Exhibition and screening of Pablo Marte
"Pretty Woman"
Wednesday, Jan 25 till Feb 19th
Pretty Woman und andere Geschichten, ein Film mit Alexander Kluge (Pretty Woman and other stories, a film with Alexander Kluge)
64’ 15’’ - Color / B&N / Sound - 2011
German, English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Russian
with Spanish subtitles
“A comedy in six parts full of excitement, suspense, logic, cruelty and madness like the fairy tales we tell children to help them through life until death”
“When I was a little girl my mama used to lock me in the attic when I was bad, which was pretty often. And I would pretend I was a princess trapped in a tower by a wicked queen.
And then suddenly this knight on a white horse with these colors flying would come charging up and draw his sword.
And I would wave.
And he would climb up the tower and rescue me.
But never in all the time that I had this dream did the knight say to me:
“Come on, baby, I’ll put you up in a great condo”.
(From the screenplay of Pretty Woman, by J.F. Lawton)
The film start from a premise of fiction: how would “Pretty Woman” (the famous movie with Julia Roberts) be, if it had been made by the German filmmaker Alexander Kluge?: Surely it would have been darker, and more ironic, chaotic and fragmented, than the original. But also a way to think about what was wrong before, between and after the Reunification of Germany.
In a conversation with Heiner Müller, Alexander Kluge asked him to say what kind of thing, animal, job, whatever... could Deutschland be. Heiner Müller answered: “just a pretty woman”.
Maybe it´s such a small world, just a coincidence, or maybe not. The first Pretty Woman was released in 1990, between the fall of the Berlin Wall - November 1989- and German Reunification, on October 3rd 1990. So, the main character, the pretty woman, who is played by Julia Roberts, has here an allegorical function and can be read in several ways. She can refer to a country, according the words of Heiner Müller, or also to the working-class, (she is a worker, a prostitute, undertaking the kind of work that the Left has excluded from their remit). Her circumstances represent the decadence of the class struggle and the entrance of the entire working class to consumerist society with its consumer worries and consumer happiness. Therefore, as historical context, in the film, the 90’s play the role of a black, broken mirror, in which the reflections provide the link with the consumer dimension of human relations... In this allegorical sense, she could be also a building - a Hotel, a 100 unit housing project, apartment blocks in soviet style, maybe a skyscraper or a great condo- but, definitely, a building... slated for demolition.
Although, of course, that was also the end of the 20th Century.
Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela
"The Springs of the flood"
Opening on the 25th of November at 20:00, on display until the 17th of December
"For this exhibition at Matador Projekt Raum we are presenting the first draft of a new chapter from our ongoing work entitled "Gradations of Time Over a Plane". This project focuses on the reflection and interpretation of the notion of Time, both as a symbolic dimension of reality and also as an abstract concept that relates to something which is non-material and that 'precedes materiality'. It is being constituted in chapters, reflections and articulations from the experience given by the field work (developed in different geographical contexts), combined with the interpretation and research of various perspectives on the relation between Man and the passing of time.
With "Springs of the Flood" we want to devise a video installation that mirrors the problematization of the present waves of questioning and reformulation, that are taking place in several places around the world, establishing a relation between two main axis of reflection: The myth of the Deluge and the unfolding of reality."
Nicolas Wollnik and Georg Parthen
"Sculptural Divide"
Friday, November 4 - Opening 20:00
In their 2-person show "sculptural divide" Nicolas Wollnik and Georg Parthen present new and recent works. Despite their different processes and treatment of the photographic medium both artists share common strategies in in claiming and transforming spatial and sculptural qualities in their work.
Nicolas Wollnik was born in 1978 in Leverkusen. Georg Parthen was born 1977 in Wiesbaden. They studied in Essen at the Folkwang School of Art and currently run the project space Minken & Palme.
Antonio R. Montesinos
"Inopia CRG: Case 0"
6th October
The suggested intervention belongs to the series I define as inopias, which consists of the recreation of different urban models in the form of scale models and dioramas.
When planning the representation of a certain space, a diagram, cartography or a diorama we usually pursue to represent reality. The series Inopias poses something very different as it tries to use these types of representation in order to stage and restore possible fictions. Such fictions do not attempt to build up ideal utopias or models where to self-reflect, but subjective micro fictions: personal ways of seeing reality. Thereby a little scene is posed on each Diorama, a small narrative fiction combining both real and made up data.
On this particular occasion, we attempt to work from the layout of Cañada Real Galiana, a large, illegal settlement of sixteen kilometers and 40,000 residents from four different ethnic communities, located in the area around Madrid. The interest for this illegal settlement comes from some models of town construction that can be found there, which are likely to be called emergent or bottom-up and cast doubt upon the traditional approach to urban planning.
JODI
"Max Payne Library"
5th August - 3rd September
"Max Payne Library"
5th August - 3rd September
Very different from computer games and their flat sight, the violence of games like Doom or MAx Payme as sceneries that experimented in a sober way the concept of virtual reality developed in the 90s surprised the adults themselves for the invitation that it would send as introducing themselves as psicokillers, with their own tricks and give-a-final-shot-from-close-to-finish with it. But well, don't take ourselves wrong, it was fun!
The piece presented by the team collective JODI in Altes Finanzamt talks about the universe of Max Payne and search engines with a comic format. From the texts wherefrom the games emerge, one looks for a series of photos and make sound recording. How would be reality without the parameters that come out from the videogames. Relax, and hold yourselves to the armchair, and enjoy the ultra violence.
Javier Fresneda
Stamina (restoration ruin)
Wednesday, 8th - 19th of June.
Stamina is an artistic research process about architecture and heritage, and its reuse from pseudo-vandalic exercises, false archeology and outsider exploration sites.
Video Screening by Greta Alfaro:
- In Ictu oculi
- In Praise of the Beast
Saturday, 4th of June
Jeleton
(text, vinyl record)
performance + opening
Turntable Piece n. 5
Friday, 13th of May, at altes finanzamt
The artistic team Jeleton makes annotations on cultural consensus through drawing, performance, music or writing. The term turntable is for a vinyl record player but also for a revolving table or a turn alternator. Their "turntable pieces" are exercises on how to perform a vinyl record, how can
be reactivated the listening or receiving situation of a prerecorded message. Talking to the records, reading texts to them, manipulating them through scratch.
www.jeleton.com
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Sara Pereira
CIRCLES FLUIDS RESISTANCE WIND DESERT WE YOU HANDS CONSTRUCTION DESTRUCTION AND THE SPACE BETWEEN
Friday, April 15th
Some experiences and thoughts about our surrounding reality, with focus on human's "construction" and "understanding" processes. Thoughts from a personal and intimate sphere which reflect, on another scale, sociological and existential concerns on the relations individual-collective, order-emergence, creation-collapse, development-decay, power-resistance.
It´s not something to understand, rather to pass through, consume and expel.
As many different meanings as there are existing people.
(If it is not about this, it is about something else)
Music
// Referents Playlist
// Une Distraction (25 min)
Experimotional three piece that likes to believe they´re a fantasy, non-existent, while producing some sort of 'zartcore' .
Guitar & Vocals - Grinni Stangner
Drums - Alix "El Tornado"
Electronics / Real time sampling - Pedro André
// Fallout Boy (Audiomassive) - Mashing up records
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Ursula Böckler
"ALDI IN AMERICA"
Friday, April 8th
Aldi in america
in the early nineties i traveled several times to america: north, middle and south america. i met friends, fell in love, cruised around. i took a lot of black & white photos and color slides. most of the time with rather trashy snapshot equipment. back home i compiled handmade photographic diaries. they are a mixture of traveling documentary and romantic story. these books are existing in a edition of two. I made one edition for the friend i was traveling with and kept the other for my own memories.
Ursula Böckler
http://www.grawboeckler.de/photos_01.html
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Phanos Kyriacou
"I’m going to have to disappoint you"
Friday, March 18th
Where has nature gone? It has certainly disappeared from our daily lives; it has become the sublime we encounter when taking time off from the everyday.
It is almost as if we are seeking solace in the artificial; we look back with nostalgia to that which is lost forever; life in the natural world.
What is evident in ‘I’m going to have to disappoint you’ is that these simulacra point to the city and the degree to which it has separated us from nature: a fake trunk made out of pretending-to-be-wood plastic; a deserted room with a wallpaper that hints at what we have forever deserted; bizarre encounters with nature/borrowed memories, printed on mugs: a joke on the triumphant victory of the digital era.
Do we experience disappointment in our day-to-day encounters with this artificiality? Probably not, since artificiality has become so natural.
Kyriacou’s assemblage of materials and images that he encounters while drifting in the city and along the information superhighways is unique, witty, but above all, thought provoking.
+ info
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Lorenzo Sandoval
"Sketches for Building up a Paradise"
February, 17th
Wonderful Days is a story of JG Ballard in which a number of European tourists are involuntarily caught in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria while place had turned into a peaceful concentration camp.
This story published in 1982 is used to start a discussion on representations of Spanish territory from the perspective of tourism development at the incipient Europe of the 60 ́s to 80 ́s. It aims to locate a set of relations between a series of promises of the welfare state, crystallized in holiday leisure time in the emerging Europe and in which the Canary Islands were, and remained, one of the prefered tourist destinations.
Moreover, when analysing the different
meanings of representation (both advertising images,
films or science fiction stories such as the title’s
reference) we also make a reflection on the own devices used for the distribution of such representations. The project emerges from the questioning on the actual loss of reference points, due to the crisis of values that the welfare state generated and from what the establishment of the social dialectic of the penultimate Europe was configured.
loren_rdeg@yahoo.es
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Acervos/ Collection Catalogue - for some, the best exhibition in the neighbourhood.
Friday, January 28th
Acervos/ Collection Catalogue - for some, the best exhibition in the neighbourhood.
Friday, January 28th
A selection of purloined "works" from the private collections of Francisco Queimadela, Lorenzo Sandoval, Mariana Caló and Pedro Serrano.
These collections consist of several unsuspected "art-leftovers" or diverted "works" from various international artists. An “acervo” as we want to present it, suggests something beyond the mere act of collecting, a creative act in itself.
This is the third presentation of Acervos, the previous ones having taken place in Sala Josep Renau (Valência) and Espaço JUP (Porto) with works from other private collections and curated, both times, by Forma Cita.
Works by:
Richard Serra, Susana Chiocca ,Ben Lewis, Von Calhau, Dirceu Maués Discoteca Flaming Star Anish Kapoor Catarina Miranda Andrea Winkler Petrit Halilaj Takashi Murakami Laetitia Morais Jimmie Durham Cildo Meireles Simon Fujiwara Yoko Ono Miguel Januário Pedro André Martin Kippenberg Francisco Queimadela Roman Signer Left Hand Rotation Masayoshi Fujita Karol Shwarz Francesc Torres Elfelix Balla Prop Giannotti & Giuriati Lucia Antonini Mónica Baptista Lucas Agudelo Sofia Lomba Alfonso Escudero Sara Pereira Erik Beltran Francesc Vera Mariana Caló Olafur Eliasson Maria Ptqk Miguel Carneiro Pedro Augusto Sonia Genoese Ignaz Shick Christian Marclay Super Seaweed Sex Scandal Inês Ferreira Graw Böckler Alexandre Lemos Francisco Eduardo Dídio Pestana Francisco López João Paulo Feliciano Filipe Dias De Martín López Anabelle Hubaut Carlos Amorales Jaime Raposo Regina de Miguel Christina Casnellie João Alves Ricardo Jacinto Albino Tavares José Cardoso Ana Ribeiro Joseph Beuys Ramsey Arnaoot Jonathan Saldanha Virginia Pinho José Maia Lorenzo Sandoval Matt Mullican Pedro Cabrita Reis Lucas Abela Marta Leite Joa Gridfonte Mario Gomes Filipa César Marta Bernardes Hannes Broecker Dan Graham Vera Mota John Holten Eirik Sördal Rinus Van Alebeek Felix Gonzalez Torres Ursula Wozniak Helena Menino
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Regina de Miguel
"Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction" (work in progress).
25th November, 2010
Regina de Miguel
"Nouvelle Science Vague Fiction" (work in progress).
25th November, 2010
Collective memory leans on spatial images. However the new ideas of time and space generated by communications have transformed perception of things in a way that they are not anymore directly experienced, but they are represented. Landscape, as we discover it on the screens, from high-speed trains or planes, doesn’t exist either, not as a place where people relate, only as an image for the spectator.
Jameson suggests that the problem with objects in today’s world is their massive “transformation into communication instruments”. Computer science leads to a “disappearance of nature” and technology dilutes the difference between the animated and the inanimate.
This way, as users and spectators in the virtual universe we are doubles that are beyond every distance. We contemplate and experience how proximity between events and their diffusion in this new “contra-space” is so small that it loses its “historical dimension” and evades from memory. Insofar we all are directly imprisoned by information and media replaces mediations, references turn more individual or singular: we all have our own cosmology but we all also have our solitude.
About our confinement in this system, there are several reasons that explain why it is so hard for us to imagine something different as what (in fact) exists. The utopian works nowadays tend to point out this issue. They don’t try anymore to represent a perfect society; they try to represent our difficulty to imagine one. It seems like we are facing a new anthropology of seeing.
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Christina Casnellie Eatable - release of fanzine
12th November, 2010
Eatable is a Collective Art Book composed of illustrations from 30 different artists, and printed entirely by hand in Silkscreen.
The illustrations had as a starting point the theme food, and consequently eating.
IInvited Authors: André Alves, Heike Pfisterer, Marta Leite, Mathilde Domecq, Rand Renfrow, Júlio Dolbeth, Lorenzo Sandoval, Mariana Caló, Sara Pereira, Miguel Carneiro, Rui Vitorino Santos, Francisco Queimadela, Rui Silva, André Lemos, Inês Ferreira, Paulo Patrício, Sakura Nagashima, Marta Monteiro, Salão Coboi, Virgína Valente, José Feitor, Barbara Rof, Catarina Miranda, Von Calhau, Christina Casnellie, João Alves, Pedro André, Délia Silva, Rita Carvalho e Lucie Firoud.
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João Alves
Significant action
23th October, 2010
The piece is composed of slices of knowledge - fragments of video made by 30 anonymous artists -
these segments are either original, collected, rearranged or stolen.
The only connective tissue between the fragments is an allusion to the abstract thematic: displacement.
The videos are displayed through a projection apparatus connected to a keyboard which the spectator
can use to trigger the different videos.
The spectator is invited to reflect on the message of the image, and is empowered with the option to build compositions out of images. This way communication is not solely a "discourse" it can also be a dialogue where exchanges
and interaction happen between participants to form new messages.
This participatory installation relates to concepts of Activation, Authorship and Community.
Activation when the spectator's experience may inspire him to act in other spheres of life.
Authorship in the way that the creator of the installation and the authors of the videos are surrendering the power they
may have as originators of the work - the author is less dominant in generating the meaning and messages of the work.
Community is seen in the cooperation that occurs in the collective elaboration of meaning.
João Alves is an artist born in Porto in 1983
Since 2000 he has collaborated with various authors in installations, performances, animations and illustrations. Does frequently exhibitions, performances and concerts.
http://alvesjoao.blogspot.com/
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these segments are either original, collected, rearranged or stolen.
The only connective tissue between the fragments is an allusion to the abstract thematic: displacement.
The videos are displayed through a projection apparatus connected to a keyboard which the spectator
can use to trigger the different videos.
The spectator is invited to reflect on the message of the image, and is empowered with the option to build compositions out of images. This way communication is not solely a "discourse" it can also be a dialogue where exchanges
and interaction happen between participants to form new messages.
This participatory installation relates to concepts of Activation, Authorship and Community.
Activation when the spectator's experience may inspire him to act in other spheres of life.
Authorship in the way that the creator of the installation and the authors of the videos are surrendering the power they
may have as originators of the work - the author is less dominant in generating the meaning and messages of the work.
Community is seen in the cooperation that occurs in the collective elaboration of meaning.
João Alves is an artist born in Porto in 1983
Since 2000 he has collaborated with various authors in installations, performances, animations and illustrations. Does frequently exhibitions, performances and concerts.
http://alvesjoao.blogspot.com/
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