Latidues: Blog

(Part 3/3) The 55th Biennale di Venezia: National Pavilions and Collateral Events in pictures and as seen by the critics, 1 June–24 November 2013

2013-06-17T17:10:00.002+02:00

Browsing throught 'The Ideological Guide' on iPad.

If you haven't been to this year's Venice Biennale and plan to go soon, download 'The Ideological Guide', a free app developed by the Dutch artist Jonas Staal. As reported in artinfo.com "the smartphone app offers information about each participating country’s 2013 pavilion, from its commissioner and curator to the sources of its funding, while also providing historical information about past pavilions, and charting that nation’s economic and political alliances with other participating countries. The app, according to its creators, shows that the Venice Biennale’s distribution of national pavilions around the city is in many ways a more accurate reflection of nations’ geopolitical position than any geographical map.

Allora. Let's begin with the Spanish Pavilion, not only as it's the country where Latitudes is based, but also as it's the first pavilion one encounters when walking towards the Padiglione Centrale. Quinn Latimer  in Art Agenda wrote: "In her discreetly powerful Spanish Pavilion, meanwhile, Lara Almarcegui also tread some familiar contemporary-art modes and ideas, though they were insistently material. And the pavilion was a natural: streaked with sunrays from the skylights above, the piles of stone, wood, glass, and dirt—the exact same amounts that were used in the building of the pavilion itself—were immediately comprehensible, inevitable, lucidly effective." [Press Release and more photos here, video interview here]

'Raw' mountains of the various materials that compose the very building where they were presented: the 1922 Spanish Pavilion.

Continuing with Latimer :   "Surrounded by Massimiliano Gioni’s larger show, the somewhat airless “Encyclopedic Palace,” with its Documenta hangover of late, and serious crush on cleanly framed taxonomies, the national pavilions’ representatives of culture and country felt antique and obvious and a mess—but also a relief. Gioni’s turning of private cosmos and personal struggle into a stylized interior design aesthetic was definitively lacking in the disordered, disparate pavilions, where taste was usually the least concern. Yet lack of taste does not always equal distastefulness, which often arises instead from an excess of the stuff. If sometimes bad taste materializes as poeticized and/or politicized kitsch (see the pavilions of Canada, the US, Israel, and, at moments, the Netherlands), other pavilions broke through the visual chatter."

On the Netherlands' presentation, Adrian Searle of UK's The Guardian commented that Mark Manders' "Room with Broken Sentence" (...) "is a sensitively conceived and quietly dramatic tableau, like the interior of a mind as much as an actual space. The human presence emerges and disappears, conjoins with furniture or is sandwiched between stacks of timbers."

Following on from our previous post on biennale tote bags, we'd like to add that the Dutch press package gets our bravo for the most beautiful, comprehensive and effectively-designed communication materials (and what a great pavilion catalogue too, with contributions by 37 international writers invited to reflect on individual works by Manders, published by Roma Publications). The press folder includes a full-coloured booklet with beautiful installation views of the pavilion; an 8-page booklet with an interview between the pavilion curator, Lorenzo Benedetti, and the artist alongside black and white photos of the works on show and a floorplan of the exhibition; two double-sided thick card A4 postcards of the artist's work; and a copy of Manders' "fake newspapers" which also covers the entrance to the pavilion. You can see images of the materials on the website of Amsterdam-based designer Roger Willems, or read more in the website of the pavilion. Gefeliciteerd!

(Three above) Installation views of Mark Manders's "Room with a Broken Sentence" (2013) at the Dutch pavilion. More photos via Contemporary Art Daily.

Latimer laments the somehow shy presentation of Valentin Carron at the Swiss Pavilion which according to her "provoked nostalgia. Bruno Giacometti’s austere, 1952 modernist idyll is one of the finest pavilions in the Giardini. If two years ago Thomas Hirschhorn [see a few photos here onwards] obliterated Giacometti’s clean lines with his overwrought, über-hoarding installation, this year Valentin Carron erred on the side of caution, hewing too close and careful to those very same lines."

View of Valentin Carron's presentation at the Swiss Pavilion.

Despite Latimer's comments on the "disordered, disparate pavilions", Jörg Heiser was amazed to find a common thread: "Even in the national pavilions of the Giardini – which are not under any over-arching curatorial supervision, but in each case are commissioned according to very different agendas – there are numerous signs that artists are groping in the dark of the unconscious and the (supposedly) ‘primordial’: grottoes and caves all over the place, clay sculptures, enigmatic allegories, prehistoric flintstones, (pseudo-)fossil findings. Is this parallel between the curated show and the national pavilions merely coincidental or does it tell us – as it steers art away from sober abstraction, calculated boutique chic, and more straightforward forms of realist social comment – something about the current state of things, the position of art in society (and economy) at large?"

And speaking of clay figures and rocks, according to Carol Vogel Sarah Sze's 'Triple Point' spread beyond the US Pavilion, with a few merchants in Castello displaying simulations of her pieces adorning rooftops, balcones and shop windows., "Ms. Sze is asking questions of her audience: “What objects in your life have value, and how is value created?” she explained. “I wanted to show objects that we know and have seen in our bag or on the shelf of a store which have the residue of emotion... Ms. Sze, who is known for creating site-specific environments from everyday objects like toothpicks, sponges, light bulbs and plastic bottles, arrived here in a snow storm on March 28 and has been hoarding, foraging and installing ever since." [Full article here, you can also read another review here or watch a video interview with the artist]

(Above) Sarah Sze's 'Triple Point', United States of America Pavilion.

The mentioned 'spiritual turn' is also shared by Corinna Kirsch in her review in Art F City, which reads: "It seems there’s something in the air about The Encyclopedic Palace’s “dream of a universal, all-embracing knowledge” (...) Science fiction and spirituality, in particular, are present in the pavilions as well as Gioni’s exhibition, though the way these themes play out are to entirely different stylistic ends... Overall, these works are less emotional than Gioni’s; even when they’re grounded in science fiction and spirituality, they’re grounded in the concerns of the here-and-now. Simply put, Gioni’s artists tend to live in their head, and the pavilions’ artists, in the world."

According to Kirsch, examples of this are the British pavilion with Jeremy Deller's "English Magic" [see a video of Adrian Searle visiting the pavilion], where the artist has "the grandest presentation on view of epic creation and destruction myths, and on a national scale." [Watch the full-length of the video 'English Magic' here]. Paul Teasdale went on to say that Deller delves in the "antiquated, faintly ridiculous notion of the ‘national pavilion’ and the antiquated, faintly ridiculous notion of Englishness itself that Deller is exploring. And the almost magical way in which we so quickly forget the past."

(Above) Visitors queue to have their own prints of "William Morris returns from the dead to hurl Roman Abramovich's vast yacht Luna, which blighted the waterfront beside the Giardini at the 2011 Venice Biennale, into the waves." (Adrian Searle) and of a Hen Harrier grabbing a Range Rover.

Above: A steel-drum orchestra played A Guy Called Gerald and Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World during the afternoon of the opening day.

Moving on. The almost bare Romanian Pavilion presented a "retrospective history of Venice, with actors as breathing archives of the Biennale itself" as Kaelen Wilson-Goldie has described in her Artforum diary review. Adrian Searle went on to recommend everyone to visit "the Pavilion, where Alexandra Pirici, Manuel Pelmuş and a small group of performers restage dozens of works from the previous 54 Biennales: using nothing more than their own bodies, they act out and mime Picasso's Guernica, Hans Haacke's famous destruction of the German pavilion's floor in 1993, paintings by Modigliani, sculptures by Rodin, performances by Marina Abramović and photographs by Nan Goldin. Both homage and parody, these quick-change charades in the otherwise empty pavilion take place all day, every day. Marvellous, funny and affecting, An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale is much more than a parlour game. It is about history and memory – and it shows that the real encyclopedic palace is not to be found in a collection of objects, but in people themselves." [see a video of Searle visiting the Romanian Pavilion, starting at min. 2.30 while the 'living sculptures' are performing a reenactment of Allora and Calzadilla's 2011 piece presented in the US Pavilion].

(Above) An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale, Romanian Pavilion.

Above: 'Bang', a so-so installation assembled by 886 three-legged wooden stols by Ai Weiwei, at the entrance of the German Pavilion (this year housed in the French Pavilion).

More Giardini. For the Austrian Pavilion, Mathias Poledna takes us to the movies Alexander Forbes reported over at Blouin Art Info "... to a very short movie, that is. At just over three minutes long, “Imitation of Life” should feel like a slap in the face to the hulking structure in which it sits (both literally and figuratively). But the single animated scene, which reproduces to exacting detail the process used by film studios in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is a joy. It’s simple, light (at least on the surface), heartwarming even, and then it ends leaving one wishing for more."

Adrian Searle also mentioned Anri Sala's "Ravel Raval Unravel": "... Albanian artist Anri Sala, representing France, is in the German Pavilion. He drew big queues last week for his three-part film installation, based on performances of Maurice Ravel's 1930 composition Concerto in D for the Left Hand. Impeccably staged though it is, Sala's is a minor work on a major scale." [Watch video here]

A (poor) photo of Anri Sala's video installation.

Mid way through a 2 hour queue under the rain to enter Anri Sala's exhibition on Friday 31 May.

Other National Pavilions in the Giardini not very much mentioned by the press, but worth visiting: Czech Republic & Slovak Republic, exhibiting work by Petra Feriancová (first room) and Zbyněk Baladrán (with the film "Liberation or Alternatively", at the back). Feriancová's project takes "Venice as a starting point and theme disappears in a return to intimate history: although pigeons, shells, masks and cityscapes are universal figures with a specific information value right here in Venice, their photographs or their collections were taken for purely personal reasons (the artist and her family) and have in fact nothing in common with Venice." [More images and text via Mousse].

the exhibition project Still the Same Place by Petra Feriancová and Zbyněk Baladrán curated by Marek Pokorný. - See more at: http://moussemagazine.it/55vb-czechoslovak-pavilion/#sthash.hhxgS6c4.dpuf

Also Lebanon was represented by a wonderful new film, "Letter To A Refusing Pilot", by Akram Zaatari. The story is centered on a powerful real-life account of an Israeli Air Force fighter who was sent to destroy a school outside of Saida in the early 1980s but refused to do so, and instead dropped the bombs in the sea. As a kid, Zaatari would hear the story from his father, director of the very same school. Years later Zaatari discovered the story wasn't a rumour and that the pilot was real. The film reflects on the consequences of refusal as a decisive act.

Zaatari's film in the Lebanese Pavilion in the Corderie.

Holland Cotter of the New York Times wrote on Alfredo Jaar’s show at the Chilean pavilion [two photos below], which is "centered around a sculpture that moves, an exact model of the Giardini campus that emerges from and sinks back into a vat of fetid-looking water. Mr. Jaar is telling a story about the alignment of art and power: Many of the older, pre-World War II pavilions are relics of a murderous nationalism were built as cultural trophies by economically competitive nations that created colonial empires and eventually led Europe into war."

Elsewhere in Venice, a number of Pavilions bid for our attention. Not least Angola, which won the Golden Lion for the Best National Participation. The question here was, as rightly stated by Filipa Ramos in her Art Agenda review, "How much of the Golden Lion for the best National Participation was due to Edson Chagas's "Luanda, Encyclopedic City" and how much of it was due to the gallery of Palazzo Cini, which hosts the Angolan Pavilion?" The impressive Cini collection of Renaissance works (Piero della Francesca, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Pontormo...see photos below) is rarely open to the public. Chagas's low pillars of twenty-three off-set takeaway posters à la Felix González-Torres (though displayed on palets), marked a contrast between classical products of Western culture and the photographed images of the streets of Luanda.

"The images consisted mostly of depictions of large pieces of junk (the seat of a broken office chair, a tattered soccer ball) that were displaced and then photographed by the artist in Luanda. Visitors were invited to collect the different images, thus producing a supersized album of all the gathered prints. Despite the naïve dualism generated by the blatant contrast between the two worlds (the location of production and location of display), the project presented an almost magical and secretive discovery to its visitors that was much in harmony with Massimiliano Gioni's exhibition's focus on parallel and lesser-known art histories."

Do check out – and leave plenty of time for – the Cyprus-Lithuania in Palasport "Giobatta Gianquinto" nearby the Arsenale entrance. The sports centre building alone is worth a visit. You'll be surprised to see such a large venue in what is seemingly such a small island. As Dan Fox of frieze writes "The Pavilion of Lithuania and Cyprus, held in a building one would never expect to find in Venice. An almost Brutalist-looking edifice, tucked next to the Arsenale, housed a huge, modern school gymnasium, where curator Raimundas Malasauskas had organized a show of performances, sculpture, painting and dance in an environment that was about as un-Venetian as one could get ... What on earth was going on? What was the work and what wasn’t? For once it was nice to simply enjoy the mystery."

Back to Quinn Latimer: "Maria Hassabi performed her intricate movement-based work on the steep, cinematic steps of the gymnasium, while far below, an installation of temporary walls made up of recycled walls from previous pavilions (by Gabriel Lester) and works by various artists—Jason Dodge, Elena Narbutaitė, and Dexter Sinister, among twelve others—looked, from above, as small and distant as a diorama." [Watch a video with interviews and images of the exhibition]

(Above) New York-based performance artist Maria Hassabi during Intermission (2013), surrounded with works by Phanos Kyriacou.

Another one to not miss is Richard Mosse's 'The Enclave' in the Irish Pavilion. The photo below doesn't do justice, if you want a better idea watch this wonderful 7min. video 'The Impossible Image' produced by frieze (and Vimeo staff pick!) in which you can hear the artist talking about the process of making the works.

(Above) Multi-screen installation of Richard Moss' The Enclave in the Irish Pavilion in the Fondaco Marcello.

Not to forget the Scottish Pavilion in the Palazzo Pisani which has one of the most solid shows in town, composed of three artists – Hayley Tompkins, Duncan Campbell and Corin Sworn. Filipa Ramos noted that "Hayley Tompkins’s floor installation of photographs and paintings puts together different scales of familiar, commonplace scenes and objects (from the depiction of a traffic jam to an electric plug or to the proliferation of plastic bottles) in such a way that they all become part of a set of recognizable, familiar presences."

Detail of Hayley Tompkins's "Digital Light Pool (Orange)" (2013), composed of Acrylic on plastic trays, stock photographs, wooden boxes, glass, plastic bottles, watercolour.

Elsewhere in the city, dozens of Eventi Collaterali and other exhibitions piled up. Christy Lange wrote about one of the most talked-about events (particularly as queues became a real 'trending topic' in any conversation). Lange writes: "organized by the Fondazione Prada, the exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969 / Venice 2013’ at Ca’ Corner della Regina ambitiously sets out to reconstruct Harald Szeemann’s seminal exhibition ‘Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information’, originally staged at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland in 1969." (...) "The show also recreates the tile and wooden floors of Bern, and even imported and installed authentic radiators. The effect is not seamless; nor is meant to be. Instead, there are visible gaps where the white walls had to be cut to fit around the classical Venetian mouldings, and the intricately painted wooden beams of the palazzo remain exposed overhead." (...) "Along with Szeemann’s preliminary sketches for the show’s poster, we also get to see evidence of the harsh reception the show received in the Swiss press: illustrated by several ridiculing cartoons in national newspapers, like one in which a cleaning woman forgets her mop bucket in the gallery, only to have it interpreted as a work of art by a museum guide."

Carol Vogel of the New York Times puts the exhibition into historical perspective: "Originally organized by Harald Szeemann, the Kunsthalle’s director at the time, the show is considered the first major exhibition of what was then regarded as radical art. It included little from outside the Western Hemisphere and little by women, but it was the first big show to acknowledge a broad range of mixed-media work that fell under freshly coined terms like Arte Povera, Process Art, Anti-Form, Conceptual art and performance art. Its nearly 70 artists included Claes Oldenburg, Joseph Beuys, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman." (...) "Featured in the show, which ends on Nov. 3, are works from artists who were then emerging, including Carl Andre, Richard Artschwager, Alighiero Boetti, Sol LeWitt and Keith Sonnier. And when the curators were unable to locate a work of art, they just left a dotted outline of where the piece should have been placed — a ghost of what once was."

Ramos reminded readers of "Celant’s ongoing inquiry upon the possibilities of reproducibility—a line of research he has pursued since his early years as an exhibition maker—a step further, as he attempts to reproduce the unrepeatable, indeed to repeat the irreproducible."

Jannis Kounellis' "Untitled" (1969) was originally installed in the lower floor of the Kunsthalle Bern. Here it's in the second mezzanine floor of Ca' Corner della Regina.

Walter de Maria's "Art by Telephone" (1967). Reenacted.

Richard Serra works from 1969.

General view of the Schulwarte (third floor in the Fondazione Prada) which displayed works by Pino Pascali (floor), Marinus Boezem (left), Frank Lincoln Viner, Thomas Bang, Michael Buthe, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Paul Cotton, Ger van Elk, Rafael Ferrer, Hans Haacke, Roelof Louw, Emilio Prini, Allen Ruppersberg, Frank Lincoln Viner and William T. Wiley.

Giovanni Anselmo's "Untitled" (floor, right); "Il cotone bagnato viene buttato sul vetro e ci resta" (left, wall) both from 1969; and the 1968 "Untitled" in the corner. (Displacement)

Szeemans' (pre-excell!) spreadsheet listing the artists names, place of residence, title, technique and measurements of the work to be displayed, and a projected travel and production budget.

Another interesting exhibition was the Future Generation Art Prize housed in the incredible Palazzo Contarini Polignac nearby the Accademia. More photos here.

Entrance to the exhibition.

Emily Roysdon, "Our Short Century", 2012.

Eva Kotátková, "Theatre of speaking objects (Becoming objects)", 2013.

Detail of Rayyane Tabet, "Architecture Lessons", 2012. From the series "Five Distant Memories: The Suitcase, The Room, The Toys, The Boat and Maradona".

Aurelien Froment, "Pulmo Marina", 2010.

And last but not least, the Palazzo Grassi's inauguration of Tadao Ando's Teatrino (or rather "Teatrone" as it's 1,000 square-metres and holds 225 seats), as stated by Ramos "a truly remarkable event for a country known for its epidemic of closing-down cinemas." During the opening days, the Teatrino screened Anri Sala’s "1395 Days Without Red" (2011), Philippe Parreno’s "Marilyn" (2012), and Loris Gréaud’s "The Snorks: A Concert for Creatures" (2012). This was undoubtedly the best contribution Pinault brought to this year's biennale. We agree with Christy Lange on that the exhibition "Prima Materia", curated by Caroline Bourgeois and Michael Govan at the Punta della Dogana "managed to reduce even good works of art to macho collections of ‘things’". The only room that was somehow 'saved' was the space mixing Japanese Mono-ha and Arte Povera with works by Merz, Paolini, Boetti, Penone, Sekine, Suga, Ufan, Koshimizu, Enokura (photo below). Adel Abdessemed's 2011 four life-sized sculptures of Christ modeled after the Crucifixion made of razor wire was one of the low points in Venice.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

(Part 2/3) "The Encyclopedic Palace", 55th Venice Biennale in tote bags

2013-06-14T09:30:00.000+02:00

Courtesy: Tucano, Milan

The biennale tote bag. Merely light and foldable marketing freebees in the form of non-rigid containers for the carrying of catalogues, innumerable press releases and checklists? Or ironic critiques of an increasingly capitalist and permissive society? Austere, poetic and challenging invitations to revalue familiar things and refocus our perceptions?

Now ever-present at the most vital and visible sites for the production, distribution, and public discourse around contemporary art, these large and often alarmingly unfastened cloth bags – typically with parallel handles that emerge from the sides of its pouch – have in the span of a few decades quietly become the unquestioned handmaiden of biennalisation. In Venice this year few dared to break with the tote's canvassed hegemony. The Dutch stuck their head above the parapet with a risky choice of clear plastic bags to accompany Mark Manders' pavilion – a whimsically aggressive engagement with issues of indispensability, and, perhaps with typically Dutch straightforwardness, transparency.

Even if a pavilion or Eventi Collaterali can fly in Michelin-starred chefs for their dinners or legendary DJs from the South Bronx instrumental in the early development of hip hop for their parties, getting the tote bag right nevertheless remains a perilous balance of form and content, of prestige and patriarchy, greenwashing brinkmanship and sheer design cojones.

So was 2013 acqua alta for tote bags in Venice? Did any of them attain the understated brilliance of the Canadian Pavilion bag at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007? (David Altmejd's noir classic in heavy twill boasted a separately tailored gusset.) Or did they match the game-changing 48 x 48 cm tote bag for Ayşe Erkmen's Turkish Pavilion in 2011? (designed by Konstantin Grcic, it featured an inner pocket made to fit the catalogue, and its own section on the pavilion website). There's a big wide world of tote bags out there...

This year, the Biennale organisation brought in the Milan-based Tucano to design the official tote – they've been working with the film festival for a decade or more – and they spurned the traditional heavy cloth in favor of a lightweight synthetic "skin" and webbing straps which lend the item the air of a piece of technical camping equipment. The extra-long straps allow for a certain dynamic freedom of movement that is a clear reference to the Futurists, although they may impede the shorter visitor on a busy vaporetto. Its uncompromising blackness seems to suggest mourning, yet with a vital rather than dour spirit – "time and space died yesterday" as F.T. Marinetti once said. Good effort.

Le pavillon français opted for a nocturne in Parisian fog grey for its bag accompanying Anri Sala's "Ravel Ravel Unravel". The rawness of the medium-weight cotton – or is it hemp? – speaks of torrid emotional intensity while the contrastingly spare and delicately-kerned typography attempts to echo the phasing-in and out of the pianists in Sala's grand video installation. Only printed on one side however – a note of uncertainty?

Being in part based in Alvar Aalto's masterpiece pavilion in the Giardini, Finland's representation at the Biennale has wisely shied away from grand gestures with its bag for the exhibition "Falling Trees". The exhibition was put together with "a sinuous curating process" the organisers reveal, and their serene bag prompts us, with its ample volume and unadorned reilu meininki tailoring, to weave our way through its "contingent encounter between art and nature". Onneksiolkoon! Pidän siitä todella!

The Tuvalu Pavilion pluckily represents the third-least populous sovereign state in the world, and likely the first in line to disappear underwater as sea levels rise due to climate change. The exhibition itself, by "sensational Taiwanese artist Vincent J.F. Huang" reportedly features "a sea turtle and a group of penguins belonging to an underwater mafia ring seeking revenge on capitalism and the effects this is having on their natural habitat". Wow. More understated – though no less imaginative – the cream-and-azure coloured tote bag bears the coat of arms of Tuvalu: a shield decorated in a pattern with mussel shells and banana leaves, a hut and stylized waves. A Tuvaluan inscription reads “Tuvalu mo te Atua” (Tuvalu for the Almighty). Made from silkscreened Polyfabric™ (an environmentally-friendly cloth) it hits all the right notes for ecologically-sensitive micro-nation enthusiasts. Child-safe and odor/mildew resistant.

The tote for Jeremy Deller's British Pavilion, entitled "English Magic", was manufactured in 100% 135gsm cotton by a company based, ironically enough, in Welshpool, Wales. The reverse side depicts a line drawing of the British Pavilion which has been a staple on the British bags since at least Chris Ofili's 2003 exhibition. Given the inspiration that William Morris provides in Deller's exhibition, and the fact that Morris was a prolific type designer, it is perhaps a missed opportunity that the slogan text appears in the all-too-familiar Times New Roman. British Council directives? Nevertheless it does lend it a kind of appropriate DIY quality, and the highlighter orange colour gives it the so-wrong-its-right touch that will secure its place on the sturdy shoulders of Deller fans, Bowie fans, cyclists, birdwatchers, tea-drinkers, stone-hand-axe experts, etc., for posterity. Not likely to appear on the Christmas list of Harry, His Royal Highness Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales. Or autocratic Russian billionaires.

2013 saw the United Arab Emirates present the work of Mohammed Kazem in the Arsenale's Sale d’Armi. "Walking on Water" comprised a projection of the sea and illuminated GPS coordinates within an chamber, but the quality of the tote bag alone was already leaving visitors feeling like they were walking on water with its speckled blue background recalling the waves of the Persian gulf. Assalaam alaykum!

Jesper Just's Danish Pavilion had to suffer the cruel injustice of technical difficulties with its complex five-screen video installation during the opening days. And to be frank, the gloomy black-on-black tote accompanying an exhibition burdened with the icky title "Intercourses" cannot have lifted the mood. An uncharacteristic error from the style-conscious Danes? In fact the design was headed by the usually-impeccable New York based Project Projects. Nevertheless, the bag looks more suited to a Bulgarian goth club or an inner tube manufacturers' convention than something to accessorize an exhibition that "challenges the viewer’s preconceived notions of space and time". Interesting pavilion. Charismatic artist. Woeful tote. Even difficult to re-gift this one.

Photo courtesy: Graphical House

Scotland! A typography-forward triumph! Impactful use of the three artists surnames in a highly refined neo-grotesque sans serif which appears not at all restrained by an attempt at upholding historical accuracy or formalities. The clarity, poise and symmetry of the white letterforms, combined with the discerning deep-blue cotton base, and the cheeky short handles say "hey, let's celebrate everything that's good about Scottish creativity!" If there was a Golden Lion for totes, this would surely be in with a roar.

"See Venice and die," is what they say? Or is it Rome? Whatever, once you've experienced the bag for Lawrence Weiner's THE GRACE OF A GESTURE, organized by the Written Art Foundation and presented at the Palazzo Bembo near the Rialto bridge, you may have witnessed the pinnacle of totes. Or something pretty close. Weiner has already produced some bag legends – check out his audacious design for Printed Matter – yet this multilingual canvas produced in Westphalia is a perky filet mignon of a bag that makes the competition look like cheap mince. As Weiner says: “Art is the empirical fact of the relationships of objects to objects in relation to human beings and not dependent upon historical precedent for either use or legitimacy". Who can argue?

Related posts:
(Post 1/3) The 55th Venice Biennale: "The Encyclopedic Palace" in pictures and as seen by the critics, 1 June–24 November 2013
(Post 3/3) The 55th Biennale di Venezia: National Pavilions and Collateral Events in pictures and as seen by the critics, 1 June–24 November 2013

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

(Part 1/3) The 55th Venice Biennale: "The Encyclopedic Palace" in pictures and as seen by the critics, 1 June–24 November 2013

2013-06-09T16:56:00.001+02:00

Poster announcing the biennale nearby the Accademia.

Following previous years reports (2009, 2011 biennale posts and 2007 photo album 1 and 2) we'd like to share our photo-documentation alongside some articles and interviews related to this year's biennale that we have been reading before, during and after our Venice trip.

Bit first a bit of recent history. Massimiliano Gioni (Busto Arsizio, 1973), currently Associate Director and Director of Exhibitions at the New Museum as well as Artistic Director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan, was appointed Director of the 55th International Exhibition of the Venice Biennale at the end of January 2012. In October 2012 he announced the title and overall concept of "The Encyclopedic Palace" (Il Palazzo Enciclopedico) and in March 2013, he announced his artist list (over 150 artists from 38 countries, map of the venues here). A real tour de force.

IL ENCICLOPEDICO PALAZZO DEL MONDO (The Encyclopedic Palace of the World) Marino Auriti (1891–1980), Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, c. 1950. Wood, plastic, glass, metal, hair combs, and model kit parts. American Folk Art Museum, gift of Colette Auriti Firmani in memory of Marino Auriti, 2002.35.1.

Both frieze magazine and Artforum had published interviews previous to the exhibition's opening. The former with Milan-based art critic Barbara Casavecchia and the latter with the Artistic Director of the 2003 Venice Biennale, Francesco Bonami. A third interesting article to give some background if you're planning a trip to Venice is by Carol Vogel in the New York Times, narrating the previous weeks to the opening.

In the above mentioned interview with Bonami, Gioni describes Il Palazzo Enciclopedico as an attempt "to conceive of the biennial as a temporary museum more than simply as a show that captures the supposed zeitgeist." (...) The title comes from the self-taught Italian- American artist Marino Auriti, who conceived of his own impossible, imaginary museum: a building that would house all the knowledge in the world. Obviously his was a dream that remains only a model, a failed project. By using this title, and by looking at the figure of Auriti, I also hoped to connect to the history of Venice, because it’s the oldest biennial; founded in 1895, it has its roots in the format of the world’s fair, going back to the Great Exhibition of 1851. I wanted to acknowledge the link to the tradition of the universal exposition but also to suggest the failure of that model right from the beginning."

29 May 2013, 9.45am. VIPs and Press gather in front of the door.

On the spirit of the biennial, its zeitgeist and the oft-heard ‘It’s a museum show, not a biennale’, Dan Fox of frieze writes: "During the opening week, I wondered why I felt like giving little more than a shrug of the shoulders whenever I heard the criticism that ‘It’s a museum show, not a biennale’. Long gone are the days when a show such as this – or for example the Sao Paulo Bienal, or the Whitney Biennial – would be the one of the few opportunities one would have to be brought up to speed on the latest art being made in various parts of the world."

With regards to the exhibition design and parcour, Paddy Johnson of Art F City rightly notes that "the grandeur of the Arsenale was greatly diminished through near-obsessive wall building. That decision kept the architecture from overwhelming the work, a godsend to the biennale, which has historically been burdened by relying on spectacle to compete with the architecture." New York-based architect Annabelle Selldorf reconfigured the space into a museum-like suite of white cube galleries projecting large walls that covered almost entirely the populated columns in the Arsenale, hidding its (rather charming) crumbling walls. This made the visitor focus on the many paintings, drawings and vitrines on display.

Room 1, Arsenale: Auriti's model welcomes visitors in the first room of the Arsenale. Behind one can observe the high walls built to 'block' the grandeur of the Corderie spaces.

Room 1, Arsenale: J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere's black and white photos of Nigerian women's hairstyles and head wrappings accompanies Auriti's architectural model.

Vincenzo Latronico introduces the linearity of the exhibition: "Gioni’s exhibition focuses on the encyclopedia as an idiosyncratic struggle—the impossible, yet nonetheless deeply human attempt at knowing the structures of the world. The part of the exhibition taking place in the Arsenale is linear and suggests a possible evolution of the way this structure has been imagined. It opens with the Palazzo Enciclopedico, a utopian architectural model for a museum of all human knowledge, patented in 1955 by Marino Auriti, a retired car mechanic. It closes with a sequence of chaotic and overcrowded video works (most notably Stan VanDerBeek’s immersive 1968 Movie Mural), offering a stark rendition of how such encyclopedias have been approximated by the Internet."

Room 13, Arsenale: Stan VanDerBeek’s 1968 Movie Mural closes the linear section in the Arsenale (though strictly speaking the show finishes with Walter de Maria's 'Apollo's Ecstasy' (below, Room 16) from 1990, a loan from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam). More photos of De Maria's piece via Contemporary Art Daily.

Centering on the much-discussed inclusion of "professional" and "outsider" artists, Holland Cotter argues that the "The outsider art concept is tired by now, even ethically suspect, the equivalent of “primitive art” from decades ago. Mr. Gioni finesses the problem without really addressing it by integrating outsider-ish-looking inside art (there’s more and more of this around) so the two designations get blurred."

Cotter continues "with a blend of insider-outsider and art-nonart components, it could have been stimulating. But the objects had little to say to one another. I feel a lack of surprise in Mr. Gioni’s show for the opposite reason: Its pairings — spiritualists paintings by af Klint and Emma Kunz, digital-printer abstractions by Alice Channer and Wade Guyton — are too neat and museumy. Yet at the same time, the show’s curatorial line is so firm, its choice of artists so strong and its pacing so expert that you are carried along, and ultimately rewarded."

Room 3, Central Pavilion: Hilma af Klint (wall) and Roger Hiorns (floor) "atomised" altar from and English church. [See profile of the artists]

Room 12, Arsenale: Alice Channer's digitally stretched images anchored at the floor by slabs of marble.

During a recent Q&A with Gioni at the ICA in London in March 2013, an interesting question arose from a member of the public about interpretative materials, and how the wonderful history that each work encapsulates was going to be received by the viewer. Gioni responed that he was inspired by a show he saw curated by Roger Buergel where the captions created a parallel narrative rather than utilising a more didactic tone, and he has since been writing "extended captions" in collaboration with artist and writer Chris Wiley.

The choice of the works by more contemporary artists often has a outsider "look" that is often played-up by these captions. Such is the case with Eva Kotátková (video here), whose rather beautiful "Asylum" (2013) installation is described as a piece in which she "collaborated with patients at the Bohnice pshychiatric hospital outside Prague, resulting in an installation based on the social hierarchies and modes of communication envisioned by the patients" (Exhibition Guide, text by Rachel Wetzler).

Room 21, Central Pavilion: Eva Kotátková's "Asylum" (2013), shares room with Anna Zemánková's drawings (wall).

To this much-debated insider-outsider wrangle, Dan Fox of frieze adds: "perhaps Gioni did stack the number of artists expressing dense personal cosmologies rather high in places throughout the show – at points it was a little like going to a party where every guest wishes to corner you and talk intensely about their definition of the universe rather than ask you how you’re doing – but I was never short of something to discover, think about, learn from, agree with or push against."

Room 7, Central Pavilion: Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser's The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz (1976–1992).

Adrian Searle writes humourously about the exhibition's megalomaniac ambitions: "You expect Gioni to leap out of Auriti's tiered architectural cake of a building yelling: "Today we curate the biennale! Tomorrow, the world!"" He then continues, "throughout Gioni's exhibition, we are asked where meaning lies. So many artists here seem to be speaking private languages only they can understand: here is a Theosophist, there is a Shaker, and over there are some horrible occult tarot drawings by Aleister Crowley, the satanist once described as the most evil man in the world... What unites this vast rag-bag of sculptures, tantric blobs, errant modernists with esoteric beliefs, and outsiders who fill drawing after drawing with lurching interior worlds, is a sense that everyone here is trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Much of the time, they just add to it."

Room 10, Central Pavilion: Enrico David's recent work with distended figures, totemic sculptures and patterned tapestries. More views via Contemporary Art Daily.

An important question is raised by Bonami in the interview: "How to avoid geographic flattening, in which everything from everywhere is thrown in? But then how do you avoid that kind of flattening with respect to history? How do you achieve historical specificity? That is the challenge if you are adopting a Wunderkammer, or encyclopedic, approach." To which Gioni responds "well, it might resemble digital Wunderkammer, or computer desktops." Something to keep in mind...

Room 5, Central Pavilion: (Vitrine) Ron Nagle's moon-rock formations and coral-like spires; (Walls) Anonymous Tantric Paintings produced between the 1960s-2004.

Starting with the Central Pavilion (previously called the "Padiglione Italia"), Vincenzo Latronico
writes in Art Agenda that "one of the Giardini’s most delicate rooms, for instance, displayed French Surrealist Roger Caillois’s collection of over a hundred rare geodes—their flamboyantly colored geometrical patterns and crystalline structures arranged in progressions, suggesting both a museum of natural history and the visionary maps of an alien landscape."

Room 14, Central Pavilion: Collection of Roger Caillois rocks from the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Caillois shares room with Guo Fengyi, whose ballpoint pen, pencil and ink drawings she created to alleviate her acute arthritis.

Vincenzo Latronico also highlights another central piece: Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s Plötzlich diese Übersicht (1981–), "a collection of over a hundred small clay sculptures offering a depiction of the world through an arbitrary selection of significant minor events. From Einstein’s parents staged at the moment after the conception of their son, to Jacques Lacan first seeing himself in a mirror at age two; from a group of potatoes (asking how they ever got to Europe) to Jagger and Jones going home satisfied after writing “I can’t get no satisfaction” it is an ironic and yet oddly sensitive encyclopedia of banal mysteries and everyday epiphanies. The display, however, is particularly significant. In 2008, when Gioni showed the piece in a Fischli and Weiss retrospective he curated in Milan, he arranged the sculptures’ individual plinths in a linear sequence of groups, suggesting both an intrinsic order and a path the viewer could follow to obtain a complete experience of the work. In the Biennale, however, these are scattered around the room, giving the labyrinthine feeling of a mass of knowledge that could never be fully apprehended."

Room 13 (upper level), Central Pavilion: Peter Fischli & David Weiss, 'Suddenly This Overview' (1981–2012).

Another absorbing piece in the Central Pavilion is Kohei Yoshiyuki series of black-and-white infrared film photographs “The Park” (1971–1979) in which the artist photographed unaware couples having sex in parks at night. An interesting piece of context is that the pictures where originally presented in a dark gallery, offering the possibility of recreating the gloom depicted and making viewers complicit in the act.

Room 17, Central Pavilion: Kohei Yoshiyuki, “The Park” (1971–1979).

Writing about this years's Golden Lion awardees, Amy Sherlock points out that music features heavily in the encyclopedic video Grosse Fatigue (2013) by French artist Camille Henrot in which "computer windows showing photographs, video clips and morphing Wikipedia pages flicker and accumulate to a pulsing baseline whose steady tempo links a primitive, cardiac rhythm with the heady erotic charge of the dancefloor."

Room 3, Arsenale: Still of Grosse Fatigue (2013) by Camille Henrot.

"Tino Seghal picked up a Golden Lion as best participant in the main pavilion for his piece in which performers sit on the floor, beatboxing, singing and humming in a shifting melody of voice and rhythm."

Room 2, Central Pavilion: Tino Sehgal shared room with Rudolf Steiner's blackboards filled with coloured chalk (background).

Also in the Central Pavilion, Italian Marisa Merz and Austrian Maria Lassnig, Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement of the 55th International Art Exhibition, share room 24. See video of the award cerimony. [More photos of Marisa Merz via Contemporary Art Daily.]

In the above-mentioned interview with Bonami, Gioni described that "a few artists in the show will use theatrical stagings or, simply, live actors. But I think of these less as performances than as living sculptures. Tino Sehgal is making a new piece, comprising a mise-en-scène with other works in the main pavilion. It’s on a smaller scale than his most recent works, but it is going to be quite intense. (...) John Bock is creating an installation that will include actors speaking in imaginary languages and what he calls a “house of maggots."

(Above) John Bock's 'Above the Point of Glowing Silence', a 2013 work commissioned by the Biennale at the Giardino delle Vergini. More views of his installation via Contemporary Art Daily.

Sam Thorne: "The Arsenale – the stronger half of the exhibition, I think – is episodic, even insistently narrativizing in its form. It tracks a kind of evolutionary process. The beginning, for example, is pointedly about beginnings of different kinds – Stefan Bertalan’s drawings of the life cycle of a sunflower or the whole of R. Crumb’s illustrated Book of Genesis. Indeed, the refrain of a great new film by Camille Henrot is ‘In the beginning…’ These early stages are also filled with animals and evocations of the natural world: Eliot Porter’s exquisite 1950s photos of birds in flight, Christopher Williams’ forensic photos of Harvard’s collection of glass flowers (1989)."

Room 2, Arsenale: Christopher Williams, Angola to Vietnam* (1989). A suite of 28 gelatin silver prints of glass flowers from Harvard's Ware Collection portraying the hyperrrealistic glass specimens made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

Room 6, Arsenale: R. Crumb's 207 pages of 'The Book of Genesis' (2009).

Having not seen Gioni's much-celebrated '10,000 Lives', 8th Gwangju Biennial (2010), we asked to those who had seen it for their impressions. Back then, Gioni also described it as an exhibition that dealt with ‘our obsession with images’ and has referred to 'The Encyclopedic Palace' as a continuation of this exhibition model proposed in 2010. In Gwangju, Gioni also included several of the works also exhibited in Venice: Shinro Ohtake's scrapbooks (1983); Paul McCarthy’s Children’s Anatomical Educational Figure (1980); Eliot Porter’s colour dye-transfer prints of birds caught in flight; and repeated numerous participating artists such as Dahn Vo, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Stan VanDerBeek, Fischli & Weiss, Aurélien Froment, Morton Bartlett, Dieter Roth, Ryan Trecartin, Christopher Williams, James Lee Byars, Matt Mullican, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Henrik Olesen, Hito Steyerl, Maria Lassnig, Emma Kunz, Mark Leckey, Pawel Althamer, Tino Sehgal and Cindy Sherman, amongst others (see Gwangju images here).

Room 13 (lower level), Central pavilion: Shinro Ohtake's obsessive scrapbooks produced since 1977.

Room 8, Arsenale: Aurélien Froment's new work "Camillo's Idea" (2013), a film featuring a mnemonist in the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza who demonstrates her own feats of memory and recites the history of mnemonics from teh system devised by Greek lyric poet Simonides of Ceos to Giulio Camillo's Fifteenth-century "Theater of Memory". (Exhibition guide, Text by Chris Wiley)

Room 5, Arsenale: Danh Vo installation with an imported colonial-era Catholic Church from Vietnam. [More photos of his installation via Contemporary Art Daily.]

Room 9, Arsenale: Pawel Althamer's 90 "sci-fi" sculptures with masks of Venetian citizens and plastic bodies are one of the downers of the Arsenale. As Adrian Searle warned "watch out for Pawel Althamer's room of flayed figures, and avoid them if you can."

It would seem that Gwangju's "unauthorized, partial reconstruction and unannounced tribute" of Mike Kelley's 1993 'The Uncanny' exhibition is in Venice echoed with the invitation extended to Cindy Sherman, who curated an excellent show-within-a-show in the Arsenale (Room 10). Sam Thorne describes it as a space with "figures of all shapes and sizes: signature pieces by Charles Ray, Duane Hanson and George Condo, some slightly more surprising inclusions like John Outterbridge and Jimmie Durham, through to Haitian vodou flags and even Sherman’s personal collection of photo albums. It’s quite a coup."

Vitrines with Shermans' collection of photo albums.

Other highlights (unfortunately not all with photo-documentation to accompany): Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj's 16mm film examining a map created by a member of Brazil's Spiritists community, one of the few intimate moments in the Arsenale; João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva's immersive room with 16mm projectors presenting a new repertoire of films shot in Mozambique; Eduard Spelterini's black and white 1890s photographs of his ballooning expeditions; Sharon Hayes' video [see interview here] inspired by Pier Paolo Passolini's 1965 documentary Comizi D'amore, in which the artist interviews American women students, executives, artists, poets about their sexuality; Rossella Biscotti's minimal sculptures produced in compost created in collaboration with the inmates of the women's prison in the Guidecca island, accompanied by an hour-long sound piece where the women describe their dreams [see interview here]; and Michael Schmidt's Lebensmitten [Food] (2006–10) photo series for which the artist spent four years documenting all aspects of industrial food production in Europe.

Room 3, Arsenale: Eduard Spelterini's black and white 1890s photographs of his ballooning expeditions.

Room 8, Arsenale: Michael Schidt's Lebensmitten [Food] (2006–10).

Room 8, Arsenale: Sharon Hayes, 'Richerche: three', 2013. 23'

Hito Steyerl's tucked-away video in the Giardini delle Vergini, was certainly one of the best pieces in Gioni's exhibition. Michael Connor of Rhizome has written about the 14 min. video, describing it as an "instructional video informing viewers how to remain invisible in an age of image proliferation". (...) "In the context of the Venice Biennale, which explores the theme of human knowledge and its limits, this discussion brings up fundamental questions about how much of our knowledge is derived through representations of the world, through images and data, and the limits of such knowledge." [Read full text here]

Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013).

Erik van Lieshout's new work Healing (2013), an outdoor drive-in movie installation with a 5 meter LED screen, involves the artist' micro-cosmos: the work and ideals of his family members.

(Post 3/3) The 55th Biennale di Venezia: National Pavilions and Collateral Events in pictures and as seen by the critics, 1 June–24 November 2013

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Latitudes conversa con el artista Alejandro Cesarco en la Parra & Romero, Madrid

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El pasado 4 de junio Latitudes mantuvo una conversación con el artista Alejandro Cesarco (1975 Montevideo, vive en Nueva York) con motivo de la inauguración de su exposición individual "La noche agranda su silencio", en la galería madrileña Parra & Romero.

La conversación se centró en los trabajos presentados en su exposición en la galería (las películas 'Zeide Isaac' y 'Present Memory' de 2009 y 2010 respectivamente; dos pies de página en vinilo [Footnote #20 y Footnote #24] y la serie de cuatro fotografías 'Where I'm Calling From' del 2012), e incluyó preguntas enviadas por amigos (novia del artista, el actor Daniel Hendler que aparece en varias de sus películas), colegas artistas (Jack Pierson, Julie Ault, Nicolás Guagnini) y comisarios con los que ha colaborado en años recientes (Sarah Demeuse desde Nueva York, Jacob Fabricius desde Copenhague o Ellen Blumenstein desde Berlin).

Cesarco trabaja con Murray Guy en Nueva York, Tanya Leighton en Berlin y Ignacio Liprandi en Buenos Aires. "La noche agranda su silencio" (vistas de la exposición a continuación) es la primera exposición de Cesarco en Parra & Romero, Madrid.

Fotos cortesía de Parra & Romero, Madrid.

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Interview between Christina Li and Latitudes on 'Incidents of Travel' for Witte de With's 'Witness to Moderation(s)' blog

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From April, 2013 onwards, writer and curator Christina Li (HK/NL) takes up the role of a designated Witness to Moderation(s) the year-long programme of exhibitions, performances and residencies that unfolds between Witte de With in Rotterdam and Spring in Hong Kong. As such, Li is invited to post regular blog entries responding to the multi-faceted projects part of Moderation(s).

Christina Li has been a part of Moderation(s) since its inception, and participated in the research and development workshop that took place at Witte de With in October 2012. Li will also be one of the four curators –together with Lee Ambrozy, Amira Gad, and Xiaoyu Weng– organizing the day-long conference Stories And Situations: The Moderation(s) Conference to take place on 5 October 2013 at Witte de With.

The interview published below between Li and Latitudes was originally published on Witte de With's website on May 2, 2013.

Christina Li: “Incidents of Travel” in Hong Kong is a second iteration of a project that you started in Mexico D.F in 2012, could you talk a little bit about how the idea of inviting artists to plan an itinerary functioning as both an artistic encounter and alternative studio visit came about?

Latitudes: The idea of the tour guide is of course not new. Back in 2009 while we were doing a year-long project in the Port of Rotterdam, we organised a series of bus tours to the port where we would present projects by Jan Dibbets, Lara Almarcegui or Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, etc. Listening to the feedback of the group that took part during those tours, we realised there was something very valuable about the idea of being (kindly) trapped in a bus for a day and to be taken around with a group of people whom you shared interests or even friendship with. Some were co-workers and took the day to talk about non-work related issues, to admire the landscape, to listen to the soundtrack that accompanied the bus tour and basically to enjoy a day away from the keyboard. We wanted to repeat what we thought was a successful format and thought our trip to Mexico DF was a perfect occasion for that.

Tour with Lara Almarcegui and botanist Remko Andeweg around the Port of Rotterdam, 8 November 2009. Photo: Latitudes. More images of the tour here.

While preparing a small exhibition of our eight years of practice for Casa del Lago in México DF, we felt we needed to add a ‘here and now’ contribution, and suggested inviting five artists (Minerva Cuevas, Tania Pérez Córdova, Diego Berruecos, Terence Gower and Jerónimo Hagerman) to develop a day-long tour for us.The choice of artists was mixed, some we had met before (Jerónimo or Terence) but didn’t know their work in much detail, and others (Tania, Minerva and Diego) we had been following their work for a while, but never met them in person. Our invitation was very open, our idea was for them to develop an itinerary that helped us understand their creative world, and that included them taking us to their favourite (or hated!) museums, libraries, markets, monuments, housing states, shops, restaurants, etc. that were special to their lives or to their artistic practice. We offered all artists a fee, covered all food and tickets-related expenses and had a car to take us around 9am–6pm, after that we used public transport. Experiencing any city accompanied by a local friend always offers a much deeper insight into any city, but navigating it with an artist whose work you admire, is even more meaningful as each site amplifies a personal connection.

Photo: Eduardo Loza

Li: Did you choose to adopt a different approach in your invitation to the artists in the Hong Kong edition? As far as I understood, Nadim Abbas’ tour was open to the public, while Yuk King Tan’s, Ho Sin Tung’s and Samson Young’s were conducted in a more intimate manner within a smaller group; what was the reason behind this decision? What were the responses to Nadim Abbas’ tour?

Latitudes: No, the invitation was the same in both occasions, though in Hong Kong we mostly used public transport. We also had more time to prepare and digest information, as were a month in residence at Spring. In the end it worked out as one tour per week as that suited best the artists’ schedule. Nadim’s tour was the first and was indeed open to the public, it has been the only tour so far with this aspect, although it was still a small group, initially of around fifteen people. We were interested in pushing the format and of course this meant that Nadim had to consider practical issues like distances and locations more carefully (ie. avoiding long walking distances, accessibility for groups, food availability…) in order to be realistic with the timings. A few people joined on and off, some engaged more actively than others. It was wonderful to see that Hong Kongers were also discovering sites they had never been to, like the Waterfall Bay Park or the nearby Waterfall Bay. Somehow we were all tourists for a day.

Nadim Abbas tour, 19 January 2013. Waterfall Bay Park's waterfall. Photo: Trevor Young

Li: Since these tours have always been meant for you both to converse privately with each selected artist and to get to know their practices and the city, has opening these tours up conjure a different perspective of how these tours could function for you both initially? How has this attempt challenge your thinking in mediating and presenting the immediate experience and documentation of these tours to a larger audience?

Latitudes: The tours were conceived from the point of view of research, and we haven’t wanted to necessarily burden the artists or the format with the expectations that they were participatory performances or some kind of touristic spectacle. We’ve tried to keep them quite casual and inconspicuous in this sense, and to respect the notion of hospitality in the same way that if we came to your house for dinner, you wouldn’t expect us to bring a group of strangers with us! Indeed this was literally the case in the day with Yuk King Tan, which concluded with a household of Filipina domestic workers making dinner for us – women whose trust and friendship she had earned through her personal affiliations and the concerns of her art. It is really not a question of us making the tours exclusive or private – we have not actually prohibited anyone else from coming along if the artist suggested it or was anyway okay with it. Yet it somehow seemed important to be able to commit to spending an entire day with them, and as soon as there is definitely something like an audience present (that might expect to be entertained or decide to leave) the dynamics and the logistics change.

The tours in México DF took place during five consecutive days right after our arrival, so the way we shared the photographic material was more direct via our Facebook at the end of each day. The exhibition at Casa del Lago opened only two days after we concluded the last tour, so had to come up with a fast solution to present our explorations: we projected a selection of 200 images as a slideshow, and displayed a selection of printed photos on the wall alongside a large map of the city with pins that located the sites we visited and the actual itineraries we followed written by the artists, which contained short descriptions of each site (we printed extra copies of these and made them available in the exhibition so one could pick them up and follow the route. These are now available to download from our website.)

Photo: Adrián Villalobos

In Hong Kong we were able to tweet during the tours, so it was an interesting process of documentation-on-the-go, of keeping a live diary of one’s journey, and to receive real-time responses from colleagues all over the world – the tweets have now been archived alongside some thirteen sound recordings, Facebook and blog posts. We also published blog posts of each of the tours which include extensive photo-documentation (by us and colleagues who took part) of the day interconnecting each photo with paragraphs of the itineraries written by the artists and our own impressions.

Li: You also have been to some other more specialised tours on offer during your stay in Hong Kong, were there more specific aspects of Hong Kong you were hoping to explore which guided your choices in attending these tours as a sightseer and a cultural tourist?

Latitudes: We were interested in studying what kind of readings the city offered away from the usual tourist sites (the Tian Tan Buddha, Victoria Peak, shopping tours, a day in Macau,…). We wanted to see if we could find more ‘marginal’ sculptures or sites that presented vernacular displays far from the polished and pre-packaged tourist experience.

1km of floating boardwalks, Deep Bay, Mai Po Marshes. Photo: Latitudes.

We picked up hundreds of leaflets in the information office and found a couple interesting ones offered by the Walk Hong Kong company we thought were somehow out of the usual menu. We have always been interested in environmental issues and wanted to approach the high density of Hong Kong from another angle, from its relation to the surrounding nature. We visited the Mai Po Nature Reserve in the New Territories, a wetland on the Australasia migratory route, and ended the day in Long Valley in Sheung Shui, observing birds and farmers collecting large amounts of lettuces and watercress. This also tied in with another wetland we visited later with Ho Sin Tung, the Nam Sang Wai area, in the northwest of Hong Kong. This is to say that our own interests ended up tying in nicely with the sites we visited with the artists. Samson Young took us to a nearby area on his tour, to the border fence that separates Hong Kong with mainland China were we listened to “Liquid Borders”, a soundtrack he has been recording placing contact microphones in the wired fencing and mixing it with the sound of water of the Shenzhen River.

Another tour we joined was the Feng Shui tour led by Susan Braun. We started visiting Norman Foster’s Hong Kong HSBC building in Admiralty, built according to strict Feng Shui principles, and finished at the Chi Lin Nunnery. The final one was with Martin Heyes, a former British Army officer and passionate World War II specialist, who took us to Devil’s Peak at the eastern extremity of Kowloon and to the Museum of Coastal Defence, to learn everything about the 1941 Japanese invasion of Hong Kong.

A group of Japanese tourists visit the fough battery on Devil's Peak. Photo: Latitudes

Li: As a whole, what would you say about the kinds of insights you have gained about the city from these tours, which might be seen as complements to the knowledge produced from the more casual encounters you have had through “Incidents of Travel”?

Latitudes: The Walk Hong Kong tours were an opportunity for us to specifically learn about birds, marshlands, Feng Shui and the 1941 Japanese invasion, but most importantly it was an opportunity to discuss with our tour leaders issues that went beyond the tour script so to speak, issues like immigration, recent historical events such as the 2003 SARS outbreak, the current economic climate, the relationship to mainland China, etc. Curiously, all of the tour leaders were expats that had lived in Hong Kong for many years, so for us it was very interesting to hear how it was to live there today. The same goes for the artists, we absorbed a great wealth of information from each other beyond discussing the sites we were taken to. We talked about books, films, about the art world, what it is to be an artist and a curator today, etc. ‘Incidents of Travel’ and our residency was very much in line with what Heman Chong, moderator of the Moderation(s) program, explained during the January press conference: Moderation(s) is about stretching time. Not surprisingly, the image he chose to illustrate the long term collaboration between Spring Workshop and Witte de With was a clock. That image stood out very clearly during our time there. The offered time gave us the chance to generate conversations with the artists, to find a common ground, to generously share and exchange some kind of knowledge, and to engage in multiple and repeated dialogues with locals and expats, a rare luxury one is not often given.

Latitudes' talk on 'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong' and their practice during 'Open Day' at Spring Wo r kshop, 2 February 2013.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"Archive as Method: An Interview with Chantal Wong, Hammad Nasar and Lydia Ngai" of the Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong. Final #OpenCurating interview.

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"Archive as Method: An interview with Chantal Wong, Hammad Nasar and Lydia Ngai" of the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, is available on ISSUU to view on screen and is also downloadable. It is also available as pdf format via Latitudes' web.

…And last, but certainly not least, our #OpenCurating research concludes with an interview with three members of the amazing Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong.

Asia Art Archive (AAA) was founded in 2000 with the mission of documenting, securing and making easily available information on the history of contemporary art in Asia within an international context. Based in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong, the non-profit organisation holds hundreds of thousands of physical and digital items. AAA aims to stimulate dialogue and critical thinking about how the region’s art histories are told and to “facilitate understanding, research, and writing in the field, enrich existing global narratives, and re-imagine the role of the archive”. Through its website – aaa.org.hk – AAA offers access to a wealth of digital material including scanned images, correspondence, artists’ personal documents, audio and video of performance art, artist talks, lectures, and events. A broad range of initiatives including the journal Field Notes, research grants, residencies, symposia, exhibitions and teaching workshops address the core of AAA’s commitment “to create a collection belonging to the public, existing not in an enclosed space, but in a space that is open and productive, generating new ideas and works that continually reshape the Archive itself”.

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ABOUT #OPENCURATING

What "old rules" about art programming, production and distribution has the internet broken? What challenges, expectations, and new possibilities does digital culture and social media present to contemporary art institutions? To what degree are curators, media teams, publishers and archivists concerned with a dialogue with their audiences? #OpenCurating has investigated these questions through how new forms of culture, participation and connectivity are being developed both on site and on line.

The research was structured around three elements. Ten new interviews were produced and published as free digital editions as well as via Issuu; a Twitter thread was moderated around the hashtag #OpenCurating; and a public conversation (transcribed as interview #7) between Latitudes and Yasmil Raymond, Curator of Dia Art Foundation, New York, was held on 19 February 2013 at the Auditorium of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).

#OpenCurating was a research project by Latitudes produced through La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partners: Walker Art Center

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Visita de la Comisión de Programas de Hangar a los estudios de los artistas residentes, 24 Abril 2013, Barcelona

2013-04-29T10:00:00.000+02:00

Cartel "Salvem Can Felipa" de Quim Packard colgado en la zona común de los estudios en Hangar.

El pasado 24 de Abril, cinco miembros de la Comisión de Programas 2010–2013 de Hangar (formado por Àlex Mitrani, Joan Vilapuig, Jordi Mitjà, Dora Garcia (ausente) y Max Andrews y Mariana Cánepa Luna de Latitudes) realizó una de las visitas periódicas a los artistas residentes en el centro de Poble Nou, en este caso a Llobet y Pons; Quim Packard; Aggtelek; Rasmus Nilausen; Marla Jacarilla, Raúl Nieves (blablabLAB) y Mireia c. Saladrigues.

A continuación un breve sumario que recoge los tuits que publicamos durante la visita (véase https://twitter.com/lttds).

Llobet y Pons (dúo formado por Jasmina Llobet y Luis Fernandez Pons) acaban de participar en la Setouchi Triennale 2013, Japón, donde han presentado la pieza "No one wins – Minibasket". Asímismo hemos visto sus últimas investigaciones con piezas realizadas con pasta dental endurecida; al pulido de diamantes que realizaron durante una residencia en Lokaal01, Amberes, o sobre la reconversión de materiales, como es el caso de 'Ex-Fork' presentada recientemente en Can Felipa.

Quim Packard actualmente está desarrollando "Historias de amor y odio", un "relato en formado dibujo que se emite diariamente, a partir del 15 de abril, vía redes sociales (véase tumblr aquí) y que finaliza en un concierto / performance en la Capsa Jove de Tarragona, el día 24 de abril a las 19h; en motivo de la presentación de la publicación 2012 del CA Tarragona Centro de Arte" (web de Hangar).

En el estudio del dúo Aggtelek (Gema Perales and Xandro Valles) vimos la serie de pinturas realizadas a partir de collages que envían a una de las fábricas de producción (prácticamente mecánica) de pintura en China para su realización. Éstas han sido recientemente presentadas en la Galería Jos é Robles en Madrid, y próxi mamente se presentará un conjunto similar en 18a edición de la feria Liste en Basilea con la galería Exile de Berlin.

Marla Jacarilla fue ganadora de la reciente convocatoria BCN Producció 2013 con el proyecto "Acotaciones tras la cuarta pared" que inaugurará el próximo 15 de Mayo en el Espai Cub de La Capella en Barcelona. "'Acotaciones tras la cuarta pared' es un drama en cuatro actos cuyo tono oscila entre lo trágico, cómico, fársico y metalingüístico. Una historia en la que un presunto demiurgo conversa con personajes existentes que pertenecen a otras obras teatrales y que se han trasladado al momento actual" (web de La Capella).

En el 2012 Rasmus Nilausen expuso 'Sisyphus, rhopography and a headless chicken' (ver video) en el espacio de La Capella (como ganador de la convocatoria BCN Producció 2012), Barcelona y en el 2013 tuvo la exposición 'Still' en la nueva galería madrileña García Galería.

Raúl Nieves del dúo blablabLAB nos presentó su trabajo con impresoras 3D y herramientas de código libre que realiza a través de talleres programados periódicamente desde Hangar.

La entrevista con Mireia c. Saladrigues tuvo lugar en skype ya que se encuentra preparando 'No tocar, por favor', una exposición colectiva en el ARTIUM de Vitoria, comisariada por Jorge Luis Marzo (blog del proyecto aqu í) que inaugura en un par de semanas en Vitoria.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"Free Forms: An interview with Lauren Cornell", Curator, 2015 Triennial, Digital Projects and Museum as Hub, New Museum, New York. 9th in the #OpenCurating interview series.

2013-04-24T17:25:00.000+02:00

"Free Forms: An interview with Lauren Cornell" is available on ISSUU to view on screen and is also downloadable. It is also available as pdf format via Latitudes' web.

After serving for seven years as Executive Director of new media non-profit Rhizome, in 2012 Lauren Cornell was appointed “Curator, 2015 Triennial, Digital Projects and Museum as Hub” of the New Museum, New York. During her tenure at Rhizome – a New Museum affiliate – Cornell initiated programmes including the annual Seven on Seven conference series, which bridges contemporary art and technology fields by pairing technological innovators with visual artists and challenging them to develop something over the course of a day. At the New Museum, Cornell was part of the curatorial team for The Generational: Younger Than Jesus (2009) and has curated exhibitions including Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ Black on White Gray Ascending (2007), and Free (2010), a group show that examined “how the internet has changed our landscape of information and our notion of public space”. She is currently preparing the 2015 Triennial, the institution’s signature exhibition, which she will curate together with artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin.

Follow:
@LTTDS
#OpenCurating
@newmuseum
@lcornell
#MuseumAsHub

ABOUT #OPENCURATING

Drawing on the emerging practices of so-called 'Open Journalism' – which seek to better collaborate with and use the ability of anyone to publish and share – #OpenCurating is a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue. #OpenCurating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.

The project is articulated around a series of ten new interviews with curators, artists, writers and online strategists published as a free digital edition [read here the published ones so far], a Twitter discussion moderated around the hashtag #OpenCurating and an public conversation with Dia Art Foundation curator which took place at MACBA on the 19 February.

#OpenCurating is a research project by Latitudes produced through La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partners: Walker Art Center

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art (IKT) Congress 2013, Madrid, 18–21 April 2013

2013-04-23T19:56:00.000+02:00

The programme of the 2013 congress of IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art, included meetings at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Móstoles as well as at Centro Cultural Matadero Madrid and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, where the IKT Members Forum, Symposium and General Assembly were held.

"Curating Value", the topic of this year's symposium organised by Brussels-based independent curator Zoë Gray, included the participation of Barnabás Bencsik (the recently forced-out director of the Ludwig Museum in Budapest), French artist Pierre Bismuth, Spanish curator and consultant María de Corral, London-based curator and theorist Dr. Simon Sheikh and Greek artist and Athens Biennial co-director, Poka-Yio.

Following is our photo diary documenting a few moments of these five days in Madrid alongside the organisers' schedule, starting the Pre-Congress programme on Thursday afternoon with a first meeting at E spacio Trap ézio at the Mercado de San Antón and ending on Monday morning with the Post-Congress programme which included studio visits to Fernando Sánchez Castillo and Cristina Lucas.

Friday, 19th April 2013

Buses depart from Plaza del Emperador Carlos V/ Atocha (opposite the renowned El Brillante bar) for Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) in Móstoles.

IKT Members Forum. Opening of the congress, welcome and greetings.

Each of the +/- 120 members and guests had 90 seconds to introduce themselves to the rest and quickly explain what projects they were currently developing.

Exhibition visits: Pop Politics: Activismos a 33 revoluciones curated by Iván López Munuera and Hailil Altindere curated by CA2M Director, Ferran Barenblit.

Lyota Yagi, Vinyl (2005) plays the melodies of Debussy's “Clair de Lune” and “Moon River” by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mancini on a record player from a record made of ice created with a silicon mould.

Lunch offered by CA2M at the Terrace.

Buses depart for Fundación Banco Santander (Boadilla del Monte) to visit the exhibition "Out of the House. Contemporary Art Cranford Collection", curated by Anne Pontégnie and Muriel Salem.

Sci-Fi-like building of the Fundación Banco Santander in the Ciudad Financiera, Boadilla del Monte.

The exhibition space holds a collection of Spanish currency. Here, the last pesetas notes that used to circulate before 2002.

View of the galleries presenting London's Cranford Collection. Holdings include mostly British art (Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst, Phil Collins, Paul Noble, Eva Rothschild, Rebecca Warren, Gillian Wearing), but also pieces by Franz West, Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Schütte.

You can also visit it virtually.

More blue chip works, by Damien Hirst (Something or Nothing, 2004).

Our Love Is Like the Flowers, the Rain, the Sea and the Hours, 2002 by Martin Boyce.

(Foreground) Jim Lambie's Sweet Exorcist, 2005.

(Foreground) Rebeca Warren, Log Lady, 2003.

Franz West, Appartment (2001)

Buses depart for Ivory Press. Exhibition visit: Ilya & Emilia Kabakov.

Tour through Ivory Press' artist books production with heavy weights like Noguchi, Chillida, Kapoor, Kiefer, Bacon...

...and of course Damien Hirst (again). Here The Holy Trinity explained in percentages, a part of a much larger sculptural/archive piece produced by Ivory Press.

View of Ilya & Emilia Kabakov's show Vertical Paintings and Other Wo rlds.

Walk to Galería Liebre. Exhibition visit: Ideas y presupuestos. Curator: Martí Manen.

Ideas and budgets for possible artworks by artists Sebastian Beyro, Black Tulip, Bonus Extra, Kalle Brolin, Priscila Fernandes, Guillem Juan Sancho, Sandra Paula Fernández, Ana García Pineda, Luis Pérez Calvo, Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum, Laramascoto, Connie Mendoza, Carlos Motta, Carl Palm, Pepo Salazar, Yes.

Visit to the Tabacalera Espacio Promoción del Arte. Exhibition visit: José Manuel Ballester “Bosques de Luz”. Curators: María de Corral and Lorena Martínez de Corral.

Entrance to Tabacalera, Espacio Promoción de Arte.

Tabacalera also shares spaces with La Tabacalera Centro Social Autogestionado (follow @latabacalera), where over 30 organisations self-manage their own spaces sharing, garden areas, storage, a stage, bar facilities, etc.

Saturday, 20th April 2013

Caixaforum. Exhibition: 'Maestros del Caos. Artistas y Chamanes'.

Walk to Medialab Prado, Calle Alameda 15, which officially opened its doors a day before our visit.

Walk to La Casa Encendida, Ronda de Valencia 2.
Exhibitions: Generaciones 2013. Proyectos de Arte Caja Madrid.
Albert Oehlen, Moderne Farbkonzepte. Curator: Christian Domínguez.

Lunch offered by La Casa Encendida in their terrace.

Buses depart for Matadero Madrid, Plaza de Legazpi 1, 28045 Madrid.

Manuela Villa, Head of Contents at Matadero introduces the different areas of the 80,000m2 of the former slaughterhouse and its programmes, including the Programa de Pensamiento Matadero Madrid; Intermediae Laboratory for the production of projects and social innovation and Archivo de Creadores (Documentation of 150 Madrid-based contemporary artists).

Fernando García-Dory of Campo Adentro working at Matadero Madrid.

Archivo de Creadores de Madrid, offering "physical and online documentation on 150 young artists or collectives of 17 different nationalities with links to the city of Madrid."

IKT Symposium “Curating Value” at the Cineteca.

"Curating Value" symposium at the Cineteca, Matadero Madrid.

Left to right: Zoë Gray, Pierre Bismuth, Dr. Simon Sheikh Poka-Yio, Maria de Corral and Barnabás Bencsik.

Exhibition visits. Abierto x Obras: Candela. Los Carpinteros . Curator: Manuela Villa; and Arqueológica, curated by Virginia Torrente. Followed by a dinner and party offered by Matadero Madrid.

Candela, site-specific work by Los Carpinteros at the Abierto x Obras space.

Pedro Barateiro's piece The Negative Reader, 2012-13, included in the group exhibition Arqueológica in Nave 16.

Mariana Castillo Deball, five dance costumes produced by artisans in Yautepec in Morelos, used to perform the Brinco de los Chinelos dance during the Carnival. Part of the group exhibition Arqueológica in Nave 16.

Sunday, 21th April 2013

IKT General Assembly in the Auditorio 200, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS).

One of the issues to discuss during the General Assembly was to decide on the next venue/city to host the IKT Congress 2014 and 2015. The members voted that CCA Derry-Londonderry would host the 2014 event (the bid included visiting the biennial Eva International in Limerick) and that Vienna's Kunsthalle Wien to host the following year.

Here Johan Lundh co-director of CCA Derry-Londonderry during his presentation for Derry-Londonderry to host the 2014 IKT Congress.

Exhibition visits: Colección I. 1900-1945; Colección II. 1945-1968; Colección III. 1962-1982; Cristina Iglesias; Robert Adams. el lugar donde vivimos. Una selección retrospectiva de fotografías; La invención concreta. Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; and Azucena Vieites. (Programa Fisuras).

Favourite Gego mobile, "Reticularea" (1973–76), in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

Favourite Jesús Soto, "Pre-penetrable" from 1957 in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

Wonderful 1967 Tropic ália by Hélio Oiticica in the "Colección III , 1962-1982" (above and below).

(End of congress & beginning of Post-Congress)

Afternoon gallery visits around c/ Doctor Fourquet

NoguerasBlanchard, with the exhibition "Can’t Hear My Eyes" curated by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk.

MaisterraValbuena, with the exhibition "Entre lo fugitivo y lo infinito" curated by Anja Isabel Schneider.

Isidoro Valcárcel–Medina, Conducto, 2013. From the press release: "On the occasion of this exhibition project, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina proposes a site-specific intervention on the floor in the gallerys entrance zone. With a critical, at times provocative stance towards the art market, voiced among others in Ley del Arte - Ley reguladora del ejercicio, disfrute y comercialización del Arte (1992), Valcárcel Medinas work sees art and life interrelated, inviting the spectator above all to an experience."

García Galería with the exhibition "En la zona gris" curated by Virginia Torrente.

Joaquín García of García Galería introducing the meteorite piece by Belén Rodríguez González

Moisés Pérez Albéniz with an exhibition of works by Antoni Muntadas (below).

Helga de Alvear with an exhibition of works by Prudencio Irazabal.

Fúcares, with the exhibition "Escópico-Esconder(se)-Escaparcurated" by Juan Francisco Rueda.

Visit to artists studios at Rampa in the Carabanchel neighbourhood, Madrid.

Found photograph in the former car repair shop that existed before Rampa.

IKT members listening to Rampa's presentation and questions on curating and the artist-curator relationship.

Bus departs for Colección Inelcom at the Ciudad de la Imagen, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid. Artistic direction of the collection: Vicente Todolí.

The circa 3,000m2 headquarters at Ciudad de la Imagen, hold 72 works by 24 artists, including Pavel Büchler, Anthony McCall, Markus Schinwald, Ernesto Neto, Sophie Calle, Kader Attia, Candice Breitz, Ceal Floyer, Fiona Tan and Fernando Bryce's 'Work in Progress' (2006) a suite of 80 ink drawings (below).

Monday, 22th April 2013

Visit artists studios: Fernando Sánchez Castillo and Cristina Lucas.

How many curators can you fit in an artist studio?

Espacio Valverde group show included a work by Antonio R. Montesinos, one of the members of Rampa.

AVE back to Barcelona... end of journey.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"Digression(s), Entry Point(s): An interview with Heman Chong", Singapore-based artist, curator and writer. Eighth in the #OpenCurating research series

2013-04-02T10:23:00.000+02:00

Cover of the interview. Photo: Joan Kee

Interview available for download as a pdf or readable on ISSUU via Latitudes' web.

Heman Chong’s art practice is comprised of “an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future”. His ongoing project, The Lonely Ones, looks at the representation of solitude and the “last man on earth” genre in art, film and literature, and is the basis for a forthcoming novel entitled Prospectus. Chong’s recent solo exhibitions include LEM 1, Rossi & Rossi, London (2012), Calendars (2020–2096), NUSMuseum, Singapore (2011) and The Sole Proprietor and other Stories, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou (2007). He has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Asia Pacific Triennale 7 (2012), Performa 11 (2011), Momentum 6 (2011), Manifesta 8 (2010), Busan Biennale (2004), and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) representing Singapore. Amonograph of his work entitled "The Part In The Story Where We Lost Count Of The Days", edited by Pauline J. Yao, will be published in June 2013 by ArtAsiaPacific.

The interview was initiated at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, in the context of Chong’s invitation to Latitudes to make a curatorial residency as part of Moderation(s), a year-long series of programming between Spring and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. "Digression(s), Entry Point(s): An interview with Heman Chong" also includes a guest spot with Gotherburg-based artist and writer Anthony Marcellini.

Follow:
@LTTDS
#OpenCurating
@HemanChong
#Moderations

ABOUT #OPENCURATING

Drawing on the emerging practices of so-called 'Open Journalism' – which seek to better collaborate with and use the ability of anyone to publish and share – #OpenCurating is a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue. #OpenCurating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.

The project is articulated around a series of ten new interviews with curators, artists, writers and online strategists published as a free digital edition [read here the published ones so far], a Twitter discussion moderated around the hashtag #OpenCurating and an public conversation with Dia Art Foundation curator which took place at MACBA on the 19 February.

#OpenCurating is a research project by Latitudes produced through La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partners: Walker Art Center

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Research trip to Dublin and Derry-Londonderry, Ireland, 8–14 March 2013

2013-03-16T22:29:00.001+01:00

View of Dublin's 1816 Ha'penny Bridge nearby Temple Bar.

Invited by Dublin City Council: The Arts Office, Latitudes visited art spaces, artists' studios and galleries in Dublin and Derry-Londonderry throughout the week.

The schedule included visits to the Red Stables Studios; Temple Bar Gallery + Studios; Fire Station Artists' Studios; Green On Red Gallery; Kevin Kavanagh Gallery and Project Arts Centre - Visual Arts, as well as talks by Latitudes to students of the MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS) (8 March, 3pm), and at the recently inaugurated CCA Derry~Londonderry (9 March, 7pm) as well as participation in the seminar "Within the Public Realm" at the Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (12 March, 2–5pm), alongside curator Aisling Prior and the artist Sean Lynch.

Latitudes was invited to Dublin in the context of the Barcelona Mayor's visit to Dublin and the renewing of the twinning agreement between the two cities. Here a coffee table at the Lord Mayor's Mansion House displays "Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape" and "Barcelona" books.

Talking to MA in Visual Arts Practice (MAVIS) students at The Lab on 8 March. Photo: @lemuela

9 March: After +4h bus ride north, we arrive at Centre for Contemporary Art in Derry–Londonderry for a talk that evening at 7pm.

View of CCA's galleries hosting the touring exhibition The Grand Domestic Revolution GOES ON (GDR), which in Derry-Londonderry "focuses on the contemporary working conditions of caregivers—primarily mothers and grandmothers—in the domestic sphere."

In the galleries, two of the London-based design collective Åbäke (Patrick Lacey, Benjamin Reichen, Kajsa Ståhl and Maki Suzuki), building a bed inspired by a 1970s design by Enzo Mari.

Collection of books on domestic spaces, DYI, cooking, gardening, self-build architecture, urban planning, etc. accompany the The Grand Domestic Revolution GOES ON (GDR) exhibition.

Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh, co-directors of CCA Derry–Londonderry, hosted a wonderful Thai pre-talk dinner.

Sunday walk around the Bloody Sunday Memorial and the Bogside area of Derry-Londonderry.

Two of the murals around Bogside.

Ernesto Che Guevara Lynch mural in Derry-Londonderry's Bogside.

With Aileen and Johan at Kinnagoe Bay in Donegal, site of 1588 shipwreck of one of the Spanish Armada ships.

11 March: Back to our temporary home in Dublin's The R ed Stables in St. Anne's Park.

A windswept North Bull I sland looking towards the city.

Visitor Centre at North Bull Island.

12 March: Studio visits at Temple Bar Studios + Gallery in the heart of the city.

Temple Bar Studios + Gallery, a former shirt-factory building, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.

Studio of artist Alan Bu tler, one of the 30 on site.

Setting up for the 2–5pm talk at The Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery organised by MAVIS, The Hugh Lane and Dublin City Council.

After the seminar, artists Sean Lynch and Michele Horrigan took us to see the 'failed' Richard Serra nearby the Guiness factory.

13 March: Visiting the sculpture workshop facilities of Fire Station A r tists' Studios with Development Manager Liz Burns and Director Clodagh Kenny.

Studio of Martin Healy in Fire Station A r tists' Studios and his work around perpetual motion.

Artist Ma ria Mc Kinney research on wheat weaving and straw craft techniques for her project 'Gar lands'.

Karl Burke "wooden drawings" photos and renderings.

Crossing the Sean O'Casey bridge to begin a gallery tour including Green on Red Gallery, Kevin Kavana gh Gallery, The Dou glas Hyde Gallery, Project Arts S pace and T emple Bar Studios + Gallery, with Dublin-based critic, curator and Senior Lecturer at the School of Irish, Celtic, Folklore & Linguistics, Caioimhin MacGiolla Leith.

Group show "Material Fact" at Green On Red Gallery included works by Silvia Bächli, Paul Doran, Dennis McNulty and Gerard Byrne (photographed), one of the more well-known Irish artists.

'Detached' group show at Project Arts Cent re, guest curated by The A rtists' Insti tute director and founder Anthony Huberman, recently appointed Director of CCA Wattis in San Francisco.

Alice Channer's "Amphibians" (left) and Sunah Choi's "Abdrucke (Imprints)", 2011-13 (wall)

Temple Bar Studios + Gallery, hosted 'Or tears, Of Course' a solo show of British artist Ed Atkins (photos above and below).

Gathering plenty of material during studio visits, lunches, dinners and meetings.

14 March: Morning visit to the wondrous Natural History, a 1857 building displaying "animals from Ireland and overseas, also geological exhibits from a total collection of about 2 million scientific specimens".

Ground floor gallery dedicated to dedicated to "Irish animals, featuring giant deer skeletons and a variety of mammals, birds and fish".

The minimal education department are doing a great job at dynamising the nicknamed "Dead Zoo" or "Museum of Museums": The 5 year old giraffe has her own twitter account @SpotticusNH and they will soon host a "night at the museum" event where a few kids will be able to sleep (or try to) in the museum galleries.

The stunning upper gallery was "laid out in the 19th Century in a scientific arrangement showing animals by taxonomic group. This scheme demonstrated the diversity of animal life in an evolutionary sequence." Unfortunately the second and third floor balconies have been closed due to a safety review as they do not comply with current safety regulations, which impedes visitors from seeing, amongst many other things, the museum's unique collection of glass models manufactured in Dresden in the late 19th Century by the father-and-son team of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"Host and Ambassador: A Conversation with Yasmil Raymond" Curator of Dia Art Foundation, New York. Seventh in the #OpenCurating research series

2013-03-07T15:40:00.000+01:00

Yasmil Raymond has been the curator of Dia Art Foundation in New York since 2009. Previously, between 2004–9, she worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. At Dia she has organised exhibitions and projects with artists including Jean-Luc Moulène, Yvonne Rainer, Ian Wilson, Robert Whitman, Koo Jeong A, Franz Erhard Walther and Trisha Brown. She is currently working on the retrospective Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958–2010, due to open in May 2014, as well as on Gramsci Monument, a project by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn that begins this July.

The published text [available via Latitudes' web on pdf and ISSUU format] is a transcription of a conversation between Raymond and Latitudes that took place on 19 February 2013 at the auditorium of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), as the public event of Latitudes’ #OpenCurating research. The conversation begins with an overview of this research, followed by a brief introduction to Dia and its projects since 1974. It incorporates “crowd-sourced” questions that were received via Twitter and Facebook, including from Raymond’s current and former work colleagues, and concludes with questions from the audience.

Interview with Yasmil Raymond available via Latitudes' web as a pdf and in ISSUU format.

–

ABOUT #OPENCURATING

Drawing on the emerging practices of so-called 'Open Journalism' – which seek to better collaborate with and use the ability of anyone to publish and share – #OpenCurating is a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue. #OpenCurating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.

The project is articulated around a series of ten new interviews with curators, artists, writers and online strategists published as a free digital edition [read here the published ones so far], a Twitter discussion moderated around the hashtag #OpenCurating and an public conversation with Dia Art Foundation curator which took place at MACBA on the 19 February.

#OpenCurating is a research project by Latitudes produced through La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partners: Walker Art Center

All photos above: Joan Morey

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

#OpenCurating: "Latitudes in conversation with Yasmil Raymond", Curator, Dia Art Foundation, New York. Tuesday 19 February, 19:30h. Auditori MACBA, Barcelona

2013-02-11T11:30:00.000+01:00

Dia Art Foundation curator, Yasmil Raymond. Photo: Lina Bertucci

| ENG |

"Latitudes in conversation with Yasmil Raymond"
Tuesday 19 February 2013, 19:30h
Auditori MACBA, Barcelona.

Free admission. Limited seating. With simultaneous translation.

This event is part of Latitudes' ongoing #OpenCurating research, which analyses the implications of Web 2.0, participation and transparency for contemporary art production and programming. The core of #OpenCurating is formed through a series of interviews, freely available online, most recently with Steven ten Thije (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Sònia López and Anna Ramos (MACBA, Barcelona), and Badlands Unlimited (New York).

The conversation with Dia Art Foundation's curator Yasmil Raymond will address Dia's historical identity, the evolving role of the curator, and Raymond's vision in commissioning and preserving art projects.

The evening will incorporate "crowd-sourced" questions by the public previously solicited via Twitter (hashtag #OpenCurating) and Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LTTDS).

Yasmil Raymond has worked at the Dia Art Foundation since 2009, where she has organized exhibitions and projects with artists such as Jean-Luc Moulène (2012); Yvonne Rainer (2011-12); Koo Jeong A (2010-11); Franz Erhard Walther (2010-2012); and Trisha Brown (2009-10). Prior to joining Dia, Raymond worked at the Walker Art Center (2004–2009) in Minneapolis where she organized solo exhibitions with Tomás Saraceno (2009), Tino Sehgal (2007) and group exhibitions including Abstract Resistance (2010); Brave New Worlds (2007, co-curated with Doryun Chong). Raymond studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2004).

As a nonprofit institution founded in 1974, the Dia Art Foundation is renowned for initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects. Between 1987 and 2004, the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea, New York, saw presented site-specific exhibitions and projects including those by Robert Gober, Jenny Holzer, Jorge Pardo and Pierre Huyghe. Dia:Beacon opened in 2003 in upstate New York, as the home for Dia’s distinguished collection of art from the 1960s to the present. Dia Art Foundation maintains long-term, site-specific projects including Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (1988), and Dan Flavin’s untitled (1996), all in Manhattan; the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York; De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) in Kassel, Germany; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) in the Great Salt Lake, Utah; and De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in Quemado, New Mexico. Currently Dia is developing a project space on West 22nd Street in New York City.

#OpenCurating is a research project by Latitudes produced through La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partner: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis / walkerart.org

| ES |

"Latitudes conversa con Yasmil Raymond"
Martes 19 de febrero, 19:30h
Auditori MACBA

Entrada gratuita. Aforo limitado. Con traducción simultánea.

Este evento es parte del proyecto de investigación #OpenCurating de Latitudes, enfocado en el análisis de las implicaciones de la web 2.0, así como la expectación de participación y transparencia, en la producción y programación de arte contemporáneo. El núcleo de #OpenCurating consiste en una serie de diez entrevistas, disponibles en línea y gratuitas, con artistas, comisarios y escritores tales como Steven ten Thije (Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven), Sònia López and Anna Ramos (MACBA, Barcelona), y Badlands Unlimited (Nueva York).

La conversación con la comisaria del Dia Art Foundation, Yasmil Raymond se centrará en la identidad histórica del Dia, la evolución del rol del comisario y la visión de Raymond en el encargo y la conservación de proyectos artísticos.

La sesión incorporará preguntas previamente enviadas por el público a través de Twitter (@LTTDS con hashtag #OpenCurating) y Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/LTTDS).

Yasmil Raymond ha sido Comisaria del Dia Art Foundation en Nueva York desde el 2009, donde ha organizado exposiciones y proyectos de artistas como Jean-Luc Moulène (2012); Yvonne Rainer (2011–12); Ian Wilson (2011–13); Robert Whitman (2011); Koo Jeong A (2010-11) (2010-11); Franz Erhard Walther (2010-2012); y Trisha Brown (2009–10). Anteriormente Raymond trabajó en el Walker Art Center en Minneapolis, donde organizó exposiciones individuals de Tomás Saraceno (2009), Tino Sehgal (2007) y exposiciones colectivas como Abstract Resistance (2010); Statements: Beuys, Flavin, Judd (2008); y Brave New Worlds (2007, co-comisariada con Doryun Chong). Raymond estudió en The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999) y cursó un máster en el Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2004).

Como institución sin ánimo de lucro fundada en el año 1974, el Dia Art Foundation es conocida por haber iniciado, apoyado, presentado y preservado proyectos artísticos. Entre 1987 y 2004, el Dia Center for the Arts en Chelsea, Nueva York, presentó exposiciones y proyectos site-specific de Robert Gober, Jenny Holzer, Jorge Pardo y Pierre Huyghe, entre otros. Dia: Beacon abrió sus puertas en 2003 en el norte del estado de Nueva York, como sede de la distinguida colección de arte desde la década de 1960 hasta la actualidad. Dia Art Foundation mantiene proyectos a largo plazo en sitios específicos tales como The New York Earth Room (1977) y The Broken Kilometer (1979) ambos de Walter De Maria; Times Square (1977) de Max Neuhaus, 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) (1988) de Joseph Beuys; untitled (1996) de Dan Flavin, todos en Manhattan; el Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, Nueva York; The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977) de Walter De Maria en Kassel, Alemania; Spiral Jetty (1970) de Robert Smithson en Great Salt Lake, Utah; y The Lightning Field (1977) Walter De Maria en Quemado, Nuevo Mexico. En la actualidad, Dia está desarrollando un espacio para proyectos en la calle West 22nd de Nueva York.

#OpenCurating es un proyecto de investigación de Latitudes producido por La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 del Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partner: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis / walkerart.org

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Latitudes' Open Day at Spring Workshop on 2 February 2013

2013-02-09T11:00:00.000+01:00

On February 2nd, Spring Workshop hosted an Open Day during which Latitudes discussed, together with Moderation(s) moderator Heman Chong, their month-long residency in Hong Kong. The contribution to the project consisted in realising the second iteration of "Incidents of Travel", with tours by Hong Kong-based artists Nadim Abbas (19 January), Yuk King Tan (24 January), Ho Sin Tung (29 January) and Samson Young (7 February) – amongst other explorations around the city, such as to Mai Po marshes, F e ng Sh ui tour or to D evil's P eak.

The evening began tracing "Incidents of Travel"'s origins with itineraries and tours organised in previous projects such as the seminar-on-wheels for the 8th Sharjah Biennial (2007) as well as during P ortscapes (2009) in the Port of Rotterdam. After introducing "Inc idents of Travel" in Mexico City and the four tours in Hong Kong, we fielded questions from the audience and discussed the ongoing research project #OpenCurating and its origins with the editorial project realised for the T he Last Newspaper (2010) exhibition at the New Museum in New York.

Moderation(s)' moderator: artist, writer and curator Heman Chong.

Q+A begins.

Food time! Thai food from the neighbouring Cooked food Market on Nam Long Shan Road, Aberdeen.

All photos: Spr ing W orkshop.

Samson Young's "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" tour

2013-02-07T12:11:00.001+01:00

As part of Moderation(s), the year-long collaboration in 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, curators-in-residence Latitudes have invited artist Samson Young to develop a day-long tour of Hong Kong retelling the city and artistic concerns through personal itineraries and waypoints.

To complement the tour, please check the archive of twitter and facebook and soundcloud posts.

Follow Twitter: #IncidentsOfTravel #Moderations

– "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong"
by Samson Young
7 February 2013

I am very envious of artists who are able describe their practices in a manner that is concise, succinct, and consistent. To tell one’s life story is also to confess. I purge my catalog of works and rebuild my identity (as told by images, sounds, and self-descriptions) every couple of years. Moderation(s)asks that I create a tour that “articulates the city and (my) artistic practice through routes and waypoints.” Are routes and waypoints more authentic than a studio visit? Are the vernacular, the eccentric and the marginal more “real,” in the same way that punk is real and techno apparently isn’t? The pressure to define the unique and the authentic is perhaps growing more urgent with globalization; but behind each assiduous defense of the authentic lies what Regina Bendix calls “an unarticulated anxiety of losing the subject” (Bendix 1997).

During this tour, I eavesdrop on my own works in the presence of six others. We take an early morning sound-walk around the Kwun Tong industrial district, visit a site near the City Hall in Central where the now demolished Queen's Pier was once located, and trespass the frontier closed area near the Hong Kong-China border. In between locations, we listen to recordings of music and/or read texts that have informed my work one way or another.

Sound walk begins at 75 Hung To Road in the industrial district of Kwun Tong.

Sound-walk: 75 Hung To Road, Kwun Tong

We begin the tour at 75 Hung To Road. I will conduct again a sound walk that I created back in 2009. Participants of the sound-walk follow me on a route through the Kwun Tong industrial district. To create this work I walked the same route a number of times at different dates and times, generating one full recording in each walk through. I then edited these recordings into a single sound track, to which the participants listen during the sound-walk. During the sound-walk, I follow my own footstep by listening to the sound marks in the sound track, to ensure that I am in sync with my recorded presence.

Samson Young leads us while listening to the 44 min. soundtrack "Kwun Tong Soundwalk" on mp3 players.

Young takes us through the bus station.

Photo: Spring Workshop.

Condemned industrial buildings around Kwun Tong.

Around Kwun Tong's shops and markets. Photo: Spring Workshop.

More condemned buildings. When Young recorded the soundtrack in 2009 these places were still open, a proof of the swift gentrification of Kwun Tong.

Short pause at Yue Man Square Rest Garden. Photo: Spring Workshop.

Soundwalk-ing in a bus terminus. Photo: Spring Workshop.

Tsim Bei Tsui, Frontier Closed Area

I was born in Hong Kong but mostly educated in Australia. I’ve always felt that children of Mainland Chinese parents had an easier time answering the question, “Where are you from?” They simply say, “I’m Chinese.” I always feel more natural saying I’m from Hong Kong, rather than plainly stating that I’m Chinese. Or, if I say I’m Chinese, I feel the need to add the footnote that I was born in Hong Kong. I am frankly confused by all of this. For the longest time I avoided identity politics in my work, but the national education saga in 2012 prompted me to revisit this issue.

Hong Kong and Mainland China are physically separated by the ShenzhenRiver and a great wall of wired fencing, and south to the border are restricted zones known as the Frontier Closed Area. Entry into the Frontier Closed Area without an official permit is strictly forbidden. In October 2005, the then chief executive Donald Tsang announced a proposal to drastically reduce the Frontier Closed Area. In February 2012, 740 hectares of land were initially opened up for public access. The proposal will be implemented in phases, and other areas will soon follow suit. Since July 2012, I had been systemically collecting the sound of places and/or objects that separate the two regions. I recorded the vibration of the wired fencing with contact microphones, and the water sounds of the Shenzhen River with hydrophones. I rearranged these recordings into sound compositions. I then re-transcribed these sound collages into graphical notations.

Frontier Closed Area.

Walking through the fields that border China.

Nearby Kaw Liu Village.

Pig farm guarded by angry dogs.

New development to house relocated villagers following highway construction.

Photo: Spring Workshop

Self-build constructions/storage along the way.

Young introduces the making of the soundtrack "Liquid Borders" which we are about to listen to.

Since early 2012, 740 hectares of land have been opened up for public access, and buildings have been constructed nearer the fence which runs along the Shenzhen river.

Bordering the fence while listening to the "Liquid Border" soundtrack.

Field recording. Photo: Spring Workshop

Queen’s Pier in Edinburgh Place.

Queen's Pier was a public pier in central in front of the City Hall. For decades it served not only as a public pier but also as a major ceremonial arrival and departure point. The pier witnessed the official arrival in Hong Kong of all of Hong Kong's governors since 1925; Elizabeth II landed there in 1975, as did the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1989. On 26 April 2007 the pier officially ceased operation. The government’s plan to demolish the pier to make way for a new highway was met with fierce opposition by conservationists. Despite the public outcry, Queen's Pier was demolished in the February of 2008.

I was living in New York when all of this happened. In 2009 I composed and directed a music theatre work entitled “God Save the Queen.” The work started out as a requiem for the Queen’s Pier. It evolved into a hymn to the structures, both physical and symbolic, of my teenage days – which were also the last of the colony’s. The performance was accompanied by a mixture of live footage from five theatre-based CCTV cameras, and pre-recorded clips of screen icon Helena Law Lan (who often played royalty for TV), dressed as the Queen.

1956 City Hall building that connected with the now demolished Queen's Pier in Edinburgh Place.

Photo: Spring Workshop

The lotus pond, University of Hong Kong

I was what you might call a “straight-down-the-center” composer to begin with. For over a decade I operated only in the concert in the capacity of a composer of the Western classical tradition. Now I do all kinds of weird things in all sorts of weird places. Chan Hing-yan, my mentor during my years at HKU, had a looming influence on me. I think a lot of what I do today is a reaction against what (I imagine that) I’d learnt during those formative years – a sort of a “creative misreading” as Harold Bloom would put it.

University of Hong Kong in Pok Fu Lam.

To end the tour Samson reads a passage of his dissertation about his approach to music composition and cultural politics.

Talking nearby the lotus pond at "Hong Kong U". Photo: Spring Workshop

–

Samson Young (1979) is a composer, sound artist and media artist. Young received training in computer music and composition at Princeton University under the supervision of computer music pioneer Paul Lansky. He is currently an assistant professor in sonic art and physical computing at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Young is also the principle investigator at the Laboratory for Ubiquitous Musical Expression (L.U.M.E), and artistic director of the experimental sound advocacy organization Contemporary Musiking. In 2007, he became the first from Hong Kong to receive the Bloomberg Emerging Artist Award for his audio-visual project “The Happiest Hour”. His brainwave non-performance “I am thinking in a room, different from the one you are hearing in now” received a Jury Selection award at the Japan Media Art Festival, and an honorary mention at the digital music and sound art category of Prix Ars Electronica.

Festival presentations and honors include: Prix Ars Electronica (Austria 2012); Japan Media Art Festival (Japan 2012); Sydney Springs International New Music Festival (Australia 2001), the Canberra International Music Festival (Australia 2008), ISCM World Musid Days (Australia 2010), MONA FOMA Festival of Music and Art (2011); the Bowdoin International Music Festival (US 2004), Bang on a Can Music Summer Music Festival (US 2005), Perspectives International Festival of Media Art (US 2009); Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt (Germany 2006); Dark Music Days (Iceland 2008); Kuala Lumpur Contemporary Music Festival (Malaysia 2009); amongst others. His music received performances by Hong Kong Sinfonietta, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, London NASH Ensemble, City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong, Bang on a Can and summer institute fellows, Network for New Music, New Millennium Ensemble, SO Percussion, Sydney Song Company, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, MIVOS Quartet, among others.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Tour of Devil's Peak and the Museum of Coastal Defence

2013-02-06T11:30:00.000+01:00

Alongside the four tours led by Hong Kong artists Nadim Abbas, Yuk King Tan, Ho Sin Tung, and Samson Young, Latitudes is also venturing into the city, researching around local forms of vernacular collection display and eccentric attractions. This encompasses museum-like retail spaces, or ‘marginal’ sculptural displays, as well as joining pre-existing tours.

On 30th January, Latitudes joined the "Devils's Peak and Museum of Coastal Defence" tour organised by Walk Hong Kong and led by former British Army officer and War World II specialist Martin Heyes, who has lived in Hong Kong for nearly 40 years. Heyes is a passionate and insightful guide for anyone interested in the context and details of the 1941 Japanese invasion of Hong Kong.

Following are abstracts of text from Walk Hong Kong website and images of our route.

Wilson Trail up to Devil's Peak.

"At the end of the 19th century, and early into the 20th, the British authorities were very concerned about perceived threats to the safety of their colonial possessions in the Far East from other European powers. Hong Kong fell into this category. Accordingly the British Government constructed impressive military fortifications to protect their imperial possessions, and one of these was at Devil's Peak at the eastern extremity of the Kowloon peninsula."

Kowloon and Victoria Harbour.

"The large fortification constructed to defend the eastern approaches to Hong Kong harbour consisted of 2 fixed gun battery positions, together with a Redoubt at the summit of Devil's Peak which later became the Fire Command Headquarters for the eastern part of Hong Kong."

Overgrown trench.

View from Devil's Peak Redoubt.

"Although the position was eventually considered redundant and was in fact decommissioned before the outbreak of the Pacific War, the location was the scene of bitter fighting between the courageous Indian soldiers of the Rajput Battalion and the attacking Japanese army during the battle for Hong Kong in December 1941, immediately prior to the British evacuation of the mainland to Hong Kong island."

Gough battery.

"Following our visit to the gun battery position on Devil's Peak, we walk down through the seafood restaurant area of Lei Yue Mun to catch the ferry to Sai Wan Ho on Hong Kong island. A short taxi ride then brings us to the Museum of Coastal Defence, housed inside the late Victorian-era Lei Yue Mun Fort."

Descending towards Lei Yue Mun.

Lei Yu Mun promenade in eastern Kowloon.

Seafood restaurants' fish tanks in Lei Yue Mun.

Lei Yu Mun bay.

"The fort occupied a strategic position guarding the eastern approaches to Victoria Harbour. The British military built barracks here as early as 1844, but these were abandoned shortly afterwards. In 1885, in the face of perceived aggrandizement from other European powers, artillery barracks were constructed with a redoubt at the core of the fortifications."

Devil's Peak (right) seen from the Museum of Coastal Defence.

Display in the Museum of Coastal Defence showing the life of a British soldier in the 19th Century.

The Hong Kong Telegraph from January 1902 – including a prominent ad for beloved Brit product Bovril.

Japanese naval flag & pistols from the December 1941 invasion of Hong Kong.

Follow the project: #IncidentsOfTravel #Moderations

To complement the tour, please check the twitter and facebook and soundcloud posts via storify.

Moderation(s) is a year-long programme occurring throughout 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Yuk King Tan's "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" tour

2013-02-03T12:10:00.001+01:00

As part of Moderation(s), the year-long collaboration in 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, curators-in-residence Latitudes have invited artist Yuk King Tan (China/New Zealand) to develop a day-long tour of Hong Kong retelling the city and artistic concerns through personal itineraries and waypoints.

To complement the tour, please check the twitter and facebook and soundcloud posts via storify.

Follow on Twitter: #IncidentsOfTravel #Moderations

–

'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong'
by Yuk King Tan24 January 2013

My art practice is a series of negotiations, folding ideas, curiosities, structures and translations which together form stories that are not entirely expected or make narratives in a slightly unfamiliar tongue. I am curious about systems of value: what is valuable and how does it appreciate? Who defines value and is that control static or creative? Where and how do we house what is seen as precious and what is finally disposable?

A large part of the tour is not only about looking at sites but about visiting the people that inhabit these places and hearing their stories. Connecting different inhabitants of Hong Kong with the tour may even intervene in how certain groups see their roles. In Hong Kong people live parallel lives. It is ironic that in such an over-populated hyper urban city, people cohabitating in one home can find themselves in completely separate, disparate existences. Part of my art process tries to investigative and re-form, and part of the tour looks at the positioning between host and visitor, migrant and home, belief and skepticism.

At the first art talk I ever gave I dressed as a tour guide, and with a loose mid-west American accent, I narrated a tour about art practice by highlighting art work seen and made and books read as various ‘attractions’, which were ingested over a travel slide presentation and onboard snacks. Like a twisted Greyhound bus tour complete with uniform and a cheerily dismissive attitude, I was interested in the distancing devices defining one’s art practice around the performance of presenting artwork in general. Any tour is an act of intimacy and distance. The act of memory is also a creative and theatrical set of gestures. This tour is a set around actions and meetings which are intimate, truthful and theatrical just as Hong Kong is a city rife with the potential for drama, fantasy and invention. I hope that the people we meet on the tour share in a larger discussion about what is valuable and what cannot be quantified.

The 12-storey meeting house buildling of T he Church of Jesus Christ of Lat ter-day Saints in Wan Chai, Hong Kong, administrative headquarters of the Mormon church in Asia.

Wanchai Meetinghouse

In a early artwork “I am the light of the world, Dlrow eht fo thgil eht ma I” I made a video about a photograph made by group of New Zealand missionaries who went to southern China in the 1940s to spread the word of Christianty – a mission that unfortunately was a political and social disaster. The work was an image of the missionaries created entirely from firecrackers. In the video loop the firecrackers explode into a blaze of furious golden fire until the footage is reversed, setting up a continuous cycle of destruction and reformation.

Elder Elliot. Courtesy Yuk King Tan.

Part of my general research is about the economic moves of T he Church of Jesus Christ of Lat ter-day Saints (LDS Church) as they are set up Hong Kong as a base to bring the Mormon Church into Mainland China. The Wanchai Meetinghouse is a 12-storey building that serves as meeting place for 12 wards, the administrative headquarters for the LDS Church in the Asia region and, with three apartments on top floor housing the church ‘Area Presidency’, as the obvious symbol of the reach of the Mormon faith.

Designed by a Mormon architect Leland Gray and his son Stephen Gray its presence suggests that one of the most regimented Christian religions in the world will also move towards a strong presence in China. Inside the Meetinghouse is a maze of rooms: sports courts, multi-purpose prayer-zones, music and classrooms all decorated with spiritually focused paintings. The Church of the Latter Day Saints requires one-tenth of their follower’s income as part of the tilling process and also committed unpaid service such as the two-year missionary tours undertaken by 19-25 year old Mormons. I became interested in the missionaries ideas about language, belief, politics and service. Most of the missionaries are required to learn as much about their host country and language of the country as possible, they even have at times have a new terminology that fuses the slang from the host country with the language of the faith and church. The Wan Chai Meetinghouse has become a type of “one-stop baptism shop” where Mainland Chinese people can be anointed a ‘Mormon’ in just twelve hours to try to circumnavigate the backlash from communist officials. As most of the churches in Hong Kong are run on a tight economic business model, the possibility of using the city as a base into China’s billion possible new recruits can be seen of as an golden, priceless opportunity.

Lobby area.

Sports area.

One of the three chapels.

Our guides share some of their musical skills.

One of the many congregation/teaching rooms.

Chung King Mansions and the nearby Mirador Mansions on Nathan Road, include low-budget guesthouses, electronic stores, clothing shops, sari stores, curry houses, tailors, and foreign exchange office. It has been estimated that 4,000 people live in the Mansions.

Chung King and Mirador Mansions

Built in the 1960s Chung King Mansions were built for a higher level of economic strata because of their height and type of construction. Now they house the largest amount of guesthouses and the greatest level of ethnic diversity in Hong Kong. It has been called the by Time magazine “Best Example of Globalization in Action” or by Gordon Mathews “the backside or globalism”. The economic trade passing through these two buildings has been significant enough to have a cause and effect in the entire region. Hong Kong anthropologist Gordon Mathews states that 20% of the mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa have been traded through these buildings. He goes on to say:

“Chungking Mansions figures as an important depot of the worldwide movement of goods and capital to and from the developing world - low-end globalization”, reports CNN.go. These two buildings are described by Surajit Chakravarty in his ‘Dissertation in Urban planning – Social Sciences’ as “spaces of market-culturalism with tensions arising from this hyper "market-culturalism", a socio-spatial condition (or entity) whereby identity is expressed through the market, legitimacy sought through consumption, and interaction between communities is marked by a spirit of competition, with tensions persisting under the façade of cooperation.”

I became interested in the light well structures when I first arrived in Hong Kong. They seemed something like a physical metaphor for the very density of change that Hong Kong aspires too achieve. The pipes and internal systems climbing up the buildings are a form of root system and, as the bars barricading the top of the wells are unable to prevent large collection of rubbish thrown at the bottom, the wells suggest the contrasts between daylight with dark obscurity, connection versus containment. A friend, who is a caretaker of the poorest housing estates in Hong Kong, once described a story where a young man wrenched off the bars at the top of the light well and from a cocktail of hallucinogens and perhaps suicidal thoughts jumped down the well. After hitting most of the air conditioners and injuring himself on the metal clothing racks he hit the bottom but survived as his body was expectedly cushioned by the huge amount of garbage that had been tossed down there.

With regards to Chung King mansions, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai has said that “…its 200 lodgings, it is a mix of different cultures ... a legendary place where the relations between the people are very complicated. It has always fascinated and intrigued me. It is also a permanent hotspot for the cops in HK because of the illegal traffic that takes place there. That mass-populated and hyperactive place is a great metaphor for the town herself…”

At Chung King Mansions we will be lead through the floors by another filmmaker, Berlin-based Elke Marhöfer who currently lives in the mansions recording and researching the stories from African traders for a film about exchange, migrants and trading with sub-Saharan Africa.

Berlin-based artist Elke Marhöfer joins us for a bit during our Mansions visit and tells us about the filming project she has been conducting in recent weeks focusing on the trade between Africa and Asia. Photo: Heman Chong.

Elke recommends Gordon Matthews' book "Ghetto at the center of the world. ChungKing Mansions, Hong Kong" (The University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Advertising low-budget lodging in the corridors of Chungking Mansions.

First floor of Chungking Mansions.

Boxed merchandise in Chungking Mansions.

Mirador Mansions (more photos here).

Notice board in Mirador Mansions.

Tailor workshop in Mirador Mansions.

In the stairwell of Mirador Mansions. Photo: Mimi Brown.

Monica's enterprises, a sari store in Mirador Mansions.

Courtyard of Mirador Mansions.

Laundry and A/C at Mirador Mansions.

Maximising laundry space.

A lost mexican sombrero in the Mirador Mansions.

Interior façades, Mirador Mansions.

Kowloon Mosque

The tour of the Kowloon Mosque is lead by an Imam, Muhammad Ashrad. Both the mansions and the Kowloon Mosque hold 4,000 people and in many ways the two structures have defined the urban population of that area. As the largest and most attended mosque in Hong Kong it also shaped the development of that area, servicing and encouraging the Muslim population to stay and work in close proximity for prayer and for counsel. Most large religious institutions are constructed around notions of belief and grandiosity. The chandeliered grandeur of the main prayer space of the mosque has becomes its own inspirational jewel at the heart of the Muslim in Hong Kong yet by keeping the Muslim population centered around one area, it can be seen as problematic, creating a type of social isolation tank which acerbates the homogeneity of Hong Kong’s cultural make-up.

Kowloon Mosque and Islamic Centre in Nathan Road, largest in the city. Photo: Mimi Brown.

Yuk King exploring the roof of the Mosque.

Tea break with macanese-portuguese pastéis de nata and chicken pie at Macau Dai Pai Dong.

Entrance to the Chai Wan recycling depot, focus of Yuk King Tan's video 'The Limit of Visi bility' (2012).

Chai Wan Working Cargo Area – Recycling Industry

My home overlooks the recycling depot of Chai Wan and it’s a daily activity to watch the progress of the boats filled with compacted paper and scrap metal move through the harbour. Two of my art projects have looked at value in terms of recycling and labour. The video ‘Scavenger’ followed the work of elderly recycle-trolley workers, named ‘scavengers’ in Hong Kong, and in the video ‘Limit of Visibility’ I filmed the progress of the recycling material around the cargo areas and as it is loaded on ships that take the material to various sites in Hong Kong and China.

Still from the video 'Scavenger' (2008). Courtesy Yuk King Tan.

The government owns all of Hong Kong's cargo working areas but private operators lease parts of the cargo bay from the government so that the refuse industry balances in tension between private enterprise and public management. One of the operators of the Chai Wan cargo bay will take us on a tour of the area and talk about his business working in the district over the last four years.

The compacted cubes of paper and cardboard, craned from trucks into formal grids carpeting the long barges, can seen as a refuse landscape, the material creating its own mountains and valleys. Compacted into modernist blocks, the previously loose paper detritus is the byproduct of a booming information industry. Distributed between masses of ships and industrial crane equipment, this material is prepared to become another kind of vast colony. Sent to less developed countries further broken down and salvaged, the waste material is a literal paper trail about the scale, power and wastage of economic development and trade. The sheer tonnage of the paper and the beauty of its compressed form about to undergo future transformation are all tied to the fluctuating market value attached to refuse material.

Still from the video "The Limit of Visibility" (2012). Courtesy Yuk King Tan.

The recycling industry that brought in so much revenue through the last ten years to ‘recycle cities’ in China has been stymied by the global market slowdown. There are times where the material shipped to China has lost most of its share value over the travel time between ports. The paper cubes are like giant books from the transactions of the city, which now may only be used as landfill. There were stories from China that refuse paper blocks are being used as less than stable filler in creating reclaimed land. For Hong Kong, waste and recycling will always be a complicated issue in a dense and expensive land and property-controlled city.

Chai Wan depot transports metal, paper and plastic to mainland China and Taiwan.

Boat route Chai Wan to Joss House Bay.

Fishing Boat Tour

The Chai Wan cargo bay operator who has an office on the Cargo Bay, also runs a small charter boat service from Chai Wan.

There is also a fishing boat area close by and we will take a small boat out into the harbour to look at the Hong Kong coastline from both urban and mountain landscape perspective over the sea. The famous Chinese painting trope of mountains and mist painting can be literally seen in Hong Kong landscape. I think of the philosophical traditions of the mountains and mist ink painting or mountain water as an analogy to the values of Hong Kong. The symbolism of a singular figure against nature, or in this case the mountains shrouding a hyper-dense urbanization can be seen best over sunset in a creaky fishing boat navigating between the large cargo tankers and cruise liners.

While on the harbour we will visit the largest Tin Hau Temple in Tai Mui Wan (or Joss House Bay) which can only be accessed by water as well as the floating fishing villages of Fat Tong Mun.

The Tin Hau Temple at Joss House Bay from the water, the oldest and largest Tin Hau Temple built in 1266.

View of the pier and the bay from the Tin Hau Temple, Joss House Bay.

Floating fish farms in the coast of Tung Lung Island.

Sunset over the bay.

Filipina Summit

We end with the tour with a dinner at a tiny boarding house where nine domestic helpers will make a meal from the Philippines and discuss political and personal issues around life as a Filipina woman working in Hong Kong.

These woman are friends, some of whom I have met, as part of a previous project ‘Helper’ 2009 in which a group of domestic helpers inhabited an gallery in Hong Kong to become both living sculptures and gallery invigilators for the duration of the exhibition.

Excerpt from Beth Laygo Interview – part of the 2009 project ‘Helper’ presented at 1aSpace, Hong Kong:

"I am a person behind everyone. We are always invisible, and if you want to call your work something, well, it should be just H, like Hey, or just like the sound ‘Hhh”, or H_____ with a gap. That’s like us - without a name. I have to subdue my personality, be in the background. Sometimes I feel as if I am losing myself piece by piece. Everyday a little part is gone, the worse thing is that it’s your self-confidence. And as time goes on you are lost, you have to be humble, and it’s so hard to be quiet all the time. You know… it's like I left my personality home in the Philippines.

We have a relationship based on verbs. My employer does not speak English, and I do not yet know how to speak Cantonese. We always use verbs in our everyday life, so we do action words. Not nouns or adjectives, the verb relationship.

Helper Beth. Courtesy: Yuk King Tan

It’s okay to be called maid, because we are like that. But sometimes it’s so degrading. Just like a helper, you are really helping and when you are really helping you feel satisfaction, you feel joy and happiness and you feel some fulfillment. Just like, ‘maid’, is a bit above a slave. It’s so very low. When called a maid, it is a compulsory word. You are obliged to do it and have no choice.

That is an irony, even for us, that we are going to other countries taking care of others kids to have more money for our kids. Just like them, the employers, they entrust us their kids and we bring them up so they can make more money. It is bad, but needed in this kind of society, for this kind of lifestyle that we all want. Because we must enjoy life. It is in our nature to seek what others have. Though it is sometimes more about wants than necessities.

The most difficult part is the adjustment period. It’s a very long adjustment period. Both parties must put up with each other; you have your own attitudes, upbringing and values. So of course I try to correct mine, but also you must adjust to my values.

I will do in the gallery space what needs to be done, if I need to sweep the floor I will sweep, if there is dust I will dust the pictures. But we are used to it, is very hard to get away from your routine. When you are used to doing it, it is very hard to stop. The routine is sometimes boring; I am a person who likes to do fieldwork. It’s so boring if it’s just about the floor and house. Not everyday you have someone to talk to because everyday is very busy. It’s so comforting to be able to talk.

It’s quite bad; the Philippines is poor because there is so much politicking. They think about politics without considering the needs of the people. The people get poorer and poorer. I studied accountancy. To be working is a necessity; no mother wants to be away from her kids. We are the ‘light of the home’, yet we must go out and earn money.

I cannot explain art; art is something other people have like a gift, its drawing and pictures. Art is a gift, something that not everyone appreciates. Something its about dreams, sometimes its when things that are extra good. I feel so honored and thankful; it’s not everybody that wants us to be an artwork. My daughter is good at drawing."

–

Yuk King Tan (China/New Zealand) is an artist who lives and works in Hong Kong, negotiating issues such as bi-cultural and multi-cultural identity within a constantly evolving post-colonial society.

Her work, which includes detailed drawings in ash and smoke residue, exploding fire cracker installations, photographs taken from rockets, and a giant cardboard HSBC lion pushed through the streets of Hong Kong, is often poetic and frequently suggestive, connecting highly different subject-matters and mediums. The meta-themes in the artist’s work unveil interests in cultural delineations, global migration, and a personal relationship to world-defining issues such as value and economy.

Yuk King Tan has had solo and group exhibitions, most notably at the Hong Kong Arts Centre (1996); Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen (1999); Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1999 and 2002); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2000); Camden Arts Centre, London (2000); Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand (2005); and Artists Space, New York (2006); Kunstverein, Hamburg (2008). She has held residencies at Dunedin, New Plymouth, Queensland, Aachen, Sydney, and London and has participated in international biennials in Queensland, Vilnius, Auckland, and São Paulo. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland University, New Zealand in 1993. She has taught and lectured at graduate and post-graduate art schools.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Ho Sin Tung "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" tour

2013-01-30T00:39:00.001+01:00

As part of Moderation(s), the year-long collaboration in 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, curators-in-residence Latitudes have invited artist Ho Sin Tung to develop a day-long tour of Hong Kong retelling the city and artistic concerns through personal itineraries and waypoints.

Ho Sin Tung's tour of Hong Kong revisits shooting spots (which are still accesible) from her video "Folie à deux" (2011), in which people read aloud their favorite passages with their back to the camera at the spots they chose. Through her reading-and-listening relationship with her readers, intimate and unique memories are created in the locations.

To complement the tour, please check the twitter and facebook and soundcloud posts via storify.

Follow on Twitter: #IncidentsOfTravel #Moderations

–

'Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong'
by Ho Sin Tung
29 January 2013

In 2011, I made a video called “Folie à deux” (trailer here), named after a psychological term describing “a condition in which symptoms of a mental disorder, such as the same delusional beliefs or ideas, occur simultaneously in two individuals who share a close relationship or association”. The video is a simple depiction of 17 people reading aloud from a passage from their favourite book with their back to the camera, at different indoor and outdoor locations chosen by each reader.

I know many people read, but only a few read books in a more personal way. The 17 people in “Folie à deux” were carefully selected as I sensed something “passionate” about them and their reading habits. Despite being a friend of the readers, I have never really discussed literature with them.

The places in which the readers chose to read are significant to each, and some locations I am unfamiliar with. However, through filming, listening to their reading, staring at their backs and spending some time with them before and after filming , stories and memories of the places are created. The video gets its name because, through reading, readers unwittingly unburden themselves - you can even see their fragility at that moment - and I am part of it.

I intend to re-visit each location (marked in this map) and by revisiting, I hope to re-tell the stories of each reader and the books they chose. Most of the places included in the trip are actually art spaces and artists’ studio. But through their stories, each place becomes less general and more intimate.

Meeting in Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong.

Cho Yun Kei, a favourite noodle spot in Sin Tung's family, and a very popular destination in Tai Po and beyond.

Breakfast in Tai Po.

Breakfast conversations.

Wandering through Tai Po.

The framers Sin Tung works with in Tai Po.

Tai Po chatting. Artist Ho Sin Tung with Mimi Brown of Spring and Max Andrews of Latitudes.

Observing a school where kids are practicing percussion instruments for Chinese New Year. Listen to the field recording here. Photo: Spring Workshop.

The 'hood.

Amazing family-run bean curd shop "Grandma Tofu Pudding" in Tai Po.

Delightful Tai Po treats: warm bean curd flower (also called "soya bean custard" / "bean curd dessert" / "bean curd jelly") at "Grandma Tofu Pudding".

Beautiful greens in Tai Po Market.

At Lo Wu station, mainlanders openly smuggle things like baby milk powder from Hong Kong.

Sheung Shui hi-rises.

Sheung Shui dialogues: "...and that? What is it? / Hmmm, I don't know... / it seems difficult to eat! / Do you think it's sweet or salty? / It looks more like an offering or maybe used for New Year decoration / I think they look like Wallace & Gromit-like fruit!

Queuing for lunch at the Gu ong Shing Ice Café in Sheung Shui.

Observing our surroundings while queuing up for lunch. Photo: Spring Workshop.

Across the street from the lunch break in Sheung Shui.

Lunch break: Pinneaple bun, a soft bun with sugar on top and a slice of butter inside.

Recurrent in the Hong Kong shopping landscape: foldable chairs and tables for sale.

Sheung Shui citizen amongst noodles and eggs.

Nam Sang Wai, New Territories, Hong Kong

Reader: Wong Wai Yin
Book: "Thomas the Obscure" by Maurice Blanchot

Wong Wai Yin is a Hong Kong artist married to Kwan Sheung Chi, also an artist. They are well known for their collaborative work, including a long performance piece,“Everything Goes Wrong for the Poor Couple”. Their work often references literature and they have a wonderful selection of books in their home bookshelf.

Wong Wai Yin brought me to Nam Sang Wai, a place I had never previously visited, and where they had their wedding photographs taken. There has been great discussion over the years about developing the wetland area of Nam San Wai - one of the most beautiful areas in Hong Kong attracting many film directors, “photographers” and their “models”.

Near where we filmed Wong Wai Yin reading, another couple was also taking wedding photos. These things reoccur over and over again in the grassy fields!

Afternoon walk around Nam Sang Wai wetlands.

Exploring Nam Sang Wai wetlands. Photo: Spring Workshop.

Abandoned house in Nam Sang Wai.

Photo: Spring Workshop

Vegetation around Nam Sang Wai wetlands.

For the unwanted visitors, a "scare cormorant" at Nam Sang Wai wetlands.

Further exploration around Nam Sang Wai wetlands.

Abandoned house, favourite spot for Hong Kong TV drama kidnapping scenes.

From here, Sin Tung filmed Wong Wai Yin segment in the video "Folie à deux".

View from the window.

A busy wedding photo location indeed!

ACO, Foo Tak Building, Wan Chai
Reader: Li João Ye Chun
Book: "Slam Dunk" by Takehiko Inoue

The owner of the Fuk Tak Building in Wan Chai offers cheap rent to some Hong Kong artists. There is also an English bookshop called ACO on the first floor; not just a bookshop but also a multi-use space for meetings, screenings, and education.

João is a former work colleague whom I admire and is now studying for a PhD in Berlin. He is very left wing and intelligent, but never in an intimidating way. I expected him to read something very academic, but rather than choosing a writer like Kant or Hegel, he picked a Japanese comic book that he liked as a boy. It’s a comic book about basketball.

He chose the last basketball match in the comic, and read aloud the count down of the match’s final seconds: 2 seconds, 0.8 seconds, 0.1 seconds, 0 seconds…

He chose something from pop culture and found a philosophical aspect to it.

ACO bookstore. Photo: Spring Workshop.

Outside Hong Kong Arts Centre
Reader: Alice Ho
Book: "Cry, the Beloved Country" by Alan Paton

Alice has worked for the Goethe Institute in Hong Kong for many years. I first met her while exhibiting there.

She is a very energetic person and full of stories, I had a really good time working with her. The book has always reminded her of her father’s death.

While reading, a nearby street musician – unexpectedly - played sad music.

Alice Ho from the Goethe Institute.

Crab buns dinner at "The 369 Shanghai Restaurant" in Wan Chai.

–

Ho Sin Tung (1986, Hong Kong) graduated from the Fine Arts Department of Chinese University in Hong Kong. She is currently a full-time artist and has a studio located in Fotan, Hong Kong. Sin Tung’s recent work predominantly uses pencil, graphite and watercolour in combination with found and ready-made images – such as stickers, maps, charts, rubber-stamps and timelines. These are reinterpreted to narrate stories of places, relationships and periods of time often within a considered, objective historical setting.

Her most recent exhibitions include “Hong Kong Inter-vivos Film Festival” in Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2012), “You Are Running A Business Called None Of My Business” in Abu Dhabi Art Fair (2011), “Folie à duex” in Experimenta, Hong Kong (2011) and “Don’t Shoot the Messenger” in Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2010). She also participated in group shows like “Hong Kong Eye” in Saatchi Gallery, London (2012), “The 9th Shanghai Biennale” in the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (2012), “Octopus” in Hanina Contemporary, Tel Aviv, Israel (2011), “Urban Utopia : if and only if” in Goethe Institute, Hong Kong (2011), “Drawing Out Conversation : Taipei” in Nanhai Gallery, Taipei (2010).

More information via Hanart TZ Gallery, Kong Kong.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"Temple and Feng Shui Tour", a guided walk around Hong Kong Island & Kowloon

2013-01-22T17:49:00.002+01:00

The "Temple and Feng Shui Tour" that we joined on the 22nd January around Hong Kong Island & Kowloon began by looking at Norman Foster's Hong Kong HSBC building in Admiralty, built according to Feng Shui principles.

The HSBC building has a large wide open area (i.e. the Statue Square) in front of it, with no other large buildings blocking the view of Victoria Harbour – thus a big plus point for good feng shui.

Natural sunlight makes its way inside the building via a movable platform regulated by computer which directs sunlight towards giant mirrors at the top of the atrium.

ATMs in the atrium.

Left lion statue (focus of Yuk King Tan's 'Scavanger' (2008) video) protecting the entrance of the building.

Two escalators access the building; three after the first floor (4 is a superstitious number as, when pronouned in Cantonese it sounds like the word for "death", hence the building doesn't have floors 4, 14 or 24).

I.M. Pei's Bank of China Tower has notoriously bad Feng Shui, nearby buildings try to compensate with shield-like shapes and curved corners.

View from 43rd floor of Bank of China Tower towards West Kowloon.

Wong Tai Sin temple (Sik Sik Yuen) where people worship Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism.

Main altar to worship Master Wong Tai Sin.

Incense sticks and offerings to Master Wong Tai Sin.

Nan Liam garden built in the style of a Tang Garden.

Blue Pond in the Nan Liam garden.

Pavilion of absolute perfection at the Nan Liam garden, Diamond Hill, Kowloon.

The Rockery gallery in Nan Liam garden, "a collection of rocks excavated from the Red River in its stretch through Dahua County in Guangxi Province, China."

Chi Lin Nunnery in Diamond Hill, Kowloon, across the Nan Liam garden.

The Buddhist temple at the Chi Lin Nunnery.

Nan Lian garden and Buddhist temple at the Chi Lin Nunnery.

View of the Japanese-style pagoda from the Buddhist temple at the Chi Lin Nunnery.

Follow the project: #IncidentsOfTravel #Moderations

To complement the tour, please check the twitter and facebook and soundcloud posts via storify.

Moderation(s) is a year-long programme occurring throughout 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Nadim Abbas' "Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong" public tour

2013-01-20T10:36:00.000+01:00

As part of Moderation(s), the year-long collaboration in 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, curators-in-residence Latitudes have invited artist Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong, 1980) to develop a public tour of Hong Kong on Saturday, 19 January.

The day-long itinerary plots a course through a handful of sites in the city, which have in one way or another influenced the form, content, and processes of Nadim’s practice. Since Hong Kong has been his home for most of his life, some of these places have been all too familiar to him since childhood. This project now offers him the opportunity to spring fresh surprises on unsuspecting “tourists”, and possibly on himself as well.

To complement the tour, check the twitter and facebook and soundcloud posts via storify, as well as the text "T he Pathology of Hong Kong in the work of artist Nadim Abbas", an account of the tour by Zoe Li on ArtInfo.com (includes a slidesh ow).

Follow future events on Twitter: #IncidentsOfTravel #Moderations

Nadim Abbas introduces his tour to 16 participants in the Wah Fu Estate, Aberdeen.

Incidents of Travel: Hong Kong
by Nadim Abbas
19 January 2013

Although I usually speak about my work in terms of images and the imaginary, there is always an equally important component that describes an encounter with externalspace. By that I am referring to the heterogenous space in which we live, which we rarely have time to reflect upon except in a state of distraction. But just because there is no time to reflect doesn’t mean that these spaces don’t affect our thoughts, subtly penetrating the internal space of our imagination; in some cases to the point where one can no longer distinguish between the internal and the external, or between dream and reality. It is these moments of uncertainty that interest me the most, and which, in my own experience, transforms art making into a perpetual balancing act on the threshold between banality and oblivion.

The itinerary outlined below plots a course through a handful of sites in Hong Kong, which have in one way or another influenced the form, content, and processes that define my practice. Since Hong Kong has been my home for most of my life, some of these places have been all too familiar to me since childhood; waiting for the right opportunity to spring fresh surprises on this unsuspecting tourist.

Wah Kwai Estate block.

Wah Kwai Estate water feature (with no water).

Around the Wah Kwai Estate. Photo: Heman Chong.

Waterfall Bay Park, Aberdeen, Hong Kong

Waterside "resort" used by the local community to swim and exercise by the side of the South China Sea.

Waterfall Bay is said to have attracted Portuguese and British ships to its shores to collect fresh water from its namesake as far back as the 16th century. Today, about 30m from the falls lie the ruins of a WW2 military pillbox and petrol powered searchlight, referred to officially as “Beach Defense Units” by Allied troops during the Japanese siege of Hong Kong in 1941. A few minutes walk from the rocky beach along the coastline, residents of a nearby public housing estate have over the years converted what looks like a disused pier into an veritable seaside resort for the local community. Despite numerous government placards warning against swimming in ungazetted waters, residents eager for an early morning dip in the South China Sea have gone so far as to add ad hoc steps, pool ladders and even fresh water facilities for an after-swim wash.

Tour guide of the day, artist Nadim Abbas. Photo: Trevor Young.

Looking towards Lamma Island from Waterfall Bay Park.

For the less adventurous, there are shelters and seating areas where the elderly gather everyday to play chess/cards, chat or simply watch the boats passing by. But perhaps the most endearing aspect of this site are the hundreds of porcelain statues of various Chinese deities clustered along the hillside and shoreline. I don’t know what started this particular outdoor collection; perhaps a makeshift shrine to protect local fisherman, or to commemorate a traumatic event? Or because it is considered unlucky to throw away statues of deities, they were quietly transferred to this idyllic setting instead. Needless to say, this latter aspect lends the whole site, already steeped in history, with a certain sacred quality. In a city like Hong Kong, where the regulation of land use usually falls into the purview of one dimensional governmental policies or market driven real estate developments, such elaborate appropriations of public space are a rarity. They represent in my mind a kind of fragile heterotopia, or an unwitting piece of relational art par excellence.

Offerings to deities, Waterfall Bay Park, Aberdeen.

Hillside covered with porcelain statues of various Chinese deities.

and more... Photo: Nadim Abbas

...some with their own shelters.

The waterfall of Waterfall Bay Park!

Looking the other direction an abandoned WWII beach-defense unit.

Inside the WWII beach defense unit.

Exploring the bay.

Nadim Abbas, Cataract (Iguazu Falls), 2011. Kinetic lightbox with Duratran print and aluminium window frames. 70(h) x 85(w) x 15(d) cm.

Walking through the Wah Fu Estate in Pok Fu Lam. Photo: Heman Chong.

Wah Fu Estate laundry.

Photo: Trevor Yeung.

Concrete Islands, Eastern Street, Hong Kong

My fascination with marginal spaces in the urban landscape began with this network of concrete islands that are located beneath the Connaught Road West flyovers next to the Western Harbour Tunnel (WHT) entrance. It is a site that I regularly pass by on bus rides to Kowloon side, and it became the model for a 46sq/m sandscape that was built in a warehouse space as part of an installation titled Afternoon in Utopia(2012).

Underneath the Connaught Road West flyover. Photo: Heman Chong.

Photo: Trevor Yeung.

Nadim Abbas, Afternoon in Utopia, 2012. Mixed media installation (sand, concrete, pigment prints, painted wall text, red tinted lighting). Dimensions variable (sandscape coverage approx 46 sq/m).

One of the distinguishing characteristics of this particular set of islands are the uniform grids of solid concrete trapezoidal prisms that were set into the ground either by government departments or the government-franchised company that operates the WHT. The usual explanation for this strangely monumental arrangement of blocks is to discourage the homeless population from sleeping on the islands. I see it also as a way for the authorities to mark their territory, much like a dog urinates on a lamppost. A couple of questions remain: are concrete islands private or public spaces? What are the laws and jurisdictions that regulate the use of these spaces? Much like the status of homeless people, it seems that these anomalous zones occupy a certain legal grey area, perpetually overlooked because they exist on the boundaries of function and visibility.^¹

Photo: Heman Chong.

Lunch break at the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade, site of the West Kowloon Cultural District development, to host the future M+, a museum for visual culture to open in 2017 with a focus on 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and moving image.

Hong Kong skyline from We st Kow loon Waterfront Promena de along the Victoria Harbour.

Man Cheong Street Housing Complex, Jordan, Kowloon

As we all know, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated cities in the world. This is typically illustrated via descriptions of crowded streets in districts like Causeway Bay, Sham Shui Po and Mong Kok, or of the ubiquitous high-rise public housing estates around the territory. This latter aspect is indicative of the tendency, which began under colonial rule, to build upwards rather than outwards to meet the demands of a growing population. Ackbar Abbas, in Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (1997) writes:

"Hyperdensity is partly the result of limited space, but it is also the result of how this limited space could be exploited for economic gain. On the one hand, the colonial government deals with the problem of hyperdensity by constructing cheap housing estates. On the other hand, the government policy of releasing crown land bit by bit at strategic moments and its prerogative, which it duly exercises, of designating land as rural (where strict building restrictions apply) or urban, ensure that building space remains scarce and property prices remain high."

Man Cheong Street Housing Complex, a case study in hyperdensity.

Photo: Trevor Yeung.

Stuck in traffic conversations (Left: Mimi Brown and right: Nadim Abbas).

Although the experience of living in a hyperdense milieu is often talked about disparagingly, it has also been argued that the close proximity between the commercial and the residential actually encourages diverse, dynamic communities and a vibrant street culture (in contrast to the the bland homogeneity of suburban sprawl).

In the early 90s, a group of Japanese architects conducted an in depth survey of the city, extolling the virtues of hyperdense living, and going so far as to liken this still existing complex of apartment blocks off Man Cheong Street (another regular sight for me on weekly cross-harbour bus rides) to the infamous (now demolished) Kowloon Walled City:

Circulation inside the apparently solid block is not horizontal but vertical. Each slab-building is actually a grouping of towers, separated by slender slots. [...] Within these slots of space, like everywhere else in Hong Kong, however, residents have built illegal elements. Thus, although at first glance this highly ordered building complex looks nothing like the chaotic Walled City in Kowloon, it shares with it many features, such as its density of use and its vertical circulation.^²

Wiring, piping, washing and air-conditioning in the Man Cheong Street Housing Complex.

My own concerns regarding the phenomenon of hyperdensity have to do with the kinds of sub-cultures, or modes of (anti)sociability that emerge as a result of extended inhabitation. This has translated into research and immersion in otakuculture, which carries with it stereotypes of socially inept male subjects walled up alone in their apartments; as if the dense accumulation of cramped interior space encourages an introversion, or vacuum of mental space itself. Interestingly, the Chinese word for otakuis宅男 (zaak naam), where 宅 is short for housing (complex) or tenement (block), and 男 means male.

Nadim Abbas, I Would Prefer Not To (宅男) #9, 2009. Digital C-print photograph, 64 x 42cm.

Shanghai Street, Yau Ma Tei.

The final leg of this tour takes us down a number of well-known streets in Hong Kong, which are prime examples of the kind of vibrant street culture that characterizes a hyperdense city like Hong Kong. They also provide a historical cross section of architectural styles in the region, from pre-WW1 “Verandah” type buildings to modern-day podium towers. Each street is known for its specific cluster of specialized shops and/or stalls. Tung Choi Street, for instance, is affectionately known as “Goldfish Street” since it is almost exclusively lined with pet shops and aquarium suppliers. My choice of these 3 streets in particular reflect my own interests as a consumer as much as producer. In fact it is often the case that I get ideas via shopping, or window shopping - there is always an excuse to pick up another piece of useless junk...

Photo: Heman Chong.

Shanghai Street, Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon(Kitchen and restaurant supplies)

Meat cleavers and tea pots around Shanghai St.

Pots and pans galore.

Passing by the Kowloon Wholesale Yau Ma Tei Fruit Market.

Yau Ma Tei Fruit Market.

A durian fruit in the Kowloon Wholesale Fruit Market.

Tung Choi “Goldfish” Street, Prince Edward, Kowloon(Pet shops, aquarium supplies, bicycle shops)

Goldfish of all size and variety sold at Tung Choi “Goldfish” Street.

Aquarium supplies of all persuasions.

Aquarium supplies to decorate fish-tanks.

Mini red, blue and white lobsters, Tung Choi “Goldfish” Street.

Nadim Abbas, Marine Lover, 2011. Mixed media (Polyresin coral casts, fluorescent black lights, plywood, door frames, mirror), 300(h) x 100(w) x 1900(d) cm.

Ap Liu Street, Shum Shui Po, Kowloon(Electronic components, consumer electronics, camera accessories, hi-fi & AV equipment, hand/power tools & accessories, flea market)

Watches, lighting fixtures, cables, transformers, telephone chargers, wires, batteries, and all kinds of other hardware supplies.

...as well as fishing nets

...all sorts of magnets. Photo: Trevor Yeung.

...and mountains of second-hand drills in the Ap Liu Street market.

1 In his visual essay, On Marginal Spaces: Artefacts of the Mundane (2011), Peter Benz devotes a whole section to the discussion of concrete islands. For a fictional account, see J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), a kind of Robinson Crusoe for the twentieth century.

2 See architectural journal, SD (Space Design) Hong Kong: Alternative Metropolis No. 330, March 1992.

–

Nadim Abbas (Hong Kong, 1980) is a Hong Kong-based installation artist. His work explores the intricate role that memory-images play in the intersection between mind and matter. This has culminated in the construction of complex set pieces, where objects exist in an ambiguous relationship with their own image, and bodies succumb to the seduction of space.

Abbas studied sculpture (B.A.) at the Chelsea College of Art and Comparative Literature (M.Phil.) at the University of Hong Kong. He currently holds teaching posts at the Hong Kong Art School and City University of Hong Kong. Notable exhibitions and projects include: “No Longer Human”, Osage Kwun Tong, Hong Kong (2012); “Marine Lover”, ARTHK11, Hong Kong (2011); “Cataract”, EXPERIMENTA & Gallery Exit, Hong Kong, “FAX” Para/Site, Hong Kong (both 2010); and “Louis Vuitton: A Passion for Creation – The Hong Kong Seven”, Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong (2009).

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (Except noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

First week of the "Moderation(s)" residency at Spring Workshop, Hong Kong

2013-01-17T17:48:00.000+01:00

View of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak.

Wall text at Spring Workshop introducing Latitudes' month residency.

Moderation(s) team. Left to right: Athena Wu and Mimi Brown (Spring Workshop), Samuel Saelemakers and Defne Ayas (Witte de With, Rotterdam), artist and 'Moderation(s)' curator Heman Chong and Mariana Cánepa Luna and Max Andrews (Latitudes). Photo: Spring Workshop.

Lunch break at Spring Workshop.

As part of Latitudes' 'Moderation(s)' research residency in Hong Kong we will be looking into how the city is articulated through specialist tours and attractions – such as self-made or esoteric museums, museum-like retail spaces, or “marginal” sculptural displays – both phenomena at the edge of the cultural, tourism and leisure sectors. Our first visit took us to the Hobby and Toy Museum in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon (below).

Hobby and Toy Museum entrance in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon.

Hobby and Toy Museum galleries at Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon.

Dinner at Lin Heung Tea House in Wan Chai.

Divinities shop around Shanghai Road in Yau Ma Tei, Kowloon.

'The Palazzo' residential complex in Fo Tan.

View from Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong's studio in the Wah Luen Industrial Centre.

MTR station Fo Tan.

French toast breakfast at Leung Chi Wo and Sara Wong's studio in Fo Tan.

Working table of Ho Sin Tung's studio at the Worldwide Industrial Centre in Fo Tan.

Detail of Ho Sin Tung's studio at the Worldwide Industrial Centre in Fo Tan.

Studying the map of Fotanian Open Studios 2013.

Fo Tan apartments looming over the forested hills.

Fo Tan industrial area.

On 15 January we made day to the New Territories to explore birds and biodiversity. Here's the bird list from the day:

Eurasian Wigeon, Mallard, Northern Shoveler, Northern Pintail, Eurasian Teal, Tufted Duck, Little Grebe, Great Crested Grebe, Oriental Stork, Black-faced Spoonbill, Yellow Bittern, Black-crowned Night Heron, Chinese Pond Heron, Grey Heron, Purple Heron, Great Egret, Intermediate Egret, Little Egret, Great Cormorant, Western Osprey, Black Kite, Eastern Marsh Harrier, Crested Goshawk, Eastern Buzzard, Eastern Imperial Eagle, Peregrine Falcon, White-breasted Waterhen, Common Moorhen, Eurasian Coot, Black-winged Stilt, Pied Avocet, Grey-headed Lapwing, Pacific Golden Plover, Grey Plover, Little Ringed Plover, Kentish Plover, Lesser Sand Plover, Greater Sand Plover, Greater Painted-Snipe, Pintail/Swinhoe's Snipe, Common Snipe, Black-tailed Godwit, Whimbrel, Eurasian Curlew, Spotted Redshank, Common Redshank, Marsh Sandpiper, Common Greenshank, Green Sandpiper, Wood Sandpiper, Terek Sandpiper, Common Sandpiper, Great Knot, Red-necked Stint, Temminck's Stint, Dunlin, Black-headed Gull, Saunders's Gull, Black-tailed Gull, "kamtschatschensis" Mew Gull, Caspian Gull, Heuglin's Gull, Caspian Tern, Domestic Pigeon, Spotted Dove, Asian Koel, Plaintive Cuckoo, House Swift, White-throated Kingfisher, Black-capped Kingfisher, Common Kingfisher, Pied Kingfisher, Grey-chinned Minivet, Scarlet Minivet, Long-tailed Shrike, Ashy Drongo, Azure-winged Magpie, Eurasian Magpie, Collared Crow, Large-billed Crow, Grey-headed Canary-Flycatcher, Cinereous Tit, Yellow-cheeked Tit, Red-whiskered Bulbul, Chinese Bulbul, Chestnut Bulbul, Red-rumped Swallow, Asian Stubtail, Dusky Warbler, Pallas's Leaf Warbler, Yellow-browed Warbler, Yellow-bellied Prinia, Plain Prinia, Common Tailorbird, Rufous-capped Babbler, Masked Laughingthrush, Silver-eared Leiothrix, Japanese White-eye, Velvet-fronted Nuthatch, Crested Myna, Red-billed Starling, Black-collared Starling, Blue Whistling Thrush, Grey-backed Thrush, Common Blackbird, Pale Thrush, Red-flanked Bluetail, Oriental Magpie Robin, Daurian Redstart, Stejneger's Stonechat, Red-throated Flycatcher, Orange-bellied Leafbird, Fork-tailed Sunbird, Eurasian Tree Sparrow, Scaly-breasted Munia, "taivana" Eastern Yellow Wagtail, "macronyx" Eastern Yellow Wagtail, Grey Wagtail, White Wagtail, Richard's Pipit, Olive-backed Pipit, Crested Bunting, Chestnut-eared Bunting, Black-faced Bunting.

Kam Tin river, looking for Grey-headed Lapwings.

Entrance to the Mai Po Nature Reserve.

Mai Po Marshes, the scrape.

Gate 107 through border fence towards the mangroves and Deep Bay, Mai Po Marshes.

Deep Bay (mudflat).

Fiddler crabs and mudskipper, Deep Bay, Mai Po Marshes.

Chinese Pond Heron and Great Egret, Deep Bay, Mai Po Marshes.

1km of floating boardwalks, Deep Bay, Mai Po Marshes.

'The Scrape', Mai Po Marshes.

Southern Mai Po Marshes.

We later visited Long Valley, the largest remaining tract of cultivated land in the Sheung Shui of the New Territories. Here a s oundscape with roosting Black-Collared Starlings and Crested Mynas, and a passing train.

Cultivated fields of lettuce at Long Valley.

Mix of lowland, cultivation, abandoned land and fishponds at Long Valley.

Farm worker collecting lettuce at Long Valley.

Packing greens, Long Valley.

Long Valley between baskets and sky-scrapers.

Very green lettuce, Long Valley.

Highly equipped bird photographers.

Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences in the Mid-levels of Hong Kong.

Visit starts here, don't get distracted.

Model of Kowloon tower block which suffered the worst outbreak of SARS in 2003.

Display of the Old Pathological Institute. "Medical students" c. 1912 examining rats for Bubonic plague.

Transitions in Midwifery display.

In the basement: traditional Chinese Herbalist shop 'Cun An Tan' Equipment.

Model of ear acupuncture points.

"Inoculation of calf with cowpox to produce vaccines against Smallpox" exhibit.

Flagstaff House Museum of Tea Ware in Hong Kong Park.

Display of tea pots introducing the history of Chinese tea drinking, from the Tang dynasty (618 – 907) to the 20th century.

Introducing the various styles in making tea beverage practiced in China at different times of the day and in different geographical points.

Compressed tea cake packaging.

All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Interview with Steven ten Thije, Research Curator, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, sixth in the #OpenCurating research series

2013-01-02T17:00:00.001+01:00

Play Van Abbe, Part 2: Time Machine (10 April–24 September 2010). Curated by Steven ten Thije (guest curator) and Diana Franssen, Curator and Head of Research. Exhibition view of: Raum der Gegenwart, (1930) 2009 scale 1:1, various materials. Installation: 430 x 860 x 610 cm. Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

As Research Curator at the Van Abbemuseum, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, Steven ten Thije is part of the team of one the first public museums for contemporary art to be established in Europe. Under the directorship of Charles Esche since 2004, the museum has defined itself through "an experimental approach towards art’s role in society", where "openness, hospitality and knowledge exchange are important". Ten Thije is also a lecturer and researcher at the University of Hildesheim, Germany, where he is studying for a doctorate in the genealogical analysis of the exhibition curator. He was co-curator of the Spirits of Internationalism (Van Abbemuseum, 2012), and alongside Esche, with curators Christiane Berndes, Annie Fletcher, and Diana Franssen, he was guest curator of Play Van Abbe (2011). Subtitled The museum in the 21st Century, this was a four-part multifaceted programme of exhibitions, research and events in which the Van Abbemuseum reflected on the meaning and role of the art museum. Using its collection to articulate questions about the public's reaction to art and its contexts, the Van Abbemuseum probed its own history and purpose alongside how cultural production has reflected the social and political dynamics of the last twenty years.

–

ABOUT #OPENCURATING

Drawing on the emerging practices of so-called 'Open Journalism' – which seek to better collaborate with and use the ability of anyone to publish and share – #OpenCurating is a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue. #OpenCurating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.

The project is articulated around a series of ten new interviews with curators, artists, writers and online strategists published as a free digital edition [read here the published ones so far], a Twitter discussion moderated around the hashtag #OpenCurating and a finissage event in Barcelona (date TBA).

#OpenCurating is a research project by Latitudes produced through La Capella. BCN Producció 2012 of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partners: Walker Art Center

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Latitudes research residency in Spring Workshop, Hong Kong, 7 January–10 February 2013, as part of the year-long programme Moderation(s)

2012-12-27T15:00:00.000+01:00

Moderation(s) is a year-long programme occurring throughout 2013 between Witte de With, Rotterdam, and Spring, Hong Kong. It's ‘moderator’, Singaporean visual artist and writer Heman Chong, will steer a program involving more than fifty artists, curators and writers, and engender a conference, three exhibitions, three residencies and a book of short stories.

Moderation(s) begins by hosting the Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes for a month residency in Hong Kong (7 January–10 February 2013). During this time, Latitudes will investigate the urban territory from a curatorial perspective by looking into how it is articulated through specialist tours and attractions, both phenomena at the edge of the cultural, tourism and leisure sectors.

As part of this – and elaborating on the approach of their recent project Incidents of Travel [see here] at Casa del Lago, Mexico City – the duo invited Hong Kong-based artists Nadim Abbas, Y uk King Tan, Ho S in Tung and Samson Young to develop day-long tours, thus retelling the city and each participant’s artistic concerns through personal itineraries and waypoints. Alongside these ventures into the city, research around local forms of vernacular collection display and eccentric attractions will be made. This will encompass self-made or esoteric museums, museum-like retail spaces, or ‘marginal’ sculptural displays.

Incidents of Travel Mexico City. Day 3: Tour with Diego Berruecos. Visiting the Biblioteca Nacional Lerdo de Tejada. Photo: Eunice Adorno.

In October 2012, a working group of artists, curators, and Witte de With staff members came together in Rotterdam. Comprised of A Constructed World (Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva), Nadim Abbas, Defne Ayas, Mimi Brown, Amira Gad, Natasha Ginwala, Latitudes (Max Andrews and Mariana Cánepa Luna), Michael Lee, Christina Li, Pages (Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi), Vivian Sky Rehberg, and Samuel Saelemakers, the group took part in a two-day workshop developed by Heman Chong to explore and identify materials that will drive the content of Moderation(s). The first project to surface from this workshop is Bibliotheek (Library), a list of books identified by the group to function both as a bibliography for Moderation(s), as well as a planned physical library that will be installed both at Witte de With and Spring.

In speaking about this project, moderator Heman Chong proposes “to make ‘soft’ the practices of both artist and curator, so that one becomes easily soluble in the other, while retaining their unique forms and patterns of working. The participants will be encouraged to indulge in the pleasures of exchanging knowledge and tools without any pressure to collaborate.”

The 2013 programme includes:

Latitudeswill produce Incidents of Travel(Spring, January 2013), for which the duo will invite four artists in Hong Kong to develop day-long tours that articulate the city and their artistic practice through routes and waypoints. Artist Michael Lee will join the project to develop a series of maps and charts that trace the larger constellation of Moderation(s). Performances by artists including Benjamin Seror, Anthony Marcellini, Koki Tanaka, and many more will occur in and around Rotterdam inA Thing At A Time (Witte de With, April 2013). In June, fifteen artists, curators, and writers will produce short stories during A Fictional Residency (Spring, June 2013). Additionally, a conference in four parts led by various moderators involving twelve guests will be staged (Witte de With, October 2013). A Constructed World will produce The Social Contract (Spring, October 2013), a work in which audiences are asked to sign a legal contract restraining them from speaking about what they saw inside the exhibition. The Part In The Story Where A Part Becomes A Part Of Something Else (Witte de With, December 2013), a large-scale show mounted at Witte de With that will sublimate many of the conversations and gestures found within Moderation(s).

Twitter: #Moderations / @WdWcentrum / @SpringHK / @HemanChong / @LTTDS

Moderation(s) is initiated by Witte de With’s Director Defne Ayas and Spring Workshop Founder Mimi Brown.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

"books_expanded_field: An Interview with Badlands Unlimited", fifth interview of the #OpenCurating research

2012-12-17T10:00:00.000+01:00

'How To Download A Boyfriend' group exhibition as interactive e-book, 58 pp (Badlands Unlimited, 2012).

Founded in 2010 by artist Paul Chan – best known for his cycle The 7 ~~Lights~~ (2005–8) and Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, realised in collaboration with Creative Time and The Classical Theatre of Harlem – Badlands Unlimited is a New York-based publishing house whose motto is “books in an expanded field”. Its publications and editions in paper or digital forms (e-books for iPad or Kindle) acknowledge that “historical distinctions between books, files, and artworks are dissolving rapidly”. Badlands aspires to reimagine the activity of reading as it encompasses the artist book, choreography and poetry, 3D, experimental typography, historical translations as well as the format of the group show.

–

ABOUT #OPENCURATING

Drawing on the emerging practices of so-called 'Open Journalism' – which seek to better collaborate with and use the ability of anyone to publish and share – #OpenCurating is a research project that investigates how contemporary art projects may function beyond the traditional format of exhibition-and-catalogue. #OpenCurating is concerned with new forms of interaction between publics – whether online followers or physical visitors – with artworks and their production, display and discursive context.

The project is articulated around a series of ten new interviews with curators, artists, writers and online strategists published as a free digital edition [read here the published ones so far], a Twitter discussion moderated around the hashtag #OpenCurating and a finissage event in Barcelona (date TBA).

#OpenCurating was awarded the first BCN Producció 2012 Research Grant of the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona.

Content partners: Walker Art Center

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art's transparency initiatives

2012-12-12T17:06:00.002+01:00

Part of our interest in the #OpenCurating research we are currently carrying out is to look at how museums and curatorial departments are engaging in new ways with their audiences and the means through which "open" initiatives are being promoted and implemented in exhibition-making and via other types of programming.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art has created two really dynamic initiatives which promote transparency throughout the museum's operations: a real-time statistics "Dashboard" including data such as the museum's energy consumption, works of art currently on display, the value of the museum's endowment, their operating expenses, average time of visits to the website, etc.

Indianapolis Museum of Art Dashboard page.

The data can be compared to previous years (stats for 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011), filtered by museum departments (Buildings, Education, Conservation, Curatorial, Finance...) as well as by topics (Art, Greening the IMA, Attendance...).

Dashboard data of the curatorial.

However admirable this tool is, the curatorial dashboard falls rather short on the depth of information, only offering statistics for the "number of acquisitions" and the "number of works with gaps in WWII-Era Provenance". They do not reveal full data sets of their departmental operational budget, for instance. Does this show there is still resistance to really open up the initiative to other kind of cost data (shipping, insurance, exhibition display, fees paid to artists (or not?)...) or even interesting insights such as (air)miles travelled by the curatorial staff, or the amount of paper used for their publications, just to mention a few.

Some of these topics (how to articulate institutions and organisations complex needs in seeming transparent, responsible and benevolent) were addressed in Latitudes' 2008 exhibition "Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities" (Archive Books, 2008) and in its catalogue essay "Shades of Green: a conversation between the curators", as well as in the essay by Stephanie Smith "'Alas for the dreams of a Dreamer!': Art Museums and Sustainability" included in the Latitudes-edited publication "Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook' (RSA, 2006).

A second initiative we find quite relevant is the "Deaccessioning database", which classifies pieces that have been deaccessioned at the museum since 2007 (following IMA's policy, see pdf here), explaining provenance, the reasons for its deaccession, listing the recipient and the day of sale, etc.

Deaccessioned Artworks page www.imamuseum.org/art/collections/deaccession

Take for instance "Houses in the Snow", a 1929 canvas by Maurice de Vlaminck sold via Sotheby's in 2009 for $173700; or the 1889 suite of prints "Les Misères Humaines" by Gaugin, which were transferred to the Musée de Pont-Aven in 2009.

Deaccessioned file for Maurice de Vlaminck's 1929 canvas.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.