PAVILION presents AUDITORIUM | LIMBO | Mar 2013

Pavilion

Sophie Yetton + Gabriel Birch
films by Mary Hurrell, Helene Kazan, Linda Persson, Thomas Lock, Mirza&Butler and Richard Whitby
2- 10 March 2013

Open Fri-Sun, 12 – 5 pm
Private View: 1 March,  6-9pm

Pavilion is Sophie Yetton & Gabriel Birch. Pavilion’s work re-frames the exhibition space by investigating the possible duality of sculptural object and gallery furniture. They create performative installations which become vehicles for the interaction between audiences and other artists’ work.

Auditorium is an exhibition that explores the idea of screen as object through a single sculpture which poses as a projection room for artists’ films. It challenges the viewer to occupy the structure and invites the audience as a whole to determine the object’s functional and aesthetic potential.

Built from timber and thin sheet material, the scale is both formally sculptural and also suggestive of lightweight architecture. The timber structure is intricate but anarchic, providing an elaborate footing for a shell-like platform. The screen stretches out across the timber, shattering and unfolding into a broken ground to offer a form of seating from which to view the films.

Auditorium presents films by:
Mary Hurrell works across performance, film and sculpture to explore choreography and composition of body, space and object. Her work investigates forms of non-verbal language, and relationships between physical and psychological experience.

Hurrell has made a new work for Auditorium, Tilt your head toward me (Remixed performance works), 2012, which incorporates recent performance footage, creating an altered interpretation of earlier works. This piece looks at the translation of performance to film and uses this dislocation to form a new composition.

Helene Kazan is a London-based multidisciplinary artist, who uses research and archival material to generate moving image and mixed media installations. Currently she is an MA student at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University, London.

Living on the Edge (2013) is a stop-frame animation entirely generated from a single archive photograph of a flooded house in London in 1989. It recreates the event and its effects on the architecture of the home, as a way of punctuating a turning point in cultural and political attitudes towards the environment, re-placing it within a contemporary context and a continued mobilised state of fear.

View film: Living the Edge

Thomas Lock is a London-based artist working with video and sound. Earlier works explore derelict buildings through a disembodied camera creating uncanny immersive video and sound environments. Lock's more recent works are low-fi video collages that break down the materiality of video and sound.

Body Dysfunctional (2009) explores the architectural space of an abandoned children's hospital in East London. The camera slowly moves throughout the building recreating the experience of a disembodied viewer.

Karen Mirza & Brad Butler have been making films for over 15 years including works that interrogate the illusionistic space of cinema, the recording and representation of space and the politics of the viewing space of film itself.

In The Space Between the film image is constantly fluctuating between object representation and surface abstraction. Repetition does not bring clarity nor is it meant to. No attempt is made to deny either the subjectivity of film or its representational mode; rather the viewer works through and against the film with the filmmakers; so to speak.

Linda Persson's practice stems from a metaphysical ground for artistic unfolding, exploring transformative spatiality through individual and collaborative engagements that influence aesthetics and discourse equally. Through the structure and syntax of filmic representation, the work aims to unsettle perception by activating physical bodies.

Encounter (2007): A lone figure performs undefined movements on a buoyant platform in a lake which was formerly industrial wasteland. His embodiment challenges the set perimeters navigated by historical events.

Richard Whitby sees video as a container in which different materials and tropes can be brought into proximity. These materials can come from historical research, documentary-style shoots and/or improvised performances with handmade props.

Palatul (2011) includes footage of inner-city stray dogs, and a narrated fable of an architect building a palace for a communist dictator.

all design | MARA/Departure Foundation | Sept 2012

ALL DESIGN

Thursday 27th September 6 - 9pm
with Geopolitical banana-wharf cocktails
exhibition Friday 28th September till Sunday 14th October 2012

Open from Thursday to Saturday 1 – 5pm, Sunday 1 – 4pm

EXHIBITING
Palwasha Amanullah, Nadia Barhoum, Remco de Blaaij,
Eva Dietrich, Daniel Fernández Pascual, Blake Fisher,
Mirko Gatti, Janet Hall, Samir Harb, Irmelin Joelson, Heejung
Kim, Steffen Kraemer, Hannah Meszaros Martin, Chris Molinski,
Corinne Quin, Alan Yates

CURATING
Louise Ashcroft and Helene Kazan

The group assembles along a narrow balcony overlooking South
Quay waterfront in Canary Wharf. A suited man awkwardly
pushes past, mumbling an apology as he makes his way through
this gathering. In close proximity, an LED sign with live share
prices moves across a building boldly asserting ‘Information in the
right hands leads to amazing things. That’s the Knowledge Effect’.
Attempting to negotiate a small stretch of water - evidence of the
Quay’s industrial past - one member of the group is precariously
perched on a ladder trying to reach the old sign on the front of
the building. Their intention is to intervene and cancel out its
alliterated past so that ‘Kall Kwik business and design’ now reveals
itself as ‘all design’.

This act of public redaction forms the title of the exhibition - a
semiotic readymade, an architectural cut-up, and an aesthetic
proposition. ‘all design’ brings the sixteen diverse spatial practices
emerging from this year’s MA programme at the Centre for
Research Architecture at Goldsmiths University together into a
space of productive interplay.

Formed around the Centre’s methodological practice-based
approach to research, the works take architecture as a point of
departure and turn it into a mode of analysis and investigation.
Collectively the projects reverse-engineer the making of space
in order to interrogate and identify the political trajectories of
matter and institutional protocols.

Situated in the financial heart of the city, this context provides
more than just a backdrop to the exhibition, as the capital
flows that move through this space are rematerialized into
zones of exclusion and estrangement. Space is not simply
a location, but a field of forces that push and pull at all the
projects presented here. Tensions emerge that reveal moments
of slippage, confusion, rupture, violence, and subterfuge; that
reveal material erosion, breakage, contamination and ruin. But
unlike the movement of electronic capital that carves clean new
jurisdictions out of networked pixels, these works inhabit and
trouble the margins of existing jurisdictions by settling on top
of melting glaciers, moving into dense jungle, occupying the
stairs of St Paul’s Cathedral, dwelling in a German mountain
cave, entering the bread ovens of Cairo, and even probing
the molecules of air and water that make up our planetary
ecologies. ‘all design’ offers sixteen unique perspectives and
interpretations of a collective set of global points and flows.

With thanks to the support of the Centre for Research Architecture
including Adrian Lahoud, Andy Lowe, John Palmesino,
Susan Schuppli, Paulo Tavares and Eyal Weizman.

PAVILION presents AUDITORIUM | Dilston Grove | Aug 2012

Pavilion presents AUDITORIUM: Gabriel Birch + Sophie Yetton
with films by artists Mary Hurrell, Helene Kazan, Thomas Lock, Mirza & Butler, Linda Persson, and Richard Whitby

Private View 10 August 6-8pm
Open w/ends 11/12, 18/19, 25/26 August 12-4pm
Dilston Grove / Southwark Park / SE16 2D

Pavilion presents Auditorium, an 'architecture-sculpture' displaying films by contemporary artists Mary Hurrell, Helene Kazan, Linda Persson, Thomas Lock, Mirza & Butler and Richard Whitby.

Pavilion is a collaboration between Gabriel Birch and Sophie Yetton, which intends to reframe the space of exhibition through interventions that call into question the relationships between viewer, art work and gallery architecture.

Auditorium is a proposal for an alternative display mechanism for artist film. Following in the vein of Pavilion's previous work, Auditorium investigates the possible duality of exhibition furniture and sculptural object.

pavilionprojects.org

Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions | Aug 2012

Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions
Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open 2012


5 July–12 August 2012

Participating artists: Francis Alÿs, Yael Bartana, Walead Beshty, Ethan Breckenridge, Gregory Crewdson, Helene Kazan, Avi Mograbi, Miri Segal, Caragh Thuring, Trisha Baga, Shi Jin, Haegue Yang

The exhibition and free events programme, Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions, considers how space is produced through social relations: shaped by our fantasies, transformed through our occupation, or controlled by violence.

It includes works by eleven artists from the Zabludowicz Collection and a new site-specific commission by London-based artist Helene Kazan. In addition, exhibition designer Emil Krøyer has created a furniture system for the Summer Sessions intended to contextualize the events programme in the gallery and to facilitate its social engagement.

The Summer Sessions are integral to the project: they take a range of recent events in the public space and the shifting (shrinking) space of education as an imperative to put the space of the collection to use, to leave no space untouched by pedagogy and resistance. Each weekend’s programme is centred on a spatial question, with presentations by several of the exhibiting artists as well as a number of invited speakers.

Friday–Sunday, 6–8 July

Spaces of Distribution and Production: Considers the spaces in which commodities, images, truth claims, and architectures are produced and distributed.

Participants include Ethan Breckenridge, Helene Kazan, Anthony Downey, and Caragh Thuring.
Walead Beshty‘s objects testify to their movement through space, and give form to invisible systems of distribution. Ethan Breckenridge contains corporate architecture of the everyday in tinted glass vitrines. Shi Jin‘s diminutive karaoke machines reference the mobile business models invented on the margins of global financial systems. Helene Kazan explores the use of masking tape on windows as protection against exterior force, from natural catastrophe and human conflict. Caragh Thuring‘s paintings depict the industrial paradigm’s breakdown as formal elements abstracted from their usual contexts: floating cranes and giants pulleys displaced across raw canvases.

Friday–Sunday, 13–15 July

The Body in Space: Looks at how the body is produced by the space it moves through, and how it in turn produces that space.

Participants include Trisha Baga, Cliff Borress, Miri Segal, Debra Benita Shaw, and Andrew Merrifield.

Francis Alÿs evokes the memory of protest, demonstrating that the way bodies appear in public is as important as the fact that they gather. The subject of Trisha Baga‘s video work navigates an infinite digital landscape, manipulating both physical and social spaces as part of her sense-making journey. Miri Segal situates the viewer simultaneously in private and public space through a mirror-play, by superimposing the viewer’s reflection on a woman enjoying herself and her lover. Haegue Yang constructs figures out of material culture’s marginalia, endowing these quasi-bodies with the authority of the shaman-figure.

Friday–Sunday, 20–22 July

Spaces of Utopia / Dystopia: Aims to flesh out society’s persistent, even relentless production of non-places and spaces of imagination.

Participants include Thomas Keenan, Avi Mograbi, and Brad Samuels.

Avi Mograbi captures a confrontation with Israeli Defense Force soldiers and questions who has the right to look, to be filmed, to access space, or deny access to others. With her study of men challenging each other in four-wheelers on a Sunday afternoon, Yael Bartana‘s work mirrors Israel’s deployment of high-tech military equipment and its ephemeral geography of boundaries drawn and transgressed. Gregory Crewdson‘s photographs are suburban portraits, an image of space shaped by disavowed desire.

To RSVP for the Friday and Saturday night discussions with dinner, please send an email with your contact information and the session that interests you to rsvp@zabludowiczcollection.com.

Troubling Space: The Summer Sessions was selected from over 100 entries to the Zabludowicz Collection Curatorial Open by a panel comprised of Chris Dercon, Martin Herbert, Maria Lind, and Anita Zabludowicz.

Curated by Helga Just Christoffersen and Natasha Marie Llorens.
Zabludowicz Collection
176 Prince of Wales Road 
London, NW5 3PT

HOUSE 2012 | Phoenix Brighton | May 2012

We are pleased to invite you to the openings of HOUSE 2012 on Thursday 3 May:

Deb Bowness

Robin Blackledge

Helene Kazan

Caroline Le Breton

Phoenix Brighton from 5.00pm

10–14 Waterloo Place

Brighton BN2 9NB

David Batchelor

The Regency Town House from 6.00pm

13 Brunswick Square

Hove BN3 1EH

Exhibition continues 4 May – 10 June

Wed – Sun, 11.00-17.00

18 & 19 May, open until 21.00

http://www.housefestival.org

HOUSE 2012 is delighted to be working with prominent contemporary artist David Batchelor. As lead artist Batchelor has also influenced the selection and development of five satellite commissions that make up HOUSE 2012, who include Robin Blackledge, Deb Bowness, CINECITY & Anna Deamer, Helene Kazan and Caroline Le Breton.

Inherent to the character of HOUSE 2012 is work that exists both within and beyond the gallery walls, out on to the street. Collectively, all these projects make playful interventions across the city of Brighton & Hove over the month of May, exploring themes of domesticity, the urban and the everyday.

Celia Davies

Guest Curator

HOUSE 2012

Chicago Boys | Serpentine Gallery | Mar 2011

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming…

Concert and study group

Thursday 8 March 2012 8pm

Serpentine Gallery

Kensington Gardens

London W2 3XA

Free

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming… is a 1970s revival band and neoliberalism study group conceived and developed by the artist Hiwa K while he was in residence on the Edgware Road. Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming… will be holding a special performance on the occasion of the exhibition On the Edgware Road at the Serpentine Gallery and the Centre for Possible Studies (6–28 March).

This performance is free, but spaces are limited. Seats will be available on a first-come, first-served basis.

Further information

Nicola Lees

Public Programmes Curator

nicolal@serpentinegallery.org

information@serpentinegallery.org

www.serpentinegallery.org

Open daily, 10am–6pm

Centre for Possible Studies

21 Gloucester Place

London W1U 8HR

T 020 7486 2266

Open Saturday and Sunday

10am–6pm from 6–28 March

All other times by appointment

Untitled Repetition | Angus-Hughes | Feb 2011

Curated by Fieldgate Gallery

Private View: Friday 24thFebuary, 6-9pm

Exhibition runs: Feb 25th – March 18th

Gallery open: Saturdays & Sundays, 12-6pm, or by appointment

Sarah Rose Allen – Clare Goodwin – Dan Hays

Helene Kazan – Charles Mason

Angus-Hughes

26 Lower Clapton Rd (at the junction of Urswick Rd)

London

E5 0PD

With repetition embedded within their modus operandi, these artists appear to be paying a more respectful acknowledgment to their Modernist predecessors. Some use repetition in series, some as motifs, while for others it is simply a form of process in the making of the work. However, on closer inspection, there is mischief to be had, as unexpected references inform their practices. From domesticity in the form of 70s wallpaper designs to architectural systems; from an inquiry into optics to inversions of the monumental, there is an eclectic range of concerns amongst these artists that ruptures the surface appearance of deference.

Untitled Repetition, Angus Highes: http://www.angus-hughes.com/UNTITLED-REPRETITION

Spaces of Reckoning | Westminster University | Dec 2011

Interdisciplinary approaches to conflict and memory. A symposium at the University of Westminster – 3rd December, 2011.

Both Conflict Studies and Memory Studies have, in recent years, become of increasing interest across the Humanities and Social Sciences, as they generate compelling dialogues between fields of study and build on the interdisciplinary turn in contemporary academe. This event will create a space that will allow for two things: the development of opportunities for discussion across academic and cultural spheres and the inclusion of voices from outside academia that can provide new insight and potential empirical challenges to theoretical discussion. The event will gather together new researchers, and is especially designed to bring together individuals from disciplines that do not traditionally intersect. We are seeking interested participants from across and outside the academic spectrum to contribute to the creation of new and productive dialogues.

Schedule of events on 03 December 2011.

9:00 - 9:25: Arrival and Registration

9:25 - 9:30: Welcome and safety information

9:30 - 11:00: Law, Justice and Memory

With Chairperson: Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Audio-documentary : ‘The Language Gulf in the Shouting Valley’

Cristina Golomoz: ‘Transitional Justice at the Romanian Constitutional Court’

Peter Manning: ‘“Moving forward through justice”: Human rights, memory politics and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia’

11:00 - 11:15: 15 Minutes Break

11:15 - 12:45: Spaces and Memorialisation

With Chairperson: Danilo Mandic

Aikaterini Gegisian: ‘Mother Armenia is distant: Memorialisation, National identity and Collective Memory in post-Soviet Yerevan’

Eray Cayli: “Architectural Memorialization as Narrativization of the Past in Sites of Post-coup Reckoning: the case of the Madımak Hotel"

Professor. Paul Miller: ‘Reckoning with the Great War: Remembering the Sarajevo Assassination’

12:45 - 13:25: 40 minutes - Lunch

13:25 - 14:25: Keynote Address

Professor Sue Vice : ‘False Memoir Syndrome’

With Chairperson: Tallyn Gray

14:25 - 14:35: 10 minute mini-break

14:35 - 16:05: Personal Subjectivity, Intergenerationality and Memory

With Chairperson: Marija Katalinic

Steve Smith: ‘Between Cultural Memory and Anecdote, Remembrance and Forgetting. An Artist's re-interpretation of a personal history of conflict.’

Merilyn Moos: ‘Learning to Remember’

Hannah Proctor: ‘ Virtual Iraq: War, Technology and the Post-Traumatic Subject’

16:05 - 16:20: 15 Minute Break

16:20 - 17:50: Contextualizing Representations of Memory

With Chairperson: Isac Petruzzi

Dr. Caroline Perret: ‘Confronting History: Jean Dubuffet’s Illustration of Eugène Guillevic’s poems "Les Murs" (1944-45)

Jette Gindner,‘Cross-mappings of the Holocaust, Colonial Genocide and Patriarchal Violencein Ingeborg Bachmann’s Unfinished Novel The Book of Franza’

Helene Kazan: Film: 'Masking Tape Intervention: Lebanon 1989' - Followed by discussion

http://www.spacesofreckoning.co.uk/

Open Shop: Artist Residency | Istanbul Biennial | Sept 2011

Open Shop is an invitation to engage with a process of open discourse, exchange and research to make visible a very specific emotive relationship with the architecture of the home and the reasons that lead to a decision to migrate. The residency will explore a cross section of personal experience of contemporary human migration in Istanbul.

Drawing on her own encounter of moving from Lebanon to England, Helene Kazan’s practice uses developed film making techniques that investigate spatialised experience. ‘Masking Tape / Light Intervention: Lebanon 1989’, is generated from an archive photograph taken of her family kitchen in Lebanon before their migration to England. Involving a combination of model making, oral history and stop motion animation, the work presents the viewer with an emotive relationship with the architecture of the home. Defined by a conversation between her parents outlining the specific situation leading to migration.

The animation will be exhibited at The Architectural Research Studio Mars, near the ‘Open Shop’ in Cihangir, as part of Architectural Research Exhibitions Series 1: Crystal City. Opening on the of 18th September during the opening weekend of the 12th Istanbul Biennial. The film enables a theoretical framework and point of reference for the research undertaken during the residency.

The ‘Open Shop’ will function in two ways:

Firstly it is an open informal space, where visitors are invited to drop in to share and discuss stories or archive photographs of a departed home. Evoking a discourse and exchange with local and international communities in Istanbul.

Secondly using two purpose built screens in the large windows that create the ‘Open Shop’ space, it will function as an informal exhibition and public screening platform relaying the visual and oral research that will be collected throughout the residency.

Parts of the accumulated research will eventually have the same process applied as was cultivated for ‘Masking Tape / Light Intervention: Lebanon 1989’, to recreate and describe other homes and personal histories.

This residency is a collaboration with openvizor, a non-profit international arts and cultural platform and organization that brings together different people and skills from around the world to combine practical knowledge and research.

www.openvizor.com www.helenekazan.co.uk

Architectural Research Studio MARS. Architectural Research Exhibitions Series 1: Crystal City

Opening: 18.09.2011 18.00-20.30 Dates: 18.09.2011 - 18.11.2011 Tues - Sat 11.00-19.00

Address: No:10 Bostanbasi Cad. Galatasaray-Taksim.

Crystal City | Istanbul Biennial | Sept 2011

Architectural Research Exhibitions Series 1 - Crystal City

Parallel exhibition to Istanbul Biennial

Opening Date: 18.09.2011 18.00-20.30

Dates: 18.09.2011 - 18.11.2011

Tuesday-Saturday 11.00-19.00

Concept and Organization by: Pınar Öğrenci

Artists: Şahinaz Emine Akalın, Luk Berghe, Uli Fischer, Claudia von Funcke, Behrouz Hescmat, Evrim Kavcar, Helene Kazan, Pınar Öğrenci, Mustafa Pancar, Erich Pick, Kemal Seyhan

Address: No:10 Bostanbasi Cad. Galatasaray-Taksim.

Contact: pinarogrenci@yahoo.com facebook.com/marsistanbul

The Architectural Research Studio Mars is hosting the Crystal City exhibition from the 18th of September to the 18th of November 2011. Inspired by Italio Calvino's book, 'Invisible Cities', the participating artists set out to discover the secret reasons why people choose to live in urban environments. At a time trying to deal with a vagrant utopia and his longing for urban humanism, Calvino embarks on a journey outside the barriers of time and space; revolting against the modern cities of our time, he investigates the future of modern, metropolitan cities. This exhibition, organized by Pınar Öğrenci, explores through the means of imagery, the artists' relationship with architecture, and therefore cities, as well as concepts such as memory, desire, symbolism, remembrance and barter.

LOW&HIGH programme: Folkstone Triennial | 16 Spaces | July 2011

THE VISITORS - TALK 1:

Structure and Site Search.

SATURDAY, 16TH JULY, 4PM.

With: Louise Ashcroft and Helene Kazan (16 Spaces, London), Julia Crabtree

and William Evans (James Taylor Gallery, London), Pierre D’Alancaisez

(Waterside Project Space, London), Toby Huddlestone (Crate, Margate), Dimitri Launder (Area 10, London).

A discussion on art activities in the contexts of relocating, development, destruction, obstruction, (re)organising and functioning within existing structures as well as creating new platforms and networks. We will also look at nomadic curators-artists/artists-curators and reclaimed (art)spaces. Panelists will share experiences of their work as art workers/art organisers, which will be followed by a Q&A session. The event

is open to everybody.

Free. To book your place email: lowandhigh.platform@gmail.com

Location LOW&HIGH 15 Tontine Street, Folkestone, CT20 1JT

www.16spaces.com

lowandhighplatform.wordpress.com

Ever Remote | Site Gallery/Crescent Arts | July 2011

Selected from invitation and open call, Ever Remote presents a selection of contemporary video works that engage or question the meaning of home, elsewhere and all the distances in-between. Each work explores a different aspect of the distances between ourselves and everything else: physical, temporal, cultural, emotional, imagined. Home and elsewhere come across as alien concepts that are constantly being both re- and de-constructed.

There will be an opportunity to discuss the work with some of the artists after the screening.

DATES & LOCATION

12th July at 6pm at Site Gallery (Sheffield), hosted by occursus. Event is free but please book at events@sitegallery.org

More info at www.sitegallery.org

15th July at 6.30pm at Crescent Arts (Scarborough). Event is free but please book at info@crescentarts.co.uk

More info at www.crescentarts.co.uk

The Great Alonso | Gallery Primo Alonso | June 2011

Primo Alonso presents:

The Great Alonso 18th June-10th July

Private View Friday 17th June 6pm-late

This summer Primo Alonso will close it's doors for good but before we go we'd like to say thank you to everyone we have worked with so far. Our final exhibition will showcase some of the brilliant artists we have had the pleasure to meet over the past five years so please come along and say your goodbyes.

The last adventure of the Great Alonso

Text by Matt Clark

Ah yes... when all else is done, when performing is in the dream of the child and the last rabbit has been pulled, only now can I dream of the last great adventure. Of the place where all men meet and talk of times spent living... that is the only adventure I have now. My last trick is that which they used to say of the devil, to prove my existence. 'Great Alonso' they used to say, 'where did that rabbit come from?' 'My hat is deep', is all I used to reply. But they could not know, how they would laugh at me if they knew the truth. I have never found the strength to reach deep enough to find the ark by which all beasts come. Never have I found the lion and the giraffe, nor has the monkey or bear reached for my hand as I reach for theirs. I only ever find a rabbit, and his meagre form is no longer adequate for their amusement. Now you know my failure and I can no longer search for that strength. I will accept a fate dealt to me here and relinquish to the foundry of the heavens any cast made from my soul, and look not for the crown and beast but to the brim and acceptance.

As I sit in this dressing room the sickly sight of this lead paint veneer chokes my nostrils, this humble stool creeks and groans with history, as if a thousand clowns had asked the reflection in the mirror for approval of their craft, and now a fog enters my eyes. The thought occurred to me that if the lights around the mirror had been put out, this scene would be less cheerless, that the gas lamps made ones heart sadder because it lighted it all up. My coat tails look tattered and worn, my face looks grey and my eyes look deep set as if into cavernous holes in my head. What is a magician with only old tricks? The children no longer applaud my successes but instead arrive like grey and purple clouds on my day of sun, obscuring my view of a once glistening horizon. A poet once told me, 'great artists have no country' and now that line sticks in my ears as justice to my secret, for there is something I have neglected to say.

I used to know a magic, a magic I was taught by a long line of marvellous magicians who took their knowledge with them when they died. This was a magic that could not be bought by means of this world, not plastic apparitions but real magic. These wonders would provide them with a place in the sky as one of the stars in the black velvet shroud you see at night. You see a magician is not a man like any other, as before he comes onto this world he makes a pact with the sun never to out shine him in they eyes of man and in return when he passes the sun grants him a place in the sky to watch over all the magic of all the universe and to learn all the tricks of man, so that they may shine on for eternity but only in his shadow.

This was the oath I took many years ago. But in my time I forgot that pact, and I broke the promise to the sun when I reached for the lion instead of the rabbit and now the broken man who writes this will not find a place in heaven but will remain in this place as a clown, one to be jeered at and taunted, one to be called 'the joke'. To me being called a mad man would be a promotion if it were not that I remain as ridiculous in their eyes as before. But now I do not resent this fate, this audience, they are all dear to me, even when they laugh at me and indeed it is just then that they are particularly dear to me. I can join in their laughter not exactly at myself but through my affection for them, if I did not feel so sad as to look at them. Sad because they do not know the truth and I do know it. Oh! How hard it is to be the only one who knows the truth. But they would not understand it; no they would not understand it at all. This is my end and this painted face is all that remains of the Great Alonso.

For press enquiries please contact

Angelica Sule: email: a.sule@primoalonso.com

Gallery Primo Alonso, 397 Hackney Road, London, E2 8PP

Open Friday-Sunday 11am - 6pm or by appointment

Tube: Bethnal Green/Old Street

Bus 26, 48, 55

Tel: 020 7033 3678

Email: info@primoalonso.com

Web: www.primoalonso.com

Invasive Alien Species | Venice | June 2011

Invasive Alien Species

An exhibition coinciding with the 54th Venice Biennale

1335 Via Garibaldi, Castello, Venezia

1st - 5th and 9th - 12th June 2011 (12pm - 5pm)

Opening reception: Saturday 4th June 6- 9 pm

Artists' talk Thursday 2nd June 3pm

Biological invasions by non-native or 'alien' species are one of the greatest threats to the ecological and economic wellbeing of the planet. (Delivering Alien Invasive Species Inventories for Europe)

10961 species of plants and animals are currently classified by the EU as alien species, a significant minority of which are dangerously invasive. Without the usual constraints of their native ecosystems to keep them in check they have become established and spread out from their point of introduction, frequently out-competing the local species, sometimes to the point of threatening their extinction. And once established eradication is virtually impossible. Venice, too, is invaded every two years by a tide of artists, curators, connoisseurs and culture vultures. Are they welcome? Are they invited? Do they make a useful contribution to the life of the city? Do they leave a lasting effect? The Venice Biennale has for over a century been one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world.

Established in 1895, the Art Biennale has an attendance today of over 300,000 visitors and the opening weekend is the most important event in the year's international art calender. The Biennale takes place in two official sites in Venice: the Arsenale, which hosts the international exhibition, and the Giardini di Castello in the east of the city, which houses the national pavilions including the British Pavilion.

Liz Sheridan, guest curator for London-based TangentProjects, has brought together 12 artists from the UK and mainland Europe in a group exhibition, in a prominent location close to the Giardini site, in response to the idea of the invasive aliens. And like the alien species in the natural world, the artists compete to find their place in the compressed space of a small empty shop.

The artists - Karen Ay, Vanya Balogh, Tracey Bush, Cedric Christie, Forge & Cutter, Helene Kazan, Manuel Kämpfer, Toni Parpan, Danny Pockets, Liz Sheridan, Steve Smith and Karen Winzer - have in common that their practices are highly responsive to the contexts and situations in which the work is developed.

The exhibition is a collateral event which coincides with the opening of the Venice Art Biennale.

For further inquiries contact Liz Sheridan +44 7812 104 126 or e_a_sheridan@yahoo.co.uk.

More details, including information on visiting the exhibition are available on: www.invasivealienspecies.wordpress.com

TangentProjects

J J & J HQ Studios

191-205 Cambridge Heath Rd, London, E2 0EL UK

www.tangentprojects.org

info@tangentprojects.org

With thanks to the British Council

Chicago Boys | Nottingham Contemporary

Chicago Boys, while we were singing, they were dreaming..

14 May 2011 at Nottingham Contemporary

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming... is an ongoing project initiated and conceived as a 1970s cover band and neo-liberalism study group by the Kurdish Iraqi artist Hiwa K. Drawing from the You tube videos, a team of global lay researchers accessed via Skype, and band members' personal experiences, the group has played songs from the 1970s and performs comparative studies of neoliberalism around the world. Pop songs from Holland, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bangladesh and Poland are interspersed with discussions and stories about the processes through which free market values such as those espoused by their namesake - the Chicago Boys - a group of Chilean students who studied under economist Milton Friedman - are experienced in specific locations around the world. Chicago Boys sessions respond to the location they are in and have focused on topics such as migration, education and privatisation of public space.

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming… was originally commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery’s Edgware Road Project at the Centre for Possible Studies, where Hiwa K was artist-in-residence. It has since developed in relation to the sites of Alternativa (Wyspa, Gdansk, Poland), Casco Projects and if I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution (Holland) and The Arts Against Cuts Direct Weekend (London) among others.

The Space, 4pm, free.

Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

Ever Remote | South Square Gallery | May 2011

A screening of artists’ films that explore and challenge ideas of home, loss, travel, distance and belonging.

Märit Aronsson

Marc Atkinson

Michael Day

Hondartza Fraga

Maud Haya-Baviera

Esther Johnson

Helene Kazan

Sybella Perry

Miguel Santos

Christiane Thalmann

Andrew and Caitlin Webb-Ellis Julia Willms

Curated by Hondartza Fraga

One night only

Friday 06 May 6.30pm

South Square Gallery is a grass-roots exhibition space committed to providing a professional and supportive resource for artists and emerging curators. As a testbed for new ideas, the gallery hosts and ever-evolving dialogue between artists and their audience.

Free entry

Opening times

Tuesday - Sunday | 12 - 3pm

And by appointment

Image: Michael Day, 2011

South Square Gallery

South Square

Bradford

BD13 3LD

Telephone +44 (0) 1274 834 747

Email. info@southsquarecentre.co.uk

Website: www.southsquarecentre.co.uk

Alt MFA | at Coalition Cuts Protest & Margate

Saturday 26th March some members of AltMFA will be marching to support the protest against the coalitions cuts to public services. 

At 2.11pm we will make a collective sound to mark the signal for actions away from the march. At this time various groups – such as Arts Against Cuts, ukuncut, resist 26 – will be staging sit-ins, occupations and other awareness raising tactics. See http://artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com/ for some useful information about the protest, the cuts and other useful theoretical links. 

During the march and after in Hyde Park we will be situated near to Arts Against Cuts group where we will be holding various collective activities throughout – look out for their banners, a giant wooden Trojan horse. 

Some Hackney members will be cycling with the bike bloc from Hackney town hall at 10am, the march starts at 11am from Victoria embankment.

Throughout the day and evening we will stage collective speakings through home made plaster megaphones (or mega-plasterphones – this term has not been endorsed by the group!).

One of these actions will be to make connection with exhibition goers at the Pavilion Projects Circuit event in Margate:

http://www.pavilionprojects.org/pavilion/upcoming_show.html http://margatearchitecture.blogspot.com/2011/03/event-circuit-drive-thru-cinema-at.html

Via mobile phone we will be offering a connection for people at the exhibition to either listen to the march or have their comments collectively voiced via the AltMFA megaphones.

A banner situated next to one of our megaohones in Margate will read:

'call 07588631674, alt-megaphone live link to the London protest - speak or listen. Altmfa'

Once in Hyde Park where we will use improvised materials such as dustsheets and old placards to make shelters and will possibly camp out.

We hope everyone has a great day.

Chicago Boys | March tour of the Netherlands

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming, tour the Netherlands March 19-25, 2011.

Casco and If I Can't Dance would like to invite you to join the touring performances by 'Chicago Boys, While We Were Singing, They Were Dreaming':

Utrecht:

19 March, 19.00-22.00


Casco – Office for Art,

Design and Theory


Nieuwekade 213-215
3511RW

Utrecht
T/F: +31 (0)30 231 9995


www.cascoprojects.org

Enschede:

20 March, 19.00-21.00


Stichting Enschede’s Odd-Fellowhuis


Nicolaas Beetsstraat 44
7514 CW

Enschede
T: 053 435 4481 ‎


www.oddfellows.nl

Arnhem:

23 March, 20.00-22.00


Dutch Art Institute – MFA/ArtEZ


Kortestraat 27
6811EP Arnhem


www.dutchartinstitute.nl

Amsterdam:

25 March, 18.00-21.00


If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution


Westerdok 606-608
1013 BV

Amsterdam

www.ificantdance.org

This tour is co-organised by Casco – Office for Art, Design and Theory and If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution in collaboration with Dutch Art Institute / ArtEZ

See more information here:

http://www.cascoprojects.org/?show&entryid=420

http://www.ificantdance.org/#chicago

Chicago Boys | at Art Against Cuts Direct Weekend

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming...

Open rehearsal and study session on the neoliberalisation of Education

at Arts Against Cuts Direct Weekend.

Saturday 15 January 3-5 pm

Sunday 16 January 3-5 pm

Camberwell College of Art, Wilson Road Building (off Peckham Rd)

Free, all are welcome.

Chicago Boys: while we were singing, they were dreaming is a 1970s cover band and neo-liberalism study group.

Drawing from the analyses of Naomi Klein, David Harvey, global lay researchers (on skype), youtube videos and band members' personal experiences, the group explores the 1970s as a stage set for the introduction of neoliberal policies around the world. The band's performances and discussions have been situated in cafes on London's Edgware Road and more recently on the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland. At the Arts Against Cuts Direct Weekend, Chicago Boys host two open rehearsals playing music from Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Bangladesh and Poland in the 1970s and inviting students, artists and activists to contribute to a global analysis of the neoliberalisation of education.

ARTS AGAINST CUTS // DIRECT WEEKEND THIS SATURDAY AND SUNDAY

[Jan 15th and 16th]

Camberwell College of Art, Wilson Road Building (off Peckham Rd)

Following on from the fantastic Long Weekend at Goldsmiths in December, the Turner Prize and National Gallery teach-ins, the Book Block and the many occupations at arts schools and universities across London, this Saturday 15th and Sunday 16th Arts Against Cuts has organised another weekend of action, planning, imagining, working and thinking together.

The event is open to all and free of charge.

Don't worry if you have not been involved before, over the two days we will get informed and prepare for upcoming demonstrations and occupations.

The schedule below has been drawn from proposals sent in.

There will be free space for anyone who wishes to put forward ideas on the days, organised spontaneity.

SATURDAY

Saturday Creche all day

10 – 11 Breakfast (BYO)

11 – 12 Open Meeting

12 – 5 Parallel Spaces and Open Spaces Including…

The Art of Direct Action, John Jordan talk and Workshop.

*Posters and Graffitti in 1968 Atelier populaire oui, Aterlier bougeois non, talk and print making workshop, Warren Carter Jess Baines, Jo Robinson

*Making a Radical Education Workbook: Radical Education Forum and Ultra-red

What shall we do with our cultural institutions? Precarious Workers Brigade

Paid Not Played Choir & Political Music Collective music and lyric workshop

*Chicago Boys: While we were singing, they were dreaming.

1970s cover band and neoliberalism study group: live music and interactive workshop on globalisation and education

* Alter/ate Mobile Slogan Factory/ Counterproductions and CGTV

* Screen printing and Banner Making all day

5.00 CLOSING MEETING

SUNDAY

10 – 11 Breakfast (BYO)

11 – 12 Open Meeting

12 – 5 Parallel Spaces and Open Spaces Including…

* Object Sabotage with Evan Calder Williams, & Mute

* Mapping and Connecting with Trade Unions

* Video Box – 1-minute videos and Communist Gallery

* Book Block workshop

*Chicago Boys: While we were singing, they were dreaming.

1970s cover band and neoliberalism study group: live music and interactive workshop on globalisation and education

* Debt and Slavery, David Graeber

* Theatre of the Dead/ Dual Power – Planning for the 29th

* Fact Sheet Workshop and Free School

* EMA working group – Planning for 18th and 19th

* International Student Discussion/ Chelsea Project

5.00 CLOSING MEETING

After party. Location TBC

Arts Against Cuts was initiated across London Art Schools last Autumn. We want to reclaim the public, critical space that universities and art schools should be, transforming those buildings into art schools for the future, bringing together art students, artists, cultural workers and those fighting the cuts from across the UK to share in defiance against the relentless marketization of our education and our lives. We will share knowledge and skills; we will collaborate across disciplines, ages and backgrounds; we will turn our imagination and desires into tools of disobedience. We will make sure that all the knowledge, ideas,tools and projects which emerge from the event will be disseminated and put into action in streets and public spaces across the country and be shared by all those in the anti-cuts movements. The Direct Weekend will be a feast of non stop workshops and presentations, slide shows and films, how-to sessions and skill shares, and a free space for spontaneous creation of events, actions and expressions. Its not important what art is but what it does, and right now it has the potential to turn the crisis of cuts into an opportunity for change.

artsagainstcuts.wordpress.com

Chicago Boys | Performance at Alternativa, Gdansk

It is dark. It is cold. And it is late. In the critical space of the Gdansk Shipyard, Alternativa Contemporary Visual Arts Festival 2010-2012—a new project by Wyspa Institute of Art—commences its two year journey.

Alternativa Housewarming, planned for December 3-5, is a three-day pilot that publicly unveils Hall 90B, an industrial building across the street from Wyspa which will be a key location for Alternativa exhibitions and events in 2011-12.

4 December: Chicago Boys: while we were singing they were dreaming... An evening of music played by a 70s revival band and neo-liberalism study group assembled by Hiwa K. The band plays popular music from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, England, Bangladesh, Poland and Lebanon in the 1970s, followed by presentations from archives relating to personal memories and neo-liberal policies. Cihat Arinc | Janna Graham | Hiwa K | Helene Kazan | Amal Khalaf | Roshi Nasehi | Abbas Nokhasteh | Shimon Sakakibara | Lawrence Abu Hamdan will be joined by local musicians, presenters and enthusiasts.

Find out more info: http://www.alternativa.org.pl/title,lang,2.html