ART-IST EVENT: Contemporary Exhibitions @ Istanbul Modern

Ahmet Polat
30 MAY 2007 - 26 AUGUST 2007

Within the framework of "Who Are You?" Ahmet Polat combines his search for identity and heritage with an autobiographical narrative, thus presenting to viewers samples from various series he produced in the near past. Ahmet Polat’s selection of 82 photographs blends diverse topics, ranging from immigrants in Transvaal to the homeless in Tilburg, from the 1999 Marmara earthquake to images of high-society.
Curator: Engin Özendes

in the news: http://www.radikal.com.tr/ek_haber.php?ek=cts&haberno=6747



Andreas Gursky
30 MAY 2007 - 26 AUGUST 2007

İstanbul Modern will be showing a retrospective exhibition of the globally renowned German photographer Andreas Gursky. Organized by the Haus der Kunst in Munich, it will reflect at length, Gursky’s 23-year-old career through 35 photographs.
It is the first comprehensive retrospective of a contemporary, international artist at İstanbul Modern.
The selection of works in the exhibition displays Gursky’s unique vision of the diverse geographies of the world. Of these photographs, thirty are recent works made after his highly acclaimed retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2001. In their breadth, audacity, colour and startling perspectives, these works give a comprehensive view of Gursky’s work extending from 1984 until today.
Curator: Thomas Weski


...and Dreams are Dreams
30 MAY 2007 - 26 AUGUST 2007

İstanbul Modern celebrates its 6th Video Program, presenting some of the most significant artists working in this vital contemporary medium. For centuries, canvas has been the classical support for painting, and painting, the classical means of framing the world. In the contemporary era, photography, film and video have become the most common devices to capture images and to project both experimental and mass messages.

Class on June 26: Krzysztof Wodiczko and Ann Hamilton

http://intermediaclass.blogspot.com/2006/10/class-on-sept-26-krzysztof-wodiczko.html

Art-Ist Event: Transit Istanbul Improvization Days

http://www.transit-istanbul.org/

Wednesday 27th - Video-dance screening - Tünel Art, Galata tower - 21:00

[Galata Kulesi çıkmazı, No.9]

free of charge

Friday 29th - Performances - Darphane-I Amire - 20:30

“Sound and light” duet Pascal Battus and Christophe Cardoën
“Globally yours” improvised dance, music and video
entrance fee 12 ytl - students / Cati members 8 ytl
free for workshop attendants

Saturday 30th - In Darphane-I Amire - starting at 13:00
open jam
“sound massage salon” with Pascal Battus and Olivier Germain Noureux
short forms - improvised music and dance
projections
performances:
19:30 Islack Köpek and guests
21:30 “Globally yours” improvised dance, music and video
free of charge

Sunday 1st - Gelisi Guzel Day in Darphane-i Amire - 13:00 to 19:00

Open jam for musicians and dancers
free of charge

Tuesday 3rd - performance - Darphane-i Amire - 20:30
“Mention Obligatoire” duet Julyen Hamilton & Barre phillips
entrance fee 12 ytl - students / Cati members 8 ytl
free for workshop attendants

Wednesday 4th - Video-dance screening Tünel Art, Galata tower 21:00
entrance fee 8 ytl - students / Cati members 5 ytl
free of charge

Friday 6th - Picnic panel - Darphane-i Amire - 19 :00

The occasion to talk with Barre Phillips and Julyen Hamilton about their work around a shared picnic. Bring food and drinks, specialities from all countries welcome.
Free of charge

Saturday 7th - End of workshop performance - Darphane-i Amire - 20:00
Closing party
Free of charge

FA 494.01 Summer Term!!!

Intermedia Class proudly announces that Jeffrey Baykal Rollins is giving lectures on intermedia art at Boğaziçi University in the summer term.

schedule as follows:

FA494.01 : SP.TOP.:INTERMEDIA ( 3 Credits )Instructor : JEFFREY BAYKAL ROLLINS
Tuesday 13:00 - 13:50 14:00 - 14:50
Wednesday 13:00 - 13:50 14:00 - 14:50
Thursday 13:00 - 13:50 14:00 - 14:50

If you have not yet attended his classes, it is strongly adviced!!

Some Pictures From Babel

ayca kubat presents:

Jeffrey-Şems-Güneş

Ayça "babel is on"

Özge "içine kapanık"

Post-Babel

Dear Babyloneans,

For the first time we -as the intermedia community- made an event out of the South Campus, thanks to everyone who participated as artists, supporters, visiters and translators. The major criticism was the lack of rehearsals, which I cannot deny. However, many people, including our program director, said the whole night was great.

As soon as we get rid of our exhaustion, we will start planning the next happening, which will be THE INTERMEDIA BIENNIAL. Where would you prefer it to be? Guggenheim?

Babel!

2nd meeting for Babel: 01.03.2007
Time & Place: TBA

PERFORMANCE TIME 07 @ GalataPerform

For information, please visit the web page!!!

An Intermediatic Body Art'ist: Youri Messen-Jaschin

"Body art is art made on, with, or consisting of, the human body. The most common forms of body art are tattoos and body piercings, but other types include scarification, branding, scalpelling, shaping (for example tight-lacing of corsets), full body tattoo and body painting.

More extreme body art can involve things such as mutilation or pushing the body to its physical limits. For example, one of Marina Abramovic's works involved dancing until she collapsed from exhaustion, while one of Dennis Oppenheim's better-known works saw him lying in the sunlight with a book on his chest, until his skin, excluding that covered by the book, was badly sunburned. It can even consist of the arrangement and dissection of preserved bodies in an artistic fashion, as in the case of the plastinated bodies used in the travelling Body Worlds exhibit. Important strategies that question the human body are: implants, body in symbiosis with the new technologies, virtual body etc. A special case of the body art strategies is the absence of body. The most important artists that performed the "absence" of body through their artwoks were: Keith Arnatt, Andy Warhol, Anthony Gormley and Davor Džalto."

Blogs he posts his work pretty often:
http://bodyartdefinition.blogspot.com/
http://yourimessenjaschinbodyart.blogspot.com/
http://bodyartpaintingvideosyouri.blogspot.com/

Destricted

!f Istanbul seems to be great this year. This film ,Destricted,
described as

The films highlight controversial issues about the representation of sexuality in art; opening up the question of whether art can be disguised as pornography, pornography disguised as art, or something else altogether. The result is a collection of sexy, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange and sometimes humourous scenarios that leave it up to the viewer/voyeur to decide.

And the other part that is worth-telling is that the people behind this film are the artists we write about on this blog.

Marina-or-Maria Abramovic, a performance artist from Balkans and Matthew Barney.
The director is Gaspar Noe, the director of Irreversible.


All other informations are here.

http://www.ifistanbul.com/Filmler_Detay.aspx?Kategori=7&Film=33#

!F Istanbul Film Fest 2007.

Next: A Primer On Urban Painting

here is the link for the film that will be shown at !f Istanbul Film Fest,
It is about street art a.k.a urban painting...


http://www.ifistanbul.com/english/Filmler_Detay.aspx?Kategori=4&Film=17

Meeting for Babel

It is time to start "babbling" about "Babel". There will be a meeting
this Wednesday, February 7, from 17:30 to 19:00 at GalataPerfrom to
begin our collaboration, and you are strongly encouraged to attend.
GalataPerform is located at:

Büyük Hendek Caddesi No:37/1 Galata Kuledibi, Beyoðlu
Tel: 0090 212 2439991, 0090 535 880 3339
info@galataperform.com

Because it can be hard to find the first time, we will meet directly
in front of the Galata Tower at 17:25 and then walk to GalataPerform.

See you then,

Jeffrey

An Intermediatic Game: Kısa Met-Yaz

How many people can tell a story? Or, rather how many stories can be told through a certain number of narratives?
Nothing much serious, we will play a game trying to tell a cite-specific short story.

Plan of the Game:
Some people -who look like a large group of friends- get on the metro at Taksim Station. They sit in separate places, surprisingly, and immediately take off a piece of paper and start writing. They write untill they reach The 4th Levent, which takes less than 15 minutes.
They write separate short stories that take place in the metro, or that are closely related to it.
Afterwards everyone will have a copy of each story and merge them all in a final one.
That is to say, in the very end we will have as many stories as the number participants. The other day we will read them all in the metro.
Just a game; nothing more, nothing less. Would you like to be participant authors? Contact me at ozgeuraz@hotmail.com

Vincent Price

It's been a long time since I wanted to share this video with you.
Vincent Price is one of my favorites.



Vincent Tim Burton - Court métrage

William Kentridge - an Intermediatic Artist from the Venice Biennial

"I have never tried to make illustrations of apartheid, but the drawings and films are certainly spawned by and feed off the brutalized society left in its wake. I am interested in a political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures, and certain endings; an art (and a politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay." William Kentridge


William Kentridge was one of the artists whose pieces of art could be seen in İstanbul Modern "Venice-Istanbul" exhibition. His distictive animations reveal both a sense of humour and bitterness through a simple technique of successive charcoal drawings, always on the same sheet of paper, contrary to the traditional animation technique in which each movement is drawn on a separate sheet.
William Kentridge is undoubtedly the best known South African artist, currently in demand by major institutions all over the world. Working with what is in essence a very restricted technique - charcoal drawings with limited touches of pastel colour - Kentridge has deployed these drawings into an oeuvre of astounding depth. The drawings have been used as the basis for a series of animated films by the very simple technique of drawing, filming a few frames, erasing, then drawing some more and so on.


He works in theater and has so for many years, initially as set designer and actor, and more recently, director. Since 1992 he has collaborated with Handspring Puppet Company creating multi-media pieces using puppets, live actors and animation. Throughout his career he has moved between film, drawing and stage yet his primary focus remains drawing, seeing his theatre and film work as an expanded form of his drawing.
His work conceptually reflects Kentridge's Johannesburg experience, not only by colonial engravings, hospital paraphernalia, botanical drawings, maps and anatomical dissections, but also through his unique technique of charcoal drawing in which the previous drawings (which are on the same sheet) can be traced by his medium of video.

sources:
- ArtThrob: A feature on an artist in the public eye, William Kentridge
- Greg Kucera Gallery - William Kentrigde
- Wikipedia - William Kentridge

more:
- William Kentridge: Quite the Opposite of Cartoons, by Philippe Moins

An intermediatic poem.

It just reminded me of the project of Meral. Not the one she did. The one she had thought of doing at the beginning of the semester. A poem with a tree. just click the phrases when they appear.


http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/silhouette/project.html



btw, have a nice holiday <3

ART-IST EVENT: HAZAVUZU @ GALERIST

BABEL @ GalataPerform, March 7, 2007

Curated by Jeffrey Baykal Rollins, “Babel” is an evening of student performance works exploring issues of art and language, with an emphasis on the spoken-word. Over the course of the event individual works will evolve into a collaboration amongst all the participants, bridging differences in culture, language, media and a variety of art disciplines.

Performance art is art in which the actions of an individual or a group at a particular place and in a particular time constitute the work. It can happen anywhere, at any time, or for any length of time. Performance art can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body and a relationship between performer and audience. It is opposed to painting or sculpture, for example, where an object constitutes the work. Of course the lines are often blurred.

Although performance art could be said to include relatively mainstream activities such as theater, dance, music, and circus-related things like fire breathing, juggling, and gymnastics, these are normally instead known as the performing arts. Performance art is a term usually reserved to refer to a kind of usually avant-garde or conceptual art which grew out of the visual arts.

Spoken word is a form of literary art or artistic performance in which lyrics, poetry, or stories are spoken rather than sung. Spoken-word is often done with a musical background, but emphasis is kept on the speaker.

One of the most common sorts of spoken word performances is performance poetry, where a poet either reads previously-published poems, or reads poems specifically written to be performed aloud. Another kind that has gained popularity in recent years is political and social commentary, done in such a way that it is, while still prose, somewhat more artistic than a typical speech. Spoken word artists are often poets and musicians. Spoken word gained notoriety in the late 1980s and early 1990s through the emergence of "poetry slams," where spoken word artists would square off in cabaret-style duels.



Babel (Hebrew: בָּבֶל; Bavel) is the name used in the Hebrew Bible for the city of Babylon (Akkadian Babilu), notable in Genesis as the supposed location of the Tower of Babel.
In Gen. 11:9, the name of Babel is etymologized by association with the Hebrew verb balal, "to confuse or confound": Balal is regarded as a contraction of earlier *balbal. The name bab-ilu in Akkadian means "gate of god" (from bab "gate" + ilu "god"). The word "bab-el" can also be seen to mean "gate of god" (from bab "gate" + el "god").

According to Genesis 11:1-9, mankind, after the deluge, traveled from the mountain where the ark had rested, and settled in 'a plain in the land of Shinar' (or Senaar). Here, they attempted to build a city and a tower whose top might reach unto Heaven, the Tower of Babel.
The attempt to build the Tower of Babel had angered God who, in his anger, made each person involved speak a different language which ultimately halted the project and scattered and disconnected the people across the planet.

Guidelines for Work
For this event, student works are invited that explore issues of language and visual culture. This can include, but is not limited to foreign language, multi-language, text-based, poetry, spoken-word, translation, and the ways language unites or disconnects humanity. Intermedia works are encouraged but not required, and can include virtually any art form.

While developing your works, you are encouraged to consider the site where the event will take place: not only is GalataPerform next to the Galata Tower, it is also in the heart of what is probably the most multi-ethnic part of the city.

www.galataperform.com

Proposals must be given or e-mailed to Jeffrey by January 30, 2007 for full consideration at: baykalrollins@gmail.com

A GREAT FEST...

http://www.dogaclamafestivali.info/dogaclama/festival.html


it sounds great to be there. but unfortunately I won't be here @ Istanbul.
but for those who will be here.

A Radical Performance Artist: Orlan

Do our self- representations conform to an inner reality or are they actually carefully contrived falsehoods fabricated for marketing purposes--in the media or in society at large?

Orlan is the French intermediatic performance artist, the creator of "Carnal Art", and a first person who used plastic surgery as a medium of artistic expression.

Born in 1947 in Saint-Etienne, France as Linda Moreno. In 1980 she moved toParis. After experimenting with a variety of media, painting, writing poetry, dance, theatre and photography, in 1964 she started her first street action-performances called "Slow-motion Walks" during which she took the town’s rush-hour routes in an extremely slow pace. In 1971, she performed "I am a Man, I am a Woman"

Orlan's main medium of art is her own body. In the '70s she did performance pieces in Lyons and, later,outside the Guggenheim Museum in New York. These consisted of abstract measuring actions relating her body to a medieval convent and to a modern art museum. Her subsequent work then came to relate religious iconography to structures of the art world. She challenged both religious traditions and art- world assumptions, the former through blasphemous imagery, the latter with real time/real place actions identifying art with life. High contrast color photographs of Saint Orlan, both living doll and living sculpture, were integrated into photo- collages, videos and films tracing a fictive hagiography.

Convinced that with its exaggerated emotionalism Bernini's St. Teresa in Ecstasy was the first postmodernist sculpture, Orlan found relationships between the forced pathos of Counter- Reformation esthetics and the historical references of contemporary artistic practice. The prototype image of Saint Orlan was a marble sculpture she carved and then, in the tradition of academic sculpture since the Renaissance, sent to be enlarged or "pointed up" to full scale. Her incarnation as Saint Orlan focused on the hypocrisy of the way society has traditionally split the female image into madonna and whore. She played off this long- entrenched dichotomy by exposing only one breast (as the nursing Virgin Mary is depicted), to differentiate Saint Orlan from a topless pinup. (The single exposed breast also referred to the Amazons of ancient mythology, represented as having only one breast to be free to sling warriors' quivers over exposed chests.)

Like many artists of her generation both in France and in the U.S., Orlan was influenced by Duchamp. Her response was an extreme one: to consider her own body a "readymade." For more than a decade she has organized performances during which she undergoes plastic surgeries changing her face. Some of them are transmitted live to many places around the world. During the performance the artist talks to the audience, answers the questions, music is played and poetry read.

In 1990, Orlan shed her saintly robes and decided to be "reincarnated" by altering her face and body through a series of carefully planned and documented operations. The idea of turning surgical interventions into performance art occurred to her when she was operated on for an extra- uterine pregnancy under a local anesthetic which permitted her to play the role of detached observer as well as patient.

"I can observe my own body cut open, without suf

fering!... I see myself all the way down to my entrails; a new mirror stage. "I can see to the heart of my lover; his splendid design has nothing to do with sickly sentimentalities"- Darling, I love your spleen; I love your liver; I adore your pancreas, and the line of your femur excites me." (Orlan from Carnal Art Manifesto)

In the course The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, the artist started to resemble some of the most well known paintings and sculptures including Mona Lisa. With self- transformation in mind, and proceeding with a cold, Cartesian logic buttressed by her considerable knowledge of esthetics and art history, Orlan began to deconstruct mythological images of women. Recalling that the ancient Greek artist Zeuxis made a practice of choosing the best parts from different models and combining them to produce the ideal woman, Orlan selected features -fetishized body parts- from famous Renaissance and post- Renaissance representations of idealized feminine beauty.

Orlan acknowledges a specific debt to Herman

Nitsch and the Viennese "Aktionismus" group that developed in the '60s--artists who startled spectators with their ritualistic staged imitations of blood sacrifices. Of all the Viennese artists, she is perhaps closest to Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who had himself photographed (supposedly) slicing off pieces of his penis as if it were so much salami.

However, there is a crucial difference between the Viennese actions and Orlan's peformances: with them as with many examples of Body art, there was an element of theatrical fakery. The barnyard and the abattoir, not the operating room, provided blood for the Viennese performance artists. "Documentary" photographs were frequently staged: Schwarzkogler did not bleed to death any more than Schwarzenegger's on-screen blood is real. (Nor did Yves Klein jump out a window.)

She aims to exorcise society's program to deprive women of aggressive instincts of any kind. During the process of planning, enacting and documenting the surgical steps of her transformation, Orlan remains in control of her own destiny. Orlan the artist and the woman will never play the victim: she is both subject and object, actress and director, passive patient and active organizer.

The new image after the plastic surgery is to be seen. However, Orlan radically changes this and shows what is to be hidden. The blood, tissues... all the materiality of human body. This way she refutes the devinely, perfect image attributed to women.

For more information on Orlan:

Orlan: Is this art? by Barbara Rose
Orlan's web site