Secret art places: Part II

Cetate Arts Danube, the other art-camp I visited in August, has been situated since 2008 on the same premises as the one in Tescani, but the methods of work are somewhat different. Initiated and supported by the Joana Grevers Foundation in Bucharest, the art-camp in Cetate is hosted in a mansion built between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century by a local landlord, Barbu Drugă. It is a beautiful Art Deco building, with Mediterranean influences.

Ştefan Creţu (RO), Simon Iurino (IT/ AT), Cristian Răduţă (RO), and Napoleon Tiron (RO) were the four artists invited to create new artworks in Cetate last summer. Over the years, all the invited artists have colonised the available spaces with their art: the old barn has taken the function of a Kunsthalle, while the vast area surrounding the buildings contains artistic interventions that surprise the viewer, especially in connection with the architecture of the place.

Napoleon Tiron, an iconic Romanian sculptor now in his eighties, placed a monumental sculpture of multiple spread wings in the garden of the mansion. For days, he cut and calculated dimensions, researching the area in order to find a position for his structure. At the time of the residence in Cetate, Napoleon had been reading about the history of landscape, van Gogh’s letters to his brother and various biographies of artists and musicians, and these writings inspired him to closely listen to nature and the sounds people were making.

Not far from Napoleon’s work, Cristian Răduţă placed a tree-shaped stand decorated with coloured plastic plates he had bought from the local market. He was calling this construction “a utility tree”, and it represented a major change in his practice, as Cristian had previously been oriented towards large-format sculptures, usually using different resins, which were bound to the studio, without exploring or interacting that much with the surroundings.

Ştefan Creţu, one of the artists that had been coming to the mansion for several years, sought inspiration for his kinetic sculptures in Darwinism. His main interest is following the evolution of humanity from amphibian to machine, stressing the limits of artificial intelligence.

Simon Iurino was focused on utilising materials from existing structures, working with the plan of the space, appropriating their context and analysing the function that these old objects had before. The series of cyanotypes he produced at Cetate were describing fragments of architectural details, combining the textile with the text and its form, in an attempt to test the expansion of linguistics.

While wondering about the local mythology in the remote village of Cetate, I unexpectedly met the British writer Selma Dabbagh who joined us for dinner one evening. She was writer-in-residence at Port Cultural Cetate, the old agricultural port by the Danube, once part of the Barbu Drugă’s estate and transformed in recent years into a cultural centre by the Romanian dissident poet Mircea Dinescu.

Selma had been talking to the local people, taking notes on mysterious situations and exploring stories told by the villagers while they were pursuing their daily errands. The night we met, during the time we were visiting the cellars of the mansion, Selma mentioned a very interesting story about a young woman turning old upon her death. The story somehow brought me closer to the intimate strata of the community, surrounded by borders – the first border being the Danube, from where one can spot the second and the third borders with Bulgaria and Serbia.

As I noted at the beginning of the text, the combination of the shock of the image, the human condition and the thin line between past, present and future define the spaces that assume a position outside the standardised art system.

And here is the story told by Selma:

The woman who serves us waves her hands around. I understand nothing of what she says. I am the only person in Port Cetate who does not speak fluent Romanian. There are many things I still don’t understand about Romania, but at least I have learnt not to mention Dracula. Port Cetate, on the Danube in the west of Romania, where I am writer-in-residence for a fortnight, has set up a sculpture park of angels to counter the Dracula park project being mooted for Transylvania, a region in the north of the country. There is indignation in the look of the woman serving us, possibly at not being deemed credible; that much I can comprehend from her challenging eyes. I like this serving woman. She bounds from table to table, talks in a flurry and has no time for anyone. She’s like an Almodovar woman without the legs, high-heels or subtitles.

What is she saying?

They’ll tell me. It’s a long story. A big story. It has been going on all week. But interpreters are fallible. If their curiosity does not match yours, you end up with holes in your tale, gaps that can only be sewn together by fictions.

First they tell me this:

There had been a death. A woman. A mother of six children in the local village, Cetate, where all the workers came from. This woman, a relative of many who worked in the kitchen, had fallen in the road, was taken to the hospital and died in childbirth. The baby was fine. 

I couldn’t get this at all.

Tragic? Yes.

Deserving of the facial expressions and daily updates? No.

Could someone explain further please?

The thing, they explained, was the body. The body of the woman had aged. When they went to bury this woman in her thirties, they found an old woman. She looked at least 70 in the open coffin. 

What else? Surely there was more.

They now felt she was haunting them. She had scared them. They could still see her. She never went to the hospital to give birth. She never would have been in the hospital if she had not collapsed. There had been many other children – that was the other thing – maybe as many as 22. The others were born and buried in the woods. Only a handful survived. That’s why they feared her. That’s why she couldn’t rest.

On my last Saturday I am taken to one of the workers’ houses in Cetate for a barbecue. We open the wine by pushing the cork in after banging its bottom against the rough stucco wall of the house. I eat a spicy sausage sitting on a blue plastic stool and am handed a litre of rosé in a tankard. A mobile phone is propped up in an empty beer glass to play us some music as we sit. There’s chat. Someone hands me a phone with a photograph displayed: a baby in a blue and white onesie lying on a towel. The child, it is explained, is the boy of the woman who died.

He’s being baptised the next day. Isn’t he cute? I consider the wriggling infant trapped in the tiny screen: a child known from birth as the progeny of an infanticidal witch.

Angelic, I reply, slipping the phone back into the glass for the music to continue.

The 20th century mansion in Cetate hosting artists each summer. Photo credit Ştefan Radu Creţu
The 20th century mansion at Cetate that hosts artists each summer. Photo: Ştefan Radu Creţu

Cristian Răduţă’s intervention in the shape of a tree decorated with colored plastic plates and located in the garden of the mansion. Photo credit Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation
Cristian Răduţă’s intervention in the shape of a tree decorated with colored plastic plates and located in the garden of the mansion. Photo: Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy of the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation

The angel with multiple wings created by Napoleon Tiron. Photo credit Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation
The angel with multiple wings created by Napoleon Tiron. Photo: Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy of the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation

Simon Iurino’s installation that questions space – emotional, physical, imagined and hidden. Photo credit Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation
Simon Iurino’s installation that questions space—emotional, physical, imagined and hidden. Photo: Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy of the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation

One of Ştefan Radu Creţu’s mythical creatures is crawling on an old wall. Photo credit Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation
One of Ştefan Radu Creţu’s mythical creatures is crawling on an old wall. Photo: Ştefan Radu Creţu. Courtesy of the artist and Joana Grevers Foundation

The group of artists in Cetate / upper row, from left to right, standing: Ecaterina Dinulescu (the coordinator of the project), and Napoleon Tiron; seating on the stairs, from left to right: Cristian Răduţă, Ştefan Radu Creţu and Jacques, Simon Iurino
The group of artists in Cetate. Standing L-R: Ecaterina Dinulescu (the coordinator of the project) and Napoleon Tiron; Seated L-R: Cristian Răduţă, Ştefan Radu Creţu and Jacques, Simon Iurino

The old smith’s shop was transformed in a chapel by architect Alexandra Afrasinei in 2013
The old smith’s shop was transformed in a chapel by architect Alexandra Afrasinei in 2013




Secret art places: Part I

The exhibition Nouvelles histoires de fantômes, prepared by Georges Didi-Huberman and Arno Gisinger and presented this year in the Palais de Tokyo, discussed the after-life of images, trying to explain how the visuality of the present is being formed after a century of art that had been politicized since WWI, and how our artistic memory is shaped by this panoply of visual information.

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas stood at the core of this major installation of images and archive material, first displayed at Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in 2010. The beautiful publication produced for the occasion inspired me for a while in my writings and thinking about art, as it was articulate, coherent and had “a soul”. In the exhibition, apart from the strong imagery, like Harun Farocki’s videos, one could see Paul Klee’s herbarium, with his related writings and graphics, or Sol LeWitt’s photo collages.

It was exactly this relationship between contemporary visuality – the private life of an artwork operating like the mechanisms of the human condition – that has led me to explore several art-camps in Romania (tabara artistica in Romanian) this summer, with the purpose of tracking the different conditions of the artistic discourse, that are not always visible due to the accelerated rhythm of the art system. And I would like to talk about two of them: one in Tescani, a small village in the Eastern part of Romania and one in Cetate, another small village in the Southern part of the country, near the Danube. What is interesting about art-camps is that they have a structure different from that of a residency – they do have an organization behind them, but it is not that visible and it usually depends on a handful of dedicated people that make things work. In an art-camp, it is normal to have the same group of artists that meet there each year, spending from two to four weeks together, creating a connection between each other and a continuity that shapes the specific identity of the location. Even though they have interests in various media, the artists tend to explore the possibilities of traditional materials and practices, trying to stay away from the computer. The awe-inspiring landscape brings inspiration and character to the artistic process, and also a real environment for thinking and debate.

The art-camp in Tescani is housed in the mansion of an old Romanian noble family, Rosetti-Tescanu. Built at the end of the 19th century, in a pure classical style, the building is flooded by light and surrounded by a dendrologic park. The observer can easily distinguish here layers of history, stories and expectations. After the heir of the family, Maruca, married the renowned Romanian composer George Enescu, the house became the drawing-room of Enescu. In 1947, the year communism was established in Romania, the mansion was donated by the family to the Romanian state and became a cultural centre. In the 1980s it became a memorial house dedicated to the Rosetti-Enescu family.

Colonia 21 is an artistic group that was formed in 2003 around another art-camp, through the initiative of Romanian painter Teodor Moraru, and supported by The Concerts Society Bistrita. Since 2008, Colonia 21 has been convening each summer in Tescani. Apart from the main group, each year there are several invited artists, together with the recipient of the Teodor Moraru Scholarship. During my stay, there were eleven Romanian artists working in Tescani: Dan Badea, Dragos Badita, Dragos Burlacu, Claudiu Ciobanu, Marius Craita Mandra, Anca Irinciuc, Cristina Nedelea, Maria Pop Timaru, Justinian Scarlatescu, Alex Tomazatos and Zoltan Béla.

Under a pavilion, hidden behind the mansion, one would discover Zoltan Bela, Anca Irinciunc, Justinian Scarlatescu and Cristina Nedelea working on several canvases at the same time.

I have been familiar with Zoltan Bela’s practice for several years, and this July, I met him at a moment when he wanted to change his style of painting radically. Focused on the process and on the daily experience, Bela was taking notes and observing the small details of the space, staying away from photography, while positioning himself closer to nature.

In her paintings, Anca Irinciunc was combining elements she kept seeing in her walks around Tescani, like the same horse, or a plate with the message “House for Sale”, with the way light was falling on the pavilion and on the grass in certain moments of the day. Hybrid pictures, sometimes visually uncomfortable, were resulting from decomposing the real images.

Working with a large collection of original photographs that he collected from flea markets in Bucharest, Justinian Scarlatescu was transferring the images onto canvas and intervening in them, often using rudimentary equipment and expired films, without controlling the result. His purpose was to address memory and to break the chain of reproducing visual information.

Cristina Nedelea mentioned that the artists in Tescani form a nucleus, with a specific interest in landscape, drawing and the figurative. Selections of art movies and the stereotypical imagery used lucidly by film directors to express certain states of mind represented an important part of the documentary material and a basis for their discussions.

Marius Craita Mandra analyzed through his paintings the relation between the rhythm of everyday life and the standardization of the daily through the use of computers. His human models resembled cases that had been emptied of their private contents, and re-filled with information that didn’t belong to them.

Dragos Badita, the recipient of this year’s Teodor Moraru Scholarship, used his observations of the surroundings and of the people working the fields to draw with Indian ink on paper flamboyant landscapes communicating the intensity of the wind through the trees and the valleys.

A good dose of humor, mythology and contemporary living are coordinates that Maria Pop Timaru combined in her drawings and objects. The comments she was making on paper, in the form of writing or futurist drawings, would be later transformed into wooden objects that talked about childhood memories and disruptive political situations.

Dragos Burlacu was tracing the spaces of experiment, that for instance included eating together with all the artists at the same table, and introducing the presence of an invisible character or a fictitious situation that would bring criticality in the form of humorous postures or comments. I mention here the painting displaying the aerial view of a friendly dinner among artists, as if God was the beholder, but in the same time the part-taker to a conspiracy.

Studying the various eating habits of people was also one of Dan Badea’s preoccupations. Concerned with how space in general generally evolved around him – at the private, as well as the professional level – Dan Badea filled the role of commentator for the group, often using moments in the past to justify a present day situation.

After approaching local topics in his paintings, Claudiu Ciobanu chose to work on an idea he had developed before coming to Tescani. Because the mansion has many places where the guests can sleep or hide, and was meant to shelter creative minds since the beginning of the 20th century, Claudiu commented in his works upon different stances of sleep or of covering someone’s identity.

Active as a biologist specialising in the discovery of viruses, Alex Tomazatos transformed his photographic camera into a strong and pragmatic eye documenting reality (but not necessarily the truth) about a situation. Exploring areas around Tescani that were hard to access, the photographer preferred to see what was hiding underneath the bed, or in the depth of the forest, or in the ditches on the sides of the road, a method of research that resembled his study of viruses.

In my opinion, these spaces of synthesis, where several worlds collide, define a fourth temporal dimension, a transversal and innocent time, untouched by expectation or alterity.

To be continued…

'Tescani', Photo: Dragoş Bădiţă
‘Tescani’, Photo: Dragos Badita

The resident artists in the art-camp in Tescani. Photo credit Dragoş Bădiţă
The resident artists in the art-camp in Tescani. Photo: Dragos Badita

Rosetti-Tescanu mansion in Tescani. Photo credit Dragoş Bădiţă
Rosetti-Tescanu mansion, Tescani. Photo: Dragos Badita

The wood-workshop of Maria Pop Timaru. Photo credit Dragoş Bădiţă
The wood-workshop of Maria Pop Timaru. Photo: Dragos Badita

Zoltán Béla paiting in plein-air. Photo credit Justinian Scărlătescu
Zoltan Bela paiting in plein-air. Photo: Justinian Scarlatescu

Anca Irinciuc and Justinian Scărlătescu working in the studio. Photo credit Dragoş Bădiţă
Anca Irinciuc and Justinian Scarlatescu working in the studio. Photo: Dragos Badita

The group of artists in Tescani / upper row, from left to right: Anca Irinciuc, Justinian Scărlătescu, Dan Badea, Dragoș Burlacu, Dragoș Bădiţă, Anca Verona Mihuleţ, Zoltán Béla, Alex Tomazatos, Cristina Nedelea; lower row, from left to right: Claudiu Ciobanu, Marius Crăiţă Mândră, Maria Pop Timaru
The group of artists in Tescani. Upper row, from left to right: Anca Irinciuc, Justinian Scarlatescu, Dan Badea, Dragos Burlacu, Dragos Badita, Anca Verona Mihuleţ, Zoltan Bela, Alex Tomazatos and Cristina Nedelea. Lower row, from left to right: Claudiu Ciobanu, Marius Craita Mandra and Maria Pop Timaru

Dragoş Burlacu, “Cena”, oil on stainless steel sheet, selectively sanded,2013. Courtesy the artist
Dragos Burlacu, ‘Cena’, 2013, oil on stainless steel sheet, selectively sanded. Courtesy of the artist

 




Pirate – bug – museum

An unspectacular football match between Steaua Bucharest and the Norwegian team Rosenborg Ballklub which took place last week made me realise that ten years ago, almost to the day, these same two teams had met with the same result (Steaua losing to Rosenborg). The entire situation, together with the chronological coincidence, made me recall an exhibition with an unusual format, presented only for a day, on the 23rd of August 2005.

Liviana Dan is a curator whose work dates back to  the ‘80s, with ‘uncomfortable’ projects in various space-formats, from basements and streets to exhibition halls in a number of Romanian cities, with a particular focus on Sibiu – a medieval city situated in central Romania. Back in 2005, Dan initiated a curatorial direction in the museum where she was working: An Artist – A Day in the Brukenthal MuseumSituated in Sibiu, the Brukenthal Museum is one of the oldest museums in Europe, opened to the public as a private institution in 1817 (although there was notable public activity in the collection long prior to that date).

An Artist – A Day in the Brukenthal Museum had a genuine laboratory structure, testing whether young artists could wield the complex structure of an old art institution and discover its soft underbelly. It was not about assailing what the museum represents, but rather about unveiling its vulnerable or unseen sides. The invited artists were supposed to make a one-day intervention in one part of the museum, without disrupting the usual display, but still questioning the history of art as a “sequence of successful transgressions”, to quote Susan Sontag.

The exhibition that day was entitled Almost Censored and it featured a site-specific installation conceived by Sebastian Moldovan. Freshly out of art school, the artist was rejecting the academic system, and the museum-as-exhibition space was too much. In this state of in-betweenness, he chose to work with that standard silence each museum encompasses, and explored the condition of closed systems or circuits that can’t support any charge. These days, when asked about the exhibition, Sebastian recalls that he could feel the museum was a serious institution and he acted like a sort of ‘pirate’.

There was one video installation installed in a former chimney ( the space where he displayed his works had  functioned as a kitchen in the past) showing various animated bugs walking around the dust that had accumulated  at the bottom of the structure over  the years. The work was playful and earnest at  the same time, being supposedly about  the bugs that walk under the skin of the museum. The other elements featured in the installation were two conjoined vacuum cleaners wrapped around a pillar, two bulbs and two plugs connected to each other, and a popular metal hook destined to keep a door shut: simple statements about the state of things, without much mystification.

Teodor Graur, ‘Europia’, the basement of the Pharmacy Museum, Sibiu, 1986; a project organized by Liviana Dan. Courtesy Teodor Graur
Teodor Graur, ‘Europia’, the basement of the Pharmacy Museum, Sibiu, 1986; a project organized by Liviana Dan, image courtesy of Teodor Graur

Sebastian Moldovan, preparatory drawing for Almost Censored, 2005. Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, preparatory drawing for ‘Almost Censored’, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Moldovan, preparatory drawing for Almost Censored, 2005. Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, preparatory drawing for ‘Almost Censored’, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Moldovan, preparatory drawing for Almost Censored, 2005. Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, preparatory drawing for ‘Almost Censored’, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Almost Censored, exhibition view, the Brukenthal Museum, 2005. Courtesy the artist
‘Almost Censored’, exhibition view, the Brukenthal Museum, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Closed Systems – Vacuum Cleaner’, object, 2005. Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Closed Systems – Vacuum Cleaner’, object, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Closed Systems – Light Bulbs’, object, 2005. Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Closed Systems – Light Bulbs’, object, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Closed Systems – Plugs’, object, 2005. Courtesy the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Closed Systems – Plugs’, object, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Bugs’, animation, 59’’, loop, 2005. Courtesy of the artist
Sebastian Moldovan, ‘Bugs’, animation, 2005, courtesy of the artist

 




A tale of two cities

The tenderness of the Korean summer, with typhoon traces on top of a “viral” atmosphere imposed a different rhythm to the city of Seoul and its surroundings. It almost looked like it was ordained to re-discuss the paradigm of the big city, with stories that go back almost a hundred years.

The astute observer would be delighted to discover the layers that are hiding in the creation of Seoul as we know it today: utopia, visionary planning, the battle with modernity, the heaviness of the past, the spirit of the community. These states of mind transgress everyday living and impose an augmented reality where the position of the individual is constantly being evaluated.

It was in the exhibition Experiment of Architopia, organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea at the headquarters in Gwacheon that I discovered extraordinary documents about four utopian projects: Sewoon Sangga, Heyri Art Village, Paju Bookcity and Pangyo village. These controversial urban narratives were intended to launch a unique modernist view of Korean architecture, based on notions like the connecting shopping arcade, community and arts, and a symbolic social space for culture – all forming, respectively, a “landscape of desire”.

Sewoon Sangga, a 50m-wide and 1 km-long mega-structure, was supposed to connect two neighbourhoods in the central part of Seoul, rendering a totally new way of seeing and fragmenting space. It was the visionary and idealist forty-something mayor of the city, Kim Hyun Ok together with the courageous architect Kim Soo Geun, aged only 35, who had made the plan for this complex which would shelter private commercial initiatives. Unfortunately, the objectives of the space were not made clear from the beginning and the theory behind the construction was too vague to gel with Seoul’s urban planning demand. The misuse of the space affected its identity and by 2008, many of its buildings had been demolished. The recent talks and presentations around this unfinished project prompted the government to restart the discussion around Sewoon Sangga, with the clear wish to revitalize the area.

The confessions of an architect recorded on a video that was presented in the exhibition made me think more about the idea of community. The architect was talking about Paju Bookcity and how he and his collaborators were imagining it: when you walk on the street and you notice that your neighbors have left their shoes at the entrance and they are inside the house, whispering, it means that you must be silent and walk on by without disturbing them because they are making love and they shouldn’t be interrupted. As I see it now, to have an industrial city dedicated to the production of books of such sensitivity shows that the discourse around it was stronger than the real capacity of the place.

In The Unfamiliar Boundaries of Paju Bookcity (2010), architect Hyungmin Pai states: “Paju Bookcity emerges upon both the Western tradition of architecture as a symbolic art and the idea of landscape as a political and artistic instrument … As the site of such multiple intersections, it is a worthy experiment for investigating the possibility of how architecture may function in the creation and continuous transformation of identity and community in contemporary urban formation. From the inception of the idea of the book city in the late 1980s to the completion of the first phase in 2007, Paju Bookcity has been part of the changing political economy of Korea. Its particularity as a planned urban area can only be understood in the context of Korea’s recent culture of city building.”

Nowadays, many book companies once located in the centre of Seoul have moved to Paju Bookcity, although the construction has never been finished according to the masterplans and ideas of the architects that hoped to validate Korean Modernism.

Photography is one of the most valid instruments for documenting the changes around us, allowing a critical distance for the viewer to evaluate the past, present and future of a certain segment of life. City We Have Known, another exhibition produced by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and featuring the works of two renowned Korean photographers, Kang Hong Goo and Area Park, thematises the city of Seoul by focusing on the remnants and memories of the old city. While Goo (b. 1956) examines the ways in which residential landscapes are transformed by processes of urban development, Park (b. 1972) is interested in the relation between the city and the individual as social system.

In his research on cities and living, Henri Lefebvre, like Bachelard before him, theoretised the relation between people and the houses they built. He wrote about the disappearance of the “house of yore”, which served as a means of integrating thought, memory and dreams. It is through creative actions that cities attain specifity; by inventing and sculpting space, the individuals render it with rhythm and consistency, appropriating the real structure of the city.

In an attempt to appropriate the past of the port city of Incheon, Korea’s third most populous city after Seoul and Busan and also a location that has experienced many historical transformations since the Stone Age, not to mention the Japanese occupation and the strategic position it held during the Korean War, a group of ten artists (Garam & NewNew Kim, Soo Hwan Kim, Gemini Kim, Hyemin Park, Suk Kuhn Oh, Su Hyeon Woo, Oops Yang, Saem Lee, Mita Jeong and Ji Hyun Jeong ) researched and occupied abandoned houses, where they intervened in various ways, in order to raise awareness about areas that are slowly disappearing. As the broken window theory says, one empty house in a region leads to another empty house.

The project, addressed to cultural agents that have an interest in locality, individuality and site-specific work, had three parts: Punk Detective Agency, where the agency workers were detectives chasing traces of local history, memories or incidents and archiving them; Temporary Property Manager, a mobile bureau that introduced empty houses to artists for a short occupation, allowing anybody who had an interest to use them; and Temporary Tenants (11 Empty Houses Project), a title given to the artists who exhibited their art works in each of the empty houses. The houses belonged to old people who had no heirs or whose heirs lost interest in the “tired” houses. After the owners had disappeared, the houses remained empty, with vestiges of the former owner standing as inspiration for the creative minds. The local market, Yongil Jayu, played an important part in their demonstration as it was the meeting point for artists, curators, merchants and their customers, allowing art and exchange to co-exist in a natural and often unexpected way.

The micro-management of any city requires different types of economies that can’t be reduced to building or conquering space in a strategic manner. The dwellers have always kept their eyes open for possibilities, refining their condition and inscribing new behaviors for those who know how to communicate with the cities.

City We Have Known: Photographs by Kang Hong Goo and Area Park, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea, 19 May – 11 October, 2015

Experiment of Architopia, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea, 30 June – 27 September, 2015.

Experimental project in the empty houses of Incheon City, (Garam & NewNew Kim, Soo Hwan Kim, Gemini Kim, Hyemin Park, Suk Kuhn Oh, Su Hyeon Woo, Woops Yang, Saem Lee, Mita Jeong and Ji Hyun Jeong)139 Yonghyun-dong, Nam-gu, Incheon, Korea, 17 June – 28 June, 2015.

Experiment of Architopia, exhibition view, Architecture Gallery, MMCA Korea, 2015. Courtesy MMCA Korea
‘Experiment of Architopia’, 2015, Architecture Gallery, MMCA, Korea. Courtesy of MMCA Korea.

Experiment of Architopia, exhibition view, Architecture Gallery, MMCA Korea, 2015. Courtesy MMCA Korea
‘Experiment of Architopia’, 2015, Architecture Gallery, MMCA, Korea. Courtesy of MMCA Korea.

City We Have Known, exhibition view, MMCA Korea, 2015. Courtesy MMCA Korea
‘City We Have Known’, 2015, MMCA, Korea. Courtesy of MMCA Korea.

Kang Hong Goo, ‘Mickey's House - Iron Rods’, 2005-6. Courtesy the artist and MMCA Korea
Kang Hong Goo, ‘Mickey’s House–Iron Rods’, 2005-06. Courtesy of the artist and MMCA Korea.

Temporary Tenants, intervention by Woops Yang, 2015. Courtesy the artist
‘Temporary Tenants’, intervention by Woops Yang, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Temporary Tenants, intervention by Soo Hwan Kim, 2015. Courtesy the artist
‘Temporary Tenants’, intervention by Soo Hwan Kim, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Temporary Tenants, intervention by Gemini Kim, 2015. Courtesy the artist
‘Temporary Tenants’, intervention by Gemini Kim, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.

Punk Detective Agency, 2015. Courtesy the artists
Punk Detective Agency, 2015. Courtesy of the artists.




Moving images

In a busy and eclectic area of Hong Kong, on the 17th floor of a commercial building, a not-for-profit space for art and performance was opened in 2014: Midtown Pop. For the conservative mind, the association of different forms of business or living with art can seem uncanny. But within the expanding space production in Hong Kong, such a place punctuates the provisions for the future.

Just a few days before the commencement of Art Basel Hong Kong, M+ Museum opened an exhibition that translates an important principle of how our society functions today – MOVING – acknowledging key aspects of borders, mobility, migration and transition. The mobile aspect of this conceptual enterprise is immediate, as the building of M+ Museum is under construction, and a series of nomadic projects have been developed in the last four years, aiming to test and slowly introduce the museum into the daily economy of Hong Kong. It all comes together in a logical association regarding the functionality of the institution and its scope – the mobile museum and the moving image. Cinematography played an important part in the curatorial demonstration, referencing the highly acclaimed film production set in Hong Kong and its special aesthetics. It was a vulnerable opening scene taking place in and outside a noodle shop from the film Floating Life, directed by Clara Law and released in 1996, that the curator had used as a “Madeleine” to discuss the mixture of feelings in a migrant’s life: nostalgia, fear of displacement and the uncontrolled switch between public and private.

By connecting all these elements, the exhibition Moving Images transposed the beholder in a complex visual experience. The setting of the video works was molecular – not too many extra walls, not too much darkness or unwanted headphones – and each art work had a well-defined position in the space, building the context for the next work the viewer would discover. Because of this rhythm, that was almost like a musical score, the visitor was naturally moving in the space of the exhibition. It is quite hard to find an exhibition where one can freely move and compose a specific relation with the space. Maximum attention was given to the labels, which were actually tiny light-boxes generating small doses of light.

Several of the works in the exhibition were discussing “the right to the city” (concept introduced by Henri Lefevre in his book Le Droit à la ville (1968), meaning the initiative of the individual to change and improve urban life, and shape it in a way that it serves the common welfare) together with the transformations Hong Kong has experienced in its modern history. The relationship with the water and the transient population was accurately constructed in Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s video piece, Central (2001), filmed on super 8 and 35 mm film. Central is a melancholic filmic portrait of Hong Kong, focused on the people passing by Victoria Harbour, carrying their memories and expectations in a silent tour. The narrator mediated the sensitive actions in the film, inviting the observer to compare Hong Kong in 2001 with Hong Kong in 2015.

The photographs depicting spectacular botanical formations, part of a series realized by Simryn Gill and entitled Forest (1996 – 1998) pointed out the colonial history of South East Asia, bringing out questions of memory and oblivion, of seeing and not being seen. The quality of the silver gelatin print was deepened by the artist through the use of strips of text that were attached to the photograph, codifying the image.

The intensity of a re-imagined dancing scene from a night on the streets of Cairo re-edited by the artist Hassan Khan in the video Jewel (2010) combined with the placid movement in Chen Chieh-jen’s piece Empire’s Borders I (2008 – 2009), which discussed the discriminatory treatment encountered by Taiwanese and Chinese migrants triggered various visual diagrams revolving around the critical phenomenology of migration and identitary transformation.

The project unfolded as a room in a room in a room, in a way celebrating the infinite possibilities of video art and film, and on the other side creating a blueprint of an exhibition that has kept on creating itself and becoming independent. Starry Starry Room (2012), the painting of the young Hong Kong artist Firenze Lai, can serve as a synthesis of this “moving visuality”.

Mobile M+: Moving Images(CAMPPaul ChanChen Chieh-jen, David DiaoEstudio Teddy CruzSimryn GillDominique Gonzalez-FoersterIsaac JulienKan XuanWilliam KentridgeHassan KhanFirenze LaiLi RanCharles LimAnson MakEllen PauKoki TanakaWang Gongxin, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chai Siris, Wong PingYoung-Hae Chang Heavy IndustriesYuan Goang-MingZhang Peili and Zhu Jia). Curated by Yung Ma, M+ Museum at Midtown Pop, Hong Kong, 13 March – 26 April 2015.

Chen Chieh-jen, ‘Empire’s Borders I’, 2008 – 2009, 35mm transferred to DVD, colour & black and white, sound, single-channel video, 26 min 50 sec
Chen Chieh-jen, ‘Empire’s Borders I’, 2008 – 2009, 35mm transferred to DVD, colour & black and white, sound, single-channel video, 26 min 50 sec

Simryn Gill, ‘Forest #6’, 1996 – 1998, silver gelatin print, 147 x 121 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist and Tracy Williams, Ltd., New York.
Simryn Gill, ‘Forest #6’, 1996 – 1998, silver gelatin print, 147 x 121 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist and Tracy Williams Ltd, New York

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, ‘Central’, 2001, super 8 and 35mm on DVD, 10 min 30 sec. Photo courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, ‘Central’, 2001, super 8 and 35mm on DVD, 10 min 30 sec. Photo courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York

Hassan Khan, ‘Jewel’, 2010, 35mm film transferred to full HD video, 6 min 30 sec. Photo courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris.
Hassan Khan, ‘Jewel’, 2010, 35mm film transferred to full HD video, 6 min 30 sec. Photo courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Firenze Lai, ‘Starry Starry Room’, 2012, acrylic on paper 40.5 x 30.5 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Firenze Lai, ‘Starry Starry Room’, 2012, acrylic on paper, 40.5 x 30.5 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist