Art Copenhagen
From 16 - 18 September, 2011, ME contemporary will exhibit at Art Copenhagen – The Nordic Art Fair, Scandinavia's largest fair for international contemporary art, featuring 80 of the leading art galleries in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Faroe Islands. ME will exhibit works by Nin Brudermann, Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Marco Evaristti, and Milica Tomic.
ME will feature Brooklyn-based artist Nin Brudermann's acclaimed project, Twelve O'Clock in London: A work of tremendous scale with a glimpse of utopian vision, Twelve O'Clock highlights an inter-governmental cooperation that occurs daily, where all nations gather together in a peaceful action – the simultaneous launch of meteorological balloons. A1 channel video poetically documents the preparation and release of these meteorological balloons, from places as varied as Poland, Iran,and the Seychelles, creating a harmony of sounds and visual imagery for the viewer. A large collage depicting a world map, that during the many years of working on the project, functioned as command board, illustrates the near-impossible complexity yet sheer simplicity and beauty of Brudermann's project and vision, a work of art in which the viewer can lose oneself and to which he can return countless times, yet find new, unseen corners with each visit.
On view at Art Copenhagen are works from Widow, a project developed by Ursula Reuter Christiansen for ME contemporary in the spring of 2011. In this series of works, Ursula Reuter explores, examines and interprets change. In her distinctive choice of strong, vibrant colors, the artist explores a range of motifs,among them women – undressed and vulnerable – floating on the surface of her canvases, where, more than mere outlines, they have already slipped between our fingers and are on their way to a new place or condition. The project was born of the existential experience of life's landmark changing phases – among them birth, death, and divorce – which, the artist reminds us, are all influenced by the people who are close to us or absent from our lives. The works exhibited in Widow acknowledge that there are no definitive states – only transitions and eternal change – and as such, the works themselves become the very embodiment of change.
In his installation titled Strange Fruit, Danish artist Marco Evaristti engages his audience in a dialogue – albeit an uncomfortable one – about the conflicts that plague our society and will ultimately lead to its undoing. Dangling from a large, plaster tree, hang three transparent boxing bags filled with hair taken from three groups of people: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Evaristti opted to use plaster for casting the tree, a material that despite its durability, remains dusty and ash-like in its essence, and though sturdy and unyielding, the tree easily becomes unbalanced if even one of its components is removed. The installation shines a light on religious intolerance and the human inclination to target a group different from oneself. The image of dangling boxing bags – so intertwined with the notions of struggle, violence, and power – taunt the viewer into approaching the work, touching or hitting it, and engaging with one self's own hatred and bias. Evaristti's Strange Fruit pays homage to the haunting 1930's era ballad of the same name,famously performed by American jazz singer Billie Holiday.
Evaristti´s latest piece shows a photo of a beautiful blossoming flower. However, at a closer look, the flower reveals that its blossoms are made of thin slivers of bloody, raw meat.
The image is followed by a 7-piece series titled, All Good Things Must Come to an End, in which the process of death and the slow decay of life is placed on display – even celebrated – for its beauty and inevitability. Evaristti pictures this process of decay – like the process of birth and aging – as part of our inevitable natural process, and one to which we all eventually succumb. In conceiving this project, Evaristti envisioned the biblical story of creation: six days where God made the universe, with each day building upon the success of its predecessor, until eventually, at its apex, life – both animal and human – populates the world and God rests. In Evaristti's version, however, the story of creation is inverted and on the final days, the sky falls into the earth, life ceases to exist, and God fades away.
ME will feature two projects by the Serbian artist Milica Tomic, whose works deal with a variety of social, political and existential issues, and lend an introspective look at questions about war, class, and national identity. Tomic's ongoing work titled, One Day, Instead of One Night, a Burst of Machine-Gun Fire Will Flash, if Light Cannot Come Otherwise, is a series of photographs showing the artist engaged in an artistic intervention in a public space, moving through the streets with an AK47 in hand visiting sites where anti-fascist actions have taken place. This “intervention in the public space” was first performed in Belgrade, and later repeated in Copenhagen in 2010, two days prior to the opening of her solo show,Reading Terror,at ME contemporary. For her Copenhagen interventions, Tomic selected locations in Istedgade, the B&W site, and Dronning Louise's Bridge, and by doing so, resurrected memories and histories associated with these sites.
ME contemporary will also feature images from Tomic's Container, a project that revolves around a war crime that occurred in Afghanistan in November 2001, where Taliban prisoners were loaded into containers and transported through the desert for several days, en route to prison. During the transport, Northern Alliance soldiers fired their rifles against the container to create breathing holes, killing many within. The few prisoners who did survive were later executed. Although the story was subsequently revealed, no pictures exist, which plays an integral role in the project as history is written based on documents and images forming the collective memory. In developing this work, Tomic investigates the construction of identity: the ones we take on and those which are imposed upon us, one of victim vs. perpetrator, and how these titles easily shift with ones perception.
ADDITIONAL INFO:
ME contemporary will be located in booth # 57 at Art Copenhagen.