LONGITUDES

Longitudes cuts across Latitudes’ projects and research with news, updates, and reportage.

Public programmes related to the exhibition 'José Antonio Hernández-Díez. I Will Fear No Evil' at MACBA, Barcelona, on view until 26 June 2016

 Fri, Mar 18 2016
View of José Antonio Hernández-Díez's 'El resplandor de la Santa Conjunción aleja a los demonios" (1991). Installation. Lightbox, sampler, timer, flash, tripod and speakers. Collection Leonora and Jimmy Belilty. Photo: Miquel Coll, MACBA.

The exhibition ‘I will fear no evil’ presents works from the beginning of José Antonio Hernández-Díez’s career in the late 1980s and early nineties – several of which have not been seen since they were first exhibited in 1991 – in dialogue with a new series produced especially for the occasion. 

The following series of events have been programmed to accompany the exhibition:

 Thursday, 31 March, 7pm:
Visit with the artist and Latitudes. Exclusive to the Amic card. Limited places.
#MACBAAmic

Saturday 2 April, 7pm:
Experience MACBA, The secrets of conservation in ‘I will fear no evil’ by José Antonio Hernández-Díez. Visit with the artist, Latitudes and Lluís Roqué
Museum galleries.
5 €. No booking required. Limited places. 
#MACBAesviu


View of Hernández-Díez's exhibition "I will fear no evil". Photo: Miquel Coll, MACBA.
Film programme: 
“Shadows and silences or the ghosts that return as if for the first time”. Curated by Andrés Duque.
Meier Auditorium
Admission: 5 €/session. Free with MACBA Amics card
Limited places

Wednesday 4 May, 7pm
‘Schastye (Happiness)’, Aleksandr Medvedkin, 1935, Russia, 95 min, b/w, silent.
Despite being released in 1935, this is a silent movie. It narrates the hapless misadventures of a peasant unable to reap a good harvest. It takes a courageous act to reconcile himself with himself and other people.

 Wednesday 18 May, 7pm
‘Finis Terrae’, Jean Epstein, 1929, France, 80 min, b/w, silent.
Four labourers leave for the island of Bannec to collect the harvest. One loses his hand and the wound becomes infected, so cannot work anymore.

 Wednesday 15 June, 7pm
‘He Who Gets Slapped’, Victor Sjöström, 1924, USA, 83 min, b/w, silent.
After many years of research, Paul Beaumont, a scientist and humanist, discovers a revolutionary theory, but his patron (Marc McDermott) seduces his wife (Ruth King) and takes credit for his discoveries. To add insult to injury, he slaps Beaumont before the assembled scientific community, compounding his humiliation. Ashamed, Beaumont flees and takes refuge in a circus, where he becomes a famous clown known as ‘he who gets slapped’. As fate would have it, one night his perfidious patron appears in the audience, having abandoned Beaumont’s wife and intent on marrying the beautiful Consuelo (Norma Shearer).

 Wednesday 22 June, 7pm
‘Kurutta Ippēji (A Page of Madness)’, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926, Japan, 70 min, b/w, silent.
Kurutta Ippēji tells the story of a worker in a psychiatric hospital who begins to feel a strange affection for a patient, who was allegedly committed after murdering her own baby. But he only wants to release her, to escape with her and start a new family. The film went missing for over fifty years and was barely seen after its release. It was the director himself who discovered the negative and a copy in his archive store in 1971.

Saturday 25 June, 7pm:
Nieve Fuga: music around 'I will fear no evil'
Exhibition galleries.
5 €. Free with museum ticket and with MACBA Amics cards. Limited places. The ticket includes free admission to current exhibitions until 9 pm.
#MACBAesviu

View of Hernández-Díez's exhibition "I will fear no evil". Photo: Miquel Coll, MACBA.


 Related content:
 2016, event, Film programme, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, MACBA, public programme
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A report from the symposium 'How Institutions Think' organised by the LUMA Foundation and CCS Bard College, Arles, 24–27 February 2016

 Fri, Mar 11 2016
All photographs: Latitudes.

[The following text was originally published on Frieze Blog on 9 March 2016].

Co-presented by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College with the LUMA Foundation, the four-day symposium ‘How Institutions Think’ [pdf of the programme] met to reconsider the habits and rhetorics of contemporary art institutions and curatorial practice. The event, held at the Parc des Ateliers, Arles, from 24–27 February, was developed in partnership with a long list of collaborators (Valand Academy of Arts, Gothenburg, Sweden; Afterall Books and the Exhibition Histories programme at Saint Martins, London, UK; Goldsmiths, London; the V-A-C Foundation, Moscow; and de Appel art centre, Amsterdam).

 Taking its title from the 1986 book by British anthropologist Mary Douglas, the symposium played out on the site of the future LUMA Arles, a 20-acre former railway yard that includes a new building designed by Frank Gehry scheduled to open in summer 2018 as exhibitions spaces, archives, residency and study facilities, as well as a restaurant, hotel and park. Introduced by CCS Bard’s Paul O’Neill and LUMA founder Maja Hoffmann, the presentations were hosted in the recently-restored L’Atelier des Forges spaces in the middle of this construction site. O’Neill took the work-in-progress status outside as an invitation for the more than 30 speakers and around 150 delegates to debate not only what the future of art institutions in general might be, but more immediately, how new ways of operating could underpin this nascent institution in the south of France. 

LUMA Arles is located in the former railway yards of Arles and includes a new building designed by Frank Gehry and the renovation of the industrial buildings on the Parc des Ateliers by Selldorf Architects.

Yet what transpired was something far more pervasive. An amplification of the noun ‘institution’ and the verb ‘instituting’ soon engulfed not only a discussion of art and academic establishments, but law, governance, and the psyche of the French state, post-November 2015 Paris attacks. The grim predicament of a Europe in the depths of the refugee crisis – as the symposium took place, at the other end of the country, Calais’s ‘Jungle’ camp was being dismantled – became the lens for considering nothing less than the spectral institution that is Western European colonial imperialism. In the first evening’s fragmented keynote by Zahia Rahmani, the writer and historian gave an account of the ‘Made in Algeria’ exhibition of colonial cartography she has curated for the MuCEM museum in Marseilles. She argued that we cannot plausibly think about the future of any institution without confronting the terrible failures and opprobrious injustices of the past, most glaringly what she characterised as the ‘toxicity’ of Western Europe’s colonial system. 
Céline Condorelli's 'All our tomorrows' (2015) hanging curtain.

 ‘Is institution building still desirable?’ wondered artist Céline Condorelli in her presentation the following day as she evoked All our tomorrows (2015), her installation that humbly corralled the symposium’s setting, comprised a large hanging curtain inspired by the ‘poor architecture’ of Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia, the social and cultural centre established in São Paulo. 

 Reflecting on his own transformative experiences made while directing the 2014 edition of the São Paulo Biennial, Charles Esche – Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands – astutely articulated both the decisiveness of Western Imperialism’s poisonous effect on the rest of the world, and the nervousness about whether anyone can even venture to be hopeful about the future. Esche persuasively argued that Western museums must make decolonialisation fundamental to their missions and no longer a marginal issue by analysing the entrails of neoliberalism’s ‘dogged persistence’ and, soothsayer-like, intuitively sensing the ‘weak signals’ of a more just politics.
 
 Question from Mick Wilson, artist, educator and Head of the Valand Academy of Arts, University of Gothernburg, Sweden, and moderatior of one of the sessions.  

Attendees gather outside the symposium venue at the Parc des Ateliers.

Sociologists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre spoke of France’s deep investment in what they termed the ‘economy of enrichment’ in observations that were particularly prickly given the art-destination place-making unfolding on the very site of the symposium. They submitted that the luxury brands that dominate the image of the country abroad enjoy a close but officially-unacknowledged complicity with heritage and culture. They argue that this compound myth of the French art de vivre accounts for the country consistently being the globe’s most visited tourist destination, yet also that, less innocuously, France’s defiance of normative economic rules about price and value make it both a haven for inequality as well as unusually susceptible to instability. Put candidly, the presence of refugee and terrorists is not conducive to tourism and handbag sales. Later, speaking about ‘turbo-fascism’ and a transition to ‘necropolitics’ (a term coined by philosopher Achille Mbembe regarding the politics of sovereignty over life and death), philosopher Marina Gržinić contended that we are living in a time of war in which our institutions battle to preserve this ‘good life’ at any cost. 

Céline Condorelli, Artist, Professor at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, and Founding Co-Director Eastside Projects, in conversation with Helena Reckitt, Senior Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London.  
 Clémentine Deliss, Independent Curator and Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg).

Turning more specifically to art’s institutions, independent curator and editor Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez argued that they are so often so deeply implicated in an economy of precarity that they spawn new toothless art forms of ‘safe participation’ and ‘soft interactivity’. ‘Stubborn’ institutions thus appeared to be both the problem and the solution. Accordingly, Clémentine Deliss – recently dismissed as the Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt – delivered a scorching critique of the racism and intransigence persisting in ethnographic museums founded in the 19th century, particularly in Germany and France. She characterised how the hundreds of thousands of objects ‘salvaged’ from the frontline of the colonial project are now trapped in a legislative embargo, reduced to little more than dormant entries on databases. Access to these hoards of material culture and their restitution is critical she asserted, yet young curators are too afraid to deal with them – contemporary art offers an easier ride. 

In the context her work directing the SBG Gallery in Montréal, Canada, curator Pip Day discussed Canada’s settler-colonialist legacy, the evasions allowed by conceiving of decolonization as merely a metaphor, and her advocacy of the work of First Nation artists such as Maria Hupfield. Bassam El Baroni, an independent curator based in Alexandria, Egypt, later presented a paper that threaded a bewilderingly dense route through a tangle of cognitive philosophy and ‘prometheanism’. Yet Day’s case studies, as well as those discussed by Mélaine Bouteloup, curator of Paris’s Bétonsalon, regarding the recently opened Villa Vassilieff which is now the second site of that institution, helped to link such abstraction to more practical curatorial and artistic thinking-in-action that addresses the past while creating new knowledge. 

Gehry’s LUMA building will comprise presentation and exhibition spaces, archive, library, offices, seminar rooms, artist-in-residence facilities, café-restaurant and hotel and is due to open in summer 2018.

 Yet it was through the presentations by writer Dave Beech and especially architect Keller Easterling that the symposium actually approached something resembling a strategy to address what had been almost uniformly painted as the shameful, broken state of the contemporary institution. According to both Beech and Easterling, we should be paying keener attention to infrastructure rather than institution per se. Following her book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (2014) Easterling’s bruising and exhilarating contention was that an enveloping urban medium (including preposterous towers, mall sprawl, special-trade-zone legal lacunae) defies consideration as a thing and is better thought of as a global operating system, a ‘disposition’ that thrives on saying one thing and doing quite another. 

Ljublijanan philosopher, theoretician and artist Marina Gržinić; writer and professor Dave Beech and curator and theorist Simon Sheikh.

At the start of the symposium artist Liam Gillick – one of LUMA’s luminary consultants alongside Tom Eccles, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Parreno and Beatrix Ruf – had asked somewhat rhetorically, ‘can an institution be thought collectively on this scale?’ It was clearly not only Charles Esche who looked out at the spine of what will be a 24,000 square metre Frank Gehry-designed tower and noticed that the institution’s die was cast already – and thanks to an architect long synonymous with the art museum as an importunate form of trophy. Following Keller’s strategic spatial repertoire of ‘counterbalances’, ‘interplays’, ‘toggles’, ‘incentives’ and ‘ratchets’, as well as her talk of heeding the dynamics of joke-telling or dough-tending, she implied that if we are going to formulate a resilient future for art institutions, we had better start feeling our way – and get a whole lot more canny. 

 –
Max Andrews is a contributing editor of frieze and, with Mariana Cánepa Luna, runs Latitudes, an independent curatorial office based in Barcelona, Spain.
– 

 LUMA Foundation spaces under construction.

 Related content:
 2016, colonialmism, exhibition-making, frieze blog, Max Andrews, Near Future Artworlds, report, rethinking institutions, symposium, toxicity, travel
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Mariana Cánepa Luna review on Francesc Ruiz's 'Correos' exhibition for art-agenda

 Fri, Mar 4 2016
View of Francesc Ruiz, “Correos,” garcía galería, Madrid, 2016. All images courtesy of garcía galería, Madrid. Photos by Roberto Ruiz.

Francesc Ruiz’s “Correos”
garcía galería, Madrid   
January 16–March 5, 2016

by Mariana Cánepa Luna

Francesc Ruiz’s second solo show at Madrid’s garcía galería delves into the visual communication of one of Spain’s most iconic institutions, the Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos—the national postal service, commonly known as Correos—whose graphic identity was created in 1977 by Spanish designer and artist José María Cruz Novillo (b. 1936). Ruiz’s interest is not limited to Cruz Novillo’s pervasive design, but more broadly includes Correos as an agent of distribution as well as the various commercial guises that come into play in this public service. Ruiz’s choice to focus this exhibition on the postal system, the pre-eminent pre-internet network, is not casual: through his characteristic strategy of “expanded comics” he has long been concerned with the potential of distribution and official versus alternative forms of circulation.

—> Continue reading...

 Originally published on art-agenda.com on 25 February 2016.


 View of Francesc Ruiz, “Correos,” garcía galería, Madrid, 2016.
  View of Francesc Ruiz, “Correos,” garcía galería, Madrid, 2016.
 Francesc Ruiz, Correos IV (Carton), 2015.
 Francesc Ruiz, Correos IV (Carton), 2015.
 Francesc Ruiz, Correos I (Bufanda), 2015.
 Francesc Ruiz, THE MIDAS TOUCH, 2015.
 Francesc Ruiz, MARCAR (6549/6567/6574/6547), 2015.
  Francesc Ruiz, Correos III (Caja), 2015.

RELATED CONTENT:
 2016, art-agenda, Francesc Ruiz, madrid, Mariana Cánepa Luna, report, Reviews
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Cover Story, March 2016: José Antonio Hernández-Díez: The sacred heart of the matter

 Thu, Mar 3 2016
March 2016 cover story. This and previous stories are archived here.

The March 2016 cover story marks the twelve of the series. This section published monthly on our home page, focuses on an artwork or moment related to our past, current or future practice – "close ups" of what we do, see and are thinking about. (When the next Cover Story is published, the March one will be archived here.)

'José Antonio Hernández-Díez. I will fear no evil' opens at MACBA’s Convent dels Àngels on 18 March 2016 (and runs until 26 June). Guest curated by Latitudes, the exhibition focuses on the Barcelona-based Venezuelan artist’s first experimental works from the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

 The presence of ghosts and bodily organs in this phase of José Antonio’s out-of-joint art – videographic spectres, disembodied voices, preserved creatures, hearts and skin – is only enhanced by the somewhat necromantic aspect of the fact that several of his works are being reconstructed. Dealing with the symbology and spiritual practices of Catholicism, 'Sagrado Corazón Activo' (Active Sacred Heart, 1991) is one of the pieces which will be brought back to life. In a workshop in Barcelona’s Gràcia, sculptor Fernando Romeo is making its heart. Continue reading...


Related Content:
 2016, behind the scenes, Exhibition, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, MACBA, making of, production, Solo show
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Curators: 'I Will Fear No Evil', José Antonio Hernández-Díez, Convent dels Àngels del Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), 18 March–26 June 2016

 Tue, Mar 1 2016
José Antonio Hernández-Díez, "La Hermandad", 1994. Video installation. ”la Caixa” / MACBA Collection.

Latitudes is curating the solo exhibition 'I will fear no evil' of Venezuelan-born Barcelona-based artist José Antonio Hernández-Díez (Caracas, 1964), which will open at the Convent dels Àngels del Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), on March 17.
 
'I will fear no evil' presents works from the beginning of Hernández-Díez’s career in the late 1980s and early nineties – several of which have not been seen since they were first exhibited – in dialogue with Filamentos (2016), a new series developed especially for the occasion.

José Antonio Hernández-Díez, "La Hermandad", 1994. Video installation. ”la Caixa” / MACBA Collection.

The present exhibition looks back to Hernández-Díez’s first experimental works with video alongside early iconic screen- and vitrine-based works, including three of those presented at the time of his landmark first monographic exhibition 'San Guinefort y otras devociones', held in 1991 at Sala RG in Caracas. This exhibition heralded what the artist termed as a ‘New Christian Iconography’, offering – as artist-colleague Meyer Vaisman described – ‘a techno-pop view of Catholicism’s most beloved symbols’. 

An newly text by Latitudes will be published in Spanish as No. 32 of the Quaderns portàtils (Portable Notebooks) series. This MACBA-produced collection is freely distributed and downloadable from the museum website in PDF and ePUB format. An English translation will also be available as a separate PDF.

Exhibition runs between 18 March–26 June 2016 and is organised and produced by the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).
 2016, Barcelona, curators, Estrany de la Mota, Exhibition, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, latitudes, MACBA, production, Publication, Solo show
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Documentation of Latitudes' talks at the Athens Biennale summit and Tabakalera, Donostia-San Sebastián, November 2015

 Fri, Feb 19 2016

Latitudes in the international Summit 'Synapse 1' at New Rex of the National Theatre of Greece. 'Session II: Rethinking Institutions', November 18, 2015. Photo: Athens Biennale.

Documentation of two recent presentations by Latitudes in Athens and Donostia–San Sebastián is now online. 

Entitled Omonoia (‘concord’ in Greek), the Athens Biennale 2015–17 is directed by Massimiliano Mollona and will grow over the next two years with the help of anthropologists, researchers, activists, academics, artists and civic organisations. In November 2016, Omonoia launched with the summit Synapse 1: Introducing a laboratory for production post-2011. Latitudes participated in the “Rethinking Institutions” session alongside Maria Hlavajova (founder and artistic director of BAK, Utrecht); political economist Leo Panitch; Emily Pethick, director of The Showroom, London; Documenta 14 Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk; public services expert Hilary Wainwright, and Amalia Zepou, Athens Vice Mayor for Civil Society and Municipality Decentralization. 

 By way of introduced we discussed the “Near-Future Artworlds Curatorial Disruption Foresight Group”, the forum for megatrends and the future of institutions of contemporary art that has taken place in May 2015 at the Vessel / MADA (Monash Art Design and Architecture) 2015 International Curatorial Retreat in Bari, Italy; in August at Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, and in November at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK. We followed this with some geological speculation that in “digging deeper” both literally and figuratively, we perhaps find new institutional models. How do we think about artworks and institutions in terms of tens of thousands of years, for example.

See the video here (in English).


Public lecture organised by consonni as part of LaPublika. Tabakalera, Donostia–San Sebastián. Wednesday, November 11, 2015. Photo: Consonni.

Also in November, Latitudes led the workshop “Beyond The Roundabout, or How Public Is Public Art?” for consonni/LaPublika at Tabakalera. As part of this Latitudes gave a public lecture. The workshop addressed the work of artists who conceptualize or actualize their works against a backdrop of vast stretches of time or topological change. In the public lecture we made various transects through our curatorial projects determined by the public sphere, raw materials and their transformation. “From the zinc which led to an Esperanto micro-nation, to the air of a Beijing shopping centre, or the dead trees of printed news, Latitudes will join some traits and ideas around ‘human resources’, extractive modernity, obsolescence and the carbon cycle.” 

Hear the audio here (in Spanish). 

Related content: 
 2016, Athens Biennale, Near Future Artworlds, public art, report, rethinking institutions, seminar, video documentation
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Cover Story, February 2016: Sarah Ortmeyer, Towering allusions

 Tue, Feb 9 2016


The February 2016 Cover Story is dedicated to Sarah Ortmeyer's piece VITRINE MAURICE (2011) presented as part of the group show Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes & des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels.

 
Related Content:
 2016, Brussels, cover story, focus, Meessen De Clercq, Sarah Ortmeyer
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Jurado y equipo tutorial de BCN Producció 2016, La Capella, Barcelona.

 Tue, Feb 2 2016

Photo: La Capella.

El jurado de BCN Producció 2016 formado por los artistas Francesc Ruiz y Mireia Sallarès, y los comisarios Glòria Picazo, David Armengol y Latitudes junto con el director de La Capella, Oriol Gual (con voz y sin voto), ha seleccionado nueve proyectos de entre las 240 solicitudes recibidas para su producción y presentación a lo largo de la temporada 2016 en el espacio de La Capella – a excepción de los dos proyectos deslocalizados. 

Proyectos individuales (abril / junio / septiembre 2016)
• 'Background Immunity' de Ricardo Trigo
• 'No es homosexual simplemente el homófilo sino el cegado por el falo perdido' de Equipo Palomar (Rafael Marcos Mota / Mario Páez Sanchez)
• 'El misterio de Caviria' de Antoni Hervàs
 
Espai Cub (abril / junio / septiembre 2016)
• 'Demo' de Pau Magrané / PLOM
• 'Until I am no longer able to stand' de Anna Dot
• 'Cartas desde el bosque' de Bárbara Sánchez B.
 
Proyectos deslocalizado (a lo largo del 2016)
• ' Teatre amador' de Oriol Nogués
• 'La materia como forma' de Ariadna Parreu
 
Proyecto de comisariado (Noviembre 2016–Enero 2017)
• 'La dissidència nostàlgica' de Joana Hurtado Matheu

Iniciamos nuestra tarea como parte del equipo tutorial junto a David Armengol y Mireia Sallarès. ¡Ganas de trabajar y de celebrar el 10º aniversario de BCN producció!
 
BCN producció es una convocatoria anual dirigida a la comunidad artística de Barcelona (y su área de influencia), para la producción y presentación de tres exposiciones individuales en la Sala Gran de La Capella, tres en el Espai Cub, un proyecto de comisariado y dos proyectos deslocalizados. Es una iniciativa del Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB) del Ajuntament de Barcelona.


RELATED CONTENT:

  • Proyecto de investigación ‘#OpenCurating’, BCN Producció 2012, Barcelona, junio 2012–april 2013.  
  • Ten interviews with artists, curators, archivists, online dept., editors around how the internet is changing artistic and curatorial practice  – free download via Issuu. 
  • The rise of Web 2.0 and an increasing expectation of participation and transparency is transforming our political, social and cultural landscape. What relevance does this have in contemporary art production, exhibition making and curatorial authorship? Storify #OpenCurating
 2016, Barcelona, BCN Producció, convocatoria, Jurado, mentoring, tutoría
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January 2016 Monthly Cover Story: Kasper Akhøj's Eileen Gray’s E.1027

 Mon, Jan 4 2016

NEW YEAR / 
NEW MONTH / 
NEW MONTHLY COVER STORY /

The January "Cover Story" features a black-and-white photo by Danish artist Kasper Akhøj taken from the living room of Eileen Gray's E.1027, the seaside villa built at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, in the late 1920s. The image is part of the series 'Welcome (TO THE TEKNIVAL)' that Kasper has been working on since 2008 examining the process of restoration and the convoluted history of this icon of modern architecture. On January 16, Kasper will open a solo show at Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS, Amsterdam. A publication designed by Copenhagen-based designer Anni's will include an essay by Latitudes’s Max Andrews.

We first got to know Kasper in 2007 in the United Arab Emirates. Kasper was there installing 'Autoxylopyrocycloboros' (2006) for Simon Starling as part of Sharjah Biennial 8, while we were there curating the biennial’s symposium. Four years later, in 2011, we were delighted to include Kasper’s work in the Latitudes’ group show Exposition International des Art Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes & des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts & Art and Technology in Modern Life) at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, in 2011. Here he presented a slideshow which centred on the ‘Abstracta’ display system, originally designed by the Danish architect and designer Poul Cadovious in the 1960s. 

Happy 2016! 

(Above and two below) Publication “Welcome (to the Teknival)” on Kasper Akhøj’s project with an essay by Latitudes’s Max Andrews. Designed by Anni's and published by Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS, Amsterdam. Photos by Anni's.





RELATED CONTENT: 

 2016, architecture, cover story, Eileen Grey, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Kasper Akhøj, Max Andrews, photography
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More from OMONOIA – Athens Biennale 2015–2017 on our December Cover Story

 Tue, Dec 1 2015
International Summit Synapse 1 at New Rex of the National Theatre of Greece. 'Session II: Rethinking Institutions': (from left to right) Leo Panitch, Maria Hlavajova, Adam Szymczyk, Amalia Zepou (moderator), Hilary Wainwright, Emily Pethick, Latitudes (Max Andrews & Mariana Cánepa Luna) © Eva Galatsanou.

The above picture by Eva Galatsanou was taken during 'Session II: Rethinking Institutions' one of the Summit panels that launched OMONOIA, the Athens Biennale 2015–2017. Latitudes participated in this panel on November 18, as one of the speakers. Our current Cover Story on Latitudes' home page features this event at the National Theatre of Greece, New Rex.  

 Below some more photos of that day and the working group meetings that took place at the former Bageion Hotel (18 Omonoia Square) on November 19, 2015.

 Omonoia Square. On the left the Bageion Hotel (with the orange banner), HQ of the Athens Biennial 2015–2017.
 
Omonoia Square from the first floor of the Bageion Hotel.

 Artistic Director Massimiliano Mollona, and Athens Biennale directors Xenia Kalpaktsoglou (left) and Poka-Yio (right) welcome guests to the second day of the Summit "Synapse 1: Introducing a laboratory for production post". 

 After the welcoming words, guests joined closed-door working groups sessions around the building on 'Cooperativism', 'Commons & Urban Welfare', 'Alternative Currencies' and 'Solidarity Networks'.

 10am–1pm: Latitudes joined the 'Commons & Urban Welfare' working group which had representatives of Avtonomi Akadimia (GR), Omada Metavasis / Transition (GR), Omikron Project (GR), Sarantaporo (GR), Votanikos Kipos Squat (GR), Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network (TBC) (GR), Green Park (TBC) (GR), Luigi Coppola (Parco Commune dei Frutti Minori, IT), Sylvia de Fanti (Teatro Valle, IT) and Federica Giardini.

2–5pm: During the Open Assembly, artist, activist and Berlin-based curator Margarita Tsomou feeds back to the audience what was discussed during the 'Solidarity Networks' working group which had representatives from Refugees Welcome (GR), Solidarity4all (GR), HYLE[Ύλη]matter (GR), Notara Squat (TBC) (GR), The Other Human (TBC) (GR), Metropolitan Community Clinic at Helliniko (GR), European Village (GR), Ivor Stodolsky (Perpetuum Mobile) (NO).

Potent voices like that of Tsomou raised questions about a proposed 'open' biennale format and the possible (in)adequacy of visual arts to host activism. "I do my activism in the street" – she exclaimed. (Tsomou has recently interviewed Adam Szymczyk (artistic director of documenta 14) for DIE ZEIT – download here.)

 Other speakers were more direct in their pragmatism and asked the forum "What do we have? Do we have a hammer? Do we have chairs?" to which Mollona and Poka-Yio responded the biennial has the Bageion Hotel building and in-kind sponsorship for production, everything else has to be decided and invented collectively for the next two years. 

 End of the Open Assembly at the Bageion Hotel.

 Stairs of the Bageion Hotel.


RELATED CONTENT:
 2015, Athens, Athens Biennale, collaboration, cover story, crisis, modes of assembly, openness, panel discussion, participation, photo, report, rethinking institutions, summit, Workshop
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