Adel Abidin, Construction Site, 2006, Video installation, 26.25 x 19.50", Duration: 01'30 minutes / looping, Courtesy of the artist. |
Jenny Holzer, I was in Baghdad Ochre Fade, 2007, Oil on linen, 33 x 306 inches, 12 panels, 33 x 25.5" each, Courtesy of the artist and Cheim and Read. |
Meanwhile in Baghdad … Rhetoric of Optimism, Reality of Conflict |
Jonathan Monk, Deadman, 2006, Wax, rubber, human hair, oil paint, fabrics, 12 x 66 x 22", Courtesy of the artist, Casey Kaplan, New York, and Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe.
Meanwhile in Baghdad..., Installation View, The Renaissance Society, 2007.
Jannis Kounellis, Untitled, 2006, 3 bed frames, fabric, paint, 75 x 36 x 12" per bed, Courtesy of the artist and Cheim and Read.
Maryam Jafri - Inquiry into Kenya Detention Camps, The Times of London, 1959, From the series Siege of Khartoum, 1884, Archival inkjet on Hahnemuehle paper, 27 A-1 photo-collage posters.
Daniel Heyman, Amman Series, Drypoint, 8 parts, 27 x 22 inches each.
Matt Davis, Trooper, 2007, Lambda print, 72 x 48 x 2". |
The Renaissance Society By HAMZA WALKER From the demise of communism to the Iraq war, globalization has taken a turn from the rhetoric of optimism to the reality of conflict. With the war going into its fifth year, the events in Iraq are less the headlines these days and more a backdrop. Meanwhile in Baghdad… is a group exhibition which takes the war as a general context in which to examine a range of artistic responses, some as direct as Daniel Heyman’s Abu Ghraib Project in which the artist made engravings based on first hand accounts he gathered from victims of torture, and others as viscerally poignant as a series of bandaged bed frames by Jannis Kounellis. Artists include: Adel Abidin, Walead Beshty, Matt Davis, Daniel Heyman, Jenny Holzer, Maryam Jafri, Jannis Kounellis, Ann Messner, and Jonathan Monk. Adel Abidin's art practice is based on the premise that art produces arguments for the viewer. Abidin started his art career as a painter, but three years ago, he abandoned painting to concentrate on media-based art. Currently, he makes primarily videos, video installations and short films.The main topics I deal with are of a political nature. This is sometimes attributed to the fact that I am of Iraqi origin, but I believe we truly live in political times, regardless of geographical position, and art cannot thrive outside its social context. In his solo exhibition About Me at Huuto Gallery in Helsinki, Finland, spring, 2006, he presented four video installations and a video work.In his Abidin Travels a travel agency promotes vacation trips to Baghdad, showing the life that Iraqis are living at this very moment in Iraq, while the spectators in the gallery sip their glass of wine. Abidin Travels is a video installation, consisting of two monitors, two DVD players, posters, and brochures. Walead Beshty, artist and critic, was born in London. He received his BA from Bard College and worked for Artforum before continuing his education at Yale University, earning an MFA in Photography. His gallerist in New York describes him as “greatly influenced by the possibilities opened up by the conceptual practices of the ‘70s and their active critical and social engagement with art making, and the formalist aesthetics of his early mentors. His work concentrates on the interplay between aesthetics and the ideological mechanism of late capitalist culture…” He has received praise from such publications as The New Yorker, New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, ArtReview and Artnet. Beshty has had two solo exhibitions in New York and has participated in numerous group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Matt Davis’s recent work involves photographic elements (often found, gifted, or stolen) used to produce collage objects. The work investigates the nature of image creation, deconstruction, and re-construction as it relates to the individual’s desire to capture and leave a trace. Within this framework, concepts of dislocation, transience, and mortality are explored. Matt Davis’s work investigates ideas of techno-fantasy in relation to modern man’s fascination with digital media, video and film special effects. Chroma-key backdrop special effects paint and no-seam back-drop paper are often incorporated into the collages. Recent collages, drawings, and paintings attempt to represent the un-represent able. Many of the works depict technologically influenced “out of body” experiences, and ghost-like images. The works often incorporate illustrations of figures in relation to infinite space, “the void”, and vortexes. Matt Davis’s work is heavily influenced by science fiction/fantasy/horror film and literature, comic books, as well as minimalism. The artist’s practice interweaves photography, image collection, image manipulation (manually and digitally), and collage techniques to produce a wide variety of objects varying in material composition and scale. Since March 2006, Daniel Heyman has traveled to Amman, Jordan and Istanbul, Turkey at the invitation of Philadelphia law firm Burke Pyle LLC to participate in interviews that the firm, along with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and Detroit law firm Akeel and Valentine PLC were conducting. The lawyers were gathering evidence for a class action lawsuit on behalf of dormer detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison. Heyman witnessed the interviews and created drypoint prints in an effort to attach personal faces to the Abu Ghraib story. Heyman explains his process: "I sit in this hotel room and draw the face of an Iraqi who is telling the most humiliating and degrading story of his life. I try to disappear. I draw, first a small sketch on a scrap of paper, and then a copper plate using a stylus. As I listen and draw, I am also inscribing the words I hear into the copper, backwards. I have to write very quickly, so that I do not loose the thread of the story.” Jenny Holzer, is an American conceptual artist. She attended Ohio University (in Athens, Ohio), Rhode Island School of Design, and the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Holzer was originally an abstract artist, focusing on painting and printmaking, but after moving to New York City in 1977, she began working with text as art. The main focus of her work is the use of words and ideas in public space. Street posters are her favorite medium, and she also makes use of a variety of other media, including LED signs, plaques, benches, stickers, T-shirts, and the Internet. Her work has also been integrated into the work of Canadian contemporary dance troupe Holy Body Tattoo. Maryam Jafri (b. 1972, Pakistan) is an artist based in Copenhagen and New York. Her videos, installations and collages often focus on the role of language and memory in the construction of identities, from the individual to the national. She holds a BA from Brown University and is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Recent solo shows include Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2006), Kunsthalle Helsinki (2006) and Malmo Art Museum (2005). Jannis Kounellis was born in 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. In 1956, Kounellis moved to Rome and enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti. While still a student, he had his first solo show, titled L’alfabeto di Kounellis, at the Galleria la Tartaruga, Rome, in 1960. The artist exhibited black-and-white canvases that demonstrated little painterliness; on their surfaces, the artist stenciled letters and numbers. Over the past 25 years Ann Messner has focused her attention as a visual artist primarily in an investigation of and a concern for what she perceives as a schism central to the contemporary experience: the conflicted separation between private and public experience. The accompanying unresolved tensions between the two often contradictory cognitive and civic realities, the interior life experience of the individual and the social imperative, although not the only concern within her work, have proven to be the corner stone for her oeuvre, resulting in a number of temporary site-specific public works, as well as many exhibitions in the more traditional venue of gallery/museum. British artist Jonathan Monk draws upon what is already available, from family photographs to the legacy of conceptual art, combining homage with humour and personal context with art history. Among his works for Present Tense 23 is an engaging reworking of a 1981 piece by Lawrence Weiner in the AGO's collection.Monk was born in 1972 in Leicester, England.Spanning painting, performance, installation, photography, and video, and alluding to a wide variety of both autobiographical and art historical references, the work of Jonathan Monk defies categorisation. In suggesting a variety of models for the production and interpretation of art, he aims to test the continued strength of the Modernist canon and to demystify the creative process. Everyday anecdotes and high art myth are juxtaposed, generating a frequently humourous confusion in the reading of the work. |
Jenny Holzer, I was in Baghdad Ochre Fade, 2007, Oil on linen, 33 x 306 inches, 12 panels, 33 x 25.5" each, Courtesy of the artist and Cheim and Read. |
Jonathan Monk, Deadman (Detail), 2006, Wax, rubber, human hair, oil paint, fabrics, 12 x 66 x 22", Courtesy of Casey Kaplan, New York, and Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe. |
