Drawings for If the Universe Were Watching, an installation on ASTRON’S LOFAR Telescope on the occasion of Into Nature: Time Horizons, the 4th edition of Into Nature’s outdoor biennial, 29 July–29 October, 2023.
Programme produced on the occasion of Playbill Act V: Anna Daučíková & Helena Jiskrová at Torpedo Theatre, Amsterdam June 9, 2023.
Completely adept at taking on institutions that wield normative forms of power, Anna Daučíková is unashamedly informed by the value of her lived experience, a personal history that takes a guiding role within her practice, particularly the period of time during which she lived under surveillance in the former Soviet Union.
In an early photographic series titled Acadamey of the Arts (1988), Daučíková rightly takes up her position atop a plinth built into the side of the Academy of Arts building in Moscow, a subversive move given that it was a position traditionally reserved for the male greats. Daučíková went on to become a professor herself, and was for a long time one of the few women teaching at the academy in Prague. This biographical trajectory evolved into a series of films titled Portrait of a Woman with Institution, which plot out the relationships of various women to the institutions they inhabited. For Act V, one film from this series was screened, dedicated to Czech architect Helena Jiskrová. Alongside the screening, four pieces of furniture redesigned by Jiskrová from salvaged street materials set the scene for the viewing.
Richard Nonas: Collected Printed Matter 1971–2020 is a tribute to an artist who has superbly captured the essence of the artist’s book, the poster and the invitation as well, by integrating them as symbiotic components into his artistic research; that is, a poetic narrative contaminated by those memories of landscapes and figures that have animated his personal history and that have never left him. This book showcases 138 records of artist’s books, catalogues, posters, invitation cards and ephemera (with an essay by Jan Meissner). Richard Nonas (1936–2021) was a major figure in American post-minimalism.
Born in Hartsville, South Carolina, Curtis Cuffie moved to New York as a teenager, first residing with his brothers in Brooklyn. In his adult life, Cuffie spent time unhoused in the streets of Manhattan where he found both inspiration and materials for his work as an artist. Cuffie’s sculptures interpret material street culture in the 1990s and early 2000s, using discarded and found objects assembled and transformed into collaged figures that speak to both the abject reality of urban surplus as well as the magical alchemy of artistic creation. Built by Cuffie outdoors, primarily on the sidewalks around Astor Place and along the Bowery, his sculptures were subject to the whims of weather, police interference, and the sanitation department, as well as Cuffie’s own continued interventions into his work. Edited by Scott Portnoy and Robert Snowden with Ciarán Finlayson and designed by Julie Peeters.
Riffing off the title, this volume includes an interview with Carolyn Lazard—an artist whose conceptual and often spare videos, sculptures, installations, and performances explore the full amplitude of relation—by Catherine Damman, plus a feature on New York-based contemporary artist Tishan Hsu, whose practice examines the “embodiment of technology”, and contributions by time-based media artist Silvia Kolbowski, for whom political resistance, the unconscious, and structures of spectatorship are a central concern of all her projects; choreographer and dancer Yvonne Rainer; and science fiction author Octavia Butler. Edited with Kathrin Bentele, Anna Gritz, and Ghislaine Leung. Including the work of Lutz Bacher, stanley brouwn, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Hanne Darboven, Jef Geys, Tishan Hsu, Pope L., Louise Lawler, Carolyn Lazard, Ghislaine Leung, Lee Lozano, Henrik Olesen, Sarah Rapson, Margaret Raspé, Ketty La Rocca, Sturtevant, Martin Wong and Octavia E. Butler.
DIY Seaweed Farming: a ‘how to do it at home’ guide is the result of an experimental research project, where Honey Jones-Hughes and Antonio de la Hera attempted to create a sea-like environment in their kitchen with the intention of nurturing seaweed to for human consumption. In essence we were trying to create a micro seaweed farm in our home, hoping to create the perfect environment for what is being hailed as a miracle crop capable to of solving climate, plastic and even fuel issues. As a project it was interesting for us to explore what it meant to try to replicate the sea in a confined environment, to live together with seaweed in captivity, and the daily labour of caring for something that was in many ways like a houseplant.