ISCP Talk
June 15, 2010

Salon: Nika Oblak and Primoz Novak (Slovenia) & Claudia Ulisses (Portugal)

‘The work of Nika Oblak and Primoz Novak draws parallels between a society driven by personal needs and capital and their own role as artists in the contemporary art market. Infused with humor, their work adopts the visual tactics and seductive constructions commonly employed in the mass media to lure the consumer.” Oblak and Novak have exhibited in venues such as Sharjah Biennial 9, UAE Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; Japan Media Arts Festival; Transmediale Berlin, Germany; and most recently in Biennale Cuvee, Linz, Austria. (Text by Yasmen Biag-Clifford)

Claudia Ulisses’ work focuses on social and political issues. Her critical approach, sometimes nostalgic in tone, addresses the (in)flexibilities of the human condition. She develops her work through a minute process of critical analysis, creating multidisciplinary projects with a combination of media such as photography, installation sculpture and video. The form as visual seductive device is evident, but it acts mainly as an element of subversion of reality. Representation is a way to place the viewer face to face with the disconcert and ambiguity of the iconographic discourse.

Exhibition
June 4–June 7, 2010

Out Of The Blue

Out of the blue is a four-day exhibition presenting the work of both New York based and international artists curated by Helga Just Christoffersen and Natasha Llorens. The invited artists will produce new work in response to the short duration of the exhibition. The works in Out of the blue do not have the character of closed or final statements – they are temporary manifestations of ongoing projects and singular fragments in larger frameworks. Participating artists include Emcee C.M., Master of None, Gergely László, Yoshihito Mizuuchi and Mie Olise.

Out of the blue investigates different types of systems that are characterized by generative accumulation; systems of collecting, archiving, annotating, filling in the gaps and reusing resources. A system in the included works can be understood as that which links memories, documents, objects and data in mechanical unison, and human beings together in common projects. The expression, ‘Out of the blue’, references a moment of sudden interruption, when something unexpected throws the logic of a system into a state of flux. Over the course of the exhibition, the works presented will be altered or added to. As evolving manifestations, they reveal the process of each system and point to what each interruption engenders.

Out of the blue is curated by Helga Just Christoffersen and Natasha Llorens and was chosen from an open call made by ISCP to students of the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS) at Bard College and the Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts.

This exhibition is made possible by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Opening Reception: Jun 04, 2010

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
June 1, 2010

Salon: Carlos Irijalba (Spain) and Gaël Peltier (France)

Carlos Irijalba studied Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country and UDK Berlin. His work analyzes the way in which Western culture constructs a circuit of the real that loses all outside
references and becomes entirely self-contained. Major themes in his work are the society of the spectacle, the insignificance, the noise and the general conformity on contemporary culture. In his recent works Twilight (2008-9) and Unwilling Spectator (2009-10), Irijalba plays out the gap between relative time and space and the subjective experienced reality.

Gaël Peltier presented The Artist, Apologizes, an original performance. Peltier’s research deals with a set of notions related to the construction of the image, and specifically to the intrinsic temporality of the “image-movement.” They belong to the field of “expanded cinema,” in which simultaneous practices compose a body of work that materializes through objects, photographs, films and performances. This practice uses its own systems of depiction to indicate with acuity, to show the origin, and the source of these realities’ recording. It thus questions the complex relations it maintains between and among the works. This work shows a confused dimension, assented suspension of credulity, which is not unrelated to the experience of fiction. However it is more complex because the structural element expresses its commitment to the reality of the act, of the performance. The viewer is led most of the time on the threshold of objectivity, which induces a demystification in the process of depiction.

Participating Residents