Interview with James Richards

27/10/16

Interview with James Richards

Requests and Antisongs

ICA, London

21 September - 13 November 2016

Combining fragments of film, music, vocals, erotica and medical documentary, James Richards (b1983, Cardiff) creates site-specific audiovisual installations and morphing exhibitions, which immerse the visitor in a kaleidoscopic and cinematic sensorial experience. Keeping a diaristic digital scrapbook, Richards draws from this to create his collages and assemblages, inspired by Dada.

Already having won the Jarman award for film and video in 2012, and the Ars Viva Prize for young artists two years later, Richards was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2014, and will be representing Wales in Venice (Cymru yn Fenis) at next year’s biennale. He spoke to Studio International during the installation of his exhibition Requests and Antisongs, at the ICA, London.

Read this interview here

Interview with Douglas Kotwall of the K11 Art Foundation

25/09/16

Interview: Douglas Kotwall

The third-generation heir of one of China’s most influential business families, Adrian Cheng set up the K11 Art Foundation (KAF) in 2010 when he realised the talent of some of the young artists working in Beijing at the time. With the goal of incubating and promoting their potential, as well as bringing big name western artists to China, the foundation has gone from strength to strength, and now has international collaborations with, among others, the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, the Centre Pompidou, the Palais de Tokyo, the Metropolitan Museum and the Serpentine Galleries and ICA in London. The K11 art mall in Shanghai is claimed to be the world’s first art mall. Cheng is said to have spent HK$20m (£1.98m) placing numerous artworks – mostly by local artists – on each floor. The venue also has 19 exhibition panels in a museum in the basement, where exhibitions change every three months. An art village and an associated artist exchange programme are further aspects of the non-profit foundation.

Read this interview here

Interview with Guan Xiao

25/09/16

Interview: Guan Xiao

Guan Xiao (b1983) works mainly in sculpture and video, exploring how ways of seeing are now influenced by the increasing dominance of digital imagery as a source of information. One of the artists championed by the K11 Art Foundation (KAF), Guan recently had a solo show, Flattened Metal, at the ICA, London, which was the second collaboration between the two institutions. The exhibition is to move to the K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, this autumn.

Juxtaposing references from the past, present and future, and weaving visual, audio and textual material together, Guan explores the notion of conversion: “the different ways our inner selves get in touch with the world outside, and the possibilities that objects disintegrate objects (to construct indescribable nothingness)”. She spoke to Studio International via email from China, shortly after the birth of her first child.

Read the interview here

Review of Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic at ICA, London

15/02/16

Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic

ICA, London

3 February – 10 April 2016

Betty Woodman (b1930) began working with clay as a teenager. Adopting the utilitarian form of the vase as her subject, she initially got her husband, George – then a painter, now a photographer – to paint her finished pieces. “There’s a form,” she says, “and then the way you paint on it changes the way you perceive it.” Looking for example, at Posing with Vases at the Beach (2008) – two large vases painted, on one side, with nude figures such that they become bodies – this couldn’t be better exemplified: in Woodman’s hands, a functional vessel is turned into a figurative sculpture.

Having spent many years championing ceramics, Woodman now talks equally easily of the joys of painting. When George stopped adding to her pieces, she left them unpainted for a while, but then began to develop her own gestural style. Today, this combination of forming and painting, combining 2D with 3D, is what makes Woodman’s work stand out. Her anthropomorphic creations play both on the object/image dichotomy and the age-old equivalence of pot to body, reflected in the terminology of the pot’s parts: lip, mouth, shoulder, belly and foot.

In 2006, Woodman, who lives and works in New York City and Antella, Italy, spending six months of the year in each, was the first living woman to have a major career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her current exhibition at the ICA, London – Theatre of the Domestic – is her first UK solo presentation.

Read the rest of this review here

Review of Art into Society – Society into Art: Seven German Artists at the ICA

09/02/16
Art into Society – Society into Art: Seven German Artists
ICA Fox Reading Room, London
19 January – 6 March 2016


Can art bring about reform? Maybe even revolution? How might it be used as a politically motivated tool? These questions were at the forefront of seven key German artists’ minds in the early 1970s, and an exhibition of their work, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1974, opened them out to a wider international audience.

In its series of archival exhibitions, displayed in the Fox Reading Room, the ICA has currently mounted a grand review of the exhibition Art into Society – Society into Art: Seven German Artists, which took place from 29 October – 24 November 1974 and was organised by the then ICA curator, Norman Rosenthal, and the writer and curator Christos M Joachimides. The research and display have been jointly – and thoroughly – pulled together by Lucy Bayley and Juliette Desorgues. On show are photographs of the installation and surrounding events; vitrines with the catalogue and printed material relating to the exhibition; photocopied press coverage from the time; and select audio and video material, including extracts from a general discussion on politics in Germany that took place at the ICA on 19 November 1974.


Read the review here

Interview with Eloise Hawser at the ICA

03/08/15

Interview with Eloise Hawser

Eloise Hawser: Lives on Wire

ICA Lower Gallery, London
1 July – 6 September 2015

The light in the ICA’s lower gallery changes colour slowly, switching through a deliciously dilute RGB spectrum; the gentle buzzing hum in the background offers a white noise that could lull one to sleep. In the centre of the room stands a curious contraption: a colour-changer taken from the cinema organ once found at the Stockport Regal. Capable of conflating a spectacle of music and light, cinema organs were developed by the British telephone engineer, Robert Hope-Jones, in the early 20th century, to replace the orchestras that had previously accompanied silent movies. Placed behind often quite ornate art deco-style illuminated glass outer shells – somewhat like a jukebox in appearance – these organs could be played remotely via a pneumatic system, albeit sometimes with a slight time lapse between the organist’s command and the resulting sound.

The colour-changing mechanism is a complex contraption, comprising cams, arms and a spring box or variable resistor. Originally, this would have been connected to a set of filament light bulbs but, here at the ICA, it is fed through an analogue to DCX convertor in the ceiling, which makes the LED lights in the gallery change colour.

Accompanying the mechanism are a couple of films – one showing the cinema organ that remains behind the scenes in Burberry’s flagship store on Regent Street – a former cinema – and an installation of BT cables, expanding the theme of wires and incipient obsolescence.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/eloise-hawser-interview-video-lives-on-wire-ica-london-cinema-organ

Review of FB55 in the Fox Reading Room, ICA

24/04/15

FB55

Fox Reading Room, ICA

24 March – 17 May 2015

This was supposed to be a small but fascinating celebration of the 60th anniversary of Francis Bacon’s first exhibition at the ICA. Instead, the business of curating the show became for Gregor Muir, the ICA director, a mystery of the disappearing archive. “I had hoped to show installation shots, I had hoped to show photos of Bacon at the ICA, and I had hoped to present a room in which I could show what the exhibition looked like,” he explains, “but that was, in the end, impossible.”

For whatever reason, there is scarcely any documentation of the 1955 exhibition. Muir scoured the ICA archives from the time, now held at Tate, but all he could find was a test print of an invitation card (through sheer luck, he later chanced on an actual card in a nearby bookshop); the press release; a list of works; and one photograph of an ICA employee standing in front of one of the works, hanging in the then Dover Street Market premises.

So why persist in making a show out of, well, virtually nothing?



To read the rest of this review, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/fb55-francis-bacon-archival-display-review-ica