Biennale Updates: cronache dall’effimero per la prima volta del Padiglione Maldive in Laguna
Artribune.com [Italian only]
30 May 2013
by Francesco Sala
Alle otto del mattino non c’è nessuno lungo Riva di Ca’ di Dio. Pochi temerari in tenuta da jogging, i ragazzini che si trascinano a scuola, un paio di turisti. E poi un blocco di ghiaccio. Sbarca dal Canale dell’Arsenale, trascinato a forza di muletto; prende a sciogliersi, inesorabile, una goccia alla volta. È il monolite con cui Stefano Cagol significa la sua partecipazione alla Biennale di Venezia, ospite di quel Padiglione Maldive che ha trovato casa –alla sua prima volta in Laguna –in uno stabile semi-abbandonato in viale Garibaldi. Verrà il giorno in cui le Maldive non si saranno più, sommerse un centimetro alla volta dall’innalzamento del livello degli oceani; la raccolta messa insieme dal collettivo CPS – Chambers of Public Secrets indugia sul titanico precariato di una terra in crisi di identità, storica piattaforma tra Oriente e Occidente che esorcizza nell’arte la sua eutanasia.
Aggressività post-espressionista per The Disappearance di Wael Darwesh, che colpisce sulla tela con antica disperazione; gli fa da controcanto l’installazione di Patrizio Travagli, tetris di superfici specchianti che illudono e alludono in una straniante frammentazione dello spazio visivo. Inevitabili i riferimenti allo tsunami, che ha portato il suo carico di brutalità anche alle Maldive: sul tema arriva l’installazione di Thierry Geoffroy, mentre a ragionare su una ricostruzione più o meno possibile sono Christoph Draeger ed Heidrun Holzfeind.
Island Nations Seize the Venice Biennale Spotlight to Decry Climate Change
Blouin Artinfo
06.12.2013
by Kate Deimling
MEDIA, REVOLT AND CRITICISM: Encounter of 3rd degree between art and media
November 2, 2012
Auditorium of the SCHOOL OF MEDIA ART, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Schools of Visual Arts, Charlottenborg, Kongens Nytorv 1, 1050 Copenhagen, Denmark
Alfredo Cramerotti, Director of MOSTYN, Wales’ Contemporary art Centre and writer of the book Aesthetic Journalism: How to Inform without Informing on how the artist can find ways not only to ‘import’ journalism into art, but also re-insert an artistic approach into the information industry.
Alfredo will reflect on the concept of public opinion. Does it work as an aggregate and is it open to critical understanding?
Further contributions by Jasmina Metwaly artist and member of Mosireen collective in Cairo, and Truls Lie, documentary filmmaker, editor-in-chief of DOX European Documentary Magazine and a film critic at Le Monde Diplomatique, Scandinavian edition. Final discussion
lead by the hosts: Carsten Juhl, Head of Department for Art and Theory and Tijana Mišković, Academic Research Project Coordinator.
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About the seminar MEDIA, REVOLT AND CRITICISM: Globally we are being confronted with new encounters between visual art and information practices. In urgent and tense situations like the Arab Spring the moving images become important means of communication, especially because of their manipulative nature.
This seminar is the 2nd part of Arab Spring art seminar at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, that started in October 2011. The next seminar will take place December 14, 2012 including presentations by: Seamus Kealy, museum director at The Model, Aida Eltorie from Finding Projects Association and visual artist Rabih Mroue.
For more information, please send an email to:
tijana.miskovic@kunstakademiet.dk
AGM Conversation Series, Cairo Session: On Dialogue
AGM Culture Conversation Series, Cairo Session: On Dialogue
During the upcoming Cairo Biennale, AGM will coordinate a recorded conversation between curators, artists and cultural producers on the 16th December 2010. This one day session will focus on social and geo-political topics relevant to the Mediterranean region, opening up to some tactics for producers and audiences to employ via modes of aesthetic journalism, ficto-criticism and political fictions. Having recently interrogated the nature of collective production and collaboration as part of Chamber of Public Secrets’ contribution to Manifesta 8, AGM wishes to expand on this to address the term “dialogue”. If, as in the realm of cultural diplomacy, dialogue is to be understood as a reciprocal act and as a prelude to collaboration/cultural understanding, then the session asks: who sets the terms of dialogue, where is it enacted, how does it function and what are its inherent asymmetries? More specifically, we hope to delve into the realm of questioning the instrumentalisation of “dialogue” in contemporary art and institutional practices as well as on the geo-political scale.
This session will be disseminated through attendees networks and on agmculture.org.
Participants
Khaled Ramadan (Lebanon, Finland & Denmark) Alfredo Cramerotti (Italy & UK) Hannah Conroy (UK) Yesomi Umolu (UK), Khaled Hafez (Egypt), Aida Eltorie (Egypt & USA), (Dermis Leon (Spain), Achilleas Kentonis (Cyprus) Patrizio Travagli (Italy) Giuseppe Moscatello (UAE), Alexandre Gurita (France), Michael Thoss (Germany).
Sponsors/Supporters
Allianz Stiftung
European Union House of Delegation Cairo-Egypt
About AGM Conversation Series
The AGM Conversation Series brings together, in different configurations and venues, artists, curators, thinkers and contributors variously involved in processes of “knowledge production” via art, media, research or other forms of critical engagement. Adopting AGM’s itinerant format, these sessions seek not only to assess the “state-of-play” at various moments in the lead up to the exhibition or research process in which they are involved at that time, but to continue discussions around thematics that are central to their approach and productions.
A significant feature of the Conversation Series is that they have taken place in semi formal settings, requiring no audience but a camera and an amassed group of participants. They sit somewhere between the formal setting of the commonly used artists talk /seminar format and the informal nature of social/networked conversations between arts practitioners and producers. The sessions provide an open forum for sharing and exchange with no underlying pretext but to consider the current state of affairs.
The edited versions of the AGM Conversation series are distributed online through open networked communities such as Facebook, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and also on agmculture.org.
About AGM
AGM Culture is a curatorial project with some of the inbuilt features of a parasite. Each time, by changing partner, location, form and content, its primary focus is to explore the peculiarity of the hosting body – be it a site, an institution or a theme. Previously, AGM has explored new modes of knowledge production within art and the media in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the U.K. and in the Web space
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
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