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ANGEL ORENSANZ FOUNDATION
NEWSLETTER May - June 2013 1
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NEWSLETTER #25 Contents
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12 Director Al Orensanz Graphic Design Yuliya Novosad Articles Derek Bently
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Angel Orensanz To Appear At Aviff Cannes Film Festival 2013......................... 4 Angel Orensanz Takes the Grand Canal during Venice Biennale 2013.......8 Taksim Square Protest interpreted by Angel Orensanz.....................................12 Angel Orensanz flies an Eagle at Art Basel.......................................................16 Angel Orensanz says Goodbye to James Gandolfin..................................... 20 3
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Angel Orensanz To Appear At Aviff Cannes Film Festival 2013 By Derek Bently
Aviff Cannes 2013 is a visual annual arts exhibition within the world famous Cannes Film Festival. It has already positioned itself among the highly respected international art films awards festivals. Aviff takes place this May 21, 22 and 23. “The Titanic that never arrived” & ‘Sundance” are the titles with which Angel Orensanz participates. This year France is represented with 8 visual artists; Iran with 4; England, Iran and South Africa with 3; South Africa with 3; USA and Japan with 1. Among the participants this year are Aldo Lee (Japan) with: “Fukushima mon amour”, “ Juan Carlos Zaldivar (USA) with “Shift”; Koorosh Asgari (Iran ) with : “Shahrzad”; Mahmood Nouraie; (Iran) with: “Wind & Death”; Thomas Dorman from South Africa with “Alone”; Thomas Dorman (South Africa) with the film “The lovers.” The pieces participating in the current festival have all the freshness and innovative spirit of new director’s films. They are endowed with enthusiasm and absolute freedom that are too risky to move over to the big screen and the red carpets. The Honorary Committee is formed by Sculptor Angel Orensanz who is also a cinematographer, Bernard Brochand, mayor of the City of Cannes, Bernard Marquet, vice president of UNAM in Monaco, and Sheikh Abdallah S. Al-Fassi, an art collector. Angel Orensanz is the author of about 15 short movies that include landscapes and events that are part of his art productions worldwide. He uses techniques associated with the cinema verite and the narrative movie making.
His visual stories and documentaries always include harrowing landscapes in which rocks, water and forests exude magic. Sculpture and context share always a leading role. The space around the art has always been part of the visual narrative that Angel Orensanz portrays. It was true in the 1970’s in Central Park and In Berlin; and in the Costa Brava in the 1980’s. And it has been a constant in his open space installations in America and Europe of the last 20 years.
About Angel Orensanz Foundation The Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts was established in 1992 as an artistic and cultural resource open to artists, writers, thinkers and leaders from all over the world, and to the community around. Over the years the Angel Oresanz Foundation has welcomed and been inspired by Philip Glass and Spike Lee; Arthur Miller, Alexander McQueen, Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou and Alexander Borovsky; Elie Wiesel and Chuck Close. Also they cooperate with PS1/MoMA; The Goethe Institute and the Whitney Museum, New York; The Italian Cultural Institute, New York University; Columbia University and Princeton University; the National Russian Museum of St. Petersburg and the Royal Shakespeare Co. of London; The World Council of Peoples for the UN, the United Jewish Council and the American Academy in Rome, among others. The Angel Orensanz Foundation works with independent artists from all over the world to develop here educational and artistic project.
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Special Preview:
1986 to the Present: The Orensanz Years On one evening in February 1986, Angel Orensanz, having recently arrived from Atlanta, Georgia, took a stroll around the Lower East Side looking for a building where he could establish his studio. He walked from Delancey street, past the corner of Rivington and Norfolk streets, and up to Houston, finally stumbling upon the former Anshe Slonim synagogue on Norfolk Street. Grim, silent and abused, the building seemed to look grounded and frightened. Thomas McEvilley, an accomplished art critic and scholar, imagined the building sitting “like an ancient spirit with folded wings.” Orensanz moved up the steps and peeped through a crack in the cinderblocks covering the entrances. The sun was setting, casting a ray of light over the ark and the eastern wall of the temple. Support beams from the balconies were leaning into the main space, and the entire area was strewn with debris, broken glass, and decaying books. Orensanz still saw something wonderful in the space, and later set about locating the owner, a developer with numerous holdings in the neighborhood, who eventually sold him the building. Angel Orensanz had arrived in New York after doing sculpture projects in Atlanta, Boca Raton, Los Angeles, and other parts of the country. However, it wasn’t until after his return to Europe that he discovered the Lower East Side and was charmed by its European colors and flavor. Soon after purchasing the property on Norfolk street, he unsealed its doors and windows. He then had proper doors and windows installed to protect the space from pigeons and the wind and snow. Next he secured the floors and brought in electric light for the first time in years.
Coming Out Now! 7
Angel Orensanz takes the Grand Canal during Venice Biennale 2013 By Derek Bently Venice Art Biennale ANGEL ORENSANZ. SCULPTURE IN VENICE. JUNE 1 - NOVEMBER 24, 2013 The 55th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale will take place from June 1 to November 24, 2013 at the Giardini and at the Arsenale. The Preview is scheduled for May 29, 30 and 31 in various venues around the city. It is titled The Encyclopedic Palace and is curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The award ceremony and the inauguration of the 55th Exhibition will take place on Saturday 1st June. Preview on 29, 30 and 31 May. The Encyclopedic Palace of the will be laid out in the Central Pavilion (Giardini) and in the Arsenale forming a single itinerary, with works spanning over the past century alongside several new commissions, including over 150 artists from 37 countries. Eighty eight national participation will also be exhibited; among these 10 countries are participating for the first time. Forty seven Collateral Events will be promoted by various organizations and exhibited in different venues around the city. This year, the main intervention of Angel Orensanz will consist of a traverse of the waived Grand Canal, from Ferrovia to Piazza de San Marco, with a boat that will be an outstanding constructionist moving installation. This construction will be made of movable shards, banners and fabrics. They play with the colors of the palaces, bridges and all architecture that flank the Gran Canale. A movie will be shot about the impact of the light on the waters, the buildings rows and the floating sculptures over the Gran Canale.
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The connection of Angel Orensanz with Venice is a long, permanent idyll that has played at palazzo Maliepiero, Piazza Razzonico and other significant locations at both sides of the Gran Canal. This moving installation at the Giardini della Biennale itself will post periodically and the schedule will be adequately informed. A timetable will be displayed in Central Venice, around Piazza San Marco, the many square establishments and throughout the banks of the Grand Canale. Angel Orensanz participates as well at the international art exhibition at Life Gallery within a project of Doron Pollak “Art Life for the World� Markers 9. Angel Orensanz is expected in Venice for the opening ceremonies of the Venice Biennale, and for the opening this ambitious sculpture project that will be available for the entire duration of the Venice Biennale 2013.
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Taksim Square Protest interpreted by Angel Orensanz By Derek Bently
Taksim Square (Turkey). You bring the protest, we will bring the world. Angel Orensanz resonates with the Ankara masses. New York, June 11, 13. Nothing is so embarrassing for the public powers as to have the masses protesting in the central square or the local central park. Yesterday was Paris and today is Ankara or Cairo. The television studios are close by; and the national newspapers and the foreign correspondents work all above it; the tourists never miss it and the local groups gain international press, radio and television usually love
it. The grand central square is open and available to everybody. Transportation, private parking, buses stops, schools, hotels, theaters, parks‌everything is right there. Masses come from everywhere and dissolve instantly. Visibility is guaranteed and safety accessible like nowhere in the entire country. Finally, the grand public recovers its leading role. “Tell me what is going in Taksim Square, right nowâ€?. Well, yesterday there were a few hundred people giving away bottles of water and food; with complaints about government transparency, police brutality and media complacency. But now things are rising in temperature and social reach.
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Sculptor Angel Orensanz has been documenting with his art installations and tableaux this form of public discourse for the last ten years. In Moscow, New York, Barcelona, London, Paris he is always active documenting a phenomenon associated with photography, newscasts and film. He has successfully inserted his sculpture work in those massive and multi centered urban concentrations. One of his first ones was the Peace Rally in Central park in the early 80’s. One million people occupied Central Park in Manhattan to listen to Orson Welles among others.
Taksim Square now, is the title of this sculpture concept that we are dealing with right now. Angel Orensanz rushes into the moment of political and social sensitivity. He visually participates in the revival of the experience of the central as a realm of individual consciousness and massive cooperation. Who could imagine that the Taksim Square still had such role in the conceptual diatribes and sculpture would leave the museum halls to participate in the tumult of voices and concepts.
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Angel Orensanz flies an Eagle at Art Basel By Derek Bently
Angel Orenanz has brought to Art Basel a spectacular participant. It is a resident of the mountainous region of Aldeaduero, right in the banks of the River Duero in the frontier with Portugal. This a majestic gigantic bird that Orensanz makes fly short distances in public corners of the city. FROM THE 13 TO THE 16TH OF JUNE. Eagles left this part of Central Europe many centuries ago. What Angel Orensanz does is to stimulate the imagination of one of the most urban centers in Europe with an element that brings back other times and cultures when the urban and the rural coexisted in total harmony. Angel Orensanz is developing a concept of inter exchanging the urban and the rural; the cultural and the wild at both ends of spectrum of the ordinary and the sophisticated perception.
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By presenting this piece with a surprise approach, the visitor/participant is introduced to a new aesthetic perception. Now is not a question of encountering the formalized art piece but the unexpected one coming to you. Angel Orensanz does not use the conventional art language but surprise ingredient; the eagle is already a staple of the traditional decorative arts but the live eagle is always alien to an art convention no matter how innovative or unconventional portends it. Angel Orensanz will retain pictures of this citywide performance to be exhibited later in the art gallery of his Foundation in New York City in the Fall of this year. Angel Orensanz has developed some dozen projects of art surprise, both in Europe and the USA. His first one consisted on a foldable tent that he inhabited and planted in all major European capitals such as Warsaw, London, Berlin, New York and Barcelona during the 1990’s. A web site accompanies this and other “public interventions� that can be followed in Angel Orensanz web site (www.angelorensanz.com).
Museum. Events. Art Gallery. 172 Norfolk Street, New York NY 10002 Tel. (212) 529-7194 www.orensanz.org 18
Angel Orensanz says Goodbye to James Gandolfini By Derek Bently
James J. Gandolfini, passed away in Rome yesterday June 20. He came to be known worldwide mostly for his role in The Sopranos, impersonating a troubled crime boss Tony Soprano, who tries to balance his private family life and his career in the Mafia. It was this characterization as Toni Soprano what reached and mesmerized the entire world. He visited often Italy, the country of his parents and family. What attracted us to each other was this similarity of belonging to a Latin country, our constant attraction to our roots and the permanent strangeness of living our lives in cultures and countries supposedly alien and estranged to us. He told me once: “You, Orensanz, live and work in a building alien and distant to the present life of today’s New York; and I live inside the skin of characters that clash with my personal fiber…”. He came to our Foundation several times for different social events and we became good friends. What I loved most of his performances was the intensity and fullness of identification and inner recreation of the characters to himself. He not only brought into himself the character of the script, but he brought his complete personality into the character. I could see that he was all excited with a new character to interpret, like getting to know a lost relative and learning through him the past of his family, I believe that few people like him were able to make sure that the character was totally absorbed into the arts. Two documentaries is what I most admired of his career Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq and his other one, Wartorn: 1861-2010 where he analyses post-traumatic stress disorder and its impact on soldiers and families through various wars in American history from 1861 to 2010. This double identity always mesmerized me in him and in all big actors. So many people have passed through Norfolk St. over the last three decades I have made my house in New York.
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T 212 529 7194
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www.orensanz.org