Afterglow: Marinella Senatore in conversation with Alfredo Cramerotti @ UK Italian Embassy London
Wednesday 8 June 2022, 6pm
Pera + Flora + Fauna: The Story of Indigenousness and the Ownership of History @ 59th La Biennale di Venezia
Collateral Event of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 23 April -27 November 2022, Archivi della Misericordia, Venice, Italy
People of Remarkable Talents (PORT), an arts and culture agency under the Perak State Government, with support from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, and the National Art Gallery Malaysia, announces its commission of the exhibition Pera + Flora + Fauna, as an official Collateral Event at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. PORT is honoured to present at this prestigious international art event, the artists and artworks that have been inspired by the rich histories and context of the state of Perak, Malaysia.
Pera + Flora + Fauna engages with the discourse around how indigenousness and nature are affected by mainstream cultural attitudes of industrialised nations, the very nations contributing to existing environmental problems. This leads us to question, can aesthetic thinking support the conservation and restoration of nature or indigenous rights and ways of life? Can indigenous populations across the globe challenge the mainstream documented (art) history written by the non-indigenous? Can indigenous populations achieve the liberty to collectively claim “their own history and narratives”, antagonising the dominant discourse? Pera + Flora + Fauna intends to address these questions drawing on different perspectives of man, nature, and their interrelation.
The exhibition features Malaysian artists and collectives, and an Italian artist, from multiple disciplines ranging across performance, film, sound, sculpture, and new media. The artists are Azizan Paiman (MY), Kamal Sabran (MY), Kapallorek Artspace (MY), Kim Ng (MY), Projek Rabak (MY), Saiful Razman (MY) and Stefano Cagol (ITA), with the contribution and participation of the people of the Semai tribe from Kampung Ras, Sungkai, Perak.
Pera + Flora + Fauna will take place at Archivi della Misericordia in Cannaregio, Venice; commissioned by Nur Hanim Mohamed Khairuddin, General Manager of PORT, and curated by appointed lead curators Amir Zainorin and Khaled Ramadan, and associate curators Annie Jael Kwan and Camilla Boemio.
The team is advised by Alfredo Cramerotti, the president of IKT and the director of MOSTYN, Wales.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the discourse expands through a forum where invited panelists Alfredo Cramerotti, Dorian Batycka, Henry Meyric Hughes, and Jo-Lene Ong, along with the curators and artists, will share their observations and interpretations around the concept of Ownership of Nature and History; attempting to contextualise the notion of the natural and the historic and why it cannot be independent of the intellectual, artistic, emotional, and technological resources available to us in the industrialised world. In addition, there will be three on-site performances by the artists; one which explores sound and body movement to heal the internal psychic and spiritual body based on Malay traditional healing rituals; the others inviting the audience to engage with the ongoing contest between capitalist-driven narratives of extractivism towards land and indigenous peoples, and the agency and creative resilience of indigenous communities in sharing their histories and holistic principles of coexistence with nature.
Caterina Silva: Summer Unknown exhibition @ Bosse & Baum, London – curated by Alfredo Cramerotti
Opening 6th April 2022
ARTiculating Regeneration: Art as Agent for Change webinar by PlusTate / IKT / MOSTYN
An online panel discussion exploring sustainable & regenerative artistic practices and the impact on their respective landscapes.
About this event
Tuesday 5 April, 15.00 – 17.00 (UK time) / 10.00 – 12.00 (EST)
Plus Tate, MOSTYN and IKT (International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art) join forces once more for a panel discussion exploring regenerative blue/green infrastructure and sustainable artistic practices with hands-on implication and direct impact on the environment and landscapes upon which they are situated.
In October 2021, our organisations connected to present Sustainable Design and Regenerative Architecture in Cultural Spaces. During the session, we explored how art venues can become greener and heard from artists who were embracing sustainability as a pivotal part of their making.
During ARTiculating Regeneration: Art as Agent for Change on Tuesday 5 April 2022, speakers will take these concepts further by sharing their practices and the impacts on the landscapes on which they sit.
Speakers from across the globe will join together virtually to share the great work they are doing in this area. We will hear from:
Jason deCaires Taylor, Underwater Sculpture Artist
Jan Mun, Blade of Grass Artist
Elizabeth Monoian & Robert Ferry, Land Art Generator
Bill Reed, Regenesis Group
Adam Sutherland, Grizedale Arts
The session will be moderated by Ombretta Agró Andruff of IKT & ARTSail
New Spring 2022 programme season at MOSTYN: Angharad Williams: Picture the Others & The Wig exhibitions; McKenzie Wark: The Artist-Publisher podcast series
Exhibition
Angharad Williams: Picture the Others
February 19–June 12, 2022
Picture the Others is the first institutional solo exhibition by Welsh artist and writer Angharad Williams. This new commission will consist of a large-scale installation presented across MOSTYN’s gallery spaces and will include film, painting, sculpture, and text. Williams’s practice reflects on the relationship between the individual and wider societal structures. The exhibition, curated by Juliette Desorgues (Curator of Visual Arts, MOSTYN) will be accompanied by live elements such as a performance and workshops in addition to the project titled The Wig that will include film, writing and publishing by the artist and other contemporary artists.
Angharad Williams is an artist living in Ynys Môn and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include High Horse, Kevin Space, Vienna (2021); Without the Scales, Schiefe Zähne, Berlin (2020); Witness, Haus Zur Liebe, Schaffhausen, Switzerland (2019); Island Mentality, Peak, London (2019); and Scarecrows, LISZT, Berlin (2018). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including: Jerwood Arts, London (2021), Stadtgalerie Bern (2021) and Kunstverein Munich (2020). Performances have taken place at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2020); ICA, London (2019); and Radiophrenia, Glasgow (2017).
Supported by Foundation Foundation, Arts Council Wales, The Henry Moore Foundation, The Megan Gwynne-Jones Charitable Trust.
The Wig
19 February – 12 June, 2022
The Wig is an ongoing, accumulative project between Gianmaria Andreetta, Jason Hirata, Megan Plunkett, Richard Sides and Angharad Williams.
The project’s title borrows from the notion of “La Perruque“ (“The Wig“ in English), first introduced by philosopher Michel de Certeau in his groundbreaking book The Practice of Everyday Life. Published in 1984, it looked at the still relevant issues of the value we attach to the objects around us in contrast to the value we perceive in those who make them.
“The Wig“ broadly refers to anything done under the guise of work, but is in fact not work, or not the work one is supposed to be doing. Practicing “The Wig“ can be as simple as writing personal emails during office hours, using the company photocopier to print private invitations, or using someone else’s time for one’s own. For its current form at MOSTYN, the project will feature a collaborative video developed by the participants as well as reading material and resources shared between the artists in their ongoing conversations.
Online programme
McKenzie Wark podcast series: The Artist-Publisher
February 1–5, 2022
In this podcast series, writer McKenzie Wark talks to artists who are also publishers and publishers whose work is a kind of art practice. Zines and books, made cheaply or by the thousands, or web-based journals available for free—these seem antithetical to the unique work of art. And yet the creation of meaning around art practices requires this other kind of practice of publishing written works. Contributors include Jacqueline de Jong and GB Jones amongst others.
McKenzie Wark is the author, among other things, of Philosophy for Spiders: on the low theory of Kathy Acker (Duke University Press 2021) and The Beach Beneath the Street: the Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (Verso 2011). She is professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City.
Atlante Temporaneo. Cartografie del sé nell’arte di oggi @ Gallerie delle Prigioni, Treviso
Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti and organised by Fondazione Imago Mundi / Fondazione Benetton Studi e Ricerche
Temporary Atlas: Cartographies of the Self in the Art of Today
5 February – 29 May 2022
Curated by Alfredo Cramerotti
The exhibition presents an idea of mapping that is alternative to the traditional conception. We know that there are two maps – an objectively-driven mapping and an individually perceived one – after all, not every aspect of our environment or our life has the same value. Equally, there are cartographers-explorers and cartographers-artists.
The fourteen cartographers-artists of Temporary Atlas do not gaze exclusively on the outside but rather focus towards themselves, aiming to investigate their perceptions, identities, emotions, physical and mental sensations. They adopt the traditional approach to mapping (a representation of reality) but expand it along unconventional paths – identity, spirituality, subconscious, feelings or memories that interact upon each of us.
Walking through the exhibition, the visitor realises that however an artwork can engage reality, and reality is understood beyond representation, it is also true that much depends on which criteria we adopt to manifest this relationship. What we read in a representation (cartographic or artistic) depends on what methods and rules we intend to follow in this reading.
Temporary Atlas is an attempt to identify the fleeting border between these two extremes: a reading of the person who, in the midst of a global pandemic yet to be resolved, re-evaluates their own priorities. The exhibition aims thus to describe our emotional, political, aesthetic horizon. It explores, in other words, the visitors’ expectation that art can allow us to reflexively understand our daily reality.
Participating artists: Oliver Laric, Jeremy Deller, Paul Maheke, Matt Mullican, James Lewis, Kiki Smith, Walid Raad, Ibrahim Mahama, Otobong Nkanga, Rochelle Goldberg, Seymour Chwast, Enam Gbewonyo, Sanford Biggers and Sarah Entwistle.
New publications from MOSTYN: Richard Wathen and Nick Hornby
New Eyes very Time
Rooted in the historical canon of painting, Richard Wathen’s (b. London, 1971; lives and works in Suffolk, United Kingdom) work focuses largely on portraiture, portraying figures in states of hesitation and contemplation: listening at walls, pretending to sleep, moon bathing, or engaging in other apparent states of uncertainty. Wathen’s works depict the tumultuous and complex array of negative human emotions, from anxiety and sorrow to despair, brought on by the socioeconomic pressures of contemporary living. The intensity created through the use of small details is powerful and emotional as an expressive gesture. His works subvert the genre of figurative painting through a bold play between representation and abstraction, between the solid density of the matte surface and the fragility of the figures represented.
The catalogue presents a selection of the large- and medium-format works that can be read as an investigation of the human condition in an age when an image is considered a stand-in for a sentient being. With essays by Alfredo Cramerotti, Juan Bolivar and Rebecca Geldard.
Link here
Zygotes and Confessions
A a new publication devoted to the work of London-based artist Nick Hornby, and has been produced to accompany his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. The exhibition, which shares its title with the publication, is presented at MOSTYN, Wales, UK, from November 2020 to April 2021.
Hornby is known for his monumental site-specific works that combine digital software with traditional materials such as bronze, steel, granite and marble. In this publication he presents a substantial new body of smaller, more intimate work comprising three discrete yet interrelated series of works inspired by the history of sculptural busts, modernist abstractions and mantelpiece ceramic dogs. United by glossy photographic surfaces created by means of an industrial process in which his marble and resin composite sculptures are dipped into liquid photographs, these new works explore themes of portraiture, the body, identity, sexuality and intimacy in the digital era. A number of the works have been made in collaboration with fashion photographer Louie Banks.
Along with a foreword by Helen Boyd, Head of Marketing and Publisher Relations at the Casemate Group, the publication features a text by MOSTYN director Alfredo Cramerotti and an essay by London-based publisher, editor and writer Matt Price. Price writes: ‘With one eye on the sculpture of the past and the other on that of tomorrow, technology is at the heart of London-based Nick Hornby’s practice and is central to the production of his often imposing, mind-bending and futuristic-looking sculptures. Using materials such as bronze and marble, his work points back towards the Renaissance or the nineteenth century, yet his use of resin and digital technology positions him very much in the present, exploring languages both figurative and abstract, often simultaneously.’
The texts are presented in both English and Welsh. Newly commissioned studio photography of the works by Ben Westoby, along with installation views of the exhibition commissioned by MOSTYN from Mark Blower, illustrate the publication, which has been designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik. The publication is co-published by MOSTYN, Llandudno, and Anomie Publishing, London, and distributed internationally by Casemate Art, a division of the Casemate Group.
Link here
“Conflict Reporting” on Third Text, Volume 35, Issue 2 (2021)
Conflict Reporting
Aestheticising Objectivity
By Alfredo Cramerotti & Lauren Mele
Pages 248-262 | Published online: 29 Jan 2021 | Published in print: February 2021
Abstract
In 2001, artists Broomberg and Chanarin documented a day in the Iraq war. The result was a visual yet non-descript narrative, achieved with light and presence; a physical documentation of their journey titled The Day Nobody Died. In 1968 photojournalist Eddie Adams captured Saigon Execution in Vietnam, also a war-time image but with the lens of reportage. The former is a rendition of their experience, not bound by the constraints and facets of aestheticising fact. The latter was presented as news and was the receiver of outrage and scrutiny as such. This article explores how representations of humanitarian crises and wartime are complicit in their perpetuation, and how art demonstrates an attempt at representing such events as futile. We seek to establish a link between what is viewed and what is reported; what is seen and what remains outside the picture; an attempt to unravel what the difference is between viewing and witnessing.
Abstract available at https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2021.1873003
New book by Alfredo Cramerotti: Curating the Image – Notebook for a Visual Journey [Distanz Verlag, Dec 2020]
From the publishers’ webpage:
“Unconscious Informing” – For over twenty years, the curator Alfredo Cramerotti (b. Trento, Italy, 1967; lives and works in Llandudno, Wales) has built an extensive collection of visual materials divided into multiple categories. Newspaper clippings, postcards, drawings, flyers, articles, advertisements, other media materials: Cramerotti finds something of interest wherever he looks. He clusters and collages his finds along five independent thematic foci: design approach, alpine culture, leadership, houseplants, and the gaze. Cramerotti’s interest in creating a system of order and reference takes inspiration from the work of Aby Warburg. He uses his collection of imagery to study formal principles of commercial visual culture, adding ironic observations and drawing connections to media trends. With an essay by the curator.
Curating the Image. Notebook for a Visual Journey (download short extract)
Supported by The Ampersand Foundation, L’Artisan Parfumeur , Maria and Theodore Fatsis, Penhaligon’s, Adam Prideaux and Carolin Scharpff-Striebich. Designed by Laura Catania. Published by Distanz Verlag, Berlin.
New publications by Intellect as part as the Critical Photography book series, edited by Alfredo Cramerotti
Fortunes of War: Photography in Alter Space
By Eric Lesdema Series edited by Alfredo Cramerotti
£49.00 | 120 pages | 7 Oct 2020
An extended edit of Eric Lesdema’s photographic series of the same name, with 83 colour photographs and essays from leading academics which analyse how his work provides an alternative approach to documentary photography. Twenty-first-century interpretations and applications of photography are questioned, as are warfare and its cultural framework.
An extended edit of Eric Lesdema’s photographic series of the same name, with 83 colour photographs and essays from leading academics which analyse how his work provides an alternative approach to documentary photography. Twenty-first-century interpretations and applications of photography are questioned, as are warfare and its cultural framework.
Eric Lesdema’s photographic series Fortunes of War was awarded the UN Nikon World Prize in 1997. Originally a series of fifteen images, this extended edit includes 83 colour photos, accompanied by a series of essays by leading academics in the field. The essays explore ideas raised by the prescient nature of the work, offering a highly original and engaging debate about its alternative approach to documentary photography, which views photography as an alternate space with the potential to project events rather than record them. In exploring an approach that cuts against the traditional concept central to documentary photography since its inception, the book thus raises important questions about twenty-first century interpretations and applications of photography and media. With thought-provoking research and a diverse array of essay contributions, Fortunes of War proposes new lines of interdisciplinary investigation, reflection and inquiry.
Photography as Critical Practice: Notes on Otherness
By David Bate Afterword by Liz Wells Series edited by Alfredo Cramerotti
£45.00 | 300 pages | 15 Dec 2020
A collection that combines visual works with critical essays around the theme of everyday life to explore the concept of otherness and highlight photography as a form of critical practice. Put together in this way, the book images and text work in dialogue with one another to construct a new perspective on questions of otherness and alterity.
The ‘other’ is a topic of great interest within and across contemporary photographic practice and theory, yet it remains neglected outside the now well-established field of postcolonial studies. This volume brings together photography and written essays that relate to aspects of otherness and visual work. Presented together, the images and critical writings work in concert to construct a new social perspective on questions of otherness and alterity and to highlight photography as a form of critical practice.
In a departure from existing conceptions of otherness in postcolonial discourse, Photography as Critical Practice places emphasis on the human condition not as a liberal concept, but as something formed and framed by a broader dimension of social, sexual and cultural otherness. In this way, the book provides a fascinating new vista on the otherness of photography.
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
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