Harm van den Dorpel
Presenting Harm van den Dorpel’s new online project Hybrid Vigor
MAUVE @ Club Pro LA, Oct 21 – Nov 13
Vienna-based artist-run space MAUVE is presenting a group exhibition at Los Angeles’ Club Pro LA, opening October 21 and running to November 13.
Featuring artists Harm van den Dorpel, Maria Cozma, Daniel Ferstl, Titania Seidl, Lukas Thaler, Rita Vitorelli and Eugen Wist, the show brings works curated by the Austrian gallery, exploring “experimental ways of curating, thereby connecting the artistic scene in Vienna to the rest of the world” since its inauguration in 2012.
According to the press release, the space collaborates closely with the artists it works with, in an effort to bringing production, discourse and curation more closely together, particularly in relation to the MAUVE gallery founders’ own practices, which includes that of Ferstl, Seidl and Thaler, also presenting work in the show.
The exhibition will include a publication with commissioned texts by Paul Becker, Birke Gorm and Nicholas Hoffman.
See the FB event page for details.**
share news itemHarm van den Dorpel @ Narrative Projects, Nov 10 – Dec 19
Harm van den Dorpel‘s IOU solo exhibition is showing at London’s Narrative Projects, opening November 10 and running to December 19.
The Netherlands-born and Berlin-based artist’s show includes a press release that carries on a rather personal though politically relevant rundown of a history of free information becoming increasingly monetised and therefore restricted, from Trent Reznor’s obscure Ghosts series, released on Creative Commons, to Google’s cessation of RSS protocol, along with its step towards a “structured (semantic) web”.
The works on show at IOU will consist of large sheets of thermosensitive paper, applying the same principal of thermal paper receipts that use heat instead of ink for a printing method that will slowly disappear in what the press release calls, “a ghostly transaction timestamped in the supposedly perpetual blockchain, our only hope”.
See the Facebook event page for details. **
share news itemThe Moving Museum Istanbul exhibition launch, Oct 28
The Moving Museum is launching is 2014 Istanbul massive group exhibition at the Sishane Otopark on October 28.
Taking over three floors of the complex and spread over five central halls, a metro level mezzanine and a public outdoor park, the exhibition encompasses over 80,000 square feet of Istanbul’s newly constructed Sishane Otopark, an import urban planning project and rare example of the city embracing the use of public space.
The exhibition will embed itself “within the fabric of the city and public circulation” and will include close to 50 different artists and collectives presenting the fruits of their three-month residencies, which brought together 35 international artists and 11 local Istanbul-based ones for a period of “intensive research, production, and public engagement”. Some of the names featured include, among others, Hito Steyerl, Ilja Karilampi, Jon Rafman, Amalia Ulman, Hannah Perry, and Harm van den Dorpel.
See The Moving Museum’s website for details. **
share news itemPrivate Settings, Art after the Internet (2014) exhibition photos
For a minute I’m confused. Looking through the images for Warsaw’s Private Settings, Art after the Internet group survey, curated by Natalia Sielewicz, it’s a disorienting trip through a recent and familiar past for any fan of this kind of contemporary art. It features everything from the droll and deeply troubling leftist philosopher-as-popular-icon-and-fashionable-brand video commission and “sportswear range” ‘Thinkspiration’ (2014) by DIS, to Cuss Group‘s more aspirational attempt at redefining post-Apartheid South Africa into a “rainbow nation” in their ‘Live Distillation’ (2013) video and digital print installation. To try to attempt to explain what this kind of art is, where any attempt at a broadstroke compartmentalisation of a creative cluster of artists dispersed along an incongrously digitised world would forever fall short, is impossible. So let it be a generation born at the genesis of the internet and raised in the squall of its exponentially expanding reach; their immediate environment, politics, identity playing a central role in shaping a collective output fed by and filtered through the network.
Pooling together the work of 27 international artists and collectives born in the 80s and 90s, the exhibition – running in Poland’s Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (MOMAW) and naturally spilling out onto the web as well as a live events programme – supports a deftly constructed insight into some of the most dynamic and influential practitioners working today. Whether its Korakrit Arunanondchai‘s ‘2556’ (2013) – “painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names” – video or Loretta Fahrenholz‘s dystopian Ditch Plains (2013) film – made in collaboration with members of Ringmasters dance crew and Hurricane Sandy – theirs is an experience that is shared in all its difference.
With a capacity for self-mediating at unprecented velocity, images, ideas and popular cultural tropes are consumed and regurgitated in infinite mutations, while remaining static in a state of endless motion. Jesse Darling‘s materialisation of software’s influence as owner and objectifier in Photoshop 1 (Healing Brush, Clone Stamp, Paint Bucket) (2013) confuses the point where the body ends and the image begins, while Harm van den Dorpel‘s ‘Untitled assemblage (selfie)’ (2013) mimics the cyclical nature of identity creation and curation within its sphere of digital prints on perspex while still dangling within, and being dwarfed by the concrete structures surrounding it.
These works, which also include those of Ryan Trecartin, Jennifer Chan, Metahaven and more, are collated, curated and recalibrated into the Private Settings website, where images and information are dispersed across artists pages, then themes: ‘Body in the Web’, ‘Affect and Presence’, ‘Corporate Aesthetics’, ‘Surveillance and Biopolitics’ and ‘Copies in Motion’. Less an index of art and more a web of associations, the exhibition becomes an experiment in form over content; contemporary culture as shaped by “today’s imperative for creative participation in public life”.
Hence, Yuri Pattison‘s gentle wordplay in the temporary “bespoke rogue scraper site” Familiarity Breeds Contentment – where a bot curates content based on the Private Settings themes, museum, artists, curator, from a server set in the exhibition space and hosted offsite – while Czosnek Studio‘s open call for video and image self-portraits in United People of the Internet declares, “the internet is you and me.” **
Exhibition photos, top right.