Turbulence 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art, 2017
Turbulence 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art
The board of the 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art pleased to present aSpecial project curated by Camilla Boemio as part of the “Zone of Turbulence”: “Delivering Obsolescence: Art Bank, Data Bank, Food Bank“, by artists: David Goldenberg and Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, at the Odessa Municipal Museum of Private Collections, Bleshchunova
Camilla Boemio’s curatorial practice spans art and science, combining a number of approaches from developing structures for supporting either the work of others, forms of political imaginary, existing and fictional realities to broader enquiries into forms of commonality and discursive sites, resulting in projects merging exhibitions, politics, fiction, display, public space, writing, and whatever else feels urgent at the time.
In 2016 she curated “Diminished Capacity”, the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale of Venice, and took part in ‘The Social’, at the 4th International Association for Visual Culture Biennial Conference held at Boston University.
Excerpt on the Biennial taken from the Odessa website and its translation from Russian into English
“The Odessa Biennale once again confronts the artist with Global problems. That, according to many authoritative experts, is one of the signs of provincialism or marginality. However, in the era of fundamental crises, and even more so – a crisis of fundamentals, the true outline of the future often encountered in the margins of canonic texts, at the boundaries, are melting in the fire of innovations.
Half a century later after “Future Shock” by Alvin Toffler outstanding sales manager discovered that we are shaped by turbulent flows of V.U.C.A., volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity.
If earlier turbulence in culture has been defined as a crises or transition with their spatial-temporal boundaries, now the state of turbulence claims to be boundless. The Ancient curse “May you live in an era of change” becomes meaningless as contemporary culture fails to reach a state of stability. Output from turbulent area is considered a catastrophe that could end human existence as a whole.
Unity and opposition, private and the general enter into the most dangerous zone of risk. Radical design modeling is urgently needed as permanent change accelerates exponentially. One such means has been art. A daily challenge of art at all times has been working with universal relationships including dynamic ones. Value of this function in turbulent zone tends to infinity. We are once again called to look into the essence of social problems from the specific and universal art optics. But we exist at a moment where audiences for contemporary art are isolated (which is a generation of postindustrial society) becomes unbearable.”
Special project Curated by Camilla Boemio with David Goldenberg and Fabio Lattanzi Antinori.
To quote from David Goldenberg’s fictitious press release for the 2016 version of Distributing Obsolescence, and expanded for Pavilion Journal: “Idea for an exhibition, that doesn’t need to take place, to do two things. Establish “an imageless art practice” and, through its construction, bring together artists that question the existing formation of art, individual and group exhibition formats, and the ready-made artist.” It’s a method but also an investigation of a state of global turbulence in which every aspect of life concerns: conflicts, strategies and expanding feelings in which contemporary art can activate debate’s.”
Goldenberg’s Installation extends Delivering Obsolescence. Part 1 pools together 4 elements – organization of found contextual materials and equipment, a fictitious press release and exhibition, found texts on temporal and cultural looping written on carrier bags, found designs for exhibitions – arranged in clusters within an ambiguous space, part Free Port, part Archaeological storage room, displaying cultural artefacts from today including art itself. Part 2 Use the material to generate activities looking at reimagining the space art occupies.
Altogether, the material carries out a series of negations.
Although installation is one of the central media of the British artist David Goldenberg, language and text form the basis of his individual works and sometimes of entire exhibitions, using language as a fragment and an act, similar to an act of speech –not only a statement, but also an action.
His exhibition at The 5th Odessa Biennale is about writing, words, art language and practice, but at the same time about installation and representation.Installation becomes a modus operandi to analyze the conditions of today’s art, its saturation, and the commodified use of artistic practice to the detriment of research.
The work of Fabio Lattanzi Antinori, celebrates the fragile existence of mass data archives. Drawing from daily-trading figures, financial flash-crash algorithm records, news-websites, search engines results, dark pools operations and E-bay cheapest sales descriptions, Antinori manipulates these into stories of collapsed financial empires. Like the narrator of a Greek tragedy, his hand flickering on an imaginary harp as he plays the soundtrack of the predetermined collapse, transforming stock values and data entries into angelic voices who sing the chorus of inevitable catastrophe.
Belvedere ishis work for this exhibition, is made up of a video installation, which combines with UK United’s sound installation specially created for the Biennale.
Belvedere is made by letting the computer ‘create’ a poem distributed pretty much in irregular quatrains. In order to create the composition, there is a set of algorithms that use the famous letter from Prime Minister Theresa May, with which she started out the official divorce from the EU. It uses a selection of headlines on immigration published online through the Twitter account of the main UK newspapers (The Guardian, Times, Independent, but also Sun, Daily Mail, Telegraph etc) Each word of the headlines is used to more or less randomly select a word from Theresa May’s letter. The result is then organized in quatrains, some of which, by complete random calculation, even rhyme.
Please contact Camilla Boemio for further details and photos on the artist’s work on camilla boemio@yahoo.it
Technical Support: Meyer, San Francisco
Links:
http://aniconics.wordpress.com
http://2017.odesa-biennale.org.ua/participants/
David Goldenberg’s Bio
David Goldenberg, (Hitchin, Hertfordshire, UK, 1956) is an important English conceptual artist.
For years, his research has been concentrated on the Post Autonomy concept, which he has developed in a number of shows held at important international institutions – Art bank, Food bank, Data bank. Distributing Obsolescence, curated by Camilla Boemio, Villa Caprile, Presaro, Italy (2016). “The loss of arts image”, Centre for contemporary art, Vargi IV, Gijlan, Kosovo 2014. “In search of Post Autonomy” , Palazzo Isimbardi, Milan, Italy 2012, The Scenarios of Post Autonomy, Glenda Cinquegrana: the Studio, Milan, Italy (2012), The Space of Post Autonomy, Arts Depot, Vienna, Austria (2011), Plausible Artworlds, Basekamp, Philadelphia, USA (2010), Mobile Documenta, Fordham Gallery, London, UK (2009), The Time of Post Autonomy is Now, Your space, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, NL (2009), The Space of Post Autonomy, Local Operations, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2007).
Goldenberg has participated in a number of Group shows of international stature, Bodrum Biennial, Turkey (2015), Mobile Biennial, Romania (2014), The Caspian Biennial, Baku, Azerbaijan, (2013), Venice Biennial collateral exhibition, Personal Structures, Palazzio Bembo, Venice, Italy (2013), Berlin Biennial online project (2012), the 1st Land Art Biennial of Mongolia (2010), the 10th Istanbul International Biennial, Turkey (2007), and the 6th International Biennial of Sharjah, UAE (2003).
To these must be added exhibitions at international public institutions, such as Here, there and everywhere: Eurasian Cities. Chapter 1. Curator Jiho Lee, project director Kyong Park. Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, South Korea 2015/16; The Spatial extension of Art, CNM, National Gallery of Macedonia, Skopje, Macedonia 2015; Dispositions in Time and space, The National Gallery of Contemporary art, Bucharest, Romania, 2014/15, Locally Localised Gravity, curated by Basekamp, ICA, Philadelphia, USA , 2007, Jump into the Cold Water, Shedhalle, Zurich, Switzerland (2006), Copyfight, Copy-art.net, Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain (2006), Soft logics, Kuenstlehaus, Stuttgart, Germany (2004), Dec, “Evolution Cell“, Organised by Finger, NGBK (Neue gesellschaft fur Bildende kunst e.V.), Berlin, Germany (2002, Century City, Tate Modern, London, UK (2001), Infection Manifesto, Bonnerkunstverein, Germany (2000); Out of Space, Kolnischerkunstverein, Germany (2000), Host, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland (1998)
