Another reason this blog has been neglected as a receptacle of my wit and wisdom is because this year I am planning two biennales! The first one has now launched, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival. The theme is The Power of Things, and the spectacular exhibition is still available to view until June 3. It features wonderful works by Olafur Eliasson, Philip Beesley, Jae Rhim Lee, Roman Kirschner, Frederik de Wilde, Jessica de Boer, and many more. If you can make your way to Rotterdam, I unreservedly recommend seeing it. Here are some photos from the opening:

DEAF Official Opening Night

I am also busy preparing the next ZERO1 Biennale in San Jose, California with an international team led by Jaime Austin. Check our our artist lineup and get your flights booked to join us there in September!

 

Top Ten of Twenty Eleven doesn’t have the same ring Top Ten of Twenty Ten had to it, plus I wanted to do something a little different than last year. It was hard to pare it down, but I thought I would try to keep it to the Top 5 of 2011 and include some photos. Here goes!

1. This year an exhibition entitled Constellations opened at Cornerhouse in Manchester UK, which I co-curated with my friend and collaborator, Karen Gaskill. The show featured works by Kitty Kraus, Katie Paterson, Takahiro Iwasaki, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and investigated themes of impermanence and flux. I know I’m biased, but I’m very proud of how beautiful and coherent the show was. Karen and I are already scheming about the next project!

Out of Disorder (hair) by Takahiro Iwasaki. Photo by We Are Tape.

Untitled by Kitty Kraus. Photo by We Are Tape.

2. I started my wonderful job as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam and kicked off Blowup, a brand new event and exhibition series there. Over the year I delivered 5 successful editions of Blowup and the organisation’s first e-Book series (in the form of readers that accompany each Blowup event). More exciting things to come in 2012, including the Dutch Electronic Art Festival!

Blowup: The Era of Objects, with Julian Bleecker, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Anab Jain. With me doing my best Oprah Winfrey. Photo by Jan Nass.

Doing my best Vanna White. Photo by Jan Nass.

3. Travel highlights: I was an invited guest of BAM in their International Curator’s Programme and had a blast discovering Flanders; gave 4 talks in 7 days on a whirlwind and magical tour through Ukraine; visited the Venice Biennale during opening week; and enjoyed the IKT (international association of curators of contemporary art) Congress in Luxembourg and Metz. I’m really looking forward to more great trips in 2012, including going to places I’ve not yet been, like Tel Aviv.

Karla Black, Scotland + Venice

Nice to see a queue for contemporary art! Pinchuk Art Centre, Kyiv, Ukraine

4. I gave lectures in a number of places scattered around the globe, from Durham, Ontario, Canada to Lviv, Ukraine and many spots in-between (including my first Pecha Kucha here in Amsterdam to a packed house at Trouw), and I also picked up a speaking agent — Tessa Sterkenburg at The Next Speaker. Contact Tessa if you want to book me for 2012.

Dan McGee and I, in Durham, Ontario, at the Common Pulse symposium. Photo by David Jhave Johnston.

Lviv, Ukraine

5. I brought on four fabulous international correspondents to help with Curating.info, commissioned a new logo by designer Rita Godlevskis, and kicked off a huge new project: the Curating.info Fellowship, with CCA Glasgow.

New Curating.info logo by Rita Godlevskis

New site look and feel (ideas and implementation by Mikhel Proulx)

 

Well, where to start when writing a tribute to this multitalented, brainy, considerate, funny, knows-where-all-the-coolest-stuff-is, amazing and strategic-thinking woman.

Hmm. Guess that list of adjectives was a tip of a tip of the iceberg, but one has to start somewhere.

I first met Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino in Singapore, at a policy summit on digital technologies and the arts. I was jetlagged like I had never been before and staying awake in the 100% humidity was mostly a feat of will. Then Alex started speaking and I sat straight up, captivated by her presentation on how she founded the design studio Tinker! in London and how she was evangelizing for open hardware all over the world. I have to meet this woman, I thought to myself. Fortunately, I did, and a few years later she’s now a partner at Really Interesting Group, working on high profile stuff for Mozilla, and working on a fascinating project about emotional robots for a major European Union funded research group. I also invited her to share her expertise on the Internet of Things and speculative design at my latest Blowup event at V2_. You can read her text, “Is this thing on? Identity, robots, and spying through everyday objects” in the free, downloadable e-Book that accompanied the event.

So yes, she’s a heavy-hitter and every time you chat with her, you’ll learn something. Chances are you’ll laugh, too. Her dry sense of humour comes out in many of her design projects, including this one, Curious Scarves, a way of advertising your relationship status and which gender you are seeking, because “it’s hard being single in the big city”:

Ada Lovelace Day or not, it’s just high time I wrote a little tribute to Alex, my friend and colleague, who is basically number one on my speed dial** when I want to know what’s what in the worlds of design, internet of things, robots, and future thinking.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. This is my contribution for 2011.
My previous contributions were:
2010: About Eva Schindling
2009: A little story about Anab Jain

** – OK, she’s not really on my speed dial, because I hate the telephone. (I really hate the phone… don’t call me. Please.) We need some kind of new way of expressing the symbolism of speed dial, but for email and Twitter DMs and whatnot. If you think of/invent/know of a term like this, lemme know.

 

I have been running Curating.info as a free resource for curators of contemporary art since 2006. It was borne out of a “why not” attitude towards sharing and openness, since I was compiling research on curating anyway. I also thought it would help me make my research more rigorous, as writing on this blog during my Master’s thesis did. A few years later and Curating.info is getting fan mail and picking up a lot of attention. Today I’m able to easily recruit four fantastic interns to share the burden and we have nearly 5000 fans on Facebook. The question was what to do next with this great platform. With thousands of people paying attention, what can you do and what should you do?

I had a vague idea that I’d like to create a Curating.info Scholarship, part funded by donations from the Curating.info community (that I had, thus far, never directly asked for any money) and could think of several good curatorial Master’s programmes that would benefit from a scholarship in place. I went to the IKT Congress in Luxembourg this year, and in the cavernous and highly atmospheric basement of the Casino Luxembourg, ended up chatting with Sally Tallant, Head of Programmes at London’s Serpentine Gallery. Sally, who as it turned out knew and loved the site, listened as I tipsily described the nascent plan for the Curating.info Scholarship. “But why not do even more?” was her response. “Make it an experience in a gallery you love and trust, something where people can get real experience. There are already loads of scholarships out there.” Immediately I saw how right she was, and changed course accordingly. My first thought was to partner with the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) in Glasgow, in part because it’s a great institution and a fellowship would fit with its ethos, and in part because its Director, Francis McKee, is both a visionary and a highly trustworthy person. Francis was onboard, and so it was born: the Curating.info Fellowship in collaboration with the CCA in Glasgow.

The Fellowship is a chance for an individual to conduct curatorial research and produce an exhibition at the CCA. The Fellow will work at the CCA four days per week over the six month fellowship, developing a curatorial project or body of curatorial research. Fellows will be paid a flat fee of £8,000. Ideal candidates for the Fellowship are emerging or mid-career curators who can demonstrate passion and fresh thinking in curating and writing about contemporary art, and who have a vision for what the role of the curator means today.

The deadline for applications is October 21, 2011. Applications will be judged by Francis McKee, Sally Tallant, and myself.

We’re really excited about it. I hope you will spread the word, contribute to the crowdfunding campaign, and apply to be our first Fellow.

Contribute to the crowdfunding campaign here.
Apply for the Fellowship here.

 

One of my guilty time-wasting pleasures is reading online newspapers. When I really feel like procrastinating, I read the comments too.

Mostly comments on news sites are godawful. The comments section of any news site is the absolute underbelly of the internet, where every troll comes out to show their true colours. If I need a quick dose of spite, misogyny, homophobia, and general unpleasantness to remind me of how human (all too human) we are, the comments section of any given news site will serve quite nicely.

Then, in the most unlikely of places, a comment stopped me in my tracks enough to spur me to blog about it. I say in the most unlikely of places because this was an article on Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, asking for advice on what to do about being continually invited to a neighbour’s dinner parties, where the only meal ever served is overcooked beef tenderloin and salad. Imagine — it’s a kind of First World Problem turned into a nightmare serial of mile-wide, inch-deep proportions. The comments almost universally castigated this callous couple and their ingratitude towards their kindly neighbours who perhaps prefer their beef well-done (and so what?).

Then I read the following:

shoshanab
10:55 AM on August 23, 2011
I had an uncle who lived through the holocaust in Auchwitz and Bergen Belsen as a child. As an adult, he kept strictly Kosher at home including seperate dishes and dishwashers. He also put 18 cents (the Hebrew number that correspons to the word for life) into a jar for every meal he and anyone else in his home ate, which was later donated to charity.

However, if he went to anyone else’s home, he ate whatever he was given. No requests. No special meals, no demands. If he went to your generous friend’s house he would eat anything they gave him, even pork ribs, then go home and put 18 cents into a jar to be thankful for the food and for being alive.

Perhaps you can think about that the next time well cooked beef tenderloin doesn’t meet your requirements in generously offered food and friendship.

This comment took a spurious complaint by a not-so-neighbourly couple, and in not even 200 words spun it into real lesson, especially relevant in this age of uber-foodie-ism and entitlement complexes. I might just be putting 18 cents in a jar for each meal I enjoy from now on.

 

Jack Layton, leader of the Official Opposition, and leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, has lost his battle with cancer.

It is hard to put into words how significant a loss this is for Canada. Whether you voted NDP or not, Layton was universally admired for his sheer determination and devotion to Canadian families, seniors, children — everyone who needed help. He genuinely believed we could lift each other up and create a fairer society.

It has been a toxic year tainted by the disgusting spectacle of British politicians rushing to distance themselves from the corrupt media empire they had helped to create; revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere that provided hope which was quickly extinguished once it was clear youth, women, and moderate voices would have nothing to do with the new order; America brought to the economic brink by petty partisan bickering and a rabid right wing; London burning ostensibly over a police shooting but looters gone wild leaving a bitter taste; and a recent Dutch election that saw the rise of Geert Wilders’ far right PVV party go from 9 seats to 24. I have not even touched the economic roller coaster and the repulsive charade of bank bailouts followed by enormous-bonuses-as-usual on Wall Street.

Amid all this toxicity, negativity, and despair, Jack Layton had this to say from his deathbed:

“… consider that we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together. Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

Don’t let them tell you it can’t be done.

Amid the shameful circus of global politics, Jack Layton was a rare genuine spirit, the epitome of public service, and someone so straightforward and real.

I am completely broken up over the loss of one of the good ones, in the face of all this bad. I am going to repeat Jack’s words many times to myself, and resolve to reprioritise and set an example afresh, to keep my head up in this dark hour. My condolences to Olivia Chow and Jack’s children, I cannot imagine the immensity of their loss.

Rest in peace, Jack.

In lieu of flowers, Jack Layton’s family has asked that donations be made to the Broadbent Institute in memoriam.

 

Well instead of belaboring this point or dragging out the I’m-so-busy excuse, I will simply point out that it’s been about a year and a half that I have been settled here in the Netherlands. I love it. I delight in all the cultural discovery that there is for me here. I have fixated in particular on a child star, Danny de Munk, as one of my Dutch cultural investigations.

Danny de Munk was a child star in the 80s. He seems to have floated along, with one failed album in English, but otherwise reigning as the highest-paid Dutch singing star.

One tune from his youth, Mijn Stad (My City), stands out for me. The lyrics for this song are astounding. Here is just a small sample:

Hier heb je alles wat je hartje bekoort,
wat ruzie en inbraak, en soms ook een moord!
Je krijgt op je kanis, je fiets wordt gejat,
maar wat moest je doen, als je Mokum niet had
Want Amsterdam, is poep op de stoep,
en haat in de straat, je bent op je hoede,
vooral ‘s avonds laat,
en Dansen bij Jansen,
kapsones in zuid,
een steen door de ruit!

Which translates roughly as:
Here you have everything your heart desires,
Fights, break-ins, sometimes even murder!
Your bike is stolen, but what would you do, if you didn’t have Mokum.
Amsterdam is poop on the sidewalk, and hate in the street
You’re on your guard
Especially late at night, dancing at Jansen,
strutting in the South,
a brick through the window!

I can’t help but love this child star and the culture from which he springs where a song called “My City” is so equally disparaging and loving. Poop on the sidewalk! An honest appraisal, delivered with that eerie whistle that I find escaping from my lips more than once as I idle here in fine fine Mokum.

Do yourself a favour and watch this great video from 1985 of Danny himself singing about Amsterdam’s crime rate and poop on the sidewalk problem:

Postscript: It’s perhaps worth mentioning where I found this song in the first place. In 2004 I was at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam and heard a presentation by Merijn Oudenampsen, in which, as I recall, he scathingly took down the I AMsterdam campaign. Of course in 2004 I had no idea that I’d be living in Amsterdam in 2011. All those years later, I remembered the presentation, and found that it had been adapted into an article in Mute. In the article, I noticed the Danny de Munk song lyric, typed that into YouTube, and discovered the video above.

 

Tomorrow I have the pleasure of launching the series I have been working on in my capacity as Curator at V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam.

The name of the series, Blowup, was inspired not only by Antonioni’s film but by the notion that blowing an image up reveals detail; blowing an inflatable object up creates form; blowing something up explosively can be festive or threatening.

The first event in the series is entitled Wild Things, and is about art for animals to appreciate, inhabit, or interact with. Three incredible speakers: Amy Youngs (US), Wilfried Hou Je Bek (NL), and Elio Caccavale (IT/UK), plus one cat: Barbie (NL), will be presenting over the course of the evening.

If you are anywhere in the Benelux region, you should rush to V2_ tomorrow night (July 7) and get there by 8 PM to enjoy the evening. For most readers, you are far enough away that I cordially invite you to tune in via webstream. V2_’s streams are really excellent, I would almost dare to say it’s even better than being there, because we use multiple cameras and the camera operators are so good. You will miss out on the custom cocktail, the “Wild Zebra”, but you can attempt to replicate this at home by making a White Russian and trying to make chocolate stripes on the side of your glass. Ya, I know — tricky. Just make White Russians and visualise the stripes. You can even participate in the online chatter by Tweeting about the programme using the hashtag #v2_!

So if you are nearby, see you there; and if not, get comfy in front of your computer, and tune in to: http://live.v2.nl tomorrow, July 7, at 8PM Central European Summer Time.

Also — every Blowup event will have an e-Book reader released with it. Keep an eye out, I will amend this post with the download URL for this, the first Blowup reader!

 

I’m delighted to announce the successful launch of Constellations, an exhibition co-curated by myself and Karen Gaskill, at Cornerhouse in Manchester, UK.

Constellations presents four international artists working with sculpture and installation. Minimalist in their approach, all present ideas on remoteness, fragility, disintegration, melancholy, and transience, together creating a profound and almost palatable sadness.

Adopting its title from the patterns of celestial bodies, the exhibition considers the relationship between ideas and the formation of concept. Drawing on the historic usage of constellations as maps or event atlases of the celestial sphere, this exhibition presents a collection of ideas on ephemerality, impermanence and flux in contemporary art. At its very core is an organic grouping of works that when in relation to one another form new ideas and notions, new constellations, each as fluid and volatile as the other.

The works selected are concerned with the fragility and breakdown of content. This instability not only manifests as a dissolution or reduction, but also as a loss of content, a shift in form, or the temporality of an objects’ existence. Each metaphorically deals with the passage of time, creating its own duration, but ultimately brings the attention back to the present moment. The result is an exhibition that in structure and content is all at once timeless, durational and unstable.

The shift from one form to another is most apparent in the ice lamps of Kitty Kraus (pictured above), household lightbulbs are encased in ice infused with ink, resembling small frosty black cubes, which when plugged in cause the ice to melt haphazardly across the floor. The initial sculpture draws murky trails with inky stained water, leaving the often broken lightbulb and its cable trailing, a testament to its ultimate demise.

Surrounded by the slow dissolution of Kraus’s lonely systems, the delicate landscapes of Takahiro Iwasaki (pictured below) respond in their fragile yet resilient form. The mimicry of permanent geographies such as mountain ranges, using delicate and unstable materials such as cloth and pencil lead, create a contrasting, yet equally delicate infrastructure, reminding us quietly about the fleetingness of time and earth’s instability.

The reduction of form is mirrored in the takeaway poster stacks of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (pictured below). Durational in nature, the work slowly diminishes, shifting in form as the audience remove the posters and the tangible aspect of the work disappears. The work is evocative of what once was, of death and passing, and the image of the sea on the posters also invokes a sense of timelessness and strength to contrast the melancholy of the diminishing pile.

Katie Paterson’s two works both deal with space and the universe, and our position as humans in the cosmos is revealed by the works. 100 Billion Suns is a daily colourful explosion of confetti, happening in different parts of the Cornerhouse building each day. Each piece of confetti bears the colour signature of the brightest explosions in the universe. She has shrunk massive events to human scale, and presented them in bursts that will land and be tracked throughout the gallery in unpredictable ways. Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) on the other hand, is a work that transforms Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata using radio waves (pictured below). By bouncing Morse code of the score off of the moon’s surface, errors are created that are reproduced in the version played by the piano in the gallery. The lost information in the score is as a result of some celestial interference, a chance intervention that is not unlike the chance vagaries of the room temperature and floor surface that will impact the final form of Kitty Kraus’ ice lamp works.

The works in this exhibition each work in different ways with form, material, and change. Katie Paterson’s confetti canons are an addition to the environment, while viewers slowly subtract Gonzalez-Torres’ work from the gallery. Kraus’ ice lamps physically transform from 3D to 2D, while Iwasaki’s work plays with scale and form by transforming the idea of a mountain into household materials. The radio waves that Paterson used to send the Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back echo the ocean waves represented on the Gonzalez-Torres poster. Natural materials such as ice, water, soil, and air are present in all the works in either representation or in physical form. The pieces here may be minimal in aesthetic, but they are not abstract, they represent real things, and changes in the real world.

When devising constellations in the sky, people created stories to help understand our natural world, to make sense of it. But these celestial drawings are ultimately arbitrary, fragile, and could be replaced by new mappings or new understandings at any time. The mutability of the works in this exhibition are like the fragile understanding enabled by a constellations’ path. We are drawing edges around materials that we wish to know and to contain, even if ultimately, we cannot. The works in this exhibition provide us with a new poetic template to think about our understanding of time and material.

More info on the show:
Cornerhouse
Sat 25 Jun 2011 – Sun 11 Sep 2011
Mon – Closed, Tue – Sat 12:00 – 20:00, Sun 12:00 – 18:00