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. Here’s what you need to know for the week of June 21st, 2018.
Blok Weekly Opening Picks
June 21
- Bucharest, Romania: Postindustrial : Zâne at Rezidența BRD Scena9. “Postindustrial: Fairies” exhibition it is the first project in the curatorial program produced by Rezidența BRD Scena9. “Ioana Cîrlig and Marin Raica are two Romanian artists who practice documentary photography. In order to work on the Post-Industrial Stories project, they moved in 2012 to Brad, and then to Valea Jiului, where they still live part of the time.
- Warsaw, Poland: I’m sorry for everything at Czynny Żal Gallery. The presented works constitute a cycle in which I discuss important topics related to gender identity, gender and stigma related to sexual preferences. I am interested in the constructiveness of gender, created by the American feminist, philosopher and theoretician of culture Judith Butler, assuming that through the series of activities played and imposed on us by the cultural circle in which we live, the environment gives us sex. Her theory is related to many sexual practices (and often the whole lifestyle), hidden under the abbreviation BDSM. There is, inter alia, a domino figure – a woman who takes on roles traditionally associated with the male sex: firmness, domination, domination, aggressiveness. In my work, I try to capture these situations related to role playing, disintegrate it, which is traditionally understood as masculine or feminine. I refer to many fetishes that the world of BDSM implements, and related subjects.
- Dresden, Germany: Fear pleasure. Can you resist the evil of the thriller? at Schimmel Projects – Art Center Dresden. ANGSTLUST is a German term which is used to describe the tingle of fear. Instead of exhibitions, most people tend to link to the expression with either horror movies or fairs. In ghost trains, grotesque scenery, sounds and lights arouse curiosity among the visitors. For the exhibition, Raiko Sánchez and Miriam Schröder created a space in which the works are put in scene and presented in a variety of perspectives, in which the observer has the possibility to move around. Video, sculpture as well as painting are being mad.
- Kostanjevica, Slovenia: Petra Varl: Blizu svetlobi / Near Light at Galerija Božidar Jakac, Kostanjevica na Krki and Petra Varl. The exhibition Near Light emerges from the small, intimate, sensory and rational impulses of the artist and her desire to establish a dialogue with an exceptionally seductive, but demanding exhibition space. Petra Varl creates a choreography between four basic elements, which “toy” with the experience of the material reality in the worlds of the artist and visitors, and subtly connects them with the possibilities of the fleeting and momentarily. Suspense between the material and something that is on the edge of the material presence, between the visual and non-visual, is created within the space.
June 22
- Warsaw, Poland: “Sirkling” performance Tori Wrånes / Laura Marie Rueslåtten at Ujazdowski Castle. The protagonists of the “Sirkling” performance are a group of singing trolls, playing on various instruments, involved in the sequence of simple events taking place in the space of the exhibition. The audience watches the event from the perspective of a rotating audience, which completely changes the perception of the exhibition becoming a movable stage design for the duration of the performance. “Sirkling” was first performed during the individual exhibition “Hot Pocket” at the National Museum in Oslo (2017).
June 23
- Bucharest, Romania: The Unstable Condition of Zhong Zhong & Hua Hua Zine Launch at ODD and tranzit.ro. Lou Lou Sainsbury & Georgiana Cojocaru present their double zine launch & lecture-performance of poetry, essay and diary entries, including the projects ‘The Unstable Condition of Zhong Zhong & Hua Hua’ and ‘To be emptied out to glorious non-returns’. Working from an interdisciplinary practice of moving image, text, sound & performance, non-binary artist Lou Lou Sainsbury will join writer and curator Georgiana Cojocaru in hosting an evening of performative readings and open discussions, where they will present their work from the ODD residency.
June 24
- Moscow, Russia: Garage Live presents 1968: New World. Performance directed by Dmitry Volkostrelov. This performance was originally produced to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Moscow’s legendary Taganka Theater and was only performed only four times, in 2014. The design is based on the theater’s interior and the performance examines the inconsistency of memory. Here it will resonate with the Museum’s building, originally constructed in 1968.
June 28
- Moscow, Russia: The exhibition “Matter of Horror” at Solyanka VPA Video Performance Animation. The project focuses on border states and territories: the fusion of biological (body) and technological, the impact of viruses on systems, the “unconscious” of network structures. First of all, the curators Olga Deriugina and Nikita Vasilenko rely on the concept of the “horror of philosophy” proposed by Eugene Tucker, where “horror” is an attempt to think the world without us outside of philosophical discourse and tools.
Art news from around the Blok
- Palermo, Italy: Manifesta 12 Conjures Up a Natural Order in Extremis, From Erotic Plant Parties to Civilian Bombings:
Manifesta 12 describes our current world as one carved by opposing forces of nurture and violence. Sensitive to its locale at a cross-cultural axis of the Mediterranean, “The Planetary Garden: Cultivating Coexistence” approaches Palermo less as a static location than as a junction at which flows of trade, conflict, information, ideas, people and capital tangle like strands of spaghetti con le sarde.
- Amsterdam, Netherlands: Part of a report obtained by Dutch broadcaster AT5 suggests that former Stedelijk Museum director Beatrix Ruf was wrongfully accused of conflicts of interest. The report, which was commissioned by the Municipality of Amsterdam, has yet to be published in full:
Ruf resigned as the director of the Stedelijk in October 2017 after it emerged that she had not declared the earnings of her art advisory business, Currentmatters. An article by Dutch newspaper NRC also accused Ruf of failing to declare the details of a major museum donation by Thomas Borgmann, the terms of which were allegedly favorable to galleries with which Ruf had regularly worked. Three museum board members — Rita Kersting, Madeleine de Cock Buning, and Jos van Rooijen — resigned this week following the report’s partial publication.