Tuesday 29 November 2011

Important research on our theme

So after our discussion in class today about grasping the concepts of memory that we want to use for our theme...here are some artticles for all of us to look into, only 2/3 each, but Im sure theyre going to really help us. If it's a book which google books omits a few pages/chapters, just look at any summaries/criticisms about it on the net. It will probably be useful to look at any criticisms to our articles to see if they are any ideas we're missing.

Lizzie :
1) Walter Benjamin : The work of art in the age of the mechanical reproduction.
See if he has anything else interesting too.
2) N. Benoit-Lapierre : Dialectique de la mémoire et de l'oubli
3) R. Robin : La mémoire saturée

Heather
1) Paul Ricoeur : La mémpire, l'histoire, l'oubli
2) A. Wieviorka : Déportation et génocide : entre la mémoire et l'oubli

Emma
1) Pierre Nora: Entre mémoire et histoire
2)T.Todorov: Les abus de la mémoire

Cait
1) P. Bertrand: L'oubli: révolution ou mort de l'histoire
2) MC Lavabre: Usages et mésusages de la notion de mémoire

Lisa
1) T. Ferenczi : Devoir de mémoire, droit a l'oubli?
2) F. Dosse: Entre histoire et mémoire: Une histoire sociale de la mémoire

So as we've decided, we will read them and bring notes to our group meeting on Friday 12-3pm or 1-3pm depending on your classes etc.
Also, if we could bring any notes made of the previous research we've done, that would be Fantastico!

Monday 21 November 2011

Artist research : 1) Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie is a Frenhc conceptualist who has uncovered the physical and geographical scars of war and conflict in a series of frequently brave personal journeys. The 60-year-old has spent 25 years capturing epicentres of volatility across the world, becaoming renowned for her unsentimental, no-holds-barred approach to presenting the damage wreaked upon bodies and earth by combat in destinations including the Balkans and Kuwait.

She has cited a campaign in Beirut in the early 80s as the starting point for her snapshots of architecture reduced to rubble by the ravages of war.

As photo journalists sought demonstrably shocking, orthodox images of disaster, Sophie, became one of the first photographers to survey damaged terrain from a broader viewpoint, working from planes to map the imapct in the land.

Perhaps best known for producing graphic images of stitched wounds and victims recovering after surgery, she has won the award for her current two-month retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, having also had major exhibitions in New York and Bosten.

"Sophie's fragmented images explore the terrain of the real and imagined, addressing urgent issues of trauma, loss, memory and conflict," [...] "push the boundaries of the photographic medium"

Sophie says , 'My real interest is travelling the world’s tormented places and revealing the scars and the traces on the ground,’ 'I am dedicated to the earth.’ #

She says how her photos are true and false at the same time. She uses technical teams to manipulate and add to her photographs.
Such as with her "Eleven Blow ups" work.

"Vulaines"

“In addition to photographing the buildings from a child’s perspective, I cut out bits of scenes from old family photo albums in order to combine them in monumental diptychs”



This last works relates well to our theme of memory, exploring the idea of the perspectives of a child. 

Saturday 19 November 2011

Malik Oharian




In Invisible Film Melik Ohanian projects Peter Watkin’s film Punishment Park onto the Californian desert landscape El Mirage, where it was shot in 1971. Highly controversial at the time, and banned in the USA for over 25 years, the film is here absorbed by the infinite landscape and only the sound remains.
Melik Ohanian shows this film in the place it was filmed and the site of the original story, the El Mirage desert in California. Ohanian has both image and sound projected into the desert landscape, without a screen and at full length, as the sun goes down. The drama of the original material can still be experienced on the sound track, while the slow change of light over the landscape creates moments of quiet memory. It's playing on our visual memory.





Julien Maire

The Inverted Cone

This is an artist not on the list that I stumbled across whilst researching Melik Ohanian. The work is called THE INVERTED CONE
The Inverted Cone is a new installation, premiering at transmediale.10, which uses a constellation of projection devices to create a condition of atemporality, where our memories of the past, and our experience of the present, collide. In this installation, digital and analogue images, pass through the same lens. What we see is not a video, nor a still, but a kind of disorientating electronic composite. The combination of temporally discrete visual sources provokes, in the viewer, an awareness of the historical continuum of image-making.
The work refers to the famous metaphor of the “memory cone”, described by Henri Bergson in his book Matter and Memory. Bergson explains that the base of the “memory cone” represents the entire collection of memories of our lived past, whilst the peak of the cone is our present condition, and our memory of the past at the time we interact with the world. At the heart of Maire’s installation is an ‘inverted light cone’, which is a literal translation of Bergson’s metaphor into an actual optical process. When participating in the heuristic process of engaging with this work, the viewer automatically becomes a media-archeologist, experiencing distinct chronologies simultaneously.
The Inverted Cone is a new iteration of Julien Maire’s memory station series of works.
 

Alexandre Perigot

FIAC 2009 | Jardin des Tuileries<br />Alexandre Perigot, La maison témoin d'Elvis, 2005<br />© Jerome Taub

This is the Elvis house I was talking about. It's basically an exact replica of Elvis's original house in Memphis built out of metal scaffolding. (2005). It's called La maison témoin d’Elvis and was featured in the Tuileries gardens. In all the info i've read about it, nothing really refers to memory but I just really like it. 

Wednesday 16 November 2011

Guillaume Leblon

The Parisian gallery Jocelyn Wolff hosts “Replique de la chose absente,” the solo exhibition of Guillaume Leblon. The operative logic giving life to the works, realized for the occasion, consists in creating a “space-time box” of latent energy. This energy, at the same time distinct from reality and linked to the memory of it, reveals the strength and ambiguity of the objects that inhabit the place. The objects — as a trace — resist. This drag force structures a space and a time that belong to the realm of art.
 
GUILLAUME LEBLON, Foreground: Pomme suspendue, 2009. Cord, raw clay, paint, 5m of corde, 8cm diameter. Background: Réversibilité, 2009. Mixed media, 240 x 90 x45 cm. Courtesy Galerie Jocelyn Wolff , Paris.
 
The artist uses again and again the same objects and materials (see glass tablets, extremely important for Leblon, in works like September and Reversibilité), and through repetition these elements create a feeling of the uncanny — a feeling also noted in a text on Leblon by Luca Cerizza. At the same time, Leblon conceives his entire work as a unique body and inserts his compositions in a vital cycle — life-death-rebirth — antithetical to the “trivial” objects composing the pieces. Theseobjects, in their warm but distant concreteness, through reappearing as an evocation of swimthe world — the “illusion of the real” — gain an aura.
Four gongs (16h, Frévent) beat the time once every hour, reminding us once again that inside this “other” space we are surrounded by a totality, an ensemble in which the single works converse with each other. The place is imbued by the presence of the world; the participation of the spectator, moving around a living environment, puts it into focus again. A certain mysterious “ghost” of the history of art, from modernism to minimalism, previously colonized in a system of objects, comes to life again. Far from a postmodern dimension, the palpable body takes possession of its soul. “Things acquire sense when they get to the end: then history starts.”


http://guillaumeleblon.com/works.php

Thursday 10 November 2011

Katia Kameli


Katia is a Franco-Algerian artist and filmmaker whose practice is marked by the exploration of multiplicity and the in-between. In her video, photography and sculpture work, the artist investigates intercultural spaces, intersecting identities and their construction. As she herself says: “Fluxes of people are automatically creating hybridisations, indeed new spaces, thoughts and situations.”







For several years the Paris-based Franco-Algerian artist Katia Kaméli has explored the representation of Algerian culture and it intersection with French culture. Notably she has addressed the representation of women in the videos Nouba (2000) and Aicha (2002) and situations of immigrants in the projects Nomadic Utopia (2000) and En route pour l’aventure (2000). Her most recent video, Bledi a possible scenario (2004), is part of an ongoing series of artistic propositions, which includes a forthcoming workshop with art students in Algers (March 2006)

Bled means the land, i is the possessive in Arabic.
 We get few images from Algeria, which most of the time tend to stigmatize the political and social situation that is far more complex than the established power would like to have us believe. The Algerian people, oppressed by an insidious civil war, have become paranoid, have closed their windows, searching for and dreaming of democracy through their parabolic dishes. So, Bledi in progress is the temporary title of a series of projects dealing with Algeria.
The series includes three works for the moment. Bledi, a possible script, an imaginary storyboard, a possible narration made up of overlays tracings of images gathered from the Algerian press. The film Bledi a possible scenario plays over the many layers of Algerian realities.

More of the interview at:  http://katiakameli.com/katia-kameli-speaks-with-william-jeffett/





Above images taken from the Gateway series (Algeria). Below a photograph taken from the New York series.



Also she works with sound. She interviewed an Algerian taxi driver and you can listen to it on her site at http://katiakameli.com/gateway/

Could be an interesting feature for our exhibition :)









Wednesday 9 November 2011

Michel François

This guy has some cool installations but he wouldn't fit in to the themes we've been looking at, just thought i'd post this link so you can have a look at what he does.

http://hildadeschutter.blogspot.com/2010/01/michel-francois-plans-devasion.html

"The art of Michel François works through the construction of ideas and mental representations implicitly
present in the work. Out of the image formed by the spectator, emerges a dialogue alluding to art and human
society. Political themes are touched upon from a relational point of view." Xavier Hufkens

I Gilbert FASTENAEKENS I



Gilbert Fastenaekens est né en 1955 à Bruxelles où il vit. Rapidement reconnu pour son travail photographique sur les paysages urbains de nuit, il participe à la mission photographique de la Datar en France en 1984.

Parallèlement, de 1990 à 1996, Gilbert Fastenaekens a poursuivi un travail sur Bruxelles, publié sous le titre Site (ARP Editions, 1996), nous amenant à questionner le sens profond de la ville et de son développement, autant que son fondement et la logique qui y a cours. L’ensemble des œuvres photographique récentes, présente principalement des éléments de paysage urbain qui implique progressivement le spectateur, d’un traitement plutôt sculptural de l’architecture à une vision de plus en plus ouverte, poétique, voire théâtrale de la ville. Au départ d’un abondant corpus photographique, issu d’une réflexion en profondeur menée depuis une quinzaine d’années sur l’architecture et l’espace urbain de Bruxelles – murs aveugles, murs rideaux, chantiers et dents creuses urbanistiques, etc.- l’artiste a sélectionné des images d’une grande densité formelle. Ces photographies couleurs, faisant l’objet d’impressions numériques et présentées dans un format pouvant aller jusqu’à 2m x 2,5m, confrontent le spectateur de manière quasi physique avec la banalité de l’habitat contemporain



"At night, urban topography is left to its own devices. It is the unlit stage of an enigmatic opera, the abandoned decor of a monumental play from which the actors have been banished. Night is a moment prolonged over several hours, but freed of the weight of minutes, of the passage of time." It is concept that sets the tone for all of Gilbert Fastenaekens work.

 
La réalité comme ruine (http://archive.photographie.com/?evtid=117237&secid=2)
 

Depuis son invention, la photographie a toujours eu un lien avec la ruine : tous les deux possèdent la caractéristique d’être une empreinte d’une relique, tous les deux fonctionnent simultanément comme moment, - un lien temporel entre image ou lieu – et comme monument – une évocation des événements antérieurs. La mémoire moderne ne peut plus exister sans photographie. Ruines et photos sont les prothèses de nos souvenirs fuyants. Une photo d’une ruine séculaire vieille d’une centaine d’année est une relique qui témoigne d’une relique, une image hiérarchisée qui nous confronte aux diverses dimensions du passé et un exercice façonné dans des pensées (méta) historiques. 

La photographie et la ruine ne renvoient cependant pas uniquement au passé dans le sens de délabrement, destruction ou disparition. En rendant le passé visible naît aussi l’idée de progrès.
En outre, il y a également une étrange déformation de la notion ruine, notamment dans la création de l’idée du bâtiment inachevé, de la ruine en construction.
Ruine et chantier sont l’un l’autre considérés comme incomplets.
Le portrait de Bruxelles comme chantier séculaire (de Gilbert Fastenaekens), les panoramas d’un Sarajevo délabré ou de paysages mutilés près de Doel (de Jan Kempenaers), les squelettes en beton (de Niels Donckers) montrent des paysages contemporains en ruines, inspirés par des reliques du modernisme, le morcellement chaotique du paysage suburbain, la métamorphose hystérique de la métropole post-moderne ou par des traces omniprésentes de pollution.