Sunday, December 23, 2018

Saturday, December 8, 2018

Salvador


Pierre Verger, Salvador, Brazil 1946-50

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective


Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

Growing awareness and concern about the pervasive and advancing scope of global environmental crises have in recent years prompted a new area of interdisciplinary research: the environmental humanities. Efforts have coalesced around the fields of anthropology, philosophy, history, literature, and now art history, as scholars seek to enlarge upon the traditional anthropocentrism of the humanities and embrace
a more expansive consideration of nature, ecology, and changing understandings of them. “Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective” engages this vital new trajectory, bringing together seventeen speakers from a variety of perspectives to explore environmental dimensions of artistic expression across a range of periods and cultures. The symposium is convened in connection with the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, which reinterprets American art over three centuries in relation to environmental history and evolving ecological perception. “Picture Ecology” extends the exhibition’s focus and approach to the visual cultures of diverse times and places, offering compelling ecocritical analysis of a broad spectrum of artists and objects. 
Organized by exhibition co-curator Karl Kusserow.




Sunday, December 2, 2018

Hyperion Has Stumbled


Hyperion Has Stumbled (detail), 2018 

When you daydream while walking—and, with your eyes set on the sky, you find that evidently you are not Hyperion, celebrated by Hölderlin in his writings, who lingers above earth—it is easy to stumble. Yet the daydreamer’s clash with reality is from another perspective a creative or even an insightful encounter, and one of the ideal media that causes people to fall over obstacles is sculpture. In this lecture, I will argue for a conceptual shift from the celebrated dexterity of the hand to the despised clumsiness of the leg. I will share samples of my work that stick to and never leave the ground. These works confirm the close dependency of sculpture on an onerous and yet surprisingly generative reality.

Location: Scheide Caldwell House
Title: 
Hyperion Has Stumbled
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (
Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow)
Respondent: 
Mitra Abbaspour, (Princeton University Art Museum)
Time: 1:30 p.m.
December 7 at Princeton University

Measuring the Distance to the Goal

Measuring the Distance to the Goal, 2018 
Wood, concrete, acrylic 
123 x 26 x 16 cm 

The Fox


Katerina Iliopoulou, The Fox 

Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Designs of Destruction


Designs of Destruction


Between 1943 and 1945, the Allied Air Forces produced aerial photographs of 79 Italian cities, annotated them with the location of monuments, and appended them with elaborate instructions for aerial bombers on “how to miss cultural sites.” Similar lists and maps of monuments were produced by the Allies for almost every country in Europe, expanded or shrunk to fit various phases and types of fighting. The longest German list was 150 pages; one map of 23 monuments for the whole of France was once made.
 What kind of media were these? To what use were they put; how did they partake in the technologies of precision on which Allied aerial strategy hinged, and how did they help inaugurate a new global regime of cultural preservation?
Lucia Allais draws from her book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the 20th Century (Chicago: 2018). The book chronicles the triumph of the cultural monument as a modern and global building type between the 1930s and 1970s.

Tue, 11/27 · 5:00 pm7:00 pm · N107 School of Architecture 

M+M Program in Media and Modernity

Monday, November 26, 2018

Reading Matters' Conference

Reading Matters' Conference 

      
      Schedule of Events. The three-day conference is organized around a series of presentations prepared by teams of speakers. The first, kick-off event will commence on the evening of November 29, 2018, with a film screening and discussion, followed by two days of panel presentations.


Introduction + Panel I : 

Reading as Terrestrial Operations

Jane Bennett • bio
Raviv Ganchrow •  bio

[ + more info ]

https://readingmatters.princeton.edu/schedule-of-events   

Saturday, November 24, 2018

From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop

From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop  
Growing up in 1990s Harlem, I couldn’t have escaped hip-hop if I’d wanted to. The streets bumped with it: the boombox action on the corner and in the park, the speakers screaming from apartment windows, the cars reverberating with bass. On the way home from school every weekday, a nerdy Dominican boy listened to the beats and was mesmerized. None of that loud music in our house, my mother would always say but I itched to bump the beats at home on our radio. Sometimes, if Mom had stepped out to the store and I was feeling brave, I’d tune in to Hot97 and live a few minutes of glory.
It wasn’t only the sonic architecture of the bass that snared me. The allure was in the verses themselves with their mighty torrent of words: sharp and cutting, smooth and coy, boisterous and threatening. And the prolifically inventive rhyme schemes! When, at the innocent age of twelve, I first heard the Notorious B.I.G. rap “Escargot, my car go / one sixty, swiftly” I had no clue what escargot was and had to look the word up but even before receiving enlightenment from the dictionary I knew the verse was a gem. As much as the books I devoured at the local library, the rap game expanded my cultural horizons.
Text by Dan-el Padilla Peralta 

Definition of Adrift


                  Leigh Stein, Definition of Adrift 

Talisman-images Gather the Cosmos and Press it to Your Body

Talisman-images Gather the Cosmos and Press it to Your Body

Practiced in medieval Islamic and European cultures, talismans were like apps that appealed to the planets and other powers to intercede into precise earthly problems. In this lecture, Dr. Laura Marks will argue that in our seemingly disenchanted times, it is still possible to re-fold the universe, grasping the points of disparate histories and places and drawing them together. We see this at work in movies, digital media works, and objects. Dr. Marks will focus on the affective results using such media to connect from the body to the cosmos.

Sunday, November 11, 2018

A Sculpture is What you Bump Into by Accident and You’re Okay





One does not have to look up to the sky as a jay-walker in order to stumble. Sometimes, all it takes is to be in a gallery, enjoying the artwork, until you bump into a sculpture. This was at least the view of one of the most important thinkers and painters of American abstract art, Barnett Newman, who had said that “sculpture is what you bump into [i.e. by accident] when you back up to see a painting.” And yet our contact with sculpture’s blatant materiality--accidental as it may be--also prepare us to accept the aggravating conditions of a life in a constant struggle with its own imperfections and defects. 

Location: Hamilton 616
Title: A Sculpture is What you Bump Into by Accident and You’re Okay 
Speaker: Kostis Velonis (Princeton University)
Respondent: Rebekah Rutkoff (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
Time: 6:00-7:15pm


November 14 at Columbia University

Monday, November 5, 2018

thrown off a cliff






thrown off a cliff, 2018 
Marble, wood, acrylic 
19 x 33 x 19 cm

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

I Hate Irony


 I Ηate Irony

I was walking along one day when I realized that I hate irony
I think I was thinking of the movie The Shining and how scary it is
When I was 21, I didn’t sleep for two nights straight because of that movie
It reminded me a lot of growing up and the things I’ve seen
Fear is not irony
If you have ever been truly scared there is no irony in your voice when you scream
And too
Love is not either
I was in love once and all I could think of was joy
Not drinking, nor sex, or spaghetti
Not witty things to say or martinis
That bubble down the stairs with gracious olives
I didn’t think of my large grey turtleneck folding over my abdomen
As I was touched so quietly by the stars
I hate when people think they are being funny by being ironic
Or they want to show you they are clever
So they say something really meaty
With twists and curves
I don’t think it is funny to be so elitist
To everyone who hasn’t had the chance to be as special as you are
Being cultivated into fine things when you yourself was nothing to begin with
Humor is not irony as I belly laugh all along the bench
Of the waiting room while they announce my father will die
Or when my friend was killed by her husband while he wore all black
To be torched is not ironic, but it hurts
It hurt her flesh.  It hurts me to think about it.
And not precious I am to think about it, to give it time
O but Dottie, you say, you are so funny
Surely you realize you are always being ironic
But I am not, I will tell you
I am only being real

Dorothea Lasky 

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Displacement of the Self


Displacement of the Self, 2018 
Concrete, wood, acrylic
72x240x28cm

ARE WE HUMAN? THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years


ARE WE HUMAN?
THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES
2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years
The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial explores the intimate relationship between the concepts of “design” and “human.” Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human. The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species. Humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding. We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.
Design is the most human thing about us. Design is what makes the human. It is the basis of social life, from the very first artefacts to the exponential expansion of human capability. But design also engineers inequalities and new forms of neglect. More people than ever in history are forcibly displaced by war, lawlessness, poverty, and climate at the same time that the human genome and the weather are being actively redesigned. We can no longer reassure ourselves with the idea of “good design.” Design needs to be redesigned.
ARE WE HUMAN? : The Design of the Species : 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years invites a wide arrange of designers and thinkers from around the world to respond to a compact set of eight interlinked propositions:
DESIGN IS ALWAYS DESIGN OF THE HUMAN
THE HUMAN IS THE DESIGNING ANIMAL
OUR SPECIES IS COMPLETELY SUSPENDED IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF DESIGN
DESIGN RADICALLY EXPANDS HUMAN CAPABILITY
DESIGN ROUTINELY CONSTRUCTS RADICAL INEQUALITIES
DESIGN IS EVEN THE DESIGN OF NEGLECT
“GOOD DESIGN” IS AN ANESTHETIC
DESIGN WITHOUT ANESTHETIC ASKS URGENT QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR HUMANITY
These propositions will be explored over the coming year in events, classes, workshops, and online discussions – including open calls for responses to the propositions by short videos. This year of exploration around the world will culminate in a dense program of exhibitions, debates, broadcasts and publications during the six weeks of the Biennial in Istanbul that opens in October 2016.
This Biennial is an archaeological project. It is not about celebrating particular designers or about visualizing remarkable futures. It will be a multi-media documentary about the state of design today, when everyday reality has outpaced science fiction. It will place the extreme condition of contemporary design into the context of the extended 200,000 year history of our species – from the first standardized ornaments and the footprints of the first shoes to the latest digital and carbon footprints. A Biennial normally focuses on the last 2 years. The time frame for this exhibition will span from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years. Ancient archaeological artefacts from Turkey and the region will be presented at the heart of the Biennial to reframe the latest real-time thinking about design.

Text by the curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial  

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Belle Isle, 1949


We stripped in the first warm spring night
and ran down into the Detroit River
to baptize ourselves in the brine
of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles,
melted snow. I remember going under
hand in hand with a Polish highschool girl
I'd never seen before, and the cries
our breath made caught at the same time
on the cold, and rising through the layers
of darkness into the final moonless atmosphere
that was this world, the girl breaking
the surface after me and swimming out
on the starless waters towards the lights
of Jefferson Ave. and the stacks
of the old stove factory unwinking.
Turning at last to see no island at all
but a perfect calm dark as far
as there was sight, and then a light
and another riding low out ahead
to bring us home, ore boats maybe, or smokers
walking alone. Back panting

to the gray corse beach we didn't dare
fall on, the damp piles of clothes,
and dressing side by side in silence
to go back where we came from. 
Philip Levine

Saturday, October 13, 2018

Picturing Protest



Gordon Parks, Untitled, Washington, D.C., 1963 

The civil rights movement and the movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam came to the fore in the 1960s, spurring protests across America both spectacular and everyday. As protests gave material form to First Amendment freedoms—religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition—photographers transformed the visibility of collective action, much of it led by students. Fifty years after the watershed events of 1968, Picturing Protest examines the visual framing of political demonstrations around the country and on Princeton’s campus. These images archive protests’ choreography, whether procession, sit-in, or violent clash. They also capture the gestures of protest, with hands signaling anguish, self-defense, and solidarity. At a time when the coverage and circulation of news media was rapidly expanding, many of these photographs became icons of social struggle, fundamentally changing the ways people visualized America; five decades later, they continue to do this work. Drawn from Princeton University collections, the images on view compel us to contemplate the capacity of protest, and of art, to imagine, interpret, and cultivate change.


Princeton University Art Museum 
May 26 -October 14, 2018

Friday, October 12, 2018

Athens in a Tank



ΤΟ SPACE52 παρουσιάζει σε επιμέλεια του εικαστικού Γιώργου Τσεριώνη την έκθεση “Athensinatank”. Έλληνες και ξένοι καλλιτέχνες, που εντάσσουν στην πρακτική της δουλείας τους την κεραμική τέχνη και παρουσιάζουν έργα από πηλό ,ως μια καταγραφή της σύγχρονης Ελληνικής πραγματικότητας. Η ενασχόληση των καλλιτεχνών με τον πηλό παρουσιάζει το διάλογο τους σχετικά με τις ανεξάντλητες δυνατότητες του μέσου και σηματοδοτεί την αυξανομένη δυναμική της κεραμικής τέχνης από καλλιτέχνες, για πρώτη φορά.

Κωστής Βελώνης, Αύγουστος Βεϊνόγλου, Νανά Σαχίνη, Διονύσης Χριστοφιλογιάννης, 
Hope, Βασίλης Ζωγράφος, Σοφία Παρλαμά, Νίκος Παπαδημητρίου, Μάρω Μιχαλακάκου, Ανδρέας Βούσουρας, Δέσποινα Χαριτωνίδη, Πάνος Προφήτης, Βανέσσα Αναστασοπούλου, Βασίλης Παπαγεωργίου, Φωτεινή Πολυδώρου, Νικολέττα Κατσαμπέρη, Bella Easton, Σωκράτης Σωκράτους.

Athens in a tank 
 SPACE52
Επιμέλεια :Γιώργος Τσεριώνης
12.10 .2018/3.11.2018

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Bright File (June)





Cracking, 2018
Ceramic, concrete, wood, clay, steel, marble, plaster, plastic 
30 X 22 cm 

'Le Rayon X' and 'Six Heures avant l'été' (1980) by legendary Greek artist Christos Tzivelos (1949-1995) were the starting point for this show that centres on light but isn't about light. Felt as an effigy for June – not the proverbial month but those 30 days in 2018 – the show brings together works by Elena Narbutaitė, Rallou Panagiotou, Yorgos Prinos, Iris Touliatou, Christos Tzivelos and Kostis Velonis to make pronouncements on a raw, fertile state, which hasn't been assigned a name. In a sense, the show is about looking for wild love (Amour Fou), the alchemical Rebus (the androgynous being that fuelled Jung's individuation fantasies) or some other feeling of wholeness. It is also about processes that suspend this longing – stretch it out, preserve it, cast it, antagonise it, take its place even, until it is exhausted. Works are plugged in, hung, projected. Slowly they accumulate heat from the sun or from within the wall. Alchemically, we could say they begin as stars (those made of herbs) and planets (iron, copper, silver, gold) which young are black, orbiting in the dark. As they slowly grow and grow warmer, they turn yellow, then white, then finally become fully transmuted into a red, at which point they fluoresce. 

Big thanks to Bia Papadopoulou and Christophoros Marinos for sharing their extensive research on the work of Christos Tzivelos and to Giannis Tzivelos for generously lending us the works of his uncle.

The show has a lifetime of several hundred hours.
When heated, it glows with visible light.

Elena Narbutaite, Rallou Panagiotou, Yorgos Prinos, Iris Touliatou, Christos Tzivelos, Kostis Velonis

Curated by Maya Tounta

5 October until 27 October 2018
Haus N Athen

56-year span



Escape is round the corner, 2018 
Steel rusty rod, 48 x 106 

‘56-year span’ is a curated display of works from 1962 through to the present; an interconnected journey incorporating seventeen art pieces exploring experience, effect and event, invoking im- mediacy and immutability. 
Among the works exhibited are two abstract compositions in bronze from the 1960’s and 1970’s, by the sacred monster of Greek modernism; Klearchos Loukopoulos, followed by two early threadworks from Savvas Christodoulides (Couple, 1997 exhibited at the XLVII Venice Biennale), where the artist practices the various gestures involved with the act of sewing. Three works by Vasso Gavaisse, the two from the 2010 Water Leaf series. Three works from Alexandros Tzannis, one of his large scale works in ink and ballpoint pen on paper from 2015 and two parasites from his current series; borrowing elements from the iconography of science ction. Three works by Ilias Papailiakis, results of the artists ongoing journey with the impact of political historical events as well as his research into the history of world painting. Four new works from Kostis Velonis,  two canvases and a wall sculpture titled Escape is Round the Corner, executed from a discarded rod into a three-dimensional line. 
Six artists of different generations creating works originating from dissimilar ideologies and medi- ums, like/referring to, the multicultural societies where we live today. The works enter into a dia- logue with one another without sacrificing their particular identities, resembling the mixed ethnic communities where multiple cultural traditions co-exist. 

9/19 /2018- 29/ 09 /2018 “56-year span”, Marinos Vrachimis Art Proposals, Nicosia, Cyprus

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Sans titre


Solitaire a mon ilot
matelot sans mat
ceux yeux demi-clos
 je transforme ma 

force en mille flots:
one magique ma-
thematique me pilo
-te et j'aime a 

la folie cet ilot
immobile! l'exil aux
 doux gout  amer ...

Rever donc aux seuil
d'une tierce ame 
-risque est mon conseil

Kolja Micevic

Monday, September 3, 2018

The Value of Freedom






Kostis Velonis, At the End of  Demonstration Day, 2009  
Wood, acrylic
Dimensions variable 

The concept of freedom is constantly changing. This exhibition charts its psychological, cultural, religious, political and legal evolution against the backdrop of historical developments, to arrive at a contemporary understanding of what freedom means. Works by more than fifty artists shed light on this complex issue from various angles. 
With its overlapping themes and cross-references, the exhibition weaves a tapestry of interdependencies and reciprocal influences between the individual and society, democracy and the economy, work and leisure, body and mind, nature and culture. Freedom is always relative to other factors and so has to be constantly renegotiated. For instance, one part of the exhibition looks at different forms of state governance that shape the community, while another area addresses the control of information as a crucial instrument of power. Some of the works highlight the fragility of freedom, while others explore identity-defining processes such as work. The public space is also the subject of some of the works. All in all, what emerges clearly is that the autonomy of the individual invariably goes hand in hand with social responsibility. 


With works by Zbynĕk Baladrán, Dara Birnbaum, Jordi Colomer, Carola Dertnig, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Harun Farocki, Karin Ferrari, Forensic Oceanography, John Gerrard, Johannes Gierlinger, Lola Gonzàlez, Johan Grimonprez, Igor Grubić, Eva Grubinger, Marlene Haring, Hiwa K, Leon Kahane, Šejla Kamerić, Alexander Kluge, Nina Könnemann, Laibach, Lars Laumann, Luiza Margan, Teresa Margolles, Isabella Celeste Maund, Anna Meyer, Aernout Mik, Matthias Noggler, Josip Novosel, Julian Oliver, Trevor Paglen, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Ivan Pardo, Oliver Ressler, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ashley Hans Scheirl, Christoph Schlingensief, Andreas Siekmann, Eva Stefani, Superflex, Pilvi Takala, Philipp Timischl, Milica Tomić, Betty Tompkins, Amalia Ulman, Kostis Velonis, Kara Walker, Stephen Willats, Anna Witt, Hannes Zebedin, Zentrum für politische Schönheit, Tobias Zielony and Artur Żmijeweski. 
Curated by Severin Dünser. 

THE VALUE OF FREEDOM 
19 September 2018 to 10 February 2019 

Belvedere 21
Arsenalstrasse 1 1030 Vienna