Tainted Conceptualism: a conversation
with Hassan Khan
7pm, May 20, 2011
ICI presents: The Curators Perspective
Lamia Joreige
7pm, May 24, 2011
Media Burn: Pop Video Test
7:30pm, May 31, 2011
41 Essex St.
New York City, NY
Throughout the month of May e-flux will be hosting three events at their storefront space in Manhattan. Please check out the program details below.
Tainted Conceptualism: a conversation with Hassan Khan
May 20, 2011
7 p.m., free admission
We assume that moving away from both self-reflexivity and social representation, leads to pure formalism. Hassan Khan confronts this notion through his use of medium, presentation formats, and the creation of partially flawed conceptual systems. Khan will join Sohrab Mohebbi in conversation to consider the play of conceptual methods in Khan’s 52-minute four-channel video piece The Hidden Location (2004) attempting to locate a prevailing thread in the artist’s work. Following a screening of the artist’s selected single channel videos, the conversation will revisit questions and quotations from a collection of texts, interviews and conversations about The Hidden Location, taking them as relics of the piece as the work develops its own relation to history in time. This discussion takes place alongside the artist’s first US presentation of this piece at the Queens Museum of Art, opening May 22nd with a music performance by the artist at 4:30pm. In The Hidden Location, sixteen different sections, in varied length and form, are woven together, triggering the viewers desire to locate relationships between separate sections of the work on the one hand, and between the work and culture at large on the other. As much as it presents the impossibility of cultural representation, The Hidden Location also shows how the medium of the video, through its multiple forms and narrative structures, can only present a landscape in which specific mapping of content is transient and essentially unattainable.
Hassan Khan (b. 1975, London) lives and works in Cairo. Solo and group exhibitions include Galerie Chantal Crousel, Gasworks, Kunsthalle St. Gallen (2010), as well as the Biennials of Istanbul (2003), Seville (2006), Sydney (2006), Thessaloniki (2007), Contour (2007), Gwangju (2008), and Manifesta 8. Khan is the head of 2011 Venice Biennial jury.
Sohrab Mohebbi is the Curatorial Fellow at the Queens Museum of Art.
Independent Curators International (ICI) presents:
The Curators Perspective Lamia Joreige
May 24, 2011
7 p.m., free admission
On Tuesday, May 24, Lamia Joreige, the co-founder and co-director of the Beirut Arts Center, will give an introduction to the contemporary art scene in Lebanon, including the creation of the center, its objectives, and artistic direction. Born in Lebanon in 1972, Lamia Joreige is a visual artist and filmmaker who lives and works in Beirut. She uses archival documents and fictitious elements to reflect on the relation between individual stories and collective history. She has presented her work in many institutions, including the Kunsthalle Whitebox, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Parsons The New School, National Museum and Art Center Reina Sofia, Sharjah Biennial, Pratt Manhattan Galley, International Center of Photography, and Galerie Tanit. Joreige is also co-founder and co-director of Beirut Art Center, a unique non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art in Lebanon. She has contributed to various publications and panels such as: Afterall online, UK (2010), Zones of Conflicts, INIVA, UK (2008), Sarai Reader, India (2007), Art journal, USA (2007), Artforum, USA (Oct. 2006), Out of Beirut, M.A.O., UK (2006), Livraison n°4, Rhinoceros, France (2004) Camera Austria n° 78 (2002), Homeworks II (2005), Missing Links (2001), and Hamra Street Project (2000), Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. She was a resident artist at Delfina Studio, and was part of the Edgware Road project organized by the Serpentine gallery in London.
The Curator’s Perspective is an itinerant public discussion series organized by Independent Curators International (ICI) taking place in a variety of venues throughout New York. Each event features an international curator who distills current happenings in contemporary art, including the artists they are excited by, exhibitions that have made them think, and their views on recent developments in the art world.
Media Burn Independent Video Archive
Pop Video Test
May 31, 2011
7.30 p.m., free admission
“The Pop Video Test” was a joint effort by Scott Jacobs and Tom Weinberg of the Chicago Editing Center, and the Video Group of the Bell and Howell Corporation in 1980. This cooperative effort between the independent video community and a corporate video distributor was intended to test the viability of the home video market. The video-makers assembled ten hours of video pieces meant as an alternative to available pre-recorded programming (i.e. Hollywood movies). Fifty VCR owners in the Chicago area agreed to examine and review the tapes. Test viewers then received the programming two hours at a time, in groupings labeled Video Art, Documentary, Entertainment, and Potpourri.
Tom Weinberg, founder and director of Media Burn Archive will present a program inspired by the “The Pop Video Test” including: TVTV’s Adland; Juan Downey’s Information Withheld (1983); and selections from the early community-based TV show Greetings from Lanesville.
Media Burn Archive is a collection of over 6,000 independent, non-corporate tapes that reflect cultural, political and social reality as seen by independent producers, from 1969 to the present.
