Category: ARTMargins Online: Interviews

László Gergely is a founding member of Lumen Photography Foundation and Lumen Gallery (since 2002). He lives and works in Budapest. The term Tehnica Schweiz is used for his collaboration with Péter Rákosi (since 2004).  Tehnica Schweiz is a member of POC – Piece of Cake, an international network of photographers (www.pocproject.com). Gergely László is an alumnus of ICP – NYC and has exhibited at many institutions in Europe, including M?csarnok (Kunsthalle, Budapest); NBK Berlin; Witte de With (Rotterdam); Norwich Gallery; and the Vienna Secession.

Attila P?cze opened Vintage Gallery (Budapest) in 1996. He studied car design at … Read more

s Esche works at the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, NL) and Afterall Journal and Books, based at Central St.Martins College of Art and Design, London. In 2010, he curated the 5th U3 triennial in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is a visiting lecturer at NABA, Milano and De Appel, Amsterdam a.o. Over the last few years, he has curated the 3rd Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah, Palestine, 2009 (with Reem Fadda); the 2nd Riwaq Biennale (2007, with Khalil Rabah); the 9th  Istanbul Biennial 2005 (with Vasif Kortun, Esra Sarigedik Öktem and November Paynter); and the 4th Gwangju Biennale (2002, with Hou Hanru and Song … Read more

Markéta Stará: Your Young Artists’ Biennial came along after two years when it was curated by Karel Císa?, who is known for his profound and frequently challenging curatorial approach. Your curatorial strategy and selection of artists seems, in comparison to you predecessor, open to a wider audience. Was it your intention to defy the approach of Karel Císa??

Tomáš Pospiszyl is a critic, curator, and art historian based in Prague. He has worked as a curator at the National Gallery in Prague (1997-2002) and was a research fellow at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since 2003 Pospiszyl … Read more

Ivan Moudov lives and works in Sofia. He was educated at the National Academy of Fine Arts and at the High School of Applied Arts, both in Sofia. Solo exhibitions in Zurich, Verona, Prishtina, Braunschweig, Sofia, Trieste, Milan, and Stockholm. He participated in the 2007 Venice Biennale, the 1st Moscow Biennial, and in Manifesta 4, among many other group shows.

Pavlina Mladenova: You are participating currently in a group exhibition entitled Beyond Credit – Contemporary Art and Mutual Trust in Istanbul, which is one of the significant events of Istanbul European Cultural Capital 2010, with curators Maria Vassileva, Iara Boubnova, … Read more

Transitland EUROPA is a collaborative archive of 100 videos that reflect on the transitions and transformations in the post-Socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The videos include works from the past twenty years, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. As part of the project, a reader of more than 300 pages was published, containing essays by several experts from the region, as well as short descriptions of all the video works included in the archive. In addition, several video jukeboxes, a website, and several discursive events will allow viewers to enter the Transitland Archive.

The … Read more

Sanja Iveković was born in Zagreb where she continues to live and work. Since the 1970s Ivekovi? has worked with performance, video, installation, and public action. Her work has been shown at many international exhibitions. The following interview was produced when the artist opened her first solo show in ?ód? (“Practice Makes the Master”: 10/17/2009–12/13/2009). The show was curated by Magdalena Zió?kowska and was accompanied by a public project.  The project was a Polish version of Ivekovi?’s ongoing project Women’s House (Sunglasses) in which she appropriates advertising for sunglasses in an effort to tackle the issue of violence against women.… Read more

Bojana Peji? has organized many exhibitions of Yugoslav and international art. In 1995 she organized an international symposium, The Body in Communism, at the Literaturhaus in Berlin. She was chief curator of the exhibition After the Wall–Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, organized by the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1999), which was also shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art ­Foundation Ludwig in Budapest(2000) and at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2000-2001). Peji? recently curated Gender Check–Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe at MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna). Peji? lives and works in Berlin.

“There is not … Read more

Ion Grigorescu is a painter and media artist. Ever since his debut, Grigorescu has been active in the public space. He has taken part in many group exhibitions. Grigorescu has worked extensively with performance, which he documented through photos and S 8 mm films (most of them in black and white). In these documents Grigorescu deformed the film image with the help of superimposed circular lenses (Body Art with Three Mirrors, photo, 1974, Mimicry, photo and film, 1975). During Ceaucescu’s regime, Grigorescu performed a number of secret political happenings. Among these were Election Meeting (1975) and the … Read more

The Prague Biennale 4 is about to end. ARTMargins discusses the event with Edith Je?ábková, the co-curator of the Biennale’s Czech section. Je?ábková is a curator at the Klatovy/Klenová Museum in Plze?.  

ARTMargins: What was your involvement in the Prague Biennale?

Edith Je?ábková: I curated the Czech section (“White Paper, Black Bride”) together with Ji?í Kovanda. We have worked together before. I recently curated two of his shows. We also thought that our ideas were similar, so we decided to work as a team.

A.M.: What were your curatorial priorities?

E.J.: We wanted to look at the Czech section … Read more

Jaroslav And?l has produced numerous exhibitions and publications on modern and contemporary art both in the Czech Republic and abroad. He is the co-author of  Czech Modernism 1900-1945 (Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, Texas, U.S.A. 1990) and co-editor of Cinema All the Time: An Anthology of Czech Film Theory and Criticism, 1908-1939 (Czech National Film Archive: 2008). He was recently appointed artistic director of the newly opened DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague.

Erich Sargeant: You have been open a few months now, are you happy with how things are going, the initial reception to the gallery … Read more

Barbora Klímová lives and works in Brno. She has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Klímová is also a holder of the Tranzit Award (2007), as well as the prestigious Jindrich Chalupecky Price awarded annually to Czech contemporary artists. For her Replaced-Brno-2006 project at the 2009 Manifesta, Klímová chose five performances by five artists that took place in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and ‘80s. The main selection prerequisite was that the performances were conducted (or could have been conducted) in a public space. Instead of composed, clearly identifiable performances, she concentrated on gestures or acts that bordered on normal … Read more

Iosif Kiràly is one of Romania’s most prominent contemporary artists. He teaches at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where he is also the co-founder of the Department of Photography and Time-Based Media Arts. Kiràly lives and works in Bucharest.

Ileana Pintilie: You are at present one of the best-known Romanian artists active on the international art scene. Please talk about your formation as an artist, about the artistic elements that influenced your development.

Iosif Kiràly: My background is a hybrid one. In the 1970s, I attended a Bauhaus-like art school in Timi?oara (the only one existing at that … Read more

A conversation between critic Linda J. Park and curator Olga Kopenkina about the Properly Past exhibition at the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York City (March 18 – May 3rd, 2008).

The recent exhibition Properly Past, curated by Olga Kopenkina, brought together the work of five Brooklyn-based artists to the BRIC Rotunda Gallery in New York City. Kopenkina frames these artists’ works around ideas concerning the failure of modernity and highlights the “obsolete phenomena and forms that contain signs of a modernist utopian promise for a future” (from the curatorial statement). Altogether, the works in the exhibition offer observations and … Read more