Geography of Transterritories
dal 23/2/2010 al 21/5/2010
Segnalato da
23/2/2010
Geography of Transterritories
San Francisco Art Institute - SFAI, San Francisco
With works by Michael Arcega, Ursula Biemann, Claire Fontaine, Carlos Motta, Societe Realiste, the exhibition marks but one instance of many similar creative projects on the current global art scene -inside exhibitions, at conferences, within publications, and across public spaces- in which the ideas and phenomenological "facts" that underwrite the transterritorial imagination are unfolding. This show is also a forum and point of departure for further creative interventions in the public sphere that are essential to understanding contemporary creativity and current geopolitical, organizational, and global realities.
Curated by Hou Hanru
Geography of Transterritories addresses those issues of transborder conflict that are profoundly changing global modes of production, communication, and space/time organization. Such changes have prompted new understandings both of geography and of the geopolitical strategies devised for coping with the new reality of constant displacement and transit. Traveling between different parts of the world or stuck in intermediate zones like refugee camps, displaced persons and populations now live in spaces—transterritories—to which the once-commonplace concept of home no longer unambiguously applies.
Temporary-seeming but often enough permanent, such transterritories and the peoples who occupy them have come to challenge the established boundaries of nation-states and other dominant forms of geopolitical demarcation. Though undergoing economic, political, and military oppression and exclusion, transterritorial peoples, whether intentionally or as a matter of course, establish and occupy sites that are intrinsically open to new possibilities for social, economic, and political restructuring. A potentially salutary effect of what otherwise can seem to be systematically detrimental global processes, the space opened up by the "transterritorial imagination" is a space singularly amenable to the realization of certain forms of utopic social production. Geography of Transterritories marks but one instance of many similar creative projects on the current global art scene—inside exhibitions, at conferences, within publications, and across public spaces—in which the ideas and phenomenological "facts" that underwrite the transterritorial imagination are unfolding.
Like the spaces and peoples whose ways and means have motivated it, the work included in Geography of Transterritories was itself created by a process of displacement, by territorial prerogatives that "cross over." Consistent with SFAI’s transnational vision for understanding how museums, exhibition spaces, and wider contemporary culture interrelate on a global scale, Geography of Transterritories—like the exhibition World Factory that preceded it in SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries (January–May 2007)—is a component of New Models of Production, one of five discrete yet intersecting directions, within SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, for investigating current constructions of contemporary global culture.
Devised by SFAI’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs Hou Hanru, New Models of Production examines and promotes innovative models of art production—models that lead to new definitions of art and of the role the artist may play in an era of globalized culture. This exhibition is also a forum and point of departure for further creative interventions in the public sphere—interventions that are essential to understanding contemporary creativity and current geopolitical, organizational, and global realities.
Artist Bios
Michael Arcega is a San Francisco–based interdisciplinary artist working primarily in sculpture and installations. Though visual, his art is largely inspired by language and verbal jokes. He utilizes comedic strategies and tactics to express darker global issues stemming from asymmetrical power dynamics. He received his BFA at SFAI and his MFA at Stanford University. His work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. His solo shows include the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, Marx & Zavattero in San Francisco, and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York City. He has had residencies at the de Young Art Center in San Francisco, the 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica, and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito. Recently Arcega was awarded the Joan Mitchell MFA award. http://www.arcega.us
Ursula Biemann is a Zurich, Switzerland–based artist, theorist, and curator working on geopolitical displacement and migrant labor. Border mobility and extraterritorial spaces are the central recurring theme in her video essays Performing the Border (1999), Remote Sensing (2001), Europlex (2003), and Contained Mobility (2004). Major research projects in recent years include Black Sea Files (2005) on the Caspian oil geography; Sahara Chronicle (2006–2009) (included in this exhibition); and a video essay on Palestinian refugee camps. She was curator of the 2003 exhibition Geography and the Politics of Mobility at Generali Foundation in Vienna. She has published numerous books, most recently the monograph Mission Reports: Artistic Practice in the Field, Video Works 1998–2008 (2008). Biemann’s research is based at the Universities of Art and Design in Zurich and Geneva. She teaches seminars and workshops internationally. http://www.geobodies.org
Taking her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Paris-based Claire Fontaine founded herself as a readymade artist in 2004. She began to elaborate a version of imitative neoconceptual art. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting, and text, she considers herself a nonspecific singularity, an existential terrorist in quest of emancipation, whose practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence of today’s contemporary art. The humanoid equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box—displaced, deprived of use value, and exchangeable—she awaits the possibility of what she calls the "human strike" ("grève humaine"). Recent exhibition venues include Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich (Germany), Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris, and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco. Claire Fontaine is preparing a book on the concepts of the readymade artist and the "human strike." http://www.clairefontaine.ws
Carlos Motta works primarily in photography and video installation. Using documentary genres and sociological motifs, he engages with specific political events to observe their effects and suggest alternative ways to write and read them. Solo-exhibition venues include P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in Long Island City (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA), and Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño in Bogotá (Colombia). Group-exhibition venues include the 10th Lyon Biennial (2009) in Lyon (France), Casino Luxembourg in Luxembourg, 5x5Castelló09 at Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló in Castelló (Spain), and Creative Time in New York City. He is a graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (2008). Motta received grants from the Art Matters Foundation in New York City in 2007 and from the Cisneros Fontanals Foundation in Miami (Florida, USA) in 2008. http://www.carlosmotta.com
Société Réaliste is a Paris-based cooperative created in June 2004 by Ferenc Grä1f and Jean-Baptiste Naudy. It manages the development of research and production structures in fields such as territorial ergonomy, experimental economy, political design, and counterstrategy. Resolutely polytechnic, its practice is developed through exhibitions, collaborative research projects, cultural events, lectures, critical writings, and educational interventions. As a tandem, the cooperative is researcher in design at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (the Netherlands). Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Synagogue de Delme (France), Galerie Martine Aboucaya in Paris, Kunstpavillon in Innsbruck (Austria), and Trafo Gallery in Budpest. Nations in which the cooperative has recently exhibited include Greece, Turkey, Spain, France, Belgium, Poland, the United States, Croatia, Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Serbia, and Hungary. http://www.societerealiste.net
SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Geography of Transterritories is made possible through the support of swissnex San Francisco, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, CulturesFrance, the Cultural Services of the Consulate General of France in San Francisco, and Artnow International.
Image: Carlos Motta, Installation at Rotunda Gallery "Exposure" Exhibition (Nov-Dec 2007)
Panel discussion: Geography of Transterritories
Michael Arcega, Ursula Biemann, Claire Fontaine, Carlos Motta, Société Réaliste, and Hou Hanru
Wednesday, 24 February 2010 at 7:30pm
Lecture Hall 800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public
Press Contact:
Bob Gamboa, tel (415) 749-4507, e-mail bgamboa@sfai.edu
Opening reception: Wednesday, 24 February 2010 from 5:30 to 7:30pm
The opening reception will be followed by a panel discussion with the artists at 7:30pm in the Lecture Hall.
San Francisco Art Institute SFAI
The Walter and McBean Galleries
800 Chestnut Street campus San Francisco, CA 94133
Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Free and open to the public