Art Radar Asia News conducts original research and scans global news sources to bring you selected topical stories about the taste-changing, news-making and the up and coming in Asian contemporary art.
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Today we received an email from one of our readers Luca Quattrocchi, a professor at the University of Siena in Italy asking us to help him locate Rauf Khalilov, a video artist from Azerbaijan who exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 2007.
class="hiddenSpellError" pre="">Rauf Khalilov
Professor Quattrocchi wrote:
I´m professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Siena, Italy, and one of my focus of interest is video art. Last year I curated an exhibition in Siena (“Erranti/Wanderers in contemporary video art”, with works of Pipilotti Rist, Kimsooja, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jordi Colomer, Shirin Neshat, Hans Op de Beeck, etc.), and I’m actually elaborating the next year exhibitions plan.
I was very touched by the work of class=”hiddenSpellError” pre=”of “>Rauf Khalilov, that I saw on the 2007 Venice Biennale in the Azerbaijan Pavilion.
I was wondering if you could help me in reaching him, in order to find a way to collaborate.
We are only too happy to pitch in and help our subscribers so we have put up this post in the hope that a connection can be made. Please contact us at Art Radar or leave a comment below if you can help reach Rauf.
Our curiosity was roused by Luca Quattrocchi’s interest and if yours is too, find below links to two of his works on youtube.
Morning Starts at 0-01 is a haunting flickering video work featuring macabre and disturbing scenes of blood, suicide and worse. If you do not have a strong stomach, skip this one and watch the 6 minute Gravity Life instead. This curious sepia-toned piece backed by NASA soundtracks and music examines the powerful links between the forces of gravity and life.
SpiNN (2003) by Shahzia Sikander, still image of video
Art Radar talks to Pakistani miniaturist and video-maker Shahzia Sikander on the occasion of her debut show in China.
The internationally acclaimed Shahzia Sikander spent 2003-2008 performing an in-depth study of the moving image and the fruits of her analysis are on display at “Authority as Approximation,” her first solo exhibition in China at the Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong.
Curated by Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, the 5 works on display are video art pieces that challenge authority and question existing stereotypes of Pakistani culture.
The exhibition is unique as it stands as her first show comprising only moving images, and continues her practice of critically deconstructing traditional imagery of India and Pakistan.
For this event the venue is transformed into a black-box screening gallery, allowing viewers to appreciate Shahzia Sikander’s treatment of the video medium, which represents a departure from her seminal miniature drawings, and highlights her approach to new media.
The show displays her past video work ‘SpiNN’ (2003), which was shown in the Venice Biennial Arsenale exhibition, and emphasizes her latest film, the video-essay ‘Bending the Barrels’ (2008), which debuted in New York early in 2009. The subject of Sikander’s ‘Bending the Barrels’ is a Pakistani Army military brass band performing in formation, which is examined as a politcal device. On the meaning of this film, cultural critic Aditya Dev Sood explains:
“In her choice of Pakistani Army Bands as a subject for visual capture and representation, Sikander triggers deep resonances from within the tradition of Indo-Islamic miniature painting. The corporeal language, rhythm, space-making and compositional effects that she discovers and creates in film appear rooted in courtly spectacles as well as in their painterly representation, in various Mughal and later Company and British Imperial styles.”
Bending the Barrels (2008), by Shahzia Sikander, still image of video.
It’s all about the drawings
Sikander specializes in drawing, and all of her art is conceived in this way and then evolves into various mediums.
As an artist she wears many hats: she also programs animation and operates the camera when shooting film. She creates animations from scanned drawings using the applications Photoshop and Fireworks.
For her film work, she was permitted to operate the camera at the Pakistani military facility herself. However, regarding what medium she chooses, she remarks “the idea dictates the medium.” Unconcerned with medium, she has no preference whether an image is moving or not, and instead chooses what best facilitates communication. However, despite the medium of a work, it will eventually be reflected in Shahzia’s 2D drawings. She comments “Even during filming, it was all research or fodder for drawing.”
Unprecedented Access
Perhaps most surprising about this exhibit is that Sikander, who lives in New York City and is married to an American, was able to gain access into a Pakistani military facility to film original footage of the army’s brass band. Sikander explains that she was allowed inside and permitted to film because she won a military medal in 2003 as an honored Pakistani artist, and was thus granted entry. However, she added that “I find when a project is approached with intent and clarity, I have always been granted access and goodwill has been reciprocated.” Her American husband was also allowed inside the facility to film with her.
Video art: “It’s always been there”
Sikander’s exploration into the moving image reinforces the rising trend of video art. However, Shahzia sees video art as far more than a trend, saying “It’s always been there at the forefront of contemporary expression.” She suggests video art will only become more pervasive, commenting “It’s easier to send a disc, and its immediacy allows for a larger audience… [With Youtube] Everyone now has the freedom to become a videographer.”
The exhibition runs from Sept 2-Sept 30, 2009, at the Para/Site Art Space in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.
Unlike other art prizes, the Abraaj Capital Art Prize is awarded for art project proposals rather than work already produced.
By recognising the latent potential of ideas and providing funding for the winners, the Abraaj Art Prize which is open to artists from MENASA (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) helps to bring into being works that may otherwise never have been made.
Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Walk on the Sky, installation, 2009
In its inaugural year the winning projects were on show for the first time at the Art Dubai art fair in March 2009.
Zoulika Bouabdellah
The winning piece by Algerian video and installation artist Zoulika Bouabdellah (b.1977) and curator Carol Solomon was a stunning three dimensional space called Walk on Sky, Pisces 2009.
The piece recreates the night sky with a system of light-emitting diodes mounted on an aluminium ceiling to form a constellation of of stars. The viewer is invited to walk on the stainless steel floor which mirrors the pulsing pattern of coloured stars 3 meters above thus creating an experience of walking on the sky.
Multiple sources inform the work including the polygon star (a key geometric configuration in Islamic art), the influential tenth-century treatise, Book of Fixed Stars by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi and the story of the legendary glass floor erected in front of King Solomon’s throne which the Queen of Sheba was led to believe was water. (note 1)
Bouabdellah’s work demands the involvement of the spectator, who must physically enter the installation in order to be able to experience it .
“It is not interesting from afar; you have to walk on it. When you walk on it, it becomes art.” explains Bouabdellah to the Gulf News.
When Art Radar viewed the piece out of doors at Art Dubai, the floor was covered in desert sand footprints and fascinated children played games of flying and sliding across the sky floor. As dusk fell the viewers became shadows and the coloured star patterns above and their reflections below grew more dominant, becoming intricate patterns of colour piercing the gloom.
The work of the 10th century Persian astronomer Abd Al Rahman Al Sufi has provided a key source of inspiration for the piece. “My work is a homage to science, to global intelligence.”
Speaking of the influence of Islamic culture in her work, Bouabdellah points to a period between the 9th and 15th centuries, an era to which she would like to return in terms of the expansiveness and inclusivity of Islamic culture.
”Islamic culture during that period was like bridges between spaces. We cannot talk about Islamic culture without talking about Africa, India, Southern Spain, China.” The era represents for her a time when the yearning for knowledge transcended boundaries and cultural categories, when the Caliph would invite scholars, regardless of religion or ethnicity, to the Maison du Savoir in Baghdad. (note 2)
It seemed to us in the failing light as the echos of playing children reverberated inside the space, that the piece was more than a bridge linking spaces. Children showed us it was also a bridge across generations and a magic carpet of possibility. Just one warning….best to wear trousers if you want to take a walk across the mirrored floor of magic.
The other winners were:
Nazgal Ansarinia
Nazgol Ansarinia, Rhyme and Reason, carpet 2009
Iranian artist Nazgal Ansarinia (b 1979) with curator Leyla Fakhr for her carpet piece Rhyme and Reason 2009 in which she transforms the traditional floral motifs of the Persian carpet into scenes of contemporary life from Iran. The work prompts us to take a closer look at what is being taken for granted.
Nazgol Ansarinia, Rhyme and Reason detail
Kutlug Ataman
Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman (b 1961) with Italian curator Cristiana Perrella for his video Strange Space in which the artist is filmed crossing a sulphorous desert land with bare feet and blinded eyes. The piece is inspired by a classical folk story in which the hero blinded by the love of the heroine is condemned to wander in the desert trying to find her just to burn in flames when they finally meet. Ataman’s work is a metaphor for the relationship of attraction and trauma created when tradition and modernity meet.
Kutlug Ataman, Strange Space, video, 2009
Notes:
1. Abraaj Capital Art Prize 2009 pamphlet distributed at Fort Island, Madinat Jumeirah at Art Dubai 18-21 March 2009
Australian curator and writer Melissa Chiu of the Asia Society New York discusses the newest trends from China in a video called Inside The Contemporary Art Scene.
She identifies several emerging changes:
young Chinese women are emerging as a force for the first time
new technology is being adopted and young artists are excelling at video and other new media
China’s experience as a world centre of manufacturing has influenced the scale and construction of art from China and beyond its borders, particularly evident in the activities is Zhang Huan
influence of artists in their fifties driven abroad by the Cultural Revolution and now returning to work in China
two emerging artists are singled out : Cao Fei for her work on Second Life and Yang Fudong for his videos
Moscow-based Russian artist Olga Chernysheva, a graduate of the Moscow Cinema Academy and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, captures quotidian life in post-communist Russia.
Olga Chernysheva talk and video show at ICA January 13 2009
On 13 January 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts she discusses her practice in the context of Russia today, and shows several of her video works.
In The Train (2003), the director’s camera traverses the cars of an intercity Moscow train; Anonymous (2004) portrays a middle-aged woman and a drunken man each having a private moment in a public park; and March (2005) captures the dynamics between young male cadets, scantily clad teenage cheerleaders and band members performing before a corporate event. The programme also includes her newest video, Untitled After Sengai (2008).
White Space gallery exhibition of Olga Chernysheva photographs to January 17 2009
White Space gallery presents Acquaintance. a new series of photographs by Russian artist Olga Chernysheva. A series of new drawings, a video and a sculptural installation will also be exhibited.
Chernysheva’s work frequently expresses a social interest in relation to how her country is changing. For instance, in her Moscow Area series she might highlight those things frequently relegated to the edges of society and consciousness, such as a group of elderly in a home, an old lady entering a church to pray, or the queues of people entering and exiting the Moscow underground metro system.
Likewise, monuments from the time of Communism are explored in the Alley of Cosmonauts series in terms of their intended meaning as symbols of power and the advancement of the Communist state, versus their current semi-ruinous condition – in what also seems to be either a muddy and disorganized building site – as remnants of a previous civilization, dotted amongst a new society growing around them.
Whilst one can frequently read disillusionment, loss and isolation in Chernysheva’s images, one also sees signs of life and renewal, perseverance and warmth in what they depict. Her films and photographs transcend their documentary function, investigating instead the very fabric of the individuality, stoicism and self-sufficiency of the Russian character, meditating at the same time on the role of the artist in a time of change.
Metal Truck Caravan Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek
CENTRAL ASIAN ART
The strong presence of Central Asian artists at recent art fairs and exhibits in New York is helping to underscore the fact that the region has joined the mainstream of the international art market reports Eurasianet.
A special exhibition titled Given Difference at the Asian contemporary art fair in New York in November featured six artists from Kazakhstan, Georgia and Turkey.
Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan was represented by two rising stars of the Central Asian art world — Erbossyn Meldibekov and Almagul Menlibayeva.
Menlibayeva videos punkshamanism
Almagul Menlibayeva’s works attempt to distill traditional practices, ideas and imagery into a contemporary art form. Often described as punk-shamanism, Menlibayeva’s videos are theatrical and laden with complex references — from tribal symbolism to images of the communist industrial past.
A New Silk Road installation view
One of Menlibayeva’s videos shown at the New York art fair — Headcharge — is a story that casually begins in a restaurant in the city of Almaty and gradually slips into a disturbing ritual performed by the female protagonists. The video shows several urban young women eating a sheep’s head and feeding each other, thereby underscoring the juxtaposition of traditional nomadic beliefs with today’s urban lifestyle. Step by step, the film gives way to a parallel reality, referring to shamanistic travels between worlds.
Born and raised in Kazakhstan, Menlibayeva currently lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam. Art curators say she often depicts the cultural and spiritual traditions of her native country as erotic and strongly feminine dream sequences.
Menlibayeva’s second film, Kissing Totems, is a surrealistic journey inspired by her childhood memory of walking past Soviet factories, seeking the help of a shaman to cure her mother’s severe illness. With what seems to be the clear influence of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s enigmatic style (particularly the bleak interiors of Stalker), the split-screen video follows a girl, accompanied by her mother, entering an abandoned industrial complex filled with birds. The video then takes a surreal turn when she encounters female-like creatures, called peris.
Meldibekov: photographs of leaders and Peak Communism
The other Kazakh artist presented at the Asian art fair, Meldibekov, explores the question of belonging, but through a different prism. His series Family Album (made together with his brother Nurbossyn Oris) are historic photographs of groups of ordinary people — families or friends — posing in front of a public sculpture of their country’s leaders. Each old picture shot during the Soviet period is matched by a newer one of the same people at the same spot but with a different sculpture behind them — a change in the figure with whom they are associated, determined by the state and history.
Meldibekov looks at the figure of the leader as fetishized by ordinary citizens. He also shows people as if both empowered by virtue of proximity to the great leader and the due diligence of paying homage to him.
Meldibekov has recently begun a series entitled Peak Communism which was also featured at the New York Asian Art Fair. The artist inverts cheap metal pots and bowls and moulds their tops to show their shapes as different shapes — such as Communism Peak, Lenin Peak and Peak of the Pioneer.
Kyrgyz art: video and photography at Winkleman New York
Elsewhere, an exhibition of Kyrgyz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, entitled A New Silk Road, is on display these days at the Winkleman Gallery in New York City. The show runs through January 10. A series of photo images and a 5-channel video, shot along the highways and small villages connecting China through Kyrgyzstan to Europe, capture the determination and resourcefulness that define this mountainous and economically impoverished region and provide snapshots of how local and global economics are intertwined.
To represent Central Asia and the Caucasus in 2008 Shanghai art fair Best of Discovery, curator Sara Raza has alighted on the work of the outlandish Kazak performance artist Erbossyn Meldibekov and also on the emerging Georgian artist Sophia Tabatadze (see post click here)
Shirin Neshat Women Without Men Faurschou Gallery Beijing to January 18 2009
As unlikely as it seems given the current political climate, many people in the art world are now asking: is contemporary Middle Eastern art the next big thing, reports Time Out Beijing.
The present boom is founded on the unprecedented exposure that Islamic culture has received since September 11, as well as the influx of cash from Arabian royal families and governments into new art fairs and museums. However, even trendier than contemporary Middle Eastern art are female Middle Eastern artists, and photographer Shirin Neshat is a big contributor to that.
Neshat has been a resident of the United States for over twenty years, but has returned to visit her family since the 1990s when political conditions improved. In these visits she has maintained a relationship with the Eastern world and witnessed her country change from the progressive political and social system imposed on her country to the present theocratic regime.
‘For me one of the principal challenges,’ Neshat says, ‘is to imagine how the artist who is an immigrant to another country and who is immersed in the characteristics of another culture, can create works that contribute to a broader and more tolerant dialogue.’
Shirin Neshat
For her first exhibition in China at the Faurschou gallery, the 51-year-old will explore the themes of human passion and desire through the conditions of women and religious codes in contemporary Muslim society. She will show her monumental film opus Women without Men consists of five video installations based on Shahrnush Parsipur’s banned book by the same name. The novel is set in 1953, the year when the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, attempted to avert a coup mounted by American and British forces who wanted to reinstate the Shah as an absolute ruler in order to avoid the nationalisation of the country’s oil industry.
The first thing that will strike you hopefully is a sigh of relief and then, perhaps, a cause for celebration as your faith in art is renewed. The standard at 798 will have been raised once again both in terms of the level that art can effect you and in terms of gallery presentation.
In article in Time Magazine, she was quoted as saying that she seeks to “untangle the ideology of Islam through her art,” and this exhibition, the artist’s first in China, will present five films that reinterpret the lives of five Iranian women in 1953, the year the democratically elected prime minister was overthrown by an American-supported coup d’etat. More than a discussion of the events of this important year in Iranian history, the videos document the personal trials of women living within strict societal restrictions about religious, sexual and social behavior.
Acquired as a gift by The Outset /Frieze Art Fair Fund to benefit the Tate Collection: Akram Zaatari born 1966 Nature Morte, 2008
Video projection
11 minutes
Dimensions variable
Ed 2/5 + 1 AP Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Hamburg
Akram Zaatari is a video artist and curator who lives and works in Beirut. Author of more than 30 videos, and video installations, Zaatari has been exploring issues pertinent to Lebanese postwar condition, particularly the mediation of territorial conflicts and wars through television.
Each year, two prominent international curators are invited to work alongside Tate curators to select works. This year, the international curators were Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem) and Sabine Breitwieser (independent curator and General Secretary of CIMAM).
The Fund is organised by Outset which was founded in 2003 as a philanthropic organisation dedicated to supporting new art. The charity focuses on raising private funding from its supporters and trustees for public museums, galleries and art projects.
With Tate’s annual government funding for its acquisitions effectively frozen since 1982, and now worth a small proportion of its original value, the Fund helps provide a much needed contribution towards Tate’s ongoing campaign to develop its Collection. A significant number of works acquired through the Fund are currently on display at Tate Modern.
more in category Iranian art including posts on Iranian artists at Saatchi exhibition 2009, survey of Islamic art at Pergamon museum 2008 , Iranian Farhad Ahrarnia picked as ‘one to watch’ by Canvas magazine 2008, market news for Iranian art
In Huang Hsin-Chien’s work, Shanghai, Shall We Dance? located in the public space of the Shanghai Museum of Art, viewers are invited on to a typical Shanghainese dance floor for a spontaneous dance. As the dancers move the images of foreboding highrise buildings surrounding them melt and transform into the images of the viewers dancing together. The direct real time link between the dancers’ movements and the artwork allows viewers to be participators in the creation of the artwork and according to Taiwan Contemporary Art Link explore their perceptions of and connections with urban space.
Huang Hsin-Chien has an unusual background. Having studied Mechanical Engineering at National Taiwan University and Art at the Art Center College of Design at Pasadena USA he has become fluent in both technology and traditional art. He has exhibited work at the Hong-Ga Museum, Taipei Artists’ Village and the National Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan as well as the MiArt Contemporary Art Fair in Milan.
Fascinated by interactive art using digital media, Huang exhibited a work called Experiment Exchange in the Natural Circuits show at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in New York in 2007. Experiment Exchange consists of a screen showing a silhouette of animated white birds which move in real time according to the actions of the viewer, a form of collaborative art in which viewers work together with technology and remotely from the original artist.
Following his recent exhibition ‘Stitched’ in London, Iranian artist Farhad Ahrarnia is featured by Middle East specialist art magazine Canvas as ‘one to watch’. Born in 1971 in Shiraz, Iran and educated at the Northern Media School Sheffield UK, Ahrarnia divides his time between the two cities and “it is perhaps by being both “here and there” that he is able to reflect on his own identity and look at life as an observer” says Canvas. “For Ahrarnia nothing is quite what it seems and everything merits a closer look”.
Working in a range of media from photography and video to embroidery, Ahrarnia’s choice of technique (craft versus technology) and his subject matter (domestic versus international) are in his own words: “A reflection and testimony to the complexities of contemporary experience rooted in the hybrid, fragmented and diverse Middle Eastern ‘reality’ where tradition and modernity fuse”.
With exhibitions throughout the north of England under his belt, this summer Ahrarnia exhibited his recent work ‘Stitched’ at the Leighton House Museum in London. Featuring images of celebrities and Iranian ex-royalty taken from print and online media, Ahrarnia digitally prints the image onto canvas and then painstakingly embroiders part of the surface with colourful silk threads.
“In doing so” says Canvas “it is the relationship between what lies on the surface and what may lie underneath that piques his interest. Influenced by the ordered and geometric structures of late Mondrian paintings, Iris Murdoch’s novel ‘Under the Net’ and even the philospohical work of Wittgenstein it is the act of pulling thread through fabric that for Ahrarnia pulls hidden meanings from within the images”.
The subjects of his work include US soldiers who have died in Iraq, former empress of Iran Farah Diba Pahlavi and one of Iran’s most legendary women the stage and screen icon Googoosh.
In his brilliant video work ‘Mr Singer’ he responds to the fictional character Seargent Zinger based on a real story of a salesman and spy who sold Singer sewing machines to affluent Iranian families in the 1930s and 1940s meanwhile collecting information on the people and areas he visited.
If you enjoy reading about emerging artists you can follow Art Radar Asia’s Beam series which takes an in depth look at the art practice, career highlights and auction history of up and coming artists.
