|
Archive for the ‘news’ Category
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010
Art & Desire Seminars, 17-20 June 2010, Istanbul
In organizing this seminar series on Art and Desire, our aim is to conduct an exchange between contemporary creative practices and contemporary critical theories. We found it necessary to produce this encounter because we wanted to be able to critically reflect upon Istanbul’s specific conditions as it is becoming the European Capital of Culture in 2010. In its process of becoming a “global city”, Istanbul has been the stage of rapid urban transformation in the past two decades. Not surprisingly, the growth and concentration of artistic and creative practices in the city became one of the markers of such transformation, along the regional scale concentration of finance capital, media industries, and service economy. The selection of Istanbul as the European Capital of Culture of 2010 (while Turkey’s membership to EU remains to be a contested and complicated issue) crystalizes the meaning of such transformations. The driving force behind such urban transformations has been the global expansion of the capital; what happens in Istanbul also takes place in other global border posts, and what takes place is not simply the development of existing social conditions beyond certain thresholds but a neoliberal transgression that is directed towards the consolidation of a new social order, new social subjectivities, and new representation regimes. Istanbul’s rapidly developing artistic and culture scene has to be evaluated in this critical context.
As a part of the Istanbul 2010 program, by organizing this seminar series, we aim to provide a critical contribution –perhaps, even an intervention, to what we see as the expansion of global capital and its accompanying neoliberal governmentality beyond geographical borders, into the creative practices and social imaginaries. In this context, with Art and Desire Seminars, we aim to facilitate encounters between contemporary creative practices and contemporary critical theory, between what we practice and what we think, between here and there, now and then, from each to each.
The seminar series is inspired by Ulus Baker’s similar seminars conducted in Middle East Technical University’s (METU) Media Research Center (GISAM) in 1998 with the same title. Baker’s work traced the relations and passages between the regimes of technological representation and modern social subjectivities, examined contemporary social dynamics and visual representation techniques, and through such interrogations, provided valuable leads for creative minds to explore in aesthetic forms. By departing from Baker’s work, we seek to facilitate critical discussions on four interrelated lines of inquiry:
Forms of Affect: A framework for evaluating the contemporary theoretical explorations regarding social subjectivities, affective regimes, and creative practices.
Art and Biopolitics: A framework for the discussion of artistic and cultural production vis-a-vis contemporary modes of governmentality.
Art and Autonomy: A framework for exploring creative production practices and circulation channels that take place outside of the mainstream artistic and cultural production.
Regimes of Image: A framework for the discussion of new, post-photographic and post-cinematic representation regimes that develop under the ontological conditions of digital media technologies.
Art and Desire Seminars seek to explore these themes and problematics through a series of lectures, performances, workshops, presentations, screenings and shows. These events will bring together cross-disciplinary participants who produce theoretical and practical works in philosophy, social sciences and the arts. Each seminar session will be a 4 days event and two sessions will be held on 17th – 20th of June, and 18th – 21st of November of 2010. Our desire in these seminars is to establish a truly communicative environment by encouraging in depth exposition of ideas and works and lengthy discussions. Therefore, we will encourage each presenter to make a “lecture-like” (40-45 mins. long) presentation of her/his work. The works presented at the seminars will be published as an edition in December 2010.
Art and Desire Seminars aim to be a platform for the discussion of contemporary artistic and cultural practices in a social and political context, and in this respect, will continue as an annual event independently and collectively organized by artists, art collectives, publishers and scholars in the following years.
You can find the detailed program of the June 2010 session of seminar series here, and contact us for more information on Art and Desire Seminars.
Posted in events, news, works | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010
WINDOWS
A collaborative Video Exhibition
March 24th – April 1st, 7 – 10 pm
Rooftop Studios
7 Noubar Street, Mounira, Cairo
Windows video exhibition that is the outcome of Aras Ozgun’s 3 weeks workshop at American University in Cairo and Townhouse Gallery which involved 15 students, film makers, artists, academics with or without prior experience in video art. The exhibition was developed during the span of Aras’s residency with AUC’s Performance and Visual Arts Department.
Artists contributing to the exhibition are; Ahmed El Gendy, Amira Hanafi, Amran Frey, Angela Harutyunyan, Aras Ozgun, Belle Gironda, Corey Sattler, Hani Sami Lotfi Naguib, Heba Amin
Lara J. Worcester, Mariam Mekiwi, Maya Asfour, Mohammed Alaa, Mohammed El-Assyouti, Nagham Osman, Nork Zakarian, and Yasmin Shash.
The project has provided an open framework (literally, “window frames”) which combines and cultivates different experimental narratives, aesthetic techniques and method that are possible in video. It encourages the audience to relate to the physicality of windows both as (un)demarcators of private and public spheres as well as subjective and social borders or unbound situations through which the subject relates to the surrounding world.
The window is understood as a liminal space, as a metaphor, as a form of experience, as a social function and as a poetic device. Each video contains an “event” that relates to the situation by utilizing narrative or non-narrative form/technique that works with windows: An off-screen voice or
dialogue conveying a story, or audible/visible clues of something that takes place in the room behind the camera –or at the outside, or a small act in front or outside of the window, or just an interval of time.
Each video itself is a space that opens to another one, each video contains an “event” that takes place in this opening –a view or a story that relates to a slice of time. None of the videos directly connect to the others: together they form a heterotopic space, a multiplicity of places, identities and narratives –a room with many views. While each contributors’ work remains an autonomous piece, at it nonetheless resonates with the others and forms a collective and participatory body of work at the same time.
Posted in events, news, works | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
Posted in events, news, works | No Comments »
Friday, March 5th, 2010
WINDOWS
A COLLABORATIVE MULTICHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION PROJECT
by Aras Ozgun
Sharjah Art Gallery and Townhouse Art Gallery, March 6-March 23, 2010
The American University in Cairo
Performance and Visual Arts Department
IDEA | between private and public
The main idea of this project is to provide an open framework (literally, “frames”) that can combine and cultivate many different experimental narratives, aesthetic techniques and approaches that are possible in video. Each frame/video is open to be called with a performance as well as a documentary, with sound, acts, or a still-life or a landscape image. Each artists contribution can reflect a personal statement/concern relating to a limit situation between private and public. While each contributors work remains as an autonomous piece/expression, it resonates with the others at the same time, and forms a collective, participatory body of work.
IMAGE | between still-life and landscape
The exhibition, which will be developed collaboratively with the workshop participants, will consist of multiple TV monitors. Each TV monitor displays a single image; a window fully framed from inside the room (or whatever interior space it belongs to), and the outside as seen through it. Each window is different from the others.
Each window is a liminal image between a still-life and a landscape. While showing a window framed from interior, each video partially reveals the identity of that particular interior space (objects and details around the window, curtains, walls, window frames etc.), and at the same time, presents a limited view of the outside (a piece of landscape, a street view, a brick wall, open sky, another window?), thus constructs a limit and a passage between inside/outside, interiority/exteriority, private/public. Each video contains an “event” that relates to this limit situation by utilizing any possible narrative form/technique that could be presented in this setting. An off-screen voice or dialogue conveying a story, or audible/visible clues of something that takes place in the room behind the camera –or at the outside, or a small act in front of the window or at the outside, or just an interval of time. Each video itself is a space that opens to another one, each video contains an “event” that takes place in this opening –a view or a story that relates to a slice of time. None of the videos directly connect to any other; all together they form a heterotopic space, a multiplicity of places, identities and narratives –a room with many views.
PROGRAM
Session 1 – Introductory session (lecture, references, sources and materials)
March 6, Saturday, Townhouse Gallery
12:00-4:00pm
Session 2 – Development of ideas and critique
March 9, Tuesday, Sharjah Art Gallery
12:00-5:00pm
Session 3 – Videography and field work
March 13, Saturday, Townhouse Gallery
10:00am-6:00pm
Session 4 – Post-production
March 16, Tuesday, AUC PVA computer lab
12:00am-6:00pm
Session 5 -Exposition making at Sharjah At Gallery
March 23, Tuesday
12:00am-6:00pm
Exhibition
March 25 – Exhibition at Sharjah Art Gallery
Posted in events, news, works | No Comments »
Monday, March 1st, 2010
I will be giving a public lecture at Performance and Visual Arts Department of The American University in Cairo on March 4th, at 1:00 pm. I will be staying in Cairo until the end of March as a visiting artist at AUC and conduct a workshop and a collaborative video exhibition.
Posted in events, news | No Comments »
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
I’ve added high resolution versions of a few older video works to pyromedia web site.
Osseus Labyrint’s Frying Pan Performance is a live recording of the performance duo at New York Downtown Arts Festival in 2000. It is followed by an interview I made with them after their performance at Tompkins Square park.
Horses Under The Sun is an experimental documentary video made at the International Sculpture Symposium at Sefakoy, Cesme, Turkey in 1997. It is about the creative processes of the sculptors participating to the symposium.
an.kara is another experimental documentary; it is a 16 min. video-essay on the urban transformation of the capital city of Turkish Republic, Ankara. I made this video in 1996 with Ersan Ocak.
Enjoy.  )
Aras
Posted in news, works | No Comments »
Monday, July 20th, 2009
I’ll be conducting a workshop on ethnographic film and new media practices at Yerevan, Armenia, in the context of Utopiana’s ”Visiting the Archive” project, on July 24th-25th this week. Following the workshop, I’ll participate to “Summer Seminars’ For Contemporary Art Curators”, organized by National Association of Art Critics in Yerevan next week. The subject of this years Summer Seminar is “Towards Collaborative Curating: Contemporary Curatorial Education in the Age of the Global Art Market”. I’ll deliver a public lecture in the seminar on Monday July 27th, titled “Post-Fordism, Neo-Liberalism, and Cultural Production”. You can find the whole program here. I’ll be looking forward for both events. Please stop by if you’ll be around.
Tags:Creative Industries, experimental video
Posted in events, news | No Comments »
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
I’ve finally had the chance to re-digitize the short experimental video I’ve made in 1999, “Still-Life“. It looks emotionally old, somehow, but now with better resolution. Enjoy!..
http://pyromedia.org/projects/still_life.html
Posted in news, works | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
I will make a presentation at the Universities Art Association of Canada Conference at Toronto at a panel brought together by Marc Leger and myself, titled “Creative Labour and Creative Industries”. The session will take place on Friday November 7th at 1:30 pm, at University of Toronto Art Centre, University College, 15 King’s College Circle. (more…)
Tags:Creative Industries, Toronto, UAAC Conference
Posted in events, news | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
I’ve been to Video Vortex Conference at Bilkent University in Ankara this weekend. The conference was organized by Bilkent University’s Department of Communication and Design, in cooperation with the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. See; http://std.comd.bilkent.edu.tr/videovortex/ and http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/weblog/tag/ankara/
(more…)
Tags:Ankara, Video Vortex
Posted in events, news | No Comments »
| |
