calendario eventi  :: 

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25/2/2006

Four exhibition

MoMA PS1, New York

The Thirteen

Chinese Video Now

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now, an exhibition featuring a young generation of Chinese artists working with new media and responding to the great socio-economic changes that are taking place in the country. The thirteen emerging artists and artist teams—most of them born in the 1960s and 1970s—will show twenty-three video works. The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now is on view from February 26 through April 24, 2006.

Their choice to work with video—a relatively cheap medium that produces rapid results—underscores the heady times they face. Unlike the earlier generation of Chinese artists who gained recognition in the 1990s, the majority of these young artists choose to remain in China, living and working in major urban centers like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. In these cities they experience first-hand the growing consumer culture and rapid urban development.

Though most of these artists have presented their work internationally, many of them have not exhibited in the United States. This exhibition will present, and in many cases introduce, some of the most exciting work produced in China today.

Artists in The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now are: 8gg (multimedia duo Jiang Haiqing and Fu Yu, based in Beijing); Cui Xiuwen (b. 1970 in Heilongjiang, lives and works in Beijing); Dong Wensheng (b. 1970 in Jiangsu province, lives in Changzhou); Cao Fei (b. 1978 in Guangzhou, lives in Guangzhou); Hu Jieming (b. 1957 in China, lives and works in Shanghai); Huang Xuaopeng (b. 1960 in Shanxi, lives and works in Guangzhou); Li Songhua (b. 1969 in Beijing, lives and works in Beijing); Liang Yue (b. 1979 in Shanghai, lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai); Lu Chunsheng (b. 1968 in Changchun, lives and works in Shanghai); Ma Yongfeng (b. 1971 in Shanxi, lives and works in Beijing); Meng Jin (b. 1973 in Chong Qing); Xu Tan (b. 1957 in Wuhan; lives and works in Shanghai and Guangzhou); and Xu Zhen (b. 1977 in Shanghai, lives and works in Shanghai).

The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now is co-curated by David Thorp and Sun Ning, Director of Platform China in Beijing.

This exhibition is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

February 26, 2006 through April 24, 2006

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Torbjorn Rodland

132 BPM

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents 132 BPM, the fourth and most recent video work by the Oslo-based photographer Torbjorn Rodland. Best known for infusing a sense of unease, mystery and quietude into otherwise banal images—urban and natural landscapes, portraits, pets, the still life— Rodland’s video work comes out of his desire to translate still photography into moving images. The video will be shown in the Vault, a legendary space at P.S.1 which has a long history as an intimate showcase for music, performance and installation art. Torbjorn Rodland: 132 BPM is on view from February 26 through April 24, 2006.

Rodland’s highly attuned eye for color, composition and the crispness of his imagery carries over to his video work, in particular to 132 BPM. BPM refers to beats-per-minute, and according to the artist, the intention was to “add a constant beat to the images - and not the beat of fast editing." In this piece, amid woods, waterfalls and a view of the sea, nature seems to delight in and dance to the music.

132 BPM was shot during a one-month stay in western Croatia. Prior to the trip, Rodland created an iPod playlist of chart-music with identical tempo (132 BPM) and bought a metronome. Working alone and wearing headphones, the artist set branches, leaves, and trees into motion, as well as animated them with flashlights. After each day of filming, he sorted and edited the material on a laptop. Rodland subsequently worked with Sex in Dallas, a French electronica group based in Berlin, to create the music. Together, the artist and musicians looked at the images and roughly synchronized the music. When Rodland returned to Norway, he remixed the music and injected sounds of nature in motion.

For the artist, 132 BPM combines the notion of machines making dance music and the experience of breathing in a living forest. Rodland perceives the work as a reference to the ways in which “sublime nature is mystically linked to urban longing."

Born in Hafrsfjord, Norway in 1970, Torbjorn Rodland has lived and worked in Oslo, New York, and Berlin over the past few years. Since the mid-1990s his photographs have been widely exhibited and reproduced. He was included in Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1. His first book, White Planet, Black Heart, will be published in June by Steidl.

Torbjorn Rodland: 132 BPM is organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas.

Opens at 3:00 p.m. on February 26, 2006 and runs through April 24, 2006

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Wolfgang Tillmans

Freedom From The Known

Freedom From the Known is Wolfgang Tillmans’ first exhibition for an American museum, and unlike any he has ever previously mounted. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s purely abstract photographs, and explores the presence abstraction has had within his figurative and representational work. Twenty-four of the twenty-five large-scale works on view were produced specifically for this exhibition and have never before been shown. Freedom From The Known is on view from February 26 through May 29, 2006.

Tillmans’ large-scale abstractions are presented in frames—a departure for an artist who pioneered a style of installation based on taping and pinning pictures directly to the wall. The elusive, transitory images in the abstractions, when framed, can be seen as objects in space, displaying both buoyancy and weight. Most of these works are “camera-less"—pictures made by the direct manipulation of light on paper, rather than on a negative.

Alongside the abstract works, a group of figurative/representational photographs from the series Empire, based on pictures Tillmans made between 1991 and 2002, are on view. The original pictures used for Empire were either passed through a photocopy or fax machine, then scanned to the highest possible resolution, turned into large-scale C-prints and framed. Due to the large format, minor surface incidents are intentionally enhanced, along with the grain and grit.

A selection of earlier photographs is also included to provide a context for Tillmans’ passage from figurative and representational imagery to abstraction. They reveal how he opens up his work to the possibility of accidental and chance intervention.

The German-born and London-based Tillmans (b. 1968) has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions over the past fifteen years. He was a recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2000, awarded by Tate Britain. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago will present his first American museum retrospective opening on May 20, 2006.

Freedom From The Known is organized by P.S.1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas. A fully-illustrated publication by Steidl, designed by the artist and featuring an essay by Nickas, will be published to coincide with the exhibition.

Exhibitions at P.S.1 are made possible by the Annual Exhibition Fund with support from Peter Norton and the Peter Norton Family Foundation, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, The Goldsmith Foundation, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, Kathleen and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., David Teiger, Michel Zaleski, Christopher Daly and Sheldrake Organization Inc., Sue & Edgar Wachenheim Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation, Dennis W. LaBarre, Lawton W. Fitt, L. Matthew Quigley & Elizabeth Quigley, Mathis-Pfohl Foundation, SilverCup Studios, Brandon Paul Coburn, Sholom & Zuckerbrot Realty LLC, Yellow Book U.S.A. and The Friends of Education in honor of Peter Norton and Gwen Adams and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

February 26, 2006 - May 29, 2006

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Clemens von Wedemeyer

Solo show

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is pleased to present the U.S. premiere of Big Business and Otjesd/Leaving by German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer. Known for installations that exist in a realm between cinema and the fine arts, von Wedemeyer’s moving-image works, shot on 35mm film or video, are usually accompanied by research material, video documentaries, or still photographs to illuminate the conception and production processes. Through their witty references, which allude to cinema classics as well as socio-critical topics and historical events, von Wedemeyer’s works are meditations on a complex world. This exhibition is on view from February 26 through April 24, 2006.

Big Business (2002) is von Wedemeyer’s eponymous remake of the 1929 Laurel and Hardy slapstick classic. Two sales representatives get into a fight with a customer over the sale of a Christmas tree in the middle of August. Over the course of their wacky and revengeful fight, mayhem ensues—a home is trashed and a car is shredded with bare hands.

It is not until The Making of Big Business (2002) that von Wedemeyer reveals the context of the former’s production: the Waldheim detention center, an institution where the prisoners occupy their time by first building and then destroying model houses. In fact, the actors in Big Business are these very prisoners. The video, which complements Big Business, explores aspects of prison life and elucidates how construction and subsequently, demolishing model houses function as occupational therapy for the prisoners.

In Otjesd/Leaving (2005), von Wedemeyer investigates the immigration of Russians to Germany, which increased after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a single fifteen minute shot, which recalls the camera work of the great Russian masters such as Andrei Tarkovsy or Aleksandr Sokurov, the film captures an imaginary scene of people waiting for visas in front of the German consulate in Moscow. The camera slowly follows a young woman trying to fight her way into the building. The different dialogues in Russian are not dubbed or subtitled, creating for the viewer an atmosphere of confusion and disorientation. This is further enhanced by the incessantly moving camera, and the fact that the scene was shot neither at a consulate nor in Moscow, but in a forest near Berlin.

Clemens von Wedemeyer (b. 1974, Gottingen, Germany) received a M.F.A. in 2005 from the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig, Germany. He currently resides in Berlin and Leipzig. Since 1998 he has exhibited mostly in Germany and France and has received several awards.

Clemens von Wedemeyer is curated by Klaus Biesenbach, P.S.1 Chief Curator and Curator, Department of Film and Media at The Museum of Modern Art, with the valuable assistance of Jenny Schlenzka.

This project has been made possible by the support of Julia Stoschek.

February 26, 2006 through April 24, 2006

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center
22-25 Jackson Ave - Long Island City, New York

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