Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Khedoori experiments with ambiguous spaces through a diverse practice that includes installation, sculpture and film.  The artist’s current solo exhibition of new and recent work at Hauser & Wirth in London is remarkable for the artist’s foray into documentation.  The Iraq Book Project, an ongoing documentary piece, was first shown at The Box in Los Angeles in 2009.  It is comprised of online news articles dating to the start of the Iraq War – 18 March 2003.  Sourced from around the world, the articles are retrieved using the search terms ‘Iraq’, ‘Iraqi’ or ‘Baghdad’.  They are then translated into English, compiled and presented in a series of large books arranged chronologically.  The articles are printed in a uniform, seamless manner and each is demarcated by title, date and source.  These large books are arranged in the main gallery space at Hauser & Wirth on tables along with stools for gallery visitors to interact with the work.  Khedoori’s Iraq Book Project is an on-going effort that is updated continuously.  Its conclusion will depend upon the length of the war.

Khedoori is certainly not alone in responding to the Iraq War, but has typically eschewed such content in her work. While The Iraq Book Project is somewhat of a departure, it can also be viewed as a repositioning of Khedoori’s engagement with space.  In this work, Khedoori locates information within the digital realm and extracts it.  This process allows viewers to explore the changing face of and attitudes towards the war.  It also stores information as a part of our collective memory that would otherwise be dispersed and largely be forgotten.  Khedoori preserves war coverage and places it within the physical world.  She chooses book form, which is a lasting and traditional mode of recording and passing on knowledge.

Untitled (Iraq Book Project) 2008-2010. Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010. © Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the Artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

A film installation and a photographic series are found upstairs in the American Room of the gallery.  Film is an important medium for the artist, who has returned to it throughout her career.  The photographic series is set in a natural Australian landscape at 5.00 am, while the film is set 12 hours later at 5.00 pm.  For the film installation, Khedoori returns to the device of the mirror to manipulate the moving image.  The film is projected onto a screen that meets a mirror at a 90 degree angle – causing the looped footage to appear to continually separate from itself as it plays.  The Hauser & Wirth gallery points out that the affect is much like a Rorschach ink blot test.  Yet, in this instance it is set in landscape and in motion.  This work allows the gallery visitor to encounter ambiguous, psychologically-tinged space.

Rachel Khedoori’s work has shown internationally since the mid-1990s.  In 2001, the artist’s high-profile solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland brought her work increased international attention.  Subsequently, Khedoori has taken part in several noteworthy group exhibitions.  In 2008, the artist was included in the traveling exhibition Visual Tactics or how pictures emerge, which opened at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Seigen, Germany.  Khedoori’s work received a lot of attention in 2009 when she took part in the Venice Biennale’s Fare Mondi/Making Worlds exhibition and Paul McCarthy’s Low Life Slow Life: Part 2 at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco.

Born in Sydney, Australia, Rachel Khedoori is the identical twin sister of fellow artist Toba Khedoori.  She currently lives and works in Los Angeles CA and is represented by Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner in New York.  Khedoori received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and her MFA from the University of California in Los Angeles in 1994.

Untitled, 2010 (Film, 3:33 minutes). Installation view, Hauser & Wirth London, 2010.© Rachel Khedoori. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Peter Mallet.

Rachel Khedoori concludes at Hauser & Wirth in London on 31 July.  It marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK’s capital city.

DailyServing’s Sasha Lee recently had the chance to sit down with Denise Gray of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Education department to discuss her role as an educator, both as an individual scholar in the field and also within the MOCA’s philosophy. Denise, along with others in her field, are extraordinary examples of a vibrant voice shaping how we understand contemporary art today. Whether organizing special events, or working with the fantastic MOCA apprentice program, Denise’s hard efforts are all conducted in the name of inspiring passion for art in others, and lending the public tools to appreciate art. Denise’s educational philosophy begins not with a lecture, but what the participants themselves know and have experienced. In light of the recent events surrounding MOCA–Denise’s interview reminds us the invaluable resource that the museum & educators such as Denise provide.

DailyServing: Can you talk a little bit about your position at the MOCA and the various projects you oversee, maybe your favorites?

Los Angeles-based artist Meeson Pae Yang creates intricate sculptures and installations that explore technology through the context of the body and the natural world. Developing systems that mimic both micro and macro environments, the artist often builds an entire ecosystem within a singular installation. Meeson Pae Yang’s most recent work, Traverse, takes place in a vacant storefront in California. The artist has built a replica forest-like landscape that is composed of translucent trees which spring from the hard concrete floor. The exhibition combines organic and synthetic material to create the illusion of a deep seated wintry forest.

The artist received her undergraduate degree from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and has completed recent projects with Lawerce Asher Gallery and JK Gallery, both in Los Angeles.  Traverse, from 2009, was commissioned by the Arts Council for Long Beach for a vacant storefront at 5661 Atlantic Ave in Long Beach, California.

Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Guests represents Poland at this year’s 53rd Venice Biennale. Wodiczko’s video projection installation is at once an aesthetic and a political work. While much contemporary art addresses social and political issues, it is an exceptional achievement for an artist to convey such commentary through powerful aesthetic means as Wodiczko manages to do in this work.

Guests is realized by the projection of large-scale windows physically surrounding the viewer on the walls and ceiling of the darkened Polish Pavilion.  The windows create an invisible but obvious barrier that cannot be crossed by the shadowy, silhouetted figures behind them.  It is clear that these figures are immigrants and refugees through the installation’s accompanying sound element featuring voices discussing their struggle for work visas, opportunity, and national identity.  These stories are pulled from Wodiczko’s own research into the experiences of immigrants from around the world residing in Poland and Italy. Throughout the length of the looping installation (approximately 17 minutes) various vignettes of people come in and out of focus as they are alternately burdened with luggage, washing windows, blowing leaves, sweeping, and selling umbrellas.  In a few poignant instances the shadowy figures look inside, touching the window panes, underscoring their exclusion.

Wodiczko brings the highly relevant predicament of restrictive immigrant policies into the gallery space to educate and to confront the typically elite Biennale audience.  Wodiczko’s Guests certainly presents an idealized account of the immigrant figure, but in doing so creates an effective argument that perceived ‘outsiders’ and ‘others’ are vital members of society.  Wodiczko’s own intent can be summarized by the quote he includes at the pavilion’s entrance: “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples.” (Hannah Arendt, 1943)

Krzysztof Wodiczko earned his MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1968.  As a prominent contemporary artist, Wodiczko has been awarded many prizes including the Hiroshima Art Prize (1998) and the Katarzyna Kobro Prize (2006).  He is also a prolific writer and theorist.  Wodiczko is currently Director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and professor at the Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities.  He lives and works in New York, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Warsaw.

Kryzstzof Wodiczko’s Guests was curated by Bozena Czubak.  It was commissioned by Agnieszka Morawinska and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art along with other supporting institutions for the Venice Biennale.  Guests remains at the Polish Pavilion through 22 November 2009.

Milena Bonilla, Variations on a homogenous landscape (detail), 2006. Photograph courtesy the artist.

While the act of mapping conveys authority – giving credence to that which it records – mapping cannot remain entirely static and must be revised to represent changes in power structures.  In efforts to better understand or better represent the world, many contemporary artists eschew two-dimensional map-making in favor of addressing the ways in which traditional maps are transgressed by global complexities.

Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists currently on view at the Institute of International Visual Arts in London (Iniva) offers creative alternatives to a stale representation of global organization.  Capitalizing on the potentially transformative nature of mapping, nine contemporary artists deconstruct conventions in favor of introducing previously ‘off the map’ concepts.  Whose Map is it? is inextricably engaged with the larger theme of globalization for the way that this present condition problematizes the traditional two-dimensional nation-state map structure.  Presenting new and recent work in diverse media, the exhibition offers freshly layered, content-wise approaches that creatively reposition map-making to more fully represent today’s mobile world.

Bouchra Khalili, Mapping Journey #1 (film still), 2008. Courtesy of galerieofmarseille. Produced with the support of Artschool Palestine. Copyright the artist.

The deconstruction of existing map structures is central to the exhibition.  In Milena Bonilla’s Variations on a homeogeneous landscape (2006), traditional scientific cartographic means are questioned by presenting repositioned and disoriented fragments of familiar maps.  In a different vein, Bouchra Khalili’s Mapping Journey films the marking through and across of a two-dimensional map in order to illustrate a path of actual, experienced migration.  As the moving image overrides the flat, two dimensional map, the viewer sees that mobility has become the new global landscape as it crosses political boundaries.  Also mapping in an innovative way, Gayle Chong Kwan’s new commission Save the Last Dance for Me charts the movement and migration of Rumba.  The resulting large-scale, global cultural map is accompanied by a sound piece offering Rumba dance instruction.

Oraib Toukan, The New(er) Middle East, Installation view at Rivington Place 2007. Copyright the artist, Photo: Thierry Bal.

Map structures take on Post-colonial concepts in Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s new commission A continuing survey of syntatic parsing.  In this work, Wolukau-Wanambwa charts British colonial conquest narratives in juxtaposition with bourgeois British civilian life of the same period.  Also of Post-colonial theme, Alexandra Handal’s Labyrinth of Remains and Migration (2000-01 & 2010) draws visually spare ‘mental maps’ that represent Palestinian dispossession.

The gallery audience is charged with mapping their own Middle East in Oraib Toukan’s interactive magnetic puzzle piece entitled The New(er) Middle East.  This work references the region’s divisive geo-political history that has been marked by Western intervention.  More specifically, Toukan’s work playfully alludes to the catch phrase introduced by the Bush administration’s Condoleezza Rice in 2006 conceptualizing a more stable Middle Eastern political map through further Western interference and map restructuring.

Esther Polak, NomadicMILK, installation view at Rivington Place 2007 2010. Copyright the artist, Photo: Thierry Bal.

Globalization’s free-trade economics define the ever-more global face of the world and are therefore addressed by multiple artists in this exhibition.  Artist Susan Stockwell’s site-specific commission, River of Blood, focuses on the world’s growing urban populations by highlighting economic disparity in London along a commonly recognized North-South divide.  River of Blood is on one hand a map of the Thames River and its tributaries.  On the other hand, its red vinyl cut-outs resemble human arteries, thereby emphasizing the visceral socio-economic, geographic divide between the haves (of North London) and have-nots (of South London).

Esther Polak’s NomadicMILK (2009) is engaged with mapping the movements of a particular contemporary economic system.  This work tracks the movements of nomadic Fulani herdsmen and dairy transporters throughout Nigeria using GPS technology to illustrate the constant movement required to execute the work of a single industry.  Focusing on a site of dramatic economic transformation, Otobong Nkanga’s Delta Stories (05/06) illustrates the ecological ramifications of harvesting oil repositories in a Nigerian delta region.

Susan Stockwell, River of Blood, 2010. Copyright the artist, Photo: Thierry Bal.

Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists was initiated by Iniva curators Christine Takengny and Teresa Cisneros in conjunction with a full schedule of educational events including the Crossing Boundaries Symposium that took place 2 June.   Upcoming events include a July 8th talk entitled The Content and the Meaning of the Spaces We Encounter with Paul Goodwin and Alex Vasudeum.  On 15 July a screening will be held of visual essayist Ursula Biemann’s film Sahara Chronicle, followed by a discussion with visual culture scholar Irit Rogoff.

Whose Map is it? new mapping by artists is on view at Iniva’s Rivington Place in London through 24 July.

For this Sunday’s edition of From the DS Archives we hope to offer a little edification to accompany our readers’ 4th of July festivities.  While we should certainly celebrate, it is also important to think about what it is to be American.  Taking another look at this previously published feature on Brian Jungen’s Strange Comfort, allows us to do just that.  For Strange Comfort, Jungen playfully combines Native American imagery with pop culture consumerism – offering up an aesthetic engagement with American cultural history.

Happy 4th of July to our DS readers!

Strange Comfort, Brian Jungen’s exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), is as delightful as it is disquieting.  Jungen, who is part Northwest American Indian, transforms objects of American consumption into relics of tribal culture.  The result is transcendent hybrids that raise questions about the relationship between art, culture and commodity.

Still from DOUBLE TAKE by Johan Grimonprez, 2009, 80 minutes, Courtesy: Zapomatik

Despite the plethora of images and information that inundates contemporary life, we can rarely be certain of the reliability or the persuasive spin defining what we encounter.  Artist Johan Grimonprez questions the reality presented by news media and popular culture and sees that fear has become a global commodity. In an effort to make sense of the chaos and to offer his own critical analysis, artist Johan Grimonprez positions his film work within the intersections of popular culture and art, of fiction and documentary.

The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh currently presents Johan Grimonprez - offering a sample of Grimonprez’s work in film that allows the gallery visitor to experience the progression of his career.  This exhibition includes Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), DOUBLE TAKE (2008), Where is Your Helicopter (1992) and It Will Be Alright If You Come Again, Only Next Time Don’t Bring Any Gear, Except A Tea Kettle (1994).  These examples reveal that Grimonprez has been an early leader in the ascendancy of the moving image and documentary in contemporary art practice.

Still from DOUBLE TAKE by Johan Grimonprez, 2009, 80 minutes, Courtesy: Universal and Zapomatik

Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y and DOUBLE TAKE – both film essays – address compelling contemporary issues.   Each was created using found footage from news broadcasts, Hollywood movies, animated films and commercials layered together to address contemporary complexities.  Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y focuses on the history of airplane high-jacking since the 1970s and how this changed the nature of journalism. In DOUBLE TAKE, Grimonprez uses highly recognizable visual Hitchcock metaphors to segue into important pedagogic content.  Hitchcock’s many cameo appearances hint at repeated doubling of identity and meaning while the birds become a metaphor for fear and paranoia.

Grimonprez’ work reminds us to take nothing at face value – that multiple and hidden meanings lie beyond the images we encounter.  This idea is something that we are reminded of everyday – most recently with the violent Israeli crackdown on aid ships seeking to break the Gaza blockade.

Still from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997–2004, by Johan Grimonprez. Photography by Rony Vissers, Courtesy: Zapomatik

Johan Grimonprez lives and works in Brussels and New York and is represented by the Sean Kelly Gallery.  He studied at the School of the Visual Arts in New York where he now serves as a faculty member.  Grimonprez has shown internationally and his work can be found in important collections such as Artist Rooms.

Johan Grimonprez will be on view at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 22 July 2010.

Mowing the lawn is synonymous with suburban existence.  It is a task so habitual and perfunctory that it seems unlikely as artistic subject matter.  However, it is precisely this everyday quality of lawn maintenance that enables Jeremy Wood to imbue it with significance by newly exploring it with GPS (Global Positioning Systems) technology.  For Mowing the Lawn, currently at Tenderpixel in London, Jeremy Wood continues his technique of GPS drawing – this time in his own backyard.  Using GPS to record his riding lawnmower’s path over several seasons, data of his movement and location (including latitude, longitude, altitude and time) are essentialized into a linear pattern.

Wood’s use of GPS diverges from the traditional use of the technology, which was invented by the United States military for navigation and combat purposes.  Instead of underscoring the current power structure, Wood creates personal cartographies that reflect the everyday nature of contemporary mobility.  Wood likens the GPS record of his movement to a ‘visual journal’.  He maps his journey through space and time, recording and understanding an otherwise transient experience in a new way.  Unlike some past work, Mowing the Lawn does not cross borders, but instead ignores traditional lines of power all together.

Jeremy Wood currently lives and works in Oxford, England and Athens, Greece.  Wood has worked with GPS technology since 2000 – when military quality GPS first became available to civilians globally.  He holds a fine arts degree from the University of Derby and an MFA from Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design.  His work was recently included in Map Marking at the Pace Digital Gallery in New York.

Jeremy Wood’s Mowing the Lawn will be on view at Tenderpixel through 22 June 2010.

The Serpentine Gallery in London presents Nairy Bagrhamian and Phyllida Barlow.  The exhibition features new and recent work by two contemporary artists exhibited together for the first time.  The Serpentine Gallery suggests Baghramian and Barlow represent ‘two positions on sculpture in the 21st century’.  The pairing of the two artists offers new insight into their respective sculptural practices.

Baghramian and Barlow’s work is displayed separately, in solo rooms, and also in deliberate dialogue.  While offering different approaches, both artists are inspired by the gallery context and capitalize on characteristics of the space.  Their large-scale installations are often in arranged in tension and certainly inhabit the space of the gallery visitor.  For all of these characteristics, the installation demands a physical viewing experience.

Nairy Baghramian was born in Iran.  She now lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Galerie Daniel Buchholz.  She is known for photography in addition to her sculptural and installation work.  Baghramian is inspired by politics and literature as well as the legacies of minimalism, design and modern architecture.  She often engages with context, institutional framing and the production and reception of contemporary art.

Phyllida Barlow lives and works in London.  She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art where she has served as professor for some time.  Barlow’s work utilizes mass produced materials that she typically combines on-site and later recycles.  Her sculptural work is often realized in the large-scale, installation environment.

Nairy Baghramian and Phyllida Barlow is on view at the Serpentine Gallery from 8 May through 13 June 2010.

Courtesy The Third Line

The Third Line in Dubai presents Islands – Abbas Akhavan’s first solo exhibition in the region.  According to The Third Line, Akhavan’s site specific installation visualizes the connections between the art world/art market and the world’s economy.  Akhavan positions this global economic theme within Dubai – mapping the city directly onto the gallery walls.

In Islands, Akhavan paints a series of aerial maps that do not portend accuracy, but instead utilize humor and imagination.  The maps incorporate the most recognizable imagery associated with Dubai’s landscape, architecture, culture and economy.  The artist highlights everything from man-made islands to palm trees in faux gold leaf.  The use of faux gold leaf is not only visually striking, but underscores Dubai’s gold trade and economic excess.

Courtesy The Third Line

The most compelling aspect of Akhavan’s installation is that it openly relies upon the art collector’s participation.  Islands will be altered throughout its duration as art collectors purchase various parts of the map.  Each purchased area of the map will be visually sectioned off and selected parts moved or removed.  The art collector becomes a pseudo-land owner, illustrating the way that the art world mirrors real world economics.  Through Akhavan’s work we see that geography is profoundly divided, altered and remapped through the all-powerful market transaction.

Abbas Akhavan currently resides in Toronto and is represented by The Third Line.  He was born in Tehran and has lived in Canada since 1992.  Akhavan received his Bachelors of Fine Arts from Concordia University and a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of British Columbia.  He works in a variety of media including paint, installation, video/performance and site-specific ephemeral work.  Akhavan teaches in Vancouver at both the Emily Carr University of Fine Art and Design and the University of British Columbia.  His work has been exhibited across Canada and internationally – at spaces that include Artspeak (Canada), the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art (Aalborg, Denmark) and Uplands Gallery (Australia).

Courtesy The Third Line

Abbas Akhavan’s Islands will be on view at The Third Line in Dubai from 6 May through 10 June 2010.  A preview will be held Wednesday, 5 May from 7.30 to 9.30 pm at The Third Line Gallery, Al Quoz 3.

Originally published on March 29, 2010

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

The Kitchen in New York City is currently showing On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance, a Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray. The exhibition features new and recent work by Hewitt in photography, sculpture and film installation. The Kitchen writes that in this exhibition Hewitt’s ‘…long-standing interest in non-linear perspective merges with W.E.B. Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, to create visually elegant and thoughtfully composed situational works’.

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance brings together a selection of images from three of Hewitt’s photographic projects. Riffs on Real Time (2008) features sculptural, layered collages with mundane objects created to be captured in photograph. These sculptural creations reflect the condition of existence through a shared temporality. In the Midday (2009) series she creates contemporary still-life arrangements that reference our consumerist society through repetition. Hewitt creates and documents multiple times – making each photographic image of the same still-life arrangement subtly altered in perception. Hewitt’s newest photographic project, A Series of Projections (2010), breaks down and simplifies the artist’s structural complexities. In a departure, black and white photographs capture photographic fragments projected onto the studio wall in addition to honing in on objects placed on wooden surfaces.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Like much of Hewitt’s work, her new film installation, created in collaboration with experiential cinematographer Bradford Young, is inspired by a literary source – in this instance Claude Brown’s Harlem migration text Manchild in the Promised Land (1965). This film installation engages the landscape of a particular place (Harlem) and the manifest implications and effects of movement through this space. Hewitt and Young drew visual inspiration from Harlem’s dense urban grid, its architectural features and through the study of its street archives. The Kitchen describes this film installation as featuring ‘a series of silent vignettes’ where ‘time is marked through oscillations between the still and the moving image’. The passage of the gallery visitor through the installation mirrors and completes the work. This theme of human movement is as particularly definitive to our global age as it was to the formation of 20th century Harlem.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004. She also undertook Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University from 2001-2003. Hewitt received the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands and, more recently, the 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant. She is currently in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Leslie Hewitt is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York and is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Hewitt has shown extensively across the US and was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and MoMA’s New Photography exhibition in 2009. Hewitt’s work has also been shown internationally – notably at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. Look for Leslie Hewitt’s work in the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City (organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta). This exhibition is on view 28 March – 11 August 2010.

The Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance will remain at The Kitchen through 20 May 2010. A discussion between Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, moderated by Rashida Bumbray, will be held Sunday, 9 May at 4.00 pm.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

The Kitchen in New York City is currently showing On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance, a Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition curated by Rashida Bumbray.  The exhibition features new and recent work by Hewitt in photography, sculpture and film installation.  The Kitchen writes that in this exhibition Hewitt’s ‘…long-standing interest in non-linear perspective merges with W.E.B. Dubois’ theory of double consciousness, to create visually elegant and thoughtfully composed situational works’.

On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance brings together a selection of images from three of Hewitt’s photographic projects.  Riffs on Real Time (2008) features sculptural, layered collages with mundane objects created to be captured in photograph.  These sculptural creations reflect the condition of existence through a shared temporality.  In the Midday (2009) series she creates contemporary still-life arrangements that reference our consumerist society through repetition.  Hewitt creates and documents multiple times – making each photographic image of the same still-life arrangement subtly altered in perception.  Hewitt’s newest photographic project, A Series of Projections (2010), breaks down and simplifies the artist’s structural complexities.  In a departure, black and white photographs capture photographic fragments projected onto the studio wall in addition to honing in on objects placed on wooden surfaces.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Like much of Hewitt’s work, her new film installation, created in collaboration with experiential cinematographer Bradford Young, is inspired by a literary source – in this instance Claude Brown’s Harlem migration text Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).  This film installation engages the landscape of a particular place (Harlem) and the manifest implications and effects of movement through this space.  Hewitt and Young drew visual inspiration from Harlem’s dense urban grid, its architectural features and through the study of its street archives.  The Kitchen describes this film installation as featuring ‘a series of silent vignettes’ where ‘time is marked through oscillations between the still and the moving image’.  The passage of the gallery visitor through the installation mirrors and completes the work.  This theme of human movement is as particularly definitive to our global age as it was to the formation of 20th century Harlem.

Leslie Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004.  She also undertook Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University from 2001-2003.  Hewitt received the 2008 Art Matters research grant to the Netherlands and, more recently, the 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Grant.  She is currently in residence at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Courtesy of the artist and D'Amelio Terras, New York

Leslie Hewitt is represented by D’Amelio Terras in New York and is in the public collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  Hewitt has shown extensively across the US and was part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial and MoMA’s New Photography exhibition in 2009.  Hewitt’s work has also been shown internationally – notably at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw.  Look for Leslie Hewitt’s work in the exhibition After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City (organized by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta).  This exhibition is on view 28 March – 11 August 2010.

The Leslie Hewitt solo exhibition On Beauty, Objects, and Dissonance will remain at The Kitchen through 20 May 2010.  A discussion between Leslie Hewitt and Bradford Young, moderated by Rashida Bumbray, will be held Sunday, 9 May at 4.00 pm.

Originally Published: June 4, 2009

The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh is currently showing, Buried, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent video and photographic work by artist Willie Doherty in conjunction with the release of a new publication by the same name. Doherty, who was born and raised in Derry, Northern Ireland, addresses his homeland’s struggle to come to terms with its haunting past of violence and loss. His work has universal resonance in its focus upon a site of contested nationality, the human capacity for violence, and the collective memory of such legacies.

Doherty was born in 1959 in Derry, Northern Ireland and his work originates from lived experience. Doherty’s life span has been aligned with The Troubles, a period of ethno-political and geographic conflict in Northern Ireland, typically dated from the 1960s to the Belfast Agreement of 1998. At its most extreme, this period was defined by the violent acts of republican and loyalist paramilitaries. Yet, as Bloody Sunday (which occurred 30 January 1972) proves, violence also infected the British government’s forces. At thirteen years old, Willie Doherty witnessed the atrocity of Bloody Sunday, in which British soldiers shot and killed fourteen unarmed, peaceful protesters. Since 1998, peace has largely reclaimed the region with only sporadic outbursts of violence remaining. Most recently, the Real IRA shot and killed two British soldiers in March of this year.

Despite the fact that Doherty addresses deeply personal subject matter, he maintains distance in his work. He never features his own image or voice, but instead employs actors to fill that role. The eerie, haunting, and typically reticent imagery found in this exhibition reference images and places that seem familiar to the viewing audience and are therefore quite relatable. This is particularly appropriate because the public’s memories of The Troubles are largely defined by the shared experience of reading newspapers and watching the evening news. The artist purposefully addresses this collective memory and its impact, which continues to haunt the present of even those who did not experience the violence firsthand.

The video Ghost Story (2007) has quite a personal feel, with an intimate narrative voice-over accompanying slow and deliberate camera work. Yet, even this narrative consistently references collective memory. Ghost Story’s main focal point is a railway track that has been paved over to create a footpath. The path or track is a recurrent theme in Doherty’s work and it can be said to represent both the movement of time and the borders–both figurative and literal–which arbitrarily divide us. The camera returns to the path again and again as the narrative describes and the camera alternately illustrates terrifying memories. The video questions how we can ever fully move on when ghosts and memories continue to haunt our present.

Doherty’s strongest work in the exhibition is in video. The video medium is endowed with a temporality that marries well with Doherty’s exploration of memory and humanity’s relationship with the past. Buried (2009), is the the new work commissioned by the Fruitmarket Gallery (with support from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation). It is a visualization of the memories that the Ghost Story narrative claims to continue to permeate every facet of contemporary existence. Similarly deliberate camera work focuses on a dark forest area as the camera discovers clues of past acts of violence. As it moves it uncovers items such as a jacket, rubber gloves, a lighter, and wire. A fire peters out–smoke and fog obscure the screen and contribute to the haunting quality of the imagery. The muffled sound accompanying the video, is commentary from a Bloody Sunday documentary that has been distorted by the artist.

The third video installation is the 30 second video loop, Re-Run (2002). Much different in tone and pace from the other two videos, Re-Run features two screens surrounding the viewer, both showing a man running frantically, at full speed across a bridge. Each screen simultaneously shows the same scene at different points in time. Constant jump cuts to different angles echo the frenetic nature of the scene. As the video constantly loops, it seems to evoke the continuing struggle to outrun and move on from the past.

The cibachrome print works Uncovering Evidence That the War is Not Over I (1995) and Bullet Holes (1995) focus in on evidence of past violence through illustrating remnants of an explosive device along with rusted bullet holes. Small Acts of Deception II (1997) returns to an image of a foot path much like that featured in the video Ghost Story, coupled with an image of a person’s lifeless foot. The images Last Occupant, Abandoned Interior II and III illustrate disheveled and decaying domestic spaces. These rather mournful and dark photographs hint at the lives and families torn apart by violence. Silver gelatin prints documenting spaces in Belfast devoid of human presence dominate the rest of the exhibition and evoke a sense of absence and loss. Donegal Lane, Belfast and The Westlink, Belfast are reproduced from images that date to 1988. They are hauntingly similar to the images from 2008, including Kent Street, Belfast; Franklin Street, Belfast; Footbridge, The Westlink, Belfast; and McKibben’s Court, Belfast. Through these images, we see a rather concrete continuation of the past into our present.

Doherty’s work is highly relevant to our contemporary world, where images of violence and tragedy inundate our media on a daily basis. Globalization means that information is shared almost instantaneously around the world and we therefore share in the tragedies of others more than ever before. Unfortunately, violent conflict in contested spaces, much like that of Northern Ireland during The Troubles, continues globally.

Willie Doherty lives and works in Derry and is represented by the Kerlin Gallery in Dublin. Doherty’s work, which addresses internationally relevant themes, has achieved acclaim since beginning his career in the 1980s. He won the 1995 Irish Museum of Modern Art’s Glen Dimplex Artists Award and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in both 1994 and 2003. Doherty represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and Northern Ireland at the Biennale in 2007.

Doherty is also currently featured in Willie Doherty: Requisite Distance at the Dallas Museum of Art.

Buried will be at the Fruitmarket Gallery through 12 July 2009.

Whitechapel Gallery in London is currently showing Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street).   This project addresses concepts of individual and community identity by revisiting the tradition of public street parties and festivals popular in 20th century London.  Drawing inspiration from these past events captured in newsreels and photographs, Manchot creates and documents her own 21st century street party.

Manchot realized Celebration by working closely with Cyprus Street inhabitants and organizing a party in this Bethnal Green, East London neighborhood.  The artist captured gathered residents as they posed for a group portrait using 35mm film – a medium with historic connection to old newsreels.  Blending photography and film, Manchot used a single tracking shot that pivoted to create a comprehensive, durational group portrait.

Melanie Manchot:  Celebration (Cyprus Street) also includes  photographic portraits of individual Cyprus Street residents.  Manchot’s new film and photographic work is juxtaposed with archival footage selected by the artist of historic street celebrations such as peace parties that took place in 1919 and 1945.  This arrangement allows the gallery visitor to view the changing faces of communities that have coalesced around London’s streets over time.  Most importantly, Manchot’s work reveals the diversifying effects of global migrations on a particular contemporary community.

Celebration (Cyprus Street) is exhibited as a part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s Education Programme.  It was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and was funded by Film London (Digital Archive Film Fund) and Arts Council, England.

Melanie Manchot lives and works in London.  She is represented by Goff + Rosenthal in New York.  Manchot earned an MFA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London and works in photography, film and video.

Melanie Manchot: Celebration (Cyprus Street) will remain at Whitechapel through 14 March 2010.