LONGITUDES

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

Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2016 – Artists and locations of the programme "Composiciones" announced

 Tue, Jun 21 2016

A "Save The Date" press release (scroll down for different languages) has been sent out with information on the participating galleries and spaces and their exhibitions for the forthcoming Barcelona Gallery Weekend (29 September–2 October 2016). 

Returning for its second edition in 2016, Latitudes will curate "Compositions" (Composiciones), a series of artistic interventions in unique sites across the neighbourhoods of the city. Each of the commissioned artists is represented by a gallery participating in the Barcelona Gallery Weekend. 

Resisting an overall theme, and instead developing from the artists’ responses to the specificity of each context—people as well as places—the five art projects form a temporary thread that links evocative locations and public space, running parallel to the Weekend’s exhibitions in galleries and museums.  

The invited artists are Lúa Coderch  (Iquitos, Perú, 1982), Regina Giménez (Barcelona, 1966), Lola Lasurt  (Barcelona, 1983), Robert Llimós  (Barcelona, 1943), and Wilfredo Prieto (Santi Spiritus, Cuba, 1978), and the spaces where their interventions will take place are: 
The full schedule of routes, guided tours and parallel programming will be announced in September.
'Composiciones', five new commissions for the Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015.

"Compositions" is a programme of artists’ interventions originally conceived and curated by Latitudes for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend in 2015, when it produced five projects by David Bestué (in the former ceramics factory Cosme Toda, L'Hospitalet); Dora García (at the Biblioteca del Campo Freudiano de Barcelona); Jordi Mitjà (in the Museu Geològic del Seminari de Barcelona); Rasmus Nilausen in collaboration with Pere Llobera (at the house of the former priest, gardens of La Central del Raval) y Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (in the Umbracle – Shadehouse – at the Parc de la Ciutadella). 

#BarcelonaGalleryWeekend
#Composiciones2016

Related content:

  • Composiciones 2015 commissions;
  • 2015 social media archive;
  • Instagram of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend;
  • PRESS RELEASE: Latitudes curates "Composiciones", a series of five artists' commissions for the first Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 October 2015; 
  • NOTA DE PRENSA: Comisariado de "Composiciones", cinco intervenciones artísticas para el primer Barcelona Gallery Weekend, 1–4 Octubre 2015
 2016, Barcelona, Barcelona Gallery Weekend, commissions, Gallery Weekend, Lola Lasurt, Lúa Coderch, offsite, Regina Giménez, Robert Llimós, site-specific, Wilfredo Prieto
Stacks Image 39


Last days! Cover Story and exhibition of José Antonio Hernández-Díez: techno-pop, death and resurrection

 Mon, Jun 20 2016
Monthly cover story on www.lttds.org

José Antonio Hernández-Díez’s exhibition No temeré mal alguno (I will fear no evil) – curated by Latitudes – continues at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) until 26 June. Reconstructed for the exhibition, the extraordinary Sagrado Corazón Activo was first shown in September 1991 in a group show titled El Espíritu de los Tiempos (The Spirit of the Times) in Caracas, Venezuela. It belongs to a body of work that José termed a ‘New Christian Iconography’ in which the application of communications and medical technology interlace with systems of paranormal belief, most prominently Christian theology.


Published as part of MACBA’s Portable Notebook series, Latitudes’s essay about José’s exhibition explains that “this visceral work deals with a key point of difference in theologies related with transubstantiation and ‘real presence’ – the notion that Jesus Christ is actually somehow present in a fleshy way in the bread and wine of the Eucharist versus being a symbolic or a metaphorical presence. Sagrado Corazón Activo seems to inhabit the peculiarly disjointed temporality that is proper to hauntology – a techno-medical vision of a science-gone-mad future within an ancient symbolic past.”   
Photo: Inés Balcells for ABC El Mundo.

No temeré mal alguno (I will fear no evil) focusses on José’s first experimental works with videography in the late 1980s and early 1990s and such early iconic vitrine-based works, alongside a new project made for the occasion. The presence of ghosts and bodily organs in this phase of Hernández-Díez’s out-of-joint art – videographic spectres, disembodied voices, preserved creatures, hearts and skin – is only enhanced by the necromantic aspect of the fact that several of his works were remade, as if brought back to life, for the exhibition.

#HernándezDíez
   
Related content:
 2016, Barcelona, cover story, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, MACBA
Stacks Image 39


Reseñas sobre la exposición "No temeré mal alguno" de José Antonio Hernández-Díez en el MACBA

 Fri, Jun 17 2016
A una semana de concluirse la exposición de José Antonio Hernández-Díez en el MACBA (finaliza el 26 de junio), hacemos revisión de la cobertura de prensa más relevante (por orden cronológico) y que encontraréis bajo la pestaña "Contenidos relacionados" en la sección final en ésta y en todas nuestras páginas, espacio desde donde también compartimos entradas al blog.

Compartimos una vez más el registro fotográfico de la exposición y el archivo de redes sociales (reseñas, posts en instagrams y tuits) que diferentes usuarios han ido publicando a lo largo de los tres meses que ha durado la exposición. 

Recordad que quedan dos actividades más: el 22 de junio, 19h, se proyectará "Vampyr" de Carl Theodor Dreyer (1932, Francia y Alemania, 75 min, b/n, sin sonido) dentro del ciclo "Sombras y silencios o los fantasmas que vuelven como la primera vez" que comisaría el cineasta Andrés Duque para la exposición y el sábado 25 de junio, 19h, Nieve Fuga realizará un concierto en vivo en la sala de exposiciones en el contexto de la programación #MACBAesviu, un collage sonoro inspirado en las obras de la exposición. 
 
“Las obras de José Antonio Hernández-Díez toman el MACBA”, eldiario.com, 17 marzo 2016.


“El MACBA acull una exposició amb instal·lacions experimentals de José Antonio Hernández-Díez”, Vilaweb.com, 17 març 2016.

Núvol, video by Ester Roig, 17 març 2016.
 
Sonia Ávila, "José Antonio Hernández-Díez mira a su pasado”, El Periódico, 17 marzo 2016.

Carlos Sala “Cuando el video era el rey”, La Razón, 18 marzo 2016.
 
Griselda Oliver, "Viu o mort. El gos d’Antonio Hernández-Díez", Núvol.com, 19 març 2016.
Eugènia Sendra, “Com recuperar la fe perduda”, revista Time Out, 23 març 2016.

Javier Díaz-Guardiola, “La obsolescencia artística programada también existe”, ABC Cultural, 25 marzo 2016.
Antoni Ribas Tur, "Nova iconografia religiosa i un gos sant, al Macba”, www.ara.cat 29 març 2016.

Jaume Vidal Oliveras, "Hernández-Díez, líbranos de todo mal", El Cultural, El Mundo, 1 abril 2016.

 Maria Palau, "Art, vida i mort", El Punt/AVUI, 7 abril 2016.

Roberta Bosco, "Arqueología contemporánea", El País (Catalunya),17 abril 2016.

Contenido relacionado:
 2016, análisis, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, latitudes, MACBA, press coverage, public programme, related content, Reviews
Stacks Image 39


Kadist and Latitudes present 'Incidents (Of Travel)' online

 Tue, May 31 2016

Latitudes and Kadist Art Foundation are partnering in a new 'distributed' phase of 'Incidents (of Travel)' as an online periodical. As part of its Online Projects, Kadist will be publishing regular contributions from six of its fellows working around the world. 
 
Originally conceived by Latitudes as day-long artist-led tours around Mexico City (2012) – followed by Hong Kong (2013) and San Francisco (2015) – 'Incidents (of Travel)' explores the chartered itinerary as a format of artistic encounter. Online storytelling present and document curatorial fieldwork and an offline day’s itinerary.
 
Curator Yesomi Umolu and artist Harold Mendez inaugurate the series with a dispatch from Chicago – fieldwork and online storytelling photographed by Nabiha Khan of an offline day’s itinerary. 

Forthcoming contributions from Marianna Hovhannisyan (Yerevan / Istanbul), Yu Ji (Shanghai), Moses Serubiri (Kampala), Simon Soon (Kuala Lumpur / Sydney), and Natalia Zuluaga (Pereira / Miami), fellows who participated in the seminar ‘The Place From Where We Look’ at Kadist Paris in June 2015. 



RELATED CONTENT:
 2016, Curatorial Practice, field trip, fieldwork, Incidents of Travel, Kadist Art Foundation, out of the studio, report, San Francisco
Stacks Image 39


Cover Story, May 2016: Material histories – spilling the beans at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux

 Tue, May 10 2016

A cover story is published monthly on www.lttds.org

"In pondering a museum’s memories you seldom think of coffee beans. Yet at CAPC Contemporary Art Museum Bordeaux, burnished nuggets of the past in the form of the seeds of Coffea arabica occasionally materialise, as if out of nowhere. One day one might appear atop a pile of papers on an office desk; weeks later, another bean might show up in the middle of one of the exhibition galleries. A look on top of a shelf in the library might harvest several. During Latitudes’ recent residency at CAPC, François Poisay from the exhibition team showed us the stash he has been squirrelling away in his desk for years." 

Continue reading on www.lttds.org (after May 2016, it will be archived here) 

Related content:  
 2016, 2017, CAPC Bordeaux, cover story, making of, material history, raw materials, research
Stacks Image 39


Interview with Nicholas Mangan for his forthcoming catalogue ‘Limits to Growth’

 Wed, Apr 20 2016

Nicholas Mangan, ‘Ancient Lights’ (2015). Installation views, Chisenhale Gallery, 2015. Co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Artspace, Sydney. Courtesy the artist; Labor Mexico; Sutton Gallery, Melbourne; and Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland. Photo: Andy Keate.

We have just wrapped up an interview with Melbourne-based artist Nicholas Mangan to be published by Sternberg Press as the catalogue of his forthcoming solo exhibition ‘Limits to Growth’, co-produced by Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne (opening July 20) and Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (where it will be on view from October 29), it will later travel to Kunst-Werke Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin (summer 2017). 

The five-part interview weaves together a discussion of his recent works ‘Nauru, Notes from a Cretaceous World’ (2009), ‘A World Undone’ (2012), ‘Progress in Action’ (2013), ‘Ancient Lights’ (2015) and his newest piece ‘Limits to Growth’ (2016), to be premiered at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). Part of an ongoing dialogue with Mangan, it developed from a public conversation event at Chisenhale Gallery, London on 7 July 2015. 

‘Limits to Growth’ references a 1972 report commissioned by the Club of Rome that analysed a computer simulation of the Earth and human systems: the consequences of exponential economic and population growth given finite resource supplies. The overlapping themes and flows of energies in the five of Mangan’s projects discussed in the interview might be read as an echo of the modelling and systems dynamics used by the simulation to try and better understand the limits of the world’s ecosystems. 

Mangan is presenting ‘Ancient Lights’ (2015) at his Mexico City gallery LABOR on April 22, a work co-commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery in London and Artspace in Sydney.


In conversation between Latitudes and Nicholas Mangan, Chisenhale Gallery, 7 July 2015. Photos: Manuela Barczewski.

RELATED CONTENT:
 2016, catalogue, editorial, interview, Melbourne, Nicholas Mangan, Publication
Stacks Image 39


Graphic communication of the exhibition 'José Antonio Hernández-Díez. I Will Fear No Evil' at MACBA

 Mon, Apr 11 2016
Exhibition announcement sent via email.

The invitation for the solo exhibition "I Will Fear No Evil" by José Antonio Hernández-Díez has been created by the Barcelona-Newark-Paris-San Francisco-New York graphic design studio Mucho, responsible for the visual communication of this and other exhibitions at MACBA. 

Departing from the religious and technological references included in Hernández-Díez's exhibition, the cross appears like a distorted televisual aparition.

The design was later applied on the large glass vitrine that frames the entrance to the Convent dels Àngels, respecting the presence of two video pieces also on display in this space: 'La caja' (1991) and 'Vas pa'l cielo y vas llorando' (1992), videoprojections that remain lit until midnight.
 
 (Above) Draft design and (following) tests on the windows, vinyls being applied and final look of the entrance to the exhibition space at Plaça dels Àngels.

 (Above) Façade by day and façade by night (below, photo by Miquel Coll, MACBA).
 Finally, a smaller vinyl is also applied at c/ dels Àngels, easily viewed when visitors come from c/ Elisabets.

Related Content:
 2016, design, graphic communication, invitation, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, latitudes, MACBA, making of, Solo show
Stacks Image 39


The story behind José Antonio Hernández-Díez's 'San Guinefort' (1991)

 Tue, Mar 29 2016
 Pages with the story behind Plaça dels Àngels.

When giving a presentation or tour of an exhibition or project we have worked on, we are often asked how the project emerged – if there was a particular trigger or point of origin. In the case of José Antonio Hernández-Díez’s exhibition currently on view at MACBA (until June 26, 2016), our approach was a familiar one to us – we started by both delving in-depth in researching the artists previous works while at the same time looking into the history of the venue where the exhibition was going to take place.

 We are very fond of a book that has been in our library for many years – 'Histories and legends of Barcelona' by Joan Amades (Edicions 62). This two-volume tome gathers some of the myths behind Barcelona place names and includes the tales behind both familiar and obscure buildings, streets and monuments in the city. The story that most captivated us concerned the chapel of the Convent dels Àngels, and it is recounted in the essay we wrote to accompany the exhibition (published as the Quaderns Portàtils #32 – pdfs available in Spanish and English and epub in Spanish only). It goes as follows:

(...) "Outside the doorway of the deconsecrated sixteenth-century church that formed part of Barcelona’s Convent dels Àngels there once stood the stone figure of a dog, standing upright on its hind legs. Two separate legends account for its existence, as recorded by ethnologist and folklorist Joan Amades in the 1950s. A boorish man would routinely interrupt the services and torment the church congregation, it is said. He was punished by being turned into a dog. The other version states that the canine figure commemorates the thwarting of a robbery. The church once displayed an image of Saint Roch, the patron saint of dogs, accompanied by a hound. It is said that the prospective thieves were frightened away as the image miraculously began to bark. (The supernatural mythology of the chapel does not cease there – in 1627 an image of Christ began to sweat blood profusely.) 

Sculpture of a dog once stood in front of La Capella dels Àngels, the church of the Convent dels Àngels.
 
Parallel to this, we started looking at Hernández-Díez’s earliest works and investigating his pieces in MACBA’s collection. We found that the museum had his 1991 work San Guinefort on long-term loan in their collection, but it had never been exhibited. As narrated in our essay: 

(...) "that José Antonio Hernández-Díez (Caracas, Venezuela, 1964) had already been dealing with Catholic belief and superstition in his art – and moreover, specifically addressing canine veneration – is much more than an uncanny coincidence for his exhibition at MACBA’s Convent dels Àngels in 2016."  

The legend behind Saint Guinefort is one of the more obscure intersections of Catholic history and folk tradition:

(...) "Writing around 1260, the Inquisitor and Dominican friar Étienne de Bourbon related his investigation into the veneration of Saint Guinefort in the Dombes region of France. He discovered that this supposed Saint was, in fact, a dog. The account he disclosed was that a knight and his wife had one day left their greyhound Guinefort to guard their baby. When they returned to the castle they found the cradle empty and Guinefort covered in blood. Assuming it had murdered the baby, the knight hastily killed the dog, only later realising his error. Guinefort had in fact fought off a snake in order to save the child, who was found unharmed. Guinefort was buried unceremoniously in the forest outside the castle walls. Hearing of the martyred dog, local people began to believe in its power to protect children and began to bring their sick infants to the grave. Étienne de Bourbon was horrified to discover the strength of the superstition that had taken root. Children were being left overnight by Guinefort’s grave in the belief that he would rid them of spirits, and several babies had died as a consequence. Defending the orthodoxy of the church, the friar had the heretical remains of the greyhound dug up and destroyed, razed the forest and outlawed the canine cult, yet there is evidence of its persistence into the nineteenth century. The episode is worth recounting in detail, as previous accounts of it in relation to Hernández-Díez’s work have been misleading."


Coinciding with our research period, in August 2014 we happened to be travelling near Lyon, France, and took the opportunity to visit to the Bois de Saint Guinefort in the Dombes region, where the story of Saint Guinefort emerged (and where the dog-saint may still be venerated every 22nd August, despite the regional tourism office assuring us the festival day was no longer celebrated). 

Somewhere on the road between Villars-les-Dombes and Châtillon-sur-Chalaronne one can, with the help of a tagged flickr photo and GPS, find a sign, as seen below, which briefly narrates these peculiar events from the 13th Century. 



Related Content:
 2016, behind the scenes, e-books, Exhibition, José Antonio Hernández-Díez, latitudes, looking back, MACBA, microhistory, Publication, research
Stacks Image 39


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
Stacks Image 39


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
Stacks Image 39



Cookies Advice: We use cookies. If you continue browsing, we consider that you accept their use. Aviso de Cookies: Utilizamos cookies. Si continua navegando, consideramos que acepta su uso.