A psychedelic gang of boys, bears and bravehearts stomping toward us against a thumping KrossBow soundtrack. Nick Knight’s fashion film featuring Simon Foxton’s visual mash-up of Belgian menswear master Walter Van Beirendonck’s enviable archives is an explosive Technicolor experience.
WONDERLAND
NOTES ON ART & DESIGN
Oct
04
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Dream the World Away
Sep
05
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Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair
For 42 years, Gilbert & George have been reflections of each other, identical twins alike in being different: not from each other but from the rest of the world, which is a dark and violent place filled with ambiguous pageantry.
The Jack Freak Pictures shows their ominous kaleidoscopic world, a chaotic pulse of medals, flags and street names. The freaks who walk these mean streets and spooky parks are Gilbert & George. Dressed up as a Union-Jacked dynamic duo and portraying themselves as dancing vaudevillians, robotic avatars, and mutating entities. Simultaneously being victim and monster, they seem to enjoy the disaster, sticking out impish tongues and blowing raspberries.
The Jack Freak Pictures feel unpleasantly two-faced, on several levels and to be honest… a little frightening.
Jun
06
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Size Matters
Imagine yourself entering a dark space, directed towards a quietly swishing revolving door. There are signs everywhere warning you’re about to enter a “pressurized area” so if you’re pregnant, have breathing problems, or some curious disease: GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE, YOU’RE GONNA DIE. What do you think is going to happen.
Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan at the Grand Palais in Paris is probably the closest you ever get to experience how Jonah felt when swallowed by a whale. Instead of standing in an exhibition hall looking at an object, you’re in the object itself, a mixture between a whale’s stomach and a massive womb, with no sense of the surrounding environment. Your only connection with the outside world are the web-like patterns of the Grand Palais’s roof over the rounded surfaces. It’s surreal, kind of bizarre, and very beautiful.
Passing back out into the entrance area, you head through another door into the body of the hall where you’re hit by brilliant sunlight and overwhelmed by a 376,700 ft² dark purple globular monster, the exterior of the space you’ve just been in, which appears about to roll over you and makes you feel truly tiny. Kapoor really gets the scale of the Grand Palais. He didn’t fill the entire space so you can get a clearer perspective standing away from it. The mint green iron against the dark purple is beautiful as are the shadows the sun creates through the glass and iron slats of the roof.
These two very different, very challenging environments fulfilled Kapoor’s aim of creating “a contemplative and poetic experience”. There’s nothing more to say.
Apr
28
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Paula
With the birth of my children I realized I developed a new set of feelings. There was that complete and unconditional love, not wanting anything in return. There was the fear something could happen to them which made me more vulnerable then I ever felt before. And there was astonishment about the simple fact that they exist and I was allowed to watch them grow up. All these feelings can be found in the portraits Hendrik Kerstens made of his daughter Paula.
Kerstens, like most parents, wanted to document all the important moments in his daughters life, to capture something of the fleeting moments that fade from memory all too quickly. But his portraits are not the average family snapshots. Kerstens recognized and captured the fact that every human being, no matter how familiar, remains a mystery that can never be completely unravelled.
Then there is his consciousness of the fact that people are the same, no matter who they are or what age they live in. Associations are determined by the way we are depicted: the clothes and make up we wear, accessories and lighting.
Kerstens: ‘One day Paula came back from horseback riding. She took off her cap and I was struck by the image of her hair held together by a hair-net. It reminded me of the portraits by the Dutch masters and I portrayed her in that fashion.
It’s the combination of the love for his child, his awareness of the little we know about our loved ones, his attempts to come to grips with the passing of time and the knowledge of his craft what makes this series of photographs so unbelievable beautiful.
Jan
09
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Prayer of Shadow Protection
Most Dutch bridges, whether fixed or movable, are built by civil engineers without any input from architects resulting in “functional constructions devoid of any poetry whatsoever.”
Therefore it is really nice that an architect was deemed necessary for this relatively small drawbridge for the Amstel-Drecht canal in South Holland.
NIO Architects, one of the finalists in the 2010 Dutch Design Awards, found poetic inspiration in all sorts of odd places: a Jedi Starfighter, a praying mantis and the design of the stylized pleasure boats that clip along in the canal. And, unlike the most Dutch bridges, this bridge, the Prayer of Shadow Protection, is dark, somewhere between green and blue, a bit like the water in the Netherlands but more sparkling.
The result is a bit terrifying, yes, but also kinda awesome.
A freak robot with elegant contours slowly disappearing as dusk falls
Dec
23
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Father & Daughter
A bittersweet short movie, set in the landscape of the Netherlands with its wide skies and tall poplar trees, tells the story of a young girl whose father departs in a small boat and disappears. The girl returns again and again to the place he left her to peer out to the sea to search for him. Each return marks a passage in her life, from child to adolescent, mother and eventually old woman. Of course her father will never, can never, return. Yet the longing for her father always remains with her.
For anyone who has experienced a last moment like this, and many of us have, this poetic film strikes a chord. How often does one travel back to that spot, even if it is only in one’s mind?
There is no need to understand why the father leaves his daughter. The grief and a longing for his return are so intense that everyone can attach an individual interpretation, be it a lost father, child or love. In the director’s own words it is about “longing” that never diminishes despite the passage of time, defeating all logic.
In 2000, Father and Daughter won the Academy Award for Best Short Film
Director: Michael Dudok de Wit
Music: Norman Roger
Nov
10
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Dreamland
One of the most impressive exhibitions I saw during my recent trip to Paris was the Dreamland exhibition at the Centre Pompidou and the installation that really hit me was Malachi Farrell’s shocking “Nothing Stops a New Yorker”, a rich mix of menace and absurdity, borrowing from Arte Povera, Dada, Jean Tinguely and sound art.
What you get is artistic fireworks. Buildings standing in the middle of heaps of trash, suggesting the decline of our infrastructure, outfitted with cardboard arms, activated by a motion detector, which also triggers a two-part, high-decibel soundtrack. The first audio is an aerobics session, with the cheery voice of the instructor orchestrating the flow of the movement as the sculptures raise and lower their arms. The workout is interrupted by panicked news reports from September 11, 2001, along with terror-alert broadcasts and excerpts from Public Enemy songs.
Malachi Farrell’s complex installations link light and sound to the mechanical choreography of his invented objects. Their tinkered and handcrafted characteristics reinforce the dark humor and satire suggestive of circus and street theatre while confronting us with political, social, and ecological issues, creating uneasiness and prompt us to act.
Oct
03
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Like Everyday
Ghadirian’s “Like Everyday Series” was created from the plethora of domestic gifts she received after her wedding to fellow photographer, Peyman Hooshmandzadeh. Each of the 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.
Ghadirian uses these ordinary kitchen utensils as a readymade pun. Through a simple recontextualisation she exaggerates female typecasts in a hilarious way. Like a sieve-faced wife representing a woman who’s all mouth: a neighbourhood gossip, endlessly broadcasting like a loud speaker or a grater-faced wife, the dreaded prototype of mother-in-law jokes everywhere, all absurdly reducing identities to stereotypes.
Ghadirian’s work is not only linked to her identity as a Muslim woman living in Iran. It deals with issues relevant to women living all over the world. The daily repetitive routine to which many women find themselves consigned and by which many women are defined.
Sep
15
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Nearly reachable
“ Drawing a labyrinth with salt is like following a trace of my memory. Memories seem to change and vanish as time goes by. However, what I seek is the way in which I can touch a precious moment in my memories that cannot be attained through pictures or writings. I always silently follow the trace, that is controlled as well as uncontrolled from the start point after I have completed it.”
Motoi Yamamoto
When observing the maze you can almost feel the perspective of divinity looking down at the mortal world from a snowy mountaintop. We are all moving towards death. Because we live in times where unpredictable death seem to be lying around us so casually
Where do we come from and where are we going? The importance to live each day to it’s fullest. Once we see life from the perspective of divinity, we are made to realize the importance of each moment.
Artist website: Motoi Yamamoto
Tags: SCULPTURE SPACE
Aug
07
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Operation Supermarket
“Imagine the Iranian art couple Farhad Moshiri and Shirin Aliabadi stepping out of an air plane into the surprisingly WiFi-enabled aisle of Tehran international airport. Struggling to digest the single serving of in-flight chicken salad, they follow the signs to the baggage claim. Because of the zero tolerance drug/alcohol policy of their country, there is another checkpoint after the baggage claim for a possible random check. The x-ray monitor detects chocolate bars, detergents, cereal boxes, a package of some unknown powder, and more. The inspectors immediately jump and stop the couple. A bearded officer in dark green uniform and brown slippers asks them to take their luggage and follow him to the small inspection room on the side – needless to say, not so politely. They put their suitcases on the table that he shows them and he starts going through their stuff. They ask him to be more careful and he gets angry and starts throwing their belongings out of the suitcase. He unwraps the chocolate bar that says Tolerating on the package, opens the Ask Why cereal box, empties a bottle of washing liquid that reads American.
Most of the pieces of the series called “Operation Supermarket” are destroyed by the custom officer in front of the creator’s eyes. After finishing the inspection, they are free to go. Then the officer takes a sip out of a bottle of mineral water with a Kit-Kat for a break”
Operation Supermarket
Art: Farhad Moshiri and Shirin Aliabadi
Story: Sohrab Mohebbi