lunedì 8 ottobre 2012

Arkadiy Nasonov

Can you describe your work? 
I can not describe my work in few sentences, I am trying to create works which are opened to long chain of interpretations. What is nesessary to say for each project I always do as a hermeneutic text for it. I look on my works as on illustrations to a certain text which I produced.



What are you working on ? 
I am workig on a movie dedicated to my grandfather, cult russian movie-maker and his last project which he filmed at the age of 80.




What inspires you? 
Life, love, music, books, travels, movies, friends - common things.



What you hope to evoke from your viewers? 
Their memories.




How your work has grown and changed? 
This is visible from a certain distance. This is question for my viewers.






Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within 
certain parameters? 
I tried a lot of media, but last time I am trying to reduce myself and concentrate on paintings and documentary movies, this is for me more related to my own nature.





Can you tell me something about your residence in Rijksakademie? 
It was much fruitfull, than i expected.



Is there anything else you would like to add? 
Best wishes 4 u.




lunedì 21 maggio 2012

Jasper Hagenaar




Can you describe your work?
The main theme in my work is longing. 
Longing for a great adventure, longing for a place not here, longing for history.  
It’s a form of modern romantic escapism. 
I want to bring back the feeling I had as a young boy. 
Reading a travel guide or a science fiction novel; dreaming about the adventurous life I planned to live later on.  
In my paintings I reflect on this feeling, because now I know I’ll never be an astronaut, explorer or cowboy. 
Therefore there is always a melancholic, retro perspective touch to my work.



What are you working on?
At the moment I am working on a proposal for an exhibition. I’ve been nominated for an art prize, and this exhibit is part of it. I have to work within a certain theme, and I am trying to put in as much of my own stuff as is possible. I am also working on a series of paintings for a solo exhibit later on.



What inspires you?
My inspiration comes mainly from reading. 
Sometimes from watching movies; I used to watch a lot of of movies, but through the years this influence declined. 
I like old books, mainly non-fiction. For instance, I lately found a book from the seventies about ocean liners with all the details about tonnage, size and motoric specification.  
Every ship was photographed and its history written down.  
For me a book like this generates a stream of images in my head, and slowly these images find their way into one or several paintings. 


What do you hope to evoke from your viewers?
I hope my paintings evoke a certain feeling from my viewers. 
I want them to leave in a different state of mind. If I manage to suck them in to my mood of melancholy and uncanniness through one of my paintings, I succeed. 
I want my work to raise questions instead of answering them. A painting should slowly creep up someone’s mind.


How has your work grown and changed?
A few years back I started out painting modern icons. 
I wanted to focus upon the act of painting instead of the content. So I decided to make paintings of subjects very well known. It had to be immediately clear what you were looking at. Palm trees, cowboys, airplanes etc. After a while the content became important again. 
I often used photography as a source, and the ideas for paintings originated from these photographs.  But nowadays, the idea is first.  
Then I start thinking about what could be the best way to turn this idea into a successful painting. Most of the time I first make 3-dimensional models. Models in clay or paper-mache.  Then I do a sketch in watercolour, before the painting in oil. 



Do you experiment with different mediums a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?
A few years back I got some serious health problems while working in my studio. 
Because I used my paint very thinly I had to use a lot of turpentine. This was causing me problems. 
I experimented with all sorts of paints to get this turp out of my studio. 
I started using oil paint that you could dilute with water. Since then I have used this paint. But the search for the perfect painting ground continues. I work more and more on panel; also linen glued to panel or even plaster grounds.  Experimenting with these grounds is one of the main things in my work at the moment. 


Can you tell me something about your residency in Rijksakademie?
My years at the Rijks were two of the toughest and best years in my life. 
Everything I do now originated there. At first it’s a little intimidating, but when you’ve found your way around it is an enormous help in your development.  
The fact that the Dutch government considers closing this unique institute is outrageous. 


Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thanks for posting my work!

sabato 24 marzo 2012

Karishma D'souza


Can you describe your work?
My paintings work for me as tangible memory holders, spaces of unearthing. On a recent trip to the edge of the Sahara, the dunes were another reminder that change is constant, and that nothing can be grasped too tightly. In my work however, I attempt to document certain truths that persist through the noise and clamour one can find oneself in if one is not careful.



What are you working on?
I am working on a body of oil paintings of sizes that are intimate, of around one foot square, and smaller. The act of painting grounds me, and helps me negotiate new spaces. Through painting I attempt to work out the question of how one nurtures the intensity of communications. 




What inspires you?
The visual arts and literature – locations where one finds oneself in the inner worlds of others; The seamless shifting between the ‘real’ and the spirit world in Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, the intensity of Italo Calvino and Murakami, the author sidestepped in a translated Marathi short story. I hold close the poetry of T.S.Eliot, Maya Angelou and Kabir; and the startling, almost un-graspable humanity in the works of Vermeer, Bruegel, and Rembrandt, seen in the flesh on recent museum visits. I delight in the ethereal finesse of Persian and Mughul illuminations.


What do you hope to evoke from your viewers?
My paintings are often spaces through which I keep what is most dear to me at hand. They are for me a documentation of what has impacted me most in everyday living. They are a way to communicate and reach out to the world around me, and to hold the dialogue, in an attempt to slow down the slipping away of intangible things, or at least to hold a memory of them.



How has your work grown and changed?
For me painting is a space where I can speak about anything I wish to – and hear the echo. Life pulls along and creates references in its wake, from direct experience, and from re-lived experiences communicated by others, which get woven into or lie beneath the parallel made-up world. Painting has always been a space of reaching out. 



Do you experiment with different mediums a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?
I work with oil on canvas, and watercolours. I find that oil painting is always a tussle - which can be very rewarding. I can traverse an infinite range of negotiations with it – from the most immediate to the image that demands time and building up. 




Can you tell me something about your residency in Rijksakademie?
It is very important that Art is given equal respect and funding as the other fields of research. With the spending cuts the future of the academy, from where it is physically housed, to how it has been conceived, is in jeopardy. The atmosphere the Rijksakademie has built is one of inquiry. It has a wonderfully open environment with discussions and conversations that occur casually over the day in studios and over meals, with resident artists and visiting advisors, which always brings something new to deliberate over; which is enriching. The fact that the artists come from such varied backgrounds, disciplines, and experiences, makes an encounter with each person in a way a step outside my world. The connection of art is the first meeting point and it expands from there to keep being returned to at different intersections. I hope to use the duration of the residency as time dedicated to absorb the opportunities for discussions, travel and seeing art, the experience of living in the Netherlands, and negotiating all these new encounters through the work I will do during my time here. 




Is there anything else you would like to add?
I would like to thank you for your interest in my work, and for the invitation to be interviewed for the Arte da Ardere blog.


martedì 7 febbraio 2012

Marcelino Stuhmer

Can you describe your work?
My work hovers between the use or juxtaposition of different materials and media, including painting, photography, film, video, performance, and architecture. My work constructs narrative strategies and artistic discourse concerning representation.
The work reflects mythologized subjective and collective interpretations of current events, history, social communication, and the layers of identity.
The Recurring Dream (2007-8) is a large-scale panoramic painting (2.5 meters high, 4 meters in diameter) that depicts the famous dream sequence from Cold War film classic The Manchurian Candidate (1962). In this scene, the camera pans 360º around the room transforming from an elderly women’s tea-time lecture on gardening into a brutal Communist display of mind-control.
The ambiguity of this scene mixes perception and hallucination, which was not only at the center of the language of nineteenth century panoramic painting, but also refers to current media practices in fabricating patriotic and illusory perceptions of conflict and torture.
The installation Get Ready to Shoot Yourself, 2009 is based on a film set from Orson Welles’s film The Lady From Shanghai (1947), which features the aftermath of a shootout in a mirror maze. It is essential to the concept of the installation that the publicity still photograph that was the basis for this project was purely for publicity purposes only and did not appear in the film, it was in fact a lost staged moment outside the fictional narrative. I was immediately intrigued with the idea of pushing this 2-dimensional tableau image back into 3-dimensional space, re-constructing the image and fictional set that encapsulated the film’s complex narrative. In the installation the viewer walks directly intothe space of the image taking on the roles of both actor and interpreter within the reconstructed, yet broken mirror maze. Allowing the viewer to wander with their own image constantly displaced, reflected, and shattered suggests a contemporary fear and desire to “reside” within images.
This is a homage to Manet, to Velazquez, and to the mirror as metaphor and as another space, where “I am here, but I am also over there,” as Foucault describes it.
Get Ready to Shoot Yourself, 2009: http://marcelinostuhmer.com/Projects/26.html


What are you working on?
I’m currently working on another large-scale installation, a screenplay, and series of paintings, sculptures, collages, and photographs all as part of an on-going multi-disciplinary and complex fictional project I started in 2009 called The Choreographed Accident: Objects, Images, and Artifacts from the Pavel Avorsky Museum, Warsaw, 2009-present. The work collectively examines a Secret Service agent Paul Avery’s (aka Pavel Avorsky) series of clandestine “Warsaw Notebooks” that investigate top-secret British military research into time travel. Avery, the son of a brilliant Polish physicist who worked in the early 20thcentury with Einstein and R.B. Jeffries on time displacement experiments, discovers and explores his father’s scholarly work. The story is told through 2 fabricated newspaper clippings (see links below), paintings, collage, photographic light-boxes, sculptures, and a multi-media installation. I like the idea of a story that takes 5 years to tell, and this ongoing narrative reevaluates cinematic forms of mythology. The content of this project continues to grow creating the need to reevaluate everything learned from a previous experience with the work. The story firmly sits within the genre of the Cold War spy movies with double agents, scrambled communication and evidence that unfold in a “wilderness of mirrors.” It is a dystopian sci-fi, detective thriller that is “stranger than fiction” in the models of Solaris, Alphaville, Notes from the Underground, and the writings of Kafka, HG Wells, George Orwell, Grahame Greene, and the mazes and labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges. The Choreographed Accidentdescribes a socio-political framework of totalitarian oppression where the individual is a non-person in a psychologically suspicious, paranoid, and neurotic society, where artists unconsciously censor themselves communicating metaphorically, and where improvisation is inhumane. The complex network of fabricated materials and objects creates a conceptual cinema that plays out in the imaginations of the viewer. In a digital age where the manipulation or staging of events is always possible, images that document history don’t have to be truthful, they just have be believable.


What inspires you?
 …an incomplete list in no particular order: concepts of the underworld in mythology, literature, and painting, subways, grottos, mirrors, mise-en-abyme, Siennese painting especially Sassetta, getting lost in Rome and Milan, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Aventura, L’Eclisse, Red Desert, Zabriskie Point; Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, Lady from Shanghai, Mr. Arkadin, Godard’s Alphaville, Hitchcock, Jacque Tati’sPlaytime, the writings about photography by Sigfried Kracauer, Susan Sontag, and Roland Barthes, Jacque Ranciere, Jorge Luis Borges Labyrinths, Exactitude in Science, etc, etc, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Slavoj Zizek, Helio Oitcica, the spatial and organizational plan of Mondrian’s 1913 Paris Atelier, Tacita Dean, Rudolf Stingel, Joan Jonas, Anri Sala, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ilya Kabakov, Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, Robert Gober, John Heartfield, Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground, The Plastic Exploding Inevitable, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion and his conceptual architectural model “Cinema”, Gordon Matta Clark, the anatomy theaters in Padova and Leiden, the 1930’s German Total Theater of Erwin Piscator and Walter Gropius, Kurt Schwitters’ Merz concept, Tatiana Trouve, Bob Dylan’s Boots of Spanish Leather, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, It’s All Over Baby Blue; Los Carpenteros and Frederick Keisler and Imaginary Architecture, the film Russian Ark, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema I and II, Kubrick’s 2001 in relation to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Miles Davis soundtrack Filles de Kilimanjaro, Bitches Brew; Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, the sound of Nico’s voice, Thierry de Duve, Jeff Wall, Richter’s October 18, 1977…


What you hope to evoke from your viewers?
Whether on a canvas or within a participatory installation, I wish the viewer to find themselves confronting their own identity, occupying a specific spatial context as both a character and interpreter of the parallel space, narrative, politics, and time.
I’m fascinated with how the digital age has completely shifted how film is experienced, and how viewers have taken ownership of cinema as a modifiable consumer product in which the temporal and spatial elements can be re-ordered with the simple tool of the remote control.
The typical viewer has become a kind of undeclared VJ within our culture.
I want to give viewers the same freedom within my installations to perform and interpret the work based on the own terms.

How your work has grown and changed?
When I studied at the School of the Art Institute for my MFA, I was a die-hard painter. I dabbled a bit in video, but it wasn’t until I came to the Rijksakademie where I truly explored a variety of materials, media, and narrative strategies. I started with juxtaposing spoken narrative with a series of paintings. I then created my first film My Baby Just Cares For Me, 2001-2, which examined the profiling of immigrant Muslims that began to take form in the early 2000’s throughout Europe. The film featured an American architect at a Brussels train station watching a Muslim couple from a distance and immediately questioning whether the young man is mistreating his girlfriend. The story was written while I was living in east Amsterdam in the Indische Buurt (the East Indies Neighborhood) in a Turkish and Moroccan neighborhood. Although I have a Dutch citizenship I found myself feeling more at home in my neighborhood than among the Dutch. My own Post-Colonial Dutch and Indonesian cultural identity, as both Christian and Muslim, was certainly beneath this exploration. Since leaving Holland in 2004 my work has continued to deal with the questioning of identity but through the collective means of popular culture. The Silva Screen is another painting series that deals with the concept of a questionable cultural identity.


Do you experiment with different materials a lot or do you prefer to work within certain parameters?
I constantly explore process and materials to find a direction for the most relevant and enigmatic means to tell a story.
For example, I had the opportunity to create a performance for the Bergamo Film Festival, I collaborated with an Italian drummer Tiziano Riva who created a new drum solo soundtrack for the video Last Breath on the Mirror, 2009, the video playing within the Get Ready to Shoot Yourself, 2009 installation, creating a new conceptual and temporal relationship with the film sequence. Tiziano Riva performed his drum solo on the film festival stage, with The Last Breath on the Mirror projected above him.
The reference to music as a silent film accompaniment was clear enough, yet I decided to have Riva take the stage in the role of a Buster Keaton, an idea that could only come to me after I met him and I noted that his uncanny facial resemblance.


Can you tell me something about your residence in Rijsakademie?
My experience at the Rijks was full of amazing experience being in close contact with a remarkable cross-section of international artists, global and personal political concerns, and conceptual strategies.
The advisors were fantastic, and the opportunities to show my work to a larger audience was very helpful and led to some direct professional contacts. It was a great learning experience, however, I feel that my time there was a very transitional period. It wasn’t until after I left that I began to really shift my work into site-specific installation, performance, and narrative space. In fact my sketchbooks from that period are full of drawings of installation ideas, many of which I only explored much later.
I’ve learned to trust my instincts as an artist.


Is there anything else you would like to add?
Thank you so much for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you and your readers.
I wish you all the best with your blog and your future curatorial adventures.