Offsite Project
October 7–October 7, 2010

Rose Nolan: Wall Work

Location: Brooklyn Preparatory High School, 257 North 6th St, Groundfloor, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (L train to Bedford Ave)

Over the course of two weeks this Fall, eight Brooklyn Preparatory High School students; Ashley Brown, Anthony Bryan, Tsering Cheodon, Gloria Lopez, Barbara Ramirez, Latesha Richards, Paul Samaniego, and Naomi Vargas, collaborated with International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) artist-in-residence Rose Nolan to create a text based Wall Work in their school. Contributing students gained insight into contemporary art practices while creating a site-specific work with Nolan along the corridors of their school. The completed wall piece is based on their collective discussions of language, visual structure and architectural space. Wall Work was developed as part of ISCP’s Participatory Projects initiative that brings the work of resident artists into the public realm.

With works ranging from the discrete to monumental, Rose Nolan’s practice utilizes everyday materials such as house paint, painters’ tape and cardboard.  Relocated to a new architectural space and context, her work breaks down every day phrases inviting the viewer to challenge the way we receive language. She is represented by the Anna Schwartz Gallery in Melbourne and Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington and her residency at ISCP is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Participating Residents

ISCP Talk
October 5, 2010

Salon: Isabelle Cornaro (France) and Alexandra Navratil (Switzerland)

Isabelle Cornaro will present documentation of a few recent works (installations, sculptures and films) and her upcoming projects. Cornaro’s work, which is transdisciplinary, includes the use of cultural objects and images (the transposition of classical paintings, casts of kitsch domestic objects) and it plays with issues such as systems of representation, commodity fetishism and the creative gesture.

Isabelle Cornaro (born 1974 in France) studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre (Paris, France) and Visual Arts at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (Paris, France). She was an artist-in-residence at the Palais de Tokyo’s Pavilion in 2005-2006. Since then, she exhibited in France and abroad in group shows (Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, Germany; Museum of Modern Art of Bergamo, Italy; Raven Row, London, UK). She also had several solos exhibitions in galleries and institutions (La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel, France; Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Germany; Gallery Balice Hertling, Paris, France).

Alexandra Navratil will present a new series of drawings and photographs in her studio and two recent video works.

Alexandra Navratil’s (born 1978 in Zürich, Switzerland) work in various media including video, photography and drawing examines historical and political concepts of perception and their correlations with systems of representations in cinema, architecture and politics. Navratil graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths College in London in 2007. She recently exhibited her work at Formcontent, London; Lothringer13/Laden, Munich; MUSAC, León and Galeria Angels, Barcelona, among others, and was awarded the Swiss Art Award in 2009.

Participating Residents

Exhibition
October 1–October 24, 2010

There Has Been No Future, There Will Be No Past

Regional exhibitions often use sociopolitical history as a key in the interpretation of the work of artists who, despite obvious consistencies in their background, do not share a single cultural identity. This approach bypasses individual histories and regularly leads to forms of cultural profiling persistent enough to affect even those younger generations of artists whose work does not deal with collective history. The art from Central and Eastern Europe is no exception. As Zdenka Badovinac (1) has noted, artists and cultural practicioners from this region must be aware that they can only move forward by complying with world standards, as well as, being concerned of how their otherness is perceived. For Badovinac, otherness must be continuously and actively redefined, to save it from becoming a pattern or, worse, drifting into folklore. Today, the work of visual artists from this region is too often considered in direct relation to the socialist ideologies that dominated the former Eastern Bloc, a perspective that fails to acknowledge the breadth and scope of contemporary art practice in Central and Eastern Europe.

In this regard, There Has Been No Future, There Will Be No Past curated by Marco Antonini and Sandrine Canac was conceived as a platform for self-representation and dialogue. Participating artists include Rada Boukova, Eric Stephany, Igor Eskinja, Andreas Fogarasi, Wojcieh Gilewicz, Marzena Nowak, Jan Mancuska, Jiri Skala, Svatopluk Mikyta, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkacova, Kader Muzaqi, Svetlana Mircheva, Irgin Sena, Ellie Krakow, Tehnica Schweitz (Gergely Laszlo & Peter Rakosi), Katarina Sevic, Katarina Zdjelar and Maziar Afrassiabi.

The curators invited eight ISCP alumni from Central and Eastern Europe whose work does not address the social and political history of their countries. Each of the artists was invited to nominate a peer artist to take part in the exhibition in an effort to expand the geographic context and ambit of the project. This nomination process engaged the artists in the curatorial process allowing them to further articulate on their own artistic discourse, placing their work and the work of their peers on a personally drawn ‘map’. The invited artists have not only contributed to the visual and conceptual outcome of the exhibition, but also offered new perspectives in its interpretation. Furthermore, the artists will incorporate ‘non-art’ images (inspirational material, unfinished works, archives, sketches etc.) in the exhibition, highlighting the importance of personal materials in the development of their work.

Deliberately avoiding the creation of paradigmatic models for the interpretation of contemporary art from Central and Eastern Europe, There Has Been No Future, There Will Be No Past adopts a free and discursive approach. In this way, the exhibition emphasizes the network of intellectual exchanges that sustained its development, highlighting the fragmented complexity of an unpredictable group portrait.

(1) From: ‘Undefining the Other: Markus Miessen in conversation with Zdenka Badovinac’, in Markus Miessen, ed., East Coast Europe, (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2008), 71.

This exhibition was supported by: Austrian Cultural Forum New York, Brooklyn Arts Council, Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, Czech Center New York, Italian Cultural Institute in New York, Ministry of Culture of the Slovak Republic, plus421 Foundation, Polish Cultural Institute in New York and Supreme Digital. Thanks to the Young Visual Artist Awards (YVAA), a major artist fellowship in Central and Southeastern Europe that culminates with a residency at ISCP for supporting emerging artists of the region.

Opening Reception: Oct 01, 2010

Participating Residents