The event surrounding the biannual arts and culture print publication will include an evening of music, performances, and video screenings by artists and writers featured in this coming issue, along with other LA-based artists. Contributors to the magazine, which brings emerging and established artists together to collaborate, include Anja Salonen, Adjustments Agency, Andreas Angelidakis, Brian Khek, Dexter Lander x Max Lamb, 18+, #Livingroomtoday and Maggie Lee, among others.
With the accelerated pace of commodification and consumption of marginal identities (and spaces) globally, comes the question of, and tension between complicity and resistance in political art and social critique. Discourse is developing beyond ideas of visibility and representation to notions of assimilation into existing cultural paradigms, which is why AQNB was in Los Angeles to present the ‘Accessing Economies: Engagement & Withdrawal’ screening and reading at Club Pro LAon July 17 to interrogate the politics of identity within commercial or institutional spheres.
It’s part of an ongoing series of screening, reading, performance and discussion events lead by editor Jean Kay and organised in collaboration with video production partners Video in Common, and follows similar events already held in London and Berlin –two key cultural centres in the art editorial platform’s network. Titled ‘The Future Is Here, It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed’ and ‘At the Backend’, together these earlier programmes interrogated the systems and infrastructures embedded in networked communication, and how this affects distribution, flows of information and power, as well as language, community-building and identity formation.
Meanwhile, ‘Accessing Economies’ carries on that conversation into the consequences of structural affiliations as both inspiring and influencing critical art practice, and creating new markets. Maria Gorodeckaya, for example, inverts the gaze through the lens of female sexual desire in ‘do it for me’, while Vika Kirchenbauer‘s queer subjects confront the high art voyeur with ‘YOU ARE BORING!’: “I mean, who wouldn’t want to fuck a work of conceptual art?”
Evan Ifekoya talks marginality as a lived position for AQNB/ViC editorial video commission ‘Genuine. Original. Authentic.’ and Sarah Boulton‘s poetry, read by Ulijona Odišarija, passively lingers in the margins, outside of valuation, by dealing with what the artist describes as “what you don’t need to say, and not saying it”. Imran Perretta‘s ‘Untitled (work in progress)’ explores the privilege of apprehension and self-analysis for a work in progress video, while Ann Hirsch and Cristine Brachepresent two videos that concisely and consciously apply for access to systems of power and control, only to complicate and disrupt them when awarded it.
Below is the full programme of video, audio and stills of the works presented in their running order:
Maria Gorodeckaya: ‘do it for me’ (2016) [5:11]
Moscow-born, London-based artist Maria Gorodeckaya explores the nature of women’s objectification,
reclaiming the gaze through the lens of the camera and re-directing it onto the male body. Inverting sexual power dynamics, Gorodeckaya’s work expands into poetry, sculpture and installation, building on her interests in desire and its suppression by religious, economic and institutional means.
London-based artist Evan Ifekoya discusses their ongoing music video series, questioning the notion of cultural or personal authenticity and what it means to be entertaining. Also working with collage, knitting and drawing, Ifekoya talks about deconstructing pervasive gender binaries, expressing the banality and importance of physical ‘making’.
Vika Kirchenbauer: ‘YOU ARE BORING!’ (2015) [13:44], ‘COOL FOR YOU – GIVEN YOUR CONVENIENT ABSENCE’ (2016) [2:25]
Berlin-based artist Vika Kirchenbauer looks at the transference of (certain) bodies and politics from subcultural to high art spaces and the new dynamics that emerge. In complicating ideas of performance and shifting the spectator’s perspective back on themselves, Kirchenbauer questions how power and self-understanding is renegotiated within an institutional framework.
Sarah Boulton: Poetry read by Ulijona Odišarija [2:59 min]
London-based artist and poet Sarah Boulton presents moments of inclusivity, engaging and implicating its audience directly or with distance, or both. Friend and fellow artist Ulijona Odišarija reads as a single clear voice without embellishment, expressing a certain creative ambience around perceptions and consciousness in relation to objects that refuse signification and thus capital value.
Imran Perretta: ‘Untitled (work in progress)’ (2016) [5:00 min]
London-based artist Imran Perretta explores the liminal space between socially and culturally constructed spaces, as well as the role of the body within that. Inscribed as they are with external assumptions, prejudices and, above all, concerns, Perretta’s film is an interrogation of white-washed narratives of privilege and their ideologies of self-actualisation, described in an aqnb review of his performance work as, “the over analyzed body in stark contrast to the under analyzed body”.
Imran Perretta, ‘Untitled (work in progress)’ (2016). Video still. Courtesy the artist.
Ann Hirsch: ‘Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca)’ (2011) [14:06]
LA-based artist Ann Hirsch interrogates (networked) media and its false assumptions of personal freedom. Placing herself in the externally constructed environment of a reality TV programme and its culture of constant surveillance, Hirsch surrenders to the mechanism of production, where she and 14 other contestants vie for the affections of ‘Frank the Bachelor’ on camera with no control on how they’re viewed, edited or represented.
Cristine Brache:, ‘Sequence 02 1’ (2016) [15:56 min], ‘finally people are reading about me’ [00:14 min] (2016)
[00:14 min]
Toronto-based artist and poet Cristine Brache shows marginal women’s bodies and their reproduction as objects in circulation. In complicating and questioning economic, political and sexual power relations as both oppressed and empowered, Brache’s at times fetishistic work expresses a tension between aspiring for access and visibility, and the means by which one achieves it.
Los Angeles-based performance and installation artist Devito’s Jazz Rollercoaster, La Bonheur will present a large-scale track “engineered specifically for the blueprint of gallery” interspersed with sculptural objects acting as representations, models, or sketches for a future, unwritten performance.
Brooklyn-based Curwood, meanwhile, is an artist working with film, animation and sculpture and his multi-layered i Object exhibition will feature objects that are “self-activated and assert their own right to interface in the arena.”
Together the two artists present a body of work that’s “engrossed in sculptural mischief, satirical prodding, and witful commentary”.
Hannah Boone, Aria Dean, and Merideth Hillbrand are presenting an untitled exhibition of work at Los Angeles’ Club Pro LA, opening May 13 and running June 3.
Organised by LA-based curator Santi Vernetti, the description of the show somewhat refreshingly tells us that “goal of the exhibition was to foster a spirit of discovery rather than to select and display works around a preconceived theme”.
Further, the press tells us that untitled exhibition “brings together three like-minded artists who share many formal and conceptual interests” and who are all likely to consider the architecture of the recently-opened gallery, “with its idiosyncratic and charming imperfections”.
The artist and Editor-in-Chief of bi-annual magazine FOUNDATIONS will present “an introspective look at male adolescence” in relation to the insidious and idealised machinations of normative archetypes of masculinity that promise a superior ideal but only offer failure.
This will be the inaugural exhibition for Club Pro Los Angeles, where Gladstone will explore “a psyche riddled with impossible expectations” via a video installation in the ‘dark’ room, and paintings and sculpture in the ‘light’ one. Here, the “fantasy and pleasure, shame and unease” of idealised desires and their negative effects come expressed through ‘shooter manifestos’ and chat forums like puahate and 4chan.
