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14/2/2013

Three exhibitions

Malmo Konsthall, Malmo

Sven Augustijnen - Spectres
(Belgien, 1970)

The Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen is well-known for his films. His most recent feature length documentary Spectres (2011) provides a critical portrayal of Belgium’s colonial past in Congo based on cultural and historical analysis.

Congo will always be associated in Sweden with the mysterious plane crash in 1961 that killed the UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld. Fifty years later Sven Augustijnen turns his camera to another dark chapter in the decolonisation of the Belgian Congo: the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically elected prime minister.

The main character in Spectres is Sir Jacques Brassinne de La Buissière, a former high-ranking civil servant and protagonist in the political and humanitarian 'thriller' that unfolded after the hasty decolonisation decision, transfer of power and subsequent conflicts, up to the imprisonment and execution of Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961.

Jacques Brassinne wrote a doctoral dissertation on the sequence of events that led to this tragedy and was called to testify as a witness by the parliamentary committee of inquiry. Due to his position at the time of decolonisation and his thorough factual enquiries into the historical circumstances, he has, so to speak, a privileged standing as 'protagonist-narrator' who embodies the confusion of everyone affected by these traumatic and dramatic events, which relate to questions of 'responsibility' and 'guilt'. Through this travelogue Jacques Brassinne advances the evidence he has refined over thirty years and addressed during meetings and memorials with the last survivors, all of them witnesses or family members of the main protagonists.

The title Spectres refers to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book Spectres de Marx (1993) / Specters of Marx. Derrida discusses the returning ghosts, the spectres of the past, which reappear in the present again and again. Augustijnen’s project shows that Europe has not yet come to terms with its spectres – colonial histories which still have an influence on our lives and our ways of thinking.

The exhibition presents different objects from Brassinne’s personal records: photographs from execution sites taken during the 1960s and 1980s, historical objects and audio clips. A comprehensive publication with background material, photographs and texts completes the exhibition, together with the piece Cher Pourquoi Pas? (2007). Here Augustijnen makes use of newspapers from the early 1960s to question the role of journalists in the course of the historical events and its portrayal, including a recent reflection on Dag Hammarskjöld’s death.

Sven Augustijnen (1970, Belgium) lives and works in Brussels. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the Hoger Sint-Lukas Instituut in Brussels, and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. His work is mainly focused on the tradition of portraiture and the fluid boundaries between fiction and reality, using a hybrid of styles and techniques. His films have been shown at exhibitions and festivals in Athens, Brussels, Fribourg, San Sebastián, Siegen, Rotterdam, Tunis, Tel Aviv, Tokyo and Vilnius, among others. In 2007 he participated in the Documenta 12 magazines. The film Spectres has drawn a lot of attention internationally and in 2011 Augustijnen received the Evens Arts Prize.

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Dave Hullfish Bailey - Broken Country
(USA, 1963)

In Dave Hullfish Bailey’s complex installations he incorporates everything from photography, film, words, sand, grass and grain to drawings and ready-made objects. A turning point in his practice is architecture, especially modernist architecture, and alternative ways of using and creating utopian living structures. In his works Bailey often poses questions about the relation between natural and societal structures. Language and histories are emancipated and new potential social realignments are suggested. Narratives are joined together, expanded and condensed through non-linear systems, diagrams, complex webs, patterns and trains of chain reactions, reflecting the way in which it is impossible to form a singular or fixed viewpoint when social, political and cultural spheres, as well as language, facts and fictions are so inextricably connected.

For the project at Malmö Konsthall Bailey presents ongoing research from southern Colorado's Eastern Plain’s, an ecologically complex region that provided the context for diverse models of community organization throughout successive waves of modernization. The failures of these experiments set the stage for the countercultural occupation of the lands, most infamously by the alternative community of ‘Drop City’, a melting pot for artists, musicians, thinkers and architects. Formed in 1965 and abandoned in the early 1970s, Drop City was one of the frontline outposts in what the Whole Earth Catalog* referred to as the ‘Outlaw Area’. Bailey looks for points of material and cultural porosity between the separatist impulse, and the concrete geographic and historical contexts of utopian experiments. Extending this concern into the present, an abandoned public school across the road from the Drop City site anchors Bailey’s more speculative investigation of experimental pedagogy rooted in the interplay of topography, climate, writing and media.

Dave Hullfish Bailey (b. 1963) lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Thanks to John Taylor, Highways Department, City of Malmö.

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Alfredo Jaar - The Sound of Silence
(Chile, 1956)

Alfredo Jaar addresses issues associated with how we view the world. The series of works presented here focus on what the artist calls “the politics of images”. The exhibition presents four works: The Sound of Silence, Searching for Africa in LIFE, From TIME to TIME and Untitled (Newsweek).

The installation The Sound of Silence (2006) consists of a large rectangular structure. The visitor encounters a wall with strong, dazzling light. On the opposite side is the entrance itself, where green and red lights indicate when visitors are allowed to enter. Inside the installation an eight-minute film is shown. The artist has described this work as a theatre built for a single image. Jaar sheds light on how images are created and what significance they can acquire, while also showing the potential complexity of how we see and relate to images. As the artist says, “Images are not innocent. You do not take a photograph. You make it”.

In the works Searching for Africa in Life (1996) and From Time to Time (2006) Jaar focuses on the often problematic representations of the African Continent in the Western media.

In Untitled (Newsweek) from 1994, Jaar shows what he calls “the barbaric indifference” of Newsweek magazine in the face of a genocide that killed a million people in one hundred days. The work forms part of The Rwanda Project 1994-2000, a long-term project dedicated to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Alfredo Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile in 1956. He lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009), São Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta (1987, 2002) in Kassel, Germany. Important individual exhibitions include the Altes Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and NGBK, Berlin (2012), SMBA, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2011), South London Gallery (2008), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (2007), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994), New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992) and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1992). He will represent Chile at the next Venice Biennale in June 2013.

Image: Alfredo Jaar, Searching For Africa in Life, 1996. Five C-prints 152,4 x 101,6 cm each. Courtesy the artist, New York

Public relations officer
Lena Leeb-Lundberg +46 40-34 12 94 lena.leeb@malmo.se

Part of Fotografi i Fokus, the South Sweden Photography Biennial.
Press preview: Thursday, 14 February, 11am
Welcome to the opening Friday February 15, 5-9 p.m.
Jacob Fabricius welcomes at 7 p.m.

Malmö Konsthall
S:t Johannesgatan 7 SE-205 80 Malmö Sweden
Opening hours
Daily 11-17
Wednesdays 11-21
Closed: Midsummers eve, Midsummers day and during installation.
Admission free

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