<nettime-ann> I Know the World | Artist talk & discussion Sunday 3 Febru

I Know the World | Artists talk and discussion

Sunday 3 February, 14.30 ? 18.30 hrs

Within the framework of the exhibition I Know the World, which addresses artistic practices informed by geographic and cultural parameters, participating artists will contextualize their work. These works are research based, their sensibility and insight having been gained by travels abroad and are directly related to a specific location, some works include presumptions and artistic strategies which function as useful obstacles when encountering a host country. Within this context a dialogue will take place between audience, artists, curators and Trans Artists (an international platform for artist-in-residence programmes, based in Amsterdam).

Prior to the artists talks (12.00-14.00 hrs), Trans Artists host a workshop on artist-in-residence programmes and related international matters for everyone curious about international art practice and for those who wish to participate on one of the international programmes. You can find more information on www.transartists.nl/articles/trans_artists_workshop.67.html

Programme

14.30-14.45 | Introduction by Lise Nellemann, guest-curator of I Know The World. She is the founder of and responsible for the program of Sparwasser HQ, Offensive for Contemporary Art and Communication in Berlin.

14.50-15.20 | Daniëlle van Zuijlen represents 'hosting' as a model of research. She is currently finishing a five-year ´inverted´ residency in the provincial town of Hoorn in the Netherlands, where she stayed in her ?own? country and invited guests from abroad.

15.25-15.55 | Kristine Agergaard (J&K) will speak about J&K´s futuristic fiction Egyptomaniacs, where religions fuse and new world orders unfold before our eyes. The question is raised as to whether the artists produce a fantasy, a prediction, or a portrait of an existing hybrid world culture.

16.00-16.30 | Sören Lose will talk about the way his work in I Know the World commments and discusses the heritage of Danish culture by juxtaposing the classical icons of so called Danish national romanticism with his own photographs and found tourist snap-shots.

16.45-17.15 | With regards to the amateur theatre re-enactment from Skagen that Tamar Guimaraes includes in her work in the exhibitionI Know The World, the artist Amalia Pica in a comparable manner creates collective actions in the city of Amsterdam. Her performances help us experience historical moments through a feeling of déjà vu. As a participant of an earlier version of the exhibition I Know The World in Berlin,the (Argentinian) artist will present several of her residency projects.

17.20-17.50 | Tanja Nellemann Poulsen & Grete Aagaard do not only see traveling as a tool for education. The cosmopolitan life is also a privileged life, something equivalent to total freedom. The artists express a critical voice towards these clicheés of travel and 'life style industry' images.

17.55-18.30 | Moderated talk by Lise Nellemann with the artists, Binna Choi, Cosmin Costinas, Yep Wiersma and the audience.

Binna Choi is curator at BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and the Research-in-Residence programme. She is forming a critical art practice based research circuit Electric Palm Tree.

Cosmin Costinas is a writer, art critic and curator, currently doing a residency at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. He was one of the editors of documenta 12 magazines (Vienna/Kassel).

Yep Wiersma is advisor and educator at Trans Artists.

Archives of Memory

Reading session by the Department of Reading

Monday 4 February, 17.00 - 21.00 hrs

The Department of Reading is an online-based project promoting new forms of reading. It investigates how to make public readers? disposition to comment and interfere with text, as well as a mode that opens texts towards their intricate textures. One intention is to collectivize the process of reading, another is to further a practice of writing while reading. The online platform of the Department of Reading supports this process and provides conditions for its different reading practices. In applying computer tools, furthermore, this platform also aims to create performative and interpretative modules that offer different approaches to collaborative reading, writing and interpreting.

Archives of Memory, the first reading session of the Department of Reading in 2008, deals with a short text by Giorgio Agamben, entitled The Unforgettable. The session will address Agamben´s comments on The Unforgettable as a departure point for a more general discussion on archiving. With the topos of The Unforgettable it becomes possible to engage differently with questions that concern the modality and thus the treatment of the irretraceable amount of online data. What usage, habit or custom is at our disposal here? What principles of archiving do we apply? Finally, can we understand archiving as another mode of reading?

Everyone is welcome to attend the Archives of Memory at SMART Project Space or participate online, in both cases you will need an account on Skype. If you join the session at SPS you will need to bring your own laptop. Please send an email to soenkeh@gmail.com with your Skype-name in advance.

The Department of Reading is initiated by Sönke Hallmann and supported by the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

Coded Cinema | February Programme Code: 0200

Films selected by Dani Gal & Achim Lengerer in the framework of the project voiceoverhead

The Conversation

(1974) 120 min
Francis Ford Coppola

The Conversation is an Academy Award nominated 1974 mystery thriller about audio surveillance, starring Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Teri Garr, and Cindy Williams; it also features an early performance by Harrison Ford and an uncredited appearance from Robert Duvall. In between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Coppola directed The Conversation, the story of a paranoid wiretapping and surveillance expert (played by Gene Hackman) who finds himself caught up in a possible murder plot. Though the script was written in the mid-1960s, the film was released shortly after the Watergate scandal broke and thus reflected contemporary issues of personal responsibility and the encroachment of technology on privacy.

Vampyr (1932) 30 min

Carl Theodor Dreyer

Freely adapted from classic Victorian supernatural tales by author Sheridan Le Fanu, Vampyr tells the story of a young man who becomes involved with two sisters, one of whom, wasting away with a strange sickness, turns out to be the victim of a vampire.

Klassenverhältnisse (1984) 122 min

Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub

This adaptation of the Franz Kafka novel Amerika - retains the prevalent theme and tone of Kafka?s work - an air of paranoia, a fear of authority, of being unaware of all the facts and not behaving in the correct way, of not knowing one?s rightful place and of being unable to persuade one?s case to a distant, uncaring authority. Being set in America, one would expect Kafka?s to be looking beyond the confines of his oppressive life, upbringing and employment towards a new beginning, but there is never any sense of Kafka?s America being the land of opportunity that it is for so many other immigrants.

Halfmoon Files (2007) 87 min

Philip Scheffner

Mall Singh's crackling words are heard as he spoke into the phonographic funnel on 11th December 1916 in the city of Wünsdorf, near Berlin. Ninety years later, Mall Singh is a number on an old Shellac record in an archive - one amongst hundreds of voices of colonial soldiers of the First World War. In his experimental search The Halfmoon Files, Philip Scheffner follows the traces of the voices to the origin of their recording. Like a memory game - which remains incomplete right until the end - he uncovers pictures and sounds that revive the ghosts of the past. His protagonists' words intersect along the concentric spirals the story follows. Those who pressed the record button on the phonographs, on photo and film cameras, were the ones to write official history. Mall Singh and the other prisoners of war of the Halfmoon Camp disappeared from this story. Their spirits and ghostly appearances seem to play with the filmmaker, to ambush him. They pursue him on his path, to bring their voices back to their home countries. Philip Scheffner lives and works as a filmmaker, video- and sound artist in Berlin.

Vampyr (2001-2002) 15 min
Michael Pfrommer

The Japanese Chie Nagaura reads a phonetic transcription of a German text. The Latin characters used in German have been transcribed into the sign language "Katakana". This enables her to read a text in a language she doesn't know. The original German text was taken from the film Vampyr "The dream of Allan Grey", by Carl Theodor Dreyer produced in 1932.
Michael Pfommer is a visual artist working in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The man who knew to much (1934) 75 min
Alfred Hitchcock

Vintage Hitchcock, with sheer wit and verve masking an implausible plot that spins out of the murder of a spy (Fresnay) in an equally implausible Switzerland (all back-projected mountains), leaving a pair of innocent bystanders (Banks and Best) to track his secret - and their kidnapped daughter - in a dark and labyrinthine London. Where the remake had Doris Day maternally crooning with fateful foreboding, sharpshooting Best simply grabs a rifle and gets after the villains. Pacy, exciting, and with superb settings (taxidermist's shop, dentist's chair, mission chapel complete with gun-toting motherly body, shootout re-enacting the Sidney Street siege, terrific climax in the Albert Hall), it also has nice villainy from a scarred, leering Lorre (here making his British debut). At two-thirds the length of the remake, it's twice the fun. (From an original story by Charles Bennett and DB Wyndham Lewis.)

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) 122 min

Fritz Lang

This is a very unique crime-horror film by director Fritz Lang. Though you may initially be lost it doesn't take too long to figure out what is going on: the titled character (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) has plans to create havoc and destroy order in the World. However, his detailed instructions have to be carried out by others, like Dr. Baum (Oscar Beregi Sr.), because Mabuse is in an insane asylum. In fact, Mabuse dies and his ghostly soul inhabits Baum?s, who then directs the minions to do terrible deeds. One of these henchmen is an ex-con named Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl), who's recently fallen in love with Lilli (Wera Liessem), from whom he'd borrowed (and repaid) money after he was released from prison. Kent is uncomfortable with performing his role and, after an ingenious escape with Lilli, ends up assisting the (feared by all criminals) police Commissioner Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), who'd been trying to figure out what happened to a former associate named Hofmeister (Karl Meixner) and the assassinated Dr. Kramm (Theodor Loos). Hofmeister had been drummed out of the department for accepting a bribe, but had learned both Mabuse?s name, which he etched on his apartment window, and of his counterfeiting plans.

The Coded Cinema offers 24 hour access to an intimate 12 seat film theater, allowing visitors to let themselves in at their own leisure. The Coded Cinema is located in a small building adjacent to the main entrance. The access codes and programmes are distributed monthly.

I Know the World

Fucking Good Art І Tamar Guimarães І J&K І Søren Lose І Tanja Nellemann Poulsen & Grete Aagaard І Daniëlle van Zuijlen
Guest curated by Lise Nellemann (Sparwasser HQ, Berlin)

Exhibition from: 12 January ? 1 March 2008

?I Know the World? focuses on the issue of artists in transit and the manner in which the production of artworks is influenced by experiences abroad. 'I Know the World' is an exhibition and a day of talks focusing particularly on works and artistic practices that have been informed by encounters with another local context, often as a result of the artists? participation in international residencies. As with the previous edition of 'I Know the World', which took place at Sparwasser HQ in Berlin in 2007, this exhibition relates to issues of internationalism, mobility and cultural differences, but especially aims to take a closer look at the art works themselves. The works are based on research, sensibility and insight gained by the artists on location and some include presumptions and personal artistic strategies which function as useful obstacles when encountering the host country and a foreign context.
Artist duo J&K bring forth ideas of the Orient framed by their own culture and mix them with what they actually observe and discover in their host country. The result is a work that brings to life a futuristic fiction where religions fuse and new world orders unfold before our eyes. Søren Lose's work comments on the heritage of Danish culture by juxtaposing the classical icons of so called Danish national romanticism with his own photographs and found tourist snap-shots. The work also reflects on how a country succeeds in bringing home an international artist when he gains foreign recognition and questions how the artist's work is then inscribed into national art history. Tamar Guimaraes? work ?Jan Leton and the Archive? uses footage of outdoor theatre play, re-enacting a historical situation around a former slave, Jan Leton. 'Today, please stay home! Please stay home today stay home stay home home home home' is a quote from a digital running text display that is part of Tanja Nellemann Poulsen & Grete Aagaard´s installation ?Set Up Tours ??. With this work the artists express a critical voice towards these clichés of the 'travel and life style industry' images. Daniëlle van Zuijlen is currently finishing a five-year residency in the town of Hoorn. In this sort of inverted residency, she stays in her ?own? country and hosts visitors from abroad. She presents a pamphlet that can be taken home by visitors. 'Hosting' in a slightly different sense is also introduced by the artist duo Nienke Terpsma & Rob Hamelijnck. Through their participation in residencies the artists produced and published issues of the magazine 'Fucking Good Art' collaborating with artists in the host cities. These issues will be presented in the exhibition.

voiceoverhead

Casper Cordes І Harun Farocki І William Furlong І Sharon Hayes
A project by Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal

Exhibition from 12 January ? 1 March 2008

In their collaborative practice Achim Lengerer & Dani Gal deal with audio-acoustics and storage media used for acoustic material. Their core interests are audio-recordings, particularly of language, spoken word and speech, original footage taken from radio-broadcastings or other archives. Their work found its multiple form in the project 'voiceoverhead' which is rooted in a record collection of approximately 350 records, including footage documenting political speeches and language orientated radio-programs. The records aurally cover historical events and were originally designed to function as ?documentations of the real?. This notion of the 'documentary' has been questioned throughout the history of the medium itself and developed as one of the inherent debates around the emerging modes of reproduction in the late 19th century - the phonograph, film and photography. Starting with the early Lumière-movie 'Workers Leaving the Factory,' this discussion emerges. Harun Farocki has shown, in his 1995 video-essay on the Lumière-sequence, the complexity of a playful representational conspiracy between the audience/viewer, the document/documentarian and the documented beginning at the birth of the genre itself. This act of conspiracy takes place when any document from the archive is brought back to the public sphere as a kind of reenactment of a communicative and rhetorical figure.

Lengerer & Gal developed the idea ?voiceoverhead? in order to locate the record collection and their artistic practice within a broader context and to include the work of other artists, filmmakers and musicians working with archived language materials in multiple ways and diverging modes. So too do divisions exist in the cultural field: such as electronic music that is entrenched in elements of language and radio-sounds and there is a sub-genre of visual artists, filmmakers and documentarians who also focus their work in this area. Both fields are conceptually and practically applying different approaches to the given speech material: differences in working and presentation methods, as well as differences in distribution and public reception. 'voiceoverhead' presents, confronts and merges the approaches applied in these diverse cultural productions in the exhibition and in an evening of sound performances, taking place on Friday 29 February.

'voiceoverhead' is a co-production with the Jan van Eyck Academy.

Looking for an Apartment

SMART Project Space is urgently looking for temporary accommodation for an intern who comes to Amsterdam in the context of the Youth in Action Programme of the European Union. The internship is from January until November 2008. For further information or suggestions, please respond to this email or call the SMART Project Space office during office hours.

Renovations Underway

In August 2005 SMART Project Space acquired the former Pathological Anatomical Laboratories of the Wilhelmina Hospital area in Amsterdam Old West. After two years of developing plans, fundraising and permit procedures, renovation work began in May 2007 to the 3600m2 building. Peter Sas Architects and Bouwborg Nordwest are developing it into exhibition spaces (500 m2), a 3 screen cinema, a multi platform auditorium (120 seat capacity), ten studios, a café/restaurant, library with reading room and an art bookshop. Renovations will be complete in early 2008. During this time, access through the main entrance will remain available for all visitors and resident artists.

SMART Project Space, I Know the World and voiceoverhead are kindly supported by the Mondriaan Foundation, Gemeente Amsterdam, VSBfonds, Stichting Doen, Filmfonds, Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, Stichting Dioraphte and the Danish Arts Agency.

SMART Project Space

Arie Biemondstraat 105-113 | NL-1054 PD Amsterdam

phone: +31 20 42 75951 | fax +31 20 247 59 53

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

Location map: www.smartprojectspace.net/info/location

Opening hours: Tuesday ? Saturday, 12:00-17:00 hrs

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