calendario eventi  :: 

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24/4/2012

artgeneve

Palexpo S.A., Geneve

The prestige of Geneva has long been reflected by the many events and conventions held in the city, which attract visitors from around the world. From 2012 onwards the field of contemporary art will also be represented, in the guise of a first-class exhibition, artgenève, which will take place from the 25th – 29th April 2012. The high-quality programme will be presented amidst a refined atmosphere of human dimensions – entirely in tune with the spirit of Geneva, which is appreciated around the world for its beauty and rich multicultural heritage.

artgenève will showcase exclusive international galleries, and at the same time provide a high profile to other players on the art scene. The aim is to highlight well-known galleries from around the world and, equally, other upcoming galleries whose elaborate programme has already gained recognition. In addition, a large display area will be devoted to Foundations, Museums and Offspaces, convinced that promoting dialogue between galleries and institutions brings new dynamism. The publishers of art books and magazines will also be present, benefitting from an inviting and comfortable area in which to welcome their visitors.

The supporting programme for the 2012 edition currently includes a prize for art critics, conferences, performances, a video show and the exhibition ‘Magic Love Trade Objects’ by the curator and writer Jan Verwoert, as well as the presentation of a new private art collection in Geneva, ‘The Kuser Collection’.

Programme:

The Kuser Collection

Presentation of this new genevan private collection with works by Pierre Bismuth, Brock Enright, Swetlana Heger, Alain Huck, Michael Kunze, Gerhard Merz, Anna Parkina and Mika Tajima.

'We are mystics rather than rationalists', wrote Sol LeWitt in his Paragraphs on Conceptual Art in 1967. The unseeable belongs to the most important themes of visual art. Art does not present the visible, it makes visible, as Paul Klee had already decided.

But what is the unseeable? The idea invented in the artist's mind, the concept that as the actual 'work' precedes all realizations? This would be the rational explanation, and respectively a reduced understanding of conceptual art, which Sol LeWitt rejected. Is the unseeable the spiritual in art, as Kandinsky argued? Or is it the secret that lies beneath the surface of the image? Or does the artwork refer to a past experience, the traces of which it carries like a Freud 'Wunderblock'? Or does art give us a premonition of the future arising from a visionary gift, as is often ascribed to artists?

The selected works from the Kuser Collection may commonly be referred to as conceptual, but they are not rational, clear and transparent; instead they deal intensively with the mysterious and the secret.
The exhibition invites a criminological search for clues in contemporary art, in a world of hidden texts, smoke signals, tracks and paradoxical entanglements.


Magic Love Trade Objects
groupshow curated by Jan Verwoert

artists:
Gitte Villesen, Michael Stevenson, Kirsten Pieroth, Bernd Krauss, Rachel Koolen, Arvo Leo, Linda Quinlan, Sarah Forrest, Julieta Aranda, Anton Vidokle, Danai Anesiadou.

Where magic is performed, objects change hands. They are traded as tokens for the magical bond forged between us and the spirit world: charms, amulets or fetishes. In accordance with the given lore, they serve a function (to protect or bewitch). But there is much more to them. They are very particular things, crafted with much love and attention to detail. In fact, the sheer specificity of their material features often enough cannot fully be explained in terms of symbolic function or meaning only; they are quite simply very very peculiar things.

It's a quality that artworks too can have: made and traded to charm, some works nonetheless retain that strange singularity, materially and intellectually: No matter how hard you try, there is something about them that resists interpretation, not because they were autonomous—no, they're still artefacts to be loved and traded—but because, to some extent, they remain impenetrably singular.

If you listen carefully, you might hear surrealism's unruly laughter resonating around these works. That laughter raises questions: What if these works were tokens for social bonds to be forged? Bonds as peculiar as the works themselves? In defiance of lore, decorum and protocol, what other relations, magical and otherwise, could be brought into being through sharing these strange things?


artgenève prize
for emerging art critics and art writers

artgenève announces the Meta Young Art Critics' Award.
The Meta Young Art Critics' Award is the first award scheme set up specifically to recognize the contribution made by art critics and art writers, and to encourage them at an early stage of their careers.

The contemporary scene of art production has long operated as a zone of indistinction, where entrepreneurial impulses reign and disciplinary boundaries become just another (post-)medium. Discursive practices such as writing and publishing are embraced by artists, while multi-tasking art critics curate exhibitions and develop performative sidelines to their textual habitus. The recent codification of 'art writing' likewise signals an admission that a 'third rail' has emerged, neither descriptive or prescriptive, neither academic or journalistic, between the art critic and the art historian. And of course the imprimatur of the art critic has been noted as in decline ever since the curator and the consultant came to dominate an ever-more globalised and market-driven art world.

Keeping this in our sights, the aim of the Meta Young Art Critics' Award is to focus on the imperative which rightly belongs to the critic and to the activity of criticism: to situate itself not simply above or beside the current field of production, but within it in order to grasp its conditions of possibility. The immanent role of the critic is in that sense less to interpret and more to reconstruct, in the words of Adorno, an 'exact imagination' that inhabits and extracts the principle of a work, wherever it starts and ends. We are establishing this award also out of curiosity: what is art criticism when it isn't operating at the service of something, be it institutional canons or marketing drives? How do we envision the act of judgement with relation to contemporary art practice, an act deprived of power and profit? Does it simply become a more intensely textual art practice among others and accompanying others, or does it have its own, cognitive, affective resources to structure the experience of art?

Submissions should be in English and can discuss one work, several works, a whole ouevre, or a field of practice. Submissions should be no longer than 10,000 signs or 1400 words. The final date for submissions will be 29 February 2012.

The author of the prize-winning essay will receive 1000 CHF in prize money and essay will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of Parkett, which is represented in the jury for the Meta Award.


Bach Suites Exhibited
A Project by Augustin Maurs

The project offers another approach of some of the most popular yet highly elaborated European classical music works: the Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach. As a result of years of investigation, the french cellist Augustin Maurs has removed the suites from the concert hall where they are usually performed, although for which they have not been written, to relocate them in an idealized environment: a continuously accessible unilluminated space.
Through the elimination of the traditional frontal concert situation and of any visual input, SOLO - Bach Suites Exhibited unifies the listener and the performing musician within the same visual and musical space. Drawing upon the Bach Suites themselves, the performance investigates the possibilities of interpretation and contemporary practice.
the Suites alone

Originally conceived as studies, Bach’s Cello Suites represent at the same time the beginning and the culmination of the cello repertoire. For many musicians and music-lovers these works are associated with strong, personal and lifelong experiences. The fact that there are no social occasions passed down pointing to the context in which the Suites were conceived invites a perpetual debate about this music and allows an imaginative free reign for the defining of the place and the surroundings in which the works can be performed.The context mentioned in SOLO - Bach Suites Exhibited is based on the conviction that the Suites are not really suited to conventional concert practice. The ‘absolute’ architectural beauty of the Suites finds itself here in the dark. The performance of the Suites is, given their complexity and dimension, a challenge for every cellist. They are infrequently performed in their entirety – and then only as a one-time concert experience. The reiteration of the performance of the Suites represents an extreme accomplishment for the interpreter and requires extensive preparation. Although works for a solo instrument, the Suites are polyphonic masterpieces of unusual plasticity, which offer infinite possibilities for interpretation.

Through its “work in progress“ character, SOLO - Bach Suites Exhibited captures this sense of malleability and plays with the countless possibilities inherent in the pieces. The recurrence of the performances allows for the combination of various modes of interpretation and offers a new freedom to the audience: they are not limited to a particular time frame nor to a singular reading of the works. On the contrary, the repetition adds an element of flexibility and comprehensiveness to the experience that would normally not be found in concert life.

Magic Love Trade Objects
conferences with curator Jan Verwoertand artists of the exhibition
25 April, 4–7 pm

Solo – Bach Suites Exhibited
a project by Augustin Maurs
daily from 12pm–1:30 pm and 6–9pm

Fine Arts Expert Institute
daily
11.30 study of signatures
13.00 pigments and dating
14.30 infrared reflectography and undedrawings
16.00 radiography and underlying compositions
17.30 looking behind the paintings

HEAD - Folklotopie II
presentation of an art edition, with the artists
24 April (private view), beginning at 6pm

Pictures Never Stop Party
25 April, 11pm at silencio club in Geneva

Tino Sehgal, Villa Sarasin
23–26 April, 2–7pm

Head of Press & PR
René Lambelet tel. +41 22 7611085 fax +41 22 7983052 e-mail rene.lambelet@palexpo.ch or: presse@palexpo.ch

Palexpo S.A. CP 112
Route François-Peyrot, 30 - 1218 Le Grand-Saconnex CH-1218 Geneva, Switzerland
opening hours:
Wednesday, 25 April, 11am–8pm
Thursday, 26 April, 11am–8pm
Friday, 27 April, 11am–8pm
Saturday, 28 April, 11am–8pm
Sunday, 29 April, 11am–7pm
tickets
adults, 12.- CHF
groups (20 people min.), 5.- CHF
seniors/students/ages 6 to 16, 5.- CHF
children, ages under 6, free of charge

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