calendario eventi  :: 

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7/2/2008

Two exhibitions

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Allora & Calzadilla - Never Mind That Noise You Heard
8.02.08 - 4.05.08

Never Mind That Noise You Heard is the first ever solo exhibition in the Netherlands by artist duo Jennifer Allora (b. 1974, US) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971, Cuba).

Based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Allora & Calzadilla have worked together since 1995, and have established themselves as prominent figures in the international contemporary art scene.

Never Mind That Noise You Heard will provide an opportunity to see (and hear!) recent installations and videos that consider the continuum between noise and music as a productive measure and potentially rich tool through which cultural, social, and political relationships can be gauged and challenged. Many works in the exhibition are the outcome of Allora and Calzadilla´s investigations into militarism, war, and the inscriptions of power encoded in and through sound.

The central work will be a monumental installation entitled Wake Up (2007): a sound and light installation for which the artists asked trumpet players from around the world to interpret Reveille; the trumpet call which signals the start of the military day. These sonic re-workings open up the wake up call to other registers of meaning and associations. The recordings are linked to a series of speakers and lights embedded within the walls that divide the space, creating a visual/auditory experience.

The genesis of Wake Up lies in Returning a Sound (2003), a video work made in Vieques, Puerto Rico, an island used for the past 60 years by the US Military and NATO forces to practice military bombing exercises. The local and international civil disobedience movement led in 2002 to the stopping of the bombing, and the beginning of the process of demilitarization, decontamination, and future development.

Returning a Sound addresses not only the landscape of Vieques, but also its soundscape, which for residents of the island remains marked by the memory of the sonic violence of the bombing. The video follows Homar, a civil-disobedient and activist, as he traverses the demilitarized island on a moped that has a trumpet welded to the muffler, acoustically reterritorializes areas of the island formerly exposed to ear-splitting detonations.

Sediments Sentiments (Figures of Speech), 2007, consists of two white truncated forms, with tunnel-like passageways that were conceived as 1:1 scale models of some future disaster. These amorphous sculptures function as stages for a satirical dissection and re- interpretation of political rhetoric. From the tunnels come the voices of opera singers, performing through the musical language of opera fragments of speeches by key actors in the global theatre of recent political history: from Martin Luther King and the Dalai Lama, to George Bush and Saddam Hussein.

The exhibition is curated by Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen. The Stedelijk Museum Bulletin will contain an article about the artists.

Jennifer Allora (b. 1974, US) and Guillermo Calzadilla (b. 1971, Cuba) have been working together since 1995. In recent years they have won a prominent place in the international art world. In 2007 they were awarded the Only Lyon Prize at the Lyon Biennial and in 2006 they were finalists in the contest for the Hugo Boss Prize, administered by the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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MAGNUM Photos 60 years

This retrospective is being presented at the Stedelijk Museum to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the renowned MAGNUM photo and press agency.

Throughout that period MAGNUM never ceased to supply photographs that have become part of the world’s collective memory – pictures of landmark events like the Russian army’s invasion of Prague in 1968 and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing in 1989. The exhibition uses photographs, books and texts to illustrate the history of MAGNUM year by year and gives visitors the opportunity to view work by 83 photographers, such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Carl de Keyzer, Martin Parr, Susan Meiselas and Leonard Freed.

MAGNUM was established in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David Seymour. They were convinced that photography was the best medium with which to document world events and raise public awareness. And they succeeded – the way MAGNUM photographers have recorded the background to the news has proved vital to the public’s perception of events. From the start, the agency was distinguished by its complete independence: the choice and length of reportage, editing control and intellectual property rights were all kept in the agency’s own hands, guaranteeing photographers the status of auteurs. Attracted by the energy and artistic ethics of its founders, other photographers soon began to join the new agency, eventually making it one of the most original and prestigious creative co-operatives in the world.

MAGNUM photographers were and are to be found on every front line in every continent. They have recorded every major aspect of our times, from armed conflicts and revolutions through to everyday life and outstanding personalities. Their insight and vision have enabled them to create iconic images which have been disseminated through the international press to become part of our society’s collective memory. MAGNUM photographs have proved to be both witnesses and artists working on the basis of personal intuition or a variety of individual concepts. Henri Cartier-Bresson believed in the ‘decisive moment’, while Raymond Depardon looked for ‘moments of weakness’ and Gilles Peress practised ‘documentary archaeology’. Equally, Martin Parr’s work features ‘consumerist clichés’, while Lise Sarfati produces ‘inner landscapes’.

The forthcoming exhibition is in two parts. The first is a 45-metre-long frieze offering a linear account of MAGNUM’s activities over the last six decades, conveyed by way of texts, key images and original books. The second consists of four interactively controlled projection screens which enable visitors to (re)discover the work of all the photographers associated with MAGNUM (past and present) via carefully composed selections of images.

This is the third exhibition about MAGNUM to be held at the Stedelijk. The first, in 1964, stressed the post-war humanist ethics propagated by the founder members and was based on the collection of photographs acquired by the museum since 1958. The second, in 1990, emphasised the vision of the individual photographers. This reflected the growing interest in auteurship at a time when the print media were increasingly losing ground to television. The present exhibition presents these individual views and relates them to current thinking about the visual presentation of history.

The exhibition was originally devised and produced by the Rencontres Internationales d’Arles and Magnum Photos. The anniversary volume Magnum Magnum will be on sale during the exhibition (564 pp., published by Thoth, € 150).

Image: Allora & Calzadilla

Opening: Thursday, February 7, 5 p.m

Stedelijk Museum
Paulus Potterstraat 13 - Amsterdam

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