Wharfage - CAMP - Sharjah Biennial

A project on the creek in Sharjah, U.A.E. from where a large number of dhows leave for Somalia. Somalia, a collection of semi-state entities, is also know as a 'free trade zone' where formal tariffs and customs do not apply. This arrow of trade, in which the ship of Foucault's Heterotopias is not an escape from but an entry into space of conflict, is our subject.

It offers a way to think about how business and the spectral lives of those commodities are part of a global capital. With war up ahead, economic recession at its tail and pirates in the middle, this movement of goods may trace old routes, but maps a contemporary landscape used objects, a diaspora of Somali traders who cannot return, giant wooden ships and urgency. The project consists of two parallel pieces a book a radio transmission from the port.

CAMP was started in November 2007 as an artists space in Mumbai, India. CAMP is not an artist collective but a workshop gathering ideas, sensibilities and energies. Its projects centre around an ability to work infrastructually, to produce configurations of technology, space and time that locate human agency in the midst of networks. In 2008 2009 CAMPs members have had exhibitions or partipated in Metrpolis Copenhagen, Dakar Biennial-off, Dictionary of War (Taipei Biennial edition) Manifesta 7 (Companion book) AV Festival Newcastle, 48C Delhi, The Powerplant Toronto (If we can't get it together...) and the Sepentine Gallery London (Indian Highway) among other events. CAMP are co-initiators of PAD.MA footage archive and a umber of other projects out of their home base in Mumbai.

CAMP are Shaina Anand, Nida Ghouse, Hakimuddin Lilyawala and Ashok Sukumarran.

Ewan Atkinson - Night Flight - Joscelyn Gardner - Words... just words...

www.ewanatkinson.com

www.joscelyngardner.com

Annette Messager - The Messengers - Hayward Gallery

Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX
4th March - 25th May 2009
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/visual-arts/hayward-exhibitions

Annette Messager is widely regarded as one of Europe’s most important contemporary artists. The retrospective Annette Messager: The Messengers, presents an overview of the artist’s career and reveals her use of an astonishing and affecting repertoire of forms and materials (among them soft toys, stuffed animals, fabrics, wool, photographs and drawings). Mixing aesthetic registers and playing with remarkable virtuosity on our senses and feelings, this exhibition presents a panoramic survey from the intimate and conceptually driven pieces Messager made in the early 1970s to the very large sculptural installations of the past 15 years, in which movement plays an increasingly important role.

Vides - Centre Pompidou

Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris
February 25 2009 - March 23 2009
11h00 - 21h00
www.cnac-gp.fr

A quite exceptional event, "Vides" (Voids) is a retrospective of empty exhibitions since that of Yves Klein in 1958. In almost a dozen rooms of the National Museum of Modern Art, it assembles in a totally original manner exhibitions that showed absolutely nothing, leaving empty the space for which they were designed.

The idea of exhibiting emptiness is a recurring notion in the history of art over the past fifty or so years, almost to the point of becoming a cliché in the practice of contemporary art. Since the exhibition by Yves Klein – "The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility" in Paris in 1958, totally empty exhibitions have been the statement of different conceptions of vacuums.

While for Yves Klein it was a way to point out the sensitive state, by contrast it represents the peak of conceptual and minimal art for Robert Barry with "Some places to which we can come, and for a while 'be free to think about what we are going to do' (Marcuse)" (1970). It may also result from the desire to fudge the understanding of exhibition spaces, as in the work "The Air-Conditioning Show" from Art & Language (1966-1967), or to empty an institution to modify our experience, as in the work by Stanley Brouwn. It also reflects the will to create the experience of the qualities of an exhibition venue, as with Robert Irwin and his exhibition at the ACE Gallery in 1970, or with Maria Nordman at her exhibition in Krefeld in 1984. Emptiness also represents a form of radicalness, like that created by Laurie Parsons in 1990 at the Lorence-Monk gallery, which announced his renouncement of all artistic practice. For Bethan Huws and his work "Haus Esters Piece" (1993), emptiness means being able to celebrate the museum's architecture, signifying that art is already there on site and there is no need to add works of art. Emptiness assumes almost a sense of economic demand for Maria Eichhorn who, in leaving her exhibition empty at the Kunsthalle Bern in 2001, helped to devote the budget to the building's renovation. With "More Silent than Ever" (2006), Roman Ondák, for his part, had the onlooker believing that there is more than what is just left there to be seen.

Commissaires / organisateurs:
Laurent Le Bon, John Armleder, Mathieu Copeland, Gustav Metzger, Mai-Thu Perret, Clive Phillpot