pratchaya Phinthong focus their attention on collapse and the financial crisis. Julien Prévieux takes a personal approach to the consequential situation, addressing his reasons for not entering into the world of business in ‘Lettres de non-motivatio’ (2015). Allen Ruppersberg, Mladen Stilinović and Patricio Gil Flood, look at leisure time and the ways we fill our time in contrast to time spent working. The back-and-forth energy of production and reception is articulated in the objects of Eva Barto, Stefan Brüggemann, Ève Chabanon. An overall anxiety works its way through the pieces, stringing them together in their shared desire to reorganise and understand our commitment to the sphere of art.**

Exhibition photos, top right.

The Les ruses de l’intelligence group exhibition was on at Paris’s Parc Saint Leger, running October 10 to December 13, 2015.

SUPERFLEX

Cycle Music and Art Festival, Oct 27 – 30

Les ruses de l’intelligence (2015) exhibition photos

The Les ruses de l’intelligence group exhibition was on at Paris’s Parc Saint Leger, running October 10 to December 13, 2015.

Header image: Les ruses de l’intelligence (2015) Exhibition view. Courtesy Parc Saint Léger, Paris.