Emily Wardill

The films of British artist Emily Wardill are brilliant cinematic labyrinths. Visually striking and playfully rigorous, they draw upon an array of sources– underground theater, psychoanalytic case studies, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Rancière, and even the game logic of Nintendo Wii–to pose fundamental questions about vision, representation, and media and their role in how we come to know ourselves. Wardill has been the recipient of much recent critical acclaim: Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer rated her film The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter) (2008) as one of his top ten picks of 2008 and The Guardian newspaper deemed her its “artist of the week.”

Film London and Channel 4 in association with the UK’s Whitechapel Gallery have announced that the winner of this year’s Jarman Award is Emily Wardill.

Wardill was announced as the winner of the award at an event at the Whitechapel on Tuesday, October 5, following screenings of work by Wardill and the other 2010 shortlisted artists Spartacus Chetwynd, Ben Rivers, and Zineb Sedira.

Wardill receives a ash prize and a broadcast commission to make four artworks for Channel 4’s Three Minute Wonder strand. The rest of the shortlist receive $1,600 each. This year’s jury included: John Akomfrah, filmmaker; Iwona Blazwick, director of the Whitechapel Gallery; Avi Grewal of Channel 4 documentaries; Mark Rappolt, editor of ArtReview; artist Gillian Wearing; and Stuart Comer, film curator at Tate Modern.

Ryan Trecartin - Touched - The Liverpool Biennial 2010

excerpt from The Re'Search from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.

Tehching Hsieh - Touched The Liverpool Biennial

FACT
88 Wood Street
Liverpool
L1 4DQ
Merseyside
until November 28th 2010
www.fact.co.uk

Liverpool Artist's Book Fair 2010

Saturday 2 October 12-6pm
A Foundation
67 Greenland Street
Liverpool L1 OBY
Merseyside

A Foundation is pleased to host the Liverpool Artist's Book fair for the 2nd year running. The fair will be a vibrant platform for stall-holders to present an extraordinary array of artists' books, zines and other paper-based works, many of which will be for sale.

Antti Laitinen - Sailing The Bark Boat

photos by julia waugh

Liverpool Biennial 2010: Touched Conference - John Moores University

Liverpool John Moores University
Art & Design Academy
Duckinfield Street
Liverpool
L3 5YD
Merseyside
18 September 2010

11:00 - 12:30

The conference is part of Touched, the International exhibition for Liverpool Biennial 2010, running from 18 September until 28 November.
www.biennial.com

From the organisers:
As the story of Doubting Thomas tells us, to touch is the mark of truth, the most intimate gesture and the greatest commitment. To touch or to be touched is the performance of truth, when incredulity is displaced and the world condenses into a moment of all enveloping realisation, changing everything. But let us not limit touch to mean touch physically, even that lowliest of senses, smell, can touch us deeply. To be touched arrives unexpectedly though every sense – including thought itself – locating our most intimate moments in space and time. How to live by these moments where strength and vulnerable.

Performing Truths - Moderated by Mark Waugh, Director of Afoundation and Co-director of the International Curators Forum (ICF)

Particpants: Tehching Hsieh (artist), Alfonso Lingis (philosopher and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus of Penn State University), Coco Fusco (artist, writer and Chair of the Fine Art Department at Parsons/The New School for Design), Tania Bruguera (artist)

12.30-13.30: Lunch

13.30- 15:00 : Between the Senses - Moderated by Peter Gorschlueter, Former Head of Exhibitions and Displays Tate Liverpool, now Deputy Director of the Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt.

Participants: Steven Connor (writer, critic, broadcaster and Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Birkbeck College, London), Tony Chakar (artist, architect and writer), Jamie Isenstein (artist), Danica Dakic (artist)

15.00-15.30 : Tea

15.30-17.00 : The Beauty of Commitment (working title) - Moderated by Lorenzo Fusi, Curator Liverpool Biennial

Participants: Freee (artist), Minerva Cuevas (artist), Alfredo Jaar (artist), Will Kwan (artist)


www.biennial.com/content/LiverpoolBiennial2008/LiverpoolBiennial2010/ProfessionalAccreditation.aspx

Sachiko Abe

A Foundation Liverpool
67 Greenland Street
Liverpool
L1 OBY
Merseyside
18 September - 28 November 2010


Sachiko Abe’s work encompasses, performance, drawing, film and sculptural installations using cut papers accumulated over the last seven years. Her practice explores duration, repetition and constraints. She will be performing at A Foundation for the Touched - The Liverpool Biennial and exhibiting drawings she has completed during her residency in the city. A Foundation has commissioned a film by Ben Rivers that will be shown during each performance.

This is a paradox as she first started creating artworks after leaving the Self Defense Forces in Japan because ‘the life of artists seemed so free.’ Her work since 1997 has explored the regimes of subjectivity which are imposed by society, most explicitly in her series of performance works.

Elevator Girl Friend in which she acted outside of the conventional behaviour of the demure elevator assistants who were a common sight in big department stores.

Abe says of this work, ”While the job sounds boring, it was a “dream job” for young girls because it was believed then that only the most beautiful and elegant person could be assigned to be an elevator girl.”

Her more recent works continue to explore disquieting routines that provoke anxiety and touch us in ways we cannot explain. In Cut Papers Abe invites the audience to experience an intimate space in which the constant snipping of scissor blades is the only measure of time passing. At A Foundation Liverpool Abe will perform for the duration of the Biennial but be warned Abe says. “My work is neither beautiful nor meditational.” Rather it is an aesthetic paradox that locates the artist at the center of a field of reciprocal subjectivity, she is an object of the gaze that returns the subject to themselves by activating a feedback loop.

Cut Papers is a series of works that create a surplus of meaning within an apparently simple aesthetic economy. It is this scenic space of perception and production that is the focus of the work. Abe will present the performance in an environment of large scale sculptural interventions in the Furnace gallery and a new large scale drawing work produced during her 2010 residency with A Foundation funded by the Pola Foundation. An intricate graphic weave produced by intensive durational periods of drawing which might be best apporached through the dimension of the fold as expressed by French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like Cut Papers Abe’s drawings invite us to contemplate the intensity of ideas which accumulate and are disseminated in the transformation of a white sheet of paper into medium of communication.