Aktuell – April 2012

Veranstaltungen Lichtenberg Studios April 2012

Türrschmidstr. 24, 4. Stock

 

16. April um 19 Uhr

Temporary Services and The Mythological Quarter (Bonnie Fortune & Brett Bloom)

 

Vortrag und Diskussion zur künstlerischen Arbeit.
Temporary Services und  Bonnie Fortune wohnen vom 19. März bis 22. April in den Lichtenberg Studios, forschen und werden Interventionen in der Öffentlichkeit Lichtenbergs realisieren.

The Mythological Quarter (Bonnie Fortune & Brett Bloom) is our way to use art to pay attention to where we live or find ourselves working. We are deeply invested in exploring the intersection of culture and ecology. We believe artists have a valuable role in shifting our collective values away from lives based on consumerism to more resilient, healthy ways of being.

​Through interviews, recording city use, and producing original research, we document people, places, and projects that are taking a culturally based response to present day environmental issues and the looming global catastrophe.

The Mythological Quarter is a project in thinking ecologically about the world in which we live. We started from a micro-local standpoint documenting our own experiments from growing blackberries, or making tofu and passive greywater systems, in our Copenhagen apartment, situated in the Mytologiske Kvarter (several Copenhagen city blocks that are named after Norse gods).

We expand out knowledge by conducting interviews with artists and scientists working with these issues in hybrid and creative ways, as well as, review books and exhibitions that are dealing with culture and ecology issues, wherever they might be taking place.  We think it is important to relate global issues to local life. We are building this project into a resource and see ourselves as part of a larger ecological art movement.

“Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. We are based in Chicago, Copenhagen, and Philadelphia. We have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public.

Temporary Services started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Our name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others. It is a way for us to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. Having „Temporary Services“ displayed on our window helped us to blend in with the cheap restaurants, dollar stores, currency exchanges, and temporary employment agencies on our street. We were not immediately recognizable as an art space. This was partly to stave off the stereotypical role we might have played in the gentrification of our neighborhood. We weren’t interested in making art for sale. Within the boundaries of “what sells,” artists often carve out tiny aesthetic niches to protect, peddle, and repeat indefinitely, rather than opening themselves up to new possibilities.

Experiencing art in the places we inhabit on a daily basis remains a critical concern for us. It helps us move art from a privileged experience to one more directly related to how we live our lives. A variety of people should decide how art is seen and interpreted, rather than continuing to strictly rely on those in power. We move in and out of officially sanctioned spaces for art, keeping one foot in the underground the other in the institution. Staying too long in one or the other isn’t healthy. We are interested in art that takes engaging and empowering forms. We collaborate amongst ourselves and with others, even though this may destabilize how people understand our work.” (Brett Bloom, 2011)

 

Noch bis 27. April
Die Kunst der Intervention

Ein Jahr Lichtenberg Studios

 

Die Ausstellung im ratskeller (Möllendorffstraße 6, 10367 Berlin)

 

KünstlerInnen: Norbert Artner (AT), Matthias Beckmann (DE), Holger Biermann (DE), Oliver Breitenstein mit Ilse Ermen / Stefan Riebel (DE), Klaus Eisenlohr/ Johann Zeitler (DE), Karin Glanz (DE), Olivier Menanteau (FR), Karsten Neumann (DE), Lucas Norer/Doris Prlic (AT), Saskia Niehaus (DE), Jürgen O. Olbrich (DE), Jürgen Paas (DE), Bora Petkova/HR-Stamenov (BG), Roman Pfeffer (AT), Studierende der Klasse TransArts – Transdisziplinäre Kunst (Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien) (AT), Hans Winkler (DE), Michael Zheng (US). Ella Ziegler (DE).

April, 2012