The action of a lighthouse whether frontally as a signal or as a light cone are mesmerizing. The lighthearted explosion of light on a disco mirror ball make us happy or - more likely - silly. Charbel Ackermann will bring a combination of these two achievements of modernity on stage. His hollow mosaic mirrors will cover the theatre with a rhythmic sequence of light showers and will transmit a steady code to the musicians and the audience.
Danielle Arnaud contemporary art
123 Kennington Road London SE11 6SF T/F: +44 (0)20 7735 8292 Fri, Sat & Sun 2-6pm or by appointment
danielle@daniellearnaud.com
www.daniellearnaud.com
15 may - 14 June 2009
Laid together on the lookout
In Melville’s Moby Dick, the crew, while eyeing the whales, speculates about passing things. “HERE, NOW, are two great whales laying their heads together; let us join them and lay together our own.” The works of Charbel Ackermann, Jonathan Harker and Beltrán Obregón watch, split, and stitch together. Like watchmen, they monitor virtually eventless spaces. If their videos record anything, it is minor: light changes, shaking trees, passing clouds, at most minor passing vehicles on the ground and in the air. These still spaces are subverted through partial substitution of the observed urban spaces with models and reflexions, discontinuity of viewpoint or by using anachronistic means of recording.
Beltrán Obregón’s The Land of the Giants plays on the veracity of an aerial urban photograph and the deception of scale. Eagle Cliff Spiral, seems to chart an aerial view of the top of a hill. The trail of Sisyphus shows a continued motion in space both on the ground and in the air, interweaving micro and macro views of the landscape. Spatial Sequence shows what seems to be an imperceptibly moving wing of an airplane on the backdrop of a sky transitioning from dusk to nightfall and back again.
Jonathan Harker’s Destablishing Shots consists of a series of 23 shots of various buildings and houses in Panama City. At first glance, the shots do not seem to involve anything more than the careful framing of the houses and buildings, but their impossible symmetry gradually becomes evident. The result is a disturbing portrait of a city that has been tampered with.
Charbel Ackermann’s Towers Record is an animated reconstruction of an urban scene observed for a quarter of an hour during an autumnal late afternoon. He uses a large number of paintings to record the scene through a sort of time-travel CCTV camera using the style of 17th/18th century urban topographic painting.
Beltrán Obregón is a Colombian artist based in London. Recent solo exhibitions include: El Jinete Azul (2007) at Galeria Valenzuela Klenner, Bogota, Colombia, and Spacial Sequence (2007) at Permanent Gallery, Brighton, UK. He has also shown at Bloomberg SPACE, London, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo and Moscow Center for the Arts, Moscow. He was selected for New Contemporaries 2005 and participated in the Busan Biennale Contemporary Art Exhibition in 2002. He is represented by Valenzuela Klenner Galeria, Bogota, Colombia.
Jonathan Harker (Ecuador) lives and works in Panama and France. He Exhibited at the 52nd Venice Biennale, Havana Biennial, the Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador, Panama Art Biennial, ICO Collectiones Madrid; Doubtful Strait, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC), in San Jose, Costa Rica; Producing Reality: Art and Resistance in Latin America, in Lucca, Italy; and All Included: Urban Images of Central America, at the Conde Duque de Madrid Center for the Arts, Madrid; Giorgio Persano Gallery in Turin; and Samson Projects Boston.
Charbel Ackermann is a London based artist. He uses installation, drawing, sculpture and electronic media. He has shown his work at The Drawing Center, New York; The Pasadena Museum of California Art/ Fellows of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; the Walter and McBean Galleries San Francisco; the Museum of Art Lucerne, Switzerland; Irvine Contemporary and the Gallery at the Warehouse, Washington DC; Stanford University Art Gallery; Launch Pad/Parabola, London; and Manes Gallery in Prague.
Nottingham Castle
Off Maid Marian Way, Nottingham, NG1 6EL
0115 915 3700 / www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/whatson
Exhibition open from Saturday 9 May - Sunday 12 July 2009
Gallery open daily, 10am - 5pm
Responding to our British inclination for weather-watching and star-gazing, Skies brings together historical and contemporary views of the sky - clouds and rainbows, rain and shine, night and day - explored by artists through drawing, painting, photography and film. Representational studies of weather and cloud formations combine with works that hint at the impact of pollution, or tap in to our emotional response to the sky and the forces of nature.
Skies combines work from the past two centuries by artists such as David Cox, Henry Dawson, Harold and Laura Knight, Charles Nevinson, William Nicholson and Alfred Stieglitz, with contemporary art by Charbel Ackermann, Roger Ackling, Fay Claridge, Russell Crotty, Nicky Coutts, Ori Gersht, Elizabeth Magill, Julian Opie and John Riddy.
Participation in the project The Last Book/El Ultimo Libro led by Luis Camnitzer, National Library of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Installation on display until 30 March 2009
Galerie Manes Prague
Address: Masarykovo nabrezi 250 Prague 1
"VÍTEZOVÉ A PORA?ENÍ"
Opening December 3, 6 pm
Exhibition closes 31 December
Opening hours: Tue to Sun 11 am to 7 pm www.galeriemanes.cz
La Fabrika
Address: Komunardu 30, Prague 7
"BOXING" - exhibition, film and performances
Opening December 6, 8 pm
Exhibition closes 18 January 09 www.lafabrika.cz
International Exhibitionist Screening at Barbican London, 8/9 March 2008
"Do something different". The IE slide show will be presented on a big screen in the large central foyer of the Barbican. The works will be viewed by a wide range of audiences from all ages coming to the art centre on that day for concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra, theatre pieces, films, visiting the art galleries or the library. An evening of performances and music will be organised around the screen. A bar/cafe will be also
set up for the duration of the evening.
008, 1:1 Projects, Rome, 28th February 2 March 2008
Charbel Ackermann, allsopp&weir, Mary Cork, Shezad Dawood, Bernard Debaillie, Jeremy
Deller, Patrizio di Massimo, Michael Eddy, Alice Finbow, David Ferrando Giraut, Ryan Gander, Liam Gillick, Haruhi Hayashi, Chia-En Jao, Maria Karantzi, Davide Minuti, Yaron Lapid, Miltos Manetas, Gorka Mohamed, Alexandra Navratil, Sandrine Nicoletta, Maria Papadimitriou, Theo Prodromidis, Maria Domenica Rapicavoli, Raymond Taudin Chabot, Mark Titchner, Yorgos Tsalamanis.
A music performance by Hildegard Kleeb and Roland Dahinden concluded the Island Block exhibition at the Launch Pad Gallery in the Building Centre, Store Street, London on Saturday 30 June.
Hildegard is an interpreter of contemporary piano music with an international performance and recording career. She has premiered music by Peter Ablinger, Maria de Alvear, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Roland Dahinden, Hauke Harder, Bernhard Lang, Alvin Lucier, and Christian Wolff. Roland is a composer and virtuoso trombonist. As trombonist he spezialises in the performance of contemporary music and improvisation/jazz. His concert career spans many countries in Europe, America and Asia. Composers such as Peter Ablinger, Maria de Alvear, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Peter Hansen, Hauke Harder, Bernhard Lang, Joelle Léandre, Alvin Lucier, Chris Newman, Pauline Oliveros, Hans Otte, Lars Sandberg, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Daniel Wolf and Christian Wolff wrote especially for him.
Hildegard Kleeb and Roland Dahinden have worked together since 1987. They have collaborated with visual artists Guido Baselgia, Andreas Brandt, Stéphane Brunner, Daniel Buren, Rudolf de Crignis, Philippe Deléglise, Inge Dick, Rainer Grodnick, Sol LeWitt, Lisa Schiess, Guido Baselgia, with the architects Morger & Degelo, and with the author Eugen Gomringer.
Performance 30 June 2007
Roland Dahinden performed Wind Shadows by Alvin Lucier (1994) Two pure wave oscillators are tuned a tenth of a cycle apart. As each tone sounds from a separate loudspeaker, a beating pattern is heard to spin across the room once every ten seconds. As it does so, the trombonist plays long tones in near unison with the spinning waves, causing secondary beats to sound. The player is asked to sweep slowly within an extremely narrow range, from three cycles per second above the null point between the spinning waves to three cycles below it. "Wind Shadows" was written expressly for Roland Dahinden who is one of the few players capable of producing the close tunings demanded in the score.
Hildegard Kleeb performed Opera with Objects by Alvin Lucier, written in 1997 a piece in which the performer taps on different objects that they find, exploring the timbre resonance of those objects.
The performance was concluded by a performance by both musicians of John Cage’s Ryoanji named after a meditation garden in Kyoto in a version for solo trombone, recorded trombone voices and percussion. That percussion comprised two vessels which were tapped. The musicians used two overdubbed trombones recorded by Roland Dahinden. The percussion, which continues to two measures after the score's end, is meant to portray the sand as the trombones are the stones. This "sand" is carefully placed, allowing for a resonance and a soft place for the placement of the "stones."
