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29.9.11

EVOL'S | UNDERGROUND CITY IN HAMBURG


In Nordkreuz (“Northern Cross”), Berlin-based street artist EVOL has created 
a miniature, underground city in the fields of Hamburg, Germany. 
The installation — which took him eight days to complete — found the artist 
outside of his typical urban environment, digging into a picturesque meadow 
to create a grid that viewers could actually walk through. The buildings’ compound-like, 
grey facade provides a striking contrast to the scenic surroundings, complete with 
dirt “roads.”
Check out the making-of the installation and the artist’s other work here.

28.9.11

GUILLAUME LEBLON | INTERVIEW


Philip Akkerman photographed by Willy Jolly in 2008 at the opening of his show with Tony Matelli at Stephane Simoens Contemporary Fine Art, Knokke, Belgium. ©Willy Jolly. Courtesy of the artist and the photographer
Guillaume Leblon in his studio. Photo by Selina Ting ©initiArt Magazine. 2011

The French artist Guillaume Leblon (*1971) creates site-specific installations, sculptures, videos and works on paper which transform our perception of the space and its function. Through a sort of staged presentation of his work, he charges his objects with metaphorical meanings, introducing a certain uneasiness that affects and stimulates our perception. Guillaume Leblon belongs to the generation of artists who believe that art is neither a representation of the world nor of one's knowledge, but rather an extension of the real in all its possibilities. As Lucas Cerizza puts it, Leblon’s work “does not come across as direct images, like head-on visions. Rather, it is a subtle interplay of hidden and revealed things, a slow process toward the discovery of an undefined place, the attempt to perceive an atmosphere.”
Guillaume Leblon is nominated for the Prix Marcel Duchamp 2011.
The result will be announced on 22 October 2011.


GL – Guillaume Leblon
ST – Selina Ting pour InitiArt Magazine

ST : You started showing your work when you graduated from the Rijksakademie in 2000. Since, you have been very much solicited by the international institutions, first in the Netherlands, then in Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Italy and finally you had your first exhibition in France in 2004. However, it was only until 2005 that you started working with a gallery (Galerie Jocelyn Wolff). Can we say that your work tended to be conceived for institutional context rather than for galleries? In your work, very often, we see an intervention on the architectural space of the museum.
GL : Definitely, what we can present in a museum or a contemporary art centre is very different from an intervention in a gallery, for example. Besides, it’s not a question of space or market constraint, but showing in a museum automatically implies exchanges with a curator. The projects were conceived through these dialogues. Also, for some obvious reasons, the relationship with space has to be reinvented in each exhibition according to the venue. I am not interested in museum architecture in the strictest sense. What interest me are the particular constraints that restrict the architecture. I accept these constraints as the intergratable elements in my work, that they can nourish the work and finally become an intrinsic part of the exhibition.
ST : This precision is very interesting and important because your work reminds one of architecture, particular certain works that employs architectural forms and elements, such as Intérieur-Façade (1999 – 2001).  
GL : That was the piece I did in Rijksakademie. It uses the codes of an architectural model, in a way it was a “modeling” of the real space in which I worked every day at that time. It’s true that I sometimes borrow titles from architectural catalogue, such as “view from entrance towards the stairs”, etc. These titles speak of images, i.e., what was shown in the image was not necessarily an architectural part or a sculpture but a situation, a point of view in the space.

Guillaume Leblon, installation view at MUDAM, Luxembourg, 2009. Works : Cold water I , II, III, IV, V. 2009, Pastel (gris bleu) sur papier, 200x140cm (avec cadre 216x156 cm) ; Channel. 2009, chêne brut, 575 cm (longueur) x 71cm (hauteur max) et 56cm (hauteur min.) x 102cm ; Site of confluence. 2009, coquillages, sable, matières organiques, fils, feutre et bois, taille variable, 8 feuilles de peuplier 250x125x1,6 cm, différentes formes.
Guillaume Leblon, installation view at MUDAM, Luxembourg, 2009. Works : Cold water I , II, III, IV, V. 2009, Pastel (gris bleu) sur papier, 200x140cm (avec cadre 216x156 cm) ; Channel. 2009, chêne brut, 575 cm (longueur) x 71cm (hauteur max) et 56cm (hauteur min.) x 102cm ; Site of confluence. 2009, coquillages, sable, matières organiques, fils, feutre et bois, taille variable, 8 feuilles de peuplier 250x125x1,6 cm, différentes formes.

ST : The placement and emplacement of a work inside an exhibition space is essentially the sense-making process of an exhibition. What is the most important element for you in terms of exhibition display?    
GL : The circulation is important. Often, I close the doors, confine the spaces, or I simple change the routing. I operate these spatial changes in order to oblige the audience to see the works from a certain way without restricting them. In other words, I want to offer the audience a certain point of view to look at the work so as to create a sense of strolling in the exhibition space, i.e. the exhibition becomes a landscape, a routing, without starting point nor ending point.    
ST : Does the exhibition context, the history of the museum or institution, etc. play a role in the consideration of an intervention in the exhibition space?
GL : The quality of the floor, the geology, the climate, the plants, the social condition… all the elements that describe the context and environment of an exhibition venue are the indispensable considerations in the thinking process. But there is no hierarchy between them. Then, of course, there are qualities that are specific to each exhibition space. In relation to these specificities, I have to take my position and elaborate a strategy that can enable the exhibition to exist as a whole, a totality. Such cohesion or coherence might not necessarily be à priori guaranteed in the space.   
ST : How to avoid the repetition even if the context and space varied from one exhibition to another ? 
GL : I get bored easily. I am impatient person. But I work to transform these defaults into quality. My constant preoccupation is to avoid being confined in the work process. I purposely leave the works open, instable and always standing-by. Such quality allows me to re-evaluate my work according to the exhibitions, either by expanding the pieces or diminishing them.

Left: Four Ladders, 2008, ailes d’un moulin à vent. Exhibition View: Four Ladders, STUK, Leuven, Belgium, 2008. Right: Four Ladders, 2008, Ailes d’un moulin à vent. Exhibition View : Fabricateurs d’espaces, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2008-09. Copyright image: Blaise Adilon
Left: Four Ladders, 2008, ailes d’un moulin à vent. Exhibition View: Four Ladders, STUK, Leuven, Belgium, 2008. Right: Four Ladders, 2008, Ailes d’un moulin à vent. Exhibition View : Fabricateurs d’espaces, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, 2008-09. Copyright image: Blaise Adilon

ST : If the studio is the site of creation and the exhibition is the context of manifestation, at which point is a piece of work judged complete and ready to be shown?
GL : When an object quits my studio, it might not be accomplished. The accomplishment is achieved in its destination. In other words, between the moment it quits the studio and the moment it is positioned in the museum, there is instability. The studio is not the site of completion. It’s the exhibition context which completes the work.
ST : Do the videos count as part of the totality of the work? How many videos have you made so far? What place do they occupy in your work?
GL : I have made 5 or 6 videos. They are just a sort of notes, drafts, or drawings that accompany my work. Sometimes, they are projected on a sculpture. In any case, they are not that kind of cinematographic films, but they work with the environment of the exhibition. So they are an indispensable part of my work. Generally speaking, I try not to take my works in any form of hierarchical order.

Guillaume Leblon, Notes, 2007.Vidéo couleur sonore. 7’22". Courtesy Frac Bourgogne, © Guillaume Leblon.
Guillaume Leblon, Notes, 2007.Vidéo couleur sonore. 7’22". Courtesy Frac Bourgogne, © Guillaume Leblon.

ST : There is always a performative dimension in your videos, such as Notes (2007) which you are showing right now in the Lyon Biennale 2001.
GL : There is certain implementation in my video work that highlights a more spontaneous and visually more performative dimension in the videos. At the same time, the notion of time which is specific to video has always been there in my work. I am always interested by the cinema except that I don’t have the patience to make long movies. I need spontaneity and rapidity. [Laughs] But I conscious that video allows a different way of narration, of saying things. Beside, an exhibition also has a performative quality in it.

Exhibition view : Guillaume Leblon, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 2006. Works from left: Raum, 2006, plâtre, 230 x 500 x 600 cm (2006); Sans Titre, 2006. Bois de bouleau, vêtements, humidificateur / Birch wood, clothes, atomizer, 115 x 160 x 15 cm. Olives (2006) or Chrysocale (Lampe) (2005).
Exhibition view : Guillaume Leblon, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, 2006. Works from left: Raum, 2006, plâtre, 230 x 500 x 600 cm (2006); Sans Titre, 2006. Bois de bouleau, vêtements, humidificateur / Birch wood, clothes, atomizer, 115 x 160 x 15 cm. Olives (2006) or Chrysocale (Lampe) (2005).

ST : A work that functions on the borderline between the interior and the exterior is the ubu Roi (2004). I have read some commentaries on this piece but still haven’t got a chance to see it in real. I don’t really understand the story of the dog…
GL : [Laughs] It was a piece for my first solo exhibition in France [AZIMUT, FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France]. There were a private garden and guarding dog next to the art centre in Bourgogne. I drilled a hole on the wall separating the art centre and the garden. What interests me was the bouleversement in which the domestic space entered into the exhibition space, except that there is a piece of Plexiglas attached to the hole. Whenever a visitor entered the art centre, the dog would run towards the hole and bark at the person – as a way to defend its own territory! Thus, it was us who were inside a dog-house and the dog outside in territory. It was very beautiful.

ST : Something banal, normal, easily ignored, suddenly become metaphorical, such as the phantomlike presence of the dog in the work that evoke the ideas and the paradoxes of the situation: the reverse of the roles, of the space, of a hierarchical system, etc. As you have mentioned several times that you don’t like give priority to things. But the choices of certain elements are not innocent either.       
GL : It’s true that there is a profanatory aspect in my work. Usually, they are the elements that appeared to be natural in where they were. For example, at the exhibition in Porto, Portugal, a street musician arrived at the exhibition and started playing as if he was a homeless playing in the street. Of course, he was part of the show. For me, it was a gentle way of bringing the exterior into the interior and at the same time, it was very violent because the exhibition space was supposed to be a venue with its proper function, i.e., dedicated to art: a bit like a church with a sacred status.

Exhibition view : Guillaume Leblon, Augmentation and dispersion, 2008. Centre d’art contemporain Culturgest, Porto, Portugal. Courtesy of the artist and Centre d’art contemporain Culturgest, Porto, Portugal.
Exhibition view : Guillaume Leblon, Augmentation and dispersion, 2008. Centre d’art contemporain Culturgest, Porto, Portugal. Courtesy of the artist and Centre d’art contemporain Culturgest, Porto, Portugal.

ST : So, it’s intrusive…
GL: Yes, it’s intrusive ; it’s rather a kind of poetic profanation than provocative.
ST : Does the image of a spectator exist inside your imagination at the moment when a piece of work is conceived?
GL : At the moment when one considers the space as the departure point of an exhibition, the spectator’s point of view is implied. There is also the ambiance, the body, etc., that affect the space.
ST : Thank you!

Guillaume Leblon, exhibition view : Après la pluie, Musée départemental d’art contemporain, Rochechouart, 2007. Liste des oeuvres: L’arbre, 2005, 600 cm long, bois, plastique. Structures, 2006-2007, dim. variable. bois, carton. April street, 2001-2005, 16 mm, couleur, 8 mn.
Guillaume Leblon, exhibition view : Après la pluie, Musée départemental d’art contemporain, Rochechouart, 2007. Liste des oeuvres: L’arbre, 2005, 600 cm long, bois, plastique. Structures, 2006-2007, dim. variable. bois, carton. April street, 2001-2005, 16 mm, couleur, 8 mn.

Guillaume Leblon
Born in 1971 in Lille (France). Lives and works in Paris.
Personal exhibitions (selective since 2008): 2011 - Facing the dry dirt, The Suburban & The Poor farm experiment, Little Wolf, Wisconsin, USA; - Fondation Paul Ricard, Paris, France, curator : Alessandro Rabotini. 2010 - L’Entretien, theatre piece written by Thomas Boutoux & Guillaume Leblon, le Temple, Paris, France; - Strange form of Life, Projecte SD, Barcelona, Spain; - Monumento Nazionale, Centre Culturel français, Milan, Italy, curator : Alessandro Rabotini ; - Someone Knows Better Than MeLe grand café, Centre d’art contemporain, Saint-Nazaire. 2009 - Réplique de la chose absente, Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris, France ; Site of confluence, MUDAM, Luxembourg. 2008 - Augmentation and dispersion, Centre d’art contemporain Culturgest, Porto, Portugal ; - Parallel walk, Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; - The Extra Ordinary, galerie Projecte SD, Barcelona, Spain; - Four ladders, STUK, Kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium ; - Maisons sommaires, Centre d’art contemporain, Domaine de Kerguéhennec, France.
Guillaume Leblon is represented by the Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, Paris.
http://guillaumeleblon.com

www.initiartmagazine.com

25.9.11

GARY ROUGH | SORCHA DALLAS GLASGOW























A Premonition of the Future, 2011; used and new books, reclaimed timber; 
dimensions variable. 
Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas


Gary Rough’s solo show, ‘Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. …’ was developed 
during a residency of five weeks in the galleries of Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow.



















A Premonition of the Future, 2011 (detail); used and new books; reclaimed timber; 
dimensions variable. Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

In the first gallery, copies of George Orwell’s ‘1984’ sit on shelves, lining the upper 
perimeter of the gallery. An installation of Rough’s ongoing attempt to acquire one 
thousand, nine hundred and eighty-four copies of ‘1984’ that are either used or gifts, 
the ominously titled work A Premonition of the Futurecarries with it the text’s dystopian 
notions of censorship and suppressed freedom.  On one hand, the described attempt 
represents a feat of encountering and collecting the literal and symbolic meanings of 
the text as it passes through the hands of others. Viewers are presented with a state 
in-between that speaks of potential, and a sampling of book covers reflecting the 
proliferation of the text across various publishing and distribution channels over time. 
On the other hand, the sparseness of the installation and its out-of-reach display 
alludes to a quest that cannot be attained, contrasting with the narrated ambition.






















Top: Untitled, 2011; emulsion on wall; dimensions variable. 
Bottom (Left to Right): Failed Pattern (Left), 2011; Failed Pattern (Wrong), 
2011; Failed Pattern (Right), 2011. All drawings framed pen on paper; 63.4 x 50.8 x 3.5 cm. 
Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

The curious admixture of endeavor and futility is strongly apparent in the second gallery, 
displaying three pen drawings from an ongoing Failed Pattern series where deliberate 
errors are created that distort the regularity of harlequin patterns. These drawings are 
distinguished through titles that play with the sense of both space and failure, and dialogue 
with a lone pen drawing, Failed Pattern (Away from Here) that is hung in the office of 
Sorcha Dallas as part of the exhibition. The exercise in creating intentional failed 
patterns is paralleled along corners of the gallery walls that appear to be painted 
at the same height of the shelves of A Premonition of the Future, creating a visual 
continuation across both galleries. While the cumulative effect of the distortions in 
the pen drawings creates curvatures and a slightly optical effect; the use of paint 
for the patterns of the wall make room for the mistakes to be demonstrated through 
drips and cracks, presenting a sense of beauty that arises from exercises in failure.


























Top: Untitled, 2011; emulsion on wall; dimensions variable. 
Bottom: Failed Pattern (Left), 2011; framed pen on paper; 63.4 x 50.8 x 3.5 cm. 
Courtesy of Sorcha Dallas

Across both galleries, the installation and drawings compel one to think of the ways 
that narratives and practices of effort and failure act as recurring patterns in the 
rhythm of life one encounters on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. …
Born in Glasgow, Rough (b.1972) is now based in New York, and has presented 
solo exhibitions atInverleith House, Edinburgh; PS. 1 MoMA, New York; 
McCaffrey Fine Art, NY, and Yvon Lambert, Paris.

5.9.11

JACOB DAHL JURGENSEN | CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN


Artist: Jacob Dahl Jürgensen
Venue: Christian Andersen, Copenhagen
Exhibition Title: All That is Solid Melts into Air
Date: August 12 – September 17, 2011


Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Christian Andersen, Copenhagen
Press Release:
There is an expression in the US that says, ‘I was a general so my son could be a Senator. I was a Senator so my son could be a banker. I was a banker so my son could be an artist.’ The expression has always resonated, mapping as it does a series of values – implicitly, the triumph of the cultural – as well as a very real Western socio-economic history, from warring communities to the incorporation of a body politic towards a society structured around economics – and, ultimately, towards one predicated on artistic merit (which I think we are all still waiting for).
Mimicking a jewellery shop (complete with display cases with commodities, and a bell announcing the arrival of customers) Jacob Dahl Jürgensen’s exhibition takes a similarly generational view of society and economics, again looking at it through the prism of the familial. The show takes as its focal point the watch manufacturing company Jules Jürgensen, to whose founder Jacob Dahl Jürgensen is distantly related. Established in the mid-1700s, the company became one of the most successful watchmakers of the industrial revolution, an era almost symbolic of precise time-keeping and mechanical implements. These were not mere commodities but were intimately related to the territorial expansion of that time period; Jules Jürgensen, for example, manu-factured the marine chronometers used by the Danish merchant navy. Later the watchmaker’s was sold to an American company, and became in the last century a manufacturer of cheap Rolex replicas, before going bust in the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis. It thus tracks, in many ways, the move from early industrial family-owned companies to the current economy, in which an object’s worth is derived not intrinsically but by the status or fetish attached to it (here, that of the Rolex name). The company’s closure signals, perhaps, its comeuppance but also the end of a particular world view.
For Jürgensen adds to the narrative arc of the saying quoted above a paradigm shift: that from the analogue to the digital. Vast amounts of information are now digitally stored on hard drives, like the ones used by Jürgensen to construct the chime hanging by the entrance to the gallery, the work that also lends the show its title (All That Is Solid Melts into Air – itself a quote from Marx). Information, immaterial but for the reflective disk, memory stick or hard drive it is stored on, makes headline news, brings down governments, identifies ‘terrorist’ suspects and strikes them remotely. People wave hello on Skype from thousands of miles away. Distances are compressed and time enters a continuous now. Against this present is the family story of the past, symbolised in the faded, fading catalogue reproductions of the ‘contemporary design’ watches that hang on the wall in this exhibition: time-keepers whose time, in so many ways, has passed.
For many members of a mid-thirties generation, it seems particularly poignant that this shift should be symbolised in a watch – a watch being, perhaps, the first item that one owned that once was analogue, and which then suddenly took on the rectangular shape and LED numbers of the digital wristwatch. What of all the time spent learning the twelve-hour analogue clock! All that knowledge, obsolete in our own lifetime. Contemporary artists have lately taken the role of archaeologists, archivists or historians, and this exhibition, unlike Jürgensen’s previous works that rather investigated the movement of bodies and light through space, is of this kind. Artists no longer act as agents of the modernist ‘new’ – but one could argue that their interest in the past represents an attempt similar to modernism in trying to preserve a temporality that is being sidelined by the majority. In mapping the Jules Jürgensen company, Jürgensen seeks to put our latest socio-economic shift in historical perspective, but also (a modernist impulse) to make digitisation ‘strange’ again, to remind viewers, some of whom are the last of the pre-computer generation, of the ways and means of an analogue world – its slowness, its lack of standardisation and, above all, its materiality and comprehensibility. What information lies invisible, hanging in the chime by the door?
Melissa Grönlund, July 2011
Melissa Grönlund is the Managing Editor of Afterall, an arts journal based in London. She is a frequent contributor to numerous publications including frieze and Cabinet magazines.
Jacob Dahl Jürgensen (b. 1975 in Copenhagen, lives and works in London) graduated from Goldsmiths College in London. He has primarily exhibited internationally and this is his first gallery show in Copenhagen. The exhibition overlaps with his solo show Ship Wrecking at Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art. It runs through Sunday 14 August. In July it was awarded by the Danish Arts Foundation.