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 

Displacement of the Self

Displacement of the Self, 2018 

Concrete, wood, acrylic

72x240x28cm

http://haus-n.gr

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  

http://tasarimbienali.iksv.org/en/theme 

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

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

http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/art/exhibitions/3439  

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

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