ISCP Talk
July 27, 2010

Salon: Ok Hyun Ahn (South Korea) and Juanli Carrion (Spain)

In Mirror Ball from 2007 Ok Hyun Ahn lip-syncs love songs, exploring clichés to investigate how their lyrics become symbolic, and how our emotions evolve. “What if a hundred clichés burst out shamelessly and simultaneously?” Would we yawn or laugh at such an outpouring of banality?  As audiences watch the artist lip-sync a sorrowful love song, they know that she is not performing the song, and yet cannot help but identify her performance with the actual experience of emotion. Audiences do not know whether to laugh at the artist or to cry.

Ok Hyun Ahn is photographer and a video artist. She recently exhibited her works in Identity, Costume, Cliche: Korean Photography Today, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, 2009, Artist as Performer, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, 2009. Her works were previously published in European Photography, 2008. She was awarded a Ssamzie Studio in Seoul in 2007.

Juanli Carrion will present his project Kei-Seki. Kei-Seki is the combination of two Japanese words meaning scene and stone. This work began as a site-specific installation made from the remains of an unfinished bridge construction in which he used the found material to evoke the culture of entertainment as might be related to night clubs or Christmas decorations. His installation has evolved into the series of photographs and sculptures that comprise Kei-Seki. This final installation invites the spectator to consider the relationship of man and his environment and to expand their perception of nature and reality.

Juanli Carrion’s working practice begins with his interest in landscape. He raises social and political questions regarding man’s relationship to his environment as well as the human tendency to create references or associations to the environment and the effects of those ways of thinking on “reality”. His artistic practice retains a basis in photography but has developed through installation, sculpture, and video.

Juanli Carrion’s Salon is supported by the Consulate General of Spain in New York and the Spain Foreign Cultural Cooperation agency.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
July 13, 2010

Salon: Felix Burger (Germany) and Max Pam (Australia)

Felix Burger will show The Story Of My Life, a 23 minute video from 2010. “It had always been my desire to film the story of my life”, commences Burger’s autobiographical epic. “Too remarkable seemed my exuberant work, too important my artistic existence, for humanity to be deprived of it.” Felix Burger plays Felix Burger: a manic, egomaniac character and a fugitive, who on his way through his own life traverses, as it were, the époques of cinematic history. In so doing, he appears to overcome time and space effortlessly. He is an eccentric in the true sense, one who remains on the fringes because he has made himself the center of his universe and everyone else satellites. (Text by Christian Hartard)

Max Pam’s new book SuperTourist will be presented which combines his old and new work, covering both the old world (Europe) and the new (Australia). He has used a variety of media and technology – plastic cameras, saturated and overexposed colors, digital prints, color and black & white, photocopying and apparent accidents. In the words of photo critic Robert Cook, “he has used his knowledge of what it means to take a good picture to give him the latitude to take risks. Max continually encourages the viewer to interpret objects as revelatory fragments. Erotic, arch and ironic, SuperTourist takes the viewer on a journey through related arenas of travel, sex, desire and identity.”

 

Participating Residents

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.