Michael Danner
‘Critical Mass/Kritische Masse (Nuclear Power in Germany)
Part of the group show ‘LA ZONA’ at NGBK - Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin

28.4.2012 - 3.6.2012

To this day, the use of nuclear energy has been met with high hopes and profound skepticism. In Germany, both these stances have been, and still are, under intense discussion. By now, a medium-term nuclear power phase-out seems a done deal. However, the problem of the terminal storage of nuclear waste continues to be unsolved. Completed over the past four years, my photography project Critical Mass/Kritische Masse shows and documents all 17 German nuclear power plants as well as the Asse II terminal repository, and the exploration mine at Gorleben. Rather than taking a neutral position, I consider my work a contribution to the debates on our future energy options.

The images and books from Critical Mass/Kritische Masse presented in La Zona are intended to invite observers to ask questions – questions regarding our notions of security and risk. Where are the limitations of technical control systems? What are the consequences of the energy transition? Or are we facing new chances for products and alternative lifestyles?

La Zona
The exhibition La Zona identifies different categories of “zone”. The main reference is the zone in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker - a territory that is at once enclosed and abandoned, deadly and healing, unpredictable, and always changing. Filmed seven years before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Stalker is in retrospect considered as an anticipation of this catastrophe and its consequences. La Zona constructs a science fiction narrative out of the polymorphic reality of the “zone” as well as the fractured idea of progress and enlightenment.

Participants 
Büro für Konstruktivismus, Michael Danner, Katja Davar, Amin Farzanefar, Kim Feser, Ulrike Feser, Nina Fischer & Maroan el Sani, Ralf Homann, Ins A Kromminga, Tara Mahapatra, Steven Matheson, Chris McGrane, Esther Neumann, Lina Selander, Dylan Spaysky, Charles Stankievech, Ashok Sukumaran, Florian Wüst, Daniel Young & Christian Giroux.

© Michael Danner
 

ANNA HUIX | NO END OF WORLD

MONU #16 ON NON-URBANISM RELEASED

The rural as a strict counterpart to the urban appears to be a condition of the past. At least, this is what Kees Christiaanse posits in an interview with us entitled “The New Rural: Global Agriculture, Desakotas, and Freak Farms”. He points out that, today, non-urban spaces interact so frequently and intensely with urbanity that you can no longer describe something as strictly rural. Therefore, we can no longer separate the city from the countryside as these are not polarized entities and each other’s enemies, but rather the result of each other. Evidently, to be an urbanist today means that one must also be a regionalist as Edward W. Soja puts it in his contribution “Remembrances of an Older Urbanism”. In relation to that, Oswald Devisch reminds us in his piece “Urbanism as a Way of Life…in Non-Urban Areas” that the 1930s sociologist Louis Wirth stressed that the concept of urbanism is something not only confined to large, dense and heterogeneous settlements, but can also manifest itself to varying degrees “wherever the influences of the city reach”. In that senseDevisch thinks that it is time to change the urban - non-urban dichotomy into a dynamic - stagnant version that is based on social rather than spatial conditions. Obviously, new media and especially the internet play an important role in the discussion on Non-Urbanism as spaces around us are now being continually forged and reforged in informational processes asMike Crang and Stephen Graham explain in their contribution entitled “Sentient Cities: Ambient Intelligence and the Politics of Urban Space”. In their article they describe a world in which we not only think of cities, but cities also think of us, and in which the environment reflexively monitors our behavior. In his piece “Processes from ‘Away and Under’”, Clark M. Thenhaus envisions - because of those informational processes and in particular increased digitalization - no future widening of the gap between the urban and the non-urban, but rather that gap being bridged. This ‘bridging’ will occur only partially through physical manifestations, but largely through otherwise ‘invisible’ structures and open-source processes and networks. Although the limits of digital cities are usually not physical, but, for example, economic as Eduard Sancho Pou describes in his contribution “The Digital City is a Village in the Alps: The Red Bull Society”, one might find - especially in non-urban areas - “Truman Show”-like physical manifestations such as the village of the multinational corporation “Red Bull”. But non-urban spaces are also changing independently from the influence of the internet and social media, particularly in emerging market economies such as China, India or Indonesia. According to Scott Herring rural conditions have actually been changing ever since there this idea of a country and a city emerged, as he explains in another interview with us entitled “Non-Urban Erotic Spaces”. In Indonesia, for example, so-called desakotas, hybrid spaces between the countryside and the city, appear as transitory spaces that lead eventually to the rise of the city of the non-urban as Ilya Fadjar Maharika and Gayuh Winisudaningtyas put it in their article “The Pioneers: Mutation Agent of the Non-Urban”. In such a ‘non-urban city’ so-called pioneers convert agriculture into urbanized spaces with a population density double that of the countryside, into a non-urban urbanism. However, the future viability of those non-urban urban spaces remains in doubt as a typical transformation process of rural spaces - especially in Asia - means that the rural self-supporting local ecology of farming gradually vanishes as a lot of farmers go bankrupt and feudal proprietors or large multinational agro-companies take over the land as described by Kees Christianse. In order to survive, formerly independent rural communities, such as the ones in the US that David Karle mentions in his contribution ”End of the Line, Urbanism in the Great Plains”, must transition to self-sustaining micro-regional networks.

(Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, April 2012)


To get a single printed copy of the new issue please e-mail your order to order@monu-magazine.com .

Shortcut of the Day: Mark Hallam

Near and Far: Landscape photographs by Per Bak Jensen

The 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, London
2.5.2012 - 11.5.2012

The good thing about being a landscape photographer is that you have to seek out the landscape. You’ve got to be there, you’ve got to be present.

Per Bak Jensen

The Danish photographer, Per Bak Jensen (born 1949) is often said to be a pioneer in his field. In his indefatigable search for a photographic expression he has created a number of photgraphic series, which have placed him as one of the most important fine art photographers in Scandinavia. For Bak Jensen, who never digitally manipulates his images, it is essential to catch a certain essence of timelessness of the landscape, which, by his own words, set out to capture ‘the being of places’. His photographs frame locations and moods rather than people, and his unique feeling for atmosphere and the milieu is evident.

The exhibition at the 12 Star Gallery, Europe House, London, is an informal survey of a number of Bak Jensen’s most notable large-scale landscape images of Denmark, Greenland and Northern Germany, curated by Barry Phipps, University of Cambridge. The photographs may be regarded as pauses between things and events, with the quietness of spaces separating moments, yet are still moments themselves. As Barry Phipps suggests:

If you speak with Per Bak Jensen you learn that his fundamental aim is to capture ‘the being of the places’. Yet, there is more to retrieve from Bak Jensen’s photographs than what the subject of those images alone can bear. They appear t stand outside of everyday time. For the time of these photographs is a long breath where the movement of birds and planes are veiled out, and the sound of the waves on the water have been frozen by the camera’s shutter speed. Yet, the subjects of his large pictures, despite their mute immobility, still feel alive.

Per Bak Jensen was until recently an associate professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and through his unique photographic working methods he has inspired many young Scandinavian artists. His work is represented in many public collections worldwide, such as MOMA, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York and Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris. Barry Phipps is a Fellow and Curator of Works of Art at Churchill College, University of Cambridge and has previously curated a number of highly acclaimed exhibitions, including Lines of Enquiry and Beyond Measure at Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge. He continues to lecture and write on contemporary art and inter-disciplinary related topics. The exhibition is part of the cultural activities during the Danish EU Presidency. The 12 Star Gallery is dedicated to showing work which celebrates the creativity and cultural diversity that is the hallmark of the European Union. 

For information or press images please contact: Lone Britt Christensen, Cultural Attaché, Embassy of Denmark. Email: lonmol@um.dk 
The exhibition will be touring to Churchill College, Cambridge, 16 May – 21 June 2012.

Chris Round | The Way to Nowhere

Sam Nightingale

‘Spectres of Film: Islington’s Lost Cinemas and other Spectral Spaces’

A Brooks Art, London

3.5.2012 - 30.6.2012

Spectres of Film: Islington’s Lost Cinemas and other Spectral Spaces is part of an ongoing series of projects and archives that span geographical extremes (from London to Australia) and moving image history (from pre-cinematic devices to Internet auction sites) in order to visualise film’s abandonment.

Spectres of Film… will include the exhibition of three works that address the architectural site and spectral spaces of film. These include: the photographic series, Islington’s Lost Cinemas; the film-sculpture, Film; and the artist’s book, Picture Has Not Been Checked as well as new work recently shot in Australia.

Islington’s Lost Cinemas is an ambitious multi-stage interactive heritage project and conceptual artwork. The photographs that make up this project locate and celebrate the little known history of cinema in the London Borough of Islington. Islington has a rich cinematic history as the former home of more than 40 movie theatres since cinema’s invention in 1895 as well as being the birth place for some of the pioneers of British cinema. As we see the global abandonment of the medium of film, this project turns to the local by photographing the sites of the one-time lavish ‘picture palaces’ in Islington. While the cinemas themselves may have all but disappeared, Islington’s Lost Cinemas reveals a history that is often overlooked but still present in the urban everyday. However rather than mourn the loss of these cinemas, Nightingale’s project looks to articulate the latent (or spectral) presence of this history through photographing what remains: depicting urban spaces that are at once in the present and out of time. The artist wants to involve others in Islington’s Lost Cinemas and is developing a website where Islington residents can contribute memories, stories and images of the Islington cinemas, the first part of which will be launched during the exhibition. Nightingale states:

«While I’m keen to record memories about the long-disappeared cinemas in Islington, I don’t want this to be a nostalgic project but one that recognises our changing urban environment and the way in which memory and history perhaps remains as a latent or ghost like presence in these spaces. It is hoped that a function of the website will be to provides access to an illuminated history of Islington’s architecture – one that can help connect local people with the history of their urban environment».

The changing life of film is taken up in the limited edition artists’ book, Picture Has Not Been Checked, which results from collecting recycled film images found on the Internet auction site, eBay. Here a new lease of life is given to these films where they become valued commodities to be traded through digital networks – projected, re-projected and photographed on a series of bedroom walls with the aid of DIY domestic technologies, such as one presumes, the humble torch. These iconic frames, circulating on the Internet, are frozen, compressed and repeatedly re-sampled, each time decaying the image a little further. Picture Has Not Been Checked demonstrates how celluloid, grain and emulsion are replaced with the new structure of the image – the pixel.

The internal structure or material of film is also taken up in the film and sculptural installation, Film, which again derives from film-material found on the Internet: a few aberrant frames from an abandoned home-movie purchased on e-Bay become the basis of the work. Old and new technologies come together in Film where the flickering cone of light that normally dances across the projection screen is here transformed into a stream of celluloid flowing across the computer screen. The plasticity of the filmstrip degenerates and images blur into abstraction leaving only its auratic trail behind. Film points to pre-cinema technology housed as it is within a contemporary version of Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope.

Nightingale’s newest work has taken him to search out and discover the spectral spaces of cinema in rural Australia. Presented in this exhibition is a fragment of the 150 cinemas sites photographed during a recent practice-research trip that is set to produce an image and text archive project that both map and imagines the history of cinemas in regional Victoria, Australia.

BIO

Sam Nightingale is a UK artist who works with photography and the moving image; he exhibits internationally, and his work has been included in exhibitions and film festivals in America, Australia and Europe, such as Experiments in Cinema, New Mexico; Freies Museum, Berlin; Australian International Experimental Film Festival, Melbourne and Ambika P3 Gallery, London.

Nightingale’s practice is concerned with enlivening and imploding the hidden spaces within and between built structures – the uncertain spaces of story, memory and imagination. His passion for early cinema technologies and structures has led him to photograph cinemas in rural Australia as well as in the UK. However rather than simply documentary, Nightingale’s work leads him to address the structure and appearance of film itself – what he calls the architecture, infrastructure (grain, pixel) and substrate (bricks and mortar, memory and imagination).

Find out more here:

These events are free but booking is strongly recommended. Please contact julia@abrooksart.com for further information or to make a reservation. 

© Courtesy of Sam Nightingale | A Brooks Gallery

RUTH DUDLEY-CARR | “WHAT REMAINS…”

Thanks Ruth for sending us some images from her newly made landscapes taken in South Dakota, Michigan, Maine, and Massachusetts. As she wrote «I am using the landscape as a surrogate for self. There is a cataract quality, a solemn chroma, and a patina that is disintegrating, which is an attempt at forcing the viewer to find a place that is not an exact geographic location but an emotional location».  

Ruth Dudley-Carr is a photographer that works in a variety of ways, including digitally and in the darkroom. She holds a BA in Theatre Production from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan and worked as a scenic artist for many years before finding her opportunity to speak through a lens. Ruth completed the Professional Certificate Program at Maine Media College in Rockport, ME in May 2011. Ruth uses the camera to discuss the many aspects of her life and to address the concerns that she feels most people can relate to in regards to sexuality, love, the destruction of emotion, and the exploration of self. She wrote on her artist Statement «My work functions as a burrow of memory, both past and present, of realities, imbued creation, or both.  It is an invitation for the viewer to explore still frames of my mind, in coded references.  These expressive situations are possible when autobiography and fiction begin to blend in confusion.

I have created situations of emotional weight, where mood is implied through color and light.  Repressed expression and symbolic gesture are further vehicles that I apply.  This is an exploration of the consequences of sexuality, love, and the confusing boundaries that push the line between fiction and reality, either remembered from my past or dreamt in moments.  The work explores the human form as a potent commodity to be used and consumed but also appreciated.  At times this may be viewed as a voyeuristic language, though this approach has other vagaries for the viewer.  

I used the power of self-portrait to reveal the true self, removing the masks and everyday persona I feel obligated to show.  This is my chance to breathe and settle in to who I really am, or what has really happened in my past- an opportunity to view my true self/identity.  The voyeuristic approach, described with scrims, lack of focus, and unusual tones, forces a visceral reaction.  This work helps me to release the tormented dreams of the reality I once lived.  This is my visual diary, seedy with passion and love, or the implication of what might occur when you are trapped between these worlds.  I look at the discrepancy of who I was and who I am and how those worlds live together, the many facets of an individual and I fight them all.

This is my visual language to describe confusion when compared to love, and to intensify within the dilution of feelings that might exist within relationships, including those relationships with ourselves».

© All copyright Ruth Dudley-Carr 

Géraldine Lay
‘Les failles ordinaires’
Galerie Château d’Eau, Toulouse
3.5.2012 - 25.6.2012

Between 2005 and 2010, I regularly visited various countries in Northern Europe: Finland, and Sweden, Norway, Scotland and Russia. I had the feeling I was still in my former familiar universe but at the same time also plunged into a strang and extraordinary world.
This series comprise selections of urban portraits, found objects and landscapes. I photographed passers-by as if they were actors in a scene, the locations resembling film sets. My imagination created a kind of narrative fiction, establishing connections between the various cities. The passers-by seem to play an indefinite part, as if each had begun living a fleeting dream. These faces, encountering each other, fade behind the parts which my imagination had assigned to them ; the street became an open space, a place for real human comedy.

© All copyright Geraldine Lay

Shorcut of the Day: Matthias Heiderich

Olivo Barbieri 
‘Site Specific_08 11’
Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia
11.5.2012 - 28.7.2012

For his first solo show at Galleria Massimo Minini, Olivo Barbieri is presenting a series of 17 large-scale photographs that explore the form of contemporary cities and the way space is perceived. Seen from above, the city looks like a giant scale model, ruled by a motionless time that coincides with our present. The landscapes that are photographed, often from a helicopter, seem like unsettling visions that constitute a new approach to analyzing the landscape and the urban context, challenging our normal mode of perception. Barbieri’s vast oeuvre is characterized not only by architecture and a particular view of the architectural element, but by the way it is put in perspective; in essence, by the ordering of space.

Barbieri’s investigation originally focused on artificial lighting in the cities of Europe and Asia, especially after his visits to China. In the mid-Nineties, he began to adopt a new photographic technique that makes it possible to keep only a few points of the image in focus. Always keenly attuned to the mutations of the metropolis, Barbieri probes the memories of places as they evolve, altering their shapes and proportions, because, as he himself says, “There are different ways of both designing and inhabiting the city. The world is not definitive”.

The project site specific_ 08 11, which he undertook in 2003, presents images of cities and infrastructure seen from above as if they were scale models, in which the center and the fringes—fundamental parts of our identity—are re-envisioned in a startling new way. The photos are all taken from a helicopter, and this unusual perspective frees the compositions of all clichés, imbuing them with a different meaning. The artist’s aim is to explore how much reality actually exists in our lives, and to what degree we truly perceive what lies around us. In addition to color, the images have begun to employ black and white, creating a constant interplay of positive and negative that achieves a precarious equilibrium in dialogue with perspective.

Kon Trubkovich
‘Leap Second’
OHWOW, Los Angeles
18.5.2012 - 23.6.2012

With his Los Angeles debut, Kon Trubkovich reveals his most personal work to date. A new series of paintings, works on paper, and a sound piece translate psychological underpinnings through elegantly complex methods. The television static, weak transmissions, and tenuous connections he depicts suggest that somewhere behind all the noise and disruption there is a broadcast confirming our existence and interconnection.

Prominent in the exhibition are a group of large-scale portraits of the artist’s mother, culled from just one second of home video, which documented the final party she threw in the U.S.S.R before the family immigrated to the U.S. Defining a transitional moment of flux, these works illuminate the difficultly of tracing the past and express our elusive connection to the concept of origin. Through oil on linen, Trubkovich visually describes the sensation of relating to a person or physical location that no longer exists, or at least not as remembered, and aims to parse latent recall into a tangible codex.

In Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving, which inspired Trubkovich’s exhibition, the author suggests that love is a refuge – a remedy for isolation and our disconnection from each other and nature. By archiving whispers of feelings and recollections, which are dangerously close to disappearing forever, the artist forms a pictorial and emotional space, simultaneously. Implied by the title, the work presented in Leap Second also aligns with the actuality of phantom time. All of the paused moments, ethos, and bits of history that Trubkovich has chosen to suspend, occurred in the matter of an instant. This work fleshes out the missing measure by developing sentiment, and in doing so, accounts for just one leap second.

© All copyright OHWOW | Kon Trubkovich