news of the world 50 Resolution Way, Deptford, London SE8 4NT
open every Friday and Saturday, 12 to 6pm

 

Stefan Hoderlein a walk in the park

opens Friday 31st May, 6 to 9pm

news of the world
enclave 3, 50 Resolution Way, London SE8 4NT
Getting there from London Bridge, platform 1/4, Deptford train every 10 mins, takes 6 mins. Resolution Way is just across the road from Deptford station. From east London, Overground to New Cross, and 8 mins walk

Contact: Pierre Coinde / Gary O'Dwyer
Text: 07851 318 230 Email: on@thecentreofattention.org

Intensive care
or such urgent times we live!

Part 2 at Enclave gallery: Harold Offeh, Chris Rawcliffe, Eileen Perrier, Denise Hawrysio, James Robertson, Steven Morgana Part 1 at news of the world: Rose Gibbs, Richard Parry, Esther Planas, Markus Vater, Stephen Wilson, Sam Curtis

Friday 29 March 2013, 6-9pm: Rose Gibbs
Saturday 30 March, 12-6pm: Richard Parry

Friday 5 April, 12-6pm: Esther Planas
Saturday 6 April, 12-6pm: Markus Vater

Friday 12 April, 12-6pm: Stephen Wilson
Saturday 13 April, 12-6pm: Sam Curtis

Friday 26 April, 6-9pm: Harold Offeh
Saturday 27 April, 12-6pm: Chris Rawcliffe

Friday 3 May, 12-6pm: Eileen Perrier
Saturday 4 May, 12-6pm: Denise Hawrysio

Friday 10 May, 12-6pm: James Robertson
Saturday 11 May, 12-6pm: Steven Morgana

An important rule one learns in basic first aid training and lifesaving: the casualties that scream for attention are not the priority in the first instance, no matter how desperate their cries. You go to the silent ones first.

The facility with which art institution press releases, exhibition concepts, curator's statements deploy the concept and language of 'urgency' can recall the strident shrieks of a weather presenter forecasting heavy rains in Wales and the drama of an everything-must-go sale in the high street.

This 'urgency', and seeking its bestowment onto the art object itself, becomes a theatrical framing device. As a visibility strategy, it seeks to raise a consumer craving for action and intervention and to fulfill this with a presentation of artworks. Bent on drama, it scripts the parameters in which these works are to operate. As a call for action, it sucks the lifeblood out of the social and political context to spit out lymphatic dogmatic rhetoric.

news of the world space in Deptford exists as a 'curator's studio', allowing works to be looked at in an R+D / process setting.

Each Friday and Saturday over the coming weeks, one new artist is present in the space. Under the curator’s duty of care, the artist on an examination bench inhabits the gallery alongside their work, underlying the visitors’ part in the diagnosis of observable trauma, anxiety, acute failure, unstable critical condition or fitness for purpose.

Rather than summoning 'urgency', Intensive Care refers to some of the procedures and mechanisms which can deal with emergency; aligning in one space the artist, the work, the curator, the visitor, to take the time and foster calm, focus, expertise, dialogue and unity of purpose in the truthful assessment of the artwork.

Is 'urgency' a symptom of a much deeper malaise affecting the curator patient?

'The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now... but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. Indeed. This is the moment of truth, that fine and fateful line between control and disaster' Hunter S Thompson

Friday 10 May, James Robertson was at news of the world

Saturday 11 May, Steven Morgana was at news of the world

Friday 3 May, Eileen Perrier was at news of the world

Saturday 4 May, Denise Hawrysio was present at news of the world

Friday 26 April, Harold Offeh was at news of the world

in Covers an ongoing series of performances Harold Offeh attempts to transform a series of music album covers from 70s and 80s into durational performances.
Covers. After Funkadelic. Maggot Brain, 1971 (V2) will see Offeh try to re-enact Funkadelic's Maggot Brain, 1971. The original cover depicts the scream of a buried afro haired woman, Offeh reconstructs the image in the gallery. This will be one of several Covers enacted live on the night. The performances will be accompanied by music from the original albums.

Harold Offeh works in a range of media including performance, video, photography, interactive and digital media, employing humour as a means to confront the viewer with an assessment of contemporary popular culture. He studied at the University of Brighton and the Royal College of Art, London. Recently Offeh has approached the themes of futurism and hair through collective live engagements with other artists, performers and community participation. He has shown widely both in the UK and internationally. He lives in London and works in Leeds where he is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Leeds Metropolitan University. Recent exhibition include:
IN YOUR FACE, SHOW studio, London, 2012. GLAMOURIE, Project Space Leeds, Leeds, UK, 2012. GARDEN OF REASON, Ham House and Gardens, Richmond, UK, 2012. ART ON THE UNDERGROUND COMMISSION, London, UK, 2013.

Saturday 27 April, Chris Rawcliffe was at news of the world

Friday 29 March, Rose Gibbs was present at news of the world

Saturday 30th March 12 to 6pm, Richard Parry was present at news of the world

Friday, 5th April, Esther Planas was at news of the world, 12 to 6pm

Saturday 6th April, 12 to 6pm Markus Vater was present at news of the world with a show of published and unpublished books and magazines

Friday 12 April, Stephen Wilson was present at news of the world

On Saturday 13th April, Sam Curtis was at news of the world

Through video, text and performance, Sam Curtis' interest lies in the boundaries between different forms of artistic and non-artistic labour, where art and life are indistinguishable, and where he invites an audience to play as he continues to wrestle with the age old debate of why make art? And for who? On site at news of the world, Sam will be developing a work in progress: VÄXLA :to toggle, to alternate.

serial attempts: Berti, Ferreira, Gbaguidi

curated by Christine Eyene

Preview Friday 25th January 2013, 6 to 9pm.

Serial Attempts is the first presentation of process: immaterial proposal, an ongoing curatorial research project consisting of an evolving assembling of images, texts, and sound pieces focusing on concepts, studies and works-in-progress. The project reflects on the space between the artist's intention and the finished artwork by looking at fragments of the creative process. The title of this exhibition “serial attempts” draws from an expression used by Professor Hans Belting in the introductory chapter of The Invisible Masterpiece (1998, transl. 2001) in which he discusses unrealisable aspirations in art. Three artists have been selected for this showcase Cristiano Berti (Italy), Cecilia Ferreira (Mozambique/South Africa) and Pélagie Gbaguidi (Benin/Belgium), each represented by one piece or body of work.

Berti’s sound installation Happy (2004) is a work begun in 2002 that initially comprised of a video and photographic "mapping" of Happy's body. Berti, however, chooses to remove the photographic evidence and only displays the protagonist’s voice recorded in studio in December 2004. Happy is heard narrating the story behind the scars marking her skin, in Edo, one of Nigeria’s languages. The public is led to draw on their senses to reconstruct the shapes and depths of the scars and imagine the tactility of the skin while being immersed in the musicality of a foreign language.

Cecilia Ferreira’s The Chaos Within (2009) is the artist’s first video-experiment. Filmed with a webcam, the piece presents the successive stages of creation of the artist’s self-portrait, leading to the destruction and desecration of both the artwork and her own image as part of the creative process.

Pélagie Gbaguidi’s series Conciliabule (2003-2006) is shown here as images from her notebooks. Eight “captures” have been selected to reveal the artist’s thoughts through annotations and sketches seemingly jotted as spontaneous creative impulses. This body of work, first presented alongside the artist’s notebooks in the exhibition “En Toute Innocence”, Galerie Imane Farès, Paris (2011), gave the impetus to “process: immaterial proposal” which object is to apprehend art, notably produced by African artists, beyond fixed narratives, representations, and identities.

Serial Attempts is curated by Christine Eyene and organised in collaboration with Making Histories Visible.

 

Christine Eyene is an art historian, critic and curator practicing in the field of modern and contemporary art from Africa and its Diasporas, with a particular interest in representations of the body and gender narratives. She was co-curator the 10th edition of the Dak’Art Biennale (2012) and curator of the African selection of the 3rd edition of Photoquai – Biennial of World Images (2011). Her other projects include “Reflections on the Self – Five African Women Photographers”, a Hayward Touring Exhibition (2011-2013). She has recently been appointed Guild Research Fellow – Contemporary Art, at the School of Art, Design and Performance, University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).

news of the world opened in June 2012 to present work that needs to be seen or shown as it might be in a curator’s research studio. As one exhibition transmogrifies into the next, physical works gradually accrue in the space as trace evidence of the mind’s trajectory.

Herman Makkink

Opened 26 October 2012. Artist reception: Friday 30th November 2012, 6pm.

You are in a dream. Your body is in a state of suspended sensory activity. Your muscles paralysed. Your mind hovers in bright white contained space.
Scattered around that space some vaguely familiar, flattish three-dimensional objects in coordinated shades of white and black. A bit further at the back, a large shiny dark panel inclined against the wall. From where you are, you can't distinguish whether it is the thing, or the thing's support. You proceed to move towards it, to get a closer look, find out what it is. Yet as you do, it appears to glide further away without the space getting any deeper. Distance somehow remains the same.
You feel nothing. You hear voices, conversations, glasses but, as if you were on a theatre stage, you can not see anyone.
You turn around for a moment and observe the delicate isolation of the other spot lit objects placed in the room with the exquisite parsimony of contemporary set design. You resolve to stay immobile for now and to rush back at the least expected moment towards the large dark panel.
You wait...
You wait...
Now!
As you turn and accelerate back towards the end of the gallery, your mind crashes at speed into the proscenium glass and you wake up. Mind empty.


In the cinema.
The art work, with the other props, establishes the scene before the words.
There is no scope for ambivalence or complex interpretation: art in a film must 'read well'.
It must look like art.
It must support the action.
There is no time to contemplate or ambiguate. The story moves on. Action, close-up, shortcut to meaning, consolidation of narrative. Snap.
Makkink's Rocking Machine starred in two feature films: Dropout (Tinto Brass 1970) and Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick 1971). In both films, the sculptural work -the surreal fusion of female hind parts with a phallus- appears to connect to an empowered, sexually liberated female character. But violent scenes quickly follow, where, in Tinto Brass, the woman is brutalised, and where, in the Kubrick, she is killed by the work itself.


The object in time
The installation at news of the world spans 40 years setting the Rocking Machine in the context of Herman Makkink's most recent works.
Time lapsed affords us the luxury to delve into the depth and complexity of the artist's work. Over time, he has used extremely varied techniques and materials. Some dictated by the period: fibreglass in the late 60s used by many artists seeking a contemporary space-age aesthetic. Others by its rejection: bricks and reed, salt blocks, plaster. But always preferring blatantly impractical construction methods towards anti aesthetic installations.
What I see now:
The surreal-ish juxtaposition of disparate images or concepts which imply (or formulate) a secret link, connections and journeys across time and geographies and myths.
Drawing as a sort of Joseph Cornell mind-box played out in a human dimension
Images of latent chaos, ruins and disorder, or where the work itself is pregnant of its own disintegration.
In between:
The works created by the desire to shock, or in the hope to please, or because you did not care or cared too much.
And what is still important to you today.

Further information on Herman Makkink's website here.

Le jeu de Marseille

Opened from 31 August 2012

Victor Brauner
Andre Breton
Oscar Dominguez
Max Ernst
Jacques Herold
Wifredo Lam
Jacqueline Lamba
Andre Masson

 

The reason for existence, the singularity of news of the world ’s permanent and physical art space can now be discerned. As we observed the initial, inaugural installation by celebrated artist Angel Vergara suffer entropic dissolution and decay, it metamorphosed, in fits and starts, leading to the production of another installation through transmogrifying spurts in process over the last couple of weeks.

The scent of marjoram, of lavender, the ceramic cicades, the made-in-china plastic birds, glasses of Marseille pastis, the provisional garde furniture, stand in as a sketch of a wartime South of France garden. Because, to progress, we have to take you back.

Vergara’s installation suggested art-making as a public act and the political impotence of the artist; our mind now turns to the surrealists’ quest to change life, yet choosing to distance themselves from what they saw as the limitations of the present moment.

The new exhibition at news of the world provides a space for the audience to pass time playing cards with the gallery staff.

The set of cards –le jeu de Marseille- was designed collectively by Brauer, Breton, Dominguez, Ernst, Herold, Lam, Lamba and Masson as they waited in Marseille -along with Duchamp, Peret, Levi Strauss and others-, 1940-1941, for visas to escape Europe for America. This episode will be seen by some as marking the terminal decline of surrealism, whilst others see their migration as a catalyst for experiment in American art.

The immersive disengagement required by card playing, a gap the mind makes, an economically unproductive time, echoes the surrealists’ refusal to engage in the world conflict, when engagement would mean allegiance to a party or to despised institutions, and therefore ethical compromise.

The Jeu de Marseille was designed to change symbolic representation, not to enact change itself. Ending the persistent societal values in a deck of cards, Kings, Queens and subaltern Jacks become Sirens, Genius and Magicians. Reflecting the essence of the surrealists’ interest in language, the hidden, chance and poetry and the creation of new modern mythologies, the four suits are replaced by love, knowledge, dream and revolution.

'Their revolutionary declarations remain purely theoretical as they do not impact on their actions… They remain the parasites of the very class they insult' nauseated Sartre in 1947. Post war surrealists will reply by advocating withdrawal and insubordination as the true responsibility of the artist/intellectual who must look beyond the commentary of current affairs ('l’ecart absolu'), dismissing the idea that work should be dictated by its immediate context.

In inviting you to play cards at news of the world, we are offering the game as a conversation with no narrative, as a tentative synthesis of the cards’ new values with the old games rules, and the option to waste your time as an affirmative artistic act.

angel vergara

Opened 15 June 2012 6.30 to 9pm.

On 15 June 2012, news of the world throws open its doors to embark on a new phase for exhibition making. We will present work that needs to be seen; shown as it might in the artist’s studio; neither a dogmatic parcours; nor a packaged presentation of wats-hot wats-nots.

news of the world is a physical space, a personal editing process and a “curator’s studio”, albeit the endeavour may be anti-curating.

news of the world opens with Angel Vergara. Other artists, other works will accrue, as we embrace the post-contemporary and pursue our philosophical and curatorial researches, with the ability to get diverted by new finds or meetings.

Angel Vergara’s diptyque “Berlusconi Pasolini” juxtaposes the position of these two public figures with the mass media: Pasolini denouncing its standardising effect, its flattening of Italian society into sterile conformity (including the conformity in contestation), Berlusconi in control of the national media, but in the end powerless to govern.

Through sometimes aggressive, at other times tentative, paint brushstrokes, the video work also focuses on the powerlessness of the artist in apprehending, fixing, the flow of news and daily political feuilleton, nevertheless pointing to the need to maintain a constant and inflexible critical mind.

Angel Vergara is currently showing in ARTandPRESS at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale 54th international art exhibition in 2011. Other recent solo exhibitions and projects have included ’Monday: Firework; Tuesday: Illuminations; Wednesday: Revolution’, Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels in 2010; Stella Lohaus Gallery, ARCO, Madrid in 2009 ’Angel Vergara. Nous, les oeuvres d’art…’ at Etablissement d’en face projects, Brussels 2008 Art Premiere (with Joëlle Tuerlinckx), Stella Lohaus Gallery, Art Basel 2007 EACC, l’espai d’art contemporani de Castelló, Spain ’Straatman’s Happy entry into Brussels’, Stella Lohaus Gallery, Antwerp; ’Portraits’, MAC’s Grand Hornu, Belgium 2006 ’Actes et Tableaux – Retransmissions –’, MAC’s, Grand-Hornu, Begium; ’El Callajero’, Cultureel Centrum Strombeek-Bever, Belgium. He is represented by Almine Rech Gallery. This is Angel Vergara’s first exhibition in London.

Notes on the artist:

Angel Vergara grew up in Brussels. His body of work contains a wide range of media and disciplines, including performances, drawings, paintings, videos and installations, and a bar. Audiovisual material plays an important role in the majority of Vergara’s exhibitions, as well as making up a substantial part of his work. The material deals with performance recordings, parts of video and other installations, and autonomous film and video work. A continuous cross-fertilisation between art and life is a major constant, with additional focus on the particularity of the artist’s position.

The oldest audiovisual material by Angel Vergara dates from the late eighties. In his Peintures filmiques, Vergara mainly filmed scenes and elements from his own social and artistic background. At the same time, he adopted a subjective perspective towards a heterogeneous spectrum of social and artistic topics (a shoemaker at work, an office building, Marcel Broodthaers’ tomb) through simple editing techniques such as accelerating images. A few years later, Vergara created his Films actions, a series of recordings of performances in which his alter ego Straatman, a figure seen sitting underneath a white canvas in a public space, is introduced; Vergara walking around with brush in hand, tracing the outlines of people and objects around him and thus socially interacting with his environment. The same act is performed in an already mediatised ’reality’ – when Vergara marks his appropriation of existing media images with the same gesture of painting. Through the figure of Straatman, Vergara expresses himself as a kind of medium to a social and cultural background.

In contrast to this, he increasingly relates himself to media images he appropriates as an artist in his autonomous video work. From the mid-2000s, Angel Vergara has created videos in which he follows the shapes and lines of reality with a brush, as if the image were a pallet of paint, or in which he applies his brush to a glass plate placed between the cinematic reality and the camera. Generally intended for multi-channel installations, these videos reveal the tension between the artist’s position and the social history.

In the videos of the exhibition he created with Argos in 2010 (Monday: Firework; Tuesday: Illuminations; Wednesday: Revolution, 2010), historical artistic personalities such as Gustave Wappers and Antoine Wiertz played a central part. Vergara reminding his audience that these artists assumed on a social and political role. In his own work, however, he prefers to occupy the position of mediator introduced by Gustave Courbet. This role, usually assumed by modern art, does not exclude him from adopting a critical position. He bleaches the images he has filmed through digital techniques, which are neither high-tech nor subtle. Vergara belongs to a generation of artists for whom accessible and cheap media technology – available to everyone – also embodies a universal artistic ideal. Nevertheless, the actual creation remains a private process: Vergara sits alone underneath the canvas, and he also paints alone.

news of the world
SPACE: 50 Resolution Way, London SE8 4NT
TEXT: 07851 318 230
EMAIL: pierre@thecentreofattention.org