Made Up

The A FOUNDATION at Greenland Street hosted a weekend of talks, performance and film to tie in with the ongoing Liverpool Biennial 2008.

The Made Up Weekend, named after the theme of the Biennial itself, was from Thursday until Saturday and explored all kinds of interpretations of the phrase, the power of the imagination and art’s capacity to transport us, to suspend disbelief and generate alternative realities.

Challenging the idea that rationality and enchantment are incommensurable. Made Up weekend invokes the spectres that haunt not only the artistic imagination. A vision of the world familiar yet often disturbed by occultural visions, scientific anomalies, magic or sublime irrationality. Unbound by critical orthodoxies, Made Up's aporia will entertain many and exasperate some, no doubt encouraged by the multitude of explanations resonating with the city itself.

Performances included the UK premiere of Love Club, by acclaimed European artists God’s Entertainment and a rare opportunity to hear the Theremin, one of the earliest electronic musical instruments, played live by Dorit Chrysler.

A Foundation’s executive director Mark Waugh said: “The Made Up weekend goes behind the vernacular phrase to explore why we make things up and how artists use the imagination as a tool to communicate the way they see the world."

“It will be a stimulating weekend remixing science, critical debate and conversation, performance art, film making, music and pyrotechnics.
Guests include Richard Wilson, whose Turning the Place over has captured the imagination of Liverpool and other artists, including Gods Entertainment from Vienna, Mingering Mike and Tai Shani."

The programme of events ran from 12 noon until 10.30pm, where artist Tai Shani performed the work Parallax Sci-Fi Hypnosis – CCTV to parallel universes, hypnosis, black holes and time travel and Banana by Orion Maxted.

On Friday, highlights included Art Beyond Science – Tomas Saraceno in conversation with Rob La Frenais and Tony White; Ulf Langheinrich spoke with Fact director Mike Stubbs and other talks throughout the day including Cosey Fanni Tutti, Manuel Vason and George Chakravarthi ending with The Amazing Careers of Imaginary Soul Superstars, where Bluecoat artistic director Bryan Biggs was in chatted with David Blandy, the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, and Mingering Mike, before a DJ set by the latter.

At 10pm, there was the UK premiere of Love Club, a performance by Austrian artists Gods Entertainment.
On Saturday Anne Bean was in conversation with artist Richard Wilson.

There was a chance for a Face-to-Face encounter with SJ Curtis and to experience Super Nase & Co throughout the day. Chila Kumari Burman, Yeondoo Jung in conversation as well as a panel discussion with Jim Holland, James Lawler and Gary Everett followed by an evenings entertainment that included a presentation by Stewart Home and Sally O'Reilly. Patricide punctuated the event, after film screenings that included Artists Anonymous.

Participating Artists, Theorists and Thinkers
Orion Maxted, S J Curtis, Daniel Odier, Cecille Gravensen, Fritz Stolberg, Stuart Comer, Super Nase & Co, Tai Shani, Tomas Saraceno, Rob La Frenais, Tony White, Ulf Langheinrich, Mike Stubbs, Manuel Vason, Amelia Jones, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Andrew Wheatley, George Chakravarthi, Lois Keidan, David Blandy, Mingering Mike, Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, Dori Hader, Brian Biggs, Dorit Chrysler, Gods Entertainment, Anne Bean, Richard Wilson, Rachel Withers, Chila Kumari Burman, Courtney Martin, Jiyoon Lee, Yeondoo Jung, Jim Holland, Gary Everett, James Lawler, Paul Domela, Mark Bennett, Mark Waugh, Sally O'Reilly, Stewart Home, Artists Anonymous, Patricide.

photos by Julia Waugh.

The Liverpool Biennial on Flickr.
www.flickr.com/photos/liverpoolbiennial

Rob La Frenaise'blog
artscatalyst.typepad.com

Stewart Home

No Problem At YouTube: Does Modern Art Give You A Headache? from Stewart Home on Vimeo.

Far West Metro

20 September - 30 November 2008
Greenland Street
Liverpool

During the period of the Liverpool Biennial, A Foundation will become a franchise store for Far West, a major cross-art form project exploring the new consumer and cultural relationships that are emerging as the economic centre of the world shifts towards the East. The Far West Metro franchise store stocks a number of products designed by artists that address the relationship between consumer and producer, drawing on the contemporary shift away from focus on the commodity, to focus on the experience of shopping.

In practice, this results in a more participatory experience within the store, with consumers actively producing, or part producing, the product they wish to buy. In SOI Project’s work, visitors are invited to construct a piece of paper fruit using the templates provided. They may then add their construction to a fake fruit stand, in exchange for a piece of real fruit, or simply buy what they’ve made and take it away.

Also available at the store are comics, toys, music, wallpaper and more. In the process of participating, visitors/shoppers will gain an insight into the experience economy; the commodification of ethnicity; the intertwining of economics, consumerism and culture; and the process of production. Through this new model for cultural/commodity consumption, Far West Metro ask visitors/shoppers whether this level of open participation is a form of consumer emancipation, or whether it is simply the next stage in corporate appropriation.

Far West is curated by Nav Haq, Curator and Tom Trevor, Director of Arnolfini, Bristol. Far West is the first in the CONCEPT STORE series of projects at Arnolfini, exploring the interlinked notions of marketing, design, and experience economy.

Far West has been funded by The Arts Council England - Grants for The Arts, China Now and The British Council - Connections Through Culture, with support from Merlio Retail Systems.

Riflemaker at the A Foundation

www.riflemaker.org

Rochelle School
London

The Young and The Restless

“Where the hell is it?” screamed the Scouse taxi driver struggling to find the opening party the Friday before last for the Liverpool Biennial in the Old Port area of the city. Warehouse after warehouse passed by until I spotted a beacon in the dark: a stream of silver-haired men (eminent European curators, no doubt) and young artists with big beards and tweed jackets moving toward the A Foundation’s complex for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008 show. The trickle of partygoers quickly grew into, if not a flood, at least a tributary, with London dealer Anthony Reynolds, Letter to Brezhnev director Chris Bernard, and Ed Linse of Artists Anonymous spilling out into the beanbag-chair-strewn street. Inside, the warren of galleries (the place takes the warehouse-chic aesthetic to a whole new level) were flush with what can only be described as Liverpool’s “team youth”: bright-eyed young things who’ve produced some of the best new work I’ve seen in ages.

New Contemporaries board chair Sacha Craddock grabbed me and scrambled over Joe Doldon’s intricate cardboard Untitled (Floor) sculpture to rally the artists. The trio summoned—Raakhee Lakhtaria, Paul Bratt, and Haroon Mirza—seemed pleased but dazed (no doubt at the thought of taking those first tentative steps into the shark-infested waters of the art market) by the first-night jamboree. Indeed, work by fellow artist Steve Bishop was already being snapped up. His taxidermied fox shot through with fluorescent light tubes (Suspension of Disbelief)—one onlooker cheekily remarked that “taxidermy is a bit 2007”—obviously found favor with a Norwegian collector, who bagged the piece. The Scandinavian follows in the footsteps of Charles Saatchi, who bought two works by Bishop at his recent Royal College of Art MA show in London. Meanwhile, two soberly suited men from sponsor Bloomberg pored over video work by another young artist, Beth Collar.

After a mad dash for some air and alcohol at the alfresco bar, I spotted artist David Altmejd and his London dealer, Stuart Shave, chatting by the nearby paella stand. The Canadian artist, known for his disquieting, fantastic creations (who else has made werewolf heads such a hot topic?), continues to be one of the art world’s most prolific practitioners. Already on the plate are a solo show linked to the opera Doctor Atomic, at the Metropolitan Opera’s gallery in New York; an exhibition of works at Shave’s gallery in October (which Altmejd claims will be “very sexual”); and a stint at the Art Gallery Ontario.

Soon the action moved to a second retrofitted factory space across the road, where the primary “Made Up” biennial bash was kicking off. Artist Sarah Sze and museum directors Simon Groom and Reyahn King were spotted en route, as were Laurence Sillars, curator at Tate Liverpool, and Branwen Jones, director of Andrea Rosen Gallery.

Perhaps it was the lower lighting (sex-shop red) or the presence of local personalities such as drag queen Mandy Romero that prompted an upbeat change in the evening’s tempo. Guests were ready to let their hair down, including biennial director Lewis Biggs, who danced with artist Lisa Milroy while sporting what looked like a blue garter wrapped around his upper arm. Curator Adrian George, looking dapper, encircled the pool of manic dancers. But it was performance artists Corinne Mynatt and Angus Braithwaite who proved to be the most stylish movers on the floor, closely followed by Cedric Christie, who is showing his two “art cars” in the city. The motors, which will eventually be crushed and displayed as paintings, were a big hit with the Liverpudlians. As Christie noted, “Artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler even showed me a photograph of their dealer perched on the hood.”
— © Gareth Harris 2008
www.artforum.com

All Photos © The Liverpool Biennial
www.flickr.com/photos/liverpoolbiennial

The Liverpool Biennial

The A Foundation welcomes its guests; Artists Anonymous, Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008, Far West Metro, Fantasy Studio Project and Manuel Vason and extends it's welcome to our audience for whom all this has been orchestrated.

Like Artists Anonymous, we are archeologists of surface information and believe in the power of spaces to locate communication. In the words of Jeremy Hillary Boop Ph.D, as we juggle a few theories of the existential type about blackholes and the economics of representation, "Ad hoc, ad loc and quid pro quo. So little time - so much to know."

So on we go - treading a radical margin between inside and outside; following the purloined line of letters escaped from copied manifestos. The mantra of participation we hold close can be found in the Situationist Manifesto as a weapon that mobilises us against the spectacle. We'll leave it for you to decide if that's an ironic position to occupy in 2008 as Liverpool celebrates its year as Capital of Culture.



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VAGA

We are hosting a number of events during the biennial including REALISING OurSpace- The Digital Future and Visual Arts organised by VAGA on the 26th September.
www.vaga.co.uk

Fantasy Studio Project

Kyungwoo Chun, Yeondoo Jung, Young In Hong, Yongbaek Lee, Junebum Park, Sookyung Yee and Hyun-Mi Yoo
Fantasy Studio Project

20 September - 30 November 2008

Fantasy Studio Project presents the work of seven Korean contemporary artists, who will each be provided with a studio within A Foundation’s complex of converted factory and warehouse spaces for the period of the Liverpool Biennial. Rather than literally reconstruct the individual artists’ permanent studio, each will create a ‘fantasy studio’, which attempts to re-interpret the exhibition space as a location where practice ‘bleeds and blends’ with the venue itself.

Combining elements of a number of traditional exposition formats: the group show, the residency, the performance, the national showcase; Fantasy Studio Project attempts to explode the confinements of each, generating a new set of problems and intricacies. Through this process, Fantasy Studio Project explores the changing nature of the studio within artistic practice, and addresses the alienating effect on audiences of transposing ideas generated in one culture onto another.

Kyungwoo Chun will present his Thousands project. Three years in the making, this work brings together one thousand photographic portraits of individuals from the Chinese mainland, all of whom share the same surname as the artist, which literally translates as “a thousand”. Chu will also show a new participatory work, A Thousand Answers.

Yeondoo Jung’s work explores ideas around urban dislocation, memory and fantasy. The video he is exhibiting in Liverpool, Nostalgia, depicts a series of imagined idyllic landscapes, constructed in a studio. Alongside this work, Jung will show documentary footage revealing the making process.

Yongbaek Lee will show stage props and costumes from the production of his video Angel Soldier, which explores a variety of both seen and unseen conflicts in the world. Lee’s other works include mirrors that appear to crack when the view stares into them.

Junebum Park’s video, Hypermarket 4, is viewed from the artist’s eye perspective, as he makes architectural alterations to a static shot of Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof museum, transforming it into a supermarket. For Fantasy Studio Project, Park will make a new video work, in which A Foundation’s Furnace gallery space will receive a similar makeover.

Hyun-Mi Yoo injects doubt into our reading of three-dimensional space in a two-dimensional image. Yoo paints directly onto domestic space, adding objects and shadows, and then presents the work as a photograph. In Liverpool, the artist will make new work that makes explicit the production process.

Young In Hong’s work attempts to reinterpret the cityscape - monolithic architecture, statues of historical and contemporary figures, and so on. Hong’s newly commissioned embroidery work will incorporate a number of cultural and political icons from the city.

Sookyung Yee will produce a life-size sculpture entitled Very Best Statue. Yee canvassed over 100 people in Liverpool, asking them to complete forms that offered choices from a range of physical attributes. Yee has combined the most popular results to produce the city’s ideal figure sculpture.

Fantasy Studio Project is curated by independent curator and Director of SUUM Contemporary Art Project, Jiyoon Lee; with Jungwon Gu and Tomas Harold.

For further information please see SUUM Contemporary Art Project's website


Supported by The Arts Council of Korea and Samsung Electronics.