ISCP Talk
April 6, 2010

Salon: Alberto Borea (Peru) and Monika Marklinger (Sweden)

Alberto Borea’s work is characterized by the continuous displacement and use of diverse media and materials. This openness towards a diversity of media helps him to define the development of an artistic proposal, in which fundamental importance is adhered to the object’s time and history within the plastic discourse. Borea is interested in the relation between different cultures and histories, between the so-called center and its periphery. The position of distance in cultural, economic and social events is an important part of the process and execution of his projects. Attracted to the residues of civilization and culture, Borea has a particular interest in using and conceptualizing such residues for his work. Lately his work has been related to non-places, transit and movement, mapping the self, and mapping identity.

Characteristic of Monika Marklinger’s work is the emphasis on visual questions from a social and political perspective. She seldom works with single pictures but rather strives to integrate her stories and pictorial elements in collages and installations full of details. These become a sort of open chain of thoughts where text and image, object and projection, painting and photography unite. Monika Marklinger has contributed to several publications and artistic research projects such as What is to be done [Chto Delat] (part of Documenta Magazine Table, Kassel 07) and Painting Beyond Space, RUFCA, Stockholm. Marklinger has exhibited in several venues in Sweden and abroad, including Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria and the Prince Of Wales Museum, Bombay, India. Monika Marklinger is represented by Galleri Flach+Thulin in Stockholm.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
March 23, 2010

Salon: Goran Škofić (Croatia) and Samuil Stoyanov (Bulgaria)

Goran Škofić works almost exclusively in the media of video and photography. He focuses on what he calls “abstractions”: society, the individual, interaction and coexistence. In his work, Škofić uses his body as an instrument of expression. In his video installation Corpus for instance, he treats his own body. Each of the installation’s videos shows a multiplied figure of the author who rhythmically performs just one action (a workout in the gym, running, applauding in a concert hall,…). Škofić thus deconstructs the body into a naked “corpus”, liberating it from humanization and bodily weaknesses like fatigue or mistake. His character, which has no foothold either in the original or in truth, acts with the rhythm of incessantly repeating movements.

Samuil Stoyanov is interested in “thinking vision”: thinking while looking, or looking while thinking. Lately this theme has appeared in his works, but it has nothing to do with visual experiments or optical effects; rather it is to be fully associated with the conceptualization of the act of looking. Stoyanov was born in 1975 in Dobrich, Bulgaria. In 2001 he graduated from the National Art Academy with an MA in Ceramics. From 2001 to 2009 he realized eight solo exhibitions, and he is the winner of several art awards, including the 2009 BAZA Award.

ISCP Talk
March 9, 2010

Salon: Stuart Ringholt (Australia) and Valerio Rocco Orlando (Italy)

Stuart Ringholt’s interdisciplinary art practice grapples with our social environment, exploring ideas of perception and states of consciousness. With uncomfortable honesty, he highlights awkward interpersonal interactions, revealing complex networks between individuals and communities. At the recent Sydney Biennale, Ringholt facilitated 50 Anger Workshops with 400 people participating. In 2010 Ringholt will participate in the Adelaide Biennial and present a solo show ‘Vitrines’ at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney. His work has been profiled in Artforum and Frieze. Ringholt is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery.

During a six months residency at ISCP, Valerio Rocco Orlando created a new series of works about love in order to explore all the changes and correspondences experienced inside the identity of a couple. Starting from the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s theories about being-in-common and the dynamics of self-reflection and sharing coexisting in a web of relations, his intent was to demonstrate the fundamental importance of reciprocity and interchange with “the other” in order to evolve and build up one own identity and self awareness. Valerio Rocco Orlando works across a range of media including film, video, and photography. His installations show articulated compositions made of cinematic and emotional portraits. Inspired by the evolution of identity dynamics in contemporary society, Orlando’s research explores the relations between individual and collective memory, as well as the changes induced by social relationships in the process of identity formation.