Vasa 2020 E-Catalog
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VASA 2020 E-CATALOG FRONT PAGE EXHIBITIONS VASA EXHIBITION JOURNAL on IMAGES and CULTURE VIDEO / FILM SERIES ON PHOTOGRAPHY VASA : center for media studies VASA 2020 About VASA ABOUT VASA VASA in an online center for media studies. The International Curatorial Team VASA mission is to provide an internet platform for disseminating the work of theorist and image Photography makers on a global scale. The VASA community Lead Curators shares an interest in media studies, photography, Roberto Muffoletto (Austria/USA) film/video and sound. Rui Goncalves Cepeda (Portugal/UK) To meet its mission, VASA supports online curated Igor Manko (Ukraine) exhibitions; film/video screenings; the Journal on Sandeep Biswas (India) Images and Culture (VJIC); The VASA Front Page Invited Curators Exhibitions, On Photography conversations and Lara Ciarabellini (Italy/Brazil) other programs. Andrea Motta (Greece) This publication, provided free to an international Sinyagur (Ukraine) audience, was made possible by VASA staff and VASA was founded in July of 2009 and is directed Paula Scamparini (Brazil) supporters. by its founder Roberto Muffoletto. Larry Chatman (USA) Kyunghee Lee (South Korea) The e-catalog is designed as an interactive internet- VASA curators, editors, design and production team Ximena Echague (Beligum) Michaela Bosakova (Slovakia) based publication. The content of this publication and contributors are all volunteers. VASA hosts no Judith Rodriguez ( Argentina) ads, is not supported by grants or sells anything. is linked to the exhibitions, essays, and video/film Stefanie Zorzi (Italy/Austria) series on the VASA site (http://vasa-project.com). All images and texts are under © of the author / VASA is a non-profit making organization. VASA Video/Film Series artist / VASA. Membership is free. Miha Colner (Slovenia) Carla Della Beffa (Italy) Users need to be connected to the Internet for Visit VASA: http://vasa-project.com Christian Gold-Kurz (Austria) interaction with the on-line programs on VASA. Contact: [email protected] Users may freely move between this publication and VASA website. Director: Roberto Muffoletto ([email protected]) This publication may be used as a stand-alone Social Media Manager: digital publication. Annie Niland VASA 2020 Table of Content TABLE OF CONTENT This publication demonstrates the activities of VASA Front Page Exhibitions 1 throughout the year 2020. We have grouped the material into five chapters as it appears on the VASA website. VASA Exhibitions 12 The Front Page Exhibition and the VASA Exhibitions programs present the work of established and emerging artists in photography, video, digital media and sound arts. Journal on Images and Culture 21 The Journal on Images and Culture publishes occasional papers that develop a theme or position. Papers draw from theoretical and research manuscripts, visual Video/Film Series 25 dialogs, video and sound works that offer significant perspectives. On Photography 32 The Video/Film Series is designed to stream an artist(s) work or to explore a theme. All film/videos are archived. Artist and Author Index 34 On Photography is a new project statrted in 2020. It presents video recorded conversations with imagemakers, critics, gallery directors and theoreticians The illustrations are linked on a variety of subjects. to the artists’ online exhibitions. The catalog also provides Naturally, this catalog doesn’t embrace all the variety of excerpts from the essays material presented on the website. The Artist and Author and screen grabs of video pages Index provides a list of all artists with links to their linked to the corresponding individual projects on the VASA 2020 site. online essay and video/film. VAЫA 2020 Front Page Exhibitions VASA FRONT PAGE EXHIBITIONS The VASA FRONT PAGE EXHIBITIONS presents the work of photographers, video, and sound artists VASA : center for media studies 1 VASA 2020 Front Page Exhibitions Dmytro Kupriyan Home Ukraine #50 Curator: Igor Manko Dmytro Kuprian’s Home is a series of light installations that merge landscapes and cityscapes into phantasmagorical night images where manmade objects invade natural surroundings. With a portable computer projector the artist projects his cityscape images over the scenery of trees, rivers and rocks at nighttime and takes a photo of the resulting two-layered reality. This photo-of-a-photo approach adds a conceptual dimension to his strikingly convincing and beautifully produced set of works. “People have adjusted the environment for the needs of their comfort and thus transformed it. We have erected cities, confined ourselves in apartment buildings, joined shores with bridges and turned paths into roads and highways. And still we dream to be closer to nature, decorating our homes with natural materials, growing plants, etc. Are we happy with our private living spaces? Should we reconsider our modus vivendi? In this project I research human environment and the homo sapiens’s need of the acquired as opposed to the natural.” 2 VASA 2020 Front Page Exhibitions Dušan Kochol Cruising for a Bruising Slovakia #51 Curator: Michaela Bosakova “Brother, sometimes you get beaten up because you simply ask for it. Getting a testosterone thrill out of the emasculating pain and then wearing your marks proudly as war medals of phallic legion. Fed on the adoration all that you, my hero, can deliver is to bully yourself to unconsciousness, as the castrating eclipse occurs. The collection of black and blue maps is growing but the only road they show leads through your skin to the ugly side. Man up, shake off your ego erected goose bumps to make way for the pain to paint those bruises all over again,” In the mentioned project, most of Dušan’s models were chosen randomly. The process of portraying was purposely physically and psychologically complicated, maybe even harassing at some point, the models have not been instructed or briefed before the photo shoot. Without them knowing, it was actually up to them to set the boundaries, which they don’t want to cross. The outcome portraits where hands of the photographer can be seen deforming the faces of his models, on one side become some kind of an archetypical picture of pain seen mainly in the western painting tradition, while on the other they contrast with the technic of screen printing ink used a lot in pop-art. 3 VASA 2020 Front Page Exhibitions Vaughn Sills Beyond Words USA/Canada #52 Curator: Sandeep Biswas “I have chosen objects from nature one by one, found them, dug them, preserved them – a squirrel’s skeleton, poplar saplings that sprout from one long root, broken egg shells lying on the forest floor. I have taken them, or been given them, from the land on Prince Edward Island where my grandparents visited each summer, where I now have a cottage. I chose these things because of their extraordinary beauty – and because they seem to hold the mystery of life and death. My family’s 1932 Oxford English Dictionary seduces me with its promise to teach, to offer knowledge, even to dispel mystery. But entrancing as it is, leading me from one word to the next, this well-used book lets me down. Words are incomplete; they fall short of conveying the miraculous presence of a squirrel’s skeleton, the complexity of a bird’s nest, the delicacy of a moth. Six letters – l, u, p, i n, e – represent the tall stemmed purple, pink, yellow and white flowered perennials whose palmated leaves turn a dusty grayish green then brown, giving way to hairy seed pods that lyrically soften the late afternoon sun by the middle of August. The word ‘lupine’ doesn’t convey what I see and love, but neither does my long string of words. A word cannot even describe the beauty of a book.” 4 VASA 2020 Front Page Exhibitions Clemens Ascher Allusive Austria #53 Curator: Roberto Muffoletto http://vasa-project.com/index- The art of Clemens Ascher is multi allusive, in both his use of frontpage-53.php layered symbolism and his treatment of photography as a medium. In his works he continues to critically explore different methods of societal control. From capitalism and advertising via patriotism and nationalism to religion, generated ideas like fears, hopes or desires are implanted into people’s minds in order to control them. Such controlling structures use strong symbols to represent their belief systems. This is also the starting point of Ascher’s works. In his photography he recreates similar symbols representing and satirizing these manipulative methods. He continues to construct a surreal world, in which these topics occur in heightened form and multi allusive. Just as the portrayed believe systems, this parallel world is entirely built with photo realistic collage. In this fictional world people function like interchangeable marionettes playing on a theatrical stage. The content just like the working process reference the conceptual superstructure of Ascher’s work. Formally the large format works appear painterly with strongly altered perspectives and nearly abstract compositions. They seem hyper real, yet graphically reduced and with pleasing colors. Just like tempting candies in a shop window. 5 VASA 2020 Front Page Exhibitions Fran Forman Midnight Sun USA #54 Curator: Sandeep Biswas “In her body of work “Midnight Sun” American photographer Fran Forman recreates a painterly world of mystery and fantasy to release and lose herself into her own creative universe. The images traverse through an unknown world, where the characters of her story as well as the viewers submerge themselves into this uncanny and extraordinary world. My first reaction to Fran’s work is that of a visual poet, a dreamer and an idealist living in a practical world of physicalities, yet never giving up on the faith in her dreamlike world of contradictions. These contradictions are a way of life, that question the conscious and the subconscious, the reality and the perception, the ordinary and the extraordinary.