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.

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.

The Puerto Rico–based multimedia duo Allora & Calzadilla has been announced as the United States’ representatives to the 2011 Venice Biennale, marking the first time that an artist pair or collective has been picked by the nation to fill the prestigious role. The selection was made by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which the U.S. State Department has entrusted to organize next year’s pavilion; Lisa Freiman, the chair of the museum’s contemporary art department, has been tapped as the commissioner of the pavilion.

For the 54th Venice Biennale, Ms. Allora and Mr. Calzadilla will create works that combine performance, sculpture, video and sound. In “Striving for Glory”, Allora & Calzadilla have adopted the Olympic Games — the festival of athleticism originated in the 8th century B.C. as a tribute to Zeus and then later turned into a political staging ground for all manner of nationalistic display — as a focus of their installation. And not just in the abstract either: be prepared to encounter former Olympian champs Dan O’Brien, David Durante, and Chellsie Memmel in the paviion.

All together the artists are creating six works for the pavilion. “Body in Flight (Delta)” and “Body in Flight (American)” revolve around wooden reproductions of the latest designs for airlines’ business-class seats. The seats themselves will stand in for the balance beam and pommel horse, becoming apparatuses for gymnastic and dance performances. For “Track and Field” a treadmill will be attached to an overturned military tank, and runners will run on it at regularly scheduled intervals.

The exhibition, Ms. Freiman said, questions the interplay among the body and art, militarism, commerce, sport and national identity. And the artists have chosen to call it “Gloria,” a title that “works across all the different metaphors: religious, military, Olympic and aesthetic,” she said.

The title Gloria translates from Italian and Spanish to Glory. Gloria references military, religious, spiritual, Olympic, economic, and cultural grandeur, and points to the pomp and splendor of the national pavilions. The title also references the numerous pop songs that the female name has inspired.

Algorithm (2011)

Algorithm combines a custom-made pipe organ with an automatic teller machine (ATM). Visitors enter the gallery space and see the organ from behind. In the towering, nearly 20-foot-tall interactive sculpture, a Diebold ATM sits inside the pipe organ, replacing the typical organ keyboard, pedals, keys, buttons, and knobs with various ATM parts including a card reader, keypad, speaker, display screen, receipt printer, and cash dispenser. Each financial transaction that visitors conduct generates a unique musical score that produces randomized notes and chords at varying degrees of volume by driving pressurized air through pipes selected via the ATM keyboard. The artists collaborated with composer Jonathan Bailey to create a composition of sounds that range from atonal material to more classically structured melodies, harmonies, and phrases.

Armed Freedom Lying on a Sunbed (2011)

Armed Freedom Lying on a Sunbed is an altered bronze replica of the Statue of Freedom, also known as Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace (and sometimes referred to as Armed Freedom), which has crowned the dome of the U.S. Capitol Building since 1863. Armed Freedom Lying on a Sunbed features a scaled down, 7 ½-foot replica of the original bronze sculpture, lying horizontally inside a Solaris 442 sun bed. The work is housed within the Pavilion’s rotunda, which echoes the architectural form of the U.S. Capitol dome and rotunda.

Body in Flight (American) (2011)

n Body in Flight (Delta) and Body in Flight (American), Allora & Calzadilla appropriated the forms of state-of-the art elite business class seats and reproduced full-scale wooden replicas stained like polychromatic religious icons. In Body in Flight (Delta) the artists substitute the airline seat replica for a balance beam to be used by a female gymnast from USA Gymnastics—the national governing body for gymnastics in the U.S.—who will perform a routine that emphasizes flexibility and fluidity. Body in Flight (American) loosely approximates a pommel horse and will be used by male gymnasts who perform routines that feature quick movements and sheer gymnastic power. Each work appears in a separate gallery that isolates and contrasts the gendered performances. Working with gymnast David Durante and modern dance choreographer Rebecca Davis, Allora & Calzadilla developed routines to create a new vocabulary of movement that is an unexpected hybrid of gymnastics and modern dance.

Half Mast\Full Mast (2010)

Half Mast\Full Mast (21 minutes) is the third in a series of short films Allora & Calzadilla have made about the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, which was controlled primarily by the U.S. Navy until 2003, when military exercises ceased and environmental remediation began. Filmed on the island, the two-channel video consists of two projected videos, one on top of the other. Each depicts a different landscape, but both share a common cinematic framing of a flagpole in the center of the image. The result of the two images together creates the appearance of one single flagpole connected between the two screens, despite the image’s otherwise obvious disjunctive backgrounds. One gymnast at a time enters one of the two screens and takes the position of a human flag. Depending on which screen the gymnasts appear, top or bottom, the flag seems to be flying at full mast or half mast, in sites that symbolically mark places of victory or setback in the island’s 60 year struggle for peace, decontamination, ecological justice, and sustainable development.

Track and Field (2011)

Installed in front of the U.S. Pavilion, Track and Field features a massive 60-ton overturned military tank that has been repurposed by superimposing a functioning treadmill above its right track. An athlete affiliated with USA Track & Field—the national governing body for track & field, long-distance running, and race walking—runs on the treadmill at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the exhibition

The title “There is always a cup of sea to sail in” was inspired by a line by the poet Jorge de Lima (1895 – 1953) in his work Invenção de Orfeu (1952). The concept of this year’s São Paulo Biennial is based on the notion that it is impossible to separate art from politics. Art, through ways of its own, is “capable of blocking the sensorial coordinates through which we understand and inhabit the world by bringing into it themes and attitudes that did not previously fit in, thus making it different and wider.”

For this Biennial the curators, Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, emphasized the importance of intensifying the contacts with Latin America as well as with Africa. The exhibition displays works by 159 artists from all over the world.

Terreiros: 6 conceptual groupings
The exhibition will unfold six issues relating to political thought and action through art within a unique and integrated curatorial space. Each of the issues that order conceptual groupings in space will have an ambient art project to be developed for activation and public use within a program of corresponding events.

The discussions that guide, and therefore denominate, the conceptual surroundings of each of these terreiros, are:

• The skin of the invisible
• Said, unsaid, forbidden
• I am the street
• Remembrance and oblivion
• Far away, right here
• The other, the same

Some Participants:

1. Alfredo Jaar: The eyes of Gutete Emerita

2. Cildo Meireles: Inserções em circuitos ideológicos: Projeto Cédula

3. Francis Alÿs: Tornado

4. Jean-Luc Godard: Je vous salue Sarajevo [Ave, Sarajevo]

5. Lygia Pape: Divisor

6. Allora e Calzadilla: A movement without development

7. Rosângela Rennó: Menos valia

8. Alessandra Sanguinetti: El tiempo vuela

1. Stephanie Sinclair:

Born 1973 in Miami, Florida
Lives and works in New York, New York, and Beirut, Lebanon

In this series of photographs, journalist Stephanie Sinclair documents Afghani women being treated for extensive self-inflicted burns. These women, who were being cared for in a rudimentary public hospital in the town of Herat in western Afganistan, set themselves on fire in acts of utter desperation. Some of the women shared their personal histories of prolonged abuse at the hands of their husbands or families with Sinclair.

www.stephaniesinclair.com

2. Nina Berman:

Born 1960 in New York, New York
Lives and works in New York, New York

Nina Berman’s photographs document the rarely explored effects and harsh realities of contemporary warfare. She engages the viewer with intimate images of the consequences of war that are often given short shrift in the popular media.

The 2006 photographs on view here document the marriage of former Marine sergeant Ty Ziegel, then twenty-four, to his high school sweetheart, Renee Kline, twenty-one. After being severely disfigured in a suicide bomber’s attack while stationed in Iraq.

www.ninaberman.com

3. Kate Gilmore:

Born 1975 in Washington, DC
Lives and works in New York, New York

Kate Gilmore’s work explores themes of displacement, struggle, and female identity. She is the sole protagonist in her performative videos, in which she attempts to conquer self-constructed obstacles.

For this work, Gilmore’s obstacle is a tall column made of sheetrock which she tries to climb by kicking and punching holes into its walls. As in most of her work, Gilmore’s attire is at odds with the brute physical labor she performs. She works through the limitations imposed by her feminine clothing—high-heels and a polka-dot dress—with sheer muscle power and desperate determination. Shot in one take, the outcome of her endeavor is unknown before the performance begins. Gilmore’s tragicomic displays posit physical situations as metaphors for conflicts and social obstacles women face today.

www.kategilmore.com

4. Hannah Greely:

Born 1979 in Dickson, Tennessee
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California

Like many of Hannah Greely’s sculptures, Dual replicates everyday objects—here two booths in a dark bar—but with subtle incongruities of material or form. Visible indications of these discrepancies, like the length of the seat cushions and the height of the tables as well as the obviously handmade pay phone, take on a surreal presence within the otherwise mundane setting of a dive bar. Even the tears in the vinyl seats or spots of discoloration on the wood-paneled walls are carefully crafted by the artist.

The partition that divides the work compounds its uncanny effect. As the sculpture invites an intricate play of similarity and difference, the familiar becomes strange, and a sense of psychological unease emerges in the gap between what is a real-world object and what is a sculptural facsimile.

5. Sharon Hayes:

Born 1970 in Baltimore, Maryland
Lives and works in New York, New York

Through her performances, films, and installations, Sharon Hayes examines the intersection of history, politics, and speech, with a particular focus on the language of twentieth-century protest groups. Parole, the title of this installation, refers to the term used by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to distinguish individual acts of speech (parole) from a larger system of language (langue). In this installation, several distinct scenes present examples of public speech in different contexts. In each of the settings, which include Hayes’s recent performances as well as fictive scenes without an audience, the same figure appears, recording sound but never speaking. Hayes draws on historical texts—such as early lesbian activist Anna Rüling’s 1904 speech.

What Interest Does the Women’s Movement Have in the Homosexual Question—that “re-speak” to new audiences. These historical speeches, and Hayes’s work in general, explore the construction of gender and sexuality and the articulations of political protest, revealing unexpected resonances across time periods. Parole encourages the viewer to think about how past forms of protest can inform the present and how the effects of public speech are altered in the process of documentation.

www.shaze.info

6. Lorraine O’Grady:

Born 1934 in Boston, Massachusetts
Lives and works in New York, New York

Lorraine O’Grady’s diptych series pairs images of nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire and twentieth-century American musician Michael Jackson—artists she considers to be “the first and the last of the modernists.” O’Grady maintains that Baudelaire and Jackson, artists separated by nearly 150 years, occupied pivotal positions in their genres and shared surprisingly similar traits, including dramatic flair, aspirations to greatness, unrelenting perfectionism, drug addiction, and ambiguous sexuality.

Choosing from tens of thousands of internet images of Jackson to pair with the few available images of Baudelaire, O’Grady represents the two men at roughly the same ages, tracing their trajectories: Baudelaire’s descent from an aristocratic family into poverty and Jackson’s rise to wealth and fame. Made in part to reconsider the life and career of Michael Jackson, The First and the Last of the Modernists raises questions about the roles of art and popular culture as well as how modern figures are presented, flattened, and distributed through the news media.

7. Aki Sasamoto:

Born 1980 in Yokohama, Japan
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Aki Sasamoto’s installations and performances explore the nuances and peculiarities of everyday life. She uses sculpture, movement, video, and sound to transform mundane actions into theatrical events. Strange Attractors consists of a careful arrangement of sculpturally altered, found objects that take on new roles and provide guidance for Sasamoto’s improvisational performances that take place within the installation. The performances demonstrate Sasamoto’s attempt to understand the mathematic structure of the Lorenz Attractor, a fractal structure that works in a dynamic system. For her performances, Sasamoto also includes additional objects related to her recent obsessions with, among other things, doughnuts, fortune-tellers, and hemorrhoids.

8. Ania Soliman:

Born 1970 in Warsaw, Poland
Lives and works in Basel, Switzerland and New York, New York

NATURAL OBJECT RANT: The Pineapple comprises twenty-six montages, each corresponding to a letter of the alphabet, and twenty-six text panels that explore the pineapple’s history as an exotic commodity tied up with the politics of colonialism. Reminiscent of Dadaist photomontages from the 1930s such as those by German artist Hannah Höch, each montage is a hybrid of two digital images, sourced from the internet.

The accompanying panels of text are written by the artist and informed by her research and impressions on the subject of the pineapple and its historical significance. Soliman provides a political and cultural context for this tropical fruit—a prized object from distant lands that exemplifies luxury, conquest, and consumption.

9. Kerry Tribe :

Born 1973 in Boston, Massachusetts
Lives and works in Los Angeles, California, and Berlin, Germany

Kerry Tribe’s film and video installations investigate the relationships among memory, subjectivity, and representation. The work on view here utilizes a documentary format to recount the case study of “H.M.,” a patient who underwent experimental surgery in the 1950s as a cure for epilepsy. After the treatment, which involved the removal of part of his brain, H.M. suffered from severe amnesia, with his short-term memory restricted to events of the prior twenty seconds.

Tribe’s film weaves touching reenactments of interviews with H.M. with scientific animation, text, and archival images of iconic historical events H.M. cannot remember because they took place after his surgery. To evoke H.M.’s condition, this two-channel film installation uses a single strand of film threaded through two adjacent projectors with an interval of twenty seconds between them. The observation of the tandem projections brings awareness to the ephemeral nature of that brief interval, and by extension, the fragile nature of human perception.

10. Marianne Vitale:

Born 1973 in New York, New York
Lives and Works in New York, New York

“Welcome to the future of Neutralism,” Marianne Vitale declares at the beginning of her video Patron. Staring directly into the camera, Vitale orders her audience to stand up, open their mouths wide, recite tongue-twisting rhymes, and “spit at the ceiling.” While insisting on compliance with her videotaped instructions, Vitale’s performance parodies authoritarian posturing, especially when her abusive demands border on the surreal (“imagine your feet soaking in gopher urine”) and her monologue evolves into a poetic flight of mean-spirited aphorisms.

Vitale’s tone recalls the rhetoric of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements such as Futurism, whose members wrote breathless manifestos calling for radical change. While Vitale’s philosophy of “Neutralism,” which she never defines, may be grounded in a sense of irony, her direct address nonetheless retains something of the historical avant-garde’s conviction of art’s ability to jar viewers into action.

Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light. McCall creates “solid light” works – digital videos of meticulously choreographed intersecting lines and curves which are projected in darkened haze-filled rooms, creating three-dimensional sculptural forms constructed from light. When the viewer moves in and out of the projected light beams, they are forced to reconcile their perceived sense of a three dimensional object in space with the actual reality of the mutable properties of light.

[A solid light film] exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. It contains no illusion. It is a primary experience, not secondary: i.e., the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not referential. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other…every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can, indeed needs, to move around relative to the slowly emerging light form. Anthony McCall, 1974

McCall’sHis films and installations from the seventies such as Line Describing a Cone, Long Film for Four Projectors, and Four Projected Movements, represent an extraordinarily corporeal and sensuous meditation on the medium of film and the politics of the audience’s physical and conceptual relationship to it. All of these works took as their starting point the irreducible, necessary conditions of cinema: projected light, and real, three-dimensional space.

Coupling, 2009
video projector, computer, QuickTime Movie file, haze machine
one cycle: 16 minutes in four parts

Upside Down Mushroom Room, 2000
Exhibited at Fondazione Prada Milan

Carsten Höller holds a doctorate in biology, and he uses his training as a scientist in his work as an artist, concentrating particularly on the nature of human relationships. Viewer participation is the key to all of Höller’s sculptures, but it is less an end in itself than a vehicle to informally test the artist’s theories concerning human perception and physiological reactions.

Test Site, 2006.
Installation view ‘Unilever Series : Carsten Höller’, Turbine Hall
Tate Modern, London 2006.

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

Mirror Carousel, 2005.
Installation view, « Logic », Gagosian, London, 2005.

Tate Modern Interview

Marie Sester
ACCESS. 2008
Installation

A ceiling-mounted camera robotically tracks human movement. A computer selects an individual and activates a spotlight that locks on and follows him or her. Sounds (whispered words) are directed only towards that person.

Wit Pimkanchanapong
Installation
2008

Google Earth image of Singapore on the floor of the historical Chambers of City Hall. The visitors receive adhesive label to add their comments and additional information.

Ki-Bong Rhee
Bachelor – The Dual Body. 2003
Installation
Perspex, steel, water, book, water pump, light
150 x 110 x 65 cm

A book of philosophy is floating in the water. The book is a special copy of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the only book-length work written by the Austrian philosopher (1889 – 1951).

Shoot First Make Friends Later
Shirin Aliabadi & Farhad Moshiri
2006

Iranian art couple Farhad Moshiri and Shirin Aliabadi created the project “Operation Supermarket”. It consists of a series of commodity advertisements and packages mixing “poetry with detergent” as the artists describe. The emphasis is on the commodification of mainstream media traits of the Middle East, but also on a wry parody of the mythical hopes still pinned on the commodity itself as a capitalist agent for change.

The series points out the pervasive effect of Western global capitalism on the everyday life of the general public and how the citizens start to define themselves as persons by what they take from the shelves of the marketplace. These works offer manipulated packages of common household objects available at any common supermarket in the world. The title “Supermarket” suggests an allusion to global consumerism and products as the vehicles of its manifestation as the new figure of Empire.

We Are All Americans
2006

The work titled “We are all Americans” suggests our fascination with everything American. This Americanization of a society is defined by the ratio of commodity fetishism to the range of product accessibility. Global corporations, when localizing their advertisements, adapt their jingles to the local cultural attributes. Thus poetry with detergent is also a reference to Iranian oral culture and its obsession with poetry, a tradition deeply rooted in Iranian society. The artists re-brand and transform these items into a discourse on capitalism. The new guise of the image, altered from an advertisement to an artwork, consequently modifies the way the image is encountered and discussed. The artists deploy these ready-made advertisements as a platform for smuggling a new content. The immediate quality of these images – as parts of a common global image-repertoire – are used to convey a differentiated message in a fashion that contradicts their raison d’etre.

Families Ask Why
2006

In his work, Moshiri makes direct reference to everything kitsch, as the post-colonial monuments of contemporary culture of Iran and the region. He refers to the post-revolutionary drawing books, water fountains at the intersections and main squares of the cities, the furniture of the parvenu, and the Western and Westernized brands of products. But nevertheless these works go way beyond the local boundaries. With consumerism as a global tool of expression, our lexicon of products forms the vocabulary of our times. The lines of carts behind the supermarket register suggest a modern form of communication. Shoot first, make friends later is the product of a global paranoia and people killing people is what that makes everyday headlines. In fact some of them do remind us of the postcards of demonstrations outside WTO summits. And perhaps the artists are raising the question of how can we stop the famine in Africa with the choice of our soap and how can our bathroom shelf criticize out government? How can we protest with the brand of our underwear and how can we ask for forgiveness with the choice of our moisturizers. And with our preferred set of detergents we express our love, asking: “MY SOUL, MY UNIVERSE, WHERE WERE YOU ALL THOSE DAYS”

Mika’s video installations envision the female body as a microcosm of larger societal issues such as labor and class inequities. In her short films, women cast for their notable physical features and talents perform perfunctory factory-line duties, manufacturing inane items worth less than the labor required to make them. Her homemade machinery and decor are functional but crudely constructed.

These contraptions, operating by pedal, conveyor belt, paddle, rubber band, or string, are reminiscent of Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s kinetic props, though the human interaction in her works adds a carnivalesque element to Rottenberg’s environments, the physical comedy implicit in her narratives recalling Eleanor Antin’s filmed performances. The bright colors of Rottenberg’s self-contained sets don’t disguise the close quarters in which her characters work or mitigate the sense of claustrophobia induced by a dead-end job. A blue-collar work ethic is conjured through the women’s uniforms, ranging from diner-waitress dresses to jogging suits. Her cast often use several body parts at once, reminding the viewer of the feminine capacity for multitasking while it suggests an ironic futility in her sweatshop-like situations.

Mary’s Cherries, video still, 2005

Three previous videos established Rottenberg’s unique narrative approach, in which action is compressed into layers of illogical activity. In Tropical Breeze (2004), a woman in the back of a truck chews gum, wraps it in a tissue picked from a pile with her toes, and sends it on a clothesline to the profusely sweating driver, who dabs each tissue with perspiration to ferry it back for packaging and sale as a “moist tissue wipe.” Rottenberg’s installations often physically echo her videos: Tropical Breeze was screened inside a cratelike box mimicking a big rig’s trailer. Mary’s Cherries (2005) showcases a trio of obese ladies pedaling bikes who, through a magical process of clay kneading and fingernail clipping, transform acrylic fingernails into maraschino cherries. In Dough (2006), one woman smells flowers to provoke hay-fever tears while another mashes a foot-powered bellows into foul-scented air that wafts onto dough, which rises as the moisture and air hit it. Dripping beads of sweat, women’s grunting, and booming machinery dominate the audio, while close-ups of the women’s bodies and faces highlight their resignation to an abstruse cause.

Rottenberg’s newest film, Cheese (2007), conflates farm-girl imagery with the fairy tale “Rapunzel” into a story loosely based on the Sutherland Sisters, renowned for their extremely long hair. Floating through a pastoral yet mazelike setting of raw wooden debris cobbled together into a benign shantytown, six longhaired women in flowing white nightgowns “milk” their locks and the goats they live with to generate cheese. Shots of animals crowded in pens and the sisters’ bunk bed– cluttered room visually compare the women to their ruminant allies. As nurturing caretakers, these women represent maternal aspects of Mother Nature. Here Rottenberg investigates feminine magic, the ability to “grow things out of the body” as she says, as the ultimate, wondrous physical mystery.

Dough, video still, 2005/06

With her video installation Dough (2005/06), Mika Rottenberg has produced an oppressive commentary on capitalism’s alienating work conditions: the moonlight job now takes place in a specially designed sweatshop, where the housewives’ bodies are turned into machines that actually produce sweat and tears. The artist, who was born in 1976, addresses themes such as economics in the post-industrial age or cultural identity; the female bodies she portrays exist far from social norms.

Mika Rottenberg is part of a vital New York scene that is currently attracting a good deal of international attention. Rottenburg’s drawings for Dough were already on show in the pa.per.ing exhibition, which presented paper works by this young generation
of artists in the Lobby Gallery at Deutsche Bank New York. At the Frieze Art Fair, the Cartier Award’s first winner will be showing Chasing Waterfalls: The Rise and Fall of the Amazing Seven Sutherland Sisters (Part 1) for the first time. At the center of this video work are the Sutherland Sisters who became human circus attractions due to their extremely long hair.

Cheese, video still, 2008, Whitney Biennial

Mika’s video on coolhunting.com