calendario eventi  :: 

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23/10/2004

5 Exhibitions

MoMA PS1, New York

Please join us in celebrating the opening of our new fall exhibitions on Sunday, October 24th from 12-6 pm. With an opening day performance of Okinawan traditional dance and music by members of the Okinawa American Association of New York (OAANY), as well as the P.S.1 International Studio Program open house.

Hans-Peter Feldmann: 100 Years
October 24, 2004 to March 4, 2005

(Long Island City, NY, October, 2004) - P.S.1 is proud to present German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s (b. 1941) 100 Years (2001), a monumental series of 101 photographic portraits of people aged 8 months to 100 years old. Comprised of images of the artist's family members, friends, and acquaintances, the series draws out a chronology of human life within which viewers can situate themselves, glimpsing past, present, and future. 100 Years, building on Feldmann’s interest in the concept of the archive, foregrounds both individual and collective memories and imaginations, functioning as the artist’s personal database as well as an accessible exploration of the cycle of life.

Feldmann entered the art world in the late 1960s, when he began to construct and exhibit editions of small booklets containing found images such as postcards, magazine clippings and posters. These images constituted part of Feldmann’s massive “picture archive,” an assortment of images categorized according to the artist’s own system. In the event that a part of the archive was incomplete (an image was missing), Feldmann would capture this image via his own photography. Using image reproduction, photography or otherwise, as a means to illuminate the mysteries of daily life, he consistently gives credence to under-recognized art forms such as the photo album, never underestimating the power of the most “common” aesthetic strategies.

Hans-Peter Feldmann (b. Germany, 1941) lives and works in Dusseldorf. He has had numerous solo exhibitions since the early 1970s, including various shows at Galerie Paul Maenz in Koln, Germany, Galleria Sperone in Turin, Italy, and Kunstraum Munchen, Munchen, Germany. More recently he has shown at the Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York (1993), 303 Gallery, New York (1992, 1996, 2000), and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (2003). His work also appeared in documenta 5 and documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany (1972, 1976), do it, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist in Ritter Klagenfurt, Austria (1994), Big Brown Bag at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, NY (2002), Utopia Station, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Rikrit Tiravanija at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960-1982 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

This exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Chief Curator Klaus Biesenbach.

Image: a work by Hans-Peter Feldmann
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Katharina Sieverding: Close Up
October 24, 2004

(Long Island City, NY, October, 2004) – P.S.1 is proud to present Katharina Sieverding: Close Up. This is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of the Czech-born, German artist Katharina Sieverding (b.1944 Prague), one of the most significant artists working today. With over three decades of highly influential artistic practice spanning photography, film and installation, Katharina Sieverding: Close Up introduces her ground breaking body of work to an unfamiliar American public and highlights the artist's lifelong commitment to explore the tenuous relationship between the individual and society.

Katharina Sieverding: Close Up focuses on the cinematic aspect of Sieverding's photographic work, notably her large-scale self-portraits, which compose a significant portion of her oeuvre. Employing the close-up to challenge conceptions of the relationship between photography and cinema, Sieverding explores areas where these interdependent forms of media coincide and diverge. The exhibition presents the full range of Sieverding's creative accomplishments, drawing a thread through her work from 1969 through the present. By concentrating on a selection of her most significant serial photographic installations, two films, and a group of monumental single photographs and archival material, it deepens the viewers’ insight into the extreme political and social climate of the late 1960's and 1970's.

Sieverding firmly believes that the responsibility of the artist is to act as a politically engaged being, absorbing, synthesizing and commenting on the rapid advancement of our technology-driven age. Sieverding's choice to focus on photography justifiably brings to light questions about the medium's attempt to document, reproduce and represent. Her oeuvre includes monumental photographic portraits that appropriate the scale of movie screens and billboards, while their abstract forms- the result of manipulation during the developing process - create images that transcend race, gender, and age. Her photographic works are endowed with a symbolic sense of presence and the ability to command a space, and thus embody a simultaneous commitment to the observer and the observed.

Maton, one of the first photographic series, created between 1969 and 1972, comprises composite portraits of the artist staged in a photo booth. These portraits resurface in a series of 16 larger than life size photographs of Sieverding in Stauffenberg-Block, from 1969, the title of which refers to German officer Claus Philip Schenk Von Stauffenberg, who made a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Viewed in sequence, the expressions of the faces remain fixed-mouth closed, unsmiling, eyes tilted slightly upward. Experimenting with the medium, Sieverding solarized the silver gelatin originals and then used a red filter to tint the images. The Stauffenberg-Block faces, as in all of Sieverding's face imagery, reach both for an understanding of the self and for the fragmented nature of the Other.

Another work from this same period, Motorkamera, 1973/1974, is comprised of 336 individual black and white portraits of Katharina Sieverding and Klaus Mettig engaged in a series of intimate postures. This is the departure point for another seminal series from this period, Transformer, 1973, which features large format projections of multi-layered androgynous portraits. With this work, Sieverding concentrates fully on the systematic alteration and combination of male/female faces, birthing new faces and deconstructing the notion of the unified self and exploring the position of the Other.

Although Sieverding's early work explored her own female identity, she later expanded her discourse to include issues of the individual in society, creating large scale, media-based works. During 1976-78, the artist traveled to China and America, accumulating visual propaganda to further explore the symbolic communications at play in mass-marketed imagery and text. One example is the monumental four-part photograph IX, taken on a New York City rooftop during Sieverding's one-year stay in the city in 1977 while she and Klaus Mettig took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program. In this photo, Sieverding is enveloped in a sea of black, one hand grasping a glass, and the other placed atop her head. Referencing the notorious blackout in New York on the summer night of July 13th, 1977, the words "THE GREAT WHITE WAY GOES BLACK" are printed across her face.

As Sieverding experimented further with photography, intensifying her handling of light and performing technical manipulations with various new chemical processes, a shift toward material light occurred in her work. This is most apparent in XVII, 1980, a monumental work that depicts the artist's full body as an impression reminiscent of an X-ray. Struggling to attain balance, Sieverding, in silhouette, is trapped in the precarious position of having to walk across (balance upon) a singular beam of light, while raising a staff over her head.

Sieverding’s work addresses the power of the gaze and the comprehension of self through difference. This is most clearly evident in a 56-part series shown in 40 parts at P.S.1, Die Sonne um Mitternacht schauen (To Look at the Sun at Midnight), of 1973. This series of individual portraits of the artist's face painted in shimmering gold dust is tightly hung. Photography and the sun illuminate the face, which bounces the light back toward the viewer, filling the room with a warm, solar glow.

The focal point of the exhibition, Untitled (Ultramarine), 1993, is a series of eight self-portraits, comprised of three parts each, united by a vertical band of electric blue pigment. In this large-scale multi-media installation, Sieverding challenges the prescribed notion that a photograph represents a single "captured" moment, creating a cinematic flow that implicates the viewer and the object of his/her gaze in a dynamic eternal embrace.

Sieverding's early films convey a spiritual quality, evoking complex images that are charged with emotion, memory, and imagination of the self. In the 30-minute film Life-Death (1969) - which was shown for the first time at Documenta V in 1972 - film acts as a device for Sieverding’s self-reflection, illustrating the desire for life and death, and maintaining a balance between the two. With her own striking presence, enhanced by dramatic makeup and attire, Sieverding confidently investigates the existential dimensions of her own identity. On view at P.S.1 is a 42-part photographic series from Life-Death.

In September and October of 1978, Katharina Sieverding and Klaus Mettig traveled to China on a 3-week official program to four cities. The result is a rarely shown 16 mm film Beijing, Yanan, Xian, Luoyang (1978), filmed by Klaus Mettig. Here Sieverding broadened her focus to include the iconography of documentary reportage, foregrounding global events and divergent ideologies.

A silent film running slightly over two hours and 20 minutes, composed of almost untouched footage, presents us with a fleeting glimpse of everyday life after the end of the Cultural Revolution. Here Sieverding broadened her focus to include the iconography of documentary reportage, foregrounding global events and divergent ideologies.

While a Visiting professor at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou / Shanghai, Katharina Sieverding produced the film, Shanghai, 2002 /2003. Never before seen in the US, the film, comprised of two five-minute loops, document (extra)ordinary street life in and around Shanghai. The first loop, "Hongmeilu," which was shot in slow motion in a postmodern Shanghai suburb, depicts two private security guards as they follow a man, throw him into a hedge, and remove and discard his shoes. Unmoving, the fallen man lies there while a white-gloved guard confiscates his papers. The second loop, "Nanjing, Road," takes place at night in one of the most infamous shopping malls in all of Shanghai; it portrays a crowd of Chinese workers as they systematically dispose of a fashion boutique's entire inventory. The merchandise is piled high into the center of the store. The very next day the store is transformed into a clinic for cosmetic surgery.

Coinciding with the P.S.1 exhibition, Katharina Sieverding will be presented the Goslarer Kaiserring, Germany's most prestigious art-prize, on October 9, 2004.

Katharina Sieverding was born in Prague in 1944 and studied sculpture at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (1967-72) with Joseph Beuys. Her solo exhibitions include: Deutsche Guggenheim,Berlin (1998); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1998); Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (1997/8); German Pavilion, Biennale di Venezia (1997); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (1993); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1992); Memory and Vision, Art Space, San Francisco (1988); Städlische Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf (1980); Nicht auf der Stelle Treten, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (1979); Der Palast blieb kalt und verschlossen, Galeria L'Attico, Rome (1972). Her group exhibitions include Video Acts: Single Channel Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art Trust, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (2002); Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose, Guggenheim Museum, New York, Warhol Museum Pittsburgh (1997); Augenhöhe - Van Abbe Museum 1936-1986, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (1987); Photography in Contemporary German Art: 1960 to the Present, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Dallas Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum Forth Worth (1992) and Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York, The Lannan Foundation, Los Angeles (1993); Documenta VII, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1982); Documenta VI, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1977); Documenta V, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1972). Sieverding lives and works in Berlin and Dusseldorf. She is a professor at the University of the Arts Berlin.

A full-color, 500-page complete index/archive/compendium of the "close ups" in Katharina Sieverding's work will accompany this exhibition. The editor of the catalogue is P.S.1 Chief Curator and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Artistic Director Klaus Biesenbach, and includes essays by curators and scholars Norman Bryson, Sabeth Buchmann, Katja Diefenbach, Alanna Heiss, Brian O'Doherty, Daniel Marzona, Amy Smith-Stewart and Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

The exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Director Alanna Heiss with P.S.1 Curator Amy Smith-Stewart and Daniel Marzona and will travel to KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin in September, 2005.

The exhibition is co-organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, a MoMA affiliate and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and is made possible by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Berlin and Kunststiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Duesseldorf. Additional support is provided by Rosa and Gilberto Sandretto, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro and Julia Stoschek. Special thanks to Galerie Grimm/Rosenfeld, Munich and Salon 94.
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Aleksandra Mir: The Big Umbrella (New York)
October 24, 2004

(Long Island City, NY, July, 2004) – P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is proud to present the New York debut of The Big Umbrella, a recent, ongoing project by New York-based artist and Swedish citizen Aleksandra Mir (b. 1967 Lubin, Poland).

For The Big Umbrella, a performance-based work, Mir walked city streets and invited people to stand under her specially manufactured umbrella, which, at 240 x 160 cm x 160 cm high, is twice the size of the biggest umbrella found on the market and can shield up to 16 people simultaneously. Conceived for locations where it rains often, Mir addresses city-dwellers’ relationship to the uncontrollable force of weather.

Aleksandra Mir’s work prompts multiple interpretations and records various perceptions from different vantage points. Often tied to a specific happening in a particular location, her projects stress how individuals are interconnected and also how they bend to environmental boundaries. Uniting people by providing them with an opportunity to share a surreal and extraordinary experience, Mir creates a welcome space for life and art to exist simultaneously.

For P.S.1, Aleksandra Mir selected sites around New York City that reflect the dynamic spontaneity of the bustling metropolis. Depicting specific situations and interactions, Mir’s photographic sequences reflect both the incredible energy and diversity in New York City and record the current political climate. The Big Umbrella itself is also on view as a freestanding object on the floor, kept wet with a spray of water every day during the show, as if it was just brought in from the rain. The exhibition acts as sculpture, performance, prop, photography, and most effectively, as a record of its surroundings, namely, New York City. The Big Umbrella originated at Jousse enterprise in Paris in 2003. Later that year, a London chapter was presented at the Serpentine Gallery as part of a group exhibition, State of Play. In 2004, a selection of related photographs taken in Copenhagen and Dresden were presented at Art Statements, Basel.

Aleksandra Mir lives and works in New York. Selected solo shows and projects include: The World from Above, Greengrassi, London (2004); Naming Tokyo (part III), ICA, Philadelphia (2004); Happy Holidays, The Wrong Gallery, New York (2003); Naming Tokyo (part II), Swiss Institute, New York (2003); Plane Landing, Compton Verney House Trust, Warwickshire (2003); Welcome back to Earth, Kunsthalle St. Gallen, St Gallen (2003); HELLO Ringier, Ringier annual report, Zurich (2003); Daily News, Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York / Greengrassi, London (2002); HELLO Bern, Galeria Francesca Pia, Bern (2002) and First Woman on the Moon, Casco Projects, Utrecht (1999).

This exhibition is curated by Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.
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Picnic on the Ocean: Documentation of a Korean-Japanese Project
October 24, 2004 to December 20, 2004

(Long Island City, NY, October, 2004) – P.S.1 presents documentation of a collaborative project between by Korean artist Seung Young Kim and Japanese artist Hironori Muraia, both of whom were participated in the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Studio Program in 1999-2000. Conceiving their own form of resistance with their Picnic on the Ocean, the artists attempt to eliminate the cultural “barrier” between Korea and Japan, formed by differences in cultural, religious, and historic backgrounds.

Following the 36-year history of the Japanese colonization of Korea, as well as the underlying racism that remains from feudal times, it has been extremely difficult to initiate a truly equal, sincere, and open dialogue between the two nations. Since the 6th Century, Korea has strongly influenced Japan, most prominently through forms of religion, such as Buddhism, and in arts and crafts. During medieval times feudal Japan was aggressive toward Korea and, as a result of its victory over China and Russia before and after the turn of the 20th century, imperialist Japan colonized Korea in 1910. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, Korea was freed from this colonization. Almost sixty years later, foreign relations between the two nations have been normalized, but remain awkward, and at times even antagonistic. Skepticism and distrust on the part of the Koreans, and chauvinism and paternalism on the part of the Japanese still limit their contact and prevent a mutual understanding.

Between the Korean Peninsula and Kyushu Island in southern Japan, a strait with a turbulent tide and the national border keep the two territories apart. In July, 2002, Kim and Murai set out (in boats without sails) toward the Korean-Japanese border in small, traditional wooden fishing boats. Remaining on opposite sides of the border, they indulged in an ephemeral “Picnic on the Ocean” alongside a floating bed of flowers, and exchanged toasts to celebrate their cultural interchange.

The rendezvous in the ocean, which symbolically embodies the notion of a “bridge” that connects rather than isolates people, lasted from dawn until noon. This fantasy marked a small inconsequential spot on the globe, in which the past was transcended, and in which the artists’ modus operandi opened up a new future for both nations, or, at the very least, for the two artists.

This exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Adjunct Curator Kazue Kobata.
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Special Projects
October 24, 2004

(Long Island City, New York – September, 2004) – P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center is proud to present new Special Projects on October 24, 2004, including works by Paolo Canevari, Petra Lindholm, and Amy O’Neill. Special Projects are selected individually, without attention to a theme in order to reflect the extraordinary energy and variety of practices among young artists working in New York City and abroad.

Paolo Canevari: Welcome to Oz Courtyard. Selected by P.S.1 Executive Director Alanna Heiss.

Paolo Canevari’s (b. Rome, 1963) installation, Welcome to Oz, revolves around a photograph that ran in several newspapers depicting American soldiers outside the entrance of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison with the words “Welcome to Oz” hanging over their heads. Underscoring the irony and sarcastic implications of this sentence, Canevari defines and develops the idea of imprisonment as both a physical and psychological state. This site-specific installation, a barbed wire structure in P.S.1’s courtyard, is constructed of rubber from tire inner tubes bound to a wooden structure. This “fence” designates a private protected territory, defining a space that cannot be entered or escaped as well as addressing an ambiguous concept of prohibition. Viewers in the space, by experiencing a sense of physical and mental constriction, are encouraged to reflect on the authoritative and symbolic meaning of signs, barriers, and borders.

Paolo Canevari’s work has been included in major group and solo exhibitions throughout the world, including at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, XIII Quardriennale di Roma, Palazzo della Esposozioni in Rome, Centre for Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and The Liverpool Biennial, 2004. He was awarded the International Fellowship in Visual Arts by the Mid American Arts Alliance and US Information Agency (1996), and received an art prize for his work in the Art for the World, Playground and Toys for Refugee Children project in New York (2001). His work can be viewed in many permanent public outdoor projects, such as Uomoerba at the Sculpture Park in Villa Glori in Rome.

Amy O’Neill Old Noah’s Ark (from Parade Float Graveyard) The Vault. Organized by PS1 Curatorial Advisor Bob Nickas.

P.S.1 presents a new, major sculptural installation by Amy O'Neill (Pennsylvania, 1971). "Ethay, Arkway, ofway Oahnay" (pig Latin for The Ark of Noah) is based on a float from the 1968 Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California. Entered into the parade by the fraternal order of Odd Fellows and Rebekahs, the original float, titled "Hark, Hark the Ark," was covered in white and pink chrysanthemums, with a blaze of red roses on the deck. In O'Neill's reconstructed version, which is 16 feet long, five feet wide, and eleven feet high, the ark and its animals are pared down to skeletal forms and rendered in chicken wire. An archival recording that describes the 1968 parade in florid detail plays from inside the hull of the ark. While it seems to offer an escape from disaster, O'Neill's version, stripped bare of all decoration, has come to rest where all old, abandoned floats end up - in the Parade Float Graveyard.

Petra Lindholm Second Floor Special Project Room. Selected by P.S.1 Curator Amy Smith-Stewart.

P.S.1 presents a suite of three videos, each ten minutes long, by Paris-based artist Petra Lindholm (b. 1973, Karis, Finland). The videos, exhibited on monitors on the three different floors of P.S.1’s central stairwell, use video techniques such as the close-up, jump cut, accelerated and slowed images, and compressed or stretched time and space. Each sentimental and carefully constructed narrative, for which Lindholm composed the soundtrack and sings, poetically investigates the psychological terrain of our inner selves. Sunrise 5AM (2001), shot in a living room and bedroom in a modest apartment in Sweden, is absent of figures. Shifting light, dancing across rooms as the sun and moon move throughout the day, creates a deep psychological tension. Reported Missing (2003), which was shot in Stockholm, Italy, Easter Island, Chile, the Grand Canaries, and Australia, is a fragmented narrative of suggestive moments charged with emotion and imagination of self. Until (2004), making its debut at P.S.1, is a portrait of two strangers (a man in a bath and a girl in a bar) chronicled through a nighttime narrative of phone calls. Their desires and the mystery of their meeting are juxtaposed with images of the emotional landscape of their (and the viewer’s) subconscious.

Petra Lindholm studied at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm 1996-2001. Lindholm has had solo exhibitions at IrmaVepLab, Reims, France (2004); Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm (2002 and 2004); Galleri Bacchus, Borås, Sweden (2003); Prima Kunst, Collaboration with Stadtgalerie in Kiel, Germany (2002); MUU Galleria, Helsinki, Finland (2002); and Galleri Platform, Vaasa, Finland (2001).

For more information, please contact Rachael Dorsey, P.S.1 Press Office

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