Atopia is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibition on its Vitrine with the work of Michael Wurstbauer.

 

 

Michael Wurstbauer was born in Munich, 1975 and studied Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art (BA, 2003). He works mainly with time-based media in an investigation of mental states, subjectivity and repetition. His video works have been shown in numerous festivals across Europe, and he lives and works in Glasgow.

 

Eastbound - Along Bath Lane, Glasgow brings the location of Atopia into a visual confrontation with the alleys leading to downtown Glasgow at night. This is an interaction that makes the Vitrine into a crossroad for two modes of urban spaces and two singular times.

The four video works of Wurstbauer are made with stop-motion animation technique. His camera gradually moves through the alleys and takes us on a silent journey through the hidden paths of Glasgow. Here the vacant backstreets of the city assume a restless movement, and a sense of anxiety fills up their emptiness.

 

 

                              The work is visible from the street everyday from 15:00 until the next morning (4-18 Feb 2010).

 

 

 

 

Andrew Salgado (b. 1982, Regina, Canada) graduated in 2005 from the University of British Columbia. In 2009 he received his MFA from the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London, and he lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and London, England. His works have been shown in numerous international venues and his participation in Atopia’s Vitrine is his first solo exhibition in Norway.

Salgado’s works employ large-scale figurative oil paintings and videos that engage in an intense exploration of the body, identity, and sexuality.

Paint Your Black Heart Red is a video performance acted on 4 public screens of Atopia. These four acts illustrate various attempts at physical transformations and shifts of identity that at times seem to be brutal. The videos explore the uncertain territories of becoming the other and they make visible the fragility of the body and its physical boundaries.

Paint Your Black Heart Red is also the performative act of Atopia’s Vitrine to explore its own persona as a set of public art screens. With this exhibition Atopia introduces a radical shift from the conventional practices of public art. It questions the prevailing notions of public art where all has to be “pleasant to the eye and friendly to the environment”. Once again Atopia foregrounds the questions pertaining to concepts of the public, its construction and the limits of freedom bestowed on the arts in public space. 

What are the definitions of public art? Do we draw or do we locate these borders and how far could we (or should we) push these boundaries?

 

Installation view,Paint Your Black Heart Red by: Andrew Salgado

 

 

 

Heike Baranowsky, 1966 was born in Augsburg, Germany and lives in Berlin. She studied art in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, and received her MA in Fine Art from Royal College of Art London (1999).

From 2005-8 she was a Professor at Kunsthøgskolen in Bergen, Norway and from 2008 she has been working as Professor at Academy of Fine Art in Nuremberg, Germany.

Baranowsky has exhibited her works extensively in America and Europe with solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Frankfurt (1997), Entwistle London (1999), Kunst-Werke Berlin (2001), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005), Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2010), G Fine Art Washington, DC (2006), and Kunstfenster at BDI, Berlin (2008).

She participated in the New Contemporaries ’98 (1998), Berlin Biennale, (1998), Loop - Back to the Beginning, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York / CAC Cinncinati, Ohio (2001), en route, Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), MoMA Reopen, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004), Convergence at E 116˚/ N 40˚, 789 Dayaolu Workshop, Beijing (2005), 40 Years Video. Video Art in Germany from 1963 until today, ZKM, Karlsruhe and other venues (2006), DESTROY, SHE SAID, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2007), and As Time Goes By, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2009). www.heikebaranowsky.de

 

Passage opens a seascape on the side of Sannergata. Parallel to the hasty movement of cars, busses and people on the street, we see a container ship appearing on the 4 screens of Atopia’s Vitrine and joining the traffic. With the control of timing the work merges the fast with the slow through the high-speed of the seascape and the ship that seems to slowly move in reverse.

Passage presents a rare instant of poetry as Public Video Art. If poetry relies on the use of language, the poetic imagery is a sole dependent of timing.

 

Installation view, Passage by Heike Baranowsky

 

 

 

 

Jonathan Monaghan (New York, 1989) is a young artist working with 3D computer software to create digital sculptures, prints, and animations. He is currently earning his MFA at the University of Maryland, USA.

 

Calling All Angels is a digital animation work that shows various creatures undergoing transformations in a 3D environment.

Made for Atopia’s four-screen outdoor exhibition space the work attempts to engage the physical space in a dialogue with the virtual. In this setting the creatures appear to signal a physiological distress and uncertainty.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Language-cinema

a presentation by Veronika Reichl

 

Sunday, 29 Nov. 2009 at 17:00

 

Atopia is pleased to host a special presentation of works by the artist/writer Veronika Reichl.

 

Language-cinema is a series of experimental animated short films about the language of philosophy. Each film works with an original text passage by authors like Spinoza, Foucault and Wittgenstein. The project explores the sensual and the nonsensical aspects of the construction of meaning in philosophical texts.

 

Veronika Reichl is an artist and writer from Berlin, who is currently working as a guest researcher at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Her book and DVD of short films on the relationship between linguistic and pictorial information, called “Sprachkino” [Language-cinema] was published in 2008 by merz & solitude. She received her PhD in the field of artistic research in 2008 from the University of Portsmouth.

 

 

 

 

VideoForum no. 39

Sunday, 29 Nov. 2009 at 18:00

 

 

Invitation to film & video artists

 

We wish to invite you to the next edition of Atopia's VideoForum. This is an open screening program with no submission procedures, no application forms, and no rejections.

Please bring your DVDs personally to Atopia on the above date. Your works will be screened and you will have a chance to present and discuss them with a group of artists and curators.

“VideoForum works best with a small group of artists as it provides an intimate environment for discussions about the moving image.”

“This is an event for viewing and discovering the latest artists’ film & video works in Oslo.”

 

We welcome works in progress as well as completed works.

Works will be presented in the order received.

Format: DVD

 

 

Opening the Second Season of Vitrine Project

 

       Atopia is pleased to open the second season of Vitrine project with the work of the Colombian artist Miguel Jara.

 

 

 

 

 

Miguel Jara (Bogotá-Colombia -1983) is a young visual artist working with video and animation. He has received his Masters degree in visual arts from the National University of Colombia, 2008, and he is based in Bogotá.

 

In the Woods is a new animation work of Miguel Jara, which is commissioned for the Vitrine 2009-10. Jara’s gripping compositions are built with the simple act of drawing with pencil on paper. His animations focus on the natural forces and elements and work with the dynamics of the multi-screen setting of Atopia’s Vitrine. Jara portrays the constant battle of life through the gaze of wolves, the rumblings of the skies, and the flight of birds. He attempts to translate powers of the nature into the transient context of a normal street scene. In this process our street becomes the scene of a fairy tale, where the Nordic wolves roam around the neighborhood and once again put their claim on this territory.

 

Installation view, In the Woods by Miguel Jara

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter is the first photographic installation work on Atopia’s Vitrine.

The installation is comprised of 144, A3 size photographs mounted directly on the windows of Atopia. They are left outside at the mercy of weather conditions as well as the public behavior. These photographs are now collecting the residues of a 30-day exhibition period and becoming naturalized on the side of the street.

 

The Finissage of the exhibition will celebrate its final shape and development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Visions of Atopia

 

A program of films at D21 Leipzig & Kinobar Prager Frühling in Leipzig, Germany.

Thursday, 5,11,2009

 

This program of short films reflects the audiovisual attitudes of Atopia and traces their development.

Presentation by: Farhad Kalantary.

 

Works by: Linn Lervik

Shades of Grey, DV, B/W, Sound, 2007  - 6 min

The Bird, DV, B/W, Sound, 2009 (in Progress)  - 1 min 

 

Works by: Inger Lise Hansen

Talking to a Stone, 16mm, Color, Sound, 1993  - 5 min

Adrift, 16mm, Color, Sound, 2004 -  9 min.

Paralax, 16mm, Color, Sound, 2009  - 5 min

 

Works by: Farhad Kalantary

Tea House, Super8, B/W, Sound, 1993/2003 – 4 min

North 99, 16mm, Color, Sound, 2000  - 5 min

Opacity, 16mm, Color, Sound, 2005  - 6 min

Moving Target, DV, Color, Sound, 2007 – 2 min

Night, HD Video, Color, sound, 2009 - 6 min

 

As part of Atopia's Traffic project

With the sponsorship of: Office for Contemporary Art Norway - OCA