Vernacular: Reflections on contemporary art
Self-contained #1
(43:48 mins)
Ami Clarke | Mark Kelner | Mischa Leinkauf | Suzanne Mooney | Robert Waters
Facilitated and moderated by: Shai Ohayon
With the current lockdown and social distancing orders in many countries around the world, and the impending long-term restrictions that are to come, how are contemporary artists affected by these changes?
An international group of professional artists, from three different continents, share candid reflections about their lives and work during this global crisis. They represent different artistic practices and personal views.
This sharing of thoughts and reflections is intended to connect contemporary artists around the world and to solicit a discourse how individual artists deal with the situation, not the “artworld”. It is not about the “future of art” but rather about how these changes inform the artists’ own thinking processes and plans, as individuals.
Supported by: SivanS Group (Japan)
|
..
Ohayon is a Tokyo-based independent curator / consultant and the founder of the exhibition space The Container in Tokyo. Before his relocation to Japan he practiced in London, England and in Toronto, Canada. Ohayon’s curation focuses on contemporary western and Japanese art that defy conventional practices and seek to democratize art. He has a deep interest in presenting social-activist and conceptual works that aim to facilitate discourse about change and social awareness. His attention to contemporary art as a vehicle to communicate with the general public leads his curatorial approach to present works that spectators can “experience”, with a strong emphasis on accessibility and reinterpretation.
Mark Kelner is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Washington, DC. A graduate of George Mason University, where he studied with the esteemed novelist Vasily Aksyonov, his work has appeared in Artenol, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The Times among other media outlets. Beginning in 2012, his debut series, “Moscow Made, American Born,” explores Russian-American duality by means of contrasting and distorting the visual symbols, ciphers, and social systems that define both cultures and their respective art histories. In 2019, his solo exhibition “Solaris: Shelter for the Next Cold War” garnered wide acclaim and over 13,000 visitors. Additionally, from 2009 to 2017, Mr. Kelner was elected to the Board of Directors of the Hermitage Museum Foundation (USA) where he helped develop the Museum’s “Art from America” and “Art Without Borders” programs, as well as various international contemporary art projects. He was featured guest on PBS’s Charlie Rose is currently in active practice on his long-running series, “Signs and Wonders.” Mr. Kelner is represented by Galerie Blue Square (Washington, DC) and LAZY Mike (Los Angeles) and has shown at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York and the Librairie du Globe in Paris.
Mooney is an Irish artist based in Japan. She graduated with a PD. from Tama Art University, Tokyo, in 2014. She has worked on a wide range of arts projects in Japan and abroad, ranging from arts research and writing, public talks and workshops, to site-specific installation as part of her own arts practice. Her arts practice uses photography and spatial installation to examine landscape, and how such representations can reflect the lived-space of our contemporary culture, exploring issues of globalization, urbanization and the effects of technological developments on our societies. Major exhibitions include “In the Shadow of Blue” at Fresh Winds Biennale, Iceland (2020), “From Place to Place” as part of Japan Now North, in the UK (2018), and a site-specific installation for Koganecho Bazaar 2017, “From Koganecho With Love”. She was the recipient of an Aesthetica Art Prize 2015. In addition to her visual arts practice, she is an assistant professor at Tama Art University, a part-time lecturer at Waseda University, and has published journal articles and essays on visual art, urban landscape, and the effects of technology on contemporary society and culture. Publications include “Constructed underground: exploring non-visible space beneath the elevated tracks of the Yamanote line” published in a special issue of Japan Forum on Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, and several essays for a regular section titled “Mediated Culture” in 5:Designing Media Ecology magazine. Curatorial projects include “Out of Bounds”, an exhibition of contemporary art from Japan as part of Japan Now North 2019, Sheffield, U.K.
|
 Ami Clarke (UK)
Ami Clarke is an artist, writer, and educator, working within the emergent behaviours that come of the complex protocols of platform capitalism in everyday assemblages, with a focus on the inter-dependencies between code and language in hyper-networked culture. She utilises various digital media, often distributed, with aspects of live programming, to produce video/sound and spoken word performance. Her work is conceptually framed in ways that means critique is often articulated through it’s production, drawing out new (old) behaviours emerging from human engagement with technology through performative modes. She is interested in acknowledging, and thinking through, the complexities of the subject emerging in synthesis with their environment, from a critical post-human position. Forthcoming writing includes: ‘The Underlying’ Digital Ecologies, Bath Spa University publishing, and ‘covfefe: language within a meme economy’. She is also founder of Banner Repeater; a reading room with a public Archive of Artists’ Publishing and project space, opening up an experimental space for others, on a working train station platform at Hackney Downs station, London. Ideas that come of publishing, distribution, and dissemination, that lead to a critical analysis of post-digital art production: Hybrid Strategies in Network Culture, are shared in her practice as an artist and inform the working remit of Banner Repeater. She is currently building the Banner Repeater Digital Archive of Artists Publishing, developing strategies / software to facilitate a more ethically driven archival process, with the support of Wikimedia UK. Her work is included in Information edited by Sarah Cook (2016) – an art-historical reassessment of information-based art and exhibition curation, from 1960s conceptualism to current digital and network-based practices – Whitechapel Documents in Contemporary Art and MIT press series.
Berlin born and based artist Mischa Leinkauf deals with the hidden possibilities of urban environments and various kinds of limitations of spaces through borders, rules and architecture. Through interventions in quasi-natural systems of order, he provokes situations that create temporary confusion and open up spaces for a possible recoding. His actions are subversive antics in the unruly and playful Debordian tradition of the dérive, but here the experiential immediacy and spontaneity is counterbalanced by a conceptual framework of precise planning and execution. Leinkauf was part of the artist duo Wermke/Leinkauf and has received numerous awards worldwide and exhibited internationally at venues such as Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Japan, Helsinki Art Museum, Moderna Museet Stockholm, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Kunstmuseum Bonn and Manifesta 11.
Waters (London, Ontario, 1974) is a Canadian artist living in the Basque Country in Spain. His multi-disciplinary art practice incorporates the transformation of materials and concepts that explore human life in relation to conflict, desire and the unknown. Working with images, installations and social projects, he presents the human body and the practice of art as sources of political action, with the intention of questioning self-knowledge and social control, and of finding and demonstrating possibilities of freedom. In addition to exhibiting his artwork internationally, he is an adjunct professor at the University of the Basque Country.
|
