Travelers’ eyes

© lida abdul

“As an artist who works both in performance and video art, Lida Abdul creates poetic spaces that allow the viewer to interrogate the familiar and the personal. Her work is guided by a ritualized formalism that insinuates the immediacy of myth and the playfulness of a mind seeking to understand the surrounding world. In many ways, witnessing her pieces is like attempting to understand the riddles of the gestures and the repetitions that highlight her work. Abdul’s work is located at the intersection between art and architecture; it invites the viewer to see the unfolding of new forms but never resolves the contradictions and the paradoxes, the purpose of which
seems to be to make us doubt our claims of understanding.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, and resides there now. Abdul lived in Germany and India as a refugee after she was forced to leave Afghanistan after the former-Soviet invasion. Her work fuses the tropes of ‘Western” formalism with the numerous aesthetic traditions–Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan and nomadic–that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture. She has produced work in many media including video, film, photography, installation and live performance. Her most recent work has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2005, Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Vienna, Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Netherlands and Miami Central, CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain de Bretigny, and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. She has also exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan; She was also a featured artist at the Central Asian Biennial 2004. For the past few years, Abdul has been working in different parts of Afghanistan on projects exploring the relationship between architecture and identity.”

Discover the work of Lida Abdul +++

A moment closed to the river in deep Amazonia, from the “Shiwiars Project”, by Valery Grancher.

“(…)I work mostly with media of all kinds, from video, photography, paintings, sometimes advertisement, marketing via Internet and this rebounding relationship with a reality of mediation perceived at the individual level triggers my interest, more than the one understood subjectively or in a phenomenological way, that is concomitant realities, whether collective or societal which intersect, their interactions with identity, memory, temporality, a given space. The Internet is a rather specific media because it allows strange situations as I said earlier which correspond to moments of 24hours, localized or global spaces confronted to a location and one individual experience. I certainly consider the Internet at a more symbolic level in relationship to our daily reality - I do not belong to a technological system which consists of generating new technologies to be grafted upon the Internet and thus supports the modern, progressive or positivist orders- I am only interested in the human experience brought up by this particular media. (…)

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“Will the Fed’s shock rate cut rescue the global economy ?”
Evan Davis, BBC economics editor

Because of this kind of questions … I don’t want to listen to the radio today.
But I’ve found what to do with my banknote if in the future I can’t buy any flight ticket with them: I’ll go on the website of Marc Sky, The Dollar Artist, or on Won Park gallery.

“A Paris court found oil giant Total guilty of negligence over the 1999 sinking of the tanker Erika and ordered the company to pay $298 million in damages.

The money will be paid mostly to the French government, but also to various regional environmental groups, including Greenpeace. Total was also fined $550,000 for maritime pollution.

The Erika broke up and sank in heavy seas in the Bay of Biscay some 70 km off the French coast on December 12, 1999, pouring 20,000 tones of toxic fuel into the sea. The accident fouled 400 km of beaches and shoreline, crippled local industries including fishing, tourism and salt production and killed some 75,000 seabirds.”

This drawing made by Nicolas Vial just gives you an idea of how we felt as this tragedy happened.

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Conteners is a nomadic art center organised around merchandise containers, the 6mx2,5mx3m giant Lego blocks that one encounters along all the roads and in all the ports of the world..

Each year, the Conteners team invites artists (from all artistic disciplines) in different cities to take hold of a container in order to create a work of art in it.

From one to three months , artist and container are residents in a specific territory. The container, an empty and sensitive object, functions in the same way as a sponge, absorbing and compiling the elements that are an essential part of the local and popular memory and of the work in progress. The artist seizes all these elements in order to inhabit the container that will be used as a canvas, a mini concert hall, a performance theatre, a projection space, the basis of an installation.

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Never seen landings like the ones shooted by Branislav Kropilak

“Born in Slovakia, Branislav spent most of his childhood in Belgium, travelling a lot around the world with his parents from an early age. He graduated at the renowned Private Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava and later on completed studies at the Institute of Digital Photography in Prague. He spent several years working for the leading creative agencies such as BBDO, McCann-Erickson or Saatchi & Saatchi.

The main theme of his work is investigating the way in which modern technology has shaped the human environment and our lives. He is inspired by industrial design, architecture and urbanism in general. It has been said that his work betrays his roots as an advertising professional; the images produced being cool, stark and unforgiving.
The utopian bent of his work with its appreciation of geometry and perspective have already earned him a solid base of collectors and recognition from critics worldwide.”

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Here’s a picture of Jimmy Ogonga a kenyan artist, living in Nairobi.

Jimmy Ogonga also founded The Nairobi Arts Trust / Center for Contemporary Art of East Africa a non profit organization that acts as an advocate for Contemporary art and provokes the evolution of new ideas.

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UHC (Ultimate Holding Company) is an inter-disciplinary art collective, based in Manchester in the UK. Founded in 2002, they work collaboratively over multiple media as well as running a not-for-profit workers co-op specialising in graphic design and visual communications for an ethical client list.

Some of their projects:Carbon Map //2006

UHC collaborated with inter disciplinary art collective Platform on a commission for the Transport Planning Society.

Who
Based on research from Platform, UHC created a carbon map of the world showing global locations of oil and gas production, consumption and impact. The large format print will be displayed at the Transport Planning Society’s London headquarters and at events around the UK.

The Transport Planning Society
The Transport Planning Society is a society for the benefit of the community, to facilitate, develop and promote knowledge, understanding and best practice in transport planning.

Luncheon on the Barge

As part of the Futuresonic 2006 festival, UHC took part in a collaborative project with artist Gustaff Iskandar from Bandung, Indonesia.

Who
Gustaff Iskandar, director of the Common Room arts project in Bandung, Indonesia, visited Manchester to stage his ‘Luncheon on the Barge’ project on the Bridgewater Canal.

What
Gustaff came to Manchester in order to collect stories and narratives from the city and to tell stories from his own. He wanted to form a comparative study of Manchester and Bandung, two cities from different continents but both undergoing the effects of neo-liberal governance.

How
UHC introduced Gustaff to Manchester, helping him research his project. An artist from UHC then took part in the ‘Luncheon on the Barge’ with four other participants including a Libyan refugee and a local environmental campaigner. ‘Luncheon on the Barge’ consisted of an exchange of stories between Gustaff and the Mancunian residents and a comparison of the narratives of Manchester and Bandung.

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