Ciprian Mureşan, Galeria Plan B, Cluj

“If we wanna understand the Humans, we gotta see them at their lowest. The Evil—as they call it—that’s what we study today.” This line is the protagonist’s pessimistic view of humanity that opens Ciprian Mureşan’s video Dog Luv, 2009, which premiered at the Romanian Pavilion in the Venice Biennale last year. Based on a script by Saviana Stânescu, Dog Luv was presented at Plan B alongside Untitled (Tom Chamberlain), 2009, a video that teases out the titular English artist’s painting practice. Mureşan’s solo exhibition was the first in the gallery’s new location within an old brush factory—a compound that brings together five galleries and twenty art, design, and performance studios. The artist’s own studio is downstairs, as are those of three other gallery artists; Chamberlain had installed a group of paintings in the artist-run space Laika next door. This cooperative setup has filled an urgent need. Romania still lacks cultural infrastructure; rather than wait for the authorities to act, a core group of artists independently collaborated to take over several floors of the factory. At Plan B, the pairing of Dog Luv, which deals both with the fragile teacher/student relationship and human character more broadly, and Untitled, with the artist working as lone warrior, made perfect sense as a self-critique from within the collective.

Stânescu's dramatic text about humanity’s horrific appetite for torture, interrogation, and execution is played out in Dog Luv by five beautifully hand-crafted puppets of dogs. Maddog, the leader and teacher of the pack, encourages his students to recite the names of various forms of torture practiced throughout history. They do so willingly, rapidly firing off a list that includes stoning, crucifixion, genocide, and water-boarding. He goes on to specify that “the backwards spelling of DOG as GOD is not completely arbitrary.” But it does not take long before his disciples have turned upon him and the play becomes one about the act of torture rather than its theory.

Dog Luv was presented to the left of the space, and to balance its dark intent, Mureşan seems to have looked to the angel on his right shoulder to find Tom Chamberlain. An accomplished painter, Chamberlain works by laying down thousands of repeated, patterned brushstrokes using diluted pigments. The content of each canvas is indefinable and the iridescent surfaces seem evanescent. In production, only the glistening of the wet paint hints at the shapes being formed before each section has time to dry. Mureşan’s video follows the development of one painting and was screened in almost real time over three consecutive days.

The shimmering white of Chamberlain's painting-in-progress on the right thus sat in stark contrast to the dark costumes, backdrop, and content of Dog Luv on the left. In the middle, Skull Study after Holbein, 2009, a pencil drawing of the anamorphic skull Hans Holbein included in The Ambassadors, 1533, may have been Mureşan’s attempt to create a tensile connection between the two videos. The subject’s visual ambiguity is an obvious symbol of mortality, but it also reflects the distortion of Chamberlain’s paintings when viewed in reproduction. The trope somehow bridged the gap between two very different stories of humankind, one of a conspiracy that leads to hatred and violence, the other of the individual who aspires alone.

Setting the Scene/Mark Wallinger

British artist Mark Wallinger is in Çanakkale for the second time to explore potential sites and participate in meetings with the city mayor and local authorities about his My City public art proposal. As we discuss his ideas for the work, a large cargo ship, the British Curlew, heads north up the strait towards the Marmara Sea. Mark takes a photograph and explains some detail about the curlew's (the bird) distinguishable bill, a knowledge he acquired when he was a young ornithologist many years ago. The name of the boat seems familiar and Mark thinks he saw the same one on his last visit, a repetition that seems more than relevant to our conversation as he later goes on to talk about his ideas for a public artwork in Çanakkale.

Mark originally considered himself a painter, but during his M.A. and a period of teaching in the art department at Goldsmiths, University of London in the 80s, he was left with a different appetite for his own artistic practice. He goes on to explain that, “as a painter one could happily work within the confines of the form whilst also having the satisfaction of doing a day’s work. To work in a variety of forms requires patience. You have to wait and trust the ideas will come.” His infamous commission Ecce-Homo, a life-size sculpture of Christ that occupied the “Fourth Plinth” in London's Trafalgar Square in 1999, set a new tone for his work, and afterwards he started receiving numerous commissions for public artworks, but while many have been asked of him, not all are realised. One of the projects that did make it to fruition was commissioned by Andrea Schlieker (the curator who also nominated him for the My City project) for the 2008 Folkestone Art Triennial in South England. Mark describes Folk Stones (2008) as “not being a commemorative piece, or about making a grand statement. It was inspired as something more intimate and embedded in the locality of Folkestone.” Folk Stones is a collection of beach pebbles laid out in a massive square, each one individually numbered from 1 all the way up to 19,240 to correspond to the exact number of British soldiers killed on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The work is inspired by the one million soldiers who left from Folkestone Harbour to fight on the battlefields of France and Flanders. Mark describes the numbering as “a significant yet pointless act... a modern-day recalling of the labour of Sisyphus.” Folk Stones is now a permanent public artwork, which clearly engages with the city of Folkestone, and as Mark points out it does so “without being commemorative, or celebratory and without using languages of imperialism.” For him, these aspects are some of the most important when thinking about what a public artwork should be and do today. Iconic sculptures are often based on photographs and hence are forms of commemoration that are merely three-dimensional versions of found images in bronze or stone. Such public artworks simply send the viewer back to the photograph, they are symbols of the past and identifiers of glorious or tragic moments in this history. At this point Mark proposes that, “Perhaps Picasso's painting Guernica was truly the last major public artwork (in terms of art in a new expanded field).” He goes on to say that, “There is nothing for the people in Çanakkale. There is the horse of Troy – a desperate request from Hollywood to insert some kind of touristic reminder, and then there is the text on the hills of Gallipoli that also speaks to the passer by.” In a sense, both the horse and the text act like promotional materials, created only for those who come and go too quickly to absorb the two main historical memories that this city holds – Troy and Gallipoli; on the other hand, there is really no public entity or statement that has been made for those who live here. In contrast, Mark's work in Folkestone was successful in that it did something quite quietly. The emphasis and context directed the local audience's attention to something in the past without stating facts of history. In this story of public art, Mark wants to create for Çanakkale an artwork that is heartfelt, visceral, and that is both a response to how the locality affects him and is also made for the city's people. With these thoughts in mind, Mark recalls that when first invited to the My City project and on being given the site of Çanakkale, he started thinking about the knowledge he already had on the area, the little he knew about Gallipoli, the history of Troy, and the confluence point of the Dardanelles as a place for both trade and conflict throughout the ages. His initial thoughts for Çanakkale became an extension of the work he produced in Folkestone. He says he liked the notion of having thought about a “Western front on the one hand (Folkestone) and that he was now looking at the ramifications of a front at the other end of Europe.” Excited by this prospect, but also nervous of the intensity of the history of Çanakkale, the next concern of his was, “Where does one start when there is so much to address?” While London has been Mark’s main inspiration as it is his base, he has, over the years, worked in a number of divided cities including Lefkosa and Jerusalem. He says that, “Somehow these places feed into all the following work. While a new context can be daunting, by accepting the gifts a place has, new inspirations feed you.” Yet, he also realises that he is recognised for having made several important works that refer to wars and their historical legacy, and that here again, this could be what is expected of him. Although he does not have more than a few experience of Çanakkale, he says, “I feel I have some legitimacy to be working on a public artwork here, given the involvement of Britain in the battle of Gallipoli and the fact that this needs to be a history that is taught more in the UK. What is the meaning of Empire, what could they mobilise?” He also mentions other related references such as English dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe's unfinished minor epic based on the legend of Hero and Leander, as well as Lord Byron's poetry, and first ever documented swim across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia in 1810. With so many potential inspirations, it was in fact the sea, its persistent use and the people’s connection with the “back-forth motion of the Dardanelles,” that detained Mark for a while. But, he says, “at the same time, the idea of a Camera Obscura or a similar system felt right. He is thus working on a proposal that will create the opportunity for its audience to notice or identify something that makes a spark and at the same time presents a stately and mythological phenomenon that is relentless. Closing the conversation with a reference to Joyce's Ulysses and the mythology of Cyclops, Mark says of the view across the strait, “Here, yesterday suggests tomorrow. Sometimes something momentous takes place, on other days nothing seems to change and the differences are imperceptible. My work will offer a contemplative excuse to keep looking. Sometimes it is nice to simply frame something.”

As the land expands

2nd March - 15th April 2010

Al Riwaq Art Space, Bahrain

Can Altay, Fayçal Baghriche, Osman Bozkurt, Shezad Dawood, Mounir Fatmi, Mariam Haji, Basim Magdy, Randa Mirza, Mohamed, Huma Mulji, Rana El Nemr, Fahrettin Örenli, Güclü Öztekin, Mounira Al Solh, Miha Strukelj; with video screenings by artists including Köken Ergun, Ciprian Muresan, Wael Shawky and Erzen Shkololli.

Organised by November Paynter in collaboration with Al Riwaq.

As the land expands is an exhibition that includes art works chosen for their determined urgency and prevalence to the context of Bahrain and the local audience. Taking as a starting point the pool of works in the collection of the ‘Artist Pension Trust, Dubai’, for which Paynter is the Director, over 100 art works that cover a range of media, subject matter and aesthetic tendencies were presented on video and slide to a group of artists and curators during a two day workshop held at Al Riwaq in late 2009. From this presentation a number of art works that seemed the most important to show to a wider audience in Bahrain were selected by the group.

Certain themes and interests dominated the workshop conversation; these included issues of ecology and in particular land reclamation, the speed of urban development in the region and most specifically, in terms of the success and reach of the Al Riwaq gallery, the need to present art works that would provoke a reaction from the local audience. Thus, while the curatorial process was determined by a group decision, and the works presented here do not all relate to any one theme, they do all respond to the location and the current interests of those who participated in the initial selection process.

To make a coherent presentation, a few additional art works have been added to expand on certain themes and ideas, and to also activate the desire to present work in the surrounding neighbourhood of the gallery to include outdoor interventions such as the work Red Zone (a car-cover sewn from kaffiyeh) by Mohamed and a series of open-air video screenings.

Al Riwaq Art Space

P.O. Box 54622

3 Osama Bin Zaid Avenue

Adliya, Bahrain

Telephone: +973 17717441

Fax: +973 17715421

info@alriwaqartspace.com

www.alriwaqartspace.com

Ciprian Muresan / Yama

For the first time Yama hosts a hand-drawn animation that appears like a sketch on the night sky. A commissioned work by Romanian artist Ciprian Murean Untitled (2010) stems from conversations about his earlier work Pioneers (2008), an installation comprising forty lithographs that depict different children holding bags to their mouths. Many have misread the simple act that appears in each frame and assume that the children are blowing the bags up in order to burst them. Despite their naive appearance, they are in fact shown sniffing glue, a heartbreaking and depressing sight that is all too common in certain inner city areas and one that is particularly familiar to the public of central Istanbul. At the foot of the Marmara Pera and around the zone of Istiklal Caddesi every night young boys can be seen holding a bag of glue to their faces in the same way.

Rather than directly reference this act Muresan instead plays on the misreadings of his previous work and has produced for Yama a more humourous, but still dark, take on the issue. This time, just one child is highlighted and he is seen blowing up a frog that despite its inevitable likelihood of bursting surprises the boy as it explodes into thousands of pieces. A fun gesture turns out to be a cruel or perhaps simply un-controllable act and at the same time the image of the fairytale frog that turns into a prince/princess is thwarted. As we look up at the dark sky Untitled lights up Yama for a few seconds to propose that anyone can make a wish, but in an instant this bubble bursts and the sad reality of disappointment and broken aspirations that afflicts these individuals takes over from the childhood innocence of the frames before.

Commissioned for Yama by November Paynter.

Ciprian Muresan (b. 1977) lives and works in Cluj, Romania. He is an artist and the co-editor of VERSION artist run magazine and from 2005 an editor of IDEA art + society magazine [www.ideamagazine.ro] In 2009 Muresan was one of the representing artists for Romania at the 53rd Venice Biennale; the same year he also participated in among other exhibitions The Generational:Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum, NYC; Communism Never Happened, FEINKOST, Berlin and Incorrigible Believers, David Nolan Gallery, NYC.

Haris Epaminonda

To the right of the entrance hangs a small, framed book page that depicts a man looking up at a towering termite mound. The unusual scale and perspective of this landscape with figure sets the tone for the formation and play of space experienced in Epaminonda’s “VOL. IV.” The exhibition follows Epaminonda’s solo presentation “VOL. I, II & III,” which took place at the Malmö Konsthall earlier this year, and here the mazelike reorganization of the space contains a series of three-dimensional collages that Epaminonda describes as “sentences. ” While the first is made up of just one found folio—the image of the man and termite mound—subsequent collages mix bought sculptures placed on pedestals with both black-and-white and colorful secondhand bookplates framed and hung or, in the densest composition, stacked against the wall. Her desire to play with traditional museum hierarchies and the usual formats of display is evident in each scene, but also in the way the presentation feels like an illustrated encyclopedia from which different images or shapes are allowed to haunt the memory, the relationships among them left open to interpretation.

What is striking is that the only objects made to measure by Epaminonda are the beautifully crafted pedestals, each one handpainted in a shade of white or eggshell gray, alongside carefully chosen palettes for the numerous frames. This attention to certain details shifts focus onto the pieces whose job it is to support the objects of display, pieces that in this exhibition also take on the more prominent role of masking and hiding selected iconography. A final statement locates the entire exhibition: A delicate wooden sculpture ensquares the gallery’s central column in a tense embrace, framing it as an implied image that ironically can never be captured in publication.

IDEA - Gulsun Karamustafa

Interview with Gulsun Karamustafa

Contribution to the bird family of the Buyuk Londra, 2009

Hayv Kahraman

Ghada Amer

Rehang

Rehang

Opening 5 - 7 pm, Friday 11th September

Rehang is a temporary intervention that will take place in the lobby of the Büyük Londra Oteli for the duration of the 2009 Istanbul Biennial.

In this infamous drinking haunt of Istanbul, paintings and objects by artists Anna Boghiguian, Farida El-Gazzar, Hala Elkoussy, Gülsün Karamustafa, Alisa Margolis and Shahzia Sikander will replace some of the existing framed works and paraphernalia that have for years decorated the lobby.

Hotel lobbies notoriously contain prints, paintings and ornaments and while these are often franchised selections, in the Londra's case they are personal acquisitions. The art works included in Rehang sit easily within this eclectic environment, yet at the same time the lobby creates a very different context for the works' appreciation compared to their usual viewing situation in a white cube gallery space. In this unique setting the included art works become first and foremost objects of decoration, but their references to notions of hybridity, layers of tradition and complex cultural concerns sets them apart from the myriad of found and collected items that surround them. It is this shared platform that creates new narratives and memories for the art works, as well as the Londra's surrounding possessions that may well share similar aspirations with regard to their selection, but are considered from a different perspective and usually do not involve a position of intent. At the Londra, Rehang raises questions of taste, value, commodity and how an art works' environment and location relate to its populist acceptance and its appreciation as an object of art.

Curated by Sylvia Kouvali and November Paynter

Grand Hotel de Londres / Büyük Londra Oteli

Mesrutiyet Caddesi. No: 117 80050 Beyoglu Istanbul

Collection Dubai

Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin | Lamya Gargash | Ivan Moudov | Fahrettin Örenli | Mamali Shafahi | Sophia Tabatadze | Nasan Tur | Tarek Zaki

The exhibition Collection Dubai brings together works by artists that involve practices of collecting, or of accumulating material that is then presented in a gathered format. This ranges from artists who consistently photograph the same type of environment to create a very tight series of images, to others who have collected found material that clearly works together in a collection of like messages or references and finally to those who follow one idea so succinctly within their practice that their ongoing output in itself clearly forms a collection. The other half of the title: Dubai; is intentionally ambiguous and is included in order to question the titling of something as broad and diverse as a collection of art; in this case with regard to a specific collection* that the exhibition's participating artists have been invited to include their work in, even if they have no contact with the city or its newly formed art initiatives. The title therefore questions what it means to use a regional tagging device, in this collection's case as a verifier and a commercially understood entity. The inclusion of the name Dubai also in part refers to the current trend of copying and accumulation that is taking place in the UAE, which, by extension, the work of Lamya Gargash references. In her series of photographs Familial Gargash obsessively brings together a collection of lesser-known imagery from the Emirate's, the bedrooms and lobbies of its local 'one star' hotels, offsetting the Dubai tag's usual analogies of style and glamour.

Amsterdam based artist Fahrettin Örenli has been invited to present a new installation of his fanatically created drawings and photography that form part of his ongoing research into conspiracy theories that often stem from the EU's strategies of integration and the West-East oil pipeline. In contrast two works by Sophia Tabatadze are theoretically collections, but exist as the only element of a potential ongoing practice.

An installation of three videos from Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin's series Incidents present hundreds of images taken in three locations in which disparate tales are woven together to present the touching impression of how individuals can control and organise one moment in space and time, as the world continues its activities around them. Ivan Moudov's Fragments is an incredible assemblage of collected parts taken from different artworks that Moudov found in various museums, galleries and art centers in Europe. The suitcases that contain Moudov's collection act as a portable museum that traces a precisely selected artistic heritage.

In contrast Tarek Zaki's History of O gathers a group of mundane circular objects that are cast to look like rare and valuable archeological artefacts. As Mamali Shafahi works on 2500 collages that hint at the many truths, lies, tensions and ambiguities that exist in and surround Iran; Nasan Tur's installation Good News presents in a newspaper format a sample of infamous media images that at the time of going to print illustrated stories telling only good news, but which in retrospect have not always encountered such happy endings.

*The initial motivator for the framework of the exhibition was to consider the structure of the Artist Pension Trust (Dubai), an initiative that offers selected artists the opportunity to invest works into regional collections in a shared scenario of risk diversification and mutual participation. These collections are temporary and variable as works are committed and sold over a forty-year period and ultimately all the works are dispersed.

Opening reception Saturday 5 September 2009, 21.00 hrs

Exhibition until 25 October 2009

Location: SMART Project Space, Arie Biemondstraat 105-113, Amsterdam

Tape Republic

Istanbul is a patchwork of commodity zones, where specific types of products cluster together, classifying themselves and the neighbourhoods they inhabit. For example, leading down to the Galata Tower is the 'music hill', so nick-named for its series of shops that stock musical instruments and DJ hardware. Just around the corner is the 'lighting district', a glittering constellation of window displays, each one hosting an array of chandeliers, lampshades and behind the scenes switches and bulbs. Classic tourist hubs of similar same-zone products include the Egyptian spice market and the fish bazaar. Then there are the more locally frequented such as the sewing machine floor in IMC and the hardware street of Karaköy. The repetition of what is for sale in each of these areas is phenomenal. Shop after shop will seemingly sell almost identical produce, leaving unacquainted passers-by with concerns as to how anyone makes a living. Yet, despite occupying prime, central city territory, many of these shops are just the display floors for trade purchase, where bulk acquisitions of a particular light fitting, or reams of cloth are made.

Istanbul's most famous production-lines include those in textiles and finished garments, with 'made in Turkey' a common tag on multinational fashion brands such as H&M and M&S. There is one district in the city that caters for a precise genre of lower-level clothing 'brands'. Common name tags include Red Star, Romana Botta, Collins, Motor Jeans and Junker and these all generally migrate east rather than west. This district is Laleli, an area of around two square km that contains over 50,000 shops all selling ready made textile garments to ex-Soviet countries to the tune of $5 billion a year. This extensive business apparently all takes place off the record in what appears to be an inner-city, unregistered, tax-haven.

Every day hundreds of packages of clothes are dispatched by boats and trucks first to the Ukraine and Bulgaria before they are dispersed further afield. Until 2001 these parcels would accompany flying customers as luggage, but since 9/11 the airlines started to refuse such packages, not because of them being overweight or because of custom issues, but because of the way they were wrapped - with brown tape, lashings of it, sometimes covering every inch of the black sack or cardboard box containing the product within. It is this extreme use of brown tape that caught artist Osman Bozkurt's interest and not only its application on the parcels, but the fact that its popularity has become something of a local obsession, with its stickyness and usefulness meaning that it ends up everywhere in Laleli.

Bozkurt's work Tape Republic (2009), first shown as a large, multi-faceted installation in the exhibition Europe XXL at Lille 3000 (2009), is a homage to the district of Laleli and the unlikely product that has for him come to classify it more so than its textile trade. Bozkurt first began documenting the multiple uses of tape on the streets as a short-term solution to fixing broken handles and dummy limbs, marking territory, softening the edges of road bollards, to contain escaping electric wires within their lamp posts and even to replace - with thick stretches of back and forth action - the missing woven seating of chairs. These simple ways of 'getting by' and 'making do' are common sights in Istanbul, yet here the tape's prolificness forms a visual unity and classifies Laleli's preferred tactic of improvisation.

The street-found subsidiary and non-official uses of brown tape are the remnants of a more industrial approach to its application by the local cargo companies. One cargo company even requests that all packages it handles are completely covered by brown tape. The resulting indistinguishable brown, shiny lumps are then tagged by marker pen with the numbers or text that refer to their destination, although given their visual uniformity it is obvious that many must go missing in transit.

In the installation Tape Republic a selection of these packages take center stage. Without an assigned destination they sit in the gallery space as sculptural entities and as a sort of memorial to the final products of Laleli's activities, before they become untraceable, caught up in a system of diverse distribution. In the gallery space the packages emit recordings from small speakers hidden in their interiors that play out the sound of brown tape being drawn, sliced and applied, over and over again. This never-ending rhythm links to a film that captures the skill and speed of two cargo guys precisely wrapping their products. It takes about two rolls of tape to cover an entire sack or box and there is a clear pattern of application that has been mastered over the years. A special technique for breaking the tape involves rapidly creasing a section sticky side down and then speedily tugging at each side so that it splits at the fold. Then come the handles, which are spun and tweaked into shape. Like the lessons of the tape's potential usefulness seen in Bozkurt's photographs his film uncovers another unknown skill of convenience – the cutting of tape without a knife or scissors, a trick that every visitor to the exhibition will later try out at home.

Tape Republic collects all the little nuances of Laleli and its tape obsession in order to refer to much larger global circuits of production, consumerism and distribution. While Bozkurt puts on view a micro world that is unregistered and unregulated, it is a pool of activity that supports so many people and links into a regional network with historical and cultural precedents. The free use of tape in Laleli, is reflected in Bozkurt's works where he allows it to extend beyond the parameters ofTape Republic. The sticky substance with its pungent chemical smell, hangs uncut from the edges of the photographs it supports and unfinished rolls remain ready for future use on the floor. And so, like the unregulated world it contains in Laleli, the tape is in Bozkurt's work both specifically applied and at the same time left to its own devices, a metaphor for a community that binds itself together through a system of shared aspirations and the possibility to remain flexible.

The columns held us up

The columns held us up

Nedko Solakov

Encompassing three decades of his work, Nedko Solakov’s retrospective at the Sofia Art Gallery is his first large-scale exhibition in Bulgaria since 1988. Curated by Iara Boubnova and Maria Vassileva, the exhibition is arranged in chronological order, with each year of his production––from 1981 to present––noted on a board. The show begins with a selection of Solakov’s early oil paintings, which brought him acclaim in the 1980s. Some of these are gathered in groups, are displayed on the floor, lean against the gallery’s plinths, or are installed on the columns. This unconventional arrangement introduces a momentum to the spatial layout and allows the visitor to clearly understand the evolution from Solakov’s figurative paintings to his installations and videos, which underscore his deft ability to compose complex and extremely detailed stories.

The genius of this retrospective lies in the way it creates a narrative thread that journeys through the development of Solakov’s works, so that the exhibition appears as a new work itself. In the style of many of his hand-annotated works, such as his ongoing “Wallpapers” series––of which there are three in the exhibition, from 1993, 1995, and 2002––Solakov has added a written commentary of short penned texts on the plinths, on walls, on the floor, and next to works throughout the show. The viewer is in effect led through the exhibition by Solakov, but unlike didactic gallery labels, this commentary is not descriptive; instead, it appears as an element of the works on display and as an added layer that functions as the retrospective’s own narrative. Also framing the entire presentation is a rendition of Solakov’s 1998 work A Life (Black & White), wherein two painters––one making the walls black and the other following to return them to white––work for one month at opposite sides of the gallery. This perpetually changing yet rhythmically repeating backdrop animates the space and transforms the presentation of Solakov’s linear biography into a web of shifting narratives, which, in turn, like many of his works, propose a more complex and cyclic chronology.