Weekly Roundup (15 March 2018)

Dorian Batycka

Weekly is published every Thursday morning CET, looking forward to the week’s upcoming art events across Central Europe, links to deadlines for open-calls, residencies, commentary, photos and happenings of the past week worth revisiting.

BLOK’S OPENING WEEK PICKS

March 15

Bremen, Germany: Opening ‘Where Does Your Heart Belong?’ at Weserburg | Museum of Modern Art. “The exhibition, which appeals equally to the heart and mind, offers an insight into an outstanding Polish private collection. The pointed selection of works shown here can be seen in this form for the first time in Germany. The works come from the Poznań-based, but also in Łódź and Venice-based Signum Foundation, which was founded in 2002 by Hanna and Jarosław Przyborowski. Her media coverage spans painting, sculpture, performance and process art, photography, neon-textual works, conceptual art, and quite provocative and disturbing self-stagings in which traditional role models are critically scrutinized. The list of participating artists reads like a “Who’s Who?” Of Polish art.”

Bucharest, Romania: Adelina Ivan / Solo Show at Anca Poterasu Gallery. “Series of repetitive gestures, a chronology that flows in folds and resistance spaces where a substitute for the self is searching for its status are elements delineating a conceptual universe where the mystery of things is protected. The exhibition entitled ‘To restore or how the stable structures need frail gestures’ seeks that very rearranging of those states of mind and things that reveal the conceptual trajectory of Adelina Ivan, an artist that captured the restructuring of time against the critical eye of a fragmented present.” On view until May 3rd.

Anca Poterasu Gallery‎, Adelina Ivan / Solo Show, Circle Back, Video 12’15 Full HD 16/9, 2018 / film still

Prague, Czech Republic: Jiří Černický’s exhibition “Trump versus Godzilla” opens at DSC Gallery. “The “Trump versus Godzilla” exhibition is conceived as a presentation of several seemingly discontinuous series of paintings whose solitary images are firmly interlinked by a network of visible and invisible bonds (“jumping from the plate to the plate”). It’s diversity is due to the artist’s attempt to explore through painting the possibilities beyond the media. The reason is the desire to find topics that allow the innovation of unexpected formal forms.” Until April 19th.

Jiří Černický: “Trump kontra Godzilla”
16/03/2018 – 19/04/2018 — at DSC Gallery.

Stockholm, Sweden: Where Is the Entry? [Exhibition & Artist Talk] by Karol Radziszewski about his recent work installed in the Gärdet metro station. “A video-based exhibition with the work of Polish interdisciplinary artist Karol Radziszewski, curated by C-print, in collaboration with Mossutställningar. The exhibition presents a number of early and voyeurist-themed video works by Karol Radziszewski, alluding to the notion of desire, screened inside a vitrine display housed by Mossutställningar, in the metro station Gärdet in Stockholm (exit Värtavägen), on public view for all and passerby.”

C-print‎ “Where Is the Entry?” [Exhibition & Artist Talk] by Karol Radziszewski

March 16

Bucharest, Romania: Formal Encounters at Galeria Nicodim. “Duchamp’s readymades have been converted to algorithms and injected into the Matrix—now our every impulse is readymade. Any bodily desire articulated in 140 characters or less can be solicited and obtained in the time it takes one to discover the proper dating site. Casual encounters no longer exist; predictive technology has already vacuformed your latest nascent kink in plastic for evening delivery (afternoon if you’re a Prime member); the FBI has surveiled and persecuted you for it; a Russian troll farm has pulled it out of context and publicly shamed you.” Featuring work by: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge • Lou Cantor • Jamie Felton • Mi Kafchin • Philipp Kremer • Jessie Makinson • Ciprian Mureşan • Katherina Olschbaur • Daniela Pălimariu • Daniel Pitín • Aura Rosenberg • Anna Uddenberg • and more…. On view until April 28.

Formal Encounters, Galeria Nicodim

Berlin, Germany: Opening: Valie Export / Sylvie Fleury at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri. “The exhibition VALIE EXPORT / SYLVIE FLEURY presents two principal positions of feminist art. Characterized by their distinct generations, both artists explicitly engage with female.” On view until April 14th.

Galerie Mehdi Chouakri‎ Opening: Valie Export / Sylvie Fleury

Moscow, Russia: Alexander Vinogradov – Citta Ideale at Galerie Iragui. “Curated by Arie Amaya-Akkermans, ‘Città Ideale’ is the first solo exhibition of the famous Russian artist Alexander Vinogradov in Galerie Iragui. The name of the exhibition refers to the paintings of unknown Renaissance artists of the same name, which represent a kind of plans-projects of transition from a medieval city to a modern one: geometric patterns, abstract criteria and scientific approaches, often permeated with a utopian contradiction. For Alexander Vinogradov, who was born and raised in Moscow in the second half of the 20th century, the Ideal City is a new Moscow: a city that was destroyed and re-planned for the monumental architecture of the future and the Great Utopia.” On view until May 16th.

Galerie Iragui, Alexander Vinogradov – Citta Ideale

Moscow, Russia: Andrey Lev “Foreign Crafts” / Yungyon Chon “Space within us” at Triumph Gallery. “Space within us” is the first personal exhibition of the contemporary South Korean artist Yungyon Chong, members of the group show Extension.KR. She was born in Hong Kong, and was educated at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmiths in London. Yungyon Chon is famous for its unique graphic technique. Her monochrome delicate painting is full of many details, is the result of the artist’s reflection on the interaction and interpenetration of cultures of East and West.” On view until April 1.

March 17

Warsaw, Poland. ‘This Is Not a Love Story‘ by Olga Dziubak at Stroboskop. Curated by Piotr Policht, the exhibition compiles “stories collected by Olga during her year-long stay in Northern Ireland, compiled as the audio drama And Obsessions Will Disappear, are the tales of migrants, of holiday residence affairs at the Venice Biennale, of love borne over smoking cigarettes at a pub, of people trying to anchor in a new place.” On view until April 7th.

‎Stroboskop / Olga Dziubak / This Is Not a Love Story

March 20

Riga, Latvia: ‘Everybody Reads Audiences’ with Jaakko Pallasvuo at Kim?. “Kim? is continuing its new series of events entitled “New Arrivals*” with the launch of a new digital quarterly called “Kim Docs”. To celebrate the launch, we invite you to the reading night “Everybody Reads Audiences” with Jaakko Pallasvuo at 7 pm, Tuesday, March 20th.

OPEN CALLS

Call for residency applications 2018–19 and 8th Inter-format Symposium on Rites & Terrabytes at Nida Art Colony in Lithuania. The residency programme at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts (NAC) is open for emerging and experienced artists, designers, architects, curators and researchers. NAC is one of the largest art, residency and education venues in the Nordic-Baltic region. It provides the opportunity to live and work in the Colony’s contemporary architecture, situated in a coastal pine forest. Since 2011 over 350 artists and other culture professionals have stayed at the Colony. Deadline to apply: 15 March 2018

Arc Bucharest. Arc Bucharest is pleased to announce its second residency open call for curators working and living outside Romania who are interested to get deeper insight into the local art context. Deadline to apply: 18 March 2018

Artists in Residence program at Club ElectroPutere. A fully-funded residency at Club ElectroPutere, a contemporary art center based in Craiova/Romania. Since 2009 CEP has been devoted to establishing close cooperation between artists, curators, researchers, and other cultural actors through interdisciplinary programs and residencies. The center’s activity focuses on producing and researching contemporary cultural manifestations. Deadline to apply: 22 March 2018

“IN OUT” Festival is inviting filmmakers to participate in “Dance | Image” video competition organized by “Łaźnia” Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk. The Festival consists of performances, lectures, concerts, films, talks, meetings – and the competition. “IN OUT” Festival will last from January until April, when the awards ceremony is to be held on 22.04.2018. The main prize is 5 000 pln (circa 1000 euro). To enter the competition each participant can send up to three films, produced as a one channel video, no longer than 20 minutes. To enter the competition You should send the work and the application form online through the website festivalinout.pl. Deadline to apply: 25 March 2018

Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society and Goethe-Institut Indonesia. A well-funded residency for artists living in Germany to work and study in Yogyakarta Indonesia, alongside one Indonesian artist, who will be in residence for the same period.Visual arts, with a specific interest in arts and social practice; duration of stay: 3 months from September through November 2018. Deadline to apply: 31 March 2018

Open call for rejected proposals. Open call for visual artists, curators, galleries for rejected papers, applications, proposals and projects. We accept past papers and applications, which were sent for competitions, scholarships and open calls, which were then rejected. Send us your rejected project proposal now! Share your failures and transform bad fortune into critical energy. It could release your art practice from a scheme of hierarchical thinking. All submitted proposals will be shown as part of an art installation in Poland. Deadline to apply: April 22 2018

NEWS FROM AROUND THE BLOK

Marco Baravalle masterfully deconstructs the populist turn in art and visual culture, weaving together how art workers, social movements, grassroots organizations, and cooperatives can create a space for radical alternatives through to political transformation, via e-flux journal:

“How, then, can we free this alter-institutional potential from the established art apparatus? Or, to put it in Gregory Sholette’s terms, how can we autonomously organize the socially creative “dark matter” of art?Artists seem to face two unsavory alternatives: being condemned to invisibility, or being a pillar of the mainstream art world, with no possibility of interfering with its relationships of money and power. How can we avoid both fates?”

“Answers to these questions can be found by experimenting with assemblages that connect artists and art workers to social movements, grassroots organizations, and radical cooperatives. This is the most effective way to realize new subjective possibilities for artists, curators, and cultural workers in general—subjectivities not shaped by the model of the entrepreneur of the self, not chained to a mobility that forces alter-institutions to fade out too quickly, not indebted and precarious for life, not wedded to the idea of creation as a private act in an era when it is instead the result of structural cooperation, not fueled by the adrenaline of market competition, and at the same time, not domesticated by the increasingly rare privilege of welfare-state benefits. In short, we need to associate the word “art” with different forms of life.

“Seen in this light, the construction of alter-institutions cannot be reduced to the latest trend in the contemporary art-event economy. Instead, it must become a way to structurally empower different “art worlds.” A new infrastructure is needed—a new physical, digital, linguistic, and economic infrastructure—in order for art to face the challenge of continuing financialization, rising reactionary politics, and the ongoing transformation of the art world into an event economy.”

Installation view of the exhibition “Dark Matter Super Collider, Dark Matter Games,” S.a.L.E. Docks, 2017. Photo: Veronica Badolin

The Pushkin Museum foray’s into augmented reality, as per The Art Newspaper Russia:

With the help of the application Artefact 280 exhibits from the collection of the Gallery of Art of Europe and America of the XIX-XX centuries have received an interactive embodiment; In the future, all new exhibitions of the museum will be translated into augmented reality.

The platform Artefact has earned, thanks to which 280 exhibits from the collection of the Gallery of Art of Europe and America of the XIX-XX centuries The State Museum of Fine Arts. Pushkin is available in augmented reality. Now when you hover over any picture or sculpture of a smartphone camera with the included application, you will be able to learn the history of its creation, review the details, listen to the audio guide. If the painting or sculpture was restored, the application will show its stages along with the roentgenogram and sketches. The program works as follows: “points of interest” appear on top of the work to be photographed on the camera, clicking on which you can find out facts about it, “point-citations” with phrases about it from its creator or critics and “point-pictures” with sketches and links to work with a similar plot. You can use the program without leaving your home, all pictures are in the virtual directory.