H BOX a nomadic video art screening room 2011 program

H BOX at MUDAM (Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Mudam Luxembourg).
I.M. Pei architect design.
Photo by Andres Lejona.

Thinking back to 2008, I remember how excited I was about Zaha Hadid's Mobile Art Unit, which came to NYC-- Central Park to be exact-- for the Chanel Exhibition. Ideologically, this concept was ripe with potential, but ultimately, it failed content wise. Going beyond it's haute-couture breathren Chanel, Hermes has a foundation set up, which funnels profits into stimulating the cultural economy; focusing on supporting young artists and designers in the beginning of their careers, and soliciting responses to pressing issues in the global economy in which the luxury brand operates. H Box (Could have come up with a more creative name) is one of these endeavors. Curated by international media impressario Benjamin Weil, H Box has been commissioning four artists a year to produce single-channel video for the collapsible screening room since 2006. The mobile unit, designed by Didier Daustino travels around the world, and the works are updated on a yearly basis.

H Box is more successful than Zaha Hadid's Mobile Art Container in terms of form and function. The Mobile Art Container, which so far has only been used for the Chanel exhibition, could be a utilitarian space for exhibiting contemporary art, but to my knowledge it has only been used to show art in New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. The list of cities that H Box has travelled is too lengthy to list here. Beyond the collapsible and modular design-- which makes for cheap travel, the selection of the work is apt and concise. Hermes had the foresight to use an actual curator that understands the connection between contemporary art, commerce, and creative stimulus. Chanel's exhibition was "curated" by a French fashion editor, Fabrice Busteau; who functioned more as a PR person and runway art director than Fine Arts curator.

The show had one foot in commercial and promotion, and the other in runway imagination; but there wasn't a hint of creative inspiration. I left feeling like I was supposed to want to buy into their visual branding aesthetic--but couldn't because there was clearly a us vs. them divide throughout the show. It was clear that at no point was the exhibition or the works therein intended to inspire creative or independent thought. Intentional or not, I felt undercurrents of brainwashing (the show was narrated and viewers had no option on this front) and outlandish marketing schemes (each work supplanted the male gaze, so common in traditional Art History, with a feminine desire for social mobility and mindless consumption.)

H Box is smaller and therefore more concise. Focusing solely on video; a distributable, disposable, and portable medium; the content of the show is appropriate for the parameters and concept of the project. AND MOST IMPORTANTLY: The content of the videos speak to a larger curatorial mission, extending beyond flagrant and distasteful product placement which is both respectful and respectible.

According to e-flux, "21 videos by artists from all over the world have been produced, and H BOX has screened in major museums and art centers in Europe and North America (USA and Mexico). It was also presented at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008 and will travel to Beijing and Guangzhou later in 2011. The H Box itself is an object that blends a screening room, a travel kit, and a modern curio cabinet of sorts. It creates a specific context for the viewing of exciting new works by artists who, for the most, have lived and worked in numerous places, and often have a multiplicity of cultural references and bases."
www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org


2011 H BOX program
Rosa Barba
(Born in 1972 in Sicily, lives and works in Germany)
The Empirical Effect, 2010
16mm transferred to HD Cam
20min.

Ali Kazma
(Born in 1971 in Turkey, lives and works in Turkey)
Taxidermist, 2010
Digital Video, color and stereo sound
13 min.

Mark Lewis
(Born in 1958 in Canada, lives and works in Canada)
TD Centre, 54th Floor, 2009
Single screen projection 35mm and 4K transferred to 2K
6min. 18sec.

Julika Rudelius
(Born in 1968 in Germany, lives and works in Netherlands)
Dressage, 2009
HD video transferred DVC pro
8min. 40sec.

Nikhil Chopra and Munir Kabani
(NC: Born in 1974 in India, lives and works in India)
(MK: Born in 1976 in India and works in India)
Man Eats Rock, 2011
HD-CAM mastered tape
20min.

Omer Fast
(Born in 1972 in Israel, Lives and works in Germany)
Sunday Morning (Part III of the Tunnel), 2010
HD video with sound
5min. 30sec.

Hwayeon Nam
(Born in 1979 in Korea, lives and works in Korea)
Do not harm your ghost, 2010
HD video transferred HD-CAM, color and stereo sound
17min. 56sec.

Wang Jianwei
(Born in 1958 in China, lives and works in China)
Zero, 2010
HD video transferred to digital beta, color and stereo sound
18min.

Curator: Benjamin Weil
Benjamin Weil has worked on the H BOX project since its inception. Working in close collaboration with the Hermès team, he has conceptualized the project and participated in its implementation. Since the beginning he has also selected the artists whose work have been commissioned (to date H BOX has commissioned 21 works in its 5 years of existence).

Architect: Didier Fiuza Faustino
Didier Fiuza Faustino is an artist and architect. In 1996 he set up the Laboratoire d'Architecture, Performances et Sabotages (l.a.p.s.), and in 2002 founded Bureau des Mesarchitectures.

Fondation d'entreprise Hermès
The Fondation d'entreprise Hermès was founded in April 2008. Within the framework of its support for contemporary artistic creation, it sets the programme schedules for six art spaces worldwide (Brussels, Tokyo, New York, Singapore, Seoul, Bern) and produces their exhibitions. This ensemble of galleries devoted to contemporary art and photography has been completed by H Box, dedicated exclusively to showing video art all over the planet. The Fondation d'entreprise Hermès is also committed to several project sponsors in the spheres of solidarity and culture.
www.fondationdentreprisehermes.org

Rirkrit Tiravanija - "Fear Eats the Soul" at Gavin Brown's Enterprise

March 5 - April 16, 2011

From the Press Release:

Rirkrit Tiravanija will open a new exhibition at Gavin Brown's enterprise. Taking its title from the Fassbinder film Ali - Fear Eats the Soul a story of love bridging the existential divide, the show will feature, amongst other elements a T-Shirt Factory and a soup kitchen. His preoccupation with time will be overarching. Space and memory will fuse while the stomach demands a focus on the present moment.

Tiravanija's first exhibition in New York - Pad Thai - was over 20 years ago. Since that point Tiravanija has consistently defied expectations of the form, and status of the work of art. He has upended cultural conventions of audience and its role, challenged ideas of the utility in the art object, and revealed the boundaries between art and life to be illusion.

Photo documentation of the first iteration of "Pad Thai"
Paula Allen Gallery, 1990.

Tiravanija changed the paradigm of art making twenty years ago and that change began with the challenge and simple temptation of food. He released the pungent aromas of spices and fish sauce into the white cube, made a crack in our perceived freedom to reveal a new liberty of open and unending possibilities. The sensual and messy reality of food preparation and consumption were literally displayed before us. In one spoonful he swept away notions of the timeless masterpiece and the instant cultural artifact. In its place he proposed a new exhibit, and a new artifact: Ourselves, in each other’s company, eating. This was a cultural displacement that put an uncomfortable and thrilling frame around chopping, frying, stirring, slurping and doing the dishes. It exploded our ideas of sculpture to include even our digestive tract. With this meal, and their remains, Tiravanija reintroduced us to time - and our fundamental relationship with it that today we would prefer to forget. In all his works since Tiravanija has focused our attention back to time. Real time. Lived time. He has shoehorned its inevitability back into our cultural language.

In 1992, he made Untitled (Free). The body of the gallery was stripped and laid bare. Its inventory, its files, its doors, its blinds, its people - everything it contained - were stuffed into the main exhibition space in pragmatic rows. In the office was an improvised kitchen with a fridge, a gallery door as table for a preparation, burners, rice cooker, pots, tables and stools. The days of the exhibition passed unremarkably. Groceries were bought and refrigerated. Meals were cooked and eaten. Visitors came to see. Then came back to eat. The tall second floor windows of the office, free of blinds, wrapped round the corner of Greene and Spring streets. Depending on the weather each day, the office would be flooded with that particular light of New York in the Springtime. Rather than being circumscribed by the gallery, Free leaped out through the windows and into the open air.

In 1994, Tiravanija made/curated a two person show with his other half, Andy Warhol. It was a hybrid retrospective of sorts for each artist. Tiravanija created a binary set up of three pairs of work, with one work by each artist in each pair: A Mao and a stack of beer bottles; a Brillo box and a wok; a bed and a pile of books and movies. Each pair created a metaphysical and cultural bridge across time and space from one world to another. Each side looking at the other in the mirror and being disgusted at themselves. One side surface and mediated, the other dirty and touched, but both steeped in melancholia and necrophilia.

In 1999, he made a plywood twin of his apartment on E7th Street, with working toilet shower and kitchen. This is an apartment he has lived in for more than 30 years and its contours and spaces are known to him intimately. The' apartment' in the gallery was well used (as was another version in Germany the year before). It was open 24 hours a day and birthdays were celebrated, beds were slept in, baths were taken and meals were cooked and eaten. It became a vessel for two months of unedited and diverse human activity. Was this doppleganger a chance to walk in his shoes? To live his life? Or perhaps an existential recognition of the impossibility of knowing anyones human's experience apart from our own, no matter how closely we rub up against them. It was no place like home.

This work, like many others he has made using architectural space, functioned as a form of reliquary. Enormous fetishes or lived photographs that could replay moments on a new stage attempting to aggregate that human experience although knowing they will fail. Like much of his work these spaces posed a question - where is art (our culture) contained?: Within the object? Or within the memory of those who pass through it? It has been argued that language was first acquired by humans simultaneously to the development of hunting and cooking. Around the fire food, time and space came together to create an environment where cooperation in survival gave birth to human relations. In Tiravanija's view these moments are still present with us today. There are still real opportunities to develop our language and to create ourselves. We make new temples to us, our greatest creation.

Tiravanija is the winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum. Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lucelia Artist Award. He recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld along with previous retrospective exhibition at the Museum Bojmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam that then was presented in Paris and London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is also President of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER located in Bangkok-- where he maintains his primary residence and studio.

For more information please contact - Hannah Hoffman, Parinaz Mogadassi +1 212 627 5258, hannah@gavinbrown.biz, parinaz@gavinbrown.biz

Gavin Brown’s enterprise

620 Greenwich Street

New York, NY 10014

Tu – Sat 10a – 6p

The Future is Now Media Arts, Performance and Identity after Nam June Paik

From the Tate Liverpool's website:

Nam June Paik, in collaboration with Norman Ballard Laser Cone Photo: Stefan Arendt, LVR / Medienzentrum Düsseldorf

Friday 18 February 2011, 10.00–17.00

In an era of reality television and the continual rise of the web, The Future is Now examines the legacy of Paik’s thinking and practice with a focus on performance and identity, situated within current debates around new technologies, ubiquity and human experience. Through innovative web adventures and conversations chaired by Will Gompertz, Arts Editor at the BBC and previously Director of Tate Media, speakers and performers including collaborators of Paik, contemporary artists and theorists, consider how artists are constrained or liberated by a constant re-imagining of the future. Participants include Roy Ascott, Jeremy Bailey, Ruth Catlow, John Hanhardt, Kristin Lucas and Marisa Olson.

Programme

10.00-11.00 Exhibition viewing: Nam June Paik
11.00-11.15 Satellite performance - Jeremy Bailey
11.15-11.30 Welcome - Will Gompertz
11.30-12.30 Keynote & Q&A – John G. Hanhardt
12.30-13.00 Performance - Anton Lukoszevieze
13.00-14.00 Lunch
14.00-14.15 Satellite performance - Kristin Lucas
14.15-15.15 Keynote - Roy Ascott in conversation with Mike Stubbs
15.15-15.30 Satellite performance - Marisa Olson
15.30-16.00 Presentation - Ruth Catlow
16.00-17.00 Panel Discussion & Q&A

The event is followed with a performance by squib-box in the FACT bar from 17.00

Please note this event will take place at FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool, L1 4DQ.

In partnership with FACT
Generously supported by Mr Yongsoo Huh

With additional support from the Henry Moore Foundation and Picturehouse at FACT


Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) and ISEA2011 Istanbul

FACT
£35 (£30 concessions), booking required
Price includes lunch, refreshments and entrance to the Nam June Paik exhibition at Tate Liverpool. Conference tickets can also be purchased from the FACT shop. Please leave your email address when booking a ticket and you will be contacted to pose a question in advance to conference speakers.

For tickets book online
or call 0151 702 7400.

Roy Ascott is an artist and theorist whose research is invested in cybernetics, technoetics, telematics, and syncretism. His international exhibitions range from the Venice Biennale to Ars Electronica. His retrospective exhibition, The Syncretic Sense, was shown at Plymouth Art Centre in 2009, then in Korea in 2010 at the Incheon International Digital Art Festival, and opens in London at SPACE in April 2011. His theoretical work is widely published, translated, and referenced. He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium, an international platform for art, technology and consciousness research, based in Plymouth University, with nodes in Milan and Zurich. He has held senior academic positions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Vienna and Toronto, and is an Honorary Professor of Aalborg University, Copenhagen, and Thames Valley University London. He lectures world-wide. He has advised media art institutions in Australia, Europe, Japan, Korea, South America, and the USA. He edits Technoetic Arts and is an Honorary Editor of Leonardo.

Jeremy Bailey is a Toronto-based new media artist whose work explores custom software in a performative context. Powered by humour and computer vision, his work wryly critiques the uneasy relationship between technology and the body while playfully engaging the protocols of digital media (Greg J Smith, Rhizome). His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally.

Ruth Catlow, artist and co-founder/director (with Marc Garrett) of Furtherfield a grass roots, dynamic, creative and social nerve centre - online and in physical space at the Furtherfield Gallery (formerly HTTP) in North London - where upwards of 26,000 contributors worldwide have built a visionary culture around co-creation – swapping and sharing code, music, images, video and ideas. Ruth works at the intersection of art, technology and social change with a focus on ecological themes, infrastructures and processes. She contributes to publications, books and conferences and has participated in exhibitions at CCA, Glasgow; The Baltic, Gateshead; Limehouse Town Hall, London as well as galleries in Zagreb, Madrid and Detroit and has work featured on DVblog, the Rhizome Artbase and The Digital Kitchen. Ruth runs Digital Art and Design degrees at Writtle School of Design, part of Essex University.

John G. Hanhardt is senior curator for media arts, Nam June Paik Archive, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Since beginning his career at the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, he has curated film and media arts at the Walker Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.

Kristin Lucas is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist working with video, installation, performance, and interactive Web projects. Lucas addresses the complexity of our relationship to the digital realm, such as its effect on human psychology and regimes of thinking. Reversing a popular concept of infusing humanity into machines, Lucas maps technological concepts into her life, making evident their presuppositions and flaws, and raising questions about the gap between virtual and lived realities. Her artwork is represented by Postmasters Gallery and videos are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix in New York.

New York-based artist Marisa Olson has presented at Tate Modern, BFI, Centre Pompidou, 52nd International Biennale di Venezia, Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Edith Russ-Haus fur Medienkunst, Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst/ Montevideo, the Sundance Film Festival, and at numerous other arts venues and internet websites, the latter especially as a founding member of Nasty Nets, the original "internet surfing club." She has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, Folha de Sao Paolo, Liberation (Paris), the New York Times, the Village Voice, and magazines like Oyster, SOMA, Paper, and Planet. She has also written essays and reviews that have appeared in Flash Art, ArtReview, MUTE, Wired, Afterimage, and numerous internet weblogs, including Rhizome, where she was previously editor and curator. She has also curated projects at the Guggenheim, SFMOMA, White Columns, Artists Space, the Performa Biennial, and SF Camerawork, whose Journal, Camerawork, she also edited. Marisa studied History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz, and Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and is now Assistant Professor of New Media at SUNY-Purchase.

Paik's iconic performance pieces will be re-animated and re-imagined by pioneering cellist and artist Anton Lukoszevieze, and by composer-artist co-operative squib-box, alongside performances of works by other Fluxus artists and pieces inspired by Paik. Works revisited include One for Solo Violin, Random Access, Pop Sonata and the Fluxus Champion Contest. Produced by Third Ear.