Photographer Roger Ballen is known for his stark, artful montages of South African life: the dirt-poor of rural townships, the beatific scallywags and sooty lowlifes living on skid-row mixed in with the detritus washed up from the slums and shanties. His new music video with Cape Town band Die Antwoord “I Fink U Freeky,” meshes hip hop beats with his signature style of photography, animating his still images.
The slang used by Die Antwoord is Zef, an Afrikaans term that roughly translates to “common or trashy,” referencing a white trash culture, cheap, tin Ford Zephyrs (zef), trailer park kitsch, cool tough guys with style.
"I Fink U Freeky" - Die Antwoord - Photograph by Roger Ballen
Ballen’s work is a blend of photography and art, combining still life compositions and live portraiture. The artist has been shooting black and white film for nearly fifty years. Having grown up in the era of b&w photography Ballen continues to be one of the last few experimenting exclusively in this media. Explaining his passion for black and white and the constraints it implies, Ballen says, “Black and White is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.” Read more about Roger Ballen’s work
Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
The writer, Alain De Botton, famous for his musings on Proust and the nature of happiness, has always had an interest in the way humans are impacted by architectural spaces. De Botton has explored transitional places and the way they affect human emotions – and he has lived in an airport continuously for a week for research on his book A Week At the Airport. But, for his latest project, De Botton has been inspired to create an edifice for atheists to counter the millions of monuments that exist for gods.
For the scores of glorious cathedrals and mosques built by architects there appears to be none that had been built for atheists. Places of worship have been built for Jesus, Mary and for the Buddha, but temples can also be built for love, friendship and calmness…
Alain de Botton – A Temple for Atheists Image: Thomas Greenall & Jordan Hodgson
De Botton intends to build his tower in London at a symbolic height that reflects a scale of 300 million years of life on earth. He explained in the Guardian, “Each centimeter of the tapering tower’s interior has been designed to represent a million years and a narrow band of gold will illustrate the relatively tiny amount of time humans have walked the planet.” De Botton’s idea is to encourage contemplation. He also added, “the exterior would be inscribed with a binary code denoting the human genome sequence.”
Detropia, DIRECTOR Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady U.S.A., 2011, 90 min, color
From the scores of films shown at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (January 19-29, 2012 in Park City, Utah), only a few end up getting wider distribution; the rest recede into obscurity in Indie film houses. A few of the interesting art films worth looking out for are singled out here:
Directed by New York-based documentary filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, Detropia – describes Detroit’s boom and bust history; the hemorrhaging decay and eventual collapse of its auto industry. “With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, DETROPIA sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution.” The film documents buildings being demolished as Detroit’s economic prospects fade, wages plummet and tourists ogle at the “charming decay.”
THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING, DIRECTOR Ho Tzu Nyen Singapore, 30 min, color
Ho Tzu Nyen’s, The Cloud of Unknowing is an art installation and film, originally shown at the 54th Venice Biennale as part of the Singapore pavillion. The video and sound installation examines clouds as symbolizing transience and emptiness. “On a screen, a narrative unfolds, set in a public housing complex in Singapore, where eight characters in eight apartments individually encounter a cloud, embodied both as a figure and a vaporous mist.”
Excision, DIRECTOR Richard Bates Jr. SCREENWRITER Richard Bates Jr. U.S.A., 2011, 81 min, color
Directed by Richard Bates Jr.Excision blends elements of horror, teen comedy, and cult classics with great performances by Traci Lords and John Waters. Pauline the main character has a penchant for picking scabs, dissecting road kill, and fantasizing about performing surgery on strangers… (more…)
Book of Sanskrit Animal Fables (Panchatantra) India, Rajasthan Dated Samvat 1811/1754-5 AD Sanskrit manuscript on paper
There is a vast history of animal folklore in literature, and the Pancha Tantra is one of the most ancient. Here are some images from the original book, and Walton Ford’s anecdotal stories that relate to some of his drawings from his collection that takes after the ancient tome of the same name.
Artist Mariko Mori’sJourney to Seven Light Bay is a digital project that transports visitors to Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan, where Mori has installed the first part of her monumental earthwork ‘Primal Rhythm’. The installation consists of a sun pillar and the egg-shaped ‘Tida Dome’ that changes colour with tidal movements.
Inspired by the caves of Okinawa in Japan, the digitally rendered ‘Tida Dome’ is a hollow shell through which light enters as it floats in the bay, shifting colour from red at low tide to blue at high tide, with many gradations in between. Mori has chosen exact coordinates such that at the moment of winter solstice, the lengthening shadow of the ‘sun pillar’ will penetrate the actual moonstone, once it is physically installed in the bay, uniting the celestial with the terrestrial, the masculine with the feminine.
Tomás Saraceno Observatory/Air-Port-City Hayward Gallery,London, 2008. Gesamthöhe: 9,6 m Courtesy: The artist and Andersen's Contemporary,Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, pinksummer contemporary art. Foto: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno
Photo: Courtesy Tomás Saraceno
Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno’s visionary exhibition Cloud Cities at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin is a hall of floating spheres and webs inspired by utopic visions of hanging settlements or cloud cities that can migrate across the globe.
Saraceno builds on his knowledge of architecture and astronomy to create artwork inspired by soap bubbles and the tensile configurations of spider webs. Viewers at the museum can interact and enter the bubbles to experience their translucent, trans-dimensional qualities. The Mother Bubble, features an undulating plastic base for visitors to lounge on.
Nineteen year old street photographer Shane Vincent has an eye for capturing those ephemeral moments when the changing light transforms the mundane into the sublime.
The project, Stand in Line, came about when Vincent began photographing utility poles in the streets of North London where he lives: “The series started at a time where the sky looked pretty cool,” he says. “It was autumn so it would change constantly. It caused me to look up a lot.” The outcome of his first photograph, Stay connected of a utility pole “with wires coming out at all directions,” was captivating enough, recollects the young photographer, that it caused him to pay more regard to the perpendicular poles and lampposts which most take for granted and which habitually punctuate the urban horizon. By isolating them against the vivid autumnal sky, and shooting them from an anamorphic perspective, Vincent enhanced their geometric abstractions.
Stiff styles of portraiture were common practice in Elizabethan times – three contemporary artists re imagine the formal poses through photography.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, using his minimalist approach creates a series of austere portraits of Henry VIII’s six wives. Christian Tagliavini’s subjects are attired in garments handcrafted from paper and fabric the artist creates himself. And South Korean artist Chan-Hyo Bae creates a series of self-portraits identifying himself in the strangely foreign, militaristic poses of royalty.
Zander Olsen’s photo series is an intervention with the landscape, a bending of the line of the horizon to create an illusion of continuity.
Olsen wraps the trees with white fabric and photographs from the viewpoint where the elements come together in perfect unity. He has created these site-specific installations in forests in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales.
Olsen’s works suggests an inversion of emulating linear perspective in two-dimensional works of art, a technique developed by Renaissance artists using foreshortening – in this case Olsen redefines a three-dimensional environment by extending a flat line across it to create an illusion two-dimensional space. Take for example the works of Georges Rousse who paints walls of interiors, photographing them finally at a fixed perspective to create the affect of continuous graphical lines across the space.
A witty narrative of thwarted simian desire is the theme of Walton Ford’s new series of watercolor paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Ford’s obsession with King Kong, the super-sized movie monster came from his childhood viewings of the 1933 cinematic tale of abduction depicting the clash of the beastly brute Kong and delicate, blonde sophisticate, famously played by Faye Wray.
The story is less Beauty and the Beast, more unrequited love akin to Nabokov’sLolita in which Kong, the faux monster gorilla, is trapped by unnatural desire and vanity towards an act unacceptable to consummate.
In his other series, displayed like a comic strip narrative on the gallery walls, Ford returns to his earlier Audubon inspired style, depicting a scenario described in the naturalist’s journals about his pet parrot. I chatted to Ford about his new work and flipped through his past drawings in my old copy of Pancha Tantra, a collection inspired by the ancient Sanskrit book of animal fables, possibly the oldest on the planet.
I asked Ford about his inspiration behind the story of the dead parrot and masturbating monkey, and Ford explained that Audubon’s father was a ship’s Captain: “He used to bring exotic animals home to France,” recounted Ford, “Audubon himself was born out of wedlock: the Captain had a mistress in Haiti, and after Audubon was born from this mistress, the Captain brought the young boy home to his wife in France who raised Audubon.”
