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26/5/2011

Alexander Rodchenko / Ai Weiwei

Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur

Ai Weiwei
Interlacing

Curator: Urs Stahel

Ai Weiwei – Interlacing is the first major exhibition of photographs and videos by Ai Weiwei. It foregrounds Ai Weiwei the communicator – the documenting, analyzing, interweaving artist who communicates via many channels. Ai Weiwei already used photography in his New York years, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has incessantly documented the everyday urban and social realities in China, discussing it over blogs and Twitter. Photographs of radical urban transformation, of the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented together with his art photography projects, the Documenta project Fairytale, the countless blog and cell phone photographs. A comprehensive book accompanies this exhibition.

Ai Weiwei is a generalist, a conceptual, socially critical artist dedicated to creating friction with, and forming reality. As an architect, conceptual artist, sculptor, photographer, blogger, Twitterer, interview artist, and cultural critic, he is a sensitive observer of current topics and social problems: a great communicator and networker who brings life into art and art into life.

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, the son of the poet Ai Qing. Following his studies at the Beijing Film Academy, he cofounded in 1978 the artists’ collective The Stars, which rejected Social Realism and advocated artistic individualism and experimentation in art. In 1981 Ai Weiwei went to the USA and 1983 to New York, where he studied at Parsons School for Design in the class of the painter Sean Scully. In New York he discovered artists like Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and, above all, Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp is important for him because he understood art as part of life. At this time, Ai Weiwei produced his first ready-mades and thousands of photographs documenting his life and friends in the Chinese art community in New York. After his father fell ill, he returned to Beijing in 1993. In 1997 he cofounded the China Art Archives & Warehouse (CAAW) and began from then on to deal with architecture as well. Ai Weiwei opened his own studio in 1999 in Caochangdi and set up the architecture studio FAKE Design in 2003. In the same year, he played a major role, together with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, in the construction of the Olympic stadium, the so-called Bird’s Nest. Following its completion, it became a new symbol of Beijing. In 2007, 1001 Chinese visitors traveled, at his instigation, to Documenta 12 in Kassel (Fairytale). In 2010 the world marveled at his large, yet formally minimal carpet of millions of hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds at the Tate Modern.

Ai Weiwei deliberately confronts social conditions in China and in the world: Through photographically documenting the architectonic clear-cutting of Beijing in the name of progress, with provocative measurements of the world, his personal positionings in the Study of Perspective, with radical cuts in the past (made to found pieces of furniture) in order to create possibilities for the present and the future, and with his tens of thousands of blog entries, blog photographs, and cell phone photographs (along with many other artistic declarations). This first, large exhibition and book project of his photography and videos focuses on Ai Weiwei’s diversity, complexity, and connectedness, his “interlacing” and “networking” with hundreds of photographs, blogs, and explanatory essays.

The artist as network, as company, as activist, as political voice, as social container, as agent provocateur: at every moment – in the past, present, and future – every society on Earth needs outstanding unique figures like Ai Weiwei in order to stay awake, to be shaken awake, to be made to recognize their own obstinacy, and to be able to avoid tunnel vision. We are therefore deeply saddened that the completion of this book coincides with Ai Weiwei’s arrest which we deplore. We are extremely concerned about the artist. And we wish that this great thinker, designer, and fighter will remain a resistant public voice for all of us – and especially for China.

The exhibition and book were developed in close collaboration with Ai Weiwei. For reasons already mentioned, however, he was unable to be involved in completing the book. We continue to hope that he will be personally present for the installation of the exhibition.

The exhibition was organized by Fotomuseum Winterthur in close collaboration with Ai Weiwei (and his assistant, Lucas Lai). The curator of the exhibition is Urs Stahel. Following its presentation at Fotomuseum Winterthur, the exhibition will be shown at Jeu de Paume in Paris.

An English and German catalog, published by Steidl, Göttingen, accompanies the exhibition:
Ai Weiwei – Interlacing, ed. Urs Stahel / Daniela Janser, 496 pages, ca. 600 illustrations, with essays by Carol Yinghua Lu, Daniela Janser, Urs Stahel, and Philip Tinari. Price: CHF 40.

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Alexander Rodchenko
Revolution in Photography

Curator: Olga Sviblova

Modernism made photography what it is. It gave it self-confidence and made it trust itself. Self-confident because photography in the 1920s recognized and developed its own possibilities and qualities: a probing vision of the world, an investigation of the visible reality from various perspectives, direct, clear, from above, below, behind, from the front, but without references to the pool of art history. Russian Constructivism is an important part of this great shift. In 1924, Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956), already known as a painter, sculptor, and designer, conquered traditional photography with the slogan “Our duty is to experiment!” This resulted in a reconsideration of the concept and role of photography. Conceptual work entered the stage. Instead of being an illustration of reality, photography became a means to visually represent intellectual constructs, and the artist became an “artist-engineer”.

Yet Rodchenko was much more than a dynamic image maker. He wrote manifestos to accompany almost every one of his picture series, tirelessly promoting his concept of Russian Constructivism to the world. Destabilizing diagonals, harsh contrasts, tilted views, and picture and text collages are design elements found in his photographs. To this day they form, together with his texts, a unique document of the indefatigable artistic energy that is also manifest in Alexander Rodchenko’s posters, invitation cards, and publications.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Rodchenko worked together with his friend the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky on bold, photographic illustrations for Mayakovsky’s volume of poems Pro Eto. Rodchenko soon became coeditor, with Mayakovsky, of the magazine LEV (Left Front of the Arts), and was responsible for its cover designs in the years 1923–24. He designed posters for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin and was commissioned to design the Soviet pavilion to the world exhibition in Paris in 1925. The experimental and innovative “new vision” was celebrated across Europe. Rodchencko took part in the pioneering exhibition Film und Foto (Film and Photo) of the Stuttgart Werkbund in 1929. Yet already at the beginning of the 1930s, the mood had shifted in Russia; photography was increasingly being instrumentalized by the state in the interests of socialism. Rodchenko was repeatedly forced to defend himself against accusations of formalism made over his photograph Pioneer with Trumpet, and, in the end, he was expelled from the October artists group, which he himself had cofounded in 1928, for refusing to adapt his style of working to the new times.

The exhibition has been organized by the Moscow House of Photography Museum and was curated by the director, Olga Sviblova.

An English catalog on the exhibition is available:
Alexander Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography, Multimedia Complex of Actual Arts, Moscow House of Photography Museum, 224 pages, hardcover, 240 x 300 mm, b/w and color illustrations. Price: CHF 69.-

There are various events accompanying the exhibitions:

Artist’s Talk with Ai Weiwei
An artist’s talk with Ai Weiwei was planned for Sunday May 29, 2011. Instead of this artist’s talk, Astrid Näff will give a guided tour of the exhibition at 11.30 am (and, in case of great demand, again at 12.30 pm).

Image Focus at Noon

Tuesday, June 14, 2011, 12:15–12:45 p.m.
Natalie Madani:
Alexander Rodchenko―Artist in the Service of the Revolution (in German)

Tuesday, July 5, 2011, 12:15–12:45 p.m.
Astrid Näff:
Ai Weiwei—Pictures as Signs between Poetry and Provocation (in German)

Tuesday, August 16, 2011, 12:15–12:45 p.m.
Iris Stadelmann:
Ai Wewei—Balancing Act between the Present and Tradition (in German)
Entrance: CHF 10/7 (including a visit to the exhibition; free for members)

Kunst und Gesellschaft / Art and Society
Friday, June 10, 2011, 4–8:15 p.m.
In connection to the exhibitions Ai Weiwei—Interlacing and Alexander Rodchenko—Revolution in Photography, we are hosting an afternoon seminar on the topic of art and society. The seminar will delve into the complex field of how art and society relate to each other today—from the perspective of artists and theoreticians, from the West and Asia.

Including:
Carol Yinghua Lu (art critic, Beijing) on the relationship between the art scene and Chinese politics and society, under the title This Long Way (English)
Bernd Stiegler (photography theorist and professor for recent German literature with a focus on twentieth-century literature in the media context, Universität Konstanz) on Alexander Rodchenko—Social Education through Photography (German)
Amar Kanwar (video artist, New Delhi) on his artistic work within the context of various audiences, situations, politics (English)
Lidwien van de Ven (artist, Rotterdam/Berlin) on Image and Context / Memory and Medias accompanied by examples of her work (English)
Rachel Mader (art scholar, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste) on Commitment in the Ivory Tower? Relevance in Contemporary Art (German)
Lectures will be held in German or English; simultaneous translation is not available.

Image: Study of Perspective – Tiananmen, 1995-2003 © Ai Weiwei

For further information please contact
Josiane Imhasly, Press, Fotomuseum Winterthur Tel +41 (0)52 234 10 60, E-Mail: imhasly@fotomuseum.ch

Opening: Friday, 27 May 2011, from 6 pm till 9 pm
At 7 pm, the exhibition will be introduced by Urs Stahel.

Fotomuseum Winterthur
Grüzenstrasse 44+45, CH-8400 Winterthur (Zurich)
Opening hours of the exhibitions:
Tuesday to Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., Wednesday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., closed on Mondays
Admission:
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Ai Weiwei – Interlacing (Main Gallery+Gallery): Fr. 9.- (with reduction Fr. 7.-)
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Alexander Rodchenko – Revolution in Photography (Gallery of Collections): Fr. 8.- (with reduction Fr. 6.-)

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