How to go on » dai

Back from Manifesta-8

jimini — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:53:29 +0000

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.

Post Dordt 2010 exhibition

jimini — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:56:32 +0000

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.

Book launch!

jimini — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:12:11 +0000

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

The Sky is Falling…

jimini — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:42:49 +0000

Wednesday, May 26th (2010), in the Waag, Amsterdam, Rob van Kranenburg’s arranging an evening to juxtapose some stuff – probably bits of my abandoned police station, Detroit project, ‘Special Attention’ – Rob’s rant ‘The end of the Netherlands in twelve steps’ – and something to do with somewhere beginning with a ‘K’ in India (he told me but I can’t remember, sorry). Watch this space for more details!
Meantime here’s another Detroit snap, (read the small print…)

Bad news leads to double good news…

jimini — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:57:48 +0000

Just when I thought I’d found the perfect writer for my ‘Special Attention’ publication, there was an email from Michael Uwemedimo saying that he regretted having to cancel but that he was locked in a car-boot somewhere in England as part of a Hostile Environments Training which his subsidy-givers have insisted he take before returning to his filming in the depths of the Niger Delta and therefore wasn’t able to write… (Still, perhaps he will find a way to collaborate on the wider ‘Special Attention’ project when he’s escaped his kidnappers…)

Anyway, in my ensuing panic (the deadline is hurtling towards me at breakneck speed) I mailed the first names relating to the relevant topics that I could think of and, amazingly, Loïc Wacquant has offered to collaborate by allowing me to use texts excerpted from his writings (on incarceration, the penal state, race as a principle of social vision and division etc).
Plus today, Rob van Kranenburg is going to write a piece centred around the photos of the abandoned police station – incorporating his work on biometrics and his rant ‘The end of the Netherlands in twelve steps’.
So politically the project is in really good hands!
Now just need someone to write something relating to the art side of the project, but now I don’t need them to deal with the other socio-political issues that ought to work out. Meanwhile, big grin on my face about the way this is going, and I have to get back to reading my way through Loïc’s books…

Unsolicited Advice

jimini — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:51:07 +0000

The Platform for (Un)Solicited Research and Advice is a project attached to the Manifesta Biennial which I’m involved with through the Dutch Art Institute. Each month there’s a specific aspect related to biennials which is being addressed. Last month, relating to the question of personal attitude as an artist toward the biennial phenomenon, I made this sketch…

For more click here – Platform for (un)Solicited Research and Advice