The purpose of design began to shift in the late 20th century from utility toward a more holistic combination of purpose and meaning. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors.

Talk to Me explores this new terrain, featuring a variety of designs that enhance communicative possibilities and embody a new balance between technology and people, bringing technological breakthroughs up or down to a comfortable, understandable human scale. Designers are using the whole world to communicate, transforming it into a live stage for an information parkour and enriching our lives with emotion, motion, direction, depth, and freedom.

Selected Artists from the exhibition:

“We [have used] earrings as symbols of distinction since time immemorial,” the designers of kawamura-ganjavian tell us, “however they are not particularly useful items.” In response they have designed the Earshell—a sound-enhancement device that is also an elegant adornment and dramatizes the interest of the listener.

Phantom Recorder, 2010

Revital Cohen, Design Interactions Department,  Royal College of Art

The Phantom Recorder explores the phenomenon of the phantom limb: an amputee’s sensation that a missing limb is still attached to the body and functioning. This device could be activated to record or cause particular sensations. The potential for new ways to understand the communication between mind and body goes further, Cohen says: “Could we use this technology to record illusions of the mind? What if our imagination could be captured through our nerves?”

Communication Prosthesis Portrait Series (Cyclist, Actress, Chef, Craftsman, Midwife, Politician, Model), 2009

Sascha Nordmeyer

The prosthetic “smile” that is intended to empower anyone who feels awkward socially. This rigid prosthesis, shown in a series of portraits, covers the lips and exposes the gums, making communication easier and more explicit by forcing automatic facial expressions, almost grimaces. It was conceived for people who feel insecure about their appearance and their social skills and are therefore compelled to be excessively smart and communicative in every circumstance.

Short++, 2010

Adi Marom,  Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

Designs by Adi Marom and Hans Hemmert explore how daily functions and especially face-to-face communication can change simply by tweaking and tinkering with people’s height. Marom’s robotic footwear extends and contracts via an iPhone application, so that the wearer becomes taller or shorter to fit various needs and moods— from reaching a higher supermarket shelf to smelling a flower on a tree branch; height thus becomes what the designer calls an “interactive variable.”

Talk to Yourself Hat, 2006

Kate Hartman, Interactive Telecommunications Program. Tisch School of the Arts &  New York University

The Talk to Yourself Hat transmits sounds from one’s mouth directly into one’s ears via a conspicuous, trunk-like tube. As such, it playfully encourages a user to actually speak out, without worrying about privacy, when in conversation with herself. The hat also acknowledges, communicates, and legitimizes an act that is sometimes regarded as shameful.

EyeWriter, 2009

Zach Lieberman, James Powderly, Evan Roth, Chris Sugrue, TEMPT1 , and Theo Watson.

In 2003 TEMPT1, a Los Angeles–based graffiti artist and activist, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which soon left him entirely paralyzed except for his eyes. The team equipped a pair of inexpensive eyeglasses with eye-tracking technology and custom-developed software that could capture TEMPT1’s eye movements. From his hospital room, wirelessly connected to a laptop and laser-tagging apparatus installed in downtown LA, the artist can paint graffiti tags in color, which are then projected at a superhuman scale in real time— so that viewers see the glowing tag as it is created—on buildings.

Rubik’s Cube for the Blind, 2010

Konstantin Datz

Konstantin Datz has reimagined the popular Rubik’s Cube for people who cannot see the toy’s original colors. Datz stuck white panels embossed with the Braille words for each color over the squares, transforming the game from a visual puzzle into a tactile one.

 

Violence as an integral part of daily life: pain and death are constant themes in the work of the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles. The Museion exhibition tackles the murders and disappearances in the city of Jaurez in Mexico: a central element of the presentation is a wall with visible bullet holes left by executioners.

The show also features a filmed action created by the artist in Bolzano, inspired by the thought that all places have a story of suffering etched into their past.

At first glance, her works often seem to be minimalist in their form. Viewers only discover that they are deeply emotional and dramatic when they become aware of the rigorous realism in the choice of material.

Muro Baleado (Culiacán), 2009

The two walls shown in the exhibition were removed from Mexican cities and replaced with new walls. The man-high concrete-block walls are witnesses of daily violence: they display bullet holes resulting from shoot-outs that have had a lasting impact on cities such as Ciudad Juárez, where the drug war is raging with particular vehemence.

Muro Ciudad Juárez, 2010

With the title Frontera (frontier), Teresa Margolles alludes to the limits of what a city can endure. She shows places with no future, in which even young people grasp the futility of their situation, as one of her film works oppressively documents

Mori is fascinated by the way contemporary Japanese society balances technology, fantasy, and humanity. With an affectionate perspective on her native country, she explores the way fantasy and reality overlap in contemporary Japanese consciousness. Hers is a world where cartoon characters step out of comic books to stalk the real streets and real people withdraw from their grim routine to lose themselves in cartoon fantasies.

Play With Me (1994)

Mariko stands outside a busy Tokyo video store, dressed in form-fitting plastic armor and a cascading turquoise Barbie wig. She looks like a cross between a samurai waif and a robotic streetwalker who may have materialized from the video game beside her.

Tea Ceremony III (1995)

In this piece Mariko is an interplanetary geisha, dispensing tea to businessmen. Her ”office lady” uniform is regulation black, but her tight-fitting silver cap has pointy Martian ears.

Empty Dream (1995)

Mori digitally inserts herself four times into a photograph of Ocean Dome – the largest indoor theme park in the world, including an artificial beach, waves and all. Posing among happy Japanese bathers, Mori is costumed as a coy mermaid.  Hybrid creature, hybrid world; made for each other.

Birth of A Star (1996)

‘Birth of a Star”,  named for a television talent show, she is the demonic punk incarnation of the look-alike, sound-alike ingenue singers who are Japan’s premier teeny-bop idols.

Miko no Inori / The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer (1996)

In the video, which plays simultaneously on five small screens, Mori looks coquettishly extraterrestrial. With silver hair and menthol-blue eyes, she rotates and massages a glass globe in her hands as if conjuring the future. Outfitted entirely in white, the artist takes on the role of ‘alien’ (much like the being depicted in Last Departure) erotically caressing a crystal ball in her hands. All the while, Mariko voice can be heard singing an evocative ballad in her native tongue.

 Watch an excerpt of the video

Last Departure (1996)

Mariko assumes the same persona but is shown full length and in triplicate, enshrined inside a fabulous spaceship (actually a digitally morphed image of Osaka’s hypermodern Kansai airport). There’s an iconic cast to this triad: the figures suggest Buddhist Barbarellas.  They hold a glass sphere in their hands, much like a crystal ball used by mystics for telling the future – perhaps they have come to show us our destiny. The crystal ball also alludes to the 1980 novel Nantonaku Kurisutoru (Somehow, Crystal), by Yasuo Tanaka that describes the lives of fashion obsessed young women much like the young ‘cyborgs’ who patrol the streets of the Yamanote district in Tokyo.

 3-D video Nirvana (1996-97)

The title refers to the blissful emptiness that is the goal of Buddhist spiritual practice — Ms. Mori appears as the popular deity Kichijoten, in a peach-colored kimono and floating over a Dead Sea landscape tinted an acidic orange-pink. She executes a sequence of ritual gestures, accompanied by a band of cartoon musicians who zoom out toward the viewer before the whole scene dissolves into galactic mist.

Pure Land, from the Esoteric Cosmos series (1996–1997)

In order to participate in the aptly named experience, Nirvana, the viewer is led in to a dark room and asked to don 3D glasses before the film begins. The artist appears as a dancing Shaman dressed in a traditional ornate kimono and floating on a lotus flower. The Shaman is surrounded by pastel coloured elves called tunes, which each play a different Japanese musical instrument. Mariko hums and sings Japanese pop songs through a fuzzy echo chamber and the audience is treated to burst of cool, scented air on their faces. A crystal ball, much like the one featured in previous works, floats out of the sky and into the Shaman’s delicate hands.  The backdrop to Nirvana is a breath-taking view of the Dead Sea at dawn – empty yet pure.

Kumano (1997-1998)

Ms. Mori’s blend of eclectic religious symbolism, cyber technology and pop culture is well informed on all three fronts. And when she turns her attention to Japanese spirituality, as she does in the recent two-part ”Kumano,” the results are even more complex and erudite.

The work entitled Kumano is both a photograph and a film. The title refers to a Pacific peninsula in the south of Japan’s main island, a region of breathtaking natural beauty saturated in religious myth. It is the site of an important Buddhist pilgrimage circuit; legendarily Buddhist saints departed in boats from its shores in search of the Pure Land paradise. Also here are some of the country’s highest waterfalls, many of them worshiped as Shinto gods. The sun goddess Amaterasu, from whom the imperial family descends, has her shrine at nearby Ise.

In the ”Kumano” photo-mural, a purifying waterfall streams down through a grove of cedar trees; a high-tech forest shrine hovers like an apparition, as does Ms. Mori herself in the guise of the sun goddess with her symbolic mirror.

In the video, the image of the goddess flitting like a ray of light among the trees alternates with a scene of Ms. Mori performing the tea ceremony, whose elaborate etiquette she learned as a child. She gives it an unconventional tweak here by including an ancient bronze Chinese vessel among the utensils she uses, yet another indication of the hybrid, pan-Asian nature of much of her recent work.

Dream Temple (1997)

 Pratibimba (1998)

Mariko is dressed as Past, Present and Future (the three members of the Pratibimba triptych) performing Shinto rituals and running through the woods of the Wakayama Prefecture. The whole experience is made all the more enigmatic and enchanting due to the pretty, lilting songs the artist sings as she summons her audience toward the digital representation of the Dream Temple in the background.

WAVE UFO (1999)

Primal Rhythms 2007

Primal Rhythms is sponsored by  the FAOU foundation, a  nonprofit that Mori established in 2010. This project  focuses on uniting technology with ancient forces to create a harmonious, primal work on an island far from civilization.

The foundation’s mission is to explore nature and promote ecology through art. Primal Rhythms, involves a Plexiglas column, and the intimate engagement of a secluded community on the Japanese island of Miyako, part of the okinawa Prefecture. The end product will consist of the three-meter-high sun Pillar and the Moon Stone, a floating LED-equipped sphere, three meters in diameter. The pillar will jut up from a rock cluster in the island’s seven Light Bay from which it will cast a shadow over the water toward the shore that at the winter solstice will intersect with the Moon stone, anchored in the bay and changing color according to the phase of the moon and the tide. Once this Asian project is completed, Mori plans to bring site-specific works tailored to local cultures to five additional continents, beginning with South America.

Before officially beginning her work on Primal Rhythms, in 2007, Mori visited a number of sacred sites around the world and was especially intrigued by dwellings from the Jomon period in Japan—roughly 14,000 B.C. to 300 B.C.—which were associated with sculptural forms that later influenced her designs. “Two objects were always found in a particular area,” she says, “a round stone and a kind of small standing stone. The pair seems to me to be a symbol of regeneration, or a wish for help in harvest, or related to worship of the nature god. It’s probably a primitive stage of shintoism.”

Seven Light Bay will incorporate the Sun Pillar and Moon Stone. The pillar will be erected this month atop two pyramidal rocks in the bay. Originally, the plan was to carry it there in a large boat, but it was feared that the area’s precious coral would be harmed.

“Instead of placing this work in the city, I wanted to place it in the most rich nature, so that people have to travel to actually get in touch with nature and to understand that you are also the nature as well,” says Mori, who spends most of her time in New York. “I like these very ambitious projects—it’s my soul work—but my life work is to interact with the people in the city.”

The title of the 54th Exhibition, ILLUMInations literally draws attention to the importance of such developments in a globalised world. I am particularly interested in the eagerness of many contemporary artists to establish an intense dialogue with the viewer, and to challenge the conventions through which contemporary art is viewed.

The term ‘nations’ in ILLUMInations applies metaphorically to recent developments in the arts all over the world, where overlapping groups form collectives of people representing a wide variety of smaller, more local activities and mentalities.

54th Venice Biennale Highlights:

Allora & Calzadilla

Track and Field (2011)
More info on Allora & Calzadilla’s art installations at the Venice Benniale

Christian Boltanski: Chance

Last News from Humans in the French Pavilion
Statistical projections and not actual deaths, but I am still thinking about how to address the representation of birth and death for Venice.

Christian Marclay: The Clock

Golden Lion for the best artist at the ILLUMInations Exhibition
(United States, 1955; on display at the Corderie, Arsenale)
The Clock, 2010

Maurizio Cattelan: Others

Others. 2011
Taxidermized pigeons

Cindy Sherman: Untitled

Untitled. 2010
Pigment print on PhotoTex adhesive fabric

Yto Barrada: The Telephone Books

The Telephone Books (or the Recipe Books). 2010
“These are the notebooks of Z.A.B. She was my grandmother and was illiterate…”
Code drawings to identify family members.

Fernando Prats: Gran Sur (Great South)

Gran Sur (Great South), 2011
Antarctic Base Arturo Prat, Greenwich Island
Neon, wood structure, cable, aluminum, power generator

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages. Bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

The installation in neon lettering reproduces the advert that the Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton may have posted circa 1911, calling for men for his expedition to Antarctica.

The work of Fernando Prats in the Arsenale will show the powerful reality of the Chilean geography, with topics such as the earthquake and the eruption of the Chaitén volcano.

The assembly consists of three art pieces: an intervention around the impact of the volcanic eruption in Chaitén (2008); a series of works alluding to the earthquake in south-central Chile (2010); and an installation in neon lettering that reproduces the advert that the Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton may have posted circa 1911, calling for men for his expedition to Antarctica.

Ahmed Basiony: 30 Days of Running in the Space

Ahmed Basiony
1978 Cairo-2011, Egypt.
Killed during a demonstration on Tahrir Square, 28 January 2011.

On January 28th, 2011 – artist, musician and professor, Ahmed Basiony was killed with several gunshot wounds inflicted by snipers on the Friday of Wrath in Tahrir Square (The 2011 Egyptian Revolution). Ending at 32 years of age, the same period that witnessed the remaining year of Anwar Sadat’s presidency, followed by his assassination, and resulting with an Egypt held under the Mubarak Regime, Basiony was what one would consider an emblem of hope to millions of Egyptians, who were determined to live their life for change from a nationally repressed command.

Takashi Murakami: Floating Campsite

Floating Campsite. 2011
Oil painting
150 cm diameter

Future Pass explores the relationship between the creative energy of contemporary art in Asia and the rest of the world.

Yoshitomo Nara: Home

Home. 2011
Acrylic on wood board
135.3 x 123.3 cm

Manal Al-Dowayan: Suspended Together

Suspended Together. 2011
Installation, fibreglass with laminate

The doves display travel permission documents donated to the artist by many leading women from Saudi Arabia (scientists, educators, engineers, artists, etc). In order to travel, all Saudi women need a permission document issued by their appointed guardians.

The Future of a Promise examines the way in which an idea is made incarnate in a formal, visual context and how a promise opens up a horizon of future possibilities, be they aesthetic, political, historical, social or critical. With the events currently unfolding in the Middle East, the question of the future and the promise inherent within culture has assumed an even more acute degree of pertinence. It is with this in mind that the exhibition enquires into the promise of visual culture in an age that has become increasingly disaffected with politics as a means of social engagement. Whilst the artists included in The Future of a Promise are not representative of a movement as such, they do seek to engage with a singular issue in the Middle East today: who gets to represent the present-day realities and the horizons to which they aspire?

Juan Fernando Herrán: Escalas

Escalas. 2008
BIFURCACIÓN. IMPRESIÓN INKJET. 108 x 163 CMS. 2008

as imágenes fotográficas que hacen parte de Escalas revelan en primera instancia el hecho de que los habitantes de estos barrios de invasión realizan un acto de posesión territorial donde se conquista y domina la topografía. En un segundo nivel, que la conformación física del espacio público es el resultado de una serie de procesos arquitectónicos de carácter dinámico y participativo por parte de los pobladores que obedecen y son la consecuencia directa de la necesidad de construir un lugar propio que le permita al habitante participar de la noción de ciudad y de “progreso”. De esta manera, las ideas de lo público y lo privado se implican y se vuelven interdependientes. Sin embargo, dichos procesos no dejan de ser contradictorios y paradójicos. En determinadas ocasiones, el esfuerzo, la persistencia y el empeño logran su objetivo mientras que en otras circunstancias se impone la ausencia, el fracaso y la derrota. La escalera finalmente, subraya la condición de tránsito de la población y la distancia tanto física como mental entre el lugar de su morada y la ciudad, que se vislumbra como distante, ajena y referencial.

Reynier Leyva Novo: The smells of the war

Los olores de la guerra. 2009
Installation Glass bottles, perfumes
Variable dimensions

Adán Vallecillo: The physiology of the taste

La fisiología del gusto. 2010
Carious teeth and stainless steel tray
3 x 44 x 25 cm

Humberto Vélez: The Most Beautiful

La más bella. 2009
Photography on video format

Documentation of a performance realized in collaboration with the community Cristo del Consuelo from Cuenca and the community Ingapirca from Cañar, Ecuador.

The exhibition, organized by The Costume Institute, celebrates the late Alexander McQueen’s extraordinary contributions to fashion. From his Central Saint Martins postgraduate collection of 1992 to his final runway presentation, which took place after his death in February 2010, Mr. McQueen challenged and expanded the understanding of fashion beyond utility to a conceptual expression of culture, politics, and identity. His iconic designs constitute the work of an artist whose medium of expression was fashion.

The Romantic Mind

Coat
Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims (MA Graduation Collection), 1992
Pink silk satin printed in thorn pattern lined in white silk with encapsulated human hair

“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen doggedly promoted freedom of thought and expression and championed the authority of the imagination. In so doing, he was an exemplar of the Romantic individual, the hero-artist who staunchly follows the dictates of his inspiration. “What I am trying to bring to fashion is a sort of originality,” he said. McQueen expressed this originality most fundamentally through his methods of cutting and construction, which were both innovative and revolutionary.

Romantic Gothic and Cabinet of Curiosities

“Coiled” Corset
The Overlook, autumn/winter 1999–2000
Aluminum

One of the defining features of McQueen’s collections is their historicism. While McQueen’s historical references are far-reaching, he was particularly inspired by the nineteenth century, especially the Victorian Gothic.Like the Victorian Gothic, which combines elements of horror and romance, McQueen’s collections often reflect opposites such as life and death, lightness and darkness. Indeed, the emotional intensity of his runway presentations was frequently the consequence of the interplay between dialectical oppositions. The relationship between victim and aggressor was especially apparent, particularly in his accessories. He once remarked, “I . . . like the accessory for its sadomasochistic aspect.”

Romantic Nationalism

Dress
The Horn of Plenty, autumn/winter 2009–10
Black duck feathers

McQueen’s collections were fashioned around elaborate narratives that are profoundly autobiographical, often reflecting his Scottish heritage. Indeed, when he was asked what his Scottish roots meant to him, he replied, “Everything.” McQueen’s national pride is most evident in the collections Highland Rape (autumn/winter 1995–96) and Widows of Culloden (autumn/winter 2006–7). Both explore Scotland’s turbulent political history.

Romantic Exoticism

Ensemble
No. 13, spring/summer 1999
Corset of brown leather; skirt of cream silk lace; prosthetic legs of carved elm wood

“I want to be honest about the world that we live in, and sometimes my political persuasions come through in my work. Fashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.”
—Alexander McQueen

McQueen’s romantic sensibilities expanded his imaginary horizons not only temporally but also geographically. As it had been for Romantic artists and writers, the lure of the exotic was central to his work. Like his historicism, McQueen’s was wide ranging—India, China, Africa, and Turkey all sparked his imagination. Japan was particularly significant to him, both thematically and stylistically. The kimono, especially, was a garment that he reconfigured endlessly. Remarking on the direction of his fashions, McQueen said, “My work will be about taking elements of traditional embroidery, filigree, and craftsmanship from countries all over the world. I will explore their crafts, patterns, and materials and interpret them in my own way.” As with many of his themes, however, McQueen’s exoticism was often expressed in contrasting opposites. That was the case with It’s Only a Game (spring/summer 2005), a show staged as a chess game inspired by a scene in the film Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001), which pitched the East (Japan) against the West (America). Films often inspired McQueen, as did contemporary art.

Romantic Primitivism

Dress
It’s Only a Game, spring/summer 2005
Lilac leather and horsehair

“I try to push the silhouette. To change the silhouette is to change the thinking of how we look. What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There’s a lot of tribalism in the collections.”
—Alexander McQueen

Throughout his career, McQueen returned to the theme of primitivism, which drew upon the ideal of the noble savage living in harmony with the natural world. It was the focus of his first runway collection after graduating, Nihilism (spring/summer 1994). He said of the collection, “It was a reaction to designers romanticizing ethnic dressing, like a Masai-inspired dress made of materials the Masai could never afford.” It famously included a latex dress with locusts, McQueen’s statement on famine. Many of the pieces were coated with mud, a conceit the designer repeated in Eshu (autumn/winter 2000–2001), a collection inspired by the well-known deity in the Yoruba religion. The clothes, including a coat of black synthetic hair and a dress of black horsehair embroidered with yellow glass beads, came close to fetishizing materials. This fetishization also occurred in It’s a Jungle Out There (autumn/winter 1997–98), which was inspired by the Thomson’s gazelle. The collection was a meditation on the dynamics of power—in particular, the relationship between predator and prey. Indeed, McQueen’s reflections on primitivism were frequently represented in paradoxical combinations, contrasting “modern” and “primitive,” “civilized” and “uncivilized.” The storyline of Irere (spring/summer 2003) involved a shipwreck at sea and was peopled with pirates, conquistadors, and Amazonian Indians. Typically, McQueen’s narrative glorified the state of nature and tipped the moral balance in favor of the “natural man” or “nature’s gentleman” unfettered by the artificial constructs of civilization.

Romantic Naturalism

“Spine” Corset
Untitled, spring/summer 1998
Aluminum and black leather

Nature was the greatest, or at least the most enduring, influence upon McQueen. It was also a central theme, if not the central theme, of Romanticism. Many artists of the Romantic movement presented nature itself as a work of art. McQueen both shared and promoted this view in his collections, which often included fashions that took their forms and raw materials from the natural world. For McQueen, as it was for the Romantics, nature was also a locus for ideas and concepts. Inspired by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), it presented a narrative that centered not on the evolution of humankind but on its devolution. For the Romantics, nature was the primary vehicle for the Sublime—starry skies, stormy seas, turbulent waterfalls, vertiginous mountains. In Plato’s Atlantis, the Sublime of nature was paralleled and supplanted by that of technology—the extreme space-time compressions produced by the Internet. It was a powerful evocation of the Sublime and its coincident expression of the Romantic and the postmodern. At the same time, it was a potent vision of the future of fashion that reflected McQueen’s sweeping imagination.

Ensemble
Eclect Dissect, autumn/winter 1997–98
Dress of black leather; collar of red pheasant feathers and resin vulture skulls; gloves of black leather

Anton Ginzburg uses an array of historical and cultural references as starting points for his investigations of art’s capacity to penetrate layers of the past. He constructs lines of memory and imagination, whether collective or individual, and traces them to points of intersection. The last room will contain Hyperborea, a video installation that will document the journey attempting to locate Hyperborea according to its descriptions in literature, newspaper articles and mythology. The installation takes the viewer from the primordial, virgin forest of Oregon, to St. Petersburg and its eroding palaces and haunted natural history museum, and finally to the ruins of the Gulag prisons and archeological sites on the White Sea. Present throughout the installation is a cloud of red smoke that functions both as a metaphor for the exalted self and an expression of the collective unconscious.

Watch Video at www.antonginzburg.com/video-work

The body of work began with the artist’s observation that mythological patterns were undeniably woven into the fabric of everyday reality – specifically in the tension formed between the actual and the potential – and was expanded by the concept of Hyperborea, a mythical region that has been recently claimed to be discovered on the White Sea in northern Russia. Hyperborea was originally described by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus as the land of the Golden Age, and was thought to be a place of pure bliss, perpetual sunlight and eternal springtime. It has been an inspiration for early modernist thinkers such as Nietzsche and Madame Blavatskaya, while acting as a central theme to the early twentieth century St. Petersburg poetic tradition of Acmeism — dealing with the “golden age of man.” Hyperborea continues to excite imagination of global media as the supposed birth-place of numerous cultures and nations.

This book examines the interplay between the forms of protest used by environmental and civil rights activists and the techniques used by artists, which are of interest since both groups often address the same topics. It looks at how art and the media are not only reflecting a political agenda, but also how they are influencing political reaction. Consequently, Art & Agenda is not only an insightful documentation of current artwork, but also points to future forms of political discourse and decision-making.

Art & Agenda explores the impact of political activism on contemporary art. The book introduces a variety of artists who are advocating political and social reform on a local or a global scale. Some are influenced by the traditions of Agitprop and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and work with posters, urban interventions, or graphic design. Others prefer established art forms such as painting, sculpture, or performance.

The personalities and approaches of the featured artists are as diverse as their subject matter the artists goals, techniques, and degrees of radicalness depend on the cultures to which they belong as well as the social and political circles in which they move. Some of the younger artists featured in the book are fighting against poverty and for women s rights. Others are working to rebuild Haitian communities in the wake of that country s devastating earthquake. Still others are using mass communication to criticize transnational oil companies.

While Latin American artists are expressing their powerlessness in the face of totalitarian governments, Chinese artists are commenting on the radical changes taking place in their country, calling for human rights and freedom, and an end to cronyism and environmental destruction.

Selected Artists from the Book:

Filippo Minelli, Contradictions, 2010, Brescia, Italy

Life has become significantly more political in the new millennium, especially in the aftermath of the worldwide banking crisis. Art is both driving and documenting this upheaval. Initially, it was mostly young artists and activists who were raising their voices to protest globalization and the pollution of our environment, but increasingly the work of established artists is also becoming dominated by political topics.

Roland Roos, Free Repair

During two years, Roland Roos repaired broken, displaced or damaged things he encountered in public space. He took before and after photos of the unsolicited repairs and sold them for 320CHF each which is the average amount of money that is spent for one repair (materials and labor).

Superflex, GUARANA POWER

GUARANA POWER is a soft drink developed by a farming cooperative in Maues, Brazil in collaboration with the Superflex collective. The drink contains guarana, a plant native to the Amazon whose fruit has long been harvested by indigenous communities for its medicinal and invigorating properties. The farmers have had to organize themselves against a cartel of corporation whose monopoly on purchase of the raw material has driven the price paid for guaraná seeds down by 80% while the cost of their products to the consumer has risen. Besides, the beverage these companies sells is only a sugary, diluted energy drink. GUARANÁ POWER attempts to use the strategies of global brands as raw material for a counter-economic position, to preserve local economy and the livelihoods of the farmers and to reclaim the original use of the Maués guaraná plant as a powerful natural tonic.

Gregor Schneider, Bondi Beach, 21 Beach Cells, 2007

Gregor Schneider’s cells on Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach questions “the ideal of a casual, egalitarian leisure-loving society”, while evoking strongly another famous location by the ocean: Guantanamo Bay.

Helmut Smits, Photo Tip, 2004

The artist pushed the provocation even further with Photo Tip, an installation which allows people to be portrayed as a hostage flanked by threatening terrorists.

Ai Weiwei, self-portrait with aGrass Mud Horse

Shadi Ghadirian
Qajar #42
2001, black & white digital prints, 60 x 90 cm.

Ghadirian made her Like Every Day Series after her marriage to fellow photographer, Peyman Hooshmand-zadeh. In this body of work, Ghadirian comments upon the daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined. Each of these color photographs depicts a figure draped in patterned fabric in place of the typical Iranian chador. However, instead of a face, each figure has a common household item such as an iron, a tea cup, a broom, a pot or a pan.

Her work is intimately linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. Nonetheless, her art also deals with issues relevant to women living in other parts of the world. She questions the role of women in society and explores ideas of censorship, religion, modernity, and the status of women.

Shadi Ghadirian
“Nil Nil”
2008. Digital print, 30 x 30 in.

Amir Mobed
“Come Caress Me”
September 2010 performance at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran

Shocking performance at Art Gallery, inspired by Chris Burden, in which he stood in front of a target, wearing a bodysuit with a protective metal box over his head, and invited gallery visitors to shoot at him with a pellet gun. It was, he says, a symbolic execution with a message about freedom of speech and the hopes of artists of his generation being silenced.

Amir Mobed
“Come Caress Me”
September 2010 performance at Azad Art Gallery, Tehran

Amitis Motevalli
“Portrait of the Artist as a Rebel”
2005. Digital C-print, 20 x 13 1/2 in.

Each year MONUMENTA invites an internationally renowned contemporary artist to appropriate the 13,500 m² of the Grand Palais Nave with an artwork specially created for the event. This year the Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor was invited to create “Leviathan”, an aesthetic and physical shock, an experience of colour that is simultaneously poetic, thoughtful and formidable, one on a scale with the verticality and light of the Nave.

Like the Biblical sea-monster of the same name, Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan embodies a sense of extraordinary, dark power. Leviathan is emblematic of death by drowning in the depths of the ocean, and a force capable of summoning giant waves and tempests. The great beast became synonymous with political metaphor following the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s classic text Leviathan in 1651, presenting the ‘war of every man against every man’ that inevitably prevails in humankind’s primordial ‘state of nature’.

The artist describes the work he is creating for MONUMENTA as follows: “A single object, a single form, a single colour.” “My ambition”, he adds, “is to create a space within a space that responds to the height and luminosity of the Nave at the Grand Palais. Visitors will be invited to walk inside the work, to immerse themselves in colour, and it will, I hope, be a contemplative and poetic experience.” Designed using the most advanced technologies, the work will not merely speak to us visually, but will lead the visitor on a journey of total sensorial and mental discovery. A technical, poetic challenge unparalleled in the history of sculpture, this work questions what we think we know about art, our body, our most intimate experiences and our origins. Spectacular and profound, it responds to what the artist considers to be the crux of his work: namely, “To manage, through strictly physical means, to offer a completely new emotional and philosophical experience.”

Kapoor’s sculpture overflows with geographical specificities in a continual enriching dialogue between visual art traditions. He presents himself as an explorer, opening shut-up spaces, or re-creating immensity in a closed-in volume, radically sidestepping the laws of the material world. Anish Kapoor lives in a geographically offset place he calls “the in-betweeness”, playing on each identity to avoid getting locked in, in any way.

Francis Alÿs uses poetic and allegorical methods to address political and social realities, such as national borders, localism and globalism, areas of conflict and community, and the benefits and detriments of progress.

Alÿs’s personal, ambulatory explorations of cities form the basis for his practice, through which he compiles extensive and varied documentation that reflects his ideas and process. As one of the foremost artists of his generation, Alÿs has produced a complex and diverse body of work that includes video, painting, performance, drawing, and photography.


Rehearsal I (Ensayo I)
2002. Two-channel video (color, sound), 12 min.

This exhibition draws on the Museum’s unique and important collection of Alÿs’s work, highlighting three recent major acquisitions—Re-enactments (2001), When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), and Rehearsal I (Ensayo I) (1999–2001)—which include video installations, paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, and newspaper clippings. These works present an investigation of methods of social action, from rehearsals and re-enactments in urban environments that address the politics of public space to large-scale communal participation where the culmination of many small acts achieves mythic proportions.

Re-enactments
2001. Two-channel video (color, sound), drawings, maps, newspaper clippings, photographs, tables, lights.

The exhibition, which is conceptually grouped around these three thematic bodies of work, also includes additional artworks that the artist has developed around the idea of rehearsal and re-enactment in relation to progress in art and everyday life.

Modern Procession
2002. Two-channel video (color, sound), 12 min.

La Malinche
1997. Oil on gelatin silver print, 9 3/4 x 6 1/2″ (24.8 x 16.5 cm).