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10/7/2014

Kairos Time / Academy Awards 2014

Tent, Rotterdam

Kairos Time

Curated by Matteo Lucchetti

Liz Allan, Maarten Bel, Sabrina Chou, Philip Ewe, Christian Hansen, Ann Maria Healy, Hannah James, Graham Kelly, Perri Mackenzie, Machteld Rullens, Roos Wijma, Micha Zweifel

Kairos Time features twelve international artists based in Rotterdam whose works deploy a multiplicity of poetics and reflect diverse approaches to artistic practice today. The title refers to a possible common ground between the artists and the works, which may or may not be located in the spatio-temporal, social and political contexts from which they have emerged. Along with Kronos, Kairos is an ancient Greek word for time, but while the former refers to chronological, sequential time, the latter alludes to the right or opportune moment when action must be taken, chances seized or conversely lost, inevitably affecting the course of things.

Kairos represents a time lapse, an indeterminate moment when anything can happen and opportunities can be grasped, if and when they are perceived at all. Kairos Time is here understood as a space of potential, found in the daily situations or circumstances that an artist must assess and work with or against.

If we view an art practice as a series of seized favorable moments, it is worth asking: how much opportunism does it take to be an artist today? In A Grammar of the Multitude (2004), the Italian philosopher Paolo Virno analyzes post-Fordist conditions of labor and describes opportunists as “those who confront a flow of ever-interchangeable possibilities, making themselves available to the greater number of these, yielding to the nearest one, and then quickly swerving from one to another.” By depriving the term of its negative connotation Virno invents an extremely up to date rhetoric around the contemporary worker, which recalls the traits of openness, flexibility, and the unbiased attitude that are often associated with the figure of the artist.

Ranging from video to installation the works in Kairos time reflect the artist’s specific capacities to transform circumstances into meaningful visual systems, to turn specific material limits and restrictions into open-ended speculative journeys, and suggest that the opportune moment is a condition of the mind rather than a logically determined and immediately graspable point in time.

The heterogeneous work of Maarten Bel, Christian Hansen and Perri Mackenzie co-exists in the front space of the exhibition and invite the viewer to indulge in or reflect upon leisure activities. Café Bel is a real bar that “functions” at times and is open to events and happenings at others. Bel has shaped his work around the conviction that every social space is a potential space for art and vice-versa. Across the room, Mackenzie’s installation Publicness & Lightness with Motile Accessories departs from her observation of an outdoor smoking booth in which temporary, involuntary encounters define a claustrophobic social space via an addiction. Between these two works, Hansen’s three vinyl records each play a different recording of composite musical instruments (Architar or Keyboard-Skateboard, for example) that the artist created and played in the urban context that inspired their making. These interstitial sounds resonate with his awning installed at Tent, which evaluates urban re-development publicity images that preceded the gentrification process of Rotterdam Zuid.

Creating the opportunities in which their work will take shape is an attitude both Machteld Rullens and Philipp Ewe share in their own distinct ways. Rullens’ video Hardcore traverses the physical, immaterial and rhetorical security measures of the Nuclear Security Summit that took place in The Hague in March 2014— a record of when the artist crossed the demarcation lines of the hyper-protected city center. By contrast, Ewe navigates and transgresses inner boundaries, documenting his derive from one of the final stops on Rotterdam’s public transport lines to a hitchhiking experience on a freight truck.

Micha Zweifel’s work also draws from personal experience, namely the summer he shared a living and working space with a small group of artist friends in the Swiss countryside. How can a community work when its members become more and more incapacitated to perform social functions? Zweifel’s installation, which alludes to the name of the community’s local supermarket converses with the built forms evoked in Hannah James’ work. James’ The yellow and purple architecture has been dressed comprises videos that focus on performative aspects of interiors and other architectural spaces, shifting the routine through which we inhabit, perceive and remember them. Ann Maria Healy presents another kind of shift. Departing from the existence of an upside-down waterfall in her native Ireland, Healy stages a suspended environment made of waste materials, which is colonized by three ethereal and mythical figures that recite lyrics written by her.

The title of Roos Wijma’s sound installation Jacobson’s Organ refers to a patch of olfactory sensory cells present in reptiles. Her spoken word recording is activated by the presence of the audience, much like the animal’s chemical reaction to stimuli that excludes the use of sight. Sabrina Chou’s dispersed installation, Solid Ground, is designated by vinyl signage on the floor and revolves around an expanded notion of broadcasting. In the desert, at a gym, and amongst unoccupied frequencies, you may find that static transmits and inertia exerts, that interstices are inhabitable.

Graham Kelly offers another study on perception in figurehead, reflection, firework, fan, miracle, where objects and images collide as elements of found footage, filtered through a table fan and reframed by a pair of mirrored sunglasses. Acting as a mediation or edit between palpable and depicted contexts, the work aims to find a point of equivalence, a space in which producer, image and viewer can connect. Finally, Liz Allan’s The Stable Language accomplishes a digression through videos around desire and its political and economic interpretations, including Albert Heijn supermarket merchandising in First Contact, and the mass demonstration at Amsterdam’s gay pride parade in Pridest.

In collaboration with the Master of Fine Art Program of the Piet Zwart Institute, the post-graduate studies & research institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy. The accompanying publication Kairos Time is forthcoming in fall 2014.

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TENT Academy Awards 2014

On Saturday 12th July at 20:00, the TENT Academy Awards, the annual prize for the best newly graduated video artists from home and abroad, shall be awarded at Rotterdam’s Cinerama cinema. The best new video works from the Netherlands and this year's host of Finland shall be showcased, and the jury will announce the prize winners of an artist’s residency. This year, for the first time, a budget of €1500 will be also awarded. After the award show, the nominated works will be exhibited at TENT until August 17.

This summer, the TENT Academy Awards 2014 features the best video art from art academies in the Netherlands and this year's host country, Finland. During the award show on Saturday 12 July, a Dutch and Finnish winner will be chosen from the nominated clips, films, documentaries, and animations. The international jury, this year led by Juha van 't Zelfde, Artistic Director of Lighthouse in Brighton, will announce the evening's winners. The TENT Academy Awards exhibition can be seen at TENT until 17 August, and then in Helsinki at Kuva x Tila Gallery from 5 to 21 December, and at Augusta Gallery in March and April 2015. The TENT Academy Awards will also be shown at several festivals, including Gogbot (Enschede), Impakt (Utrecht), Euro Short Film Festival (Gdansk), and the Leeds International Film Festival.

New: Work budget added to prize
In spite of the recent cuts, TENT has added to the Academy Award prize by including a work budget to compliment the artist residency abroad. This year's winners receive a €1500 budget as part of their residency at KIASMA in Finland or at Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam.

2014 international jury headed by Juha van 't Zelfde
The jury is led by Juha van 't Zelfde, artistic director of Lighthouse in Brighton and co-founder of Non-fiction, Office for Cultural Innovation. The other members are: the Finnish artist Tellervo Kalleinen who has exhibited at MoMA (New York), SMAK (Gent), TENT (Rotterdam) and KIASMA (Helsinki), and, with her partner Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, won this year's Ars Fennick – Finland's foremost art prize; Sam Stevelynck, Belgian art critic and reviewer at De Standaard; and Nina Folkersma, art historian, writer, and independent curator currently curating The Great Art Show, and is a member of the advisory committee for the Kunst Noord/Zuidlijn in Amsterdam

The TENT Academy Awards is sponsored by: G. Ph. Verhagen Stichting, Stichting Bevordering van Volkskracht, Finnish Cultural Institute for the Benelux, Cinerama

Opening: Friday 11 July, 20.00h

Award Show at Cinerama: Saturday 12 July, 20:00

Tent
Witte de Withstraat 50 - 3012BR Rotterdam
opening hours
thue - sun, 11 - 18.00 hrs

stampa

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