No. 2
January 10, 2003
Immediate Release
Contact:
Karen Gysin 612.375.7651
karen.gysin@walkerart.org
WALKER
EXHIBITION HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS:
ART
IN A GLOBAL AGE IS PART OF SEASON
FEATURING
GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
FOUR-YEAR
INITIATIVE MAPS NEW TERRAIN
IN
CONTEMPORARY ART
“Understanding cultural
diversity is perhaps one of the greatest challenges of our global
interdependence. As economic borders disintegrate and political borders shift,
what remains are cultures.”
—Henry Kaufman, economic
forecaster
How does art change with a
changing world? A four-year museumwide initiative that put the Walker Art
Center’s visual, performing, film/video, and new media curators, and its
education staff in close contact with colleagues from around the world and took
them to Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, and Turkey has resulted in a
season of multidisciplinary programming that rethinks how contemporary art and
culture are defined and presented in a global context. Anchoring the
initiative, supported by a grant from The Bush Foundation, is the exhibition
How Latitudes Become Forms: Art
in a Global Age, premiering in Minneapolis February 9–May 4. Over the course of
the Walker’s 2002–2003 season, film, performance, Web-based art from around the
globe, and an array of educational and interpretive programs aim to explode
expectations of what art is and can be, across borders and artistic
disciplines. How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global
Age, curated by Philippe Vergne with Douglas
Fogle and Olukemi Ilesanmi, will travel to Torino, Italy; Houston, Texas; and
additional venues to be announced.
A Walker After Hours
Preview Party on Saturday, February 8, features live
performances throughout the evening by the Rio-based Cabelo; South African
artist Robin Rhode; the Los Angeles-based band the Melvins performing the
soundtrack to the Cameron Jamie film BB; and choreographer Ralph Lemon
and Dje Dje Gervais from Africa.
How is art from other latitudes being made and displayed? How does
it travel and translate from the locales where it is conceived to the global
arena? Are new meanings being produced and original assumptions lost over the
journey? A grant from The Bush Foundation in 1999 allowed for the formation of
a global committee made up of curators and scholars from around the world:
Walter Chakela, Director, Windybrow Theater, Johannesburg, South Africa;
Vishakha N. Desai, Senior Vice President/Director, Galleries and Cultural Programs,
the Asia
Society, New York; Hou Hanru, Paris-based independent curator-critic with an
emphasis on contemporary Chinese art; Paulo Herkenhoff, independent curator, São Paulo, Brazil, and former Adjunct Curator, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York; Vasif Kortun, Director and founder of Proje4L
and Istanbul Contemporary Art Museum, Istanbul; Hidenaga Otori, theater critic,
Tokyo, Japan; and Baraka Sele, Curator and Producer, New Jersey Performing Arts
Center World Festival, Newark, New Jersey. Committee members met at the
Walker twice a year for five days each time to expand the theoretical reach of
Walker curators and educators, critique Walker programs, and help Walker
curators make contacts in their home countries. The results of these
conversations and travels are highlighted in a season of programming featuring
an array of new work from countries represented by the Global Committee
members, as well as Argentina, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Mali, and Pakistan.
While the coming year’s programming is the culmination
of four years of work, it’s also a beginning. Becoming a good global partner
required the Walker to examine its own practices while learning how art is
defined and made in cultures across the continents. The theme of both the
exhibition and the programs suggests a level of experimentation and an opening
to the world that gives contemporary art a new kind of latitude. The issues
raised in How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age—how global
change impacts art, the blurring of lines between disciplines, how a global
sensibility takes physical shape—will continue to be a part of the Walker’s
mission.
The exhibition How Latitudes Become
Forms: Art in a Global Age examines ways that globalization, or the “new
internationalism in art,” is affecting visual culture. Twenty-eight artists,
both emerging and mid-career (many making their American debut), from Brazil,
China, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, and the United States are
represented. Their work is determinedly individualized, yet provocatively
informed by its cultural context. Their practices transcend national boundaries
without surrendering their specificity.
Ranging from drawings to architectural
structures, new-media installations to documentary films, the works in How
Latitudes Become Forms resist simplistic artistic designations. Engaging
and challenging as they might be, these multifaceted pieces invite us to
acknowledge that there cannot be a homogenous definition of what constitutes a
work of art and that the criteria of evaluation should constantly be
reassessed. Many of these works dwell in a realm between technical and
conceptual borders, combining popular culture, the mundane, and tradition to
reveal the subversive, expansive power of art.
Often creating site-specific, collaborative
works and privileging process over form, the exhibition artists stretch the
definitions of their media. Embracing a sense of civic responsibility that
redefines activism, they seem to prefer “making art politically” rather than
“making political art.” Their work explores concepts of the local and the
global, but avoids making a distinction between the two. How Latitudes
Become Forms presents projects intended to be explored by artists and
audiences together in an alternative and open-ended reflection on the ongoing
shifts in our global age.
Saturday,
February 8, 9 pm–12 midnight, $14 ($7 Walker members)
This
celebratory evening features spectacular live performances throughout the
evening:
•Cabelo
(Brazil) brings to life a new performance piece full of unexpected, playful
twists.
•A
provocateur and cultural subversive, Robin Rhode (South Africa) creates his
signature wall drawings in the gallery—a humorous, evocative experience not to
be missed!
•Get
into the underbelly of suburban American culture with the Los Angeles-based
band the Melvins and their live soundtrack to BB, a film by Cameron
Jamie (U.S.) on view in the gallery—a U.S. debut.
•Transcending
the strict discipline categories of dance and visual art, choreographer Ralph
Lemon (U.S.) and Dje Dje Gervais (Côte d’Ivoire) reinterpret Bruce Nauman’s
seminal 1965 work Wall/Floor Positions.
Enjoy
complimentary hors d’oeuvres, a cash bar, and the Martini of the Month:
Borderline. Plus, mix up your longitudes during a map collage art-making
activity. Free tickets for new members and those who recruit them. Call
612.375.7622, fax 612.375.7595, or visit www.walkerart.org/tickets/.
“We see culture, and
cultural intervention, as an agile constellation of people, practices,
connections, and objects that come into being when different disciplines,
histories, and attitudes encounter each other in a global cultural space. This
does not mean that we subscribe to the view that there are no cultural
differences, but that cultural affinities and differences are not reducible to
the mere notations of current political cartography.”—Raqs Media Collective
Exploring
the idea of the translocal—the role of place in a global, networked culture—two
new-media projects are presented as part of How Latitudes Become Forms.
In the galleries, a unique new media/visual art collaboration between the New
Delhi–based Raqs Media Collective and Tokyo’s architectural practice Atelier
Bow-Wow blends an ancient form of cultural interchange, contemporary urban
architecture, and the very latest technology. Inspired by the concept of the
caravansarai, spontaneous communities of travelers and traders of Mughal India,
the team has created a Temporary Autonomous Sarai, a meeting space that
provides opportunities for physical and virtual dialogue across cultures and
geographic borders. Borrowing its titles and concepts from Hakim Bey’s Temporary
Autonomous Zone, the project combines Raqs’ conception of a digital sarai
with Atelier Bow-Wow’s notion of da-me or “no-good
architecture”—multiuse structures (an underpass that doubles as a cinema or
barbershop, for example) that epitomize the creative, adaptive aesthetic of
Tokyo.
The parallel exhibition Translocations,
accessible online (http://translocations.walkerart.org) as well as in Temporary
Autonomous Sarai, features digital projects by artists from each of the
seven countries represented in the exhibition. One work, Warren Sack and Sawad
Brooks’ Translation Map, is a piece of software that facilitates
multilingual communication between online environments. “Right now on the Net,
discussion is dominated by the English language,” explains Walker New Media
Curator Steve Dietz. “If we hope to include most of the Earth’s population in a
global conversation, the means will need to be found to connect people across
languages and cultures.” Also presented will be the Translocal
Channel, a 24/7 stream of artist media selected by artist groups from
around the world; re: combo, a project that allows participants to mix
their own sound track using city noise, spoken language, and percussive beats
from specific locales; and big b[o]ther, an online forum about
surveillance and popular media in Latin America organized by Fran Ilich of
Mexico City.
Featuring work by exhibition artists from
the visual, film/video, new media, and performing arts, the Web site
latitudes.walkerart.org also includes related texts, essays, and conversations
between Walker programmers and members of the global advisory committee. Visit
the site frequently to tune in to webcasts of all lectures related to the
exhibition or to log on with select artists and scholars in follow-up online
conversations.
Thursdays,
February 20 and 27, 5–9 pm, Free
Join
students from the Minnesota Arts High School, who have been participating in a
community initiative with OPUS, an interactive Web site created by the new
Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective. OPUS (short for Open Platform for
Unlimited Signification) is a participatory, public space where many ideas
are in play and anyone can modify anything. Interact with a larger community as
you learn how to manipulate music, text, and visual files, and upload your own
material.
Launches March 31
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/jerome/
Singapore-based tsunamii.net launches alpha 3.8, a Walker
commission, which is an exploration of the relationship between physical space
and cyberspace. Over one year, they will electronically migrate their site from
webserver to webserver around the world, changing the DNS address after each
move to reflect the new geographic location from which the site is served.
Distributive Justice: America
http://www.distributive-justice.com
Zagreb-based artist-in-residence Andreja Kuluncic and her team
visit the Walker to develop the online project Distributive Justice: America,
which uses a game format to address the topic of distribution of goods in a
society where participants distribute money, freedom, social status,
opportunities, and public services as they like. Kuluncic will demonstrate her
multidisciplinary work at a Free Thursdays program on March 13 (see
Interpretive Programs listing below).
Film/Video
Reflecting a deeply
multidisciplinary approach, the exhibition will include artists using moving
images to observe—or imagine— cultural reactions to economic or social change.
Chinese filmmaker Wang Jian-wei, a Walker artist-in-residence, will be
represented in the galleries by his documentary video Living Elsewhere.
As China continues to modernize, the accelerated use of digital video cameras
has spawned a new freedom in documenting daily life. With his unobtrusive
camera, Wang records the experiences and the margins of life; dusty lanes,
neglected corners, displaced workers from the countryside trying to make ends
meet.
Auditorium screenings planned in
conjunction with the exhibition (program details to be announced):
March 5–22
Women with Vision, in its 10th year, is a festival showcasing
women filmmakers from across the United States and around the world, including
several of the countries represented in the exhibition. The works screened
resonate with ideas of global migration and transformation.
April 2–18
Celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Hubert Bals Fund, managed
by the International Film Festival Rotterdam, this 10-film series presents
innovative works from Mauritania, Mexico, and Argentina to Iran and Tajikstan,
which Film/Video Curator Cis Bierinckx calls cinema d’urgence—urgent
stories emerging out of specific social or political realities.
June 4–18
The wildly imaginative films of Takashi Miike are presented in the
series Tokyo Underground: Takashi Miike’s Mad Bad World. An eclectic,
subversive kamikaze filmmaker and analyst of contemporary Japanese society,
this Osaka-based artist is noted for his remarable output—five or six films per
year.
The Performing Arts component of
How Latitudes Become Forms includes two large-scale
cross-cultural/transnational performance commissions; six one-week dance or
dance-theater residencies by artists from Brazil, South Africa, Argentina,
Japan, and China; the two-part ensemble vocal series World Voices: Ancient to
the Future; and a music event by one of Brazil’s vanguard next generation
composer-performers.
The commissions involve global
collaborative projects that bring U.S. and non-Western contemporary performance
artists together in the creation of new multidisciplinary work. American
choreographer-director Ralph Lemon is creating the stage performance work House
along with the new-media/digital artwork House[raw] (both are
collaborations with artists from Africa, Asia, and the U.S., and will be
developed in residence at the Walker in 2002-2003, premiering in 2004-2005).
The second commission involves New York experimental theater-media artists The
Builders Association coming together with London, India, and
Trinidad-based designers-visual-theater artists moti roti with the new performance work Alladeen (co-presented in
Minneapolis with the Guthrie Theater) as well as an associated Web project and
a music-video.
The other dance and music
presentations concentrate on artists from key centers of global creativity
centers in contemporary art—Tokyo, Rio, Johannesburg, Beijing, and Buenos
Aires. These mostly young, experimental artists are showing us the future—not
just for contemporary art but for many of the aspects of the world we live in
today.
Perhaps even more important than the formal
concerns of this initiative is its timeliness. The tragedy of September 11,
2001, and its aftermath have resulted in a American public’s growing fear and
misunderstanding of people from other nations, a desire to ignore or reject the
concerns of the rest of the world. Our government is increasingly restricting
international writers, thinkers, and artists from traveling to America, thus
limiting access to their essential ideas and perspectives. The concentrated
presence of theater directors, media artists, composers, performance creators,
dancers, musicians, and filmmakers from around the world will offer increasingly rare opportunities for dialogue
and new understanding to develop, and for our region and country to continue to
play an important role in innovative global artistic practice.
($) = ticket price for Walker Art Center
members
Artists
in Action:
African
Influence on Contemporary Performing Arts and Performance Art
Thursday,
February 6, 7 pm, Free
See
description below in Interpretive Programs section.
Secreto
y Malibú
Thursday, January
30, 8 pm, $18 ($9)
Friday–Saturday,
January 31–February 1, 8 pm; Sunday, February 2, 2 pm, $18 ($14)
“A delicious
surprise.”—The New York Times
Intricately
orchestrated with a mix of violence, joy, and precision, Secreto y Malibú
is a masterfully staged dance-theater work—a snapshot of two young women on the
verge. In a lonely courtyard in an unnamed rural landscape, they engage in both
duet and duel, with moments of fierce physicality giving way to confusion and
fantasy, sensuality and despair. Argentinean director Diana Szeinblum creates a
complex atmosphere that presents pieces of a psychological puzzle set in a
surrealistic, dreamlike panorama.
Supported
in part with funds from The Bush Foundation. U.S. tour support provided by Arts
International with funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.
Such
Stuff As We Are Made Of
Friday–Sunday,
March 7–9, 8 pm, $19 ($15)
Patrick’s Cabaret,
3010 Minnehaha Avenue South, Minneapolis
“Lia Rodrigues’
work is a masterpiece.”—Ballet–tanz International
Melding the
irreverent spirit of the 1960s/1970s Tropicalismo movement with the hard-edge
realities of 21st-century Brazil, Rio-based dance-theater artist Lia Rodrigues
presents Such Stuff As We Are Made Of. This immersive experience
celebrates the naked human body as both a work of sculptural beauty and a
vessel for complex spiritual, politcal, and emotional desires. Contains nudity.
Copresented with
Patrick’s Cabaret. Supported in part with funds from The Bush Foundation.
Moreno Veloso + 2
Thursday, March 13, 8 pm, $20 ($16)
Walker Auditorium
If Brazil continues to produce albums as delicate and emotionally
complex as [Moreno Veloso’s 2001 release] Music Typewriter, [it] will
occupy as honored a place in the 21st century as it did in the 20th."—Time
Part of the vanguard of the next generation of Brazilian
musicians, composer-singer Moreno Veloso and + 2 (Alexandre Kassin and Domenic
Lancelloti) meld the traditions of Brazil—samba, bossa nova, MPB (música
popular Brasileira)—with their own distinctive brand of electronica, dub,
Dadaist noise experiments, and sweet artpop inflections. Like his father before
him (legendary Tropicalismo pioneer
Caetano Veloso), this Veloso points to an idiosyncratic, yet
seductive vision of new Brazilian music that embraces past, present, and
future.
Additional support provided by The Bush Foundation.
Grupo Corpo: O Corpo
Saturday, March
22, 8 pm, $31 ($25)
Northrop
Auditorium, U of M East Bank Campus, Minneapolis
“A spicy,
simmering stew of Brazil’s African, Arabic, and European influences.”
—The Times,
London
Brazil’s 19-member
Grupo Corpo grafts the pliancy of modern dance and rhythmic complexity of
Afro-Brazilian dance onto ballet. Leaders of Brazil’s fertile contemporary
dance scene, brothers Paulo and Rodrigo Pederneiras pair this gorgeous hybrid
with new sounds in Brazilian music.
Copresented with
Northrop Auditorium as part of the 2002–2003 Discover Series, made possible by
a generous grant from Marshall Field’s Project Imagine with support from the
Target Foundation. Program support provided by The Bush Foundation.
I
Want To Hold You
Thursday–Saturday,
April 3–5, 8 pm, $19 ($15)
Southern Theater,
1420 Washington Avenue South, Minneapolis
In a few short
years, Kim Itoh has become an acknowledged leader in the next generation of post-butoh
and postmodern dance in Japan. As witnessed in the 1998 Walker presentation Dead
or Alive, Itoh combines a ferocious punk energy with the sparseness and
grace of much of traditional Japanese art. I Want to Hold You addresses
the fragility of human relationships in contemporary Japanese society. This
penetrating new work, using wit and athleticism to explore uncharted
borderlands of butoh, ballet, and theater, is composed of two parts—the first a
solo by Itoh, and the second performed by eight dancers.
Supported in part
with funds from The Bush Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and
the Japan Foundation through the Performing Arts Japan Program and the Agency
for Cultural Affairs of Japan.
Ensemble Tartit
Saturday, April
12, 8 pm, $20 ($16)
Walker Auditorium
On their first
U.S. tour, the all-female Ensemble Tartit brings the music of West Africa’s
Taureg society for a rare performance. Formed in the refugee camps of
Bassikounou, Mauritania, the group creates music that is universal in its
hypnotic, bluesy qualities.
The Builders
Association/moti roti
Alladeen
Thursday–Sunday,
April 24–27, 7:30 pm, $24 ($20)
Guthrie Lab, 700
North First Street, Minneapolis
“the actors . . . transform the technological
wizardry into human passion, elation, delight, wonder, and understanding.”—The
New York Times
Alladeen
is a fresh mix of text, video, performance, and film by New York–based
experimental theater company The Builders Association and London-based
media-design-performance collective moti roti. Drawing from their experiences
as citizens of the hybridized, urban landscapes of New York, London, and
Bangalore, the two companies rethink conventional “multicultural”
collaborations, focusing on the story of Alladeen (Aladdin in the West) showing
how cultures borrow, steal, and reinterpret each other’s myths. With influences
that range from the ongoing exchange between Bollywood (Indian film industry)
and
Hollywood to the
technology trade between India and the United States, Alladeen resonates
with contemporary themes such as instant gratification, wish fulfillment, and
rampant consumerism. Co-commissioned by the Walker; the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago; the Kitchen, New York City; and the Wexner Center for the Arts,
Columbus. Copresented with the Guthrie Theater.
Supported in part
with funds from The Bush Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Living Dance Studio
Report
on Body
Thursday–Saturday,
May 1–3, 8 pm; Sunday, May 4, 7 pm, $18 ($14)
Red Eye Theater,
15 West 14th Street, Minneapolis
“. . . captures a
raw, disturbed feminine essence.”—Beijing Scene
Experimental
choreographer Wen Hui and pioneering Chinese filmmaker Wu Wenguang codirect
China’s first independent dance-theater company, producing multimedia works
that examine the everyday lives of women in modern China. Set against that
country’s greatly altered commercial and consumer culture, Report on Body
explores the challenges and changes women experience as they operate in the
shadows of a male-dominated society. This is a rare chance to glimpse the
cutting edge of Chinese dance and performance art. Copresented with Red Eye.
Supported in part
with funds from The Bush Foundation, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, and
the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project.
New York–based
choreographer-director-writer Ralph Lemon and his international collaborators
are developing the final stage of his remarkable Geography trilogy, House,
which premieres in 2004–2005.
Supported in part
with funds from The Bush Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and
the National Endowment for the Arts.
Interpretive
Programs
Panel
Discussion: Global Curating in the 21st Century
Sunday, February
9, 3 pm, Free with gallery admission
Walker Auditorium
Five visual arts
curators from around the world discuss what it means to think in a global
context. Participants include Kathy Halbreich, Director, Walker Art Center;
Vishakha N. Desai, Senior Vice President/Director, Galleries and Cultural
Programs, The Asia Society; Hou Hanru, independent curator-critic; Paulo
Herkenhoff, Director, São Paulo Bienal; and
exhibition curator Philippe Vergne.
Lecture
Series: New Ideas on Globalization
This series of
free lectures is co-presented by the Walker Art Center, the University of
Minnesota Humanities Institute, the Institute for Global Studies, and European
Studies Consortium. The Institute for Global Studies supports this program
through a Title VI grant in International Studies from the U.S. Department of
Education.
Tariq Ali: War and Empire
Tuesday, February
25, 7 pm, Free
Walker Auditorium
What differs
between old and new empires? Why has war been such a regular feature of human
history? Tariq Ali addresses these questions and ponders the effects of current
military technology on the physical world as well as changing attitudes toward
global politics. Ali is the longstanding editor of the New Left Review,
the author of more than a dozen books on history and politics, a novelist, and
a playwright.
Siva Vaidhyanathan: The Anarchist in
the Library
Tuesday, April 8,
7 pm, Free
Walker Auditorium
With the rise of electronic communication, the battle for control
over information is intensifying. Artists, teachers, and hackers struggle to
wrest control of information from governments, multi-national corporations, and
entertainment conglomerates. Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in
the Library: How Peer-to-Peer Networks are Transforming Politics, Culture and
the Control of Information, draws upon examples ranging from ancient
religions to open-source software to show how this battle will be one of the
defining fault lines of 21st-century civilization.
Carol Becker: Social Memory and the
Making of Art
Tuesday, April 15,
7 pm, Free
Walker Auditorium
Critic and Dean of
Faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Carol Becker critiques
romantic notions of nomadism by recounting her experiences leading a group of
student artists to Vietnam.
Neil Smith: The Virtues and Pitfalls
of Globalization
Tuesday, April 22,
7 pm, Free
Walker Auditorium
Marxist geographer
Neil Smith, author of Uneven Development and The New Urban Frontier:
Gentrification and the Revisionist City, will debate a representative from
the Federal Reserve on the virtues and pitfalls of globalization.
Artist
Talk: Keith Kahn, Ali Zaidi, and Danny Yung
Sunday, April 27, 2 pm, Free with gallery admission
Auditorium
Join Keith Kahn and Ali Zaidi (artistic directors of Walker
artists-in-residence Moti Roti of London) and Danny Yung (artistic director of
Hong Kong's Zuni Icosahedron) for a discussion on the creation of
multidisciplinary performance works and collaborations that are informed by a
global context.
Free
Thursdays
Artists
in Action:
Thursday,
February 6, 7 pm, Free
Walker
Auditorium
Join prominent artists and curators who are creating their work in
South Africa or who actively work with African artists. As they explore their
perspectives on the contemporary aesthetics in performing arts and performance
art, they will discuss how their practice has been influenced by their
experience in Africa. Participants include: Baraka Sele, Director of the
New Jersey Performing Arts Center World Festival; Walker Chakela, Director,
Windybrow Theater; and Walker artists-in-residence Robin Rhode, South African
visual artist; and Ralph Lemon, American choreographer. Moderated by Philip
Bither, Walker Performing Arts Curator.
Better Looking: Modest Materials
Thursday, March 6,
6:30 pm, Free
Meet in the Lobby.
Plastic,
newsprint, product packaging, and milk crate are among the many materials used
in the artworks on view in the exhibition. Join Walker Curatorial Assistant
Olukemi Ilesanmi leads a tour to discuss these materials choices and how they
impact artistic practice.
Free Ware: Distributive Justice
Thursday, March
13, 7 pm, Free
Walker Lecture
Room
Distributive
justice is not only a central issue of moral and political philosophy, but also
an object of common-sense moral reasoning. We are all sensitive to the question
of our share of the common good. For this talk, Croatian artist Andreja
Kuluncic will demonstrate Distributive Justice: America, a
multidisciplinary work
involving
artists, writers, and philosophers. Most recently exhibited at Documenta XI
(2002), this project is a continually developing exploration of social values.
It materializes in both gallery spaces and online as a game in which
participants generate content relative to their experience and location.
Better Looking: Artists’ Practice
Thursday, April 3,
6:30 pm, Free
Meet in the Lobby
Artists make choices not only about media, form, and materials,
but also where their works should be seen. From the gallery wall to the street,
artists are employing some surprising new practices. Join Walker Visual Arts
Curator Philippe Vergne on an investigation of the diversity of artistic
practice in the exhibition.
Free Verse: Bei Dao and Elliot
Weinberger
Thursday, April 3,
7 pm, Free
Walker Auditorium
Bei
Dao, the foremost of China’s Misty Poets, has been in exile since the Tiananmen
Square massacre of 1989. His internationally acclaimed poetry and fiction
avoids straightforward polemics, and instead offers a lyricism that blends loss
and hope to become a voice of conscience for the world. His most recent volume
of poetry is Unlock (2000), translated by Elliot Weinberger and Iona
Man-Cheong.
Elliot
Weinberger is an acclaimed essayist whose most recent volume is Karmic
Traces (2000). His work is vividly imaginative, acerbically witty, and
politically engaged. Among his translation credits are The Collected Poems
of Octavio Paz and Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fiction, which
won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1999, and the forthcoming volume, New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry.
9/12, a
collection of his recent political articles will be published this spring.
Free Verse is
co-sponsored by Rain Taxi Review of Books.
Better Looking: Performative Elements in Visual Art
Thursday, May 1, 6:30 pm, Free
Meet in the lobby.
From photographed street performance to temporary water paintings,
performative elements are used by many artists in How Latitudes Become Forms
to create works of visual art. Explore these practices on a tour of the
exhibition with Walker Associate Curator Douglas Fogle.
Free Thursdays are made possible by generous suport from the Lila
Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.
Open
Mondays Teacher Workshop
Monday, February
24, 5–7 pm, $10 ($8)
Explore ways that
globalization has affected artistic practices in different parts of the world
on a tour of the exhibition. Participants preview new Art Lab activities and
receive a slide packet for classroom discussions. Refreshments will be served.
Space is limited. To register, call 612.375.7622.
Teachers’
Conference:
Connecting
Stories: Globalism and Interdisciplinary Education
Friday–Saturday,
April 25–26, registration required: call 612.375.7614 for more information
Walker Art Center
Learn the stories behind the changing demographics in Minnesota
schools and explore how the arts can lead to understanding and communication
within and among global cultures.
Born 1974 in Philadelphia.
Lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Born
1971 in Havana, Cuba. Lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Working
in collaboration, Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla mine the spaces
between sculpture, performance, architecture, and public intervention. They
open avenues for reflection at the complex intersection of global politics and
personal identity. Often interactive, their work incorporates the
underutilized
(quotes of secret desires placed on flat building tops for viewing by airplane
passengers), the unexpected (a tennis video game board painted onto the floor
of a real tennis court), and the physical (office window blinds that open and
shut according to the movement of outside passersby, thus re-orienting who
controls the power of observation). Through work infused with a generous
democratic impulse, the artists address issues of public engagement and
expression.
Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin
Born 1957. Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.
Trained in art and philosophy, Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin explores the
narrow gap between the real and its reproduction, local realities and global
fantasies, signifiers and signified, ideas and language, history and
mythologies. He develops critical works that borrow the structure of language
in order to analyze the phenomenon of perception and the diffusion of
knowledge. His photo, text, and object collages originate from an aesthetic of
association that plays off the tension and heightened awareness that
juxtaposition brings. He uses “coincidences,” associative relations, to
highlight that meaning is not in the structure of language itself but in the
mind.
Born
1975 in Turkey. Lives and works in Ankara.
An
architect, artist, designer, and scholar, Can Altay is interested in unorthodox
appropriations of the built environment. His current project, the minibar
projections, is an exploration, documentation, and exhibition of the
transgressive use of semi-public space by young people. Altay’s documentation
of informal participants’ occupation of the semi-public realm, and the
resulting architectural and social response (heightened fences, the erection of
metal bars) alert us to the increasing privatization of our surroundings and
the almost complete lack of truly public space in the urban sphere.
Additionally, they capture fleeting moments in time; a sense heightened by the
age of the young minibar occupants, who are captured poised at the edge of
adulthood.
Kaoru Arima
Born
1969. Lives and works in Inuyama-City, Japan.
Since
1997, Kaoru Arima has produced drawings on an everyday basis. His supports vary
from notebooks to drawing paper to the pages of newspapers. His works are figurative
and borrow from a large range of sources. His complex and intricate iconography
includes distorted bodies with eccentric sexuality, twisted mythologies merged
with underground icons, primal anxiety juxtaposed with absolute serenity, and
sharp sarcasm next to naïve poetry. Arima’s practice evolves from two
traditions: a nonmodernist Zen Buddhist background, and another informed by
conceptual art strategies that aim to systematically analyze and exhaust the
temporal, spatial, and cultural parameters that constitute art and culture. The
subversive dimension of his work comes from the fact that each of these
languages produces a critique, exposed but unmediated by the artist, of the
other.
Atelier
Bow-Wow/Artists-In-Residence
Yoshiharu
Tsukamoto
Born 1965 in Japan. Lives
and works in Tokyo.
Born
1969 in Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo.
An
architectural studio started in 1992 by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima,
Atelier Bow-Wow champions a site- and use-specific design for the new millennium.
Leaders of a new generation of Tokyo architects, Tsukamoto and Kaijima are
proponents of what they call “da-me” or no-good architecture. Multilayered
structures with varied uses, this architecture epitomizes, for them, a new
creative, adaptive aesthetic that is the quintessence of Tokyo. They embrace
the “forward-looking quality, the throwaway feeling, . . . (the)
really-living-right-now sense of these buildings,” which include an
underpass+cinema+bar+barber+store and an expressway +department store. One of
their projects, Made in Tokyo, is a book that catalogs 70 such
structures and provides a methodology and guide to key words. Reminiscent of
the unique categorizing systems of other conceptual artists such as Dan Graham
and Hans Haacke, Atelier Bow-Wow’s work is at once a serious research
undertaking and a humorous look at both its subject and its project.
Born
1967 in Brazil. Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Cabelo is a cultural seismographer who
creates public performances and sculptural environments that chart the fault
lines and energy flows between the different densities of the physical,
psychic, and geographic spaces of his life in Brazil. After studying and
abandoning engineering and then vermiculture (earthworm farming), Cabelo moved
on to study poetry and performance at the Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. It is
the merging of these two very different backgrounds—the scientific and the
aesthetic—that gives Cabelo’s work its particular power. The power of
transformation is central to his work, whether it is the biological ability of
earthworms to transform garbage into fertilizer or the ability of the poetic to
transform our everyday lives in the modern world.
Franklin
Cassaro manipulates common materials such as newspaper, tin foil, product
packaging, audiotapes, and cough drops to construct sculptures that
provocatively conflate the organic and the inert. Originally trained in the
sciences, Cassaro approaches artistic production with the sensibility of a
renegade researcher, treating his sculptural investigations as quasi-scientific
explorations into the potential evolution of plastic forms. Categorizing his
artistic production under the self-made heading of “bio-concretism,” Cassaro
unites biological morphology and taxonomy with his fascination with the
phenomenological and social bases of the artistic production of the Brazilian
Neo-Concrete artists of the 1950s and 1960s such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia
Clark. In keeping with the legacy of the Neo-Concretists, Cassaro’s work
suggests that art can only be completed by the physical interaction of subjects
moving through the world.
Santiago Cucullu
Born 1969 in Argentina. Lives
and works in Houston, Texas
Santiago Cucullu’s site-specific wall
paintings live in the gap between personal reminiscence, fiction, and public
memory, provoking viewers to develop personal narratives while questioning the
possibility of constructing history objectively. Interested in the play between
history and power—what is remembered and what is forgotten—he combines found
imagery, historical figures, and mythological icons into ambiguous narratives.
These provocative works echo the form of history itself, full of holes and
uncertain truths.
Born
1958 in India. Lives and works in New Delhi, India.
Initially
trained as an art historian and critic, Anita Dube’s sculptures deploy a
conceptual language that valorizes the sculptural fragment as a cultural bearer
of personal and social memory, history, mythology, and phenomenological
experience. Employing a variety of found objects drawn from the realms of the
industrial (foam, plastic, wire), craft (thread, beads, velvet), somatic
(dentures, bone), and readymade (ceramic eyes), Dube investigates a divergent
range of subjects that address a very human concern with both personal and
societal loss and regeneration.
Esra Ersen
Born 1970. Lives and work in
Istanbul, Turkey.
In her work, Esra Ersen explores
social behavior—the way identities are shaped and transformed across national,
cultural, linguistic, and intimate boundaries. Whether she works with
photography, video, or installation, she often reacts to or uses the specific
location of her activity to formalize her investigations. In her video
installation Hamam (2001), she creates a viewing room that exposes a
traditionally gender-exclusive private space (two women talking and bathing in
a bathroom) to an audience. What starts as a casual, pedestrian conversation
piece ends up being a critical consideration of the social space created in
interpersonal communication: a space where, in this case, a private moment is
bounced into the display of public selves; a space where intimacy is broken and
left open to the indiscreet and inquisitive gazes of viewers.
Sheela Gowda
Born
1957 in India. Lives and works in Bangalore.
Sheela
Gowda’s work occupies a space between painting, drawing, sculpture, and
installation. Initially trained as a painter, Gowda underwent a profound
transformation in the wake of fundamentalist Hindu violence and the Bombay
riots of 1992, abandoning conventional forms of painting and turning to
sculpture and installation. She also made a dramatic shift in her choice of
materials, incorporating into her work
substances
and processes from traditional Indian culture such as cow dung, which has
sacred implications but is also used as a domestic cooking fuel and building
material, and kumkum, a red dye used for body adornment and rituals.
Consciously blurring the lines between fine art and craft, and between
creative, political, and domestic space, Gowda investigates the possibilities
of the contemporary, while also questioning the role of female subjectivity in
the often volatile mix of religion, nationalism, and violence in contemporary
Indian society.
Born
1971. Lives and works in Kyoto, Japan.
In
his work, Zon Ito privileges mediums considered too low, too domestic, too
precious, too narrative, or too crafty for contemporary art. His embroidered
tableaux feature strange playlets, hallucinated landscapes, and twisted
wildlife scenes. His visual vocabulary also appears in the animated films he
has conceived with artist Aoki Ryoko (Psychic Scope, 2000), in his
series of handmade books (Scrap Works of Scum, 1999), and in his tiny
plaster sculptures based on a word-chain game (Word-chain Game Ornaments,
1999). Based on a rigorous visual vocabulary, as well as a programmatic set of
forms, his work is animated by his decision to operate outside of the center.
The underrated nature of Ito’s practice and mediums drafts an aesthetic of
quiet subversion—a rearguard as opposed to an avant-garde attitude. His work
embodies the moment when the poetic becomes political and the ambitious
strength of the slightest gesture.
Cameron Jamie
Born 1969. Lives and works in
Los Angeles and Paris.
Cameron Jamie’s work, a blend of
video, performance, sculpture, and drawing, presents the underbelly of American
history and culture. Like Mike Kelley, Larry Clark, or Harmony Korine, he
examines the effects of popular culture on the human psyche. What
differentiates him from these artists is his methodology, informed by
scientific and forensic anthropology. Using American suburban culture as a case
study, he analyzes ways that structures of mythology are shaped and shared and
the extent to which they participate in the creation of the individual’s
fictional self.
Born
1946. Lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.
Gülsün
Karamustafa has described herself as “stretched between continents.” She
addresses issues of cultural identity and hybridity in her installation, performance,
and video work, including migration, exile, cultural appropriation, childhood,
and Orientalism. In spite of the breadth of her subject matter, her works are
firmly anchored by the deeply personal nature of her artistic process.
Evocative rather than didactic, aesthetically rich and detailed, they elicit
history only to connect it to the present, opening up new dialogues where past,
present, and future meet.
Born
1975 in Bakenberg, South Africa. Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
An
artist not afraid to draw from a life lived in-between, Moshekwa Langa creates
drawings, photographs, video, and installations that are poetic, personal, and
deeply engaged with the larger world of art, politics, and popular culture. He
often uses materials at his immediate disposal, including plastic bags,
colorful yarns, masking tape, cement bags, and paint. Just as he layers diverse
materials, he layers meanings and references that are at once cryptic,
ambivalent, and resonant. The viewer is left to decode artworks that intrigue
yet deny easy translation or classification. Sharing an affinity with Jean
Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Alighiero Boetti, Langa maps a complex
diasporic identity that has taken him from rural South Africa through
Johannesburg to his current sojourn in northern Europe. His color-drenched
drawings often include enigmatic riddles of this contemporary life: “no body”;
“imagine that you are here”; “uncertainty as your guide.” Each phrase is a
reminder that meaning is slippery, and we are all on the verge of un-belonging
as the world changes around us more quickly than we can acclimatize to it.
Marepe
Born
1970 in Brazil. Lives and works in Santo Antônio de Jesus.
The
work of Marepe (Marcos Reis Peixoto) resides in a conceptual border area
between the utilitarian and the poetic where everyday objects from his
environment in Bahia are transformed through his artistic intervention. Living
and working in this northeastern section of Brazil, an area that is economically
less robust than the metropolitan centers of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, his
work is infused with the region’s cultural specificity and its unique hybrid
mixture of African and European traditions. A sculptor by training, his
methodology invokes both the influence of Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the
readymade as well as the
challenges
to the barriers between art and life launched by the Brazilian Neo-Concretists
of the 1950s and 1960s. In Marepe’s case, however, the transformative gesture
of the Duchampian readymade is infused with both a social and a poetic
significance that at once calls into question the institutional status of the
art object while simultaneously investing everyday objects with an almost
spiritual power to modify both the artist and the viewing public. In keeping
with this agenda, he often humorously refers to his sculptures as necessaires,
or “necessities,” rather than readymades emphasizing their social origins.
Born
1964. Lives and works in Kochi, Japan.
A
filmmaker who originally studied architecture, Hiroyuki Oki sees architecture
and film as two different ways of articulating social spaces and experiences.
His films—specifically Heaven 6 Box (1995)—are timeless ballads
featuring the local people and environments of Kochi, a Southern province in
Japan and his home since 1991. His process is based on chance meetings; he
captures situations and relations from within the community, rather than as a
witness And yet his focus on locality
is metaphorical. His goal is to synthesize a “universal” architecture of the
world from micro-events, everyday gestures, and the rhythm of life. He captures
the space between events, objects, architecture, and people—the necessary
invisible space where one creates relationships. Oki’s films are about a state
of immanence, the condition of being within the limits of all possible
experience. Both formally and conceptually, Oki’s work is informed by a history
of moving-image practices that includes Jonas Mekas’ claim for regionalism,
Stan Brakhage’s experimentation with light and celluloid, and Suzuki
Shiroyasu’s predilection for the diary format.
Born
1965 in Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo.
Tsuyoshi
Ozawa is an artist with a knack for combining the real with the virtual and for
turning lighthearted critiques into real alternatives. His Museum of Soy
Sauce Art (1999), a parodic look at Japanese art history, features many
familiar Japanese masterworks re-created in soy sauce. Similarly, for his Nasubi
Gallery (1993–present), milkbox-sized portable exhibition halls operate as
both a critique of the Japanese system of “pay to show” rental galleries and as
a real alternative to those galleries, profiling both famous and unknown
artists. Public artworks like the Nasubi Gallery are deeply influenced
by the Neo Dadism Organizers, an art group active in Tokyo in the 1960s, and
Fluxus. Quietly and beautifully transgressive, his works are interventions in a
mundane and sometimes oppressive world.
New
Delhi, India
Raqs Media Collective was formed in New Delhi in 1991 by Jeebesh
Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengputa to pursue their interests in
documentary filmmaking. Over the ensuing decade, their practice has become
increasingly hybridized, incorporating work in media history and research,
criticism and curation, archives and databases, building open and public spaces
for cultural practice, new media and digital art, work with texts, sound and
words, still photography and graphic design, the Internet, computers and
cyberculture. Sarai: The New Media Initiative, founded by Raqs, Ravi Vasudevan,
and Ravi Sundaram at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies at the
University of New Delhi, is a kind of global trade route of new-media culture—a
“home for nomads” and a repository for the practice of new-media forms.
Born
1975 in Cape Town, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg.
Robin Rhode approaches his
multidisciplinary and unconventional art practice through the high energy of
street inventiveness and youth culture, often drawing on the subcultural codes
of hip-hop, popular sports, film, and fashion to render the everyday as art. He
is a “revolutionary contemporary artist” whose strategic interventions in
galleries and public spaces explore issues of culture, identity, history, and
the socioeconomic realities of a South Africa newly welcomed back into the global
fold. Utilizing lo-fi techniques like charcoal drawings, performance, and
simple computer animations, he transforms the quotidian into humorous,
evocative experiences laced with sharp commentary on the politics of leisure,
global branding, and commodification of youth cultures. Very much a provocateur
and cultural subversive, he shares conceptual links with art-historical
influences as varied as Marcel Duchamp, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and David
Hammons. Yet, these high-art associations do not negate his equally strong ties
to popular cultural phenomena like the Wu-Tang Clan, Nike brand, graffiti art,
and Hype Williams.
Born
1974 in Bethal, Mpumalanga, South Africa. Lives and works in Lenasia.
Usha
Seejarim recasts the ordinary as something worthy of attention. Her work, a
unique combination of aesthetic transformation, urban concerns, and her South
Asian heritage, injects a sense of wonder into subjects as seemingly pedestrian
as bus tickets, rice sacks, car lights, and morning shadows. She finds the
ritual in daily life and mines its essence, using an unexpected mix of
commonplace materials to encourage a larger conversation about everydayness and
personal cartographies of identity and location. She has long been concerned
with the daily commute that orders the day of so many city and suburban
dwellers the world over. In Cash Ticket, Ash Ticket from Long Distance
(1999) she collaged several hundred bus tickets in an intricate and colorful
pattern that recalls the decorative elements of African cloth or Indian saris.
The tickets mark time and register like dream traces of human industry,
imagination, and political failings; together they form part of a larger
national and ethnic narrative.
Born
1977 in India. Lives and works in Bangalore, India
Having
trained in sculpture at Chitrakala Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore,
Ranjani K. Shettar created three-dimensional works that explore the
confrontation of the urban and the organic, the metaphysical and the mundane.
Employing a range of common, everyday materials such as wax, India ink, paper,
resin, cotton, PVC pipes, plastic sheeting, and mud, Shettar constructs
sculptural artifacts that speak obliquely to the effects of urbanization in
newly high-tech Bangalore. But above all else, Shettar's work asks
phenomenological questions about the way in which we inhabit particular spaces
in our built environment.
Born
1966 in China. Lives and works in Beijing.
Song
Dong’s work embraces performance, video installation, calligraphy, sculpture,
and site-specific projects in a quietly provocative way that refuses to draw
clear-cut distinctions between these different media. He begins with mundane
daily ritual, transforming it into artistic gesture. For him the root of art-making,
indeed of most human endeavor, is self-expression. For example, his Water
Diary (1995–present), written with water on stone, is an integral part of
his life; while he has photographed this daily ritual for exhibition, it is
first and foremost a personal experience. It was inspired by his memories of
practicing calligraphy with brush and water on cement and by his realization
that a diary written in ink on paper is never truly private. The ensured
intimacy of his current diary allows him to more freely express himself.
Born
1975 in Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo.
Tabaimo
mines familiar stereotypes of Japanese life—commuter trains, sushi, suicidal
students, and overworked businessmen—to create poignant, surreal, and hilarious
animated installations. Like other talented satiric commentators in the art
world, including Robert Colescott and Yoko Ono, she possesses an insightful
eye, a quick wit, and a facility with the truth. In spite of this she seems to
possess a deep affection for her subject matter and a sense of belonging to the
community she lampoons. Her moving tableaux place the viewer in familiar
“Japanese” places (a commuter train, a kitchen, and a communal bath), making us
a part of the cartoon universes unfolding around us. Illustrated in a low-tech
style reminiscent of ukiyo-e and presented via video projectors, her films are
at once technologically sophisticated and handmade. This aesthetic appears to
connect our new hyperspeed global world with the modern one of the latter part
of the previous century.
Born 1958. Lives and works
in Beijing, China.
Wang
Jian-wei applies an anthropological method to his filmmaking, building a visual
inventory of Chinese urban society and its evolution. He documents local
phenomena, such as the increasingly
brutal effects of contemporary urban development in Chinese metropolitan
centers. His film Living Elsewhere (1999–2000) is striking for its
attention to tangential details, small gestures, the unimportant. Set between
city and countryside, capitalism and socialism, the work reveals the complexity
and the contradictions of what can be envisioned as a new political,
historical, economic, and social project—what the artist calls a “fuzzy space.”
Sharing an affinity with Jean-Luc Godard or Chris Marker, Wang’s practice
reveals the need to document specific historical, social facts—a need for
realism that photography or video can provide.
Born
1963 in China. Lives and works in Beijing.
For Yin Xiuzhen, making art
is a way to discuss and examine the different social, cultural, and
geographical environments in which she lives. She often uses people’s discarded
materials—used clothes and shoes, rubble from demolished buildings—because these
items are imbued with a sense of history and experience, and give her work a
“spirit nature.” In addition, they evoke the presence of the body and of
individual lives, both often overlooked in the rush toward architectural
modernization and rapid urban development. Like many of the artists in this
exhibition, Yin interjects the personal and vernacular as an intervention
against a growing global culture.
Zhao Liang
Born 1971. Lives and works in
Beijing, China.
Zhao Liang belongs to a
generation of artists creating a new aesthetic combining documentary filmmaking
and popular culture (TV, music video, advertisement). He merges the emphasis on
historical, social, and political testimony of the former with the narrative
structure and style of the latter, fusing language of the political avant-garde
with that of the commercially oriented entertainment industry. With the
inescapable flavor of Western, if not American, hegemony marking that industry,
Zhao’s work appears to combine not only two aesthetics but also two cultures
and political identities on the verge of change.
Global
Advisory Committee
Walter Chakela
Director, Windybrow Theater, Johannesburg, South Africa
An acclaimed playwright, Walter Chakela has changed the landscape
of South African theater with his focus on such literary personalities as
Bessie Head, Bloke Modisane, and Matsemela Manaka. He has written more than 10
plays for theater, television, and radio as well as children’s literature.
Vishakha N. Desai
Senior Vice President/Director, Galleries and Cultural Programs,
The Asia Society, New York
Under Vishakha Desai’s direction, The Asia Society has inaugurated
an ambitious and diverse contemporary arts program showcasing Asian and
Asian-American artists, while continuing to present traditional Asian arts
within new contexts. She has published extensively on traditional Indian art
and on issues in contemporary Asian art. Before joining The Asia Society, she
was curator of Indian, Southeast Asian, and Islamic art and head of public
programs and academic affairs at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Hou Hanru
Independent curator-critic, Paris, France
Born in Guangzhou, China, Hou Hanru has curated and co-curated
more than 30 exhibitions worldwide, including the Kwangju Biennale,
Korea (2002); Shanghai Spirit-Shanghai Biennale 2000; the French
Pavilion exhibition at the 1999 Venice Biennale, Italy; and Cities on
the Move (1997–1999).
Paulo Herkenhoff
Independent
curator, São Paulo, Brazil, and former Adjunct
Curator, The Museum of Modern Art, New York An art
critic and independent curator, Paulo Herkenhoff has been director of the São
Paulo Bienal and was chief curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de
Janeiro (1985–1990).
Vasif Kortun
Director and founder of Proje 4L and Istanbul Contemporary Art
Museum, Istanbul
Vasif Kortun has served as Director of the Center for Curatorial
Studies Museum at Bard College and director and chief curator of the 3rd
Istanbul Biennale (1992). He is the author of numerous essays, reviews, and
articles on contemporary visual arts, and is the editor of the quarterly art
magazine RG.
Hidenaga Otori
Theater critic, Tokyo Japan
Chief Editor of Performing Arts magazine, Hidenaga Otori is
programming co-director of the Kyoto Performing Arts Center, Kyoto University
of Art and Design, and artistic director of the Laokoon Festival 2002,
Kampnagel, Hamburg, Germany. He is the author of Reverberation Machines: The
Worlds of Richard Foreman (2002) and The 20th-Century Polyphonic
Theater: Asahi-shinbun-sha (1998).
Baraka Sele
Curator and Producer, New Jersey Performing Arts Center World
Festival, Newark, New Jersey
Performing arts consultant-curator-presenter, Baraka Sele was
artistic director for performing arts at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
San Francisco, and vice president of
performing arts for the Houston International Festival. She directed Africa
Exchange, an international program for collaboration among artists in Africa
and the United States, and is the author of the poetry collection Inside the
Devil’s Mouth.
How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age will be
accompanied by a 336-page catalogue featuring works by 34 multidisciplinary
artists and essays by Philippe Vergne, Paulo Herkenhoff, Hidenaga Otori, Hou
Hanru, and others. Softcover: $29.95 ($26.96 Walker members).
Exhibition
Tour Schedule
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Per L’Arte, Torino, Italy
June 1–September 14, 2003
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas
July 17–September 19, 2004
Additional venues to be announced.
How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age is made
possible by generous support from The Bush Foundation, The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program, the
Rockefeller Foundation, Peggy and Ralph Burnet, Matthew O. Fitzmaurice, The
Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology, Jumex Foundation,
the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Peter C. and Annie Remes, and
Shiseido. Promotional assistance provided by MPLS.ST.PAUL Magazine.
Major support for Walker
Art Center programs is provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an
appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s
Digest Fund, The Bush Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation through
the Doris Duke Fund for Jazz and Dance and the Doris Duke Performing Arts
Endowment Fund, Target Stores, Marshall Field’s, and Mervyn’s with support from
the Target Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, General Mills Foundation,
Coldwell Banker Burnet, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the
National Endowment for the Arts, American Express Philanthropic Program,
Honeywell, The Regis Foundation, The Cargill Foundation, U.S. Bank, Star
Tribune Foundation, 3M, and the members of the Walker Art Center.
The
Walker Art Center is located at 725 Vineland Place,
at
Lyndale Avenue South, Minneapolis, one block off Highway I-94.
For
public information, call 612.375.7622.
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Thursday,
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First Saturdays are made possible by Coldwell Banker Burnet.)