Curator: Gary O'Dwyer and Pierre Coinde.

Screening : Monday 22 October, 7 to 8 pm at Galapagos, 70 North 6th Street, between Kent and Wythe, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (subway: L to Bedford Av).
Entrance is free.

The Centre of Attention, a London no-commission, non-profit gallery has been branded "big on ideas" (Art Review), "immensely hip" (Artsworld TV), "a hotbed of democratic activity" (The Guardian), as it has consistently sought to show London's new generation of emerging artists.
The Centre of Attention Magazine (Number 2, the video issue) shows a "best of" through images of recent shows, short videos and BBC interviews. From the morbid fascination of Franko B blood letting to the beatification of soap opera stars by Josie McCoy; Oreet Ashery and her unsettling Jewish Rabbi performances, Sebastian Hempel revisiting kinetic art, Katharina Heilein's architectural projects. The witty, ironic take of 90s British Art has given way to a search into Meaning and Pointlessness (Gary O'Dwyer), Addiction and Desire (Eric Heist and Genesis P-Orridge). And the new London generation is now European.

Before its London launch in full version, the Centre of Attention Video Magazine is having a special screening at Galapagos, Brooklyn as part of the UkwithNY Festival
.

Thank you to Galapagos for their support.

The Village Voice wrote:

Village voice Literary Supplement - Fantastic Voyeurs - Lurking on the Dark Side of Biography, by Fred Vermorel November 2001

...Relevant here is the work of performance artists like Sophie Calle. Calle is known for randomly following people in cities, examining the sleeping habits of strangers she invites into her bed, or posing as a chambermaid and scrutinizing the property and lives of hotel guests. Calle's work is interesting, though it may be a cop-out that she protects her intentions behind avant-garde rhetoric and trades in high art rather than commercial discourses-which would be a more dangerous strategy. More suggestive, and more troubling and tentative and unsupervised, are the explorations of Oreet Ashery, a Jewish female performance artist who disguises herself as Marcus Fisher, a male orthodox Jew, and penetrates Orthodox Jewish communities and other milieus in that persona . The cutting edge of such work today, the agenda that biography needs to address, is the phenomenon of the stalker. This is where the contradictions and fantasies of identity and desire are most tested and exposed. The stalker refuses to be intimidated by the "celebritariat" and its massive security apparatus, disrupting the celebrity economy by voicing the unspeakable and demanding the impossible (the impossible which is, however, promised over and over)...

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