Listen and Be Heard Network Arts News

Private View:17.05.2012 18:30 – 21:00

This is the first in a series of exhibitions wherein the gallery invites two artists to exhibit a selection of new work alongside each other. The purpose is not to seek to unify two distinct and different practices, but rather to open up a dialogue between the artists, and invite the visitor to compare and contrast the work of two contemporary artists, and provoke discussion and debate. [Read more →]

Alexandre Singh
The Humans
An on-ongoing installation, an exhibition, multiple encounters and ‘Causeries’, rehearsals and a play.

On view: 26 April – 28 October 2012
Opening: 26 April 2012 from 5 till 8 p.m.
First manifestation: Friday 1 and Saturday 2 June 2012
Closing: The Humans live on stage. Exact date and location to be announced
Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art presents the on-site realization of The Humans, a theatrical play that aims to ‘create a new world’ by visual artist and writer Alexandre Singh. This project, on view from 26 April to 28 October 2012, came into being after seven years of correspondence between Alexandre Singh and Defne Ayas, Witte de With’s newly appointed director. [Read more →]

DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art is pleased to present:

Dissections: A Panel Discussion on Chronicles of a Disappearance 

Wednesday, April 11 at 7 PM
Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)
1920, rue Baile
FREE 
Places are limited; first come, first serve basis. 
The panel discussion will be available on-line during the event at the following address:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/dhc-art

Invited Speakers:
Christine Ross
(Presentation in French)
Monika Kin Gagnon 
(Presentation in English)
Vincent Lavoie 
(Presentation in French)
[Read more →]

March 30 / May 12 2012

Opening March 29 18:30 – 21:00

Erik Bendix
E.A. Byrne
Blue Curry
Corinne Felgate
Henry Hudson
Pascal Rousson
Lisa Slominski

Mad March hares, April Fools… there is no denying that spring is a light-hearted time of year. As the snow thaws and the days lengthen, our collective mood lifts with the promise of warmer days and new beginnings…
[Read more →]

The Dream Quest One Poetry & Writing Contest is open to anyone who loves expressing innermost thoughts and feelings into the beautiful art of poetry or writing a short story that is worth telling everyone! And to all who have the ability to dream… Write a poem or short story for a chance to win cash prizes. All works must be original. [Read more →]

Photo: Andrew Emond

DHC/ART in collaboration with the PHI Centre and the Mobile Media Lab presents:

Lost Rivers: La Petite St-Pierre

Curators Kim Sawchuk and Jaimie Robson www.mobilities.ca
With Cheryl Sim, Associate Curator for DHC/ART

February 25th 2012, 6 PM – 2 AM
DHC & ART 465, rue St-Jean and PHI Centre, 417, St-Pierre
Métro Square-Victoria, Autobus # 55
www.dhc-art.org

Each year DHC/ART participates in Nuit blanche, this grand event that brings Montrealers together for a crazy night of discovery and urban exploration. This time once again, the DHC/ART team encourages you to battle the cold in order to warm up with us. In addition to presenting a major exhibition Chronicles of a Disappearance that presents the work of five internationally renowned artists, (along with hot coffee and cookies) we also offer a special activity created for this particular night:

Lost Rivers: La Petite St-Pierre is a two-part exhibition that ventures beneath the pavement to reveal one of this city’s most famous hidden waterways. Artists Andrew Emond and Samuel Thulin pay homage to the meandering contours of La Petite St-Pierre, a river that once stretched over 15 kilometers across the southern part of the island of Montreal. Their video projections and mobile soundscapes virtually “daylight” La Petite St-Pierre, exploring its integration into the network of this city’s sewers.

Begin your journey at DHC/ART. From there you will receive clues to discover the second part of the exhibition at the new PHI Center!

Participate:

1. Download the Lost Rivers music route onto your mobile device either here soon or at DHC/ART. Don’t forget to bring your ear-buds or headphones!
2. Follow the illuminated ice lamps from DHC/ART to the Phi Centre.

This is the first in a series of location-based exhibitions that will “virtually daylight” select Montreal rivers in relation to our four seasons. Daylighting is a process that unearths waterways that have been buried because of urbanization and the drive to modernization and development. Also, watch for Under the City, the forthcoming documentary film and interactive website/iPhone app.

3. An interactive version of the ‘music-route’ will also be available on site. Visitors interested in trying out the interactive version (RjDj) are encouraged to install the iPhone/iPad app, RjDj, ahead of time. An RjDj ‘scene’ created specifically for the Lost Rivers exhibition will be available for download in the DHC Education Room.

www.underthecity.ca

In the context of its major new exhibition Chronicles of a Disappearance, bringing together the work of Omer Fast, Teresa Margolles, Philippe Parreno, Taryn Simon and José Toirac, DHC/ART Foundation is delighted to present two films by acclaimed Palestinian director Elia Suleiman who will be in attendance at the second screening on February 8th.

FREE ADMISSION
Seating is limited and available on a first come, first serve basis.

The Time that Remains 2009
(Le temps qui’il reste)
Tuesday, February 7th at 7 PM
Original version with French Sub-Titles

Chronicle of a Disappearance 1996
(Chronique d’une disparition)
Wednesday, February 8th at 7 PM
Original version with French Sub-Titles
Followed by Q and A with Elia Suleiman

Maxwell-Cummings Auditorium
Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion
Musée des Beaux arts de Montréal
1379 Sherbrooke Street West

Elia Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960 and co-directed his first videos with Jayce Salloum in New York where he lived between 1982 and 1993. His first theatrical feature Chronicle of a Disappearance chronicles his return to Israel and the West Bank after this long exile in New York. It was made while he was teaching at Birzeit University near Ramallah. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is central in Suleiman’s autobiographical films, which re-imagine and “perform” the issues and conflicts of his land and its people with a wry, almost silent humour and a burlesque sobriety reminiscent of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati. He has won numerous awards, including the grand Jury prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival for his second feature Divine Intervention: a Chronicle of Love and Pain (2002), and the Best First Film Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1996 for Chronicle of a Disappearance.

The Time that Remains (2009) “is a semi-autobiographical film in four episodes about a family, my family, from 1948 until recent times. The film is inspired by my father’s private diaries, starting from when he was a resistance fighter in 1948, and by my mother’s letters to family members who were forced to leave the country. Combined with my intimate memories of them and with them, the film attempts to portray the daily life of those Palestinians who remained and were labeled “Israeli-Arabs”, living as a minority in their own homeland” Elia Suleiman

Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) is an extended meditation on the life of contemporary Palestinians in the “Holy Land”. The film is told in a series of witty and gracefully restrained vignettes divided in two parts which echo the film’s formal ambitions: Nazareth: A Personal Diary and Jerusalem: A Political Diary. Using a wide spectrum of impressions to chart a disappearance of the self within a disappearance of the state, the film uses repetition and fragmentation as a poetic device asking audiences to decipher its multiplicity of meanings and textures.

Information: info@dhc-art.org

3rd February – 10th March

Private View: Feb 2nd 6.30pm – 9.00pm

Including Andy Harper, Whitney McVeigh, Tom Gallant, Emma McNally, Hugo Dalton, Emma Bennett, Al Braithwaite, Hugo Wilson, Hester Finch.

Vegas Gallery is pleased to announce a new group exhibition showcasing work by artists who embrace the aesthetic and challenge the anti-beauty stance (or kalliphobia) of recent times by reclaiming beauty for their own ends.

http://www.vegasgallery.co.uk

VEGAS Gallery

274 Poyser St

London E2 9RF

Nearest tube station: Bethnal Green

Curator: John Zeppetelli

DHC/ART Foundation is delighted to present a thematic group show titled Chronicles of a Disappearance, bringing together major works by five acclaimed international artists: Philippe Parreno, Taryn Simon, Teresa Margolles, Omer Fast and José Toirac. The exhibition explores different notions of disappearance articulated across the personal, social and political realms. All the works stage and conceptualize mourning, absence and loss, offering rich associative histories while also uncovering the hidden and inaccessible – or that which is made to disappear from view.

Shot in 70mm and digitally projected on a massive screen, June 8, 1968 (2009) Philippe Parreno’s haunting and sumptuous seven-minute film, imaginatively re-enacts the train journey from New York to Washington carrying assassinated Senator Robert Kennedy’s coffin on June 8, 1968. The film is literally a series of tracking shots from the point of view of the train and the dead body within it. The enormous projection creates equivalence in scale between the audience looking at the mourners lining the tracks in silent witness, who in turn look back at the audience.

Taryn Simon’s magisterial photographic inventory on what we can’t or won’t allow ourselves to see in the realms of science, government, security and nature -An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), reveals that which is foundational to America’s functioning and mythology. The formally composed and well lit photographs of normally unobtainable objects or inaccessible places are paired with precise and contextualizing texts. Gaining access to these denied spaces are also feats of diplomacy. Her work ultimately exposes, in powerful and disturbing ways – and with great analytical acuity – the undergirding of American society.

Omer Fast’s 5000 Feet is the Best (2011), is a film based on interviews with an American Predator drone aerial vehicle operator, who describes incidents where militants and civilians are fired at in Pakistan and Afghanistan – resulting in deep psychological scarring. The film is a brilliant blend of fact and fiction as it visualizes certain technical aspects of the job, while also offering fascinating narrative digressions. Using an almost circular structure, the work always returns to the central core of the interviews with both a real and fictional pilot. Alarmingly like video games, the pilot may be based in Las Vegas but directs lethal drones halfway across the world. Such are the dislocations of modern warfare.

Cuban artist José Toirac’s conceptual single-screen work Opus (2005), features an edited speech by controversial leader Fidel Castro – himself increasingly disappearing after retiring in 2008 – where everything but numbers are cut out from the audio track. The impassioned numerical pronouncements, full of rhetorical surges, are an endless litany whose corresponding stark white digits appear on a black screen. The artist reduces Castro’s ramblings to unintelligible quantifications of gains, losses or predictions, indeed reducing politics to endless spin and obfuscation.

Teresa Margolles’s Plancha (2010) is at first view a seemingly innocent minimalist sculpture, but it packs an intense emotional punch by its provocative use of bodily substances and its evocation of traumatic events. Water drips from above, hitting heated metal surfaces and evaporating instantly. Sourced from a morgue in Mexico City where the artist has worked, this is water used to cleanse corpses after autopsy—possibly also murder victims—while the steel plates are reminiscent of an operating table. With just a few concrete elements, Margolles vividly enacts the transformations of the human body after death, especially the final passage from presence to absence.

June 8, 1968 by Philippe Parreno is presented with the support of the Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle du Consulat Général de France à Québec.

VEGAS Gallery is pleased to present UNREST an exhibition of new paintings and mixed media works, by the British artist/designer Toby Mott.

UNREST explores the aesthetics of the recent London rioting of 2011. Toby Mott reworks background reproductions of the riots via tabloid newspapers combined with punk vivid colours , drawings and mixed media. In his representation the riot spectacle is reduced to the media outrage – evoking nihilism through the language and holding echoes of the language of ‘punk’ from 30 years earlier : ‘Anarchy in the UK’

Notions of this nihilism and anarchy, strong characteristics of both punk and contemporary culture are represented in background prints, composed from cut and pasted tabloid images of the rioting and accompanied by the bold sensationalist headlines. Contrasting this, Mott introduces a luxury aesthetic to the work by incorporating motifs and slogans written in precious gold and silver, symbolizing the unmet aspirations amidst the unrest. His technique of utilising the mechanized processes of screen printing in addition to the metallic foils creates a distance from the subject and through this, a removed luxury commodity is produced; the paintings become a neutral representation of the vacant repetition and banality of the violence.

Throughout this exhibition meaning does not adhere solely to individual images but rather to their accretion over time. Viewed singly, these content loaded pieces seem miraculous transfigurations of realism, but when seen in groups they form a continuous landscape of memory, regret and melancholy. The new paintings also reference Mott’s earlier work with the radical art collective The Grey Organisation and their direct actions, notably covering the windows of cork street galleries in grey paint in 1985. Political activism has always been a strong driving force behind Toby Mott’s artistic output and is still apparent in his latest artwork which is witty and always unabashedly rebellious.

Selected exhibitions include shows at White Columns, New York, The Thomas Soloman Garage, Los Angeles, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (NL), Maureen Paley Gallery, London, Galerie Philippe Rizzo. Paris, Tate Modern, London and Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles. More recently Mott has won acclaim for the Mott Collection, an archive of UK punk rock and political ephemera that includes over 1,000 posters, flyers and fanzines which was being showcased at Haunch of Venison, London and Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain and Andrew Roth Gallery, New York City.