Category: zone-events

Bayrle

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Thomas Bayrle

Madonna City Madonna Golden Nugget Club

Series and reproduction in Thomas Bayrle’s work serve as markers of overproduction and the gradual erasure of a qualitative appreciation of our environment. It reflects a contemporary movement mirroring the idea of progress developed in the West since the 18th century. Bayrle traces the age of the machine back to the 13th century, showcasing car engines with a certain admiration, comparing their mechanics to Gothic cathedrals, and evoking the rhythmic humming of scattered monks in medieval Europe.

For Anthropocène Monument, Thomas Bayrle presents a series where religious imagery intertwines with symbols of the mechanization of the world. In the four screen prints submitted by the artist for the project, the drapery of a Gothic Madonna transforms into highways.

BIO

Thomas Bayrle was born in Berlin in 1937 and now lives and works in Frankfurt. He was a permanent lecturer at the Städelschule in Frankfurt from 1975 to 2002. His work has been shown in some of the world’s most important exhibitions, such as documenta 3, 6, and 13 in Kassel, Germany (1964, 1977, 2012), and the 50th and 53rd Venice Biennales (2003, 2009). He has held major solo exhibitions at MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2016); Lenbachhaus, Munich (2016), and has received numerous awards and prizes, including the Cologne Art Prize (2000) and the Prix Arts Electronica, Linz (1995).  Bayrle is best known for his ‘super-forms’, large images composed of iterations of smaller cell-like images. Humorous, satirical, and often political, his paintings, sculptures, and digital images are commentaries on the systems of control and domination in a rapidly globalizing economy, via allegorical references to traffic patterns, mass production, and the generic designs of popular goods such as wrappers and wallpaper. 

Relevant Themes: extraction, transport, infrastructure

Category: Events

Phinthong

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Pratchaya Phinthong

A Sketch for a Monument to the Anthropocene

“-A Solid concrete dimension of Length 84 inches, width 28 inches, and height 23 inches. Standing vertically

-Every side covered by Obsidian.

-Embed randomly number of sliced polished Chinga Meteorites.

A representation of space and time-collided between reading the past through the future.

The two different contradictory perspectives, appear as a mirror: an idea for a monument that allow our projections depart asunder one from the other once we face ourselves to it.

Chinga meteorite is an iron meteorite found in 1913 in Tuva near Chinga river in Russia, estimate that it fell about 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. The Chinga Meteorite was found in the Chinga river bed in Tanna Tuva, Turvinskaya, Russia in 1911 (north of present day Mongolia). Chingas are arare type of iron meteorite known as an ataxite. Ataxites have a very high nickel content. This high nickel content results in a lack of any visible Widmanstatten pattern, and Chinga meteorites polish into a beautiful mirror like finish

Obsidian is a natural volcanic glass, which was widely used during prehistoric times as cutting implements probably because it is shiny and attractive, and can be worked easily into implements with razor-sharp edges. but also use for scrying, a tool seeing into the future and past.

Obsidian is formed through relatively fast cooling of high-silica lava domes and flows that are usually very homogeneous in chemical composition. The geological occurrence of obsidian is typically very limited and its homogeneous chemical composition is often highly characteristic of a particular source. Its relatively limited occurrence made it a valuable item of trade or exchange during prehistoric times. Although obsidian artifacts are brittle and have a short use-life, they are highly durable and can be found in archaeological sites over thousands of years old. As such, obsidian serves as an excellent material for studies in prehistoric sourcing, trade, or exchange.

Wooden box is made of any possible plywood at dimension L84”xW28”xH23”“

Artist Bio

Pratchaya Phinthong (born 1974, Thailand) lives and works in Bangkok. Recent solo exhibitions include Pratchaya Phinthong, gb agency, Paris; Sleeping Sickness, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Rennes (both 2012); Give More Than You Take, GAMeC (Galeria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea), Bergamo (2011) and CAC Brétigny (2010). Group exhibitions include Materials, Money and Crisis, MUMOK, Vienna; I Know You, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (both 2013); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; The Ungovernables, New Museum Triennial, New York; Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction, Taipei Biennial (all 2012); Until it Makes Sense, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and How to Work (More for) Less, Kunsthalle Basel (both 2011).

Themes: human, agency, extinction

Category: Events

Nakaya

Posted on by Nathan Jones
https://livelancsac-my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/jonesn6_lancaster_ac_uk/EUgF9aJDyUlMhHR9Y9YZLvkBGzQoxMJf3ewqLW6AH6FZig?e=Izgrom

Fujiko Nakata

Cloud Installation #07240 Standing Cloud

a fog sculpture poetically placed near a silver birch grove.

“I create a stage for nature to express itself freely … I am a fog sculptor, but I do not try to shape it. The atmosphere is the mould and the wind is the chisel.” 

Artist Bio

Fujiko Nakaya is a pioneer of installation and video art in Japan. As a member of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) that promoted a new interdisciplinary approach towards art, technology and the environment,  she opened Japan’s first video art gallery in Tokyo in 1980 and has since collaborated with renowned choreographers and artists including Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg and Bill Viola. In 1970 she created the world’s first fog sculpture at the Pepsi Pavilion, Expo ‘70 in Osaka and subsequently developed her unique immersive installations around the world.

Themes: human, agency, extinction

Category: Events

Gusmão & Pedro Paiva

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Falling Tree

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva

Falling Tree describes a practice of wild and motorized harvesting that the duo wishes to accompany with a divine fictive order:

“Be fruitful and multiply and I will give your leader a chainsaw. Cut down the trees, make piles and planks of wood, and with them you can make two-storey houses that will be eaten by insects. When this happens, another tree will have grown where you desecrated the first one with the machine. You will be able to cut down this other tree and sell the planks because you have to buy food and subsistence. And because all humans are orphans, there is no truth in the world. You have to hunt down these fantasies and transform all raw materials into useful things, because in the end, Paradise is an invention; what exists is nothing but an aggressive flimsy lack of the meaning of existence; and since I have abandoned you, first invent that which allows you to desecrate everything that can be sacred, earth and sky, nail and hammer”.  

Artist Bio

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, both born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1979 and 1977 respectively, are Portuguese artists whose collaborative practice spans film, installation, sculpture, and photography. They delve into themes such as perception, time, and existential inquiries. Employing analog film techniques, they create enigmatic narratives blurring reality and fiction. One notable series includes “hypnotic” films, where ordinary scenes become mesmerizing through manipulation of light, sound, and motion. Their art has been showcased internationally in museums, galleries, and biennials, with participation in events such as the Venice Biennale and documenta.

Themes: extraction, transport, infrastructure

Category: Events

Balkin

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Amy Balkin

Technosol Library

Technosols are soils that are more likely to be contaminated than other soils, and whose “properties and pedogenesis are dominated by their technical origin.” 

Anyone impacted by the production of technogenous soils may contribute a sample to the library.

Each soil sample will form a research volume existing across two sites:

  1. As housed in the library proposed for Gallery 8 (see image) 

and

  1. In situ with the perimeter to be designated by the contributor.

The site where soil has been drawn will be inscribed with a plaque, perimeter boundary, cement cap or other appropriate marker, depending on the specific hazards of the site. 

Prototype submissions might include spolic technosols from Francistown in Botswana, Al-Fe-humus soils impacted by sulphur dioxide and heavy metals from copper-nickel smelters in the Kola Subarctic, Russia, or colombite and tantalite (coltan) pegmatite-soil mixtures from Gatumba, Rwanda.

Guidelines for safe storage and handling of the volumes will be developed, owing to the hazards of shipping, handling, viewing, and storing toxic, infectious, and radioactive materials.

“Technosols comprise a new RSG and combine soils whose properties and pedogenesis are dominated by their technical origin. They contain a significant amount of artefacts (something in the soil recognizably made or extracted from the earth by humans), or are sealed by technic hard rock (material created by humans, having properties unlike natural rock). They include soils from wastes (landfills, sludge, cinders, mine spoils and ashes), pavements with their underlying unconsolidated materials, soils with geomembranes and constructed soils in human-made materials. Technosols are often referred to as urban or mine soils. They are recognized in the new Russian soil classification system as Technogenic Superficial Formations.”

Artist Bio

Amy Balkin, an American artist based in San Francisco and a Stanford University alumna, challenges conventional notions of the public domain through her interdisciplinary practice. Her work combines research and social critique to explore human interactions with social and material landscapes. Notable projects include “Invisible-5,” an audio commentary on land use along the San Francisco-Los Angeles highway corridor, investigating environmental justice issues. Balkin’s “Public Smog” challenges current laws on property ownership and pollution, aiming to expose their limitations. Additionally, her ongoing project, “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting,” collects items from places threatened by climate change, offering a global account of shared experiences. Through these endeavors, Balkin seeks to create a physical shared space with society while addressing pressing environmental and social concerns.

Themes: data, information, cartography

ruins, waste, technofossils

Category: Archives

Autogena and Portway

Posted on by Nathan Jones

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway

Untitled Superorganism

The viewer first encounters an strange, slightly acidic, smell as they enter the gallery. There is a dark circle on the floor. As you approach the circle you realise it consists of hundreds of thousands of dead ants.

A neraby screen shows a video which has been filmed in the gallery during the process of installing the exhibition – the video describes the phenomenon of an ant mill.

“In a spiral of ants, thousands of ants walk in a circle, in a ceremonial procession, until that they stop exhausted, sometimes dead. One hypothesis is that this phenomenon is simply an evolutionary quirk, a flaw in the ingenious pheromone-based system that governs the complex social behaviors and hierarchy of an ant colony. But who knows, maybe they choose this suicidal ritual, maybe this is their Stonehenge.”

Artist Bio

Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, a collaborative duo, create innovative artworks that delve into complex socio-political and environmental issues through film, installation, and participatory art. Their projects, such as “Kuannersuit; Kvanefjeld” which explores the impacts of a proposed mineral mine in Greenland, and “Black Shoals; Dark Matter” which visualizes financial markets, engage audiences in critical dialogues about contemporary challenges.

Themes: human, agency, extinction

Category: Events