With work by Simon Clark, Elly Clarke, Enda O’Donoghue, Kerstin Honeit, Rebecca Pittman, plan b/Sophia New & Dan Belasco Rogers, Fedora Romita and Kym Ward

Private View: 19.01.2012
And then exhibition is open 20.01.2012 – 19.02.2012 – Friday-Sunday 1-5pm
Panel Discussion: 21.01.2012, 2pm – with all artists plus Alfredo Cramerotti

Clarke Gallery is delighted and honoured to bring The Mobility Project to The Meter Room. This is the second stop of this exhibition, which began at Galerie Suvi Lehtinen in Berlin. We are extremely grateful for the support of Arts Council England, Coventry Council and Culture Ireland - without which this exhibition - and all artists - could not have come to Coventry.

“Keep connected, you are never alone, never alone with a mobile phone in your pocket.”1

Over the last decade, particularly since the mass take-up of the mobile phone, the ever-increasing mobility - of people, goods, information and images - has radically altered the way we perceive, interpret, navigate and even describe the world. Notions of presence and absence, solitude and togetherness and even of geography are changing as our personally tailored collections of contacts, communities, photos and politics are with us 24/7. The way we travel around the places we live in, and how we interact with others whilst we’re there, has a great impact on the way we understand not only where we are but also who we are. Communication and movement are, and always have been, closely linked, dictating the scope of our influence. But today, in a world where one tweeted photo can be seen across five continents within seconds, that influence can reach areas and cultures of which we have no concept.

This exhibition presents seven different projections of mobility. From Simon Clark’s epic cycle journey around the UK delivering postcards he picked up from the Galapagos Islands direct into people’s hands to plan b’s live redrawing of their GPS traces gathered (and redrawn) day by day during visits to the UK over the past few years direct onto the gallery wall; from Enda O’Donoghue paintings created from low-res mobile phone photos found on the internet to Kerstin Hon eit’s multi-city performance-experiments where she instructs women to stand on the same area of pavement for fifteen minutes; from Fedora Romita’s audio recordings of the U-Bahn network of Berlin as a means of getting to know the city she just moved to, to Rebecca Pittman’s two screen video installation of her journey along a featureless road in the states listening to driving music and finally also my own five minute video showing an unexpected moment of stillness on the German Autobahn - these are personal portraits of navigation. But, between them, they touch on wider issues t hat affect us all as we negotiate our way around the world - including gender, power, surveillance and the relationship between physical and virtual materiality.

On 21st January at 2pm a panel discussion will take place in the gallery, featuring all the artists in the show, a performance lecture by Kym Ward and guest speaker artist/curator Alfredo Cramerotti.

All work in this exhibition is for sale. There is also a specially commissioned set of prints by all exhibiting artists - the sales of which will help fund this exhibition’s onward journey.

Many thanks to Dan Pryde-Jarmen of the Meter Room, Daisy Ware-Jarrett, Genea Bailey and all artists.

Elly Clarke is an artist & curator based in Berlin and Birmingham, UK.

1Excerpt from Instanteous Culture by Berlin band Theodor Storm

CLARKE GALLERY - BERLIN / BIRMINGHAM / BEYOND // CLARKEGALLERY.DE // MAIL@CLARKEGALLERY.DE // FACEBOOK.COM/CLARKEGALLERY // ELLYCLARKE.COM

LOOKS FAMILIAR is dedicated to the idea of family – as the smallest of social cells, as a political issue, as a culture bearer, as history, as home. LOOKS FAMILIAR is an exhibition, an art project and a book dealing with actions that are both political and moving playfully, questingly towards the city and society.

For four weeks, new works by Julia Prezewowsky, Marco Montiel-Soto and Edition Taube will be exhibited at SAVVY CONTEMPORARY. Approaching the subject and the location, the artists dealt with questions such as: What do family ties tell us about social networks, elective affinities or individualism in societies? How do justice and injustice, power relations and ways to dream and to fail present themselves within constellations of (surrogate) families?

With its project FAMILIENBESUCH, LOOKS FAMILIAR actively involves local residents and visitors. Parallel to the exhibition, photographer Sibylle Hoessler, illustrator Bo Soremsky and author Karim Ben Abdelkader will visit families in Neukölln. The documents and portraits these visits result in will be added to the ongoing exhibit.

Additionally, LOOKS FAMILIAR will be documented and accompanied my means of a publication. The artistic encyclopedia is a cooperation with art book publishing house Edition Taube.

Un-curated by Susanne Husse and Jana Sotzko

Julia Prezewowsky // Kym Ward
Ausstellung: 11. December 2010 – 15. January 2011

Opening: Friday, 10. December 2010, 7 – 10 p.m.

In a performance-oriented media society, an enormous amount of value is placed on the public representation and marketing of the self. The artist's role in society has also adapted to the immensely enhanced power of definition wielded by the market, which treats artists’ names like brand names and is constantly in search of new talent. Sales strategies are heavily oriented toward consumer impact and performative structures of presentation, as well as the impression of a self-confident artistic ego. The new myth of the artist operates between ideal-typical, preestablished forms of behavior and, within those, a pointedly individual performance. In their exhibition, Julia Prezewowsky and Kym Ward ask: What are the parameters, gestures and forms of such a performance? Their understanding of “performance” very much includes both senses of the word, as staging and as accomplishment. The artists combine formal and conceptual aspects of various presentational strategies in their installation, and they propose promising options for constructing the subject. The search for representation and distinction is often faced with a residue of inadequacy, a failure to manifest sufficient individual presence. What emerges in this transition between the definition of form and the actual performative act is, in the exhibition PRE-FORMED, an open question.

5 Cecilia Road, London E8

State of the Art: Right Where, Art Copenhagen – The Nordic Art Fair 2010, 17th – 19th of September

Olaf Breuning (CH), Søren Thilo Funder (DK), Janice Kerbel (CA), Mark Lombardi (US), Miltos Manetas (GR), Bertrand Planes (F), Martha Rosler (US), Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung (HK/US), Elina Vainio (FI) & RazzleDazzle painting (UK).

State of the Art is Art Copenhagen's official exhibition platform for the latest contemporary art. This year the State of the Art exhibition Right Where is curated by IMO.For more information please visit:

www.imo‐projects.com

www.artcopenhagen.dk/English/State+of+the+Art

Under / Over

The tyranny between light and shadow (the underexposed and the overexposed) is given a precise image in the opening sequence of Jean-Luc Godard’s Les Mepris (1963). As the camera slides three times along Camille’s desirable, tricolor-lit body, the face of the affirmative boyfriend - Paul - is left throughout the scene, no matter what the lighting colour is, covered by Camille’s shadow. This is the overexposure of the seductive object in the eyes of the lover, himself obscured by her shadow; and it’s this dialogue – between the overt and the hidden, the highlighted facade and the shadowy underbelly, that Transidency contemplates in their first London exhibition Under / Over.

To coincide with the exhibition, Transidency (in conjunction with Close-up Videos) is compiling a set of sub-urban events: film screenings, talks etc; which negotiate issues that hang heavily on the core concept of the exhibition. Please click here for more details.

Preview / order exhibition catalogue here

]]> http://www.transidency.org/blog/2010/01/underover/feed/ 0 http://www.transidency.org/blog/2010/01/it-started-when-2/ http://www.transidency.org/blog/2010/01/it-started-when-2/#comments Sat, 16 Jan 2010 02:00:40 +0000 admin http://www.transidency.org/blog/?p=782

BERLIN 4 -7 March 2010, 100° Festival, Sophiensäle,

Two men sit in the Kitchen of Sophiensäle and talk. At first glance, nothing appears unusual about the scene, however when one carefully listens, it emerges that neither man can finish his sentences. Instead, one breaks into giggles or trails off in silence, while the other stops mid sentence and sighs deeply. It becomes clear that the dialogue is, in fact, two separated monologues; and in the background, a flickering television increasingly gains an importance.

Performance art, drama, sculpture: pan-European artist collective Transidency’s latest offering “It started when…” combines all three to produce a bewildering and mesmerizing scene of fractured communication and everyday absurdity. Set in an old apartment in Berlin’s Sophiensäle, the viewer enters a kitchen in which two men are engaged in what simultaneously seems to be a banal but also a highly intimate conversation, whose purpose or topic is not immediately intelligible.  In the background a television screen shows a variety of bizarre but captivating images such as explosions at sea or a game of scissor paper stone set in ancient Greece, with no apparent connection to the men’s dialogue. The men talk about the weather, chance, artistic failure, newspapers, longing, etc. Nothing of what they say, however, seems to have any consequence; there is neither change nor development in their interaction. The initial atmosphere is thus one of timelessness and existential absurdity, reminding one of Sartre’s Huis Clos or of Beckett’s plays, in general.

As there is no formal barrier between the spectators and the performers, the audience becomes part of the performance, wandering around the apartment, looking for meaning in some of the objects and the furniture of the apartment. Their initial response is one of irritation and uneasy amusement, triggered by the apparent senselessness of the scenario. Yet, all of sudden it becomes clear that there are actually some leitmotifs running through the men’s dialogue. The longer one listens the more fragments of sense one is able to gather.  The dialogue in fact consists of two monologues, each with its specific themes and concerns. While one of the men talks exclusively in the present tense about banal topics such as the weather, his dental health and the latest newspaper headlines, the other reflects on more profound issues such as his past relationships, abandoned dreams and the desire to produce meaningful art, all of which are expressed in the past tense. In addition an at first non-specific correspondence between the images on television and the monologues gradually emerges, which soon, however, becomes a fully developed interplay between image and word, in which every sentence uttered by the men has its counterpart on screen.

The artists thereby skillfully manage to turn a well-arranged scene of confusion into a tightly structured metaphor for the clash between the everyday and the absurd, the past and the present, the emotional and the existential, in which sense and meaning are continually produced, withdrawn and playfully dismantled. If one brings along the necessary patience (the work yields nothing at a first glance) its unique combination of discourse, image and setting proves to be mesmerizing, thought provoking and thus highly enjoyable.

- Kevin Kennedy

]]> http://www.transidency.org/blog/2010/01/it-started-when-2/feed/ 0 http://www.transidency.org/blog/2009/11/i-killed-him-for-money-constantinos-taliotis/ http://www.transidency.org/blog/2009/11/i-killed-him-for-money-constantinos-taliotis/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:20:11 +0000 admin http://www.transidency.org/blog/?p=1037 ATHENS, November 2009.

'I killed him for money and for a woman. I didn't get the money. And I didn't get the woman' © Constantinos Taliotis
Organized by Kappatos Gallery, St. George Lycabettus, Athens

www.kappatosgallery.com

A=B, The Show, Hildberghausen, Germany, October 2009. Assembling elements of different TV game shows, this performance involved two candidates executing instructions given by a big–footed TV host. The tasks included opening and closing a gherkin jar, demonstrating the workings of a vacuum cleaner or presenting a rainbow coloured sheet of paper. Accompanied by a soundtrack made of various TV jingles, beeps and canned laughter, the candidates were engaged in an absurd and monotonous game with rules that never quite revealed themselves to the audience.