calendario eventi  :: 

X

26/3/2004

Two exhibitions

Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Ready to Shoot - Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum/ videogalerie Schum from 27 March to 6 June 2004.

The exhibition, which is being held more than 20 years after the Gerry Schum exhibition organised by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1979-1980), is the first comprehensive retrospective of one of the most ambitious and complex art projects of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition to the two television exhibitions Land Art (1969) and Identifications (1970), this retrospective, initiated by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, encompasses the first documentary works commissioned from Gerry Schum, and short television interventions, as well as all the works produced by the videogalerie schum (1971-1973). The art works are documented and illustrated by stills of shoots taken by Ursula Wevers. From 1968 to 1972, Ursula Wevers, Gerry Schum's principal associate, played a large part in the productions of the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum and the videogalerie schum. The films and videos presented as part of this exhibition, as well as the original documentary material, come for the most part from the private archives of Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers (Cologne).

The concept of the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum (television gallery) was motivated by the idea of finding a way of using the mass medium television for artistic purposes and, consequently, making art more accessible to a wide public. This idea, whose aim was to create works of art specially for television rather than making and presenting documentaries about artists, should be put in the context of the emerging artistic trends of that period, such as conceptual and process art, Land Art, and Arte Povera. These latter aspired to going beyond the limits hitherto imposed by sculpture and painting, both traditional art disciplines. The Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum was actually involved with radical innovations, the extension of art to the film world in an attempt to find a unity between work and medium, and a redefinition of television as an artistic medium aimed at a mass audience. The private collection would somehow gradually disappear in favour of increased communication with a wider public.
In 1971, after their work with television, Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers set up the videogalerie schum in Düsseldorf where, until Gerry Schum's death in 1973, video works were produced in collaboration with many international artists. The gallery thus became a forerunner and pioneer in the use of video as a medium of artistic expression.

The exhibition Ready to Shoot - Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum/ videogalerie Schum, initiated by the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (14 December 2003 - 14 March 2004) will be on view at the Casino Luxembourg from 27 March to 6 June 2004, and at the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serravles in Porto (Portugal) from 23 July to 10 October 2004.

The exhibition curators are Barbara Hess, Ulrike Groos and Ursula Wevers.

The catalogue published by Snoeck Verlagsgruppe (Cologne, D) offers a chronological overview of Gerry Schum's work, from the earliest commissions to the videogalerie schum publications, by way of the productions of the Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum. It contains hitherto unpublished information, as well as information taken from catalogues that are no longer available. (Edited by Barbara Hess, Ulrike Groos and Ursula Wevers; in German; 336 pages; b/w; price euro 29.80)
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Zbigniew Libera
Positives

Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain, Luxembourg

Between March 27th and June 6th, the Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain is presenting eight photographs from the series Positives by Zbigniew Libera (born 1959 in Pabianice in Poland; lives and works in Warsaw). The pictures, which are black-and-white as well as colour prints, represent positive re-interpretations of icons from twentieth-century public life. Libera does not regard the creative process underlying his works as concluded until they have been published in the print media. This is why Positives are in fact copies of press-published originals. This particular way of working permits the artist to pursue a corrosive analysis of the power exercised by images and the media. Among other works, the Casino Luxembourg will be showing Bush Dream (2003), Defeat on Cross-Country Race (2003), and Nepal (2003).

Libera's roots are to be found in the hotbed of the « unofficial » polish art scene of the eighties. Works from this decade include Intimate Rites (1984), How to train the girls (1986), and Mystical Perseverance (1984). Since the nineties, Libera has appropriated the language of Pop Art. Using the serial production of objects in particular, each one of his works is intended to minutely resemble its original. In his series Correcting Devices (1994-2000), produced via this method, he ironically exposes the public fears that characterise our capitalist democracy and its icons, which have literally swamped Poland since the end of socialism.
Lego systems (1996) consists of a conglomerate of seven empty boxes, on which various scenes from concentration camps are represented using only the famous construction toy pieces. There are no specific references to World War Two, and obviously the same plastic pieces could have been assembled to form something completely different. The circumstance that nearly all the pieces come from the standard Lego assortment suggests that the constituting elements of such atrocities are present and readily available in our society; that history cannot easily be kept from repeating itself. It only depends on the imagination of the person who assembles the elements. Libera wishes to demonstrate « the potential danger that an innocent child's play becomes perverted into a construction of evil ». The Jewish Museum in New York acquired this work in 1997.

Since the early nineties, Libera has been widely exhibited in Europe and the United States: 1992, 1996, 1998 and 2000 at the Ujadzdowski-Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw; in Aperto '93 (Venice Biennale); 1995 at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin and at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; in São Paulo '96; 2000 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and at Berlin's Hamburg Bahnhof; 2001 at the Bunkier Sztuhi in Krakow; finally, in 2002 he was invited to the Jewish Museum, New York, in order to participate in the exhibition Mirroring Evil : Nazi imagery/recent art. The series Positives is now being shown outside Poland for the first time, after an initial run at the Atlas Sztuki Gallery in Lodz.

Curators: Enrico Lunghi / Christine Walentiny

Opening on Saturday, March 27th at 11 am
Exhibition from March 27th – June 6th 2004

Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain
41, rue Notre-Dame - B.P. 345 - L-2013 Luxembourg
Tél. (+352) 22 50 45 - Fax (+352) 22 95 95

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