Interview with Emily Jacir

 01/12/20

Interview with Emily Jacir

Emily Jacir (1972, Bethlehem, Palestine) creates works of art across many mediums, exploring histories of colonisation, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance and movement. Books, libraries, etymology and the act of translation are also fundamental to many of her works, which are frequently diaristic in form, and impacted by direct experience, community interaction, and intense research.

Currently showing a large stone medallion as part of the all-women group exhibition Push the Limits, at the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, Jacir talks to Studio International by email about the origins and meanings of this work, as well as some of her other key projects.

 

Read the full interview here

Interview with Larissa Sansour

16/11/19
Interview with Larissa Sansour

Larissa Sansour (born in East Jerusalem, 1973) is a Palestinian artist who now lives and works in London. She has studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art, London, the Maryland Institute College of Art, New York University, the University of Baltimore and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Her work, frequently filmic, employs the genre of science fiction as a means of providing an alternative perspective on current social and political issues. In 2018, Sansour was appointed by the Danish Arts Foundation to represent Denmark at the Venice Biennale 2019, the 58th International Art Exhibition. For this, she created a new film, In Vitro, shown as part of a larger installation with the overall title Heirloom. 

I spoke to Sansour by Skype about the political motivations behind the work, its complex concept and layers of meaning, and how she feels about identity and memory – especially as a Palestinian.

Read the full interview here

Interview: Elmgreen & Dragset

09/01/19

Interview with Elmgreen & Dragset 

Since unveiling a decaying public swimming pool as part of their major overview exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery back in September, Elmgreen & Dragset – the Berlin-based, Scandi artistic duo comprising Michael Elmgreen (b1961, Copenhagen) and Ingar Dragset (b1969, Trondheim) – have been the talk of the town. Their often parodic and playful work, of course, was already familiar to Londoners and tourists alike (even if the artists’ names remained unknown), as their 4.1-metre golden sculpture of a boy on a rocking horse, Powerless Structures, Fig 101, had regally crowned Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth for 18 months from February 2012 – throughout the London Olympic Games – attracting largely positive responses, including from British actress Joanna Lumley, who unveiled the piece, describing herself as ‘thrilled’ to be revealing such a ‘completely unthreatening and adorable creature’ to the public.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Ed Ruscha

10/06/18
Interview with Ed Ruscha

Published in the Summer 2018 issue of Art Quarterly and online at Art Fund

Interview with Monica Bonvicini at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

22/11/16

Interview: Monica Bonvicini

Monica Bonvicini: her hand around the room 

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

18 November 2016 - 26 February 2017

Known for her conceptual and installation art and sculpture, Italian artist Monica Bonvicini (b1965, Venice) is one of the most vital artists to have emerged during the mid-90s, going on to win the prestigious Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Her work investigates the relationships between architecture, control, gender, space, surveillance and power through the means of sculpture, installation, video, photography, text and performance. Known to UK audiences for Run (2012), her light installation at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London, Bonvicini is taking over levels three and floor of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, with a survey show, including a significant body of drawing, as well as several newly commissioned pieces.

Although she was busy working on the final preparations for the exhibition, Bonvicini found time to answer some of Studio International’s questions by email.

Read this interview here

The Union of Fire and Water, commissioned by YARAT, 56th Venice Biennale

02/10/15

The Union of Fire and Water

Commissioned by YARAT 

Collateral Event of the 56th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 

Palazzo Barbaro, San Marco, 2840 Venice

9 May – 22 November 2015

The Union of Fire and Water presents a historical and cultural superimposition of Baku and Venice as seen through the eyes of two artists, Rashad Alakbarov and Almagul Menlibayeva. Studio International speaks to the artists, alongside the curator Suad Garayeva, to hear more about the intertwined histories of the two cities.

In the 1400s, the Venetian ambassador Giosafat Barbaro travelled to and wrote extensively on Azerbaijani cities and the court of Shah Uzun Hassan. By complete coincidence, the Azerbaijani not-for-profit arts organisation YARAT – which means ‘create’ in Azeri – chose to locate their collateral event for the 56th Venice Biennale in Palazzo Barbaro, the ambassador’s former residence. The connections were only uncovered later, with the help of one of the two exhibiting artists, Rashad Alakbarov, and the curator, Suad Garayeva.

The exhibition, which comprises site-specific installations, is set to take visitors on a journey through time and space, bringing to the fore centuries of exchange and conflict between East and West and Baku and Venice. Alakbarov is showing some of his typical architectural and sculptural interventions, where meticulously placed metal structures stand before light sources and cast hidden messages on to the walls and floors nearby. He has also filled one room with a series of bridge-like staircases, which visitors must traverse to reach the remainder of the exhibition.

Kazakhstani-born artist Almagul Menlibayeva’s multi-screen film installations tell the story of Mukhtarov’s Palace, a beautiful Venetian Gothic building in Baku, which was erected by the oil magnate Murtuza Mukhtarov for his beloved wife, Lisa, in 1912. Following the Soviet invasion eight years later, Mukhtarov took his life.

Ironically, the building now houses the main marriage registry office in the city and is informally known as the Palace of Happiness.

As Garayeva explains, the exhibition seeks to present a historical and cultural superimposition of Baku and Venice, with Palazzo Barbaro as the third artist.

Watch the film interview here

Interview with Vincent Meessen and Katerina Gregos at Personne et les Autres, Belgian Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale

26/08/15

Personne et les Autres: Vincent Meessen and Guests
Curated by Katerina Gregos
Belgian Pavilion, Giardini di Castello, 30122 Venice

9 May – 22 November 2015

The exhibition in the Belgian Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale offers a complex exploration of the consequences of political, historical, cultural and artistic entanglements between Europe and Africa during the time of colonial modernity and its aftermath. It is a project that connects not only with history but also with the present situation, since, as curator Katerina Gregos reminds us: “Amnesia is a very, very dangerous thing.”

Not wanting to perpetuate the 19th-century “nation-state” model, still used by so many of the national pavilions in Venice, artist Vincent Meessen (b1971) has stepped back from the limelight and invited 10 further artists – from four continents – to show alongside him, challenging the notion of exclusive authorship. This idea is further reinforced by the borrowing of the exhibition’s title, Personne et les Autres, from a lost play by the Belgian art critic André Frankin. “This title is a metaphor for the position of the artist, within the context of a national representation,” clarifies Gregos.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a new audiovisual work by Meessen, which revisits the role of the largely unknown Congolese intellectuals within the Situationist International movement. Meessen worked with the author of an unpublished Congolese protest song from May 1968, reinterpreting the text in the form of a rumba.

Studio International spoke to Meessen and Gregos about the ideas behind the exhibition and the role of the spectator, exposed to the “sharing of a collective intelligence”, and invited to become “a character in the show”.

Watch this interview here.

Interview with Charles Lim at the Pavilion of Singapore, 56th Venice Biennale

17/08/15

Interview: Charles Lim

Charles Lim: Sea State
Pavilion of Singapore
Arsenale – Sale d’Armi, Venice

9 May – 22 November 2015

With his sailing background, Charles Lim explains, he sees the sea as ‘just an office’. His 10-year-old, 10-part project, Sea State, explores the biophysical, political and psychic contours of Singapore, which this year celebrates the 50th anniversary of its independence

Sea State takes as its starting point the question of how to represent the sea. Singapore is an island state and port that grew out of a long process of land reclamation, so the sea is key to its identity, just as it is to artist and former Olympic sailor Charles Lim (b1973). His 10-year-long project grew out of a residency in Thailand, where he was introduced to the Mekong Project, looking at the river, and the 10 parts of Sea State reflect the meteorological measurements for sea conditions, ranging from calm to stormy.

The premise of Lim’s project is to invert people’s perceptions of sea and land, and it includes a barnacle-covered buoy, made as an exact replica of one that went “missing” as part of a political cleansing act; archival material and maps; photographs; a large-scale installation piece mapping Singapore’s sea floor; and film work, looking at such processes and issues as land reclamation and sand piracy.

Watch this interview here

Interview with Helen Sear at …the rest is smoke, Cymru yn Fenis / Wales in Venice, 56th Venice Biennale

13/07/15

Interview: Helen Sear

Helen Sear: …the rest is smoke

Cymru yn Fenis / Wales in Venice

Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Castello 450, Venice

9 May – 22 November 2015

  

For this year’s Welsh collateral event, Wales in Venice, photographic artist Helen Sear (b1955) has filled the five rooms of former church and hospital Santa Maria Ausiliatrice with a whole new suite of work. Each room has its own identity but there is a dialogue between them, uniting the figure and landscape, nature and culture, and the local and the universal.

…the rest is smoke is a visceral experience, which draws the viewer in. At first they hear the sounds of birdsong and a chainsaw, before turning the corner and seeing the film that cleverly cuts together footage of the artist’s step-daughter circling a tree in a red dress and shots of the wood itself, with trees numbered for felling. While Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers counts from one to 100, Sear’s film counts down from 83 to one. It is a battle of number v nature and the wood is a character every bit as sentient and significant as the human self.

The title of the exhibition is taken from a tiny inscription on Mantegna’s last painting of St Sebastian, now along the canal in the Ca d’Oro: Nihil nisi divinum stabile est. Caetera fumus. This painting is honoured here with a lightbox, glowing bright yellow with the view over a rapeseed field. The image, which mirrors Mantegna’s in dimension, is pierced by rapeseed stalks, handpicked by Sear, in exactly the same spots as St Sebastian’s body is pierced by arrows. The effect is magnificent and overwhelming – not least because of the golden light – akin to standing before some masterful altarpiece. A church for worshippers of nature? For those who worry about getting old? A monument to times gone by, to changing technologies, to film and literature. These five rooms offer all this and more. There is much to be fathomed in Sear’s work, but there is much to simply be felt as well.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/helen-sear-the-rest-is-smoke-venice-biennale-2015-video-interview-wales

Interview with Herman de Vries at the Dutch Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale

02/07/15

Interview: Herman de Vries

Herman de Vries: to be all ways to be
Dutch Pavilion, Giardini di Castello, 30122 Venice
9 May – 22 November 2015

Herman de Vries (b1931) was educated as a horticulturalist and natural scientist and his work focuses on natural processes and phenomena, directing viewers’ attention to the diversity of the world around them. He seeks to encourage people to be alive and aware, and his guru, he says, is a squirrel, because this creature “is always awake”.

De Vries has spent a long time working in Venice preparing for the Biennale and has published a book, From the Laguna of Venice – A Journal, which is essentially a travelogue of his observations and collected material. His exhibition in the Dutch Pavilion brings some of this notation – written and photographed – and some of the flora into the gallery setting, “a place for observation”. This includes a central circle of Rosa damascena buds, creating a sensory experience through their colour and scent, and large chunks of charred acacia trunk, collected from the summer solstice bonfire in the village where he now lives in Germany.

Alongside the pavilion exhibition, de Vries is also displaying a series of posters –with texts including natura numquam errat (nature never makes mistakes), natura mater (nature is the mother), veritas existentiae (the truth of existence) and natura artis magistra (nature is the teacher of art and science) – across Venice. These short dicta sum up the artist’s philosophy and work. His succinct pronouncements can also be found in plaques dotted among the overgrowth on the abandoned island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, the site of a former hospital, where plague victims were nursed.

Studio International spoke to de Vries before taking a boat trip out to explore this sanctuary in the Venetian Lagoon.

To watch this interview, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/herman-de-vries-video-interview-to-be-all-ways-to-be-dutch-pavilion-venice-biennale-2015