Ben Lewis - Art Safari

Award-winning writer and director Ben Lewis, a self-confessed “art geek”, takes an off-beat tour around the fringes of contemporary art.

While all eyes in Nineties Britain focussed on our own Young British Artists, a different global art movement was evolving. The leading French critic Nicolas Bourriaud, described it as 'Relational Art'. Armed with Bourriaud's book Relational Aesthetics, Ben goes in search of what he hopes might be a new 'ism'.

But trouble lies ahead: many of the artists whose reputations were advanced by Bourriaud's exhibitions and writings, refuse to be interviewed, deny they are relational, or once interviewed, try to ban Art Safari from showing their work.
source: tvrage


Art Safari - Relational Art: Is It An Ism? (2004)
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Agnès Geoffray

Agnès Geoffray utilise la photographie, la vidéo et l'installation comme medium artistique.
Au travers d'images interpellantes d'emblée par la forte présence physique qui s'en dégage, Agnès nous entraîne à observer de plus près ces visages, ces corps qui peu à peu semblent nous prendre à parti.
Elle ne nous donne aucune indication (de lieu, de temps, de circonstance) ; juste ces acteurs photographiés seuls ou en groupe, tous porteurs de leur propre histoire extériorisée.
L'artiste nous plonge là, dans l'éternelle question du regard que nous portons sur l'autre, du "rapport à l'autre" : quelles réactions implique notre comportement, notre histoire personnelle ? Comment est-on perçu ? Comment exister par rapport à un groupe, une situation donnée ?
source: laperipherie

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Iris Schieferstein

Die künstlerische Freiheit findet eine Grenze in der Zuschaustellung oder der Veräußerung lebender oder toter Tiere, die keine Haustiere sind oder wegen Artenschutz nicht geschossen werden dürfen

Iris Schieferstein lebt und arbeitet als Diplom-Bildhauerin in Berlin. Sie verwendet für ihr künstlerisches Schaffen gefundene Tierkadaver und Tierpräparate aus Nachlässen, darunter vor allem auch solche von Tieren, die unter Artenschutz stehen. Sie bot ihre Werke von Anfang an - also über fünfzehn Jahre - unbehelligt unter anderem im Internet an.

2004 wurden das Landeskriminalamt und die Naturschutzbehörde aufgrund einer anonymen Anzeige auf sie aufmerksam. Kurz darauf durchsuchten mehrere Beamten des Landeskriminalamts die Werkstatt von Frau Schieferstein und beschlagnahmten viele ihrer Kunstwerke. Gegen sie wurde außerdem ein Strafantrag wegen Verstoßes gegen das Bundesnaturschutzgesetz (BNatSchG) gestellt.
source: werner-bonhoff-preis


Fleisch ist mein Material (trailer 00:51)
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oneeyedmonster.tv

saatchi-gallery

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Crappy Taxidermy

Even the tiniest niche can surprise by containing a staggering variety, as exemplified by that handful of tiny plush dolls that grew into an endless menagerie of Beanie Babies that you were totally only holding on to for your sister. For a staggeringly long procession of dead animals, there's Crappy Taxidermy.
source: thrillist

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Hugh Pocock - My Food My Poop

Hugh Pocock: My Food My Poop, on view through August 16, 2009. Working in sculpture, installation, and video, Hugh Pocock creates works that explore issues surrounding the earth's natural resources and man's relationship to the production and consumption of energy. In the creation of Pocock's newest project, he became the subject in an intimate experiment intended to determine and better understand the energy produced by our bodies from the food we consume each day. Over the course of 63 days, Pocock meticulously weighed all the food and drink he consumed as well as all the waste and urine he eliminated. Determining these weights and then calculating the differences between them would represent an approximate measurement of each day's energy production.
source: artdaily 2009

my food my poop - Baltimore City Paper/Bret McCabe

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Blind Dates Project

BLIND DATES (BD) aims to tackle with the traces or ‘what remains’ of the peoples, places and cultures that once constituted the diverse geography of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922).

General topics for deliberation, and not necessarily in the suggested order, include:

Catastrophes, trauma and memory; Mourning, longing and denial; Displacement, collective identity and subjectivity; Exile, migration, and diasporic clusters; Archives, translation and language; Humor, rumor and folklore; History, ideology and globalization; Mythology, religion and philosophy; Fact, fiction and truth; Natural, artificial and superficial; Taboo, shame and desire; Love, romance and betrayal; Obsession, compassion and care; Borders, citizenship and human rights; Justice, reconciliation and forgiveness; Fragility, temperament and passion, Art Histories, modernization, and artistic systems etc.


Nina Katchadourian, excerpt from Accent Elimination, 2005. Installation of six videos with sound. (01:34)
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Miguel Luciano

Miguel Luciano is a cognizant and dynamic artist. His paintings, sculpture, videos and combined media installations raise critical questions about globalization and colonial dependency, in particular examining the social and political impact on Puerto Rican and Latino communities. Luciano's individual and collective consciousness fuels his art. His semiotic use of religious, popular and commercial iconography, appropriated product labels, graffiti and text are visually arresting, exciting and conceptually provocative. Luciano critically reconstructs, subverts and establishes new hierarchies, meanings and allegories that redefine the Puerto Rican paradigm.
source: cueartfoundation - Juan Sánchez

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Brian Alfred

Brian Alfred's works present a flattened, depopulated and predominantly urban world derived from found images. His thematic concerns including the signifiers of Modernist idealism and technological progress, conspiracy theories and the growing prevalence of surveillance in the post-9/11 world have led him to focus on images featuring architecture, machinery, interiors and urban landscapes.
source: haunchofvenison


It’s Already the End of the World (01:33)
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maryboonegallery

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Sheepfilms

Hello, I'm Dave and I make short comedy films and animations starring me and various animals, things on chairs and mischievous mouse pointers.


GPS (01:28)
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Tree Power (0:55)
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Peter Davies

The graphics of counter culture, once invested with desire and hope, now saturate our visual memories to a point of redundancy and banality. Peter Davies initially makes small collages that mine the aesthetics of posters, bumper stickers, fliers, record covers, t-shirts, punk graphics and socio-political slogan art, all leveled by the graphic flattening of an ever-consuming society. Davies invents, re-samples and patchworks the imagery and slogans together in a composition that appears to rely on arbitrary stream of consciousness logic, but the dense figurative imagery contains an underlying abstract rectangle structure inspired by Ellsworth Kelly.
source: The Approach

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William Powhida

William Powhida’s work, reflecting his critical background, displays a concentrated fascination with the politics of access and the powers that control the assignment of value in the artworld. All roles are fair game, from nouveau-hot artists and the market-setting collectors that buy them, to the branded dealers that sell the work and the critics paid to provide intellectual justification for the pricepoints.

To soften what might appear a direct editorial voice, Powhida projects his commentary through the lens of an alter-ego, one with whom he shares a name (William Powhida). This alter-ego closely resembles any number of freshly minted artworld ‘geniuses,’ though Powhida’s character happens to exhibit all of the worst traits imaginable in any coddled enfant-terrible art star.
source: cjamesgallery


BOMB On The Inside - What One Drawing Can Do
By David Goodman Dec 3, 2009

schroeder romero
the writing is on the wall(past exhibitions/2009)

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Abdulnasser Gharem

Abdulnasser Gharem is unique in the history of Saudi Arabian contemporary art. No-one else has combined a career in the Saudi Arabian Army with life as an artist specialising in performance and site-specific installation. Gharem's studio is the street (or wherever he locates an artistic opportunity). Critically, he's someone who understands the value of contingency. This is at the heart of his practice alongside his social, ecological or political concerns.
source: universes-in-universe - Henry Hemming


Greenbox Dictionary of Saudi Arabian artists

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