Auditorium Moscow. A Sketch for a Public Space
A Special Project of the 4th Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art
16 September–16 October 2011

Curated by Ekaterina Degot, Joanna Mytkowska, David Riff in collaboration with Andrey Parshikov and Katia Szczeka

Artists: Yael Bartana, Christian von Borries, Sergei Bratkov, Matthijs de Bruijne, Tania Bruguera, Olga Chernysheva, Phil Collins, Chto Delat, Alexandra Galkina and David Ter-Oganyan, Sharon Hayes, Polina Kanis, Yakov Kazhdan, Yuri Leiderman and Andrei Silvestrov, Zbigniew Libera, Learning Film Group, Renzo Martens, Adrian Melis, Deimantas Narkevicius, Tobias Putrih, Haim Sokol, Hito Steyerl, Artur Żmijewski

Special guests: Charles Esche, Galit Eilat, Dorota Głażewska and Agata Szczęśniak (Krytyka Polityczna/Political Critique), Miguel Robles-Duran, and Sergei Sitar

Programmation cinéma hors-les-murs du BAL au Cinéma des Cinéastes, Paris, Curatée par Aliocha Imhoff & Kantuta Quiros. 20 septembre 2011 - 10 décembre 2011

Et en parallèle de l’exposition Topographies de la guerre (curatée par Diane Dufour et Jean-Yves Jouannais) au BAL, Paris.

Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd / Francis Alÿs / Basma Al-Sharif / Marine Hugonnier / Armin Linke, Francesco Mattuzzi & Decolonizing architecture / Lida Abdul / Louidgi Beltrame / Cyprien Gaillard / John Smith / Renzo Martens / Sean Snyder / Waël Noureddine / Edouard Beau / Internacional Errorista (Groupe Etcétera) / Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead / Dominic Angerame / Emanuel Licha / Daniel Eisenberg

TJ Demos lectures on Episode 3 and screens it, at Kunsthalle Charlottenborg. It's part of a series called "Radical Ruptures'. In Toronto, Episode 3 is part of 'Models for Taking Part', a show curated by Juan Gaitan, including works by Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová, Bouchra Khalili, Renzo Martens, Tobias Zielony, and Artur Żmijewski. In Moscow, the Museum of Modern Art of Warshaw, organises the 'Moscow Auditorium". Alongside Artur Zmijewski, Phil Collins et al., Episode 1 and 3 will screen, and Renzo will talk, too, on October 10 and 11.

'Ongemakkelijk langs de binnenkant', : by Pieter van Bogaert, in 'Kunstkritiek' Laurens Dhaenens and Hilde van Gelder, Lannoo Campus, Tielt, 2010, and 'Immorality as Ethics' in 'the Age of Globalization / Reflect #08,' by Ruben De Roo, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 2010. Worthwhile reads.

Capitalism and the Aesthetics of Knowledge in the 21st century, Uses of the Social Document in Contemporary Visual Art.

A series of four screenings and seminars led by Angela Dimitrakaki, art historian and writer (University of Edinburgh, UK)

Wednesday 8 December - Saturday 11 December, 18:00-21:00

Wednesday 8 December Ursula Biemann, Black Sea Files, 2005, 43'
Courtesy of the artist

Thursday 9 December Johan Grimonprez, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, 68'
Courtesy of The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens

Friday 10 December Renzo Martens, Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, 2008, 88'
Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery, London

Saturday 11 December Allan Sekula, The Lottery of the Sea, 2006, 179' (3 hours)
Courtesy of Galerie Michel Rein, Paris

FORUM: screenings, performative discussions, mediation, an art public project and a salon with music programme
Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève
Le Commun / Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain Genève
Cinemas Auditorium Arditi et Spoutnik
9.12.2010 —12.12.2010

Image Mouvement

Into the Eye of the Storm, curated by Chen Tamir, is part of VIDEOZONE V, The 5th International Video Art Biennial in Israel. The exhibition brings together video works that use the camera as a protagonist or that otherwise call to question the power the camera has on its environment and the subjects it records. In a media-saturated world, where our personal and collective realities are increasingly mediated by video imagery, we must constantly analyze what forces shape what and how we exchange information. A roster of up-and-coming local and international artists are brought together in this exhibition to examine how the camera does more than document its subject; it produces them. Often controversial, these works are both intellectually stimulating and emotionally charged, leading the viewer through a range of possible reactions ranging from doubt to abhorrence to pathos and in the process examine the very act of filming and of being filmed.
For more information, please visit: www.digitalartlab.org.il

Into the Eye of the Storm

When artists site their practice within the fabric of social relations, documentary modes often play a central role in mediating events and experiences. Though the resulting material often bears a close resemblance to ethnographic mapping, investigative journalism or even community work, in contrast to the strict ethical codes to which these disciplines adhere many of today's artists operate in somewhat murkier waters. Working outside - or even deliberately corrupting - accepted conventions and frameworks, the artists participating in this two-part exhibition find alternative means to engage with social realities in situations of war, sex and political urgency.

Renzo Martens: Episode III – Enjoy Poverty (2009) 87 minutes, Saturday 6 November - Friday 12 November

The Dutch artist Renzo Martens spent two years filming in the Congo, a Central African country decimated by the effects of brutal colonialism, civil war and material exploitation. After a further year spent editing in his adopted city of Brussels, the portrait that emerges is not a conventional, objective description of the misery which besets the lives of so many in this region, but rather a satirically reflexive account which aims to reflect something of the broader political realities. Martens performs an array of characters over the course of the film, subtly moving from diplomat to ethnographer, from economist to celebrity, all the while resolutely maintaining what John Millar has called his ‘pathologically uncompromising position’. By observing, re-enacting and thereby callously re-enforcing the status quo, he critically investigates the contradictions of humanitarianism together with the politics of contemporary image production.

Artur Żmijewski: Repetition (2005) 75 minutes, Saturday 13 November - Friday 19 November

Artur Żmijewski's video works present apparently straightforward recordings of constructed social situations. Repetition documents his attempt to re-stage the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment (1971) through which the psychologist Philip Zimbardo attempted to answer the question ‘What happens when you put good people in an evil place?’ Recruiting a group of 24 male students to spend up to two weeks in a mock prison set up in the basement of Stanford University's Psychology Department, Zimbardo observed that participants randomly assigned the role of ‘guard’ became increasingly sadistic, humiliating their ‘prisoners’ who, in turn, submitted to their abusive treatment with many displaying signs of severe stress. He was forced to end the project after only six days on ethical grounds. Żmijewski's version took place in another specially-designed prison, this time in Warsaw, with 17 unemployed Polish men who were each paid a participation fee of forty dollars a day. The resulting documentary video follows their journey down an incendiary path towards a similarly abrupt ending.

Artur Żmijewski will also be presenting Democracies (2009 - ongoing) at Tramway in Glasgow from 29 October - 12 December 2010.

Frederick Wiseman: Primate (1974) 105 minutes, Saturday 20 November - Friday 26 November

Since the mid 1960s, the veteran filmmaker Frederick Wiseman has scrutinised America's social institutions - from schools and hospitals to police departments and asylums for the criminally insane - through documentary films disseminated primarily through public access television. Primate records the Yerkes Primate Research Center's analyses of the physical and mental development of primates, including scientist's use of invasive behaviour manipulation technologies. The analytic black and white footage captures graphic scenes to which Wiseman's only contribution is deft editing.

It is essentially about one set of primates who have power, using it against another who haven't... Wiseman found no Frankensteins during his apparently very amicable visit to the centre; just nice people adding to the sum of human knowledge by subtracting from the sum of humanity itself. Derek Malcolm, The Guardian

The Ethics of the Encounter

LO SCHERMO DELL’ARTE FILM FESTIVAL,

In response to 21st century changes, artists have shown an increasing interest in art’s documentary possibilities. Cinema is thus used as the perfect narrative instrument to understand, narrate and communicate political and social events to which they bear witness.

Among the participants: Bettina Steinbrügge, author of the book The Need to Document (Zurich, 2005, with Vit Havranek and Sabine Schaschl-Cooper), the artists Phil Collins, Jan-Peter Hammer and Libia Castro & Ólafur Ólafsson. Conducted by Silvia Lucchesi.

Giovedì 25 novembre 2010
• ore 19:00, In collegamento Skype con Renzo Martens.

"Renzo Martens est un artiste hollandais. En 2003 il a amorcé la réalisation d’un triptyque de films : Enjoy Poverty. Il questionne avec ce travail son rapport aux images de guerre et de pauvreté à travers le prisme de son identité d’homme blanc occidental.
Episode 1 se déroule en Tchétchénie, durant la guerre face aux Russes. Martens s’y rend seul, en toute illégalité, et décide non pas d’interroger les différents protagonistes du conflit (réfugiés, travailleurs humanitaires, rebelles...) sur leur situation personnelle mais plutôt de leur demander comment, de leur point de vue, lui (Renzo) se sent. Ainsi le film ne s’intéresse pas à des phénomènes extérieurs, mais interroge au contraire les conditions de l’existence personnelle du réalisateur et des spectateurs en posant les limites de la notion d’humanisme. Jusqu’où peut-on comprendre l’autre?
Episode 2 n’a jamais vu le jour.
Episode 3 prend place au Congo. Le constat y est simple : l’aide au développement rapporte plus de capitaux au pays que n’importe quelle autre ressource. Dès lors, pourquoi ne pas envisager la pauvreté comme une matière première? Poussant rationalité et logique capitaliste à leur paroxysme, aux confins de l’absurde et du cynisme, Renzo Martens entreprend de monter un tout nouveau programme d’émancipation. Pas question ici d’enseigner les techniques permettant de creuser un puits ou d’irriguer un champ, le blanc décide plutôt d’apprendre à un groupe de villageois comment photographier la misère alentour. Un cliché de cadavre ou d’enfant sous-alimenté rapportant mille fois plus qu’une bête photographie de mariage, le calcul est vite fait. Mais le business reste jusqu’ici la chasse gardée des occidentaux, vrais propriétaires de la pauvreté. Au cours d’ateliers, la population locale est donc encouragée à ne pas lutter contre la misère mais à l’embrasser, afin d’en cueillir elle aussi les fruits. Dans d’autres régions où la pauvreté n’a pas de valeur marchande, les autochtones sont poussés à accepter leur sort, cette fois parce que l’on n’y changera rien. Face à une situation en apparence totalement bloquée, dans laquelle tout le monde ou presque semble trouver son compte (habitants des pays occidentaux, responsables politiques et économiques, organisations humanitaires...) en dépit d’une indignation de façade, les Africains ont-ils d’autres choix que d’accepter leur condition misérable? Lucides, ne devraient-ils pas plutôt se faire une raison?" Extrait d’un entretien avec Sabine Noble et Mathieu Chausseron
Le séminaire 12 Gestures s’inscrit dans le cadre d’une discussion entre le projet The Public School mené par Bétonsalon depuis septembre 2009 et un projet mené par la fondation Kadist, qui réunit les branches philanthropique et artistique de la fondation sous forme de collaboration et de production. Conçu comme une série d’interventions sur une année, ce séminaire portera sur des pratiques artistiques qui se développent en relation étroite avec un contexte et/ou une communauté ; d’interroger ce que l’on qualifie de ‘pratiques sociales’ dans le champ de l’art. Ce sont autant d’expériences dans lesquelles le rôle de l’artiste, du commissaire, du centre d’art, sont remis en cause au delà de l’exposition, et où l’artiste est amené à travailler de manière collaborative, processuelle et discursive en empruntant parfois ses méthodologies à différentes disciplines. On préfère ici le terme ‘geste’ à celui d’action’, car ces pratiques sont bien souvent modestes et locales, elles ne prétendent pas changer les choses mais visent à s’inscrire justement dans la complexité d’une société en prenant en compte des subjectivités, en soulevant des questions politiques, c’est à dire en « révélant la présence, derrière une situation donnée, de forces qui étaient jusque là cachées. » (Bruno Latour, Changer de société, refaire de la sociologie).

Kadist

CPHDox, Copenhagen - INTELLIGENT MEDIA CRITIQUE IN ONE OF THE DECADE'S MOST IMPORTANT AND CONTROVERSIAL FILMS

Who owns poverty? The Dutch artist Renzo Martens is on an artistic mission in Congo. He wants to make the impoverished inhabitants aware of what he thinks is their primary economic resource: poverty. During his two-year journey, he meets both UN peacekeepers who are busy protecting the country's gold mines, and international photographers who make a living selling pictures of dead bodies and starving children. The artist has brought along an enormous neon sign which shines in the midst of all the grim prospects. The sign says: 'Enjoy Poverty'. Martens's film is a highly controversial, but also nuanced and self-reflective 'j'accuse' against media-transmitted neo-colonialism, which the film itself is a part of.

Debate:
The screening on 8 November is followed by a panel debate about the 'poverty industry' with:

- Linda Polman, Dutch journalist and author of books including 'War Games: The Story of Aid and War in Modern Times'
- Lisa Ann Richey, professor of international development studies at Roskilde University, and about to release the book 'Brand Aid. Shopping Well to save the World.'
- Vivianna Nyros, programme and fund worker, Médecins Sans Frontières

festival CPH Dox

All this at Salon Populaire, Berlin. A video of the event should follow sometime soon.

Salon Populaire

In several screenings, at the Halle de la Gombe, at the Centre Wallonie - Bruxelles, organised by the 'Koninklijke Vlaamse Schouwburg' in Brussels, the screenings finally disclose the discrepancies it all may be about. In Congo, people are well aware of the production process of films on Congo. But not of the results, as films such get screened in Europe, not in there lieu of production. And so, contrary to the reactions in Europe or North America, people hardly see anything abnormal in the film. Yes, this is how films are made. What causes despair, however, is a confirmation of the limits in the mandate of NGO's, journalists, artists and enterpreneurs. TV 7 then decides to air the film and that's that.

Photojournalism is in the midst of a remarkable, and singularly unexpected, renaissance. New practices, strategies, viewpoints, techniques, and agents have radically transformed the institutions and the fundamental concepts of the field.

While it has become fashionable to lament the death of photojournalism, actual events suggest that something quite different is taking place. New ways of reporting the news, new imaginations of what the news might be, have challenged the hegemonic figure of the photojournalist at its core -- and given birth to the most interesting ideas.

An upheaval has occurred at once within the field -- the exhaustion of an old paradigm and its displacement by new ones -- and from without, where different images, and different kinds of images, have ruined the absolute authority of the old ways. These critical approaches -- at once ethical, political, social, aesthetic, theoretical, even epistemological -- which we call, following Allan Sekula, "antiphotojournalism," themselves have a history and a multiplicity of forms, which is what we present here.

Classically, photojournalism has been governed by a number of tropes: the heroic figure of the photographer, the economy of access to the event (getting "close enough," as Capa famously said), the iconic image, the value of 'the real' and its faithful representation in the picture, the mission of reporting the truth and conveying it to a faraway public, and often a commitment to a sort of advocacy or at least a bearing witness to terrible events.

Antiphotojournalism names a systematic critique of these cliches, and a complex set of counter-proposals. It names a profound and passionate fidelity to the image, too, an image unleashed from the demands of this tradition and freed to ask other questions, make other claims, tell other stories.

Sometimes the gesture is reflective, self-reflective -- what are we photographers doing here, what do we assume, how do we work, what do we expect and what is expected of us? Sometimes the desire is evidentiary -- not in the old sense of simply offering the 'evidence' of images to an assumedly homogenous public opinion, but in much more precise way: photographs have become evidence in war crimes tribunals. Sometimes the innovation is technological, whether it involves working with the hi-tech resources of advanced satellite imagery or the low-tech crowd-sourcing of participatory protest imaging. Sometimes the practices are archival, even bordering on the fetishistic.
And sometimes the question is simply whether we even need images at all.

Antiphotojournalism

... in shows curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, Adam Budak and Jelle Bouwhuis. In Amsterdam, the piece is projected from its original base: the raft that served as Martens' mobile production unit in the Congo.

Dutch artist Renzo Martens's provocative film Episode 3 - 'Enjoy Poverty' (2009, 90 min) critically investigates the representation of Congolese poverty by pressuring the contradictions of humanitarianism, photojournalism, and concerned contemporary art. The film asks 'who owns poverty?' and examines the ethics and economics surrounding images of post-colonial suffering. Following the screening, at Tate Modern, Martens will be joined in conversation by T.J. Demos and Tamar Garb, both of UCL's Department of Art History. Sponsored by Wilkinson Gallery, London.

Tate Modern

The Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography is pleased to announce:

An international symposium organized by T.J. Demos (University College London), Hilde Van Gelder (KULeuven) and Dieter Lesage (Erasmushogeschool Brussels), to be held on 21 May 2010 at The Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KV AB).

Speakers: Renzo Martens (artist, Brussels/New York), Thomas Keenan (Director, Human Rights Project and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Bard College, New York), Carles Guerra (director, La Virreina, Barcelona), Toma-Muteba Luntumbue (artist and curator, Brussels/Kinshasa). Moderators: T.J. Demos and Hilde Van Gelder.
Program: 10.00-11.30 a.m. Screening of Renzo Martens' Episode III 11.30 a.m.-1.00 p.m. Lunch break 1.00 p.m. Welcome by VLAC-director Prof. em. Marc De Mey 1.00-3.00 p.m. Symposium 3.00-4.00 p.m. Wine reception

This symposium questions what hope can be offered by contemporary art in relation to political change when it concerns dire situations that appear as otherwise hopeless. It takes as its case study the 2008 film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty by Renzo Martens, 2010 recipient of the prestigious Culture Prize of the Flemish Community. An interdisciplinary gathering of distinguished speakers will examine the film’s investigation of the imaging of Congolese poverty, considering how it pressures the contradictions of humanitarianism, photojournalism, and concerned contemporary art. If the film poses the vexing question 'who owns images of poverty?', we will examine the ethics and economics surrounding representations of post-colonial suffering. The symposium will analyze the aesthetic and political implications of this provocative film, asking as well whether the claims for art’s political effectiveness have become all too complacent in recent curatorial, art- critical, and political writing. If so, can the critical exposure of art’s hopelessness, or at least its ambiguity regarding politics, represent a source of hope, distinct from despair?

The Hopelessness of Contemporary Art