Please answer

What is the first word you think of for each Religion?


Christianity

Islam

Judaism
.......

Petra Bittl

9th March- 17th April

Petra Bittl is one of Germany's leading ceramists. This small show demonstrates her fine art origins- she treats her work very much like a painting and drawing by using clay as her medium, her canvas, her paper. The beautiful ceramic owrks that she produces are removed from what we would normally think of as 'pottery' or 'craft'

" The decision whether to become a painter or a ceramist, was very hard for me. I finally chose to study ceramics, but i soon discovered thats in creating ceramic- art, I can be both. My work is painted, scratched, inlayed with porcelain and decorated with slips"

The painted elements are simple circles, spots and lines.

Creating circles on a beach

After speaking to Gary and Louisa we came to the decision to form circles in different environments such as the beach. To stage different audiences as well as developing meaning.

The circle is perhaps the purest, most profound and the most common symbol in existence. With the probably infinite billions of stars, planets, moons and galaxies full of the same, the circle is well represented in the physical universe in the form of spheres. A circle, having no beginning or end, represents infinity, eternity, wholeness and femininity. Other meaningfully significant symbols or objects are circular: Stonehenge, Ouroboros, the Wheel of Life, a halo around the head of a saint, etc. In a very practical way, it can be said that circles rule the world. For example: wheels, gears, computer hard drives, CDs.

Circles being universal and the point being God.

Wessieling- Chinese Dress Now

The image of China has been changing drastically in recent decades and so has the Chinese dress, a symbol of Chinese idenity and femininity, and a fusion od ancient and modern, Western and Chinese. Chinese dress now comprises of a video and a series of scupltures concerning the contemporary perception towards the chinese dress.

I attended the seminar which accompannied the exhibition investigating the development of the Chinese dress from early 20th century to the present and understood the concept of her work on a deeper level.

Wessielling is a London-based visual artist.

Statement:

"My research concerns identities with an emphasis on the discourse of cultural identities in the production of fashion. I am interested in the construction of identities, the expression and creation of an identity when producing fashion, the relation of such identity with one’s locality and the tension within the industry in which it is produced. I have written on the engagement process of Paris-based Oriental designers, examining diasporic aesthetics that is born out of both the place and fashion system in which it is created. My recent geographical focus on China has led me to publish a monograph (Fusionable Cheongsam 2007) and articles on how the identities of the Chinese dress have been constructed through its social and cultural history, popular culture and fashion production.Further to the theme of identities is my practice-based research which draws on the relation between fashion, cities and identities, whereby fashion is acknowledged as a major social force and an interplay of consumer tastes, social habits and personal identities. My installation aspires to consider how fashion represents our cultural selves and such liaisons within the society we inhabit. Projects being undertaken include Fusionable Cheongsam (2007), a solo exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre which considers the dichotomous representations of the Chinese dress by means of a series of installations, and Game On: The World Fashion Conquest, a touring solo exhibition (Vienna 2007, London 2006) which inquires into the economic and cultural role that a homogenised fashion week serves beyond the fashion industry"

http://www.lifestyleasia.com/articles/arts-and-culture_4/cheongsams-tale_243.htm

Art and Religion

Art and religion have gone hand-in-hand for thousands of years. Almost every religious sect makes use of it. It glorifies, protests, idealizes, and tells the stories of religion. During some periods of out history art existed for the sake of religion. Artists of our time are generally free to create and comment on whatever they choose. People, colors, nature, dreams or shopping carts might be just as interesting to an artist as the appearance of a crucifixion or an Indian fertility god. Religion dominated art--it commissioned it and used it as propaganda. Religion or its ideas were presented in paintings, drawings, sculpture, architecture-- you name it. Religion and art share common features: their origins are uncertain, and it is hard to define exactly their criteria. So much of religion and so much of art belong to the participants--the worshippers, collectors, patrons, and those whom religion and art have left confused.


It seems that nearly all early art has its roots in religion. The Christians used it. The Taoists used it. The Buddhists, the Hindu, the Muslims, the Jewish-- all used decoration, painting, sculpture, or architecture to express their beliefs in a higher place or power. Art was a way of rearranging the mundane to make it seem celestial. Art applied human creativity and ability to the ordinary to make it extraordinary. It pointed to another place, where everything was ready-made perfect. Art was a reminder of good, evil, life and death.


Can art and religion ever truly be separate? Can one exist without another? Can we truly produce a piece that depicts anything of this world without showing our belief or disbelief in the process? So much of art's history was dominated by religion, it is hard to imagine art ever functioning without it. That question will only be answered through the passage of time. (Erwin O. Christensen Primitive Art New York: 1955)


Did art begin as a religious practice? Were ancient artists offering their talents and works when they painted the cave walls at Lascaux, France? One hundred thousand years ago, "give or take a few millenniums...the Neanderthals were burying their dead, placing tools in the graves and perhaps chunks of meat as if for use in an afterlife or spirit world."(John E . Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion 1985)


Did humans always have this suspicion of another world? Is this when religion and art began to have its huge impact on our world, during the period known as the Upper Paleolithic, about thirty thousand years ago? What seems like an almost immeasurable period of time to us is the blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. Those distant occurrences--burial of the dead, decoration of cave walls, and other evidence of rituals are what distinguish early humans from other primates and what link our ancestors to ourselves.

Sophie Calle

"Unfinished"

Blenheim Walk 9th-20th March

Sophie Calle is a French visual artist as well as a writer and a film director. For more than 30 years, she has been using her life (especially the most private moments of her life) as a material for her creative work. She uses all sorts of media such as books, photos, videos, films, performances, inventing some ways to tell the story of her (and eventually other people’s) life(s). Halfway between the novel and the performance, Sophie Calle discloses narrative processes combining fetishism, demonstration and voyeurism. In 2003, the Pompidou Centre celebrated her achievements presenting a retrospective exhibition of her work. In 2007, she published a novel constructed around a breakup letter she had received. Sophie Calle asked 107 women to give their own interpretation of the following short text: « I received an email telling me it was over. I didn’t know how to answer. It was as if it wasn’t meant for me. It ended with the words: Take care of yourself. I took this recommendation literally. I asked a hundred and seven women, chosen for their profession, to interpret the letter in their professional capacity. To analyze it, provide a commentary on it, act it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Squeeze it dry. Understand for me. Answer for me. It was a way to take the time to break up. At my own pace. A way to take care of myself. » The work, that was presented at the 2007 Venice Biennale, is the subject of a beautiful book published by Actes Sud presenting some photos, texts and operations as well as performances and videos collected on four DVDs. This is the Venice Biennale event which is presented to the public in the prestigious Labrouste reading room, at the Richelieu site.

Unfinished, in collaboration with Fabio Baldducci, uses ATM surveillance tapes to understand the meaning of money and security.

Kadder Attia

Kadder Attia was born in Paris in 1970 into Algerian family, Attia’s work is heavily influenced by his cultural heritage. It is rooted in the complex relations between the East and West and deals with many different subjects from the place of women in religion; the taboo relations between power, religion and art; to the phobias, frustrations and fantasies of the human being. Attia is unafraid of tackling questions of globalisation and religion and his work presents a sometimes darkly humorous and even cynical view of modern life. It exists at the meeting point between Western consumerism and an uprooted North African culture and addresses issues of community, diversity, belonging and exile.

In Ghost, a large installation of a group of Muslim women in prayer, Attia renders their bodies as vacant shells, empty hoods devoid of personhood or spirit. Made from tin foil - a domestic, throw away material - Attia’s figures become alien and futuristic, synthesising the abject and divine. Bowing in shimmering meditation, their ritual is equally seductive and hollow, questioning modern ideologies - from religion to nationalism and consumerism - in relation to individual identity, social perception, devotion and exclusion. Attia’s Ghost evokes contemplation of the human condition as vulnerable and mortal; his impoverished materials suggest alternative histories or understandings of the world, manifest in individual and temporal experience.

Stass Paraskos

Veron Street Exhibition- 13th Febuary-13th March

Stass Paraskos was born in Cyrus in 1933 and travelled to England in 1953 where he was encouraged to apply for entry to Leeds college of Art, later teaching there, becoming a lecturer in Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and the head of painting at the newly created Kent Institute of Art & Design before returning to Cyprus and establising Cyprus college of Art.

Parasko's paintings are best described as figurative but non-naturalistic, often describing political historical or personal scenes from his past. His work is in many public collections including the tate Gallery, the Arts council and Leeds city Art Gallery.

The Cyprus College of Art is Stass and Stass is Cyprus College of Art. As distinct entities the two are unseperable and rather like great art schools and studio- workshops of the past, this symbolic relationship between the artist and the place the artist teaches gives to the Cyprus college of Art a unique and very special personality. It is the personality of Stass.

Stass's paintings have developed over the years in manner and in content, though their essential character, which is also his, remains constant. I nearly wrote " and in ambititon" but from the first he has produced 'simple' still life and figure subjects as well as occasional painitngs that tackle more polemical subjects, often on a larger scale.

Pavilion- Kevin Newark (Photography Exhibition)

"Kevin Newark's practice resonates around the themes of space, time, anxiety and displacement. In his photographs he is interested in perceptual ambiguity, utilised as a device that both extends the visual experience and transforms the subject"

At the opening of the exhibition i met the artist and recieved an overview of his work in depth. I was intrigued by his work becoming unrecognizable from environmental materials.

“At first sight Kevin Newark’s torn and rejected plastic bags look like telescopic views of heavenly bodies,”

“We are then pulled up short by the realisation that we are looking at persistent organic pollutants that are slowly suffocating our environment.”