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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Conspire, but not too much please.
(from VVORK), Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša (three artists from Slovenia) have all changed their names to Janez Janša, the name of the current Slovenian prime minister. More at Aksioma from their inaugural initiation project.
Mount Triglav on Mount Triglav
According to VVORK and the Artists' press release, they were originally scheduled to perform their piece Signature Event Context, a work visible only in on the internet, with a special real time projection at the foyer of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. for the opening of transmediale.08 in Berlin, the curatorial premise for this year's event reads:
Under the theme CONSPIRE... transmediale.08 aims to hear from a broad range of artists, media activists and academics working within the realms of digital art and culture in ways which may be read as elaborating upon and challenging our understanding of collaborative and network practice. As such transmediale.08 looks to the cross-disciplinary tinkerers, utopian spelunkers, conspiratorial hoaxsters and stealth tacticians who question, subvert, undermine and bypass the unspoken rules, hidden codes of conduct and assumed truths entrenched within our information driven communication cultures and ideological belief structures.However, according to their press release, their participation was cancelled, so they enacted their performance at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, a day earlier than scheduled
By exploring subversive artistic methodologies and developing (counter-) conspiratorial strategies to uncover new forms of expression and digital discourse CONSPIRE... will attempt to enter the increasingly prevalent yet ambiguous worlds of network induced narratives, cryptic environments and speculative inquiry.
Full performance can be viewed here.
I'm mystified as to what the problem was, I'm not finding the actual performance offensive in the context of the memorial, (in fact I find it very poignant). The piece also has all that festival bumph illustrating that "diverse, rapidly emerging mobile communication structures, the Internet and the global media, are spawning questionable hierarchies, new structures of belief and mechanisms of derealisation" and plenty of bonus Derrida-blah-blah-blah-cakes that we all adore.
That said, Derrida is easier to parse than the official reasons:
"According to the new director of Transmediale Stephen Kovats and to the Guest Curator of the exhibition CONSPIRE... Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, the great cause for banning this project from the festival 4 days before its opening has to be find in "judicial and legislative reasons" (Kovats) and "personal - curatorial and ethical convictions" (Petrešin-Bachelez)"
Metamorphic: Neil Harrison, Bonnie Lewis & Julie Voyce until Feb 17,
Landymore Keith Contemporary Art , 800 Dundas Street West, Toronto
Neil Harrison - Poker 2006 72"x48", Acrylic on canvas
Bonnie Lewis - King Belly 2005 60"x48", Oil on canvas
Julie Voyce - Cave 2007 10.75"x8.25" Linocut
Quantal Strife looks great at Open Space (thanks to the amazing staff and volunteers)! We had a good opening and lots of nice interesting people came. I am staying on here to do a residency, so I'm meeting with tons of artists in Victoria, and will be mounting a small, packed, ad-hoc exhibition out of those meetings (opening Feb. 8th, also at Open Space). I'm seeing great work and I'm having a ball, despite being nearly as sick as L.M. I've experienced two little earthquakes so far, both while I was sitting in my B&B on the four poster bed. Kinda exorcist-ish, only for some reason not scary at all.
Many thanks to Candy Minx for making me aware of this essay by Parag Khanna, Waving Goodbye to Hegemony from the New York Times.
"Saudi Arabia, for quite some years to come still the planet’s leading oil producer, is a second-world prize on par with Russia and equally up for grabs. For the past several decades, America’s share of the foreign direct investment into the kingdom decisively shaped the country’s foreign policy, but today the monarchy is far wiser, luring Europe and Asia to bring their investment shares toward a third each. Saudi Arabia has engaged Europe in an evolving Persian Gulf free-trade area, while it has invested close to $1 billion in Chinese oil refineries. Make no mistake: America was never all powerful only because of its military dominance; strategic leverage must have an economic basis. A major common denominator among key second-world countries is the need for each of the Big Three to put its money where its mouth is.
For all its historical antagonism with Saudi Arabia, Iran is playing the same swing-state game. Its diplomacy has not only managed to create discord among the U.S. and E.U. on sanctions; it has also courted China, nurturing a relationship that goes back to the Silk Road. Today Iran represents the final square in China’s hopscotch maneuvering to reach the Persian Gulf overland without relying on the narrow Straits of Malacca. Already China has signed a multibillion-dollar contract for natural gas from Iran’s immense North Pars field, another one for construction of oil terminals on the Caspian Sea and yet another to extend the Tehran metro — and it has boosted shipment of ballistic-missile technology and air-defense radars to Iran. Several years of negotiation culminated in December with Sinopec sealing a deal to develop the Yadavaran oil field, with more investments from China (and others) sure to follow. The longer International Atomic Energy Agency negotiations drag on, the more likely it becomes that Iran will indeed be able to stay afloat without Western investment because of backing from China and from its second-world friends — without giving any ground to the West."
I made these out of dirty kleenex 4 U!
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