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micaramel · 4 years

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Artist: Thanasis Totsikas

Venue: Akwa Ibom, Athens

Exhibition Title: The Crucifixion of Thanasis Totsikas

Date: June 15, 2020 – July 10, 2020 and September 10, 2020 – October 10, 2020

Curated By: Maya Tounta

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Akwa Ibom, Athens

Press Release:

In 1985 Thanasis painted a depiction of life’s ladder and titled it The stairway of life. In 1988 he made a sculpture in metal with the same title. I found these in the digital archive of his work a few days ago and called him up to ask about them, but he appeared pretty unenthusiastic, so I let it go. This morning as I sat down to write this text – I had a whole outline for it – it wouldn’t come out. I went back to looking at the 80s ladders. We haven’t reproduced them for you here, but just imagine, these are full of dynamism, strength and forward hope. Now it is more than two decades later, and Thanasis has repainted the ladders in a series of drawings he’s now charged with a very different emotion. In the recent works, a Sisyphus-like figure appears carrying a boulder, bent-over, tired, as if about to collapse on the floor. Thanasis has replaced hope with exhaustion, strength and dynamism with unelected perseverance. The transition leaves one with that feeling of never knowing if you’re well or not, though admittedly you remember, at some point, knowing.

Coming to this thought, I remembered something else I came across in the digital archive – a scan of the backside of a postcard on which Thanasis had scribbled something. I couldn’t totally make out what it said so I sent it to him on Messenger, and he wrote back:

“This is what I’ve written”, he said. “I slowly forget all about life’s ladder…we have sour cherry juice here…it seems like my taste comes from my mother’s side of the family”. “This postcard is from a drawing. I must have forgotten about it. I used to send things like that to the house. Sometimes I’d write in the back. This one reminds me of a (Yannoulis) Chalepas drawing.”

If Thanasis hadn’t painted his Crucifixion, I’d never see those images. I kept thinking about that. That they’re real – autobiographical, as he says, but not necessary. There’s an enormity of feeling that comes with that simple realisation, and it’s hard to know how to speak about it when it concerns another person, someone you don’t know, except for a few conversations and the work of course. The work is the testimony. Then there’s the realisation that you’ll never fully access what lies behind it.

In the exhibition, we are showing 200 or so drawings Thanasis has made in the last couple of years. Most of them depict his Crucifixion, he raised on the cross, being taken down and placed in his mother’s arms. I find it hard to look at them. It’s not so much the violence and the suffering that I find difficult but the sheer quantity of them—the relentless repetition of the pain he gave time to sediment. I also fear people might look past these drawings and pass judgment on Thanasis personally for the amount of suffering to which, he has laid claim. I have a feeling Thanasis might have crucified himself to fulfil an advance sentence he’d come to expect from the outside.

In these last few weeks of self-isolation, I looked at the histories of the Crucifixion as Christian Passion, Roman punishment and subject in art and certain things resonated with the work.

The punishment of the Crucifixion Romans would mainly impose on deserters, murderers, traitors and criminals of humble origin. Depending on their social status, Romans used to place convicts at different heights on the pillar of the cross. The higher their situation, the higher they hung. That was both symbolic like in their annual dog crucifying ceremonies, and practical. A way to ensure that different bodies would end up in the stomachs of different animals. It was typical for bodies not taken down quickly to end up as food for vultures while dogs and other wild animals would feed on the legs of those that hung closer to the ground. Also, death by Crucifixion was often slow and rarely solitary. There are accounts of people speaking to each other on the cross for hours, laughing, spitting at spectators, even singing songs in protest. I can see this irreverence in Thanasis’ drawings as well. When I asked him about why he’s painted his Crucifixion, Thanasis said he had turned aggression he once felt for others inwardly towards himself. In an older interview with Kostas Bitopoulos about an exhibition at Epikentro Gallery in Patra, Thanasis had said then: “I didn’t do it to exalt it. I did it so I could rid myself from it.”

In Christianity, the cross is a handle that God’s frail and light body uses to lift the world. According to the philosopher, mystic and political activist Simone Weil, the cross – one’s personal cross, is a needle that pierces the quivering soul that is like scales out of balance to give it stability. The act of piercing, the suffering, the cross, is what allows each of us individually to realise that we are not the centre of the world. It is the breakdown of our sense of self-importance, of our ego, through the painful but necessary realisation that we’re bound to a force of gravity matched only by grace. For Weil, the original question that supposedly remained unanswered – “Why have you forsaken me?” – was responded in silence. For others, it’s never received a response. Thinking about the Armenian women that were nailed alive upon the cross, the words of Scottish painter Craigie Aitchison come to mind. Aitchison, who must have painted thousands of crucifixion scenes during his life, and who never professed to be particularly religious either, when asked about his enduring interest in the subject had said that he considered: “the Crucifixion the most horrific story he’d ever heard and little more; the ganging up against one person; as long as the world exists one should attempt to recall it.” Aitchison was by all accounts, a charming man who lived his life among animals he loved dearly. For some time, he had canaries living in his studio. They’d made their nest inside an old mattress. Once, the police caught him driving with his Bedlington terrier on his shoulder.

Thinking about a sequence of crucifixions across art history almost exclusively painted by men, I realised that seeing myself as a woman I’d never identified with the figure of Christ. I wondered if other female or female-identifying artists had been able to look past such markers of difference in identity and create representations of him in their way.

The first work that came to my mind was a photograph by American photographer Francesca Woodman, Untitled in which Woodman places the Crucifixion inside her home picturing herself as Christ hanging above the door. As Deborah Garcia says about this work, this unusual depiction of the Crucifixion which has a mise-en-scene quality is characterised by a mundane hierophany that is seldom found in common depictions of the Passion. In the 1977 self-portrait On Being an Angel #1, Woodman has placed the camera above her head producing a distorted image where her lower body disappears. The unusual angle Woodman has used to picture herself in this work reminded me of another depiction of the Crucifixion by artist Salvador Dali, Christ of St John of the Cross, 1951. To create this image, Dali employed Hollywood stuntman Russell Saunders to pose for him suspended from an overhead gantry so that he could study the effect of gravity on his body. Woodman’s photograph reminded me of Dali’s painting because of how they both position the viewer in space but seeing both works alongside each other made me aware of a fundamental difference between them. In January of 1981 Woodman’s body was found in a New York morgue as that of an unidentified young woman. According to witnesses, she had fallen off a building that same morning, and the fall had disfigured her face. Woodman struggled with depression for years. That struggle is visible in her photographs permeated by a thick atmosphere of melancholy, albeit her use of motifs and interpretation of symbols such as that of the Crucifixion is singular like pain is singular and at the same time novel. That embodied experience with the affective reach that it has is not present in Dali’s work which is characterised by a formal intention – a stylistic, distanced contouring of the subject.

Woodman’s intimate and embodied approach to showing suffering brings to mind not only the words of Aitchison and Weil who suffered from migraines that kept her in bed for days and who had written about this experience as a basis for her philosophy – but also Ana Mendieta’ work. Mendieta created a series of works in response to the rape and murder of Sara Ann Otten in 1973. In one performance she covered herself in blood recreating the victim’s poses as they were described in newspaper articles. Mendieta has said that all her works are in some sense a personal response to issues she cannot see herself responding to theoretically. Mendieta used blood like it is used in rituals of the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria but did not subscribe to one religion. In her notebook from 1980, she stated: “my art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world”.

Text by Maya Tounta

Thanasis Totsikas (born 1951) lives and works in Nikaia, Larissa. He is a skilled luthier, cutler and autobody-repair technician. This expertness has shaped his artistic practice and has been present in his work since his first solo presentation at Desmos Gallery in 1982. His prolific career has included participations at the Venice Biennale and Documenta. His artworks, expressive of a way of life more than the outcome of vocation, often incorporate objects and materials from his every day as diverse as mud and reeds and a Ducati motorcycle.

Link: Thanasis Totsikas at Akwa Ibom

The post Thanasis Totsikas at Akwa Ibom first appeared on Contemporary Art Daily.

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3jdiKcI

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micaramel · 4 years

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This week’s featured exhibitions:

Silke Otto-Knapp at Galerie Buchholz

Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM

Ben Echeverria at Parapet Real Humans

Isabella Ducrot at Mezzanin

Marie Angeletti at Carlos/Ishikawa

Marie Laurencin at Galerie Buchholz

Michael E. Smith at Andrew Kreps

Līva Rutmane at Kim?

Sally Späth, Hanna Hur at u’s

Kayode Ojo at Praz-Delavallade

Willa Nasatir at Chapter NY

Gerasimos Floratos at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Barbara Kasten at Hannah Hoffman hosted by Kristina Kite

Rodney McMillian at Petzel

Jenna Bliss at FELIX GAUDLITZ

Barbara Bloom at Capitain Petzel

Sofu Teshigahara at Nonaka Hill

Jan Dibbets at Konrad Fischer

Nick Mauss at 303

Özgür Kar at Édouard Montassut

Have an excellent week.

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/2WO4UoZ

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micaramel · 4 years

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Artists: Lutz Bacher, Renée Green, Arthur Jafa, Josh Kline, Eric N. Mack, Cady Noland, Lorraine O’Grady, Sondra Perry, Cameron Rowland, Wu Tsang, Danh Vo

Venue: Watergate, Washington D.C.

Exhibition Title: Exodus

Date: October 26, 2019 – January 25, 2020

Curated By: Paul Pfeiffer

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of the artists and Bortolami, New York. Photos by Kristian Laudrup.

Press Release:

Bortolami is pleased to announce the seventh Artist/City project, Paul Pfeiffer/Washington, D.C. A group exhibition at the Watergate curated by Pfeiffer, Exodus brings together a selection of artworks – primarily found-object sculptures – to investigate the collapsed boundary between representation and reality that now defines everyday life. It includes works by Lutz Bacher, Renée Green, Arthur Jafa, Josh Kline, Eric N. Mack, Cady Noland, Lorraine O’Grady, Sondra Perry, Cameron Rowland, Wu Tsang and Danh Vo.

The show explores the question: How can an existing object be a mask? The artists in the exhibition draw materials from daily life, distilling them down through processes of selection, sampling, editing, and arranging. The resulting artworks take the form of everyday gestures and appearances, and yet their installation within the stripped-down setting of the white cube renders them alien. On first encounter, they appear like fragments of reality isolated and objectified through their enshrinement as art objects. They radiate a presence and pathos akin to that of living beings, or forensic clues from the scene of a crime. While their material presence may speak volumes, they also invoke their former context. They resist easy explanation, refusing to identify. Their uncanny status contradicts their seeming familiarity, so that in the end they become like mirrors, merely reflecting what we want to see. Which begs the question: who or what is behind the mirror? And what is their true purpose?

This game of seemingly simple appearances and hidden motives is nothing new, dating back at least to Duchamp’s ready-mades a hundred years ago. But then context is everything. What was once called trompe l’oeil, then appropriation, then simulacrum, then sampling, has proliferated exponentially along with handheld screens and social media, reaching into every aspect of public and private life, ubiquitous to the point that it no longer has a name. In the era of personal branding strategies, algorithmic pinpoint marketing, and other self-encapsulating feedback loops, the line between human personality and image machine has become indistinguishable.

Society today is a stadium, a circus, and a hall of mirrors. Everything can be turned into a widely distributed image, from the most prosaic customs and routines, to human and environmental tragedy, to political discourse, to intimate encounter. Violence nor pleasure are less real, but our state of war is mediated through images. If data-driven algorithms can interpret personal preference from clicks and eye movements, then customize a feed predicting our appetites as consumers, how then to discern free will from manufactured habit? If A.I. sets the ontological horizon beyond the limits of human perception, how can we be sure that the images we see are real and not a customized projection?

This is the ontological Exodus, the voyage we’re on as we navigate the perverse spaces and temporalities of global capitalism.. But while the technologies are new, the state of cognitive dissonance is not. The uncanny has been fundamental to human experience from the very beginning. In the current moment of sensory overload we are reminded that the Exodus was never simply a geographic journey, it was always ontological – a journey to liberate human consciousness – and has been ongoing for millennia.

To amplify the strategic selection of artworks in the exhibit, the choice of the Watergate Building as setting is meant to communicate strongly and wordlessly the urgent context of contemporary societal transformations to which this project responds.

Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966 in Honolulu, HI) lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, MUSAC León, Spain, the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. He was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany. Pfeiffer’s works have also been included in international, large-scale exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, Biennale of Sydney, Busan Biennale, Cairo Biennale, and Whitney Biennial. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum.

Artist/City is Bortolami Gallery’s experimental programming initiative that pairs an artist with an American city. Taking place in unconventional settings for longer durations than the standard gallery exhibition, these site-responsive projects grant artists freedom to present their work according to their own creative vision. Previous projects include Daniel Buren/Miami, Eric Wesley/St. Louis, Tom Burr/New Haven and Barbara Kasten/Chicago. Ann Veronica Janssens/Baltimore is ongoing. Paul Pfeiffer/Washington, D.C was developed in conjunction with Denniston Hill’s thematic program for 2017-2022 (https://www.dennistonhill.org/exodus-and-the-ethics-of-uncertainty).

Link: “Exodus” at Watergate

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2uQRgFI

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micaramel · 6 years

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Hotel Igman was designed by architect Ahmed Dzuvic in the early 80’s. It was built in Mt.Ingman for the Winter Olympic Games held in Sarajevo in 1984. The hotel is located at an elevation of 1000 meters. Laying on a surface of 5102 square meters, it had 172 guest rooms, a restaurant, kitchen, cinema and a swimming pool. The hotel was destroyed in a fire in 1993, during the war in Bosnia. Follow me on: www.facebook.com/xiaoyangphotography/ Instagram: inhiu https://flic.kr/p/27RSE14

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micaramel · 6 years

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Artist: Ida Ekblad

Venue: XYZ collective, Tokyo

Exhibition Title: I’m four years old

Date: March 18 – April 15, 2018

Curated by: Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles/Paris

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Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of XYZ collective, Tokyo

Press Release:

XYZCollective and Freedman Fitzpatrick are proud to present Ida Ekblad’s first solo exhibition in Asia, I’m four years old.

Put it on record

Lac insects

Italian needle tin

Cigarette card and porch

Nipponophone sleeve details

Vocalion Record and sleeve

Puritan Record and sleeve

Domino Record and sleeve

Etched reverse of one sided record

Indian Record and sleeve

Show off pied piper sales

Sands of time, man and beast,

Golden Pyramid needle tin

Notice on reverse of

Lyric Sleeve

Disco Gramophone record and sleeve

Ida Ekblad’s practice incorporates painting and sculpture but also poetry, filmmaking and performance. The Norwegian artist has collaborated with multiple artists and musicians. Her sources of inspiration include artist figures such as Odilon Redon, Joy Orbison, Lina Bo Bardi, the acting of Gena Rowlands and the writing of Haldis Moren Vesaas and Inger Hagerup.

Her high-energy paintings are superabundant, retinal, corporal, pushy and highlight trends and techniques often seen as outdated or even tacky such as puffy paint, rose pattern kitchen towels, run-of-the-mill graffiti, steam punk, b-girl aesthetic or airbrushing. Colors work as both decor and aggressor, forced onto the canvas and combined with the mysterious and druggy poetry of her titles.

A sense of freedom exudes from the vibrant work of Ekblad who dislikes to plan, organize, rationalize or iron things out. Ekblad rather looks for ‘hunchy’ moments of peak eyes, peak ears, peak everything when working.

Link: Ida Ekblad at XYZ collective

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/2JpZes6

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