Monthly Archive: August 2002

Conundrum of Time: Clepsydra

Miha Vipotnik, Gallery of the Université Saint Esprit de Kaslik (USEK) in Beirut, May 2002.

Miha Vipotnik has been a video artist, filmmaker, and commercial director in Ljubljana and Los Angeles for nearly twenty years. He was also the creator and curator of the International Video Bienniale during the 1980s, and earned MFAs in 1990 at the California Institute of the Arts and in 1979 at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Ljubljana. His recent works include a video installation Journey to the End of the Ends (2000), a video art piece Gazelle (2000) about the poetics … Read more

“Palimpsest”: A Retrospective Exhibition of Peter Jacobi

Peter Jacobi, Works 1972-1992, Romanian National Museum of Art, Bucharest, May 2002

The Romanian artist Peter Jacobi was born in 1935, and graduated from the Fine Arts Institute of Bucharest in 1961. He lived in Romania until 1970, at which point he established himself in Germany, the country where his artistic vocation has since been developing in various forms: he is a modern sculptor and photographer, concerned primarily with new media and new materials.

Until 1970, he and his wife, Ritzi Jacobi, displayed abroad at the International Tapestry Biennial from Lausanne (1969) and the Biennial from Venice (1970). After 1971, … Read more

Architecture in the Tension-Zone of National Assertiveness – the Examples of Poznan and Upper Silesia in the First Decades of the 20th Century

The following essay is part of a series devoted to contemporary art and architecture East-Central Europe. It was first delivered as a paper at a conference held at MIT in October, 2001.

The way in which architecture lends character to the appearance of a town and thus is present in the everyday life of all parts of society would seem to make buildings an instrument especially suitable for the manifestation of national identity. Thus, at the end of the 19th and in the first decades of the 20th century, architecture – especially in border regions – was often interpreted as

Read more

Dangerous Liaisons

Dangerous liaisons, City Gallery “Arsenal” Poznan, April-May 2002, curator: Izabella Kowalczyk. Artists exhibited: Artur Zmijewski, Alicja Zebrowska, Dorota Nieznalska, Zbigniew Libera, Konrad Kuzyszyn, Zofia Kulik, Katarzyna Kozyra, Grzegorz Kowalski, Grzegorz Klaman, Anna Baumgart.

In April 2002 an exhibition Dangerous liaisons was opened in City Gallery “Arsenal” in Poznan. It was thought to sum up so-called critical art – one of the most important trends in contemporary Polish art in the ’90s. Critical art is seen as having taken the lead on the Polish art scene in the ’90s and as having now given way to other tendencies (one could … Read more

These Three Authors…

Küpper, Stephan. Autorstrategien im Moskauer Konzeptualismus. Il’ja Kabakov, Lev Rubinshtejn, Dmitrij A. Prigov (Berliner Slawistische Arbeiten 11). Frankfurt a.M. e.a., 207 p. 

Stephan Küpper (Berlin) examines the problems of authorship using the examples of three contemporary Moscow concept artists: the image and text artist Kabakov, and the two text artists Rubinshtein and Prigov.

As befits a work on authorship, the book itself is a reflection on the mechanisms of one’s own dominance of a presented text. Thus, the problems of authorship are reflected on one hand formally: the table of contents does without numeration and thus hierarchization of the parts … Read more

IRWIN (NSK) 1983-2002: From “Was ist Kunst?” via Eastern Modernism to Total Recall

The painters’ collective IRWIN (1983) is part of the artists’ collective Neue Slowenische Kunst(On Neue Slowenische Kunst cf. Arns, Inke: Neue Slowenische Kunst. Regensburg, 2002.) (NSK), together with the music group Laibach (1980), and the performance group Gledališce Sester Scipion Nasice (1983),which, in 1987, renamed itself Kozmokineticno Gledališce Rdeci Pilot, and, since 1990, has been called Kozmokineticni Kabinet Noordung.(A fourth sub-group should be mentioned here: the New Collectivism design group which consists of members of Laibach, Irwin and the theatre collective. New Collectivism is best known for a scandal that ensued in 1986/1987 when their

Read more

Monumental Slums

Living inside the leviathan for almost twenty years now, I do have opinions about theway East European cities look, about how one dealt with their history and future and sometimes I even became a – minor – witness and/or actor in these processes. My perspective and my theoretical investigations are not however those of an anthropologist.

Therefore, instead of producing instant theories – a dear endeavor to many local intellectuals, regardless of their field of expertise – I will humbly share with the ArtMargins readers some of my gut feelings about the city, based upon my personal/subjective empirical observations. Just … Read more

“The Lover”, Dir. Valeri Todorovsky (Russia, 2002)

In his new picture The Lover (Liubovnik) Valery Todorovsky investigates the relationship between two men in search of happiness, of a happiness that lies in the past. The film bears a simple title, but it actually touches upon a very serious subject-matter: the loss of a loved person, wife and mistress. The woman herself is, in fact, absent from the film, since the film beginswith her death. Her husband, the linguistics professor Charyshev, tries to reconcile himself to her death and accidentally finds a letter to her lover Ivan. Charyshev searches for Ivan, whose affair with his wife
Read more

From Sochi to Moscow: DEBUTS, DEBUTS, DEBUTS…

The 2002 Moscow International Film Festival (21-30 June) followed the Sochi Open Russian and International Festivals (1-13 June), and, even more so than in previous years, the festivals competed with each other for the right to premiere the most promising new Russian films. Although this year’s festival season had begun on a ‘low’ with only one single Russian entry to the Cannes official selection. Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark proved controversial less because of the artistic achievement of capturing Russian history in a journey through the Hermitage filmed in one single long take, but more because of the alleged nationalistic undertones
Read more