This is the trailer promoting the upcoming 52min documentary “Street Art – The Ephemeral Rebellion” by Anne Bürger & Benjamin Cantu, produced by Boekamp & Kriegsheim , on arte next month. The trailer explicitly promises to let us “discover the world beyond banksy”. For people familiar with the matter, it will feature rather well known activists from the US, Berlin, Paris and Moscow, though; amongst those are: Zasd, Swoon, Blek le rat, Brad Downey, Nomad, Princess Hijab, Misha, Most, Igor P, Raphael Suriani and David T.
The colported Moscow feature seems especially interesting as little (or nothing) is known about the urban art scene in the GUS States. There are rumours that the movie will have a premiere in Berlin on which no details are yet known though. The screening on arte will be on the 25th of March, at 21:50. We’ll definitely have a close look at this one.
There’s another Vernissage this evening we would like to recommend: Albin Ray the obscure but nevertheless omnipresent concrete poet, will contribute in the MAGAZIN – Society for the Development of the Arts – opening reception tonight @ Hammer-Purgstall-Gasse 7 / A 1020 Vienna / 12.02.10 / 19:00
Featuring:
Opening: FRANK DEN OUDSTEN (NL)
Music—Performance: THECLOSING (A)
Space—Intervention: ALBIN RAY (USA)
Trailer—MAGAZIN: CAROLINE BOBEK (A)
Visual—Essay: ANDREAS WESLE (D)
DJ Line-Up: DENIS YASHIN (RU) / BERNHARD TOBOLA (A)
Tomorrow on Friday 12th, 2010 @ 19:00; fresh artwork of BLK River Festival ‘09 participant BUSK – Vienna’s masked villain of typo, graffiti & street art – will be unveiled at the Street Art Passage Vienna @ 7th district entrance of MQ.
The pieces will be on show in public space 24/7 until the 29th of April 2010.
Everybody with a passion for canned beverages, wooly hats & temperatures below zero is dearly invited to join us in winter wonderland.
The video features Know Hope’s latest installation in the streets of his native
Tel Aviv done in January 2010. More than that, it’s a rare account of his intent
and delicate workflow. Behold Know Hope spinning forward his narrative
of loss and gain, time and timeliness, maturation and reluctance,
and the load experience weighs on his characters shoulders.
For everybody eager delving into the intricate yet archetypic symbolicism of his art,
we would like to recommend the latest interview with him on arrestedmotion.
In 2008 James Powderly was invited by the group “Students for a free Tibet” to support their cause during the Olympic Games in Beijing. While preparing to debut the L.A.S.E.R. Stencil, a handheld green laser with micro-stencils to beam simple messages up to three stories high, Powderly was arrested, detained and interrogated for ten days at Chongwen Detention Center by Chinese authorities. (Read the extensive article on artnet)
Soon after his return Powderly started to work on “Baltimore” , a comic book recollection of his experiences in China and their prehistory, with befriended artists. A print of the cover design and original panels of the story by artist Jihoi Lee where exhibited at BLK River Festival’s 2009 groupshow in Vienna.
The Interview on James Powderly’s BLK River contribution, detainment in China, work and life with GRL/ FAT Lab, filmed and conducted by tagr.tv’s Emanuel Andel got also featured by ORF’s science magazine Futurezone:
Aakash Nihalani, Installation View, Blk River Festival, Vienna, 2009
Mark Jenkins, Spider Legs, mixed media, Vienna 2008
A showcase of new work by Aakash Nihalani, with a solo exhibition by Mark Jenkins in the front gallery space. Opening Reception: Thursday, January 21, 2010, 7-10 PM Exhibition Open Through February 18, Tuesday-Sunday 1-7 PM For More Information: 323-969-0600 lauren@carmichaelgallery.com www.carmichaelgallery.com
A showcase of new work by Aakash Nihalani, with a solo exhibition by Mark Jenkins in the front gallery space.
The artist labels himself “a maverick hobbyist dabbling at the fringes of robotics, chemistry, writing, pyrotechnics, graffiti, art, tattoos and rock n roll.” Born in 1976 in the US Deep South, Powderly’s loose and versatile self description is indeed proven by his Curriculum Vitae. First teenage experiments with electronic DIY-kits, were soon to be followed by studies in composition and music theory and those followed by a self-relocation to New York and studies in interactive arts. He then worked at Honeybee Robotics, a Manhattan-based NASA contractor, developing the Mars Exploration Rover’s Rock Abrasion Tool. An engagement he soon swapped for activism in the world of subversive arts. Since then Powderly’s arts and design projects can be found on the surface of Mars and other people’s walls throughout the U.S. and Europe. James shares a bed with his cat Schnitzel in Berlin.
The works of Albin Ray speak for themselves and for their creator. Implicitly, they must, as little is known of this nomad who moves between Vienna and New York. Albin Ray deliberately withdraws from the self-preoccupation and navel-gazing of contemporary media-society. Thus even more so, do the bold works of Albin Ray move into the foreground; demanding active interpretation by the observers and discoverers of his utterances. Nothing but single words, phrases, shreds of thoughts, rhetorical questions and absurd pairings, Albin Ray leaves behind in repeatedly black letters, placed at those points in the city, which are not to be seen or about to disappear and covered up: Words in constant flux, under permanent reconstruction and prey to oblivion – kindred to human thought and perception.
Besides his engagement as co-founder of Graffiti Research Lab.(GRL), in recent years the Michigan-born Evan Roth internationally emerged with a versatile artistic portfolio of collaborative and solo, on- and offline projects. His works cover a spectrum reaching from net-cultural and -critical arts, to analytical works on media and media-aesthetics, from the development of typographical animated-movies, open-source software and tech-gadgets, to crowd-sourcing based media arts and political activism.
Evan Roth’s works have repeatedly been awarded and can be found in public and private collections around the globe. He is co-founder of the open-source technology collective FAT (Free Art and Technology) Lab., based in Brooklyn, New York and teaches at the Parsons New School for Design. Evan Roth lives with his wife in Hong Kong and the USA.
Born in 1985 in Santiago de Chile, Max Schaffer discovered his ability and passion for the arts in public spaces in his teenage years. His early murals on school buildings in Mexico and Cuba would be the prelude to his career in the arts. Since then he continuously has expanded his spectrum of artistic expression from painting, calligraphy and illustration to performance, sculpture and interventions in public space.
Max Schaffer studied fine arts at the Universität der Künste in Bremen; since 2008 he studies painting in the masters class of Daniel Richter, at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. So far, his exhibitions took him from Bremen, Barcelona, Budapest, Milan, Moscow and New York to remote Kirgistan.
The formation “Sabotage” was founded by artist Robert Jelinek in the area of the Documenta IX in Kassel in June 1992. Sabotage” began operating in 1992 as a small project and collective, later 1994 as Sabotage Communications- an art organisation and music label, than a union of various sublabels. Since 1992 more than 100 international “public sabotages” have taken place in form of performances, actions, events and exhibitions. In 2003 the trans-territorial State of Sabotage was proclaimed on an uninhabited Scandinavian island as the “first sovereign state of culture” on earth.
According to the group’s definition, Sabotage “is not a technique that transports meaning. Sabotage transgresses positions without presenting a new social order, provokes thinking by intervening in the official discourse. Sabotage […] tries to make thinkable new possibilities.”
Chris Sugrue is an artist and programmer from the United States. Her works experiment with the often magical or illusory possibilities of technology creating fictional worlds that bleed into reality. These software-driven artworks have taken the form of interactive installations, live audio-visual performances, and algorithmic animations. And as much as Sugrues work often takes a seemingly aesthetizicing, playful, benign and thus somewhat obscurant approach to the phenomena of the digital age, there always comes a subtle moment of techno-cultural critique into play that calls for attention to the contradictions we often find ourselves interacting with digital technology. That is to say that in the ongoing process of facilitating and subjecting more and more aspects of life to devices of communication, electronic images, databases and surveillance systems, the lack and – at the same time – increasing requirement of (self-)control, that are effects of these systems, are often masked by their usefulness or the great benefits promised.
Chris is a co-developer of the Eyewriter Project and has been an artist-in-residence at Eyebeam Open Lab. (New York), Hangar (Barcelona), Harvestworks (New York), La Casa De Velázquez (Madrid) and the Ars Electronica (Linz).
In 2003 the Los Angeles-based artist Tony Quan aka Tempt One was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, rapidly progresses throughout all systems. In some cases, the brain loses its ability to control all muscles, resulting in the progressive inability to physically move about or function various parts of the body. The disease may or may not have a known causal factor and may not even have a medical cure. But Tony Quan’s fate has neither touched his sharp mind and creative energy, nor his passion for graffiti.So in early 2009 artists, engineers and programmers from London, Hong Kong, Madrid, Amsterdam and New York City teamed up with Tony Quan to develop the EYEWRITER – a low-cost, open-source eyetracking-based graphics tool that enables people suffering from paralysis to draw with their eyes.
Within a few weeks Tony Quan already managed to create complex illustration and lettering – by the sole means of the coordinate movement of his pupils and eyelids. The Black River festival group show hosts an illustration by Tony Quan done with Eyewriter-Technology.
Tobias’ internet-based art work gained international media attention in both the art and technology world. He collaborated on challenging software such as China Channel, a tool to experience Chinese information censorship on your home computer, or Pirates of the Amazon, a software that integrates a functional “Download 4 free” button on the website of Amazon.com, world’s largest online retailer. Issues like censorship, copyright or information power structures are the motivation for Tobias’ artwork. Online culture and collaboration with his FAT Lab colleagues (Internet based artist collective) are the source of his inspiration.
Tobias’ solo show with the title “Skate the web” will be on display in Berlin this November. His work was previously shown at ROFLthing New York and WORM Rotterdam. His work was coverd by online magazines such as New York Times, LA Times, Wired, Spiegel and Rhizome at the New Museum, New York.
The artistic approach of the New York-based newcomer Aakash Nihalani is minimalist – in the best sense of the word. With radical consequence he has reduced his pictorial language to geometrical forms, lines and planes. To this end, the New Yorker employs fluorescent tape, to break up the two-dimensional relief of urban architecture with iso- and bimetric cubes and quadrants. He superimposes his tromp l’oeils over the urban surface, thus bestowing new perspectives on everyday manifestations.
And “as much as the lines and shapes seem to play with just the structural elements of a city, there exists in each piece a subtle narrative quality that’s not brooding, but light hearted instead, and perhaps more often than not, witty and humorous.” (Meenakshi Thirukode)
Know Hope is internationally known for his poetic and often melancholic artworks, which pertain to the precarious nature of human existence and revolve around the world of feelings connected with the human predicament. In this context one finds in his work the recurring motifs of hearts and hour-glasses, suggesting the fragile and easily broken nature of existence. The artist paints his elegant yet vulnerable creatures on walls, draws them with delicate ornament on paper or cardboard, or places his artworks as lit-up Chinese lanterns in the cities that he visits – reminding of the transitory nature of existence. “I hope to move heavy hearts at least one inch to the side by confessing that I’m petrified and secretly in love with the world,” Know Hope writes in connection with the hope that his works advance. The California-born Know Hope lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel. His art was and is to be found in the cities, streets and galleries of Israel, the UK, Norway, Italy, Canada and the U.S.A.
The American artist, Mark Jenkins (b. 1970) is predominantly working with the profane material of packing tape, he employs to take casts of his body and everyday objects, such as children’s playthings. He creates transparent, fragile looking figures of child- and animal dolls, tearing down road signs or populating urban green areas. On occasion the stuffed cast of his body is presented in dressed, life-size sculptures, which are planted in the urban environment, irritating everyday routines. Public space is for Jenkins an embattled territory with shifting boundaries and hybrid networks between city, art, advertising, brand names, individual and collective claims for sovereignty: “Public space is a battleground, with the government, advertisers and artists all mixing and mashing”.
Mark Jenkins lives in Washington, D.C. He operates the website, tapessculptures.org and holds ongoing workshops in connection with his international exhibitions.
Founded by the artists James Powderly and Evan Roth, the international network Graffiti Research Lab., is preoccupied with the mission of providing cheap, open-source communication technology to artists, graffiti-writers, communications-guerillas and political activists. The research and development works of the group are consecutively documented and publicized on the web with do-it-yourself construction manuals. Autonomous GRL chapters, based in cities throughout the world, multiply and co-develop the projects of the core group based in New York. The works of GRL are in international collections and museums, including the famous MoMA, New York. In 2006 the group received an award in the category of “Interactive Art” at the Pris Arts Electronica in Linz. In the context of the Black River Festival, GRL will have their groundbreaking, collaborative project, “Eye Writer” (an optical graphic tool for physically handicapped) presented in Europe for the first time.
There is hardly anyone in Vienna or in the small Styrian community of Semriach, who has not encountered at least a single pictorial or sculptural intervention of Christian Eisenberger.
The artist became widely known by the city’s public for his repeated dissemination of numerous artworks at intersections and hubs of urban life. It is said that about ten thousand of those artworks, painted on derelict packing boxes, commenting on politics, society, life and death, thereby found their way to the streets, the homes of afficiandos and the containers of cleansing services. Consequently the art of Christian Eisenberger detracts itself of the relative as much as the absolute claims for durability and profitability of both Street Art and the arts market. Christian Eisenberger is the founder of the Kunsthalle K2 in Semriach (Styria). His works can be found in many private and public collections, which include The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City and the Neue Galerie, Graz.
