something is here nothing is here (horror)

Annika Eriksson’s Something is here nothing is here (horror), 2015. The work is a lightbox placed in a pedestrian tunnel in the city center of Novosibirsk, Russia. The light of the sign is slowly fading in and out. The work was realised in the framework of the nomadic Site Residency (with its homebase on the island of Gotland, once the Baltic pirates's den), obviously rebelling against the anti-production character of the programme. To break the rules imposed by the curatorial is sometimes a good thing. We love the work, Annika, and bear no grudge! 

honorata martin at sculpture park in bródno

Honorata Martin’s art unfolds in real time and on a scale of 1:1. In her works, the logic of the event yields to the need to maintain continuity and to (with)stand. Martin is a radical performer who works with an “unradical” matter: the world around her (people, animals, buildings, streets, river, etc.) as well as with her own emotions and experiences. So far, her art has materialised for instance as a hike across the secluded areas of provincial Poland, and a renewal project in a worn tenement house. Many of Honorata Martin’s activities require the artist to overcome the constraints of her own body and social taboos – her projects have seen her hanging down from the balcony of a residential block, immersing herself in a filthy river of sewage in winter, or allowing strangers to come into her house and take her personal belongings with them. For Martin, art is a natural extension of basic life functions: eating, sleeping, walking, and sometimes mourning or fear. Most of her works escape the frames of exhibition displays or art events. An inherent aspect of her art is the risk of testing your artistic competence (not only manual skills but also the ability to build temporary communities or confront the viewers with their own repressed desires) far away from art institutions and the security and legitimisation that they offer.

The artist’s most renowned project, Going out into Poland, consisted in a solitary roam that the artist began in the summer of 2013 in Gdańsk without any specified plan. After two months Martin reached the town of Dzierżoniów in Lower Silesia on foot. The project highlights the characteristic edge of the artist’s practice, which develops between the artist and a random viewer without institutions and their rituals as a go-between. At the same time, Martin builds temporary enclaves of communication, acceptance, and exchange. Documentation is of secondary importance and functions as a “report” from mundane worlds, a mere shift of the everyday. Akin to the art practices of Paweł Althamer, the initiator of the Bródno Sculpture Park, in Martin’s work fundamental experiences do not necessarily arise from journeys to far-off lands, quite the opposite, they most often emerge from the artist’s immersion in the exoticism of the local environment.

Honorata Martin’s practice reveals a “post-institutional” dimension. Her activities echo the art of the 1970s, founded on going beyond the limits of the body and the passage of time, blurring the boundaries between artistic practice and everyday life, as it was the case in performances by Tehching Hsieh, Lee Lozano, and Bas Jan Ader, among other artists. Still, Martin’s art is immersed in the specific here and now – Poland in the 21st century, an environment that the artist addresses with a heavy load of personal fears and fantasies.The artist camps out in the Bródno Park, making use of the green enclave in the Targówek area as her temporary home. The idea to dwell in an urban park inevitably brings to mind the question of displacement and the necessity to develop new forms of communication in a world that shakes in its political and economic foundations. Honorata Martin’s performance at the Bródno Sculpture Park confronts the problems of survival, exchange and hospitality, as well as escapism. The artist’s activity is founded on a sequence of developments, interactions, events that take place when the audience is not there, occurrences that relate to and involve accidental witnesses.

centrum

Our beloved collaborators, Centrum (The Center) art space has just appropriated a bizzare collection of, apparently extinct, dinosaurs. It includes also some humanoids and a giant squid. The Centre operates from a remote gardening plot in Szczecin, Poland.

annika eriksson in novosibirsk

The Site Residency has been initiated in 2013 on the island of Gotland, Sweden. Now the programme has begun its journey to conceptually linked locations in other countries or continents, chosen for their special features: oddness, remoteness, “exoticism”, seclusion, harshness, or unique architectural values. The Site Residency programme is a tribute to the artistic strategies from the 60s and 70s – an escape from rigid institutional structures and gallery/studio-based production – and all references to land- and conceptual art tactics are obvious and intentional. The program, is oriented towards “the secret world of doing nothing” and its consequences. It is structured to reduce the stimuli and thereby motivate a new artistic approach towards the place/work system – which is always an equation with two unknowns. The character of this residency specifically implies that the artist is to refrain from production – or at least attempt to live his or her artistic practice in a somewhat different way during the residency period.
The Berlin-based Swedish artist Annika Eriksson is the third artist-participant of The Site Residency (after Agnieszka Polska and Susanne Kriemann). Over the years, Eriksson has produced a number of works in which the perception of time, structures of power, and once acclaimed social visions are called into question. Strategically Eriksson plays with duration, repetition and looping revealing how this is subject to unexpected political appropriations and inversions.

we are all in this alone

And this is (probably) the final entry related to the 2015 edition of Venice Biennale. What you can see here is a selection of drawings which belong to the project at the Macedonian pavilion, by Hristina Ivanoska and Yane Calovski. The exhibition entitled We are all in this alone references a number of intricate sources: a fresco painting from the church of St. Gjorgi in Kurbinovo, painted by an unknown author in the 12th century, as well as writings by Simone Weil, Luce Irigaray, and personal notes by Paul Thek dating from the 1970s. 

herman de vries and lazaretto vecchio island

One of the surprises of the 56. Venice Biennale is an annex for the Dutch pavilion, hidden on the deserted and hardly accessible island called Lazaretto Vecchio. The exhibition at the Giardini pavilion and other places in the city and the island is dedicated to the oeuvre of herman de vries, the legendary land art veteran. de vries has scattered a number of stones with short texts over the island, where "this point is possible starting point, a possible standpoint, here is important, there is important, and so is everywhere". Lazaretto Vecchio was first inhibited in 1249, later used as a hospital for quarantined plague patients, and a leprosarium. This tiny place on the lagoon has faced a dark and surreal history, as a place of death rituals, mass graves, quarantine storage rooms, ruins and even dog sanctuary. 

venice 2015 part 2

Some more details from the extremely dense and down-to-earth 56th International Art Exhibition in Venice: Newell Harry, Bruce Nauman, Terry Adkins, Katharina Grosse, and herman de vries, 

venice 2015

Some wonders from the Venice Biennale 2015: Dahn Vo (undoubtedly the most perfectly displayed set of works this year), Adrian Piper, Ellen Gallagher (the artist being interviewed in front of her work), Marlene Dumas, Christodolus Panayiotou (one of the most sophisticated exhibitions at the biennale), and Joan Jonas. 

art wastelands

The text below is an excerpt from Five Institutional Tales of Plants, Fungi and Gardening published in the new book by Elżbieta Jabłońska, summarizing her social gardening project ART WASTELANDS.

the estate

Majątek (The Estate) is in-depth anthology of texts on dramatic events in the 20th c., Central and Eastern Europe - "plundered manor houses of the nobility, art collections which have either been completely lost or dispersed, palaces turned into schools or museums, entire social classes destroyed" - which accompanies a gorgeous exhibition at Królikarnia, National Museum in Warsaw. The book includes a set of texts on art, war, law and economy by such authors as Jan Sowa and Svetalana Boym, and photographic essay by Krzysztof Pijarski.