Weekly Roundup (29 March 2018)

Blok’s Opening Week Picks

March 29

• Paris, France:  Chagall, Lisitsky, Malevich. Russian avant-garde in Vitebsk (1918-1922) at Center Pompidou. “The Renaissance Museum of Art and Culture” – the 250th anniversary of the Renaissance Museum of Modern Art in Berlin, Vitebsk and Minsk museums, celebrates the greats of the Russian avant-garde.”

March 30

• Berlin, Germany:  Mutterzunge off-site: Seeing and Hearing-art talk. Beyond the events and presentations at Babylon, Mutterzunge also presents several off-site projects. First of these collaborations is in the Neukölln project from the 30th to the 5th of April, 2018. This is an outcome of the workshop, and Diyarbakır nonprofit art space at nbk’s Berlin studio residency apartment, during their research visit as part of Mutterzunge. Featuring: Seeing and Hearing | Ausstellung / Exhibition / Sergi Billy Apple®, Ceren Oykut, Erkan Özgen and Cengiz Tekin. Until April 5th.

• Bucharest, Romania: Maria Pop Timaru: TOO MUCH? at Sandwich. “A colony of organisms conquers the Sandwich space. The riddle-objects of Maria Pop Timaru are in fact the same ones. The path to the end of the tunnel, lucky ones.” On view until May 4th.

• Cluj, Romania: Vlad Nancă: In the natural landscape is an intruder at SABOT. “The exhibition explores some of the gallery, an imaginary world is a dubious life, as it is enlarged micro-silhouettes for architectural sketches to a 1: 1 scale – de-humanized or post-human (for Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley). Next to these, an extra-terrestrial alphabet emerges from the Eastern European plant holders, which intersect an essentially modernist aesthetic and folkloric inspiration. “

• Celje, Slovenia: Skrivne želje “Secret Desires” at Center Sodobnih Umetnosti Celje. “The Secret Desires by artist Keiko Miyazaki are made up of four installations and a series of drawings – five parts that interconnect both visually and in terms of content. Together, they form a complex interweaving of the spoken, the textual and the painted, lighting effects, objects and items taken from everyday life. The artist uses these to thematize the world of relationships, love and sexual relations, experiences, views and inclinations, inserting desire, secret and memory into them. She reminds of the inseparable connection and folding of the present into the past, placing the question of faithfulness, deceit and guilt into consideration.” Curated by Irena Čerčnik.

• Riga, Latvia: ” Linas Lapelītes performanču vakars Kim? ” Kim? invites you to the night of performances by Lina Lapelytė on the 30th of March, at 18:00. “Undersong”, co-organized by  Rupert within the institution-in-residency program. From 18:00.

• Maribor, Slovenia: Vlasta Zorko – Retrospective at UGM | Maribor Art Gallery. “Vlasta Zorko is one of the most prominent Slovenian sculptors of the second half of the 20th century. She could be rightfully regarded as the first Slovenian female sculptor of the post-war period, as she was the first among the few professionally educated female artists to become established in the field of sculpture.” On view until June 17th.

• Moscow, Russia: “Soviet Modernism. To and From at GRUND  and IGUMO. The exhibition “Soviet Modernism: To and From” will be held in Moscow for the second time. The opening took place in November 2017 at the Theater of Mimicry and Gesta. It presents an historical section of the exhibition that reveals the meaning of the era, including more than 200 collection objects – stamps, postcards, badges and booklets from the period of the 50-80s of the 20th century. The modern part, reflected by the artists and the public, will also be presented. On view until April 13.

March 31

• Berlin, Germany. “Stream IN Stream OUT” at panke.gallery . A two-person exhibition with Karl Heinz Jeron and Jules LaPlace, “Stream IN Stream Out” Karl Heinz Jeron sets up an experimental situation in the panke.gallery. In Sachzwänge, his animatronics act in the social media, creating a dollhouse-like experimental lab. The work is visible on our website. On view until April 19th. Jules LaPlace has worked since the mid-90s within the ASCII-art field. He is working in the internet, in the internet.

• Berlin, Germany.  Vernissage – Floating Islands Erin Mitchell & Olivia Lennon at Ex-girlfriend . “In light of the change in our global climate, floating in the global climate, and our role in reshaping, if not transcending, the physical limitations of our planet, our bodies, and our understanding of society. “On view until April 21st.

• Sofia, Bulgaria:  “Pizzag8: Burnout” organized by PCNC_BAY x BLUNT x SKENSVED . “PIZZAG8 is a series of late-night, bar-like exhibitions organized by PCNC_BAY x BLUNT x SKENSVED. It is a place for social gathering, a venue for exchange, and a roving project based on a common cross-cultural icon.” With the title PIZZAG8, the installation makes reference to the much-discussed online  #pizzagate  scandal, and “fake news” item that circulated on social media and shook the 2016 US presidential elections. Used as a vehicle for the concept, it indirectly points to the power of the internet meme. Lecture performances through to April 1.

April 3

• Moscow, Russia: Victor Kokhanyukov – Peresvetov Lane « Next Big Nothing at Sightseeing. The project opens a new collection for the audience: on time, presence, etc. Curated by Viktor Kokhanyukov and Sergey Ogurtsov. On view until April 22nd.

April 4

• Moscow, Russia: ” I’m not a robot ‘ “I’m not a robot” – this phrase contains the key paradox of human contact with the car. According to the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a modern society is in a state of emergency, and prevent potential threats. In such conditions, to demonstrate the virtual network of their intentions, the exhibition will explore the legacy of robotics, mobility and art. Artist include: Danya Vasilyev, Ekaterina Vasilyeva, Julian Golub, Sasha Litvintseva, Silvio Lorusso, Maxim Mesyats, Alexander Minchenko, Sarah Kuhlmann, Lyudmila Kalinichenko, Ivan Petrokovich, Dasha Trofimov, Yegor Tsvetkov, curated by Olga Deriugina.

Open Calls

• Cemeti – Institute for Art and Society and Goethe-Institut Indonesia . A well-funded residency for artists 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 projects . Open call for visual artists, curators, galleries for rejected papers, applications, and projects. We accept for papers, scholarships and open calls, which were then rejected. Send us your proposed project now! Share your failures and transform bad fortune into critical energy. It could release a practice of hierarchical thinking. All covered products will be shown in Poland. Deadline to apply: April 22nd 2018

Art News From Around the Blok

• Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (RIBOCA), and major new biennial in Riga, Latvia, is invited to participate in the first edition. Entitled ‘Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More’, the chief curator of RIBOCA1 Katerina Gregos, who has been instrumental in setting up the biennial alongside founder and commissioner Agniya Mirgorodskaya. A total of 99 items, including 10 collectives in the biennial. See the full list here .

• In other news, Public Art Munich also announces it’s list of participants and programs. The full list of participants can be found here. 

PAM 2018 addresses the mechanisms of change and the fundamental shifts taking place today from the vantage point of Munich—a city that has experienced tremendous ideological, sociopolitical, and symbolic turns of events. The commissioned art projects span this complex history, from the Bavarian Soviet Republic, postwar denazification, Radio Free Europe, May 1968, the optimism and tolerance of the Olympic Stadium, 1989, the welcoming of refugees at Munich’s central station in 2015, to the impacts of digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the # MeToo movement. The question is not whether to take part but rather how to do so and on what terms. What should change and what shouldn’t?

• In Russia, museums morn with the people of Kemerovo. As per the  Art Newspaper Russia: 

Some museums reacted to the tragedy of the Kemerovo shopping center “Winter Cherry” on March 25, before the fire was extinguished. For example, the State Hermitage published in its Twitter account and the same on the same day. And on Tuesday, March 27, without waiting for the announcement of the national flag of the Winter Palace.

The Union of Russian Museums, which includes more than 400 institutions from 76 subjects of the Russian Federation, expressed condolences to the residents of Kemerovo in a letter sent to the director of the Kemerovo Regional Museum Larisa Myzina.

• It’s been alleged that Bulgarian philospher, psychoanalyst, literary critic and author Julia Kristeva, who lived in France from the mid-1960s, was an agent and collaborator with Bulgaria’s communist-era secret service State Security, the Dossier Commission said on March 27 2018. Known for her idea of “The “semiotic” of the pre-mirror stage, and the nature of abjection, the news comes as a shock to many in Bulgaria’s cultural scene and beyond.

• A new text from Conceptual Artists from Eastern Europe: Slovakia is published over at Post: “Alex Mlynárčik’s “Manifesto Concerning ‘Interpretation’ in Fine Art” (1969) was published on the occasion of the 1st Festival of Snow, which Mlynárčik organized together with Robert Cyprich, Miloš Urbásek, and Milan Adamčiak in 1970 in Slovakia’s High Tatra Mountains. The idea of the festival was to invite participants to use snow as a means to react to the work of international artists from the canon of twentieth-century art. This ephemeral art show resulting in three hundred installations in or with snow—which Mlynárčik explicitly and perhaps ironically likened to a sports event—not only rebuts the focus on stable objects associated with galleries and other spaces conventionally designed to show art, it also rejects, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp, the fetishization of the artwork as a monadic, self-enclosed form. In this context opening up art to process and dialogue, Mlynárčik understands “interpretation” less as the extraction of meaning from an existing object or text than as an active process of tactile assimilation (in German, Nachvollzug) that can, incidentally, also serve as a model for the assimilation of international trends by artists from Eastern Europe.”