Wednesday, April 30, 2008
I interviewed the artist Sebastiaan Bremer for the last issue of IN Magazine (INCANDESCENT) and his work continues to evolve nearly 5 years later. Swirling illustrations are layered on top of large-scale photos, creating visual worlds filled with the artist’s personal memories. He has an opening on Friday as a part of Berlin Gallery Weekend. [...]
Taking its curatorial impetus from Captain Ahab’s observation that “true places” can’t be found on maps, Die Wahren Orte at Alexander Ochs brings together a really quite nice selection of recent work from China. The exhibition marks the gallery’s move to a new space on Sophienstrasse and will continuously evolve during its four month run. [...]
Had to take a trip way out into west Berlin this morning. Staring out the window, I kept catching myself thinking about how green Berlin is—parks, plants, forests appear everywhere. Somehow, this is going to segue into a post about a brilliant performance of The Cure’s A Forest from 1980.
Nice interview with Olafur Eliasson up at Spiegel online. He discusses his $15 million waterfall project in development for New York’s East River, the obfuscation of reality, prejudice in Berlin and why he believes that developing projects for corporate sponsors like BMW without “getting [his] fingers dirty.” Good read.
Four waterfalls will be installed along the [...]
Up the Yangtze is a documentary made by Canadian-Chinese filmmaker Yung Chang about the effects of the Three Gorges Dam in China. Here’s a brief synopsis of the film:
The Three Gorges Dam, gargantuan and hotly contested symbol of the Chinese economic miracle, provides the epic and unsettling backdrop for Up the Yangtze, a dramatic and [...]
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
I’m really enjoying Berlin’s Mono-Kultur magazine. The bi-monthly publication features one interview along with related images and a unique format for each release. The current issue is devoted to Miranda July, while the previous one offered a great interview and design concept for Taryn Simon.
Very Short List guided me to a bizarrely edited clip of Charlie Rose talking to Charlie Rose about technology, which somehow led me to Animal Collective’s new video for Water Curses, directed by Andrew Kuo, whose data visualization of recent Boredoms shows was featured last week in the New York Times.
PMT was a Milwaukee-based performance art/rock band from the mid-1980s that incorporated both art and graphic design history and theory into their work. Group members included Frank Ullenberg, Scott Schanke and my former professor and good friend John Luttropp. The group based much of its theoretical approach on an obscure text by Günter Hülzenbuch, a [...]
So much to see at the Hamburger Bahnhof right now. The Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition, Lighter, is epic, occupying much of the 300-meter-long Rieckhallen, a former warehouse that was renovated and linked to the main exhibition space in 2004. I’ve always thought that Tillmans’ photographs work best in book form, where the collective presentation of related [...]
We’re sad that we missed Andre’s salon in Beijing the other night. The guest speaker was Jeroen Koolhas, who started a project called Favela Painting. Koolhas and his collaborators develop and create huge wall murals in the slums of Brazil. Their efforts encourage creativity in local youths and attempt to change peoples’ perceptions of the [...]