30/08/2012

André Alves / Estado d'época

Inauguração: 6 Setembro: 19:00
Sopro – Projecto de Arte Contemporânea 
Rua das Fontaínhas, 40
1300-257 Lisboa / 967499626
Até 22 de Setembro 2012

Estado d’época
 
Estado d’ época é um ensaio sobre a ideia de acção, renovação e transitoriedade; um comentário sobre as sensações provocadas pelos discursos contemporâneos. Segundo André Alves, esta exposição configura-se enquanto um momento declarativo e sucinto, apontando a polissemia enquanto ferramenta central para a construção da sua obra e não enquanto qualidade final da mesma.

24/08/2012

All Work and Low Pay: The Story of Women and Work

All Work and Low Pay: The Story of Women and Work @ Women's Library London
 
London Metropolitan University
25 Old Castle Street
Aldgate: London E1 7NT
Until the 25th of August 2012

‘It’s time to change the perception that, in the past, the majority of women in Britain were housewives. Women’s work has always been essential to the economy, even though they had to work incredibly long hours to support themselves and their families. The fantastic array of pictures, books, posters and objects in the exhibition shows how much women have achieved. But campaigning continues: there is still a pay gap between men and women. I hope All Work and Low Pay will be inspiring as well as fascinating!’"

The exhibition is beautifully displayed and designed andone shouldn't miss to watch the 1951 film: To Be A Woman by Jill Craigie, a fantastic feminist manifesto to equal opportunities.
Curated by Clare Rose, the exhibition compiles artifacts, documents and facts about women's work in the UK.

The centre piece of the exhibition is a table made of various types of working tables and also an ironing board and washing devie. It was built by furniture maker Sofia Linden
The wonderful display is by Cristina Monteiro
 and the poster design by Eve Barker
Unfortunately the exhibition closes tomorrow. But here are some more images for the record, because there was a very interesting selection of graphic work related to equal pay and opportunities
That just as in Craigie's film highlights the fact that although women were doing the same work for less pay, under the rationale that men had families and others at their charge, implying that working women were all spinsters (which the statistics demonstrate was not true), women had more likely to take care of the family and the house when back at home from work.

Check the exhibition's blog for more information. 

Cycling to Suffrage: The Bicycle and Women's Rights, 1890-1914 another exhibition @ the Library (Foyer) can be visited until the 8 of September.

22/08/2012

Memórias de Terra II (Isabel Azeredo) e Não Me Cortes o Cabelo que o Meu Pai Me Penteou (Joana Maia, Magali MArinho e Ricardo Martins)

15 de Setembro, Sábado, pelas 17h30 e 18h00, na Paços Galeria Municipal: Torres Vedras
Até 27 de Outubro
Praça do Município, Torres Vedras
e poderá ser visitada de segunda a sábado, entre as 09h30 e as 19h00.
Memórias de Terra II, exposição de cerâmica artística de Isabel Azeredo
 e
Não me cortes o cabelo que o meu pai me penteou, exposição registo de uma instalação land art, autoria de Joana Maia, Magali Marinho e Ricardo Martins (artista convidado).

21/08/2012

The Brilliant and the Dark @ VBKOE

OPEN MUSIC ARCHIVE

The Brilliant and The Dark
Women and Archive, Collaboration and Reenactment, Captial and Copyleft


A project by Eileen Simpson & Ben White

OPENING: August 30, 19h
August 31 - October 3, 2012

The Brilliant and the Dark (2010) interrogates proprietary rights that reside within archive material and tests the portability of open source methodologies to wider creative contexts – imagining the archive as source material and reenacting and remixing this source through the collective female voice. At its centre is the idea of the freeing the artist/author from the conditions of the market by using the viral logic of copyleft to allow open collaboration with others and embracing this process to generate unknown, unpredictable outcomes and potentials.

The Brilliant and the Dark takes as a starting point a cantata for women’s voices, of the same name, composed by Malcolm Williamson and Ursula Vaughan Williams, and first performed by 1,000 women volunteers at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969.

Through negotiation with copyright owners, music publishers Josef Weinberger, artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White secured permissions for the elements of the original 1969 score to be used as a basis for a new work. An invitation to 22 piece women's choir Gaggle to participate in the new copyleft work that explored remix and reenactment through pre-recorded and live performance, resulted in the composition of a new work for women's voices – taking lyrics, melodic phrases and rhythms from the original and paralleling the operatic format.

The artists also created a new film, which mimics the methodology of the music video as a site of pre-recorded playback and live lip synch, and appropriates the tactics of the promotional music video. The video re-animates the 1969 performance through re-staging situations – from the backstage preparations, to choreographed moments in the live event – which are documented in photographs held in the Library’s collection. The performers are seen in new costumes referencing the originals and amidst remade props. The archive reenactment takes place in The Women's Library, the space which functions to protect the material that informed the resulting work and provides the location for the video shoot.

The work is re-configured at VBKÖ, with archive elements offered for takeaway, alongside the artists' film and a video of a live performance of the full-length work by women’s choir Gaggle at ICA London.

Artists Eileen Simpson & Ben White have worked collaboratively since 2005. Their work continues to develop and test methodologies designed to release and replenish public domain materials for future use. They work at the intersection of art, music and information networks, and seek to challenge conventional mechanisms for the authorship, ownership and distribution of culture.

In 2005 they established Open Music Archive to identify, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright recordings. Their work re-animates archive material and tests the use of open source models for the production and distribution of work through events, performances and recordings, in collaboration with a range of practitioners. The projects have a common thread developing an approach to practice that aims to exist beyond the logic of the market and to scrutinise the notion of openness across fields of cultural production.

Recent projects include: Song Division at Camden Arts Centre (2011), The Brilliant and the Dark at The Women's Library London (2010), Struggle in Jerash at Gasworks London / Makan Amman (2010), Parallel Anthology at the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), Free-to-air  at ICA London (2008) and Cornerhouse Manchester (2007). See: www.openmusicarchive.org/projects

creative commons attribution share-alike 3.0
http://www.openmusicarchive.org/thebrilliantandthedark
In cooperation with the TOP KINO.

VBKÖ – Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs
Maysedergasse 2/4. Stock
1010 Wien
www.vbkoe.org

15/08/2012

Free Pussy Riot Actions

Check out an action near you here
I will be going to the London one @ 5 Kensington Palace Garden (Russian Embassy) 11am
in the meantime rocking to the Peaches:



Free Pussy Riot! #freepussyriot from Peaches on Vimeo.

13/08/2012

The Crystal Quilt: Suzanne Lacy: Tate Modern - The Tanks

The documentation of Lacy's project 'The Crystal Quilt' is being shown at The Tanks - Tate Modern London, don't miss it.
It is a wonderful piece. I found a bit confusing the installation unfortunately, because the little video with statements from Lacy and some of the elderly women that took part in the performance is too far away from the main video projection and the quilt designed by Miriam Shapiro, that inspired the set design for the performance itself. My first reaction was to think that this was no appropriated way to represent the original live piece, and only on my way back from another room I recognised that the small TV screen was part of it. Nonetheless, once my attention default was corrected, I could fully appreciate the documention attempt, which is always such a complex issue when it regards live-art.

until the 28 October 2012.

"On 10 May 1987 in Minneapolis, 430 women over the age of 60 gathered to share their views on growing older. The resulting performance, The Crystal Quilt, was broadcast live on television and attended by over 3,000 people.

It was the culmination of the Whisper Minnesota Project, a three-year public artwork empowering and giving a voice to older women. The process was consciously guided by a desire to represent diverse ethnic and social backgrounds alongside life experience and achievements, forming an active comment on the representation of older women in the media. Lacy has stated: ‘In some sense The Crystal Quilt was successful politically, in that the work was bigger, it had more social impact in that region, but do one or two events ever change the way people – other than those who directly experience it – see? This raises this issue of whether you can expect art to create social change, and at what point is it no longer art.’

The Crystal Quilt now exists in the form of a video, documentary, quilt, photographs and sound piece, combining the original elements of performance, activism and broadcast in an ambitious work that fuses social responsibility with the power of aesthetics: something Suzanne Lacy has pioneered in her long career as activist artist, writer and teacher."

Tania Bruguera is also at The Tanks with a performance, but it was already closed when I arrived. I hope to be able to visit and write about it soon.

06/08/2012

Su Richardson - Burnt Breakfast and Other Works

Curated by Alexandra M. Kokoli
6 July - 9 September
@:
The Constance Howard Gallery in Deptford Town Hall
(open Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11am-5pm)
Special Collections Reading Room in the Rutherford Building
(opne Monday - Friday, 10am - 5pm  and Wednesdays until 7pm)
Both at Goldsmiths University of London
New Cross, London SE14
 "Burnt Breakfast and other Works by Su Richardson is an exhibition of crochet and textile works by artist whose practice has played a key role in the revaluation of craft since the 1970s. Simultaneously celebrating, exploiting and subverting the connotations of feminine craft skills such as crocheting and emboridery, Richardson's self-reflectively home-made objects stir the unconscious of domesticity, femininity and their mutual implications from a distinctly feminist point of view. In her crocheted food, two different kinds of womanly and domestic 'labour of love', cooking and craft, clash and cancel each other. Burnt Breakfast is emblematic of the ambivalence that characterises feminist attitudes towards such traditional and traditionally womanly techniques..." (Kokoli)

The exhibition is wonderfully witty, most of it can be found at the Constance Howard Gallery, and don't be put off by the labirintic corridors to arrive there. I could take pictures but not share them, so I dare to share a single one, from the Special Collections Reading Room, which has a little vitrine with a few of her works, which I think is harmless enough and can work as my personalised teaser.

Unfortunately there is next to nothing online about her, so I can't share any link to images of her work, thus another reason to travel to South London and see this exhibition, with works full of humour and sexuality, such as: Friends Glove (1979) where satin long sleeve gloves caress a carefully chrocheted and embroidered pennis and vagina; or Travelling Man (1978) which Su Richardson affirms being "Made for a friend to their own instructions. There is a choice as to when to be sexual (equipment can be removed and clipped into own hand for protection and safe-keeping), choice to be anonymous (no facial features except tonge out at the world), choice to move quickly, incognito (folds up into a handy bag for travelling on someone else's shoulder)"

Update: Images can be found at 'Burnt Breakfast Crochet' FB page
(Thanks to Kokoli and Richardson)

04/08/2012

Susan Croft "Votes for Women and other Plays"

Just got Susan Croft's "Votes for Women and Other Plays" for my birthday about the use of theatre plays by the suffragettes, which I am really looking forward to start.


"A new anthology of the best plays, sketches and monologues to celebrate the Centenary of the Suffragettes. With extensive Chronology of Suffrage plays performed in the UK 1907-1914".

see also http://www.thesuffragettes.org/

"This anthology includes Cicely Hamilton, and Chris St. John's hilarious and perennially popular How the Vote Was Won, Inez Bensusan's moving short drama The Apple and Elizabeth Robin's powerful full-length classic, Votes for Women. It also seeks to supplement our understanding of the range of suffrage plays by introducing some pieces which have not been reprinted before: Alice Chapin's At the Gates, Helen Nightingale's  A change of Tenant, and Margaret Wynne Nevinson's In the Workshouse."

02/08/2012





Out Of The Circle arts residency is in an apartment in an Egyptian family building in Mohandessin area in the heart of great Cairo, Egypt. The apartment contain Out Of The Circle curator studio and two arts residency for visual artists (Egyptian and international female artists) of all media.

The international artist get a living space and a studio, with shared kitchen facilities and bathroom.
The artist has the possibility to stay for 3 to 6 months in 2013. Out of the Circle initiative supports also the management and exhibition of the artist’s project by the end of the residency.

« Out of the Circle » is an independent artistic, cultural and social initiative, supporting young contemporary Egyptian visual artists. In year 2012, we open our studio and arts residency in Mohandessin to support the Egyptian young artists and our identity through arts services and residency.

Out of the circle represents the contemporary Egyptian identity through visual arts by supporting contemporary artists whose works demonstrate the aspects of the Egyptian identity and by implementing development art projects that educate children about their community and identity.

T. 00 20 100 128 8730
E: info.outofthecircle[@]gmail.com
Web: www.outofthecircle.org