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Upstairs at Starkwhite

For those of you who missed Jin Jiangbo's exhibition Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai, three works from the exhibition along with one new image are showing in our upstairs spaces.

Image: Jin Jiangbo: Shanghai Ye! Shanghai: Engine Plan; Shanghai Bund on the day of 1 May 2009, C-type photograph

On Saturday night the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery celebrated its 40th Anniversary with exhibitions and events inside and outside the gallery. They included the opening of two new exhibitions – John Reynolds, NOMADOLOGY [loitering with intent] and Len Lye Trilogy, which includes two recently reconstructed sculptures, Zebra (1965) and Rotating Harmonic (1959). The outdoor events included a projection and soundscape by Tim Gruchy.

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's 4Oth Anniversary

Over the past four decades the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to working with contemporary art. Today the gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with a new series of exhibitions and an art party featuring events inside and outside the gallery. We'll post images of the occasion on Monday.

Jae Hoon Lee at The New Dowse

Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Tracks (2010), Installed at The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ

A new category of anxiety for art shippers

Here's a frightening scenario for artists and galleries moving art around the world: the possibility that airline employees in the States could open art crates to search them in the way baggage is often checked now. The US Transport Security Administration has mandated that beginning on 1 August, all items shipped as cargo on commercial passenger plans will have to go through airline security screening.

Since news of the requirement began to spread last year many large museums have enrolled in a federal programme that allows them to create screening facilities within their own buildings, thereby minimising the risk of being re-screened by airline staff. Many large art shipping companies have also become certified to screen and securely pack art themselves.

While art shipping experts say the burden of the new regulations will fall more heavily on dealer galleries and others working in the art market, they may also impact on art museums. Even the faint possibility of an airline inspector opening a crate and unpacking/repacking it may be enough to cause collectors to think twice about lending artworks for exhibitions.

You can read a NYT article on the new regulation here.

Leonhard Emmerling to head up visual arts at the Goethe Institut

Today Leonhard Emmerling steps down from his position as director of AUT's St Paul St Gallery to take up a new position as Head of Visual Arts at the Goethe Institut's Munich office. Leonhard's time at St Paul St was particularly successful and he will be missed. However, we wish him all the best as he takes on the challenge of running the world-wide visual arts programmes for the Goethe Institut.

Image: Philip Dadson, Uncharted Crossing (1990), presented in the exhibition Philip Dadson Video Works at St Paul St in 2006

Alicia Frankovich at ACCA

This link takes you to an article on Alicia Frankovich's installation Medea, one of seven new works commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne) for its NEW010 exhibition, which runs to 23 May 2010.

Art fairs fronting up

Images (from the top): Shanghai Exhibition Centre, venue for ShContemporary; Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, venue for ART HK; Art Beijing; Pacific Design Centre, venue for Art Los Angeles Contemporary; Art Basel Miami Beach

Art fairs fronting up

Images (from the top): Art Basel, Switzerland; Art Cologne; Art Forum Berlin; Frieze Art Fair, London; The Armory Show, New York

FREE

Last year Irit Rogoff proposed that Goldsmiths, University of London, develop a free academy adjacent to their institution and call it Goldsmiths Free. She says the reactions were largely either puzzled – “What would we get out of it? Why would we want to do it?” – or horrified – “How would it finance itself?” And that no one asked what might be taught or discussed within it and how that might differ from the intellectual work that is done within conventional fee-charging, degree-giving, research-driven institutions. She says: “…and that of course was the point, that it would be different, not just in terms of redefining the point of entry into the structure (free of fees and previous qualifications) or the modus operandi of the work (not degree-based,unexamined, not subject to the state's mechanisms of monitoring and assessment), but also that the actual knowledge would be differently situated within it.” This link takes you to an e-flux article by Rogoff exploring the difference in the knowledge itself, its nature, its status and its affect.

Image: title page of the Free International University's event programme for Documenta 7

1st Anniversary

The Starkwhite blog is one year old today with a track record of 282 posts, 16,842 visits from 869 cities in 82 countries and 27,230 page views. Thanks to our readers for following our blog.

Natasha Conland on the 4th Auckland Triennial

Curator Natasha Conland discusses the 4th Auckland Triennial Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon here.

Coming up at Starkwhite

Boris Dornbusch's exhibition Phantom limb construction sites opens at Starkwhite on 30 March and runs to 1 May 2010.

Alicia Frankovich at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Alicia Frankovich is one of seven artists invited to make a new work in ACCA's annual commissioning exhibition new010. This year ACCA has joined with Nexus Designs who have turned the galleries into seven individual sites. Each of the artists has been given a site and invited to respond to it. new010 opens at ACCA tonight and runs from 18 March to 23 May 2010. Frankovich is also represented in the 4th Auckland Triennial Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon which runs to 20 June 2010.

Performance art groomed for museums

Recently more than a hundred artists, curators and scholars met in the boardroom of the Museum of Modern Art to talk about performance and how it can be preserved and exhibited. At the conference table were Marina Abramovic, the performance artist from Belgrade whose retrospective The Artist is Present is currently showing at MoMA and Tino Sehgal whose latest show of 'constructed situations' closed recently at the Guggenheim Museum. Sehgal is also amongst the artists represented in the Auckland Triennial which opened last weekend and runs to 20 June 2010.

In a NYT article Carol Kino says Sehgal's new approach to selling performance art was part of the discussion. He is believed to be the first to have sold the rights to a performance. [MoMA recently purchased an edition of Kiss, a living sculpture that was on loan to the Guggenheim for the recent show.] Abramovic also weighed in with her views on reperformance. In her MoMA show younger performers are re-enacting five of her old pieces. “Reperformance is the new concept, the new idea” she proclaimed at the MoMA workshop. “Otherwise it will be dead as an art form.”

This link takes you to Kino's NYT article on the MoMA workshop. You can also read an earlier post on performance art here.

Image: an Abramovic reperformance enacted in the artist's MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present

Hye Rim Lee at the San Jose Museum of Art

Hye Rim Lee is represented in New Stories from the Edge of Asia: Plastic Life which runs at the San Jose Museum of Art from 13 March to 19 September 2010.

Exhibition curator JoAnn Northrup says: “I am transfixed by Hye RIm Lee's seductive 3-D digital animation, Crystal City, Spun (2008). She toys with the viewer, inviting us into her kingdom of translucent, pulsating spires populated by a winsom dragon, YONG, assorted bunnies, and a curvaceous nymph TOKI. Lee's playfully transgressive vision of a universe of female pleasure is underlined by her disciplined embrace of good design; her forms echo the grace of Brancusi's soaring biomorphic sculptures while her compositions recall the organised splendor of Louise Nevelson. In Korean culture YONG describes the powerful dragon of the sky while TOKI means bunny. Lee–born in Korea but now residing in Auckland and New York–has transformed familiar mythological characters into cybernetic vehicles devoted to female aspiration and desire.

Image: Hye Rim Lee, Crystal City, Spun (2008), video, 3 min 15 sec

Seung Yul Oh: Bogle, Bogle installation views

This link takes you to a review of Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Bogle Bogle at the New Dowse. The exhibition runs to 30 May 2010.

Images: Seung Yul Oh, Bogle Bogle, 2010, installation views The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ, March 2010

Envoy of the voiceless

John Reynolds' double-sided wall of fragments and phrases from The Thousand and One Nights and language and terms from Robert Fisk's mammoth history of the Middle East, The Great War for Civilisation caught the eye of many visitors to The Armory Show, including a senior staff member of Independent Diplomat.

Independent Diplomat is the brainchild of Carne Ross, a former British diplomat who has worked on the Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East Peace Process in a 15 year career. Unhappy with American and British claims that Iraq was developing unconventional weapons, Ross testified in June 2004 at an official enquiry into the British Government's use of intelligence. Two months later, convinced he could no longer work as a mandarin in Britain's foreign service, he resigned. Later he published a book Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite taking the foreign service to task for making “bad decisions in closed rooms” and acting “with little or no consultation of the people in whose name those decisions are made”.

Ross' vision for Independent Diplomat grew out of his disillusionment with the current nature of diplomacy which he says favours the powerful and marginalises smaller, newer or transitional states. He founded Independent Diplomat to provide these governments and groups with high-level diplomatic advice, expertise and assistance to help them make an impact in the closed and complex world of international relations.

Click here to view a short ALJAZEERA documentary on Independent Diplomat.

Image: Carne Ross, founder of Independent Diplomat

The Armory Show: end of the final day

The Armory Show has recorded it's highest attendance ever with more than 60,000 visitors. Predictably the organisers have described it as a resounding success, but so far there have been few independent reviews of the 12th edition of the event. This link takes you to an ARTINFO article on the fair by Sarah Douglas and Andrew Goldstein and John Reynolds' 1001 Nights makes it onto artnet's Noted at The Armory.

Images: The Armory Show, New York, final day, March 2010

The Armory Show: Day 3

The Armory Show: Day 2

1001 Nights at The Armory Show

The collection of death-defying stories known as The Thousand and One Nights is reconfigured in John Reynolds' work as a dark double-sided wailing wall of words, fragments and torn phrases. Like some architectonic Trojan Horse, this 1001 Nights spills a harrowing present-day content quoting language and terms from Robert Fisk's mammoth recent history of the Middle East, The Great War for Civilisation.

1001 Nights is installed at The Armory Show, Starkwhite booth 527, to 7 March 2010.

Images: John Reynolds, 1001 Nights (2010), Starkwhite at The Armory Show, New York, March 2010

The Armory Show Vernissage

The Armory Show, NY

We are at the Armory Show, NY, this week to present 1001 Nights by John Reynolds (Starkwhite, Pier 94, Booth 527). Watch this space for images of the fair.

Image: John Reynolds, 1001 Nights (detail), 2010, acrylic and silver marker on canvas, each block 100 x 100 x 40mm, installation dimensions variable

NY bound

We head to New York tomorrow to participate in The Armory Show. During this time the gallery will be open Monday 1st to Friday 6th from 11.00am to 5.00pm, Saturday 7th from 11.00am to 4.00pm, closed Monday 8th and normal hours from Tuesday 9 March.

Seung Yul Oh: Bogle, Bogle

Seung Yul Oh's Bogle Bogle is showing at The New Dowse until 30 May 2010. We'll post more installation views next week.

Image: Seung Yul Oh, Bogle Bogle (detail), The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ

The World is Not Enough: The Future of Biennials

Just two months into 2010 we have posted reports on four biennales and one triennial in the Asia/Pacific region – the Auckland Triennial, Busan Biennale, Biennale of Sydney, Gwangju Biennale and Singapore Biennale. Clearly the global recession hasn't diminished art-funder enthusiasm for these events.

Curators of biennial events will discuss the future role of expansive international surveys of contemporary art in today's fluctuating political and economic landscape in The Armory Show's Open Forum programme. The panelists in The World is Not Enough: The Future of Biennials are Dan Cameron (co-curator, Prospect New Orleans), Gary Carrion-Murayari (co-curator, 2010 Whitney Biennial), Elizabeth Sussman (co-curator, 1993 Whitney Biennial), Christina Paul (artistic director, third Quadrilateral Biennial, 2009), Trevor Smith (co-curator, Singapore Biennale, 2011) with moderator Katy Siegel, Associate Professor of Art History and Criticsm, Hunter College and contributing editor of Artforum.

We'll post a report on the discussion from New York.

Image: from The Armory Show Website

From the street

The From the street photographs of Starkwhite and Shanghai Ye! Shanghai are by artist Jin Jiangbo.

Artist directs third Singapore Biennale

The artistic director of the third Singapore Biennale, Matthew Ngui, has a lot of experience in the field of biennales, both as a participating artist and more recently as a curator. He was part of curatorial team for the Singapore Biennale in 2008, and has exhibited at the Sao Paulo, Venice and Gwangju biennales in 1996, 2001 and 2002 respectively. Ngui is one of four artists who represented Singapore at its first participation in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and he is also the first Singaporean artist to exhibit at Documenta in Kassel in 1997. Trained in sculpture, Ngui focuses on installation, video, performance, site-specific works and public art.

Ngui brings this background to the forthcoming Singapore Biennale, Open House. He says: “I would like the focus of the Biennale to be on Singapore and other countries as sites, homes and nations, where the role of art is to engage and re-present realities through its unique creative processes that often give new and fresh insights into the spaces we inhabit. Hence on site in Singapore we hope to engage artists with the public as participating and audiences starting from the very process of art making in both private and public spaces.”

Ngui's curatorial team includes Russell Storer, Curator of Asian Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery and Trevor Smith, Inaugural Curator of Contemporary Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts.

Image: Matthew Ngui, Artistic Director, 3rd Singapore Biennale, 6 March – 8 May 2011

Eighth Gwangju Biennale

Tilted 10,000 Lives and directed by Massimiliano Gioni, the Eighth Gwangju Biennale will develop as a sprawling investigation of the relationships that bind people to images and images to people. Gioni says: “The exhibition will engage our obsession with images and our need to create substitutes, effigies, avatars and stand-ins for ourselves and our loved ones. It is this perennial state of iconophilia, this maniacal love of images that we wish to examine in Gwangju.”

The exhibition title is borrowed from Maninbo (10,000 Lives) a yet unfinished 30 volume epic conceived by Korean author Ko Un while imprisoned in 1980 for his participation in the South Korean democratic movement. Held in solitary confinement, as a means to preserve his sanity, Ko envisaged a poem which described every single person he had met throughout his life, including historical figures and fictional characters encountered in literature. Upon his release he began writing the 3,800 poems that compose Maninbo (10,000 Lives), a magnum opus that reads as a personal encyclopedia of humanity. From the Biennale Media release

The Gwangju Biennale runs from 3 September – 7 November 2010.

Image: Eighth Gwangju Biennale masthead

Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai: installation views

The four installation shots of Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai were taken by artist Jin Jiangbo, shown here with his family.

Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai review

You can read a review of Jin Jiangbo's exhibition Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai here.

Image: Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai opening, Starkwhite, photograph by Jin Jiangbo

Grant Stevens: Burst at PICA

PICA (Perth) is presenting a trilogy of video works by Grant Stevens developed in response to his time in Los Angeles. If things Were Different (2009), Crushing (2009) and Really Really (2007) “…oscillate between the fanciful and romantic to the abrasively cynical by drawing on tropes of Hollywood film, advertising or bad day-time TV and purposefully mishandle media devices of editing, framing, cropping, and incorporating text or muzak”. PICA website

The artist who now lives and works between Queensland and California explains that “…unpacking and testing out these ambiguities and ambivalences are what drive me to make art – to try and make works that draw you in while making you feel uncomfortable or unsure about what you are looking at.” Eyeline 2008)

Grant Stevens: Burst runs at PICA until 5 April 2010.

Image: Grant Stevens, If Things Were Different, 2009, digital video, 18 min 17 sec, edition of 5

Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai installation views

Jin Jiangbo's exhibition Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai runs to 20 March 2010. You can read our media release here.

Images: Jin Jiangbo, Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai, installation views, Starkwhite, Auckland, NZ

Dane Mitchell at the Busan Biennale

Artistic director Azumaya Takashi has invited Dane Mitchell to realise a new work for the 2010 Busan Biennale, Living in Evolution (11 September – 20 November 2010). Mitchell is currently artist in residence on the DAAD Berliner Kunstlerprogramm.

Azumaya Takashi is an independent curator known for his experimental approach to exhibitions. He has held curatorial posts at the Setagaya Museum and Mori Museum in Tokyo and was the commissioner of Media_City Seoul 2002 and guest curator for the 2008 Busan Biennale. He is the first non-Korean to direct the Busan Biennale.

This link takes you to the Busan Biennale website.

Image: Busan city

David Elliot unveils highlights of the 17th Biennale of Sydney

As final countdown begins for the Auckland Triennial (it opens 12 March 2010), artistic director David Elliot is unveiling plans for the 17th Biennale of Sydney (12 May – 1 August 2010). Based on the curatorial theme THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age, the Biennale will present artists' works alongside the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, commentators and musicians. Elliot says: “The aim of this Biennale is to bring together work from diverse cultures, at the same time, on the equal playing field of contemporary art, where no culture can assume superiority over any other.” He has also constructed THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE with Sydney's position as an iconic world city in mind and believes biennales should enter into a conversation with the places where they are shown.

The Biennale is also dedicated to the life and continuing influence of Nick Waterlow, one of the first Australian curators to look across the Tasman and open up a long and productive relationship with the NZ art world.

This link takes you to the Biennale website and the list of artists included in THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE.

Image: David Elliot, Director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney, THE BEAUTY OF DISTANCE: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age

Year of the Tiger

This year the Chinese New Year falls on February 14 being the Year of the Tiger. For us it is also the day Jin Jiangbo arrives in Auckland to oversee the installation of his exhibition Shanghai, Shanghai, which opens tomorrow at 5.30pm.

Oh so playful

Seung Yul Oh's Bogle Bogle opens today at The New Dowse. It is the first in a series of five artists' projects commissioned by the art museum for its 2010 programme. You can read the Bogle Bogle media release here.

Image: Seung Yul Oh, Bogle Bogle (detail), The New Dowse, Lower Hutt, NZ