Posts Tagged ‘Kisa Lala’
Wednesday, October 26th, 2011
Jake and Dinos Chapman - Detail from - One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved
Jake and Dinos Chapman recently showed at White Cube in London in their first ‘non-collaborative’ show, where each worked separately on works isolated in their studios bringing their art together in the final stage of the exhibition: much like the working method of ‘exquisite corpse’ – the Surrealist game where each contributor adds his part to a drawing without revealing his artistic input to the other.
Their interest in shocking their audiences with puerile and playful provocations against bourgeois culture is evident in their sticking genitals on childrens’ and adults’ bodies in inappropriate places: In an interview with curator Norman Rosenthal at 92Y, Jake Chapman said, “Victoria Miro [their gallerist at the time] was a lovely demure bourgeois woman… Our interest was stimulation…we learned that if we called a sculpture ‘fuckface,’ it attained value – you could hear Victoria on the phone talking to some collector saying, “Yes, I can do you a fuckface, or a two-faced cunt.” We were interested in how far we could affect, invade bourgeois language…”
© Jake & Dinos Chapman – God does not love you O.M.F.G., White Cube gallery
Artist Jake Chapman, © Kisa Lala
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Tags: 92 Y, 92Y, Chapman Brothers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jake Chapman, Kisa Lala, London, new york, PJ Harvey, Sir Norman Rosenthal, White Cube, Will Self
Posted in Art, Interview | No Comments »
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Landscape by Stuart Hall © Stuart Hall
‘Oops,’ someone might have said when the last tree came down on Easter Island. One day, while making really cool art, the islanders realized they’d chopped down too many trees. Without logs to roll their art down the hilltops, or fruit from the trees, without timber for fire, and with the topsoil eroded, there wasn’t arable land left for crops, or wood for building boats to catch fish. The birds stopped coming. They were too far for a rescue. And, since no one noticed, the islanders began to selectively eat each other to stay alive.
© J F Rauzier - Cranach's Dream The New Garden of Eden?
From - If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. Image credit TJ Watt - Oscilloscope
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Tags: Alastair Mackie, Climate Change, Connected the film, Environment, Fairy tales, Forest, Hansel and Gretel, If a Tree Falls, Kahn and Selesnick, Kisa Lala, Marshall Curry and Sam Cullman, new york, Park, Sleeping Beauty, Stuart Hall, Tiffany Shlain, Wilderness, Woodlands
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Monday, September 26th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
© Pieter Hugo - Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery - Abdullahi Mohammed with Mainasara, Lagos, Nigeria, 2007 From the series The Hyena and Other Men Digital C-Print 68″ × 68″
© Pieter Hugo - Obechukwu Nwoye, Enugu, Nigeria, 2008 From the series Nollywood Digital C-Print 68″ × 68″, Courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery
My favourite cover of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control by DJ Spoek Mathambo was shot by South African artist Pieter Hugo with what feels to me, a perfect parallel rendition of Ian Curtis’ epileptic dance moves.
Photographer Pieter Hugo’s lens couples the aesthetics of the bizarre and violent with an acceptance of the mundane. His large body of work depicts the tragic and abject lives in some of Africa’s major cities and rural townships while celebrating the wild styles and fetishes of the people.
SPOEK MATHAMBO – CONTROL from spoek mathambo on Vimeo.
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Tags: DJ Spoek Mathambo, Edward Burtynsky, Ian Curtis, Joy Division, Kisa Lala, Liberia, Pieter Hugo, Tim Hetherington
Posted in Art, Environment, Music, Photography | No Comments »
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Sculpteur de Nourissons - detail © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus
Sculpteur de Nourissons © Charles Matton, Courtesy All Visual Arts, Photo: Tessa Angus
A retrospective of handmade miniature interiors by
Charles Matton is on exhibit in London’s
All Visual Arts gallery. Matton, who died in 2008 of lung cancer, built ‘Boxes,’ that recreated artist studios and mise-en-scènes, emotive still-frames of inhabited interiors, empty hotel hallways, lonesome ateliers and imaginary boîtes. Poking one’s head inside one of Matton’s enclosures is being Gulliver trespassing into another reality and expecting the room’s lilliputian occupants to return any moment.
The fascination with doll’s houses is that we glorify our need for tidying and collecting objects with imperial strokes and a make-belief sense of omniscience. Replicating the world exactly had been Matton’s passions, and his artistic journey began with painting hyperreal interiors that he eventually extrapolated into three-dimensions, creating rooms with walls exactly as he would have painted them on canvas, drawing cracks on the patina, filtering sun and shade on the furniture, miniaturizing the effects of light itself.
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Tags: Alberto Giacometti, Baudrillard, Charles Matton, Francis Bacon, Jean Baudrillard, Kisa Lala, London, new york, Sigmund Freud, Sylvie Matton
Posted in Architecture, Art, Design, Sculpture | No Comments »
Sunday, September 11th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Film still from The Mill and the Cross, 2011 Directed by Lech Majewski - Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc.
Some time ago as part of my long fascination with Venetian culture, I came across Lech Majewski’s impassioned film, The Garden of Earthly Delights, a doomed love story told through meditative and erotic enactments of Bosch’s painting, a contemporary vision of Visconti’s Death in Venice, shot in that fabled floating city, which the Polish filmmaker now calls home.
An accomplished artist and composer, Majewski, also wrote and co-produced Basquiat, directed later by his friend Julian Schnabel. His new feature film, The Mill and the Cross with Rutger Hauer, Michael York, and Charlotte Rampling playing Mary, is an elaborately layered, computer-generated tableaux of another classic, Pieter Bruegel’s 1564, The Way to Calvary – a composite of multiple light sources and seven different perspectives that Breugel had used to trick the eye.
In the painting, Jesus’s crucifixion becomes marginalized by a vista of colourful onlookers, bread-sellers, squabbling hawkers, inquisitors and their victims strapped to Catherine-wheels, all strewn across the landscape. A windmill perched on a high crag casts an all-seeing messianic gaze over the landscape, its lazy blades turning the cogs of time.
Charlotte Rampling - Film still from The Mill and the Cross, 2011 Directed by Lech Majewski - Credit: Kino Lorber, Inc.
During our conversation Majewski and I chatted about animal suicides, latent cruelty, and the art of animating paintings.
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Tags: Bosch, Breugel, Charlotte Rampling, Death in Venice, Jean Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, Kisa Lala, Lech Majewski, Michael York, Pieter Bruegel, Rutger Hauer, The Garden of Earthly Delights, Venice, Visconti
Posted in Art, Film, Interview, Photography | No Comments »
Friday, August 19th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Kahn & Selesnick, King of the Birds, 2007, Archival pigment print, 54 x 54 inches, Edition of 10 © Kahn & Selesnick, Courtesy of the Artist and the Yancey Richardson Gallery
As featherless bipeds we’ve been haunted by avian myths and envied creatures of flight, but birds are now sadly neglected and bypassed in the age of jet travel, their status further diminished by their urban cousins, the flying vermin of city parks, along with their skinned and headless counterparts that come saran-wrapped in supermarkets, their flightless bodies fully-grounded.
Beautiful Vagabonds, a summer group show at Yancey Richardson explores through photography, sound and video, more fanciful visions of these winged gypsies.
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Tags: Alex Prager, Esko Mannikko, Kahn & Selesnick, Kisa Lala, Masao Yamamoto, new york, Richard Barnes, Sanna Kannisto, Terry Evans, Yancey Richardson
Posted in Art, Environment, Photography | No Comments »
Friday, August 12th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Gypsy woman showing her golden smile - Romania - © Photo Kisa Lala 2011
Living on the edges of townships in the grey zones between cities, the Gypsies of Central Europe stay off the grid. Myths, rumours, lies cloud their histories for they leave few traces and heed no rules, instead, they live off the land, and sometimes they beg, thieve and steal.
Count Kalnoky tells me, that at his residence, in the village of Miklosvar in Romania, where I was staying as a guest, he was indeed wireless: the gypsies had cut the cables to fence the copper for their lawless trade.
The roving life seems romantic, but it’s not for the timid. To winter in open fields, to bed in barns, wagons, trailers means Gypsies are strong in their will to be free. They barter for work and stow their riches in silver and gold, knowing it can’t burn like paper, or vanish when people stop believing in its value. Gypsies are always on the move but when they halt, they build silvery houses, knowing if all else fails, they can just melt the metals and leave.
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Tags: Gypsy, Iain McKell, Kisa Lala, Miklosvar, Patrick Cariou, Photography, Romania, Romanies
Posted in Architecture, Art, Books, Environment, Fashion, Photography | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
Werner Herzog in CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS, directed by Werner Herzog. A Sundance Selects Release
The new Werner Herzog 3D film Cave Of Forgotten Dreams documents the most enigmatic ancient drawings ever found, drawn by human hands, on the walls of the Chauvet Cave in France. These 30,000 year-old cave drawings of the first ever human art were discovered in 1994, but since their exposure to the general public, the stale breath of human hordes and the stampede of foot traffic, had caused moulds to appear on the walls of the caves, and subsequently, access has been extremely restricted.
The film explores the first tangible evidence in the human instinct to make art. Hand prints of the artists immortalize the most basic human signature, and suggest a universal longing to be remembered. Some of the etchings were overdrawn with others 5000 years later, which indicates the walls were used for graffiti and art through many later generations of humans, and perhaps these ancient art galleries inspired communal and spiritual gatherings.
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Tags: 3D, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, caveman, Film, France, IFC Center, Kisa Lala, new york, Werner Herzog
Posted in Art, Environment, Film, Sculpture | No Comments »
Thursday, July 28th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
On the Road to Heaven the Highway to Hell, 2009, 75x30x88 cm, Remnants of a suicide bomber cast in dark chocolate. Artist: Stephen j Shanabrook, Photo: Veronika Georgieva. Courtesy of the artist.
Artist Stephen J Shanabrook has a way of looking at things a little askew, and recently with new partner Moscovite artist Veronika Georgieva, he took the city for a spin. Attaching a camera on the wheel of their car, they drove around South Bronx on a hot afternoon. The result is an 8 minute video, Spin City (video excerpt below). Georgieva describes the venture as “A point-and-shoot camera mounted on the wheel of our car to see things from a tire’s point of view.”
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Tags: Cannes, Chocolate, Comme des Garçons, Ford Project, FordProject, Kisa Lala, new york, rachel vancelette, Reporters without borders, saatchi and saatchi, Sculpture, Stephen J Shanabrook, Tim Goossens, Veronika Georgieva
Posted in Art, Interview, Performance, Photography, Sculpture | No Comments »
Friday, July 15th, 2011
By Kiša Lala
Fencing Classes. Christoph Büchel Piccadilly Community Centre Hauser & Wirth, London
One of the more curious shows I witnessed in London was at Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly gallery, which had been transformed into a Community Centre by Swiss artist Christoph Büchel. The change was so complete that I initially walked right past the gallery’s premises, which had removed any signs of its former status as an exhibition space. Even the galleries nameplate had been dismantled and replaced by standard billboards and announcements associated with events at the new pop-up community centre. The gallery’s sudden reversal into a non-profit centre for the under-privileged notably clashed with its location in the posh enclaves of Central London.
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Tags: Christoph Büchel, Hauser & Wirth, Kisa Lala
Posted in Architecture, Art, Environment, Performance | No Comments »
