PROJECT 35 VOLUME 2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PROJECT 35 VOLUME 2 PART 1 OF 4 ARTISTS CHEN ZHOU, BRADLEY MCCALLUM & JACQUELINE TARRY, ANÍBAL LÓPEZ (A1 53167), PRILLA TANIA, JOSEF DABERNIG, PAVEL BRAILA, DALE YUDELMAN, CINTHIA MARCELLE, AND AGNIESZKA POLSKA CURATORS PHILIP TINARI, VALERIE CASSEL-OLIVER, ROSINA CAZALI, RIFKY EFFENDY, KATHRIN RHOMBERG, RALUCA VOINEA, N’GONÉ FALL, JOCHEN VOLZ, AND STUART COMER INTRODUCTION In 2010, Independent Curators International (ICI) launched Project 35, a program of single-channel videos selected by 35 international curators who each choose one work from an artist they think is important for audiences around the world to experience today.

The resulting selection was presented simultaneously in more than thirty venues around the globe, inspiring discourse in places as varied as Skopje, Macedonia; Lagos, Nigeria; Tirana, Albania; Cape Town, South Africa; Storrs, Connecticut; New Orleans, Louisiana; Berlin, Germany; Los Angeles, California; and Taipei, Taiwan.

The diversity of venues mimics the list of participating curators, whose selections reflect their current interests and research, and most often their local regions. Collaborating with and drawing from various international perspectives and universally sharing ideas is core to ICI’s mission. What better way to do so than through an exhibition of video,

which is one of the most important and far-reaching mediums for contemporary artists today? Though surprisingly still absent or not adequately understood in many institutions, video art offers broad access and connection to artists’ works and ideas. Video, which has been in existence even longer than ICI, is the ideal medium for increasing the visibility of international artistic practices and expanding networks.

Traveling video art is not new to ICI. Video Art USA, curated in 1975 by Jack Boulton (then director of the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio) and Suzanne Delehanty (then director of the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) was the first exhibition organized by ICI and was the first international video art exhibition to tour Latin America, providing an important bridge between the Latin American and Euro-American art worlds.

With Project 35: Volume 2, ICI again draws from its extensive network of curators to trace the complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners and the variety of approaches they use to make video. The works presented in this volume, produced between 2001 and 2012, explore the contemporary concerns of international curators.

Many focus on memory and change; notions of place and identity; fiction and history; and performance and documentation. Though the works are rooted in the artists’ homelands and derive from personal experience, their impact resonates globally.

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

CHEN ZHOU MORNING!, 2011 Single-channel video with color and sound 13 min., 12 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by PHILIP TINARI

Morning! is thirteen minutes of push-and-pull between a protagonist and a director. A gray room is fraught with tension, and a man broods over breakfast and suspects that everything has been arranged in his stilllife world. He sits, a Bresson-esque model, noting the perfect framing of the shot and holding his cigarette just so. The room is a scene, which unfolds into a stage, which reveals itself to an audience, which applauds and laughs in unison as if to a script. This is an expansion of uncertain reality, caught in itself and unsure where it ends and who its participants are – a tinkle of silverware, the chirping of birds, a charcoal forest – until the protagonist (or so we thought) rises and exits, locking the flimsy door behind him.

— Philip Tinari

PROJECT 35 V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

BRADLEY MCCALLUM & JACQUELINE TARRY CUT, 2006 Single-channel color video, with sound 4 min.

Courtesy of the artists Selected by VALERIE CASSEL-OLIVER

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry began working collaboratively in 1998. Their photographs, large-scale public projects, performances, and installations focus on their experiences as an interracial couple. Through their work, they challenge audiences to confront race as a social construct. In Cut, the simple act of cutting hair is transformed into a sexually charged, racially fraught, and emotionally complex performance. Here, the cutting of hair represents acts of collaboration, dominance, submission, intimacy, punishment, and control. —Valerie Cassel-Oliver

PROJECT 35 V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ANÍBAL LÓPEZ (A-1 53167) LISTÓN DE PLÁSTICO NEGRO DE 120 MTS. DE LARGO X 4 MTS. DE ANCHO COLGADO SOBRE EL PUENTE DEL INCIENSO, 2003 Single-channel video, with sound 3 min., 30 sec.

Courtesy of Promteogallery di Ida Pisani, Milan/Lucca Selected by ROSINA CAZALI

On June 20, 2003, protesters rejected the illegal registration of General Efraín Rios Montt, a man accused of one of the greatest genocides in the history of Guatemala during the 1980s, as a candidate for upcoming presidential elections. Different institutions and individuals repudiated his candidacy. Many signaled their discontent by tying black ribbons on their cars, houses, electricity poles, or trees. With the help of his friends, Aníbal López joined in the protest by dropping a large black plastic ribbon over the notorious El Incienso bridge in Guatemala City. The plastic ribbon was 120 meters long and 4 meters wide, and waved with the wind. This action created a poetic, minimalist, and symbolic image in honor of the victims of the Guatemalan genocide. Today, General Ríos Montt finally is being judged. Each exhibition of López’s work confirms the importance of this event for Guatemalan society. It commemorates the memory of the victims and signals the hope that someday the mourning will end.

—Rosina Cazali

PROJECT 35V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PRILLA TANIA SPACE WITHIN TIME SERIES, 2008–11 Single-channel color video, with sound 18 min., 46 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by RIFKY EFFENDY

Over the last ten years, Prilla Tania has become known for works that speak of simple elements of the environment as well as explorations with different and surprising media, such as sugar, chocolate, cloth, and paper. Her photo-performances involve the public in the process of creating signification. Space Within Time is a series of video works in which the artist employs stop-motion photography to record herself against a background of white chalk images on a blackboard. The images appear and disappear corresponding to her movements. This video work is characteristic of her style and skill in capturing the daily occurrences in her surroundings. It also reveals the various tensions and frictions between memories of the past and changes that occur in the present. —Rifky Effendy

PROJECT 35 V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

JOSEF DABERNIG WARS, 2001 16mm black-and-white film transferred to DVD, with sound 10 min.

Courtesy of Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna, and Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam Selected by KATHRIN RHOMBERG

Josef Dabernig’s films frequently deal with public spaces and settings whose usual purpose and function are stated and not subject to doubt. In WARS the public space is the dining car of an inter-regional passenger train—a place with clearly defined uses that determine the progression of possible actions, gestures, and routines expected by people who find themselves there. The actors in Dabernig’s work meet these expectations; they appear isolated, independent from and uninfluenced by the reality surrounding them.

Reduced to their basic essence, they behave as monads, and thus like models in a space entirely devoid of individuals. WARS seems to have anticipated the West’s experience of the last decade. It was a state of waiting for a moment of complete and fundamental change, which never came.

—Kathrin Rhomberg

PROJECT 35V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PAVEL BRAILA CHIŞINĂU, CITY DIFFICULT TO PRONOUNCE (WINTER), 2011 Single-channel color video, with sound 21 min., 43 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by RALUCA VOINEA

Chişinău, City Difficult to Pronounce is inspired by Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. Pavel Brăila recorded the life of Chişinău throughout a one-year period, compressing the footage into a symbolic single day, without narrative or commentary—just the sounds of the city itself. The constantly changing appearance of the city, as well as the fact that there are no records in the national archives documenting the changes in Chişinău over the past twenty years, inspired Brăila to embark on this project, which functions as both urban diary and historical and anthropological filmic essay. More than the formal cinematic experience created by the different rhythms of the city, the project constitutes itself as a document that allows the viewer not only to follow the city’s idiosyncrasies but also to become a witness to its transformation. Turning spectators into witnesses is a concern that Brăila shares with many performance and visual artists. Chişinău, City Difficult to Pronounce is a chronicle of a present that is rapidly becoming history, with its public the only—diffuse—keepers of a memory soon to be erased.

—Raluca Voinea

PROJECT 35 V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

DALE YUDELMAN WITNESS, SURFER, DREAMER, AND THE TALIBAN FROM AFGHANISTAN, 2008 Single-channel color video, with sound 10 min., 55 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by N’GONÉ FALL

The mystery of a burnt-out car, abandoned off Long Street in the heart of Cape Town, sparked the imagination and commentary of passersby. In this short video we encounter members of secret societies, ex-cons, betrayed girlfriends, and recreational forensic experts. Through the tapestry of their narratives and theories, a social portrait of colloquial rationale evolves, at times both comical and surprising in content. Dale Yudelman returned to the car periodically, always expecting to find it gone. But thanks to the inefficiency of local authorities, he was able to continue filming over a period of three weeks. On each visit, he met up with characters willing to mediate the spaces between fact and fiction with anecdotes ranging from plausible to downright absurd. Yudelman examines the ambivalent nature of personal truth and shared reality by scrutinizing the paradoxes and ironies of daily life.

—N’Goné Fall

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

CINTHIA MARCELLE LEITMOTIV, 2011 Single-channel color video, with sound 4 min., 16 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by JOCHEN VOLZ

Since the early 2000s, Cinthia Marcelle has worked in a wide variety of media, ranging from installation to drawing, from video to performance. Many of her works are characterized by a careful play of movement, repetition, surprise, and rhythm, evoking a sense of choreography. Marcelle describes the poetics of futility as a series of exercises in resisting contemporary pragmatism. Leitmotiv is a short video in three chapters depicting what appears to be the natural movements of water and spume over a concrete floor, but is revealed as the collective effort of a group of individuals sweeping water into the image frame. This becomes a commentary on ideas of perception, abstraction, construction, landscape, memory, and collectivity. —Jochen Volz

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

AGNIESZKA POLSKA SENSITIZATION TO COLOUR, 2009 Single-channel color video, with sound 5 min., 2 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by STUART COMER

Agnieszka Polska critically reconciles her relationship to the historical avant-garde through animated videos, photographs, and reconstructions. She uses misunderstanding and misinterpretation to generate new questions about the past and to further complicate how it can be used to reshape the present.

Sensitization to Colour is taken from the title of a 1968 performance by Włodzimierz Borowski originally presented at Galeria Od Nowa in Poznań, Poland. Borowski was a major figure in Polish conceptual art whose work was marked by disappearance, destruction, and other tactics used to question the role of the creative act, to undermine the authority of artistic intention, and to emphasize the function of process and time in his work. Polska doubles Borowski’s original event by reconstructing the space and several of the objects used in the original 1968 performance, based on photographic evidence. The painterly and colorful qualities of Borowski’s work are translated into a monochrome gray scale in Polska’s film, highlighting the significance of black-and-white photographs in commemorating and translating the original work. The floating, disembodied camerawork in the film and the uneasy play between archival images and restaged objects amplify both the immediacy and the uncertainty of the event as it unfolds through multiple layers of representation and memory.

Like a number of recent artists, including Luke Fowler and Duncan Campbell, Polska understands artistic identity as a palimpsest of different voices, actions, and moments that she articulates through a reconsidered approach to documentary and biography. She comments, “The archive—as each and every living organism—lives and changes without ceasing, endlessly multiplying images of itself. Elements which have been negated and rejected in the process of archiving later emerge as the dark matter of our subconscious.”

—Stuart Comer

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ARTISTS CHEN ZHOU (b. 1987, Zhejiang Province, China) graduated from the Digital Media Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China, in 2009. Working primarily in video, his artistic practice involves, among other topics, the investigation of the relationship between visual perception and the symbols and signs of language-based imagery. Chen Zhou is a founding member of the video art collective 3 Minute Group, as well as a member of the artist collective Company, which includes Yan Xing, Li Ming, and Li Ran. Shortly after completing his, Chen was given a solo exhibition at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute Space, Beijing (2009). He has exhibited and screened his works internationally at venues such as Photo Tapei, Taiwan (2009), and the 1st and 2nd E-Arts Shanghai, China (2007 8). Chen recently was a guest lecturer at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing for their China New Design series, where he screened his film Morning! as well as footage of himself at work. Chen currently lives and works in Beijing, China.

BRADLEY MCCALLUM (b. 1966 in Greenbay, Wisconsin) received an MFA from Yale, New Haven, CT, in 1992, and JACQUELINE TARRY (b. 1963 in Buffalo, New York) completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY, in 2003. The two have worked (often under the combined moniker McCallum Tarry) since 1998 as a collaborative team, co-producing works and projects in a variety of mediums including video, installation, painting, public projects, performance, and sculpture. Their artwork, which focuses largely on issues of racism, social inequality, and marginalization, has been exhibited internationally at such venues as Benrimon Contemporary, New York (2012); Contemporary Museum, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore (2010); Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya, Japan (2009); and Galerie Nordine Zidoun, Paris, France (2008). They have participated in multiple fairs and groups shows including The Eye of the Collector, Museum of Modern Art of Bologna (MAMbo), Italy (2012); Streetwise, Chelsea Art Museum, New York (2011); Prospect.1 Biennial, New Orleans, LA (2008); and the 2003 Biennial Exhibition of Public Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY (2003), among others. Bradley McCallum and Jaqueline Tarry currently live and work in New York, NY. ANÍBAL LÓPEZ (A1 53167) (b. 1964, Guatemala) has created and exhibited artworks since 1997 under his Guatemalan identification number “A-1 53167,” in an effort to not only avoid being assigned membership of a cultural group based on ethnicity but also to undermine the entire practice of human identification through codes, such as names and numbers. His works largely utilize video and photography, often as a means of documenting his performances or “actions.” Solo exhibitions have been held at (Ex)Céntrico–Centro Cultural de España, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2011); Cátedra arte de la Conducta, Cuba (2007); Prometeogallery, Milan, Italy (2006); and Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic (2004), among others. He has participated in numerous group shows, including Transacciones, Centro Cultural de España, Guatemala City (2012); Monument to Transformation, Centre for Visual Introspection, Bucharest, Romania (2009); 6th Bienal de Mercosur, A Terceira Margem do Rio, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2007); CONTAGIO, Biennale Adriatica di Arti Nuove, San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy (2006); Prague Biennale 1 & 2, Czech Republic (2003; 2005); the 49th Venice Biennale, Italy (2001); and the 7th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2000). López currently lives and works in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

PRILLA TANIA (b. 1979, Bandung, Indonesia) graduated in 2001 from the Bandung Institute of Technology, where she studied Sculpture. Tania employs a range of techniques and mediums in creating her works, including video, sculpture, performance, and animation. Dead elephant leaves an ivory, a dead tiger leaves the stripes, a man dies leaving a name is a reflection on mortality and posterity, and is executed in her signature meditative stop-motion technique, which typically depicts Tania interacting with two-dimensional settings and props drawn in white chalk onto a black ground. Recent exhibitions include a solo show as part of the Video Out section of the 5th OK. Video Festival, Linggar Seni, Jakarta, Indonesia (2011), and The Fountain of Lanmeth, at the Gajah Gallery, Singapore (2012). She has held other solo exhibitions throughout Indonesia at venues including MD Art Space, Cemara 6 Gallery, and Centre Culturel Francais de Bandung.

In 2004, Tania, along with fellow artists Rani Ravenina and Ariani Darmawan, established the video art collective VideoBabes.

JOSEF DABERNIG (b. 1956, Kötschach-Mauthen, Austria) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, where he graduated with a degree in sculpture in 1981. He has been working with film and video since 1994, creating works characterized by a distinct slowness and methodical progression. His artistic concerns include rationalization, functionalism, and organizational structures and their variations, errors, and problems. He recently participated in the Moving Image Contemporary Video Art Fair in the Waterfront New York Tunnel, New York, NewYork (2012). Dabernig’s film works have been screened internationally at numerous film festivals including the 68th Venice International Film Festival, Italy (2011); Toronto International Film Festival, Canada (2006; 2009); and the Melbourne International Film Festival, Australia (2001), among others. He has been the subject of a retrospective hosted by the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck, Austria, and the Leipzig Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany (2005). In 2002 he was given the Award of the City of Vienna. Dabernig lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

PAVEL BRĂILA (b. 1971, Chişinău, Moldova) studied at Le Fresnoy, Nationale Atelier for Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing, France (2003), Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2001), and the University of Moldova (1997) and Technical University of Moldova (1994), both in Chişinău. His film and video works examine life in post-Soviet era Moldova, responding to the lack of film and photographic material from his home city of Chişinău since the mid-1980s. Brăila has held solo exhibitions at the National Museum, Brukenthal, Romania (2010); Gallery Jan Dhaese, Gent, Belgium (2009); Galerie Yvon Lambert, Paris, France (2008); and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany (2007), among others. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Why Pictures Now, MUMOK, Vienna, Austria (2006); Periferic 6 Biennial, Prophetic Corners, Iasi, Romania (2003); and Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002). In 2010 Brăila was awarded the Prize of the Jury of the Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia at the 56th International Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany, for his film Definitively Unfinished.

Brăila currently lives and works in Chişinău, Moldova.

DALE YUDELMAN (b. 1958, Johannesburg, South Africa) is a photographer and filmmaker. He primarily utilizes photographic mediums to document scenes of daily life in South Africa. Infused with poetic humor, Yudelman’s evocative images allude to the effect of the region’s political and social history, specifically apartheid. He has participated in group shows including Winter Show MMXI, Museum Photographic Art Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2011); Spier Contemporary, City Hall, Cape Town, South Africa (2010); Slamdance Film Festival 2010, Witness, Park City, Utah (2010); and Divisions: Aspects of South African Art 1948 2010, SMAC Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2010). His collaborative works with artist Arlene PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Amaler-Raviv have been shown in several major exhibitions including the 8th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2003), and Postcards from Cuba, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway (2004). Yudelman has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 2012 L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate L’Ormarins Moments Competition, Cape Town, South Africa. He was granted the 2011 inaugural Ernest Cole Award for his photographic series From the Hip and Sony Profoto Award’s Professional Portfolio of the Year prize in 2008 for his photographic series I am…. Yudelman currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

CINTHIA MARCELLE (b. 1974, Belo Horizonte, Brazil) graduated with a degree in Fine Art from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, in 1999. She uses video and photographic mediums to document her performance-based interventions on her surrounding environments. Her recent solo exhibitions include A-before-after-to, Gallery Silvia Cintra + Box 4, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2011); Zero For Conduct, Red Gallery, São Paolo, Brazil (2011); and To Come To, Sproviery Gallery, London, UK (2009). Marcelle has presented work in such major international exhibitions as the Biennial de Lyon, France (2007); Panorama da Arte Brasiliera, São Paolo (2007); the Biennial de la Habana, Havana, Cuba (2006); and most recently in the New Museum Triennial, The Ungovernables, New York, NY (2012). In 2006 she was awarded the International Prize for Performance by the Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea of Trento, Italy. Marcelle currently lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

AGNIESZKA POLSKA (b. 1985, Lublin, Poland) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, Poland, in 2009 and Universitaet der Kunste in Berlin, Germany, in 2010. Polska primarily works with video, photography and animation to create ethereal, meditative narrations that are characterized by elements of philosophy, particularly psychoanalysis. She is interested in the notion that misunderstanding and misinterpretation of history are what perpetuate civilization, leading us to constantly create new understandings. Polska also focuses on the exclusionary and inclusionary nature of historical archives, often using altered archival materials in her meticulous collage-based animations. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Kunstmuseum Cottbus and Bunkier Sztuki, both in Kraków. International exhibitions include solo shows at Żak Branicka Galerie, Art Basel Statements, Switzerland (2011); and Georg Kargl BOX, Vienna, Austria (2011). She has exhibited in selected group shows including Un seminaire a la campagne, France Fiction, Paris, France (2010); Based in Berlin, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2011); and Disobedience, LMAKprojects, New York, NY (2010). Polska currently lives and works in Kraków, Poland, and Berlin, Germany.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

CURATORS

PHILIP TINARI (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA) is director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China’s leading independent museum of contemporary art. Since 2009 he has also served as founding editor-in-chief of LEAP, the international art magazine of contemporary China. Tinari is a contributing editor to Artforum and adjunct professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Tinari is based in Beijing, China.

VALERIE CASSEL-OLIVER is senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX. She was director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington DC. In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. She has organized numerous exhibitions including Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art (2003); the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art (2007); Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image (2008) with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee; Hand +Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft (2010); a major retrospective on Black Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us, and, most recently, the survey Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011), the artist’s first major survey that is now on tour.

ROSINA CAZALI (b. 1960, Guatemala City, Guatemala) is an art critic and independent curator specializing in contemporary Guatemalan art since 1995. From 2003 to 2006 she was director of the Spanish Cultural Centre in Guatemala City. She also participated as a guest curator for Guatemala in different international biennials and as an independent curator for several exhibitions in Guatemala, Latin America, and Spain.

She participated in theoretical events and as a photography reviewer for Photo España’s portfolio reviews.

In recognition for her work, she was invited to participate in the project 9 Curators, organized by Gerardo Mosquera, and as a speaker on performance and video art in Guatemala by the Royal College of Art, London, in 2009. In 2010 she received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research on contemporary art in Guatemala.

RIFKY EFFENDY (b. 1968, Jakarta, Indonesia) is curator of the Indonesian Pavilion for the 2013 Venice Biennale. From 2002 to 2008 he was curator of Jakarta’s Cemara 6 Galeri. Recent curatorial projects include Fixer, North Art Space, Jakarta, Indonesia (2010); South East B(L)ooming, Primo Marella Gallery, Milan, Italy (2008); KOI and TRINACRIA by Filippo Sciascia and Robert Coda Zabetta, National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta (2008); Pilgrim Project by Dadang Christanto, Gaya Fusion Artspace, Bali (2006); Trans-Indonesia, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2005); Imagining Jakarta, sponsored by the Goethe Institute, Jakarta (2004); Yasumasa Murimura, Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Gaya Fusion and Sense, Bali, Solo and Soemardja Gallery, Bandung (2001); and Wearable, Galeripadi Bandung, Bentara Budaya, Yogyakarta, and Sika Art Gallery, Bali (1999). In late 2001 he established and directed the 1st Bandung Biennale, and in 2004 was a fellow of Asia Cultural Council (ACC) in New York. In 2009, along with fellow curators and artists, Effendy established the Bandung-based artspace Platform3, and in 2010 he established Inkubatorasia, a Jakarta-based space dedicated to promoting emerging contemporary artists.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE CURATORS He has edited and contributed to several publications including Tempo Magazine, Visual Arts Magazine, Kompas, and Art Asia Pacific Magazine.

KATHRIN RHOMBERG (b. 1963, Bludenz, Austria) is an independent curator and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria. In 2012 she curated Christoph Schlingensief Fear of the Core of Things, BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht. Other projects include 6th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2010); Roman Ondák Loop, Czech and Slovak Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy (2009); Ion Grigorescu: In the Body of the Victim 1969–2008, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2009); Sanja Iveković. General Alert. Works 1974– 2007 (with Nataša Ilić), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2007); and Projekt Migration, with Marion von Osten, Cologne (2002–2006). Rhomberg lives and works in Vienna.

RALUCA VOINEA (b. 1978, Brașov, Romania) is an art critic and curator based in Bucharest, Romania. She is co-director of Tranzit.ro (a member of the Tranzit.org network) and she is also involved in several other curatorial and editorial collectives from Romania (E-cart.ro, IDEA arts + society, Long April). Voinea is based in Bucharest, Romania.

N’GONÉ FALL (b. 1967, Dakar, Senegal) graduated from the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, France.

She is an independent curator, art critic, and consultant in cultural engineering. She was editorial director of the Paris-based contemporary African art magazine Revue Noire from 1994 to 2001. She has edited books on contemporary visual arts and photography in Africa including An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century (D.A.P./Editions Revue Noire, 2002), Photographers from Kinshasa (Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2002) and Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography: a Century of African photographers (Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 1998). Fall has curated exhibitions in Africa, Europe, and the US. She was one of the curators of the African photography Biennale in Bamako, Mali, in 2001, and a guest curator at the 2002 Dakar Biennale in Senegal. As a consultant in cultural engineering she is the author of strategic plans, orientation programs, and evaluation reports for Senegalese and international cultural institutions. Fall is an associate professor at the Senghor University in Alexandria, Egypt. She is also a founding member of the Dakar-based collective Gaw-Lab, a platform for research and production in the field of new media and visual arts.

JOCHEN VOLZ (b. 1971, Braunschweig, Germany) is artistic director at the Instituto Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil, where he has co-curated many large-scale site-specific projects, as well as numerous exhibitions from the collection. Forthcoming projects include permanent presentations of works by Lygia Pape and Tunga, amongst others. He has contributed to many exhibitions throughout the world, including curating Olafur Eliasson as part of the 17th International Festival of Contemporary Art–SESC_Videobrasil, São Paulo, Brazil (2011); The Spiral and the Square, Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2011); the Aichi Triennale, Nagoya, Japan (2010); and the Biennale de Lyon, France (2007). In 2009 he organized the international section of the 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy, together with Daniel Birnbaum. In 2006 he guest curated for the 27th Bienal de São Paulo a special exhibition project in homage to Marcel Broodthaers. Between 2001 and 2004 he was curator of Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Volz is based in London, UK. STUART COMER (b. 1968, US) is Curator of Film at Tate Modern, London, UK. He oversees film and video work for the Tate Collection and Displays, is co-curator for the opening program of The Tanks at Tate Modern, and organizes an extensive program of screenings, performances, and events. He is editor of Film and Video Art (Tate Publishing, 2009) and has contributed to several publications and numerous periodicals including Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, Mousse, Parkett, and Art Review.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PROJECT 35 VOLUME 2 PART 2 OF 4 ARTISTS SHEZAD DAWOOD, ANNIKA ERIKSSON, ANTANAS GERLIKAS, SARA RAMO, ALEXANDER UGAY, JONATHAS DE ANDRADE, DEANNA BOWEN, WOK THE ROCK CURATORS ABDELLAH KARROUM, MARIA LIND, VIRGINIJA JANUSKEVICIUTE, VERONICA CORDEIRO, LEEZA AHMADY, PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA, SRIMOYEE MITRA, DAVID TEH INTRODUCTION In 2010, Independent Curators International (ICI) launched Project 35, a program of single-channel videos selected by 35 international curators who each choose one work from an artist they think is important for audiences around the world to experience today.

The resulting selection was presented simultaneously in more than thirty venues around the globe, inspiring discourse in places as varied as Skopje, Macedonia; Lagos, Nigeria; Tirana, Albania; Cape Town, South Africa; Storrs, Connecticut; New Orleans, Louisiana; Berlin, Germany; Los Angeles, California; and Taipei, Taiwan.

The diversity of venues mimics the list of participating curators, whose selections reflect their current interests and research, and most often their local regions. Collaborating with and drawing from various international perspectives and universally sharing ideas is core to ICI’s mission. What better way to do so than through an exhibition of video, which is one of the most important and far-reaching

mediums for contemporary artists today? Though surprisingly still absent or not adequately understood in many institutions, video art offers broad access and connection to artists’ works and ideas. Video, which has been in existence even longer than ICI, is the ideal medium for increasing the visibility of international artistic practices and expanding networks.

Traveling video art is not new to ICI. Video Art USA, curated in 1975 by Jack Boulton (then director of the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio) and Suzanne Delehanty (then director of the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) was the first exhibition organized by ICI and was the first international video art exhibition to tour Latin America, providing an important bridge between the Latin American and Euro-American art worlds.

With Project 35: Volume 2, ICI again draws from its extensive network of curators to trace the complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners and the variety of approaches they use to make video. The works presented in this volume, produced between 2001 and 2012, explore the contemporary concerns of international curators.

Many focus on memory and change; notions of place and identity; fiction and history; and performance and documentation. Though the works are rooted in the artists’ homelands and derive from personal experience, their impact resonates globally.

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

SHEZAD DAWOOD THE NEW DREAM MACHINE PROJECT, 2011 Super 16mm color film transferred to HD video, with sound 15 min.

Courtesy of the artist and Paradise Row, London Selected by ABDELLAH KARROUM

New Dream Machine Project by Shezad Dawood was produced through a process of recreating the situations in which a series of memorable meetings occurred in 1960s Tangier among a group of young African, European, and American artists and writers and activists, including Brion Jones, William Burroughs, and Mohamed Hamri, who were experimenting with alternative languages. These original meetings happened during an era when politicians and multinational organizations were developing tools of control and militarization. This group considered art ultimately to be an immaterial process. They created networks and spaces of resistance where they shared ideas for different models for societies. The artist’s father himself escaped from India to the US in the 1960s and became a photographer of rock groups. By organizing an interactive music concert at the Cinémathèque de Tangier in 2011 with the famous Rif music group, The Master Musicians of Jajouka, and the cult British guitarist Duke Garwood, Dawood re-created those conditions in order to document a unique performance.

For the intervention, the artist built a large-scale version of the Dream Machine, a kinetic light sculpture conceived to have an effect on the viewer similar to deep meditation or dream sleep originally designed by Brion Gysin. Gysin’s invention was 50 cm high; Dawood’s re-creation was 300 cm high. Dawood also created a series of Gysin’s original-size Dream Machines out of recycled cans, in collaboration with workers from L’appartement 22’s workshop in Fez, in 2011. Preparing for the concert brought Dawood into another series of encounters and situations. Situating the project in Tangier was an acknowledgment of the influence of Sufism and Moroccan culture on Gysin. The project seeks to map a more global narrative of contemporary practices and ideas; the “souvenirs” of other times seem to originate from different spaces in present times.

The film is edited to the same flicker rate, both visually and sonically, as the Dream Machine. The final cuts and extreme contrast of flashing lights give the viewer the possibility to see the film twice—once with open eyes, as a document, and once with closed eyes, as an experience.

—Abdellah Karroum

P R O J E C T 3 5 V2

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ANNIKA ERIKSSON WIR SIND WEIDER DA, 2010 16mm color film transferred to BlueRay, with sound 30 min.

Courtesy of the artist, NON Gallery, Istanbul, and Krome Gallery, Berlin Selected by MARIA LIND

A similar sense of time being broken down, non descript of lost can be sensed in Eriksson’s video installation of Wir sind wieder da. In this work, the viewer is confronted by a group of Berlin punks hanging out in a seemingly endless dark space. As one of the key local figures of the Berlin identity, the punks manifest their position with “doing nothing“. In the piece, Failure as success appears as the motto in the subtext, and the glamour comes with smoke and wind. The punks appear like ghosts, but are still able to give us a feeling about future scenarios of how the tomorrow could be imagined.

—Annika Eriksson Press Release for “The Trilogy” Exhibition, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2012

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ANTANAS GERLIKAS A WALK, 2011 16mm color film transferred to DVD, silent 3 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by VIRGINIJA JANUSKEVICIUTE

Imagine that you see this film in a museum of technology or, better yet, in a museum of social networks. The lens of a camera effortlessly follows a dark greyhound through the streets of Riga, its parks and museums.

The dog and the camera pause to look at each other when the leisurely stroll brings them both to a gallery of historical painting: the frame captures a dog of exactly the same breed, resting along with a hunter in one of the canvases. Opposite the painting, the skinned branches of a lean stick, possibly a guide’s stick, point to nothing in particular, one of them curling back on itself. The museum blinks at the dog, and the dog continues the routine, quite cheerfully. —Virginija Januskeviciute

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

SARA RAMO A BANDA DOS SETE (BAND OF SEVEN), 2010 Single-channel color video, with sound 20 min., 35 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by VERONICA CORDEIRO

A group of musicians moves around the circumference of an outdoor wall, disappearing and reappearing in random combinations, altering the composition of the music played by their instruments. Inspired by the mechanism of a music box, the circular repetition is simultaneously continuous and erratic, playing with the spectator’s memory and sensorial expectations instigated through repetition. Their strange clothes and masks made from fabric, cardboard, and straw produce a poetic fantasy, an otherworldliness enhanced by their effortless gliding. A band of anti-heroes, as the artist calls them, these characters change parts of their physical attributes as well as order of appearance each time they reappear from behind the wall: although part of a repetitive mechanical system, such changes introduce unexpected incongruities. Repetition and difference occur simultaneously. At times all compositional elements (sound, image, and tempo) run in tandem with each other; at times they dissociate, overlapping or becoming isolated. As in a ghost train, once the musicians leave the scene they pursue some unknown course, which may be the ongoing circulation around the wall or some other distant journey. —Veronica Cordeiro

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ALEXANDER UGAY BASTION, 2007 8mm black-and-white film transferred to video, with sound 5 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by LEEZA AHMADY

Working primarily in video and photography, Alexander Ugay is a seminal figure of the new generation of Central Asian contemporary artists, many of whom have exhibited widely in the region and abroad. Ugay co-founded “Bronepoezd” (“An Armored Train”) with Kyrgyz artist Roman Maskalev in 1999—a group of experimental Central Asian artists known for working with 16 mm film, using cameras manufactured in the early Soviet Union, and processing and editing the film manually. The resultant work is often dubbed “New Romanticism” for its nostalgic look and feel of Soviet avant-garde cinema. This technique lends itself well to Ugay’s explorations of memory and personal experience, which is often rooted in Central Asian history and its impact on contemporary reality. Bastion exemplifies the artist’s fascination with former Soviet utopian ideals and their influence on future generations. The work deploys the image of Tatlin’s Tower, which was a central symbol of triumph for the newly founded USSR in an era characterized by revolutions, wars, and public cataclysms. The Tower similarly characterizes Ugay’s personal reminiscences of the past and interest in the Russian vanguard. For this work, he combined Hi-8 video and a three-dimensional architectural model to simulate Tatlin’s unrealized Tower. The enactments and style Ugay employs in Bastion are seamlessly integrated into this elegiac and poetic video.

—Leeza Ahmady

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

JONATHAS DE ANDRADE PACIFICO, 2010 Super 8 color film, with sound 12 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA

In this animation, a massive earthquake erupts over the Andes, detaching Chile from the South American continent. As a consequence, the sea returns to Bolivia, restoring its lost coastline; Argentina gains coasts with both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans; and Chile becomes a floating island adrift in the seas.

“In my visit to Bolivia in 2009, I was affected by the way the loss of the sea to Chile in the bloody Pacific War (1879–1884) was a delicate subject, unresolved, a real historical taboo. Even the smallest Bolivian book shops sell educational material for schools that didactically show the injustice of what was done: Chile’s cowardliness, the need to regain the lost sea and to defend the coast’s sovereignty. In Chile, the existence of the war is not emphasized: generally, it is taught that the whole coast has always been Chilean. In this project, the idea of the construction of truth and feelings about historical events interests me. Moral and civic didacticism is linked to my decision to work with paper and styrofoam, as they are the materials originally used for teaching in these regions. This aesthetic approach allows me to touch upon some other topics: the notion of truth as an ideological construction, the document’s relative trustworthiness, historical resentment as a social feeling, and the fabrication of mass commotion/emotion as political artifice.”

—Pablo León de la Barra

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

DEANNA BOWEN SUM OF THE PARTS: WHAT CAN BE NAMED, 2010 Single-channel color video, with sound 18 min., 20 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by SRIMOYEE MITRA

sum of the parts: what can be named is an eighteen minute performed oral history that recounts the disremembered journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia, in 1815, as told by Deanna Bowen herself. Influenced by Eli Wiesel’s 1989 New York Times article regarding art, the Holocaust, and the trivialization of memory, the work chronicles the lives of family members who could not speak on their own behalf by delving into the unknown, retracing what is hidden, and reclaiming histories of those lost. Building on Katherine McKittrick’s writings about the ways in which Black space is bound to the unknown and the apparent intangibility of unseen/absent places, Bowen’s sum of the parts: what can be named works to reveal the ways in which contemporary art practices use language to define and “call” the self and greater black communities into being. The video is partially premised on a political/ geographical/historical understanding that slavery and the systems inherent to the slave trade erased much of the material links that connect many blacks to their past and their own “stories of being.” The video also takes up concerns of the use of language, visuality, orality, symbolic gesture, and storytelling in order to articulate sites that make no reference to the black body in the past, in space, on site, or in present tense.

—Srimoyee Mitra

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

WOK THE ROCK VERTICAL HORIZON, 2011 Single-channel color video, with sound 9 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by DAVID TEH

Artists have seized upon webcam aesthetics, mining the videosphere for user-generated gold and scrap—from Laurel Nakadate’s awkward role play with lonely men to tactical aggregations like Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament, Deborah Kelly’s Tank-man Tango, or Cory Arcangel’s cut-ups of bedroom musicians. With Vertical Horizon, Yogyakarta-based artist Wok the Rock takes a more observational stance, abiding by the peculiar durée of networked video, at once domestic and, in its formatting of the act of viewing, social or even viral.

A young man stares at his desktop in bored fascination, head tilted to one side—an unconcealed reference to a legendary amateur porn video made by an Indonesian rock star (Ariel, frontman of the band Peterpan) on his cell phone, starring himself and a TV-soap starlet named Cut Tari. Everyone you meet in Indonesia has seen this video, distinctive for its 90-degree orientation, and for feats of cinematographic agility on the part of its actor-director. Ariel got three years in prison for his efforts, under a new and highly controversial anti-pornography law. Indonesia, home to the world’s biggest Muslim population, is a progressive place in many ways, but conservatives have made gains by drumming up hysteria over modern society’s changing attitudes. Vertical Horizon offers a succinct, specular portrait of a nation undergoing rapid cultural change.

—David Teh

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ARTISTS SHEZAD DAWOOD (b. 1974, London, UK) received his BA from Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design, London, UK, both his MA Fine Art and MPhil Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, London, and his PhD in Fine Art from Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. His artistic practice utilizes a range of media to address cultural and political issues such as internationality and integration. Recent solo shows include Piercing Brightness, Museum of Modern Art Oxford and the Newlyn Art Gallery, UK (2012), as well as a solo show at KinoKino, Sandnes, Norway (2012). His work has been included in numerous international fairs and exhibitions such as the 2011 Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Katowice, Poland (2011); Illuminations (After Arthur Rimbaud), Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery, New York, US (2010); the 53rd Venice Biennale, Making Worlds, Italy (2009); and the Tate Triennial, Altermodern, Tate Britain, London (2009), among others. Dawood has written and contributed to numerous books, exhibition catalogues, and periodicals. He has also been the recipient of multiple awards and honors including the 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, 2008 Commissions East, and the 2007 London Artist Film and Video Award (LAFVA). Dawood currently lives and works in London, UK. ANNIKA ERIKSSON (b. 1956 in Sverige, Sweden) works primarily in video, documentary film, and installation, initiating various real life situations and activities, and documenting them to be presented in her preferred media. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Trilogy, Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (2012), The Great Good Place, KROME Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2012), and Wir Bleiben/The Last Tenants, Galerie NON, Beyoğlu, Istanbul (2011). Ericksson has participated in various fairs and group shows, including the 2011 Basel Art Fair, The 2005 Venice Biennale, Performa 05, and Dak Àrt, Biennal. Her work has been exhibited internationally at such venues as Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Konsthall C, Stockholm, Galerie VernerklausenWerner, Berlin, Hayward Gallery, London, among many others. Annika Eriksson currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

ANTANAS GERLIKAS (b. 1978, Plungė, Lithuania) studied sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania. Gerlikas is interested in the concept of a museum and its various conventions (i.e. spatial, temporal, ideological) in relation to the artwork itself and how these conventions are enacted in daily life. His artworks are primarily video and installation-based. Gerlikas’s film A Walk was recently screened for “Intermission,” a section of the international contemporary arts festival Survival Kit 3, Contemporary Arts Center, Riga, Latvia (2012), which was also the venue for his solo exhibition Needle Eye (2011). He has participated in selected group shows including The Museum Problem, Frutta Gallery’s inaugural exhibition, Rome, Italy (2012), A Thing Spins a Leaf by the Wind, kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia (2010), And Then Came Johnny, with Liudvikas Buklys, Tulips & Roses, Brussels, Belgium (2008), Down the Rabbit Hole: Meeting the Familiar, Rael Artel Project Space, Tartu, Estonia (2008), and The Ideal Academy, Westphalian Art Association, Münster, Germany (2007). Gerlikas lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania.

SARA RAMO (b. 1975, Madrid, Spain) received a BA from the School of Applied Arts and Crafts, Madrid, Spain, in 1995, and both a BA in Painting in 2002 and an MA in Visual Arts in 2007 from the School of PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Fine Arts, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Ramo’s recent solo shows include Sin Heroismos, por favor, Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo C2M, Madrid (2012); Bienvenido, AECI, Cultural Center of Spain in Montevideo, Uruguay (2011); and The Band of Seven, EAC, Contemporary Art Space, Montevideo (2011), among others. She has participated in several international group shows and festivals such as The Near and the Elsewhere, PM Gallery & House, London, UK (2012); 29th Bienal de São Paulo, Palace of Arts, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2011); Commercial Brake, Garage Projects, 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); and Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche New York 2011, New York, NY (2011). Ramo currently lives and works in Spain and Brazil.

ALEXANDER UGAY (b. 1978, Kyzil-Orda, Kazakhstan) graduated from State University of Law, Biskek, Kyrgyzstan (2002), where he founded the creative group Bronepoezd with artist Roman Maskalev in 2000. His artistic practice mainly involves the use of photography and video as a means of exploring and documenting history’s development and influence on modern situations, as well as the notion that provisional life can be compared and cross-referenced between cultures. Ugay’s work has been exhibited internationally in numerous shows and festivals. Recent exhibitions include the Asian Art Biennial, Medi(t)ation, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (2011); Sharjah Biennial 10, UAE (2011); Promises of the Past, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Venice Biennale of Architecture, The Bearable Lightness of Being The Metaphor of Space 2, Italy (2010); New Museum Triennial, The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New York, NY (2009); the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Foundation for Culture and Arts, Turkey (2005). Ugay currently lives and works in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

JONATHAS DE ANDRADE (b. 1982, Maceió, Brazil) graduated from the Universidad Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil, in 2007. Using photography-based research methods, de Andrade explores the social and cultural conditions and contexts of geographical and personal space. His artistic concerns include the dichotomy between the individual and collective memory, expressed in his work by the weaving of artifacts and archival materials of a specific cultural history into fictional narratives characterized by romance and nostalgia. He has exhibited widely, including a solo show at Marcantônio Vilaça, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2012), and several international group exhibitions including the New Museum Triennial, The Ungovernables, New York, NY (2012); the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Foundation for Culture and Arts, Turkey (2011); and Panorama da Arte Brasiliera, Museum of Modern Art, São Paolo, Brazil (2011). He is recipient of the 2012 Marcantônio Vilaça Award and was a PIPA Award Finalist in 2011. De Andrade currently lives and works in Recife, Brazil.

DEANNA BOWEN (b. 1969, Oakland, California) received her BFA in Sculpture from Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (1994), and her MVS (Master of Visual Studies) from the University of Toronto, Canada (1998). Solo exhibitions have been held at numerous galleries in Toronto, including A Space Window Gallery (2010), Women’s Art Resource Centre (2009), as well as multiple shows at Fleishman Gallery (2006 7). Upcoming solo and group exhibitions in Canada will be held at Gallery44 as part of the Images Festival of Independent Film, Video & New Media, Toronto (2012); Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2013); and Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario (2014 15). She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most recently Projections of Home with Penny McCann, Ottawa Art Gallery, Canada (2012).

Bowen has been the recipient of awards, grants, and fellowships including the 2011 Media Arts Research and Production Grant, Canada Council for the Arts, and the 2007 Graduate Fine Arts Fellowship, University of Toronto. She has organized, moderated, and presented multiple artist talks and art events, and contributed to numerous publications including several catalogues and periodicals. Bowen is currently based in Toronto, Canada.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

WOK THE ROCK (b. 1975, Madiun, Indonesia) studied Visual Communication Design at Indonesia Institute of the Arts in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He is a founding member of Ruang MES 56, a Yogyakarta-based nonprofit exhibition space, where he held his first solo exhibition of photographic work in 2003. He has since continued to participate in group exhibitions at Ruang MES 56, often as a member of artist collective MES56.

His works have been included in the CP Biennale, Jakarta, Indonesia (2005); the Yogyakarta Biennale, Indonesia (2003); and the 6th International Digital Art Exhibition and Colloquium, Havana, Cuba (2004). He has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including Codex Code, Kedai Kebun Forum, Indonesia (2010); Common Sense, Galeri Nasional, Indonesia (2009); Secured Area, National Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2009); Let Arts Move You Art Project, KTM Commuter Trains, Malaysia (2007); and Where Troubles Melt Like Lemon Drops, Academie Voor Schone Kunsten Hogeschool, Antwerpen, Belgium (2005), among others.

Wok the Rock was awarded a silver medal at the Cintra Pariwara Ad Festival for his television advertisement Kopi Blandongan in 2005. He currently runs his online record label Yes No Wave Music, as well as produces and distributes Video Battle, a compiled video art periodical. He lives in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

CURATORS

ABDALLAH KARROUM (b. 1970, Morocco) works as a curator, publisher and independent artistic director.

He has organized and co-curated numerous international exhibitions and programs for various institutions including capcMusée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, where he worked from 1993 – 1996; the 2006 DAK’ART Biennial for African Contemporary Art; the Position Papers program in the Gwangju Bienniale 2008 (invited by the artistic director Okwui Enwezor), and the 2009 Marrakech Biennale, among others. Karroum is also a member of the Prince Pierre Monaco Foundation’s Artistic Council for its International Contemporary Art Prize. He is the founder and artistic director of several art projects: his most notable, L’appartement 22, is an experimental collaborative space for exhibitions and artists’ residencies founded in 2002 in Rabat, Morocco; and the Le Bout Du Monde art expeditions, a long term project which has taken place in different locations around the globe since 2000. In 2007 Karroum launched the web radio R22 as an extension of L’appartment 22. Abdellah Karroum is based in Paris and Rabat.

MARIA LIND (b. 1966, Stockholm, Sweden) is director of the Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden, and an independent curator and writer interested in exploring the formats and methodologies connected with the contemporary art institution. She was director of the graduate program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY (2008–10); director of lASPIS, Stockholm (2005–7); and director of the Munich Kunstverein, Germany (2002–4). Previously, she was curator at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (from 1997–2001); and in 1998 was co-curator of Manifesta 2, Europe’s nomadic biennial of contemporary art. Lind was the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. A compendium of her essays, Selected Maria Lind Writing, was published by Sternberg Press (2010).

VIRGINIJA JANUSKEVICIUTE (b. 1979, Šiauliai, Lithuania) is currently curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania, where she has organized numerous projects including The Joy is Not Mentioned (2007), part of an ongoing young Lithuanian artists series, featuring Egle Budvytyte, Goda Budvytyte, and Ieva Miseviciute, and For the First and the Second Time (2008), an exhibition of artists investigating the history of modernism, in collaboration with Stroom, a center for visual arts and architecture based in the Hague, The Netherlands. Current projects include programming the Reading Room, CAC’s venue for talks, discussions, lectures, performances, and presentations as well at curatorial and artistic experimentation.

VERONICA CORDERIRO (b. 1974, São Paulo, Brazil) is a curator and writer based in Montevideo, Uruguay.

She studied Art History at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and has an MA in Visual Anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK. She is a founder of Surcontexto.org, an independent organization devoted to research and curating in context within the field of contemporary South and Latin American art and history. Her ongoing projects include Plato Crítico, an art criticism platform that takes place monthly in different galleries and museums in Montevideo, and Inter/View, an audiovisual project with Dokumental Collective that maps thought-processes through interviews with artists, curators, philosophers, writers, and others. Recent curatorial projects include two survey shows of Brazilian artist and filmmaker Cao Guimarães: Le monde atmosphère, Galerie Xippas, Paris, France (2011), and Inmersión Sensoria, a residency and exhibition, SUBTE, Montevideo (2010); and a six-week residency and exhibition of new work of Rosângela PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE CURATORS Rennó, Montevideo (2011 12). Current projects include an exhibition of new work by Pablo Uribe and a retrospective of Ernesto Vila. Publications include an interview with Rosângela Rennó for BES Photo, Lisbon, Portugal (2012) and an essay on the collective Alonso+craciun for Marcelina, São Paulo, Brazil (2011), as well as numerous catalogue essays and articles in Art Nexus, Arte y Parte, trans>arts.cultures.media, Trópico, and Marcelina, among others.

LEEZA AHMADY (b. Kabul, Afghanistan) is a New York-based independent curator, director of Asian Contemporary Art Week (ACAW), and a dOCUMENTA(13) agent. Ahmady has traveled widely in Central Asia, presenting the largely unknown artists of the region in international art forums such as the Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, and Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong. Ahmady’s notable exhibitions include The Taste of Others, apexart, New York, NY (2005); The Paradox of Polarity: Contemporary Art from Central Asia, Bose Pacia, New York (2007); Parable of the Garden: New Media Art from Iran and Central Asia, College of New Jersey Art Gallery, Ewing (2008); I Dream of the Stans, Winkleman Gallery, New York, and MARTE–Museo de Arte de El Salvador, San Salvador (2008); Tarjama / Translation, Queens Museum of Art, Flushing, New York (2009) and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2010). She is a founding member of a number of nonprofit organizations in the US and Central Asia, such as Center for Contemporary Arts Afghanistan (CCAA).

PABLO LEÓN DE LA BARRA (b. 1972, Mexico City, Mexico) is an exhibition maker, cultural researcher, and independent curator. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London, UK. De la Barra has curated numerous exhibitions internationally, as well as written for many prestigious publications and participated in many symposiums where relevant topics have been discussed. He is editor of his own blog, the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. Pablo León de la Barra is based in London, UK. SRIMOYEE MITRA is a curator and writer. She has written for publications in India such as Time Out Mumbai, Art India—The Art News Magazine of India, and served as artistic director of Ek Aur Level Chalte Chalte: A Festival of Theatre for Change (2006), Mumbai, India. From 2008 11 she was programming coordinator of South Asian Visual Arts Centre (SAVAC) in Toronto, Canada. Srimoyee has participated in conferences including Shift: Dialogues on Migration in Contemporary Art (2011), MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada; and Extra-Curricular: Between Art and Pedagogy, Part I, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, Toronto, Canada. Her curatorial essay “Crossing Lines: An Intercultural Dialogue” (2009) was published in Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the Lens of Cultural Diversity (2011). Her project Changing Stakes: Contemporary Art Dialogues with Dubai (2011) has been listed by Now Magazine as a “Must See” exhibition. Currently she is curator of contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

DAVID TEH (b. 1977, Sydney, Australia) works at the National University of Singapore, in the fields of critical theory and visual culture. His research centers on contemporary art in Southeast Asia. From 2005 9 he was an independent critic and curator based in Bangkok, Thailand. His recent projects have included The More Things Change…, 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2008); Unreal Asia, 55, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Germany (2009); Itineraries, VWFA, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2011); and Video Vortex #7, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2011). Teh’s writings have appeared in Third Text, Art Asia Pacific, LEAP Magazine, Art & Australia, Broadsheet, and The Bangkok Post. He is director of Future Perfect, a new gallery and project platform in Singapore. Teh is based in Sydney, Australia.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PROJECT 35 VOLUME 2 PART 3 OF 4 ARTISTS ELENA DAMIANI, HELEN ZERU, SUN XUN, HEINO SCHMID, ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU, ZBYNĚK BALADRÁN, LARS LAUMANN, JIN-ME YOON, AHMET ÖGÜT CURATORS MARÍA DEL CARMEN CARRIÓN, MESKEREM ASSEGUED, HOU HANRU, CHRISTOPHER COZIER, ÖZGE ERSOY, VÍT HAVRÁNEK, MATS STJERNSTEDT, DAINA AUGAITIS, ADNAN YILDIZ INTRODUCTION In 2010, Independent Curators International (ICI) launched Project 35, a program of single-channel videos selected by 35 international curators who each choose one work from an artist they think is important for audiences around the world to experience today.

The resulting selection was presented simultaneously in more than thirty venues around the globe, inspiring discourse in places as varied as Skopje, Macedonia; Lagos, Nigeria; Tirana, Albania; Cape Town, South Africa; Storrs, Connecticut; New Orleans, Louisiana; Berlin, Germany; Los Angeles, California; and Taipei, Taiwan.

The diversity of venues mimics the list of participating curators, whose selections reflect their current interests and research, and most often their local regions. Collaborating with and drawing from various international perspectives and universally sharing ideas is core to ICI’s mission. What better way to do so than through an exhibition of video, which is one of the most important and far-reaching mediums for contemporary artists today? Though

surprisingly still absent or not adequately understood in many institutions, video art offers broad access and connection to artists’ works and ideas. Video, which has been in existence even longer than ICI, is the ideal medium for increasing the visibility of international artistic practices and expanding networks.

Traveling video art is not new to ICI. Video Art USA, curated in 1975 by Jack Boulton (then director of the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio) and Suzanne Delehanty (then director of the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) was the first exhibition organized by ICI and was the first international video art exhibition to tour Latin America, providing an important bridge between the Latin American and Euro-American art worlds.

With Project 35: Volume 2, ICI again draws from its extensive network of curators to trace the complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners and the variety of approaches they use to make video. The works presented in this volume, produced between 2001 and 2012, explore the contemporary concerns of international curators.

Many focus on memory and change; notions of place and identity; fiction and history; and performance and documentation. Though the works are rooted in the artists’ homelands and derive from personal experience, their impact resonates globally.

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ELENA DAMIANI INTERSTICIO, 2012 Single-channel color video, with sound 5 min., 25 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by MARÍA DEL CARMEN CARRIÓN

In Intersticio Elena Damiani builds a narrative evocative of travel, the passing of time, and the adjustments the body must make in response to changing perceptions resulting from transitory conditions. The video presents a series of images taken from digital archives arranged as a type of travelogue. By presenting this information in the form of a stream-of-consciousness narrative recounting, the artist points to the physical and psychological limits the subject faces when structuring experience. The image-language relationship generates fissures that relate to extra-discursive incidents that leave an inscription in the body; intensities that memory tries to recover.

—María del Carmen Carrión

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

HELEN ZERU MEMORY BACK AND FORTH, 2011 Single-channel color video, with sound 12 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by MESKEREM ASSEGUED

This three-part video uses a documentary approach to tell a personal story. In 1997, Helen Zeru’s mother died and was buried in a public cemetery. Fifteen years later, the government decided to use the land occupied by the cemetery for new construction. Zeru and her family were told to exhume her mother’s remains and move them to a different cemetery site. The video is about the artist’s reaction to this calamity as well as the pain people feel who are affected by current land resettlement plans. This situation is not unique to Ethiopia; it happens all over the world. I chose the work because of its geopolitical nature and its contemporary context.

It is raw, but addresses a timely issue in a very personal way.

—Meskerem Assegued

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

SUN XUN 21KE, 2010 Single-channel video with grayscale animation and sound 27 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by HOU HANRU

Sun Xun is a Beijing-based young artist who grew up in the post-revolution era, during which China has fervently embraced the seemingly contradictory alliance of neo-liberal capitalism and social controls. This alliance is both reasonable and efficient, given that these ideologies are in reality the incarnations of bio-political manipulations of our daily lives by those in power. Sun Xun has concentrated on revisiting and subverting official versions of history, especially the established narrative of the making of the nation-state, inquiring into the reality that supports established authorities. Rather than confront directly the authority’s control, censorship, and repression of society as was done by earlier artists, Sun Xun pursues his interrogations in an impassionate, distant, enduring, and metaphysical manner. He uses traditional hand-made techniques to produce site-specific installations that blend drawing, painting, and animation to express his mistrust of History. He has invented an alter ego of History, the magician that haunts all of his amazing animations, who forges falsehoods to replace reality. “Magicians are the authority! A lie is the truth! And it’s cheap!” 21 KE incorporates the results of his decade-long investigations. In this video, the soul (supposedly weighing 21g, or ke in Chinese) flies away from a body. The soulless body, following the conjuring stick of the magician, is plunged into a black hole of History: “History is a circle, irregular but relatively standard round. It is full of regrets, and pi is not a true formula anymore; any revolution is a lame compass, keeps turning ungratefully, and ends up with nothing.”

—Hou Hanru

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

HEINO SCHMID TEMPORARY HORIZONS, 2009 Single-channel color video, with sound 1 min., 42 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by CHRISTOPHER COZIER

temporary horizons documents the moment when the artist gets one empty beer bottle to balance on the neck of another lying on its side. Whether viewing the sequence or only hearing its sound from nearby, every time the bottle falls we either exhale or smile, being relieved of that quiet anxiety created by the anticipation of its tumble. The repeated gesture and its sound produce a cyclical rhythm. We begin to realize that there is a small amount of water in the standing bottle, which acts like a level. The actual gesture, performed and documented, infers a sleight of hand.

Heino Schmid, an artist from Nassau, conceived of this project while exploring Port of Spain at night and becoming intrigued by a street hustler’s performance of balancing beer bottles for tips from the patrons of a popular bar. He recreated the beer bottle balancing act in a colleague’s studio in London as his project for the Liverpool Biennial, to which he had been invited as a participant in the Caribbean section. It was a feat made visible as a kind of “cultural display”; a conceptual commentary on the predicament he shares with many from the Caribbean and elsewhere of being pigeonholed, expected to fulfill conventional expectations, to perform the “conditions of visibility.” In the “sterile space” of the gallery, Schmid recreated the gesture stripped or “rinsed” of all its potentially “exotic references to place.” The work takes on a sly tone of defiance touched with a mischievous sense of humor. It speaks about the formal act of making and also the context in which the artist may occasionally have to function—the artist is not making an object but a moment.

While I remain intrigued by the experience of viewing the work and all that it critically opens up and condenses, I am also fascinated by the journey from Alice Yard in Port of Spain to Blue Curry’s studio in London, and subsequently to Liverpool. Along each step of the journey the project—conceptually and physically—is constantly reforming. As Schmid moves between locations, the presentation changes as a result of engaging with other artists. Thus, it is a collaborative process that brings together a number people and places, and it is mobile, unlike the static idea of locating and isolating artists within a traditional framing, as in the Caribbean section of the biennial.

—Christopher Cozier

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU IN DIVERSE ESTIMATIONS LITTLE MOSCOW, 2011 Single-channel color video, with sound 12 min., 45 sec.

Courtesy of the artist and NON, Istanbul; commissioned

by BORUSAN A.Ş.

Selected by ÖZGE ERSOY

In Diverse Estimations Little Moscow is a video collage of fragmented, loosely connected vignettes that capture the memories of a brutal military operation in Fatsa, a coastal town in Northern Turkey, two months before the 1980 coup d’état. The video is made in Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s documentary style. Her meticulous research is reminiscent of a social scientist’s, yet does not relay the history of the event or any claims of truth. Instead, she brings together people, places, and objects that are suggested or associated with the incident—including hiding spots in the forest, informer’s masks, revolutionary songs, banned books, and dilapidated warehouses where locals were interrogated and tortured thirty years ago. Using abstracted and seemingly disconnected stories, Çavuşoğlu creates a personal narrative of written and oral histories as well as of personal memories—however obstructed they may be.

—Özge Ersoy

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ZBYNĚK BALADRÁN 40.000.000, 2010 Single-channel color video, with sound 7 min., 23 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by VÍT HAVRÁNEK

40.000.000 is a sort of “lamentation” about the current state of the world—the lack of order and economic and social organization. The title references a book written in the 1930s by a shoe manufacturer, Jan Bata, as a type of manifesto of effective organization and Ford-type production. In the film, Zbyněk Baladrán draws a subjective link between the capitalistic logic of production and the exploration of subjective human desire, sometimes through an existentialist perspective. What interests me (besides the subjective) is its filmic quality—the gap between the text (or speech) and the moving image that, in certain moments, according to the intuition of the spectator, flashes in a moment of understanding or connection between what is spoken and what is seen.

—Vít Havránek

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

LARS LAUMANN THE… (HELGA LETTERS), 2012 Single-channel black-and-white video, silent 3 min., 19 sec.

Courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley, London Selected by MATS STJERNSTEDT

Norwegian artist Lars Laumann is trained in photography and printmaking, but in his recent practice has focused primarily on film-making. Themes of obsession, fandom, love and devotion loom large in his work.

He is particularly interested in the experiences of marginalised groups, ‘outsiders’, and the ways in which they are perceived by the wider community… Laumann is drawn to stories of unusual and remote objects of love or fascination. He examines the internal work that goes into the construction of emotional attachments, and the boundaries between personal and social belief systems. He trains his gaze on these phenomena without appearing to assume a critical or analytical stance. Nor does he present them as merely ‘interesting’ Warholian or anthropological exotica. Instead he seems to be genuinely involved with his subjects; improbably, he creates a space in which we can share his ingenuous fascination.

—Artist Profile for the 2012 Liverpool Biennial

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

JIN-ME YOON THE DREAMING COLLECTIVE KNOWS NO HISTORY (U.S. EMBASSY TO JAPANESE EMBASSY, SEOUL), 2008 Single-channel HD video, with sound 18 min., 7 sec.

Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery Selected by DAINA AUGAITIS

Jin-Me Yoon is an established Vancouver artist who has contributed vastly to discussions of place and identity. This video is the first in an ongoing series in which the artist “crawls” from one location to another. In The Dreaming Collective Knows No History (U.S. Embassy to Japanese Embassy, Seoul), she traverses the distance from the American Embassy to the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, the city of her birth. Lying prone on a moving platform, she laboriously advances along the few city blocks between the sites of two political powers, each of which have deeply impacted Korea’s history. Yoon’s strange yet vulnerable actions interrupt the normal flow of cars, police, and people, leaving the viewer to make associations between national history, world powers, memory, and the place of the specific, gendered body in this ever-changing globalized world.

—Daina Augaitis

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

AHMET ÖĞÜT SHORT CIRCUIT, 2006 Single-channel color video, with sound 3 min., 32 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by ADNAN YILDIZ

Short Circuit is not only three minutes and thirty-two seconds long, it is as long as you play it. It continues in time and space like a video on repeat. In the video, we first hear the voices of children playing football, and then see the bodies of these children at play on a dark street. They are illuminated by the headlights of the passing cars, each time revealing the children in different positions. Place and time come together in this moment that is delineated by the possibility of an accident; we feel concern for the safety of the children at play and the laws that regulate traffic and help define the city. This is the challenge of modernity. The asphalt, here a metaphor for Western civilization, operates both as a playground and an automotive highway, with the ever-present possibility of accidents. It is not in the West, but is westernized. Ahmet Ögüt has created an atmosphere that is both global and specific; sometimes it turns into a thriller, and sometimes it creates a sense of flashback, both to our collective unconscious and to our childhood dreams. These two psychological states exist together. The music of life never stops, it is like a children’s song composed of dark images and happy voices. The title is yours.

—Adnan Yildiz

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ARTISTS ELENA DAMIANI (b. 1979, Lima, Peru) received a BA in Architecture from Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas UPC (1999) and a BA in Fine Arts from Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna (2005), both in Lima, Peru, and an MFA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK (2010). She employs both architecture and fine art to address such issues as geographical ruins, mortality, memory, and the societal obsession with archiving and museumization. Damiani has exhibited internationally in both solo shows and group exhibitions at many venues such as Revolver Galeria, Lima (2012); Cologne Contemporaries, Germany (2012); Selma Feriani Gallery, London (2011); and Arroniz Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico City, Mexico (2011), among others. Damiani has been the recipient of multiple awards and honors including Second Prize at the 9th French Peruvian Competition of Visual Arts, “Pasaporte para un Arista,” Culturel center Pontifica Universidad Católica PUCP, Lima (2006); a Special Mention for Video Creation at the 12th International Arts and Digital Cultures Festival of Gran Canaria, “Canarias Media Fest,” Centro Gran Canaria Espacio Digital, Las Palmas, Canary Islands (2006); and the Production Prize at the 2nd Peruvian Video and Electronic Arts Competition, Spanish Cultural Center, Lima (2004). Damiani currently lives and works in London, UK. HELEN ZERU (b. 1987, Addis Abeba, Ethiopia) recieved her BFA from the Addis Abeba University School of Fine Arts, Ethiopia, in 2008. Zeru primarily works with photographic mediums and is actively involved in art therapy practices. She has exhibited at international venues including the the Goethe-Institut Addis Abeba (2012); Alliance Ethio-Francaise, Addis-Ababa (2011); and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, Chicago, IL (2010). She is the Photography and Documentation Officer of the Netsa Art Village, an artist collective that strives toward the establishment of a Living Museum of Modern Art in Ethiopia, as well as toward stimulating creative thought and practice within the Ethiopian contemporary art community. She recently served on the jury panel for the 1st Addis Rumble Photo Contest, Moving Ethiopia, Addis-Abeba (2012); and is actively involved with DESTA for Africa, a nonprofit cultural organization dedicated to photographic training and education of aspiring Ethiopian photographers and artists.

SUN XUN (b. 1980, Fuxin, China) studied Printmaking at the China Academy of Fine Arts. Shortly after graduating, he started the animation studio Pi, creating meticulous animations that combine hand-drawn renderings and traditional materials with new techniques and media. Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented internationally at venues including ShanghART, Beijing, China (2011); Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland (2010); and the Drawing Center, New York, NY (2009). His work has been exhibited and screened at numerous group shows and festivals, including Yokohama 2011, International Triennial of Contemporary Art, Yokohama, Japan (2011); Shenzhen International Ink Art Biennale, China (2010); FIAC 2010, Art Fairs Grand Palais, Paris, France (2010); 10th Transmediale Festival, Berlin, Germany (2010); and Shahzia Sikander & Sun Xun, Freer and Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (2009), among others. Sun Xun is currently based in Hangzhou, China.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS HEINO SCHMID (b. 1976, The Bahamas) studied Fine Art at the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design, The Netherlands, and Photography at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Georgia. Schmid uses a variety of media such as video, drawing, installation, and photography to investigate the encounters between people and their environment—the personal and the public. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at The Hub, Naussau, The Bahamas (2011); Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad (2010); and PRO Gallery, Naussau, The Bahamas (2009). Schmid has participated in selected group shows including Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC (2011); The Fourth National Exhibition, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, The Bahamas (2008); and Funky Nassau: Recovering an Identity, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany (2006). His work was included in the Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010). Schmid has been the recipient of numerous awards including The Commonwealth Connections International Residency Award in 2009 and the Endowment for the Arts Award for Graduate Studies in 2005. Additionally, Schmid is a lecturing professor at the School of Communication and Creative Arts at the College of the Bahamas, and Co-exhibitions Director of Popopstudios Centre for the Visual Arts, Naussau, The Bahamas. Schmid currently lives and works in Nassau, The Bahamas.

ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU (b. 1982, Istanbul, Turkey) received her BFA in Cinema and Television from the Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey (2004). Çavuşoğlu works in a variety of media including video, photography, installation, and artists’ books. Her recent solo exhibitions include How I traveled around the world, Gallery NON (2010), and The Magificent Seven, Kargart (2006), both in Istanbul. She has exhibited internationally at such venues as La Box, Bourgesm, France (2011); NGBK and Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2010); the Musem of Health and Sciences, Bogota, Colombia (2009); and Galery Loop, Seoul, South Korea (2009). Çavuşoğlu has created several artists’ books including Teslim 6/Delivery 6 (2009), In Patagonia after Bruce Chatwin (2009), The Unsubscribed Life of Peter Bose (2007), and A Slight Hesitation of Petra Nacht (2007), among others. In addition to creating and exhibiting her work, she has contributed to multiple publications such as Art Lies, Siyahi Magazine, Pist Protta, and XXI Magazine. Aslı Çavuşoğlu currently lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.

ZBYNĚK BALADRÁN (b. 1973, Prague, Czech Republic) studied Art History at the Charles University Philosophical Faculty in Prague, and Visual Communication at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts, both Czech Republic. He is a visual artist, curator, and author. Baladrán has presented solo exhibitions at international venues including Kunstverein Milano, Milan, Italy (2011); Tranzit workshops, Bratislava, Slovakia (2009); Hunt Kastner Artworks, Prague, Czech Republic (2008); and Castillo/Corrales, Paris, France (2008). He has participated in group exhibitions including State of Affairs: Spaces Through Ideological Appropriation, AMT Project, Bratislava (2012); From the closed world to the infinite universe, Le Quartier, Quimper, France (2012); and the 11th Lyon Biennial, A Terrible Beauty Was Born, France (2011), among others. In 2001 Baladrán co-founded Galerie display, which in 2007 was merged with Tranzit.cz into Tranzitdisplay, where he currently oversees the exhibition program. He co-curated, along with several other curatorial collectives, the European contemporary art biennial Manifesta 8, which was held from October 2010 to January 2011 in several locations around southeast Spain. Baladrán currently lives and works in Prague, Czech Republic.

LARS LAUMANN (b. 1975, Brønnøysund, Norway) graduated from the Norwegian State Academy, Oslo, in 2001. Laumann’s video-based works, ranging from multimedia video installations to documentaries, often focus on situations and figures that are considered marginal to society and explore the notion of alternative realities and histories. His conceptually intricate and sometimes morally challenging works have been screened and exhibited internationally at fairs and group shows including the Liverpool Biennial, Touched, PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS UK (2010); Free, New Museum, New York, NY (2010); and the 5th Berlin Biennial, Germany (2008). In addition to his New York solo debut at Foxy Production, Kari & Knut, a fictional narrative underlined by the phenomenon of cryptomnesia (the experiencing of a memory as a new and original thought or idea), he has held solo exhibitions at Gallery West, the Hague, The Netherlands (2011); Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland (2010); Maureen Paley, London, UK (2010), Bunkier Sztuki, Kraków, Poland (2010); and Foxy Production, New York (2010), among others. In 2009 he was awarded the Statoil Art Prize. Laumann currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

JIN-ME YOON (b. 1960, Seoul, South Korea) received her BFA from Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada, in 1990, and her MFA from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, in 1992. Her artistic practice primarily involves the use of video and photographic media to address, among other issues, the complexities of identity, displacement, and memory in an era increasingly characterized by globalization and multi-nationality. Her work has been exhibited and screened both nationally and internationally at numerous events and venues such as the Aichi Trienniale, Nagoya, Japan (2010); Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, France (2008); and Videonale, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany (2007). She has authored, contributed to, and been the subject of numerous books, catalogues, and articles. Her project Beneath premiered in the summer of 2012 at Vancouver Art Gallery. Yoon lives and works in Vancouver, Canada, teaching at the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

AHMET ÖGÜT (b. 1981, Diyarbakir, Turkey) received his BA from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey in 2003 and his MA from Yildiz Teknik University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2006. Ögüt works in a variety of media such as video, photography, installation, and printed media. His recent solo exhibitions include Modern Essays 1: Across the Slope, Istanbul, Turkey (2011); Stones to throw, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2011); and Once upon a time a clock-watcher during overtime hours, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Italy (2011), among others. He has exhibited in a number of group shows and fairs, most recently the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Foundation for Culture and Arts, Turkey (2011); the 4th Moscow Biennial, Rewriting Worlds, Russia (2011); the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung, Taiwan (2011); Performa 09, New York, NY (2009); and he corepresented Turkey in the 53rd Venice Biennale, Italy (2009). Ögüt was awarded the Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs (Volkskant Fine Art Prize) in 2011 for his video Guppy 13 vs. Ocean Wave, A Bas Jan Ader Experience, in which he restaged the ill-fated 1975 boat trip across the Atlantic made by artist Bas Jan Ader.

He was also awarded the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft (Art Prize: Future of Europe), in 2010, in recognition of his artistic achievement. He has completed several international artist residencies and contributed to numerous publications. Ögüt currently lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

CURATORS MARÍA DEL CARMEN CARRIÓN is the manager of Public Programs and Research at ICI. Prior to this, she was an independent curator and art critic based in Quito, Ecuador. She received an MA from the Curatorial Practice Program at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and taught at Universidad Católica in Quito. She co-founded Constructo /, an international collective platform devoted to research and debate of art and visual culture, with whom she produced the book Circuitos de Flujo: Arte y Política (2012). Since 2009 she has been a member of the curatorial college of ceroinspiración, an exhibition and residency space in Quito. Recent projects include The Life of Objetcs, VOGT Gallery, New York (2011); Materia Prima, 8th Bienal de Mercosur, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2011); Otros Fueros, a collaboration with Tercerunquinto, EACC, Castelló, Spain (2011); Historias Fugaces, LABoral, Gijón, Spain (2011); and The Nature of Things, Biennial of the Americas, Denver, CO (2010). Former positions include Associate Curator at New Langton Arts in San Francisco and Research Coordinator for Museo de la Ciudad in Quito.

MESKEREM ASSEGUED (Addis Abeba, Ethiopia) is an anthropologist, curator, and writer. In 2002 she founded ZCAC (Zoma Contemporary Art Center), an artist residency located in Addis Ababa and Harla, a small village south of Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Over the last 16 years, Meskerem has curated numerous exhibitions both in Ethiopia and abroad. These include Giziawi #1, an art happening in Addis Ababa (2002); Devine Light by David Hammons at ZCAC (2003); Green Flame with Elias Sime, Ernesto Novelo, and Julie Mehretu; and the co-curated Eye of the Needle, Eye of the Heart by Elias Sime with Peter Sellars (2009).

She was a member of the selection committee for the 2004 Dak’Art Biennale and the 2007 Venice Biennale African Pavilion. She is currently doing research for an upcoming exhibition she will curate at the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dredsen in Dresden, Germany.

HOU HANRU (b. 1963, Guangzhou, China) is a Paris- and San Francisco-based critic and curator. He is director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and chair of Exhibition and Museum Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. He is currently curating the 5th Auckland Triennial in New Zealand (2013). Hanru has curated numerous exhibitions across the world. His most recent major curatorial projects include the 10th Biennale de Lyon, France (2009), and the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Foundation for Culture and Arts, Turkey (2007), among others. He has taught and lectured in many international institutions. He frequently contributes to art publications, and has served as a jury member for many international art awards and competitions, as well as served as advisor for numerous international institutions.

CHRISTOPHER COZIER (b. 1959, Port of Spain, Trinidad) is an artist and writer living and working in Trinidad. He is a member of the editorial collective of Small Axe, A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Cozier was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2004. He is co-director of Alice Yard, which was part of the Global Africa Project at MAD. in New York, NY. Cozier was joint curator of Wrestling with the Image, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington DC (2011). Editions of his prints have been produced and exhibited

by David Krut Projects in New York and Johannesburg, SA. He has exhibited in the 5th and 7th Havana Biennials (1994; 2000); Infinite Island, Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2007); the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE CURATORS San Juan, América Latina y el Caribe, Puerto Rico (2009); Rockstone and Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT (2009); and AFRO MODERN, Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool, UK (2010). ÖZGE ERSOY (b. 1984, Istanbul, Turkey) is a curator and writer based in Istanbul, Turkey. An alumna of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY, Özge has worked in the curatorial departments of various nonprofits in New York, Istanbul, and Cairo, and currently works as the project manager at Collectorspace, a New York-based nonprofit that opened its first space in Istanbul in September 2011. In 2010 Özge edited and self-published How to Begin? Envisioning the Impact of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Her writings have been included in Modern Painters, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Domus, Ararat Magazine, Nafas Magazine, and Bidoun, among others.

VÍT HAVRÁNEK (b. 1971, Prague, Czech Republic) is a theoretician and organizer based in Prague, Czech Republic. Since 2002 he has been working as director of the contemporary art initiative Tranzit.cz. Since 2007, the year he co-founded Tranzitdisplay, a resource center for contemporary art, he has since been lecturing on contemporary art at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. He serves as an associate editor of JRP | Ringier art publisher, and was a member of Tranzit.org, one of the three curatorial teams for the European contemporary art biennial Manifesta 8, which was held from October 2010 to January 2011 in several locations around southeast Spain. Additionally, he has curated and co-curated exhibitions including Monument to Transformation, City Gallery Praguem Prague, Czech Republic (2007-10); and tranzit–Auditorium, Stage, Backstage, I, series of exhibitions in three acts, Frankfurter Kunstverein, (2006). He has edited and co-edited Atlas to Transformation (JRP|Ringier, 2011), Jiří Skála (JRP|Ringier, 2011), Kateřina Šedá (JRP|Ringier, 2008), Jan Mančuška (JRP|Ringier/Tranzit series, 2007), Jiří Kovanda (JRP|Ringier/Tranzit series, 2007), and others such as Autobiographies (Revolver Books, Secession Wien, tranzit.c, 2006); The Need to Document (Zurich: JRP|Ringier, 2005); Lanterna Magika (PUBLISHER, 2002); and action, word, movement, space (PUBLISHER, 1999). Havránek has written for books and catalogues including Manifesta 8 (Silvana Editoriale, 2010); Promesses du passé (Praha: Kant, 2002); Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, CCS Bard, 2008); Voids (Centre Pompidou, Kunstalle Bern, 2009); Right About Now (Valiz, 2007); and Yves Klein (Centre Pompidou, Springer Wien, New York, 2007), among others.

MATS STJERNSTEDT (b. 1968 in Gävle, Sweden) studied Art History at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.

He has worked as a curator and art critic, and is currently serving as artistic director at Kunstnernes Hus, in Oslo. Stjernstedt has curated and co-curated many exhibitions and projects including Oslo Contemporary Art Exhibition 2011: Akram Zaatari, Composition for Two Wings, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, Norway, CODE SHARE 2009 (as part of “Vilnius — European Capital of Culture 2009”), Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania 2009, Maria Lindberg (a retrospective), Futura Center for Contemporary Art, Prague, Czech Republic, 2009, and Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale, Dakar, Senegal, 2008. He has worked with such prominent European Institutions as Turku Art Museum, Turku, Finland, Tranzit, Prague, Czech Republic, and Kunsthalle Bern, Berne, Switzerland, among many others. He has written art criticism for such notable publications as ArtForum, Flash Art, and Art + Text. Stjernstedt is currently living in Sweden.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE CURATORS DAINA AUGAITIS (b. Canada) has been chief curator/associate director at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, since 1996, where she plays a key role in shaping the museum’s exhibition program and building its collections. In the last decade she has organized solo exhibitions of artists such as Rebecca Belmore, Stan Douglas, Brian Jungen, Song Dong, Ian Wallace, Gillian Wearing, Paul Wong, and Yang Fudong, and thematic exhibitions that have featured works that are socially based. She was formerly director of the Visual Arts Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, where she organized residencies for artists and curators, and has held curatorial positions at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Alberta, Canada, Western Front, Vancouver, Canada, Convertible Showroom, Vancouver, Canada, and Franklin Furnace, New York, New York. She recently curated the exhibition Muntadas: Entre/Between at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain, touring to Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal, and Jeu de Paume, Paris, France.

ADNAN YILDIZ (b. 1979, Turkey) has been the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany, since January 2011. Recently he has been developing a series of solo projects entitled Artistic Dialogues focusing on artistic methodologies. He is mostly interested in the presence of the audience in an exhibition situation, and works with process-oriented approaches. Yildiz is based in Stuttgart, Germany.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PROJECT 35 VOLUME 2 PART 4 OF 4 ARTISTS IVANA MÜLLER, JENNY PERLIN, SONA SAFAEI, ANNEMARIE JACIR, MICHAEL BLUM AND DAMIR NIKŠIĆ, REYNIER LEYVA NOVO, PARK CHANKYONG, BASIM MAGDY, MARWA ARSANIOS CURATORS NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ, REGINE BASHA, AMIRALI GHASEMI, SHARMINI PEREIRA, DEFNE AYAS, YANDRO MIRALLES, SUN JUNG KIM, NAT MULLER, CHRISTINE TOHME INTRODUCTION In 2010, Independent Curators International (ICI) launched Project 35, a program of single-channel videos selected by 35 international curators who each choose one work from an artist they think is important for audiences around the world to experience today.

The resulting selection was presented simultaneously in more than thirty venues around the globe, inspiring discourse in places as varied as Skopje, Macedonia; Lagos, Nigeria; Tirana, Albania; Cape Town, South Africa; Storrs, Connecticut; New Orleans, Louisiana; Berlin, Germany; Los Angeles, California; and Taipei, Taiwan.

The diversity of venues mimics the list of participating curators, whose selections reflect their current interests and research, and most often their local regions. Collaborating with and drawing from various international perspectives and universally sharing ideas is core to ICI’s mission. What better way to do so than through an exhibition of video,

which is one of the most important and far-reaching mediums for contemporary artists today? Though surprisingly still absent or not adequately understood in many institutions, video art offers broad access and connection to artists’ works and ideas. Video, which has been in existence even longer than ICI, is the ideal medium for increasing the visibility of international artistic practices and expanding networks.

Traveling video art is not new to ICI. Video Art USA, curated in 1975 by Jack Boulton (then director of the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio) and Suzanne Delehanty (then director of the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) was the first exhibition organized by ICI and was the first international video art exhibition to tour Latin America, providing an important bridge between the Latin American and Euro-American art worlds.

With Project 35: Volume 2, ICI again draws from its extensive network of curators to trace the complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners and the variety of approaches they use to make video. The works presented in this volume, produced between 2001 and 2012, explore the contemporary concerns of international curators.

Many focus on memory and change; notions of place and identity; fiction and history; and performance and documentation. Though the works are rooted in the artists’ homelands and derive from personal experience, their impact resonates globally.

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

IVANA MÜLLER YOU ARE THERE BUT I CANNOT SEE YOU, 2007 Single-channel color video, with sound 15 min., 13 sec.

Courtesy of the artist, originally commissioned by La Porta, Barcelona Permanently available on the Internet Selected by NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ

Choreographic artist Ivana Müller develops performative concepts that play with what it means to be a spectator, both individually and collectively, within theater’s relationship to time. The question of an “invention of self,” the relation of the body to its representation (especially on stage), of the imaginary and imagination, is at the heart of her research. You Are There But I Cannot See You addresses absence, presence, and “other strategies that make theater theaters and Internet Internet” (I. Müller) literally, in the way the artist herself is set up. The video uses the protocols and techniques of online chat, in which we follow a choreography that develops in our minds while reading what is written by the artist. At the end of the video, absence and presence are further confronted when the artist faces the camera and talks to us directly, making language more potent with the ambiguity of the artist addressing the subjectivity of “you,” a concept that is both individual and collective at the same time.

—Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

JENNY PERLIN DUST OF SNOW, 2009 16mm color and black-and-white film transferred to DVD, with sound 6 min., 45 sec.

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie M+R Fricke, Berlin Selected by Regine Basha

Jenny Perlin is one of the few artists I know who has been using film—specifically 16mm film—and drawing to create a kind of concrete poetry. The timing, use of language, and call for perceptual and aural attention in her videos mimic the experience of concrete poetry (without necessarily looking like it stylistically). Her films unravel like a thought process and present the experience of faulty memory about an elusive event in history, whether overlooked or misread. Her treatment of personal history seems to be from the position of a witness—to a time, a place, a set of circumstances—and to figures who have helped shaped her own view of the world. But, as always, her presence is subtle, nearly invisible, and understood through the veil of an intensely human experience. In Dust of Snow, one of my favorite works, Perlin explores a stylistic trope in the poetry of Robert Frost, allowing it to become the storyteller for a childhood memory about early systems of logic.

—Regine Basha

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

SONA SAFAEI ALPHABET, 2010 Single-channel color video, with sound 1 min., 30 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by AMIRALI GHASEMI

Originally from Tehran, the Toronto-based artist Sona Safaei has moved from drawing and painting to a series of text-based performative multimedia works. She often incorporates language, using Persian and English as two scripts that confront each other from opposing sides, a dynamic that Safaei explores both conceptually and formally. It is rare to come across a moment when an artist can express a thousand words with such a minimal and simple act as scribbling the letters of the alphabet alone.

Alphabet is a two-channel handwritten journey, from left to right and from right to left. Safaei filmed her hand writing the alphabet both in her mother language of Persian and her adopted language of English.

Being aware of their polarity, she moves them toward each other in a delicate performance, revealing how the contemporary condition of two distinct contexts can meet and coexist in a traveler’s personal journey. —Amirali Ghasemi

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ANNEMARIE JACIR A FEW CRUMBS FOR THE BIRDS, 2005 Single-channel color video, with sound 28 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by SHARMINI PEREIRA

A Few Crumbs for the Birds follows the lives of a small group of people eking out a living in the Jordanian town of Ruwayshe, a small-time oil-smuggling community on the border with Iraq. Without sentimentality or judgment, Annemarie Jacir’s film captures the relationships between the handful of men and women of Rowayshe and the passing truckers. The truckers transport oil and other materials as they travel to and from Iraq and in return are provided food and lodging. The interdependence of one community on the other appears surreal, at times unfair, but ultimately exists in harmony. The meager existence of the villagers in this barren desert outpost is a poignant portrait of humanity’s ability to survive within the cracks of opportunity and oppression. But just as the film brings the realities of this micro-economy to our attention, it also brings about its demise. Authorities closed down the township when news of the film’s content reached them. Brittle reality crumbles. A Few Crumbs for the Birds represents one of those rare and extraordinary works of art that manages to define and redefine a genre, raising implications about art’s responsibility to tell and bear witness.

—Sharmini Pereira

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

MICHAEL BLUM AND DAMIR NIKŠIĆ ORIENTAL DREAM, 2010 Single-channel color video, with sound 7 min., 30 sec.

Courtesy of the artists and Blind Dates project Selected by DEFNE AYAS

Michael Blum invited Damir Nikšić to create a project tackling the ruins of the Ottoman Empire from Bosnia to Palesrael. They turned their attention to the question of how Ottoman institutions, centralized in Istanbul, could provide a blanket solution to the many conflicts taking place on former Ottoman territory, from the Balkans to Palesrael and Iraq—an extreme version of a “One State” solution, to speak in Middle-Eastern terms. They quickly began discussing Orientalism, as well as Western accounts of “Oriental” life—particularly accounts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that are full of fascination, estrangement, and condescension. There are many examples of such representations in Western popular culture, particularly in literature (from Albert d’Aix’s chronicle of the First Crusade to Rebecca West’s trip to Yugoslavia), music (The Four Lads’s “Istanbul not Constantinople”), and film (Lawrence of Arabia). What interests the artists is how these long-lasting clichés are crafted and quietly enforced, and the humor that arises from the cracks and crevices within them, as well as the “Oriental Dream” that resulted from this exploration—a whimsical critique of Orientalism with its traces still present throughout the imminent landscape. Taking the fate of Ottoman headgear—the fez—as a clichéd sign of the now-defunct empire, Blum and Nikšić crafted a short film where the two artists perform a duet reminiscent of a Laurel and Hardy sketch. It depicts a staged chase that takes place in and out of the maze-like cobblestoned alleys of Sarajevo, parodying the oddities of contrived divides and superimposed contradictions. The resulting video, Oriental Dream, sketches “business as usual” in contemporary geo-politics that continues to perpetuate ruptures.

This film was initially commissioned for the Blind Dates, a curatorial platform, which departs from the premise that the empire’s abrupt rupture and its various reformulations into nation-states have their lingering effects on life to this day. Blind Dates was founded and co-curated by Neery Melkonian and myself.

—Defne Ayas

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

REYNIER LEYVA NOVO EL PATRIOTA INVISIBLE (THE INVISIBLE PATRIOT), 2007 Single-channel color video, with sound 8 min., 45 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by YANDRO MIRALLES

The real Patriot hides not behind any image.

He just is. And what he is, it’s invisible.

—Reynier Leyva Novo The Invisible Patriot is inspired by “La Bayamesa,” the Cuban national anthem composed by Perucho Figueredo in 1867. The video shows a guitar player who, though barely visible, offers a personal interpretation of the musical composition. Reynier Leyva Novo often uses the study of history, denying its alleged objectivity and showing how susceptible it is to being understood, expressed, and even manipulated as part of a personal discourse. He defends the idea of history as an interpretation, distanced from the unifying official speeches that so often deny individual understanding. In The Invisible Patriot, the war cry of “La Bayamesa” disappears, and in its place is an intimate and poetic melody. Is there only one way to understand and express patriotism?

The Invisible Patriot responds to this question, announcing that the essence of patriotism might be found, not in the visual appeal of its exterior, but in the intangible nuances of its emotions.

—Yandro Miralles

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

PARK CHAN-KYONG FLYING, 2005 Single-channel color video, with sound 13 min.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by SUN JUNG KIM

“In June 2000, after fifty years of division, the first North-South summit took place. For the first time since the war, a direct flight between the two Koreas was inaugurated. President Kim Dae-jung and the South Korean delegation flew from Seoul to Pyongyang. At that time, I was given sponsorship by a TV station to do something with the unedited source footage of this event. . . . The video’s soundtrack is taken from the beginning of the renowned composer Isang Yun’s 1977 Double Concerto, which was inspired by the myth of the tragic lovers Gyeonu and Jiknyeo in Korean folklore. According to the myth, the King of Heaven punishes the couple’s lack of diligence by stranding one of them on a star in the west and the other on a star in the east. The couple, using first the Milky Way to bridge the distance, and then, when the King puts an end to this ruse, using a bridge of birds who take pity on them, succeeds in reuniting for one day a year, on July 7. Yun compared this myth to North-South relations.”

Excerpted from the artist’s statement “Flying (for Premiere)” —Sun Jung Kim

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

BASIM MAGDY MY FATHER LOOKS FOR AN HONEST CITY, 2010 Super 8 color film transferred to HD video, with sound 5 min., 28 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by NAT MULLER

My Father Looks for an Honest City combines the search for an unknown quest with a subcutaneous political commentary. Shot in the desolate urban no-man’s-land on the outskirts of Cairo, where the advertised promises of utopic gated communities abut the broken realities and informal architecture of the poor, Basim Magdy films his father carrying a flashlight in broad daylight. In a reenactment of the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope’s cynical and performative gesture of carrying a lamp in daylight in search of an honest man, the artist’s father looks for an honest city. The satellite cities around Cairo become anthropomorphized as sites of corruption, lies, and social stratification. The graininess of the Super 8 film, the menacing sound of thunder, the stray dogs, broken water pipes, fake palm trees, abandoned construction sites, and garbage all add to the desolation of the urban landscape and the sense of displacement. Nevertheless, there is still something comforting and hopeful in the presence of the artist’s father, and his persistent search for redeeming qualities.

—Nat Muller

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

MARWA ARSANIOS I’VE HEARD 3 STORIES, 2009 Single-channel color video, with sound 12 min., 29 sec.

Courtesy of the artist Selected by CHRISTINE TOHME

I’ve Heard 3 Stories is a video and 2D animation that brings together different stories about the 1950s Chalet Raja Saab, a beach house in the southern outskirts of Beirut located in an area that has changed, since 1978, from a hip “Acapulco-style” resort to a derelict urban landscape. The video attempts to investigate and restage the disappearance of a dancer from the Crazy Horse Saloon in the Hamra area of Beirut who was frequently seen at the Chalet Raja Saab. Marwa Arsanios often locates her work within an urban context to explore the different stories and histories that together constitute specific spaces, places, and communities.

Her practice goes through different stages: historical and theoretical research; collecting material and attempting to appropriate it by drawing, animation, scriptwriting, and performance; and collaborations with theoreticians and other practitioners. Using what she calls “leftovers,” traces and spatial products embodying once-powerful ideologies or historical “golden ages,” she revisits these fragments, exploring the delirious visions and images they conceal—their sexuality and eroticism—through parallel histories, and negotiating this historical material using storytelling and other fictional approaches. Her oeuvre seeks to understand how specific subjectivities form within the collective, and how one can voice one’s own subjectivities.

—Christine Tohme

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ARTISTS IVANA MÜLLER (b. 1972, Zagreb, Croatia) is a visual artist, choreographer, and theater director. She studied literature in Zagreb, Croatia, dance and choreography at the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and fine art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, Germany. She describes her artistic language as one that combines photography, video, dance, and text. Both poetic and political, Müller’s work addresses such subjects as the body, self invention, societal heroism, the relationship between performer and spectator, and the notion of authorship, among other things. Her work has been exhibited and performed at various international venues including Rotterdamse Schouwburg, Rotterdam, Belgium; STUK, Leuven, Belgium; La Villette, Paris, France; Dance Theatre Workshop, New York, NY; National Museum of Singapore; and Saddler’s Wells Theatre, London, UK. She also participated in the 14th Impulse Theatre Festival, Cologne, Bochum, Düsseldorf, and Mülheim, Germany (2007) at which her group performance piece While We Were Holding It Together received the festival’s Goethe Institute Prize for best off-theatre production. Müller, along with artists Paz Rojo and Nicole Beutler, is one of the founding members of LISA (2004-9), an artist collective based in Amsterdam. Müller currently lives and works in Paris, France, and Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

JENNY PERLIN (b. 1970, Williamstown. Massachussets) received her BA in Literature and Society from Brown University, Providence, RI, in 1993, and her MFA in Filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL, in 1998. She completed postgraduate studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY, in 1999. Solo exhibitions and screenings of her work have been shown internationally at such venues as Bard College, NY (2011), Gävle Konstcentrum, Sweden (2010), Galerie M+R Fricke, Germany (2010), and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2007). Her show Funes, a three-part film installation, recently opened at Simon Preston Gallery, New York (2012). Perlin has participated in numerous biennials and group exhibitions, including Found in Translation, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2011); Toronto Film Festival Cinematheque/Pleasure Dome, Canada (2011); Guangzhou Triennial, Farewell to Post-colonialism, Guangdong Museum of Art, China (2008); and Videoform/Filmform, Hamburg, Germany (2008), where she was awarded the prize for Best Work in the Competition for her film Transcript. She has been the recipient of other awards including the Ann Arbor Film Festival Special Jury Prize for the film Perseverance & How to Develop It in 2003, and two awards for her film Happy are the Happy, from the Student Academy Award Regional Prize in 1999 and the Black Maria Film Festival Juror’s Award in 2001. Perlin currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, NY. SONA SAFAEI (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) received her BFA in Painting from the Islamic Azad University of Tehran, Iran, and is currently studying sculpture and installation at OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design), Canada. She works in a range of media such as drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, often employing language and the perception of borders to comment on her own geopolitical and cultural concerns. Safaei’s work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues in Iran, UK, Belgium, Brazil, and Turkey, among others. Shortly after graduating from the University of Tehran in 2006, she was selected to participate in the 4th Biennial of the Islamic World in Iran. She also participated in Urban Jealousy, the 1st International PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS Roaming Biennial of Tehran (2008-9), which traveled her work to Istanbul, Turkey; Tehran, Iran; Berlin, Germany; and Belgrade, Serbia. Her work has been included in Remote Homecoming Chapter One, Limited Access III, Studio Strike & Mohsen Art Gallery, UK & Iran (2011). Safaei currently lives, works, and studies in Toronto, Canada.

ANNEMARIE JACIR (b. 1974, Palestine) studied film at Columbia University, New York, NY. Jacir has written, directed, and produced numerous award-winning films, many of which address the political and social issues surrounding her native Palestine. Jacir approaches her topics with a synthesis of sympathy and criticality, combining the personal and the political. Her works have been screened internationally at the Venice International Film Festival, Osians Asian & Arab Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival, among others. Her most recent film and first feature-length project, Le Sel de la Mer (2008), and her short film, Like Twenty Impossibles (2003), both debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. She has co-founded multiple groups and collectives including Philistine Films, an independent production company, which focuses on creative endeavors related to the Arab world, Dreams of a Nation, an independent cinema project dedicated to the promotion of Palestinian cinema (for which she also serves as chief curator), and the Palestinian Filmmakers’ Collective, based in Palestine. Jacir has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Montpellier Film Festival’s Best Film Award, the Venice Film Festival’s Corto Cortissimo Official Selection, and the Clermont Ferrand Film Festival’s Press Prize for Quelques Miettes Pour Les Oiseaux (2005), a collaborative project with filmmaker Nassim Amouache. She has taught at Columbia University, Bethlehem University, and Birzeit University, as well as in refugee camps in Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan.

Jacir currently lives in Amman, Jordan.

MICHAEL BLUM (b. 1966, Jerusalem) obtained his MA in History from the University of Paris, PanthéonSorbonne in 1988 and graduated from Ecole Nationale de la Photographie, Arles in 1992. DAMIR NIKŠIĆ (b. 1970, Bosnia and Herzegovina) studied at Brera Academy of Fine Arts, Bologna, and Academy of Fine Arts, Sarajevo. In addition to multiple shows in which they have exhibited separately, Blum and Nikšić were recently featured in the exhibition Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible!, MESS Festival, Sarajevo (2012). The genesis of the two artists’ collaborative practice begun with their mutual participation in the 2010 exhibition Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire, held at Pratt Manhattan Gallery. Nikšić and Blum were paired up by project’s curators, and created the work Oriental Dream, 2010. Michael Blum is currently based in Vienna and Montreal. Damir Nikšić is currently based in Sarajevo.

REYNIER LEYVA NOVO (b.1983, Havana, Cuba) graduated from the José Antonio Díaz Peláez Experimental Art Center in 1998, the San Alejandro School of Fine Arts in 2003, and attended the Higher Art Institute from 2004 to 2008, all in Havana, Cuba. Solo exhibitions of Novo’s work have been held in Havana at Salle Zero, Alliance Français (2010); Center for the Development of Visual Arts (2010); Museum of Colonial Art (2009); National Museum of Fine Arts (2009); and Morro-Cabaña Park (2003), among others. He has exhibited internationally in group shows including Between forever and never, the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011); Liverpool Biennial, Touched, UK (2010); Coca-colonized, Brot Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria (2010); Serendipity, Portugal Arte10, Lison, Portugal (2010); The Downpour, the Nap, the Sugarcane Crop and the Tobacco, 31st Pontevedra Biennial, Pontevedra Museum, Galicia, Spain (2010); I Shot The Sheriff (Héroes y Villanos), Open Studio 4.0, Madrid, Spain (2010); and Confluences Inside II: Contemporary Cuban Art, National Hispanic Center Art Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico (2009). Leyva Novo lives and works in Havana, Cuba.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE ARTISTS PARK CHAN-KYONG (b. 1965, Seoul, South Korea) received his BFA from the College of Fine Art, Seoul National University, South Korea, and received his MFA in Photography from the California Institute of Fine Arts, Los Angeles. He is known for his work in film and photography, as well as for utilizing these mediums to address political and cultural issues pertaining to his native Korea. Park has held solo exhibitions at numerous venues including many galleries in Seoul, such as PKM Gallery | Bartleby Bickle & Meursault (2010), Atelier Hermès (2008), SSamzie Art Space (2005), and Kumho Museum (1997). His work was selected for the Bright Future section of the Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands (2011), and the 61st Berlin International Film Festival, Germany (2009), where his film PARANMAJANG was granted the short-film section’s prestigious Golden Bear award. Other festivals and group shows include Trust, Media City, Seoul (2010); Seoul Museum of Art (2010); Linguistic Morphology: Art in Context, the Association of East Asian Art and Culture, The Sungkok Art Museum, Seoul (2010); the 3rd Anyang Public Art Project [APAP2010], Anyang, South Korea (2010); and the 4th and 6th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2002; 2006).

Park currently lives and works in Seoul, South Korea.

BASIM MAGDY (b. 1977, Assiut, Egypt) received his BFA in Painting from Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt (2000). Magdy works in a variety of media such as video, installation, animation, sculpture, painting, drawing, sound works, and printed matter. Upcoming exhibitions in 2012 include La Triennale, Intense Proximity, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Transmediale. 12, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; and a solo show at artSümer, Istanbul, Turkey. Recent solo exhibitions include Pie in the Sky, Platform Sarai, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (2011); One Day We Will Shine Like The Stars, KÖR Kunsthalle Wien public space Karlsplatz, Vienna, Austria (2010); and Last Good Deed, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland (2009), among others. His films and videos have been screened internationally at such venues as the Goethe Institute, Cairo, Egypt; Musée d’art contemporain de Baie Saint-Paul, Quebec, Canada; White Box, New York, NY; as well as part of Art Dubai, Dubai, U.A.E. He has been the recipient of multiple grants and awards, and has contributed to numerous publications including various exhibition catalogues and periodicals. Magdy currently lives and works in Cairo, Egypt.

MARWA ARSANIOS (b. 1978, Washington D.C., United States) received her BA in graphic design from the Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon, and her MFA from Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London, UK. She has exhibited in the 12th Istanbul Biennial, Foundation for Culture and Arts, Turkey (2011); Art Dubai, Bidoun Projects, Art Park, Dubai, UAE (2011); the Forum Expanded section of the Berlinale, Berlin, Germany (2010); the Home Works V Forum, Beirut, Lebanon (2010); and at Tokyo Wonder Site, Shibuya, Japan (2010). Her videos have been included in events such as an e-flux NYC storefront public screening for Video Data Bank’s release of the DVD box set Radical Closure (2010), and most recently at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Arsanios and her cousin, Mirene Arsanios, are the founding members of the artist organization 98weeks Research Project, a nonprofit artist-run project space. She is also one of the organizers of Platform Translation. Arsanios was granted an artist’s residency at the Arab Image Foundation for 2009, a research residency at the Tokyo Wonder Site in 2010, and a three-month residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, The Netherlands, for 2011. Arsanios currently lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

CURATORS NATAŠA PETREŠIN-BACHELEZ (b. 1976, Ljubljana, Slovenia) is an art critic and independent curator. In 2010 she was appointed co-director of the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers. Since 2006 she has co-organized the seminar “Something You Should Know,” EHESS, Paris, France. In 2010 she was associate curator of The Promises of the Past, Centre Pompidou, Paris, and guest curator of Paris Photo. Curatorial projects include Yona Friedman. Around ville spatial, Mala galerija, Ljubljana (2010); Conspire, festival transmediale.08, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (2008); Distorted Fabric, De Appel, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2007); Participation: Nuisance or Necessity?, lASPIS, Stockholm, Sweden (2005); Our House is a House that Moves, Galerija Škuc, Ljubljana, Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland (20036) ), and In the Gorges of the Balkans, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany (2003). She was co-curator of the project Société Anonyme, Le Plateau and Kadist Art Foundation, Paris (20078). She has contributed to magazines including e-flux journal, Springerin, Parkett, Bidoun, and Sarai Reader, and is a member of the editorial board of ARTMargins. Since 2011 Petresin-Bachelez has been chief editor of Manifesta Journal. Petresin-Bachelez is based in Paris, France.

REGINE BASHA (b. 1968, Petah Tiqva, Israel), the child of Iraqi-Jewish parents, completed her undergraduate degree in Studio Art and Art History at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. From 1992 to 1995 she was director and curator of the Saidye Bronfman Centre Gallery in Montreal. In 1996 she graduated from the inaugural class of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, NY, and remained in New York until 2002, curating independently and within collaboratives. From 2002 to 2007 she became adjunct curator of the new Arthouse in Austin, TX, and produced special projects with artists such as Daniel Bozhkov and Dario Robleto and exhibitions including Treble at Sculpture Center, New York (2004). From 2007 to 2012 she returned to New York and independently curated exhibitions including The Marfa Sessions at Ballroom Marfa, TX (2008); Substitute Teacher at Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Georgia (2010); An Exchange with Sol LeWitt at Cabinet, Brooklyn, NY and Mass Moca, Williamstown, MA (2011); and Speculative Futures at Bloomberg Headquarters, New York (2011). Most recently, Basha was the Executive Director of the residency program Artpace in San Antonio, TX. AMIRALI GHASEMI (b. 1980, Tehran, Iran) is a graphic designer, media artist, and curator. In 1998 Ghasemi founded Parkingallery, an independent project space in Tehran, Iran, and in 2002 he set up Parkingallery. com, a virtual gallery, as an online platform for young Iranian artists. Ghasemi has shown his photography, video, and design work in festivals and exhibitions internationally. Among his curated exhibitions, workshops, and talks at the Parkingallery are Deep Depression (2004-6); Sideways (2008); Urban Jealousy, the 1st International Roaming Biennial of Tehran (2008-9); and three editions of Limited Access Festival (2007-11), which led to a variety of projects with art and education institutions in Brazil, Egypt, Germany, India, The Netherlands, Serbia, Turkey, and the UK.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE CURATORS SHARMINI PEREIRA (b. 1970, London, United Kingdom) is an independent curator and publisher. She is the director and founder of Raking Leaves, a nonprofit independent publishing organization. In 2011 she was the international guest curator of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize and in 2006 she co-curated the 1st Singapore Biennale. She has written extensively on contemporary Asian art and spoken at many international conferences. She lives and works in the UK and Sri Lanka.

DEFNE AYAS (b. 1976, Germany) is the Director and Curator of Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Belgium, as of January 2012. Previously, Ayas worked as a director of programs of Arthub Asia and as an art history instructor at New York University, Shanghai, China. Ayas has also been a curator/ programmer of Performa since 2004, the biennial of performance art in New York, where she has managed the biennial’s collaborative partnerships with a consortium of eighty+ cultural institutions across the city and organized or co-organized acclaimed projects and programs with an international roster of artists, architects, curators, and writers. She remains curator-at-large at Performa. Ayas is co-curating the 11th Baltic Triennale (with Benjamin Cook, LUX) in September 2012, and the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Shanghai city pavilion (2012).

YANDRO MIRALLES (b. 1980, Havana, Cuba) graduated with a degree in Art History from the University of Havana, Cuba, in 2006, and completed postgraduate studies in Museum and Curatorial Studies at the UNESCO Chair on Sciences for the Comprehensive Preservation of Cultural Heritage at the National Center for Preservation, Restoration and Museology in Cuba (CENCREM). He was a professor of art history at the University of Havana, and has organized exhibitions for various institutions such as the National Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of Dance, the Cuban Photographic Library, and the Servando Cabrera Museum (all in Cuba), as well as for the Cuban Artists Fund, Magnan Metz Gallery, Chashama 217 Gallery, and the Metropolitan Pavilion, in New York, NY. He has lectured and published on Cuban contemporary art.

He is currently the Curator in Residence of the Cuban Artists Fund, a nonprofit organization based in New York.

SUN JUNG KIM (b. 1965, Seoul, South Korea) is a Seoul-based curator and director of SAMUSO: Space for Contemporary Art. Kim is currently co-artistic director for Gwangju Biennale 2012 and a dOCUMENTA(13) agent. From 1993 to 2004 Kim worked as the chief curator at Artsonje Center, a contemporary art center in Seoul, South Korea. She was commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, Italy (2005).

In 2006 she initiated the annual contemporary art festival Platform Seoul. She co-curated Your Bright Future, an exhibition of 12 contemporary artists from Korea presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, and Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX (2009–10). Kim has curated solo exhibitions for artists such as In-Hwan Oh, Martin Creed, Beom Kim, and Haegue Yang at Artsonje Center. Kim was the artistic director of the 6th Seoul International Media Art Biennale Media City Seoul 2010.

NAT MULLER (b. 1974, Maracaibo, Venezuela) is an independent curator and critic based between Rotterdam, The Netherlands, and the Middle East. Her main interests include the intersections of aesthetics, media and politics, media art, and contemporary art in and from the Middle East. She is a regular contributor to Springerin and MetropolisM, and has been published in Art Papers, Bidoun, ArtPulse, X-tra, Majalla Foreign Affairs Magazine, De Volkskrant, and The Daily Star. She has taught at universities and academies across Europe and the Middle East, and has served as an advisor on European-Mediterranean collaborations for the European Cultural Foundation of the EU and as an advisor on e-culture for the Dutch Ministry of Culture. Currently she is art and new media advisor to the Dutch city of Utrecht. Muller serves on the advisory board of the Palestinian website project Artterritories, the arts organization TENT, Rotterdam, and is on the selection committee of the Mondriaan Fund (NL). She is 2012 curator of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize. Muller is based in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

PROJECT 35

ABOUT THE CURATORS CHRISTINE TOHME (b. 1964, Lebanon) is an independent curator and founder/director of the Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts, Ashkal Alwan, a nonprofit arts organization established in 1994, committed to the production, facilitation, and circulation of artistic practices across a wide range of disciplines. Ashkal Alwan’s platforms include the Home Works Forum on Cultural Practices, curated projects in Lebanon and abroad, the publication of literary works and artists’ books, residency programs, art production grants, an unprecedented public archive of contemporary creative endeavors, and a monthly newsletter. In 2011 Ashkal Alwan launched Home Workspace, a multipurpose facility in Beirut dedicated to promoting an interdisciplinary approach to arts education and production in the Arab world. Home Workspace houses Lebanon’s first public library for contemporary arts as well as the HWP, an international arts program admitting 15 participants per year to study with some of the world’s leading artists, filmmakers, curators, thinkers, and academics. In 2006 Tohme received the Prince Claus Award for her dedication to the development of critical culture in post-war Lebanon. Tohme is based in Beirut, Lebabon.

PROJECT 35

INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL

ABOUT ICI About ICI Independent Curators International (ICI) produces exhibitions, events, publications, research and training opportunities for curators and diverse audiences around the world. Established in 1975 and headquartered in New York, ICI is a hub that connects emerging and established curators, artists, and art spaces, forging international networks and generating new forms of collaborations. ICI provides access to the people and practices that are key to current developments in the field, inspiring fresh ways of seeing and contextualizing contemporary art.

In 2014, ICI exhibitions will be seen in over 37 venues in 15 countries and 11 U.S. states. Emerging curators from 24 countries participated in the Curatorial Intensive, ICI’s professional training program, with courses held in Addis Ababa, Mexico City, Moscow, and New York; and more than 60 curators and artists are contributing to ICI’s talks, public programs, and research initiatives.

Project 35 Volume 2 is produced and circulated by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York. The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, by grants from the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and the Robert Lehman Foundation; the ICI Board of Trustees; and donors to ICI’s Access Fund.

Project manager: Frances Wu Giarratano Project assistant: Alaina Claire Feldman Video editor: Johannes DeYoung

All works © Independent Curators International (ICI) and the artists.

Independent Curators International 401 Broadway, Suite 1620 New York, NY 10013 212.254.8200 www.curatorsintl.org