Last week a live presentation via Skype for Lado Darakhvelidze’s Museum TV Station at PS2 Gallery at 18 Donegal Street in Belfast. The exhibition continues until January 8th 2011 and you can watch recorded versions of all four live broadcasts – Irakli Kakabadze (New York), Zurab Rtveliashvili (Stockholm), Pamela Renner (New York) and me, Jimini Hignett (Amsterdam).
My presentation included a short piece about the visit to Birkenhead to photograph my grandmother’s house before it gets demolished plus a clip from an absurd, crass American cartoon which came up when I tagged Belfast into Youtube – Captain Planet saves Belfast. To see a recording of the Skype presentation, click here.
Our Temporary Art Souvenir shop in Murcia turned into quite a sucess – press coverage in the papers and even on the telly! Here’s a couple of pictures of Hedwig Feijen, Manifesta’s director, visiting the shop.
And here carefully avoiding the busts I made of her…
Although the shop’s finished, maybe my souvenirs of Ibn Arabi orange papers will have an extended life as on the very last day of the shop in Murcia a chap showed up asking lots of technical questions about them and it turned out that he was a specialist in printing orange papers, with a factory in Murcia – the bloke I’d been seeking for the last 3 months! I’d ended up printing the papers myself using rubber stamps I made on the laser cutter at Protospace which is a very labour intensive process, and prone to a lot of mis-prints.
Anyway, this chap is happy to collaborate by letting me print less than the standard 200kg minimum (which is two-hundred-thousand papers!), per design, and by helping arrange distribution on fruit through a Murcian grower, and I even hope it will be possible to distribute an Arabic version via a Syrian fruit merchant too (Damascus is the site of Ibn Arabi’s tomb). Would be nice as I feel the plan has more potential than has been got out of it so far.
More photos of the project at Manifesta-8 on the TEMPORARY ART SOUVENIRS page.
In my new role as guest curator for the 3rd edition of Se Busca (a project by Maribel Perpiña of laPinta in Barcelona, a project which brings together 14 artists with as many curators from around the world in an extended collaboration) I’ve been doing studio visits with participating artists doing residencies at Hangar in Barcelona. This weekend there’ll be an intermediary presentation of the book of the previous edition and the programme for the presentation in the Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) which will happen on October 6th and 7th.
Here’s a photo of the programme poster in Hangar.
As preparation for the project ‘Temporary Art Souvenirs‘ which is being set up as a parallel event in Manifesta-8, I’m dragging 20kgs worth of plaster busts of Manifesta director Hedwig Feijen, to Barcelona as extra luggage on their way to our souvenir shop in Murcia. The busts are one of my souvenirs and the moulds were completed this very afternoon, ready for the first rounds of casting. There’s a bit of concern that the plaster busts might cause embarassment, so our original poster has already been banished from the press-pack and replaced with one where the bust has had a picture of a T-shirt stuck over it… Here’s a bootleg copy of the ‘banned’ poster –
Oh well… controversy is probably good news rather than bad… maybe if the product itself gets banned that means I’ll be able to sell them for a decent price on the black market… So order your Golden Bust here while you still can!
Been invited to participate in Post Dordt 2010 with a performance at the opening and an installation made up from The Detroit Diary along with a video of the ‘Special Attention’ presentation – great!
Opens Saturday 28th August at 17hrs in the CBK in Doordrecht, runs until September 29th.
Here’s the invite with more details.
The Detroit Diary is here at last!
There’s going to be a launch of all this year’s DAI publications on Saturday July 3rd, at The Ateliers in Amsterdam.
‘PERFORMING REALITY’ Saturday 3 July 16.00 – 19.00
Exhibition Werkplaats Typografie, De Ateliers, Stadhouderskade 86, 1073 AT Amsterdam
BOOK LAUNCH
12 Artist’s books, 16.00
PUBLIC LECTURES, 17.00 Seth Siegelaub will speak about copyright and economic issues concerning independent radical publishing, including art books, based on his publishing experience with the Chilean book ‘How to Read Donald Duck’, the so-called ‘Xeroxbook’ and the ‘Artist’s Contract’. He will specifically address free access to information and the practical problems of distribution in a world of dominated by capitalist property values.
Daniel McClean will discuss copying in art, copyright law, and his role as both a curator and a lawyer, focusing on the tension between practices of copying in art and the constraints imposed upon these practices by copyright law. The recent project ‘Free Sol LeWitt’, which McClean co-curated with Superflex at the Van Abbemuseum questions models of authorship in art. He will also discuss important trials involving artists, including Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.
Q&A with Seth Siegelaub, Daniel McClean, Delphine Bedel, James Goggin, Aernoud Bourdrez [Use-IP] & Yannick Bouillis [Shashin], 18.30
Drinks, 19.00
More info about the Publications Project, see DAI website
An evening of ideas, discussions, presentations and more, on the topic of, The breakdown of control and surveillance situations – Detroit, The Netherlands and Karachi for example. From the viewpoints of technology, art and self-organising.
On Thursday June 3rd 2010, OT301, Overtoom 301, Amsterdam, at 20.00u Rob van Kranenburg will discuss ‘The breakdown of control and surveillance situations, Police 3.0, the Facebook Generation and Garbage 3.0… What does
it mean?’ Suzanne Hogendoorn with a small presentation compiled around the mirror that the global south mega-cities hold up for us to imagine the future of our own mega-cities in terms of self-organisation. And Jimini Hignett with a presentation, centering around the abandoned police station in Detroit, from the angle of my ongoing theme of ‘How to make art when everything is all fucked up?’
‘Click here for more details.‘
In Barcelona visiting my good friend Maribel Perpiñá. She has just published a great book – ‘Se Busca Curator’, an overview of the curatorial practice in contemporary art. Wrapped around the cover is a poster mapping the topography of verbs used to describe the activities and responsibilities of curators by 99 respondents to questionnaires.
Big thank-you to The Stokroos Foundation – they have agreed to support my upcoming publication, which means that the photographs can be printed in colour – hurrah!
John Berger enunciates the possibility for art to run
“like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts and honour.”
As an artist, I feel the need to offer resistance to ‘life’s brutalities’, and although ‘activist art’ is not a new phenomenon, there is something about the times we are living through whereby I feel that a certain urgency has made the combination art and activism more necessary.
