Mayday Productions is a New York based curatorial collaborative. Our
concern is to construct a series of focused situations the success of
which is based on unpredictability and utopia. Our goal is to create a
transient space for simultaneous encounters between artists,
audience, curators, and art objects. While making transparent the
artists' processes and curatorial approaches we are indeed projecting
an agenda: the dialectics of control and sensuality. Mayday
Productions' projects are not meant to be an institutional critique but
instead presents our own experimental model. The actual events are
not end products but rather steps toward utopia.
Mayday Productions has planned the following activities:
AGIT PROP AUSTRIA
In light of recent political activities and the subsequent flurry of
response from inside and outside the art world both internationally and
within Vienna, Mayday Productions will turn the Kunsthalle
Exnergasse into a transparent platform through which individuals and
groups will be able to communicate and find a presence. Mayday
Production will operate from the Kunsthalle Exnergasse to facilitate
and maintain communication via the Internet and on location within an
already existing network of over 13000 art professionals worldwide.
Mayday Productions intends to consolidate and make public all
activities regarding Austria's present political status by inviting every
individual or organization to contribute in person or online.
VIENNA RESIDENCE
Mayday Productions has invited three artists to take residence for a
few days and present a project or a one day event at the Kunsthalle
Exnergasse. The artists are: Matthew Buckingham (film and video),
Fritz Welch (wall drawings and sound), and Jayce Salloum (video
installation)
The following three projects will take place in three installments:
May 17 - 20, 2000
Jayce Salloum
Jayce Salloum is an artist who has spent the last 15 years in the
continual process of documenting, amassing and filtering visual culture
derived out of transitory spaces, or territories in the process of
'between-ness' - be it local urban spaces undergoing gentrification
(New York's East Village), geo-politically carved areas (South
Lebanon), or palimpsests of historically charged regions (former
Yugoslavia). Manifested through street photography, appropriated
imagery, video, film, installations and curatorial and academic pursuits,
Salloum orbits around specific points of contention where the
constructed urban or suburban environment regurgitates social and
political discourses - that usually go undetected in our daily frames of
references.
For Agit Prop, Jayce Salloum will take residence as a visitor, bringing
with him collected items for installation, and inviting the public to add
to this collection. Conversations and interviews with visitors will be
video taped and edited into an ongoing body of work which consists of
footage, notes/observations and other material from ex/current
Yugoslavia, and the Middle East that contributes to his study of
borders, refuge and the conditions of living/moving trans-culturally.
Jayce Salloum is a Lebanese - Canadian living in Vancouver.
May 24 - 27, 2000
Fritz Welch
Wall Drawing and Sound, 2000
Site-specific installation
Fritz Welch works in two mediums: drawing and sound. He draws
using graphite or ink on a variety of surfaces and he collects and
generates sounds. Both forms are based in the types of cultural
products and by-products that pile up around us, like so much trash,
and a procedure based on disassembly, ruination, and regeneration.
Welch finds his inspiration in agit-prop graffiti, advertising flyers,
Chinese menu marginalia etc., as well as in every-day ambient sound
and conversations; objects and images that seem stripped of any life
or really any cultural value, not even capable of maintaining the status
of kitsch, and sounds that cross the line between music and noise. For
Kunsthalle Exnergasse Welch will make a large-scale wall drawing
combined with an elaborately edited sound collage.
Fritz Welch is a Brooklyn-based artist who has shown extensively in
the New York area. He regularly performs with his group Bushwick Trio
at the Knitting Factory in New York. He has recently shown at
Transmission Gallery in Glasgow and the AC Project Room in New
York.
May 31 - June 6, 2000
Matthew Buckingham and Joachim Koester "Sandra of the Tuliphouse
or How to Live in a Free State (Ellipses)" 16mm film/video/slide
projection installation with sound, 1998
"Ellipses" is one section from a larger film and video project titled
"Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in a Free State," a
collaboration between Matthew Buckingham (USA) and Joachim
Koester (Denmark) which examines past and present life inside the
anarchistic 'free city' of Christiania, in Copenhagen. In "Sandra of the
Tuliphouse or How to Live in a Free State" Christiania is approached at
face-value, as a self-described laboratory of freedom, an environment
that provides an almost unique opportunity to unravel a very particular
history of markedly contrasting power relations and vivid social forces.
The "Ellipses" section of the work focuses on the subjectivity of
Sandra, a fictional character who is visiting Christiania for the summer.
The viewer follows Sandra through her first four weeks inside the
community as she becomes increasingly preoccupied with the image
of Christiania's flag; three yellow dots on a red field. To Sandra this
sign resembles an ellipses, the three dots used to indicate missing
words or faltering speech in a printed text (i.e.: ...). As an ellipsis this
symbol comes to represent spatial and temporal ruptures in her life
and surroundings related to her own personal dislocation and more
generally to the incomplete possibilities of utopia.
Matthew Buckingham lives and works in New York. His work has been
shown recently in the Greater New York exhibition at the P.S.1
Museum, at the Musee d'art moderne de la ville de Paris, the Museum
Fredericianum, Kassel, and his films have been screened at the Pacific
Film Archives/Berkeley Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
Kunsthalle Exnergasse is a non-profit exhibition space and cultural center
that presents inter-disciplinary/intermedia projects in art, music, graphic
design and performance. The facility cooperates with galleries and other
socio-cultural centers in Austria and abroad.
Kunsthalle Exnergasse
Währingerstraße 59, 1090 Wien
Contact: Tel: 401 21/41, 401 21/42