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Katarína Uhlířová
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review
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01.02.2009
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BEN COTTRELL, JANA KOCHÁNKOVÁ UND VLADIMÍR SKREPL / LOST EYE / MEETFACTORY GALLERY / 2009
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The shattered reality of Ben Cottrell from Cornwall and Berlin
The first thing I noticed about the Lost Eye1 exhibition were the drawings. They were new to me, all of them from the two-month period when Ben Cottrell (born 1982 in Cornwall) was a resident of MeetFactory in Smíchov. Drawings of faces and grimaces.
Collages of decaying smiles. Masks with wrinkles of reality. The many smaller… |
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Milena Dimitrova
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review
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01.01.2009
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HOMELAND DECAY
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The impulse for this article was provided by the magazine’s publisher as we were discussing the books I'd been reading, in search of a general overview of modern art and the modernist avant-gardes of central and Eastern Europe.
My search ended in failure: these books caused only confusion. They did not provide orientation. For one, many countries in southeastern Europe were hardly discussed in… |
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Karin Rolle
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review
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01.01.2009
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JACQUES RANCIÈRE – THE TWO ‘RESISTANCES’ OF ART
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The image of the free and rebellious artist who criticizes and reshapes society has lost much of its credibility. Yet the French philosopher Jacques Rancière still believes art to have political significance; he discusses the potential for resistance in contemporary art, presenting a theory in which the resistance of art is a relationship of tension between two different resistances.
Scant,… |
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Karin Rolle
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review
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01.01.2009
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GEORGES DIDI – HUBERMAN: AGAINST THE UNREPRESENTABLE
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The precarious relationship between art and history is a topic explored by French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. In his Bilder Trotz Allem (Pictures in Spite of Everything), he sets forth an argument against the prohibition of displaying the radical inhumanity of the Shoah through visual media; against the formulation of the “unrepresentable” and against the scepticism of… |
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Milena Dimitrova
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review
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01.01.2009
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AT ARM’S LENGTH
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Contemporary art that engages with Eastern Europe tends to be viewed from a purely Western perspective. Bulgarian artist Kamen Stoyanov, an artist as an observer, makes no attempt to evade this question. Vienna’s MUMOK in Vienna played host last year to the exhibition “at arms length” by Stoyanov, in connection with the awards ceremony of the Viennafair. This exhibit took as its theme the… |
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Robin Mackay
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review
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01.02.2008
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UNFOLDING THE MIDDLE EAST: KRISTEN ALVANSON’S NONAD
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Azad Gallery, Tehran, May 2008
In his 1998 book on Leibniz, philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposed the figure of ‘The Fold’ as a way in which a philosophy of immanence might measure the multiplicity of the universe. If Being speaks in one voice, if we invoke no transcendent plane of organisation, then how can difference be articulated? Deleuze’s vision of folds-within-folds, which he discovers to… |
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Tony Ozuna
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review
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01.02.2008
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PUNKS NOT DEAD
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Punk. No One is Innocent—Art—Style--Revolt
Kunsthalle Wien
16 May—7 September, 2008
In Eastern Europe, or in any non-English speaking country for that matter, punks must take pride in writing “Punks Not Dead” without the apostrophe after the “K,” as it should be. Without the grammatical correction, on their leather jackets, t-shirts and graffiti on the walls, the slogan takes on a Dadaist… |
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Lenka Vítková
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review
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01.02.2008
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A PLACE IN FRONT OF THE PICTURE
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Maria Lassnig, Serpentine Gallery, London. Curator: Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist, April 25 – July 8, 2008
At the recent London exhibition of Austrian painter Maria Lassnig (b. 1919), the large, bright walls of the elegant Serpentine Gallery display sizable figurative oil paintings, often self-portraits, some schematic male and female figures on a white background or symbolic bodies… |
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Tony Ozuna
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review
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01.01.2008
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LOVE AND DEATH (FROM MEXICO TO VIENNA)
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Review of “Viva La Muerte!” — Art and Death in Latin America
Kunsthalle Vienna, October 17, 2007—February 17, 2008.
The tomb of Mexico’s last Emperor, His Imperial Majesty Maximilian I, is coveted in the Royal Crypt in Vienna, Austria. It was shipped there one year after he was publicly executed by firing squad in Mexico, 1867.
Before becoming Emperor, Maximilian had merely been an Archduke.… |
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Cristian Neagoe
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review
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01.01.2008
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BACK TO THE FUTURE, FUTURE TO THE BACK
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Picture this. There’s a guy walking around in the gallery, snubbing everyone, looking at the walls as if they were painted with shit. He is not looking at the works, just at the empty spaces between them. The works get the snub too. He’s wearing this black t-shirt and it says “M-am plictisit” on it. That’s “I’m bored” in Romanian. Phosphorescent green, with a clear designish touch, as the letters… |
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