di Jenni Lomax

It seems to me that as time goes by and a greater number of memories need to be stored, the more conflated and compacted everything becomes. Chronology is abandoned as the process of recollection and retrieval becomes both more partial and more personal. There is, for example, no linearity or particular order to the many artworks my mind has recorded during visits to 15 or more Venice biennales, but while I would need to do some research to pinpoint a date, I can usually recall with clarity the physical location of the work and the feelings it evoked. For me, buildings and architecture are important vehicles for carrying memories of exhibitions. Within the spaces that I know most intimately, like the Whitechapel Gallery and Camden Arts Centre, I can project onto any section of wall or floor a mental slide show of every work that I have hung or seen there.

“For me, buildings and architecture are important vehicles for carrying memories of exhibitions.”

We have recently invited the artist Simon Starling to select a group show for Camden Arts Centre. His idea for the project is to work with the past programme and history of our building (designed as a public library by Starling’s maternal great uncle Arnold S Tayler in 1897), to pull traces of the past towards ideas for the future. His rummaging through our archives has strained my memory, certainly with artists and exhibitions that took place long before my time here. One question he had about the Argentine artist Leopoldo Maler brought to the front of my mind a series of influential exhibitions I had seen at the Hayward Gallery in the ‘80s. Simon asked me if I knew Maler and was he still alive. I knew nothing of his show at Camden in the early ‘70s but, I told him, ‘his work was in the wonderful Falls the Shadow exhibition at the Hayward’. When I looked at my catalogue for this show there was no evidence of the dramatic, kinetic work I vividly ‘remembered’ seeing in the upper gallery of the Hayward.

I had in fact seen the work in Pier+Ocean: Construction in the Art of the Seventies, which was shown in 1980, six years before Falls the Shadow. What I do remember about both these shows (and the later Gravity & Grace) was how each individual work was allowed to be itself, while occupying its place in a way that seemed intrinsic to the gallery space and the curatorial thread. Pier+Ocean was selected by the artist Norman Dilworth and the curator Gerhard von Graevenitz and Falls the Shadow by Jon Thompson and Barry Barker (Jon Thompson also curated Gravity and Grace: The Changing Condition of Sculpture 1965-1975 in 1993). Piet Mondrian’s painting Pier+Ocean (1915) lent its title and formed the core of an exhibition which pulled aspects of contemporary British and American art towards Northern Europe, making connections that were both revealing and liberating. It was the first time that I felt, culturally, part of Europe.

“Thinking about these two exhibitions now, I realise that my stored memory of them still influences my aesthetic judgments and preferences.”

Barry Flanagan (I think) was the only artist to be in both shows. Other artists whose work I can place in Pier+Ocean were Richard Tuttle, Mary Martin, Wolfgang Laib, Robert Smithson, Richard Long and, of course, Leopoldo Maler. Falls the Shadow was entirely European, although Britain was separated in the sub-title, ‘Recent British and European Art’. The artists whose work I remember (or maybe not?) from this show were Rebecca Horn, Avis Newman, Lothar Baumgarten, Lili Dujourie, Tony Carter, Hanne Darboven, Richard Deacon and Mario Merz.

Thinking about these two exhibitions now, I realise that my stored memory of them still influences my aesthetic judgments and preferences. It is also interesting how Simon Starling’s collection of Camden Arts Centre’s memories appear to chime with the spirit of Pier+Ocean and Falls the Shadow; his current list of artists, along with Leopoldo Mahler, includes Lothar Baumgarten, Tony Carter, Wolfgang Laib and Richard Tuttle.

http://www.cataloguemagazine.com/contemporary-art/magazine/article/exhibition-memory-issue-3/

Jenni Lomax was educated at Maidstone College of Art and Horsney College. She held teaching posts at the Belfast College of Art and various London art Schools, before being appointed Community Education Organiser at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1979. At the Whitechapel she was instrumental in developing a vigorous education programme at the core of the gallery’s activities. She  has been the Director of Camden Arts Centre, London, since 1990 where she has established an international programme of exhibitions, residencies, education projects and public events. She led the organisation through a major building refurbishment scheme which was completed in 2004 by Tony Fretton Architects. She was awarded the Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2007, and received an OBE for her services to the Visual Arts in 2009.

Intervista a Jenni Lomax

di Stella Kasian

Stella Kasian: Il Camden Arts Centre è una delle istituzioni culturali maggiormente rispettate, recentemente fra le gallerie d’arte premiate dall’Arts Council, avendo ricevuto un incentivo sui fondi pubblici concessi. Fra i meriti riconosciuti vi è la capacità di vedere dove altri non posano lo sguardo. Negli ultimi anni sono stati rivalutati artisti del passato, ad esempio Eva Hesse i cui lavori sperimentali poco conosciuti al pubblico sono stati messi in mostra lo scorso inverno “Studioworks”, 2009-2010; giovani promesse come Angela de La Cruz alla prima mostra in una galleria pubblica inglese, mostra che le ha valso peraltro la nomina al Turner Prize “After”, 2011; o artisti stranieri appena noti nel Regno Unito, come Pino Pascali, la cui personale si è recentemente conclusa “Final works 1967-68”, 2011. Quali sono i criteri in base alla quale viene stilato il programma espositivo della Galleria?

Jenni Lomax: Lo scopo fondamentale del Camden Arts Centre è permettere alle persone di scoprire nuovi aspetti dell’arte. Quindi piuttosto che condividere la medesima tipologia di artisti di molte altre gallerie a Londra, come la Whitechapel o la Serpentine, che spesso tendono a mostrare uno stesso aspetto dell’arte, il Camden preferisce concentrarsi sul processo del fare arte, sul modo di pensare e lavorare degli artisti, su come alcuni siano o meno influenzati da altri. È per questo motivo che si cerca di creare un equilibrio fra artisti emergenti e pietre miliari della storia dell’arte, con il costante obiettivo di coinvolgere il pubblico nella comprensione di questi processi di creazione e ispirazione. S.K: A tal proposito, il pubblico ha un ruolo importante, non solo mero spettatore della mostra, ma è chiamato a prendere personalmente parte alle attività della galleria, spesso attraverso un’interazione diretta con gli artisti. Prima di diventare direttrice del Camden Arts Centre lei ha lavorato per più di dieci anni (1979-90) come Community Education Organiser alla Whitechapel Gallery. In che modo la sua esperienza precedente ha influito sul lavoro che svolge oggi al Camden? J.L: Prima di tutto c’è da dire che io stessa ho ricevuto una formazione da artista. Successivamente ai miei studi ho passato diverso tempo lavorando nell’area dell’East London, proprio dietro l’angolo della Whitechapel Gallery, nell’ambito di workshop e attività analoghe fatte con giovani artisti. Quando sono arrivata alla Whitechapel l’Educational Programme non esisteva, e negli undici anni che ho lavorato presso la galleria ho creato questo settore lavorando direttamente con gli artisti, portandoli a prendere parte alle mostre; ho creato un programma di residenze d’artista da svolgersi fuori dalla galleria, all’interno di scuole e ospedali. Una totale novità al tempo. Altre gallerie avevano un dipartimento educativo ma nella sua concezione più tradizionale e formale che escludeva la possibilità di mettere gli artisti e le mostre al centro della scena. Era un momento di grande fervore nell’East London, molti artisti si stavano trasferendo nella zona aprendo lì i propri studi e creando delle comunità. Mi è stato possibile lavorare a stretto contatto con tutti questi artisti. C’era davvero una grande collaborazione. Quando giunse il lavoro al Camden Arts Centre ero profondamente interessata alle possibilità di questo spazio, al tempo non molto conosciuto come galleria d’arte quanto per la serie di corsi qui organizzati. La struttura dava grandi possibilità che sentivo di dover sfruttare. C’era lo spazio giusto per creare un Artist’s studio e a me interessava non tanto essere una curatrice, quanto porre l’attività degli artisti come punto di partenza del programma della galleria..

Continua su:

www.teknemedia.net/download.html?mId=9187

JENNI LOMAX DETOURS EVENT

‘Detours’ is a series of talks introducing views from elsewhere by leaders in the visual arts. Speakers discuss the relationship between practice and context: how institutions and professional practice develop in response to specific situations, both geographic and cultural. Commencing in 2008, the series will run over three years, with ‘seasons’ of talks in March-May and October-November.

The ‘Detours’ project is a collaboration with the Centre for Art in Social Contexts, Glasgow School of Art.

Continua http://culturaincifre.istat.it/sito/musei/Il%20pubblico%20arte%20contemporanea.pdf

Last April the Board of the Founders of Fondazione Museion confirmed Letizia Ragaglia as director of the museum for the next four years. At the same time it introduced a new management formula: each year the museum will host an international curator who will stage a themed exhibition.
After months of work, Museion is proud to present the guest curators and the themes of the main exhibitions for 2012 and 2013. The exhibition programme for 2012 has also been established and the new season is set to see innovations and changes in the museum.

Rein Wolfs, guest curator 2012
Since January 2008 Rein Wolfs is the Artistic Director of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum. From 2002 until 2007 he was the Director of Exhibitions of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. In 2003 he curated the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennial. From 1996 until 2001 he was the first director of the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich.
Among his most important exhibitions were shows with Douglas Gordon, Maurizio Cattelan, Angela Bulloch and Cady Noland at Migros Museum and retrospective exhibitions with Bas Jan Ader and Rirkrit Tiravanija as well as large shows with Urs Fischer and Erik van Lieshout at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. At Kunsthalle Fridericianum he curated major exhibitions with Christoph Büchel, Pawel Althamer, Teresa Margolles, Thomas Zipp and Monica Bonvicini and shows with Klara Lidén, Latifa Echakhch, Cyprien Gaillard, Matias Faldbakken, Nina Canell and Navid Nuur among others.

REIN WOLFS. GUEST CURATOR

to read the article click here

Pelin Tan: As an architect, what is your view on designing a space for an artwork or collaborating with curators? What do you think are the possibilities of the relation between spatial design and presentation of artworks? 

Nikolaus Hirsch: From my own practice as an architect and curator at the Portikus I can say: there is no recipe. First of all it is crucial to understand that you do not need an architect for the exhibition of artworks. As Jan Verwoert and I called it on the occasion of his curatorial project in Sheffield: one option is about “debriefing the architect”.
Depending on the artistic approach and curatorial concept of an exhibition it can make sense to think about a specific display. This can happen in the way Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa worked with Ryue Nishizawa: a clean distribution of labor between curator, artists and architect. Despite its strong visibility the architecture of display remains in the domain of service. Yet, display is not only a question for the architectural discipline but one that more and more artists see as an integral part of their work. This was obvious in the last Venice Biennial when artists Song Dong, Monika Sosnowska, Oscar Tuazon, and Franz West created architectural structures in which the work of other artists could be shown. In this case display is not a mere background but an artistic intervention in its own right. You can even go further: For the European Kunsthalle, we developed a strategy of “Institution Building” (so the title of the book I co-authored with Markus Miessen, Philipp Misselwitz and Matthias Görlich), with artists designing an exquisite-corpse-like museum, trying to merge the concepts of “exhibition” and “museum”, ultimately dissolving the difference between served and serving, between container, background, and art object.

NIKOLAUS HIRSCH
I am trying to connect what used to be separated parts of my work.
This sounds rather simple, but actually it does create a conflict with the highly specialized discipline of architecture. In this respect the concept of unitednationsplaza questions the role of an architect in a particular way. To produce a building for an exhibition that actually is not an exhibition, but a school, inevitably implies an architectural practice that is more than design. The shift from exhibition to school emphasizes a social situation; a communal condition which changes the way things are manifested physically in space. The effect on myself was a constant negotiation between different role models: planner, craftsman, and teacher. On the one hand I am organizing matter; inert matter that ultimately forms something like an institute.
On the other hand, I am – invited by Anton Vidokle and together with Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Liam Gillick, Natascha Sadr Haghighian and Tirdad Zolghadr – part of an academic space.
In a certain way this reflects an approach that understands a work of architecture as both a theoretical model and a physical space. unitednationsplaza is both a model and a real building in Berlin.

MM
What is your personal take on the current trend of institutionalizing future production, that is to say art institutions as places of knowledge production becoming, in the long term, initiators of actualities
and matter. How would you describe the new relation between academies and art institutions such as galleries and museums?

NH
Undoubtedly, there is a new dynamic between museums and academies. This has to do with a critical understanding of knowledge production, and in a larger context, with the arts aiming for
socio-political relevance. If you look back to the history of exhibitions in the past 15 years it becomes obvious that some of the most important shows defined their role as that of an initiator of an active social project. The aim was to reposition the exhibition as a project that would in some way be transformative on a social scale – something that, by the way, architecture even unintentionally always does. Yet, it becomes more and more clear that the problem might be that the exhibition deals with things on the level of representation and might just not be the right format to aim these ambitious goals.
This limitation explains the recent interest of art institutions, such as museums and galleries, in academic structures. Museums are trying to legitimize and reinvent themselves by expanding to new audiences and – always in danger of political instrumentalization – by referring explicitly to their enlightening mission. In a way, unitednationsplaza is trying to start from the other side: from the school model.

Tirdad Zolghadr
(POST-SCRIPTUM)
Quite true, what with the humanist flair of documenta 12 springing to mind, where one notices a trend towards art as an integral part of everyday culture, in a mass pedagogy type of way. Or sometimes just a mass sort of way.
However I do not think this changes things fundamentally with respect to, say, “risks” of political instrumentalization. A public interface with such a mass agenda that is not susceptible to public accountability is not a pleasant idea. Perhaps this would be different if there were a higher ratio of innovative practice among curators than among party politicians, but this is hardly the case. On the other hand, spaces that do not pander to what Nikolaus calls new audiences derive their strength not from their fundamentally self-determined politics but from their formal intelligence.
The advantage of even the unitednationsplaza itself is not that it is autonomous and immune to any kind of instrumentalization (it isn’t), nor that it lacks an “enlightening mission” (it doesn’t), but simply that it tackles questions of programming and pedagogy from an angle that is refreshingly oblique and unexpected.

The conversation continues on http://www.104.fr/module/104revue/EN/oeuvres/miessen/Place_des_Nations_Unies_construire_le_savoir/page3-4.html

unitednationsplaza, Mexico DF

The seminar explored the spatial parameters of knowledge production, hence reflecting the model of unitednationsplaza as such. Since this model proposes an “exhibition as school” we have to ask: What and how do we display? Can we transcend the traditional boundaries between research, education and display? What are the spatial formats that determine the school?
Unitednationsplaza was contextualized in a short history of school models: a critical survey from ancient symposia, over modernist schools such as the Bauhaus and the Blackmountain College, to new sites of knowledge production such as the Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi. What had started more than two thousand years ago as an informal symposium of intellectuals joining for drinks, food and talk has evolved into a highly differentiated structure of lectures, conferences, round tables, workshops, reading groups, desk crits, pin-ups and tutorials. Its spatial equivalent is the heavy luggage of architecture: the conference room, auditorium, dormitory, laboratory, library, gallery and studio.

Those architectural components and their walls, ceilings and floors are more than just inert material but a trigger for a spatial practice as a form of knowledge production. Speculating on a situation in which the learning environment and knowledge production become interdependent, the seminar investigates the potentials and limits for the creation of a critical collective space.

to see the video of the conference click here

posted 10.24.11 on the designobserver.com

to read the article click here

What defines the contemporary art institution? Who are the authors in the construction of institutional space? Is it possible to built an institution while producing art? In times in which artists create buildings, architects contribute to art exhibitions, and curators act like artists, it seems to be possible to rethink the classical role models, and thus to renegotiate the relation between art production, the exhibition and its spatial envelope.
In the following I present four projects that I have been working on in the past years: firstly European Kunsthalle, secondly Exquisite Corpse which is a contribution to the ‘Curating Architecture’ program at Goldsmiths College in London, thirdly unitednationsplaza in Berlin, and lastly Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi. All these works can be understood as attempts that not only concentrate on the spatial presentation of art but that understand the institution as a medium in its own right.

To read the entire article: http://www.oncurating.org/documents/oncurating_issue_0209.pdf

The Ghevra settlement is located in the new north-western frontier of the city, having emerged after a large population was re-located there in conjunction with the demolition of squatter settlements in the city, namely in Nangla. In Ghevra, urban planning becomes a tangible physical frame. The grid is its conceptual device. At the megacity’s most recent frontier, the grid of the new settlement is reminiscent of the previous neighborhood close to the center of the city, from which the inhabitants were evicted. Nangla was an informal squatter settlement, and now people have been thrown into the urban planning of Ghevra. Its grid might remind us of the proportion of Manhattan, yet in a version that is scaled down to a minimum with blocks of 13 x 2 parcels at three to six meters each. This parcel is the legal form.
Practice

Mohalla in Hindi and Urdu translates as neighborhood. The Cybermohalla project deploys the meaning of the word mohalla in its sense of alleys and corners, of relatedness and concreteness, and as a means for talking one’s “place” in the city as well as in cyberspace. Approximately 70 practitioners work within the Cybermohalla, engaging with various media tools and forms, including animation, photography, storytelling, performance, radio, stickers, broadsheets, event-based conversations, wall writing, booklets, wall magazines, and blogs.

The project has been divided into four different but related approaches. Belonging to generative contexts, the activities imply a constant making, questioning, and refashioning of the specific location. Generative contexts thrive on local intellectual life and site-specific narratives. In its ongoing and open nature the resulting generative and multi-layered archive collects information that simultaneously asks new questions about the daily life in the neighborhood.

Activities in the minor practices section involve solitary or smaller group exercises such as reading and writing. By paying attention to the self, to the body and its senses, the idea is to unleash and make available creative aspects of each individual’s perception.

The communing activity is a way to connect resources in a variety of formats. By smaller group collaborations, emphasis is on experimental and unexpected assembly of materials and on the type of conversations that such activities generate.

The public dialogue distributes ideas generated by the various activities. An open dialogue is kept in motion that allows for new material to re-enter the intellectual fabric of the localities. This may include provisional constellations of images, texts, sounds, objects, etc., that are regularly brought into circulation and conversation in the forms of broadsheet, radio, installation, wall writing, and books.
Institution Building as Knowledge Production

In May 2007, Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller set the Hub in motion by researching the existing Cybermohalla labs in Dakshinpuri and LNJP, investigating programmatic structures and spatial parameters. Collecting material of the lost space in Nangla and measuring the two remaining cultural labs they started to develop a spatial reference for the new plot in Ghevra. The research process and its tools were almost immediately reintegrated in the Cybermohalla Ensemble’s written practice. In his diary fragment “With Nikolaus and Michel, after moving through Ghevra / 2 May 2007,” Suraj Rai wrote: “Michel moved from one edge of the room to the other, watchful of his readings on the instrument he used to measure distances. He placed the black instrument squarely on a wall. All our eyes were fixed on the red dot of light that the instrument cast on the opposite wall. Then he read out the measurement and Nikolaus sketched it down. Next, the instrument was on the floor, and the red dot of light on the roof. I have seen hundreds of plots and many rooms being measured with an inch tape. But this measuring felt different. Maybe because of the machine, or perhaps because of the two personalities using it.”

Before taking the pencil in their own hands, Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller asked others to draw and to speculate on the future space – those who will inhabit it. The questions were, Can amateurs draw? Can architects share the production of space? Together with more than twenty of the Cybermohalla practitioners Hirsch and Müller sat down on a cool stone floor and made drawings. Programmes were drawn as spatial diagrams. Out of scale, yet accurate in their intentions, these drawings became speculations on a future institution that has become a hybrid of community center, school, studio, and gallery.

Back in Frankfurt, Hirsch and Müller developed an initial model based on the workshop in Delhi: an almost perfect system with an extreme economy of space that integrated entire work areas in the wall structure. Too perfect, one might say. After the first prototype was shown at the Swedish Architecture Museum in Stockholm (March 2008) the system was broken up. The spatial elements and the related decision-making processes were redistributed and scaled further down to a group of students, decomposing the geometry into individual components – not for the sake of individuality but for a communal process that changes again the physical condition of the space. Knowledge production becomes physically tangible. Within a given systemic approach, multiple scenarios are allowed to evolve. Introducing a numeric multiplication, three groups of two students work on walls and floor, facade and doors, ceiling and terrace. Interfaces have to be negotiated: changes in geometry, in structural engineering, and a material strategy is developed using different kinds of waste timber boards. The structure shown in Vienna, previously exhibited at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, is the result of a long process: a one and a half storey, 3 x 6 x 5 m large prototype of the Cybermohalla Hub that Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller will construct in Delhi in 2009. Eventually the Hub in Ghevra shows a possibility of how institution building can become a self-reflexive tool of knowledge production.

Text excerpt by Monique Behr