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.

Through installations, photographs, and community-based projects, Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar’s work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations.

“I strongly believe in the power of a single idea,” says Alfredo Jaar. “My imagination starts working based on research, based on a real life event, most of the time a tragedy that I’m just starting to analyze, to reflect on…this real life event to which I’m trying to respond.”

1. Gold in the Morning, 1997

In 1985 Alfredo Jaar went to Serra Palada, an open cast gold mine in north-eastern Brazil. There he photographed and filmed the astonishing working conditions of the self-employed miners. An insistence on the importance of context to the subsequent interpretation and distribution of his work has been central to Jaar’s practice; and the Serra Palada material was initially installed on a New York subway station alongside indicators of fluctuations in world gold prices.

“I always describe myself as a project artist. I’m not a studio artist. I do not create works in my studio. I wouldn’t know what to do. I do not stare at the blank page of paper and start inventing a world coming from my imagination. Every work is a response to a real-life event, a real-life situation.”

2.  A logo for America, 1987

The representation of geography and the intricacies of global relations influence Jaar’s every thought and action.

In more recent projects, this obsession has led to critical investigations of cartography. A logo for America was an explicit demonstration of the significance of the images and language of geography – its representation and articulation. It also appropriated an amendable technology that utilized Jaar’s interest in texts, words, film processes, and graphic design. Part of a six – year program sponsored by the Public Art Fund, Inc. in New York, Jaar was one of thirty artists invited to produce a 45 – second computer animation / intervention on the Spectacolor lightboard in the heart of Times Square.

3.  One Million Finnish Passports, 1995

Finland has a historically stringent immigration policy, staunch nationalists they accept only a tiny fraction of the citizenship applications they receive, far less than any of their neighboring countries. Observing this, Jaar somehow managed to get 1 million Finnish passports printed up to represent the number of people who should have been nationalized as Finnish citizens but weren’t.  Now obviously this poses somewhat of a security risk, so the passports were housed behind a fortress of bullet-proof glass and the passports would be burned after the exhibit ended.

One million replicated Finnish passports, glass, 800 x 800 x 80 cm.

“I could say that everything I know about art, I learned as an architect. As an architect, I give myself a program, taking into account a specific space. Space is not just physical. It’s also social, cultural, political. Studying the space, I try to reach what we call the essence of the space. Then I combine that with the essence of what I am trying to say. All these elements are incorporated in the program, in which I have an objective.”

4. Infinite Cell, 2004

Iron bars, painted wood, mirrors. 145 5/8 x 177 1/8 x 102 3/8 inches.

“A mirror is a simple object of daily life, and the perfect articulation of the narcissism of our society- a society that only cares for itself. In ‘Infinite Cell’, it’s about seeing ourselves in infinite projection and thinking about what we want to do as artists, as intellectuals. What do we want to say as producers of culture? And to whom are we speaking? Am I my public, or is it someone else? It also has to do with the horrors of the twenty-first century. This piece is probably one of my most emotionally charged works. Unfortunately, it has a universal life: all countries have histories of horror. And so, in a way, this piece asks, ‘How do we make art in the world, the way it is now? How do we make art today?’”

5. The Cloud, 2000

Public intervention, Valle del Matador, Tijuana, Mexico-San Diego, USA Border. October 14, 2000.

“People describe me sometimes as a conceptual artist, as a political artist, with work of a strong political connotation or social content. I always reject those labels. I’m an artist, and believe it or not I’m interested in beauty and I’m not afraid of it. It is an essential tool to attract my audience, and sometimes I use it to introduce horror because the audience has to be seduced.”

6. The Skoghall Konsthall, 2000

Public intervention, Skoghall, Sweden.

Jaar was invited to Skoghall where he constructed a paper museum, organized a one-day exhibition, and then had the structure set on fire. The timing, temporarily, and duration of this project—as well as its denouncement—had a theatrical character.

“I was shocked to discover that a community could exist for thirty years without any visible cultural or exhibition space. How do you represent it the absence of this space for culture in an entire community? I found it hard to believe that people could live without it the intellectual and critical stimulus that visual art can provide^to question, to speculate, and to search. It blew my mind. I sought a spectacular way to deal with this lack. I created an exhibition space for twenty-four hours and then burned it away I wanted to offer a glimpse of what contemporary art is and what it can do in a community. Then by “disappearing” it in such a spectacular way, I hoped to reveal its absence”.

7. Lights in the city, 1999

In Canada Alfredo Jaar completed a project referred to as Lights in the City, in 1999.  This is a historic landmark which had burnt around five times before Jaar completed this project. The building is called Copula of the Marche Bonsecours. There were approximately a hundred thousand watts of red lights installed within the Copula so that when a button is mashed the copula lights up with a red color inside of it very brightly so that it can be seen all around the city of Montreal.

Detonating devices have been placed in multiple places such as Accueil Bonneau, la Maison Eugenie Bernier and la Maison Paul Gregoire, and homeless shelters that are located within five hundred yards of the Cupola. Each time a homeless individual enters one of these areas they are free to push the buttons located within these areas so that the Cupola will light up inside with bright red colors. The entire point of this is to allow homeless individuals to be recognized as a person within the city without humility.

“I submitted my proposal to the people at the shelters. They appreciated that I was not exposing them through photography. They liked and approved my idea. These red lights connected to the shelters were my way of sending a distress signal to the city—of making the homeless visible withcnit pointing at them directly Of course, the red hghts also recalled the fires that consumed the building many times, but metaphorically. ”

“We wanted the Cupola to become a permanent monument of .shame, and other shelters wanted to join us and get connected, but six weeks later the mayor canceled it. like all of my projects, it failed. We did not give the homeless a home. We did not resolve their problem. We gave them a brief, hopeful moment when they regained their humanity, when people started acknowledging their presence, smiled at them, when the press also contributed to the dialogue, but eventually they returned to their status as homeless. With these projects you change so little…”

Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds challenges our first impressions: what you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means. The sculptural installation is made up of what appear to be millions of sunflower seed husks, apparently identical but actually unique. Although they look realistic, each seed is made out of porcelain. And far from being industrially produced, ‘readymade’ or found objects, they have been intricately hand-crafted by hundreds of skilled artisans. Poured into the interior of the Turbine Hall’s vast industrial space, the seeds form a seemingly infinite landscape. The precious nature of the material, the effort of production and the narrative and personal content make this work a powerful commentary on the human condition.

One of China’s leading Conceptual artists, Ai is known for his social or performance-based interventions as well as object-based artworks.

Video: The making of Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds

Sunflower Seeds is the latest of a number of works that Ai has made using porcelain, one of China’s most prized exports. These have included replicas of vases in the style of various dynasties, dresses, pillars, oil spills and watermelons. Like those previous works, the sunflower seeds have all been produced in the city of Jingdezhen, which is famed for its production of Imperial porcelain. Each ceramic seed was individually hand-sculpted and hand-painted by specialists working in small-scale workshops. This combination of mass production and traditional craftsmanship invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geopolitics of cultural and economic exchange today.

For Ai, sunflower seeds – a common street snack shared by friends – carry personal associations with Mao Zedong’s brutal Cultural Revolution (1966-76). While individuals were stripped of personal freedom, propaganda images depicted Chairman Mao as the sun and the mass of people as sunflowers turning towards him. Yet Ai remembers the sharing of sunflower seeds as a gesture of human compassion, providing a space for pleasure, friendship and kindness during a time of extreme poverty, repression and uncertainty.

Los Penetrados (The Penetrated) is a 45-minute film in eight acts. The film was originally shot on October 12 2008, Día de la Raza, or the Day of the Race, which is the Spanish holiday commemorating Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. The film features a mirrored set with ten geometrically arranged blankets positioned on the floor, on which the various possible combinations of male and female and black and white, engage in anal penetration. The faces of the hired participants are digitally removed, rendering them as dehumanized, modular workers in Sierra’s imposed economy.

Acto 1
2008, black and white photograph, 55 x 98 inches

The eight acts are divided into the following permutations: white man/white woman, white man/white man, white man/black woman, white man/black man, black man/black woman, black man/black man, black man/white woman, black man/white man.

Choosing to film on Día de la Raza, Sierra makes an allegorical connection between the conquest of the Americas by the Spanish, and the penetration that occurs in his film. The subject matter of anal sex invites an examination of cultural psychologies of domination and submission as they relate to labor, race, gender, and class. Though conceived upon a mathematical formula, the film’s acts arrive at a succession of fluctuating outcomes, which yield an analysis of contemporary social structures in Spain. For instance, in Act III, seven of the ten blankets are left without performers, due to police pressure against females taking part in the labor. Or in Act V, where the number of passive black male subjects is diminished by cultural insecurities, perhaps born from experiences of racial inequality.

160 CM LINE TATTOOED ON 4 PEOPLE
El Gallo Arte Contemporáneo. Salamanca, España. Diciembre de 2000

Sierra’s projects often employ underprivileged individuals who function as laborers in useless and demeaning activities. These acts have largely been seen as a commentary on the social ramifications of capitalist models. Procedures such as tattooing a continuous line across the backs of his “workers” foreground the artists’ concerns with exploitation.

12 WORKERS PAID TO REMAIN INSIDE CARDBOARD BOXES
ACE Gallery New York. New York, United States. March 2000

He is well known outside of the United States as an agent who challenges notions of the “politically correct” in order to illuminate social incongruities. Stemming from minimal and conceptual practices of the 60’s and 70’s, Sierra’s controversial actions and performances yield evidence and/or documentation in the form of sculpture, photography, video, and installation.

The Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present works by artist Rosângela Rennó in an exhibition titled Ring. The exhibition is part of the Brazilian Culture Month 2009, which is organised by the Pharos Arts Foundation in cooperation with the Brazilian Embassy in Cyprus. The opening will take place on Monday 23 November at 8pm.

Rosângela Rennó’s work is predominantly photography based, although she rarely takes photographs of her subjects, instead, she recasts and transforms appropriated photographic images. In the past she has presented anonymous portraits compiled from existing photographs – photographers’ studios and even photographs of prisoners’ tattoos. Whilst she finds novel and often politically charged ways of presenting the images, her work is also profoundly humane, as the viewer finds themselves imagining other people’s lives, particularly those who are marginalized or unacknowledged.

She represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Rosângela Rennó was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 1962. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

The Last Photo
2006

I invited 43 professional photographers to photograph the Christ the Redeemer monument in Rio de Janeiro using mechanical cameras of different formats that I have collected over the last fifteen years. The cameras range from a 4×5 plate camera from the beginning of the twentieth century to a 35mm reflex camera from the 1980s. The cameras were used for the last time; they were then sealed. The photographs were edited by their authors and myself. The project The last photo [A última foto] consists of 43 diptychs, each pairing the cameras with the last photo they registered. So long, photography.

Bibliotheca
2002

37 vitrines containing photo albums and digital color photographs mounted on Plexiglas, one map and one painted steel file.

Immemorial
1994

In her series Immemorial (1994), Rosângela Rennó showed an installation of fifty photographs that yield dark portraits of workers and children who built Brasília, the capital whose architectural design was championed for its utopian vision. In a warehouse of the Public Archive of the Federal District, Rennó found suitcases of more than 15,000 files concerning the employees of the government construction company Novacap. In Immemorial, she uses stories that told of a massacre in the workers’ barracks and of dozens of workers who had died in the building of Brasília and been buried in the foundations. In the archives, these workers were classified under the heading ‘dismissed due death’.

In “Experiencing Cinema,” a better use of atmospherics, Brazilian Rosangela Renno revives an early 19th century phantasmagoria practice of projecting still pictures onto veils of smoke. Photographs, gathered from found family albums, cohere briefly on the smoke screen; then both image and screen dissipate, mortality again provocatively aligned with ephemerality.

Jeff Sheng’s series of portraits of gay men and lesbians serving in the military, all of them in uniform and with their faces obscured in some way — by a hand, a door frame or by darkness. Mr. Sheng has photographed 40 servicemen and servicewomen so far and plans to shoot 20 more. His “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” show, featuring around 30 photos, will open at the Kaycee Olsen Gallery in Culver City in September. Mr. Sheng is at work on a second volume of the book.

He described his subjects, identified only by first names that are pseudonyms, as people who “didn’t want to risk their careers, but who wanted to take some kind of stand.” Earnest and passionate about his work, Mr. Sheng said he struggles to avoid being heavy-handed as an artist. “I merge a fight for social equality with photography, but I’m always trying to figure out how to do it intelligently,” he said.

The policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” — the DADT he refers to — has been in place since 1993. Last month Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for an end to it, saying, “I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”

Read full article at The New York Times
Purchase Book
www.jeffsheng.com

On 27 March 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location “The Globe
Shrinks”, a new video installation by Barbara Kruger.

“The Globe Shrinks” (2010) is a multiple channel video installation that continues
Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of
declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address,
and the unspoken in every conversation.

Barbara Kruger
still from The Globe Shrinks
dimensions variable
four-screen digital video installation
2010

Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was. At least, that’s the way it looks in “The Globe Shrinks,” an immersive new multichannel video installation that is challenging the presumptions of all who dare to enter the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.

Balancing self-possession with self-doubt and rage with tenderness, Kruger’s art does exactly what one of her subtitles says: it show us to ourselves. The globe may shrink for those who own it, as another phrase (borrowed from the critical theorist Homi K. Bhaba) puts it, but Kruger’s perfect calibration of life’s crueler ironies performs a kind of miracle, allowing the blind to see all.

This is the third of a series of video works with which Kruger has translated her widely copied graphic designs — superimposing red or white text over cropped images, or enlarging words into slogans the size of buildings — into propulsive action. Some of the text in “The Globe Shrinks” came out of “Between Being and Dying,” her installation last fall at Lever House, where she covered the windows, columns and floor of the lobby in phrases like “A rich man’s jokes are always funny,” speaking truth to the lords of power and ambition who build palaces like, well, Lever House.

www.maryboonegallery.com
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151

The shovels are the outcome of a programme launched by the Mexican government – at the instigation of the artist – for “handing in” illegal weapons so as to stamp them out or at least limit their use. Reyes melted down the metal of 1,527 weapons, which was then used to make shovels for planting trees, with the help of community associations, everywhere the work goes on show.