Art & Walls

18591km Art Exhibition Guide

25 – 28 November 2015

Silent Green Kulturquartier

Sin título

ARTISTS

01-Koray Arman & Cem Dildar, Video

02-AWK, Graffiti

03-Nicolas Barnräuther & Arystan Petzold, Installation & Music

04-Anders Bigum, Video

05-Bin-Han To, Video

06-Javier Blanco, Sculpture

07-Carolina Cristòfol, Painting

08-Catherine Duquette, Performance

09-Vicente Expósito, Video

10-Salym Fayad, Photography Reportage

11-Ece Gauer, Painting

12-Rafael Gil, Painting & Lithography

13-Roland-Tim Heienbrok, Photography

14-Nathalie mp Johann, Video- Installation

15-D.S. León, Installation

16-Nuno Marcelino, Photo Reportage

17-Tarik Mesli, Installation

18-Ira Mowen, Video

19-Maria Nitulescu, Photography

20-Mahdieh Shadmehr, Painting

21-Lapo Simeoni, Installation

22-Guillaume Tissier, Painting

……………………………………………………..

01) Koray Arman & Cem Dildar

”Trees are stronger than walls”

This is a story about this is a story of a park…in the center of a mega city…which has been the capital of 3 big empires and carries the history of 8000 years… hometown of tens of nations, hundreds of ethnic groups and cultures, and a holy place for 3 big religions. It is about how people with different ethnicity, cultures and religions came together and have been one voice in order to protect a park against the government. It was the basic love of any human-being to protect the mother-nature, so the differences within the society didn’t matter on those days.

They were reporting from the beginning of demonstrations. Their work is a short movie with a duration of max 5-10 minutes. The Park’s name is Gezi Park. But we will try to not mention any name of any person, any place, any nation or any politician. Our aim is just to show that the nature is a common value of all human-beings and the existence of the trees together with our love to the nature can stop overbuilding of the cities, stop the isolation of the different cultures, racism, fascism, violent capitalism and even the wars.

02) AWK

„Wall“

The art work for the exhibition simply titled “wall” is approach to walls from purely structural, aesthetical, simplified way. The installation is meant to invoke feelings and considerations of the actual building of the wall, the experience of the tangible aspects of this political and societal construct. To explore what and how do people perceive when thinking about such constructs as “tearing walls down” and “putting walls between”.

03) Nicolas Bärnreuther & Arystan Petzold

„The Walls in our mind“

We live in an open society, where mindsets of all kinds and colors are offered on the idea market with the promise of assisting the individual in finding an identity. This is, a role to define his own position from witch he might interact with his context.

Mindsets are helpful for organizing and simplifying the massive amounts of information we are exposed to as individuals. They function as a filter in our mind or if you want as the pentaprism in a camera, reflecting the stimulus in our brain while translating it through its set rules or form. Mindsets also have a natural tendency to rigidity, (as if made of crystal like the pentaprism).

The less critical reflexion the individual applies to his own experience, the more the indset takes control over his judgement.

This is soothing for the distressed mind but at the same time accentuates the rigidity of these mind structures, disabling the necessary flexibility needed to solve certain problem situations.

Even more when these situation are of confrontation against different mindsets.

Physical walls (as in segregational walls) exist as a byproduct of failing to overcome conceptual walls. (As in an argument where none of the sides is capable of or willing to empathize and so move towards a solution).

This particular situation I believe is universally shared, and applies to general and particular areas with the result of spliting society in different sections and sometimes confronted sides(from different cultural backgrounds or different political points of view to different neighbourhood or different urban tribe).

Our task as artists is to bring movement/dinamism into the discussion to break or at least prepare the ground for those who will break down those conceptual walls. Exploring the borders of interaction of different mindsets, acting as possible translators from one mindset to the other, simplifying possible consensus.

Through this work it is the viewer who exploring the space around him through both sight and translation through space, will physically experience the difference between observing reality from a fixed point of view and truly experiencing threedimensional reality.

The appearance of things depends on the crystal we observe them through.The true nature of things can only be (partly) grasped through observation plus experience.

This idea should ideally impregnate the viewer in the deep and profound way that can only be achieved through experiencing art.

Arystan Petzold

Arystan Petzold is a German composer and trumpeter based in Italy at the quite location of Orvieto, in the region of Umbria.

His music has developed in the last years while living in Italy surrounded by Nature. That lead him to get focused in getting an harmonic direction of “Musikphilosophie”, based on the laws of nature and the natural harmonic series, in a search towards the origins of sound – “feelings are just the human part, which also makes it accessible, and can be not only a physical baying of vibrations”

04) Anders Bigum

„Versus“

Versus is a cinematic interpretation of the invisible boundaries within our society. Segregation build up and past on throughout generations, decades and millenniums. Walls of the mind that makes it nearly impossible to see the similarities and embrace the differences.

The inability to understand the positive impact of the differences; that contrast creates the whole. Without blacks and whites the picture will fade into a dull meaningless blur.

05) Bin-Han To

„Ophelia: Love & Privacy_Settings“

Binimans’short takes the serious and complicated topic of privacy in the digital age, mixes it with slapstick cartoon sensibilities and turns it into an animated romantic comedy (with slight dare we slight, say, erotic touches…).

What if everybody could read your thoughts, and know all your most inner wishes and desires? And what if, at the same time, you were just a regular guy trying to find a woman? That’s the problem of Hubert. Anyone can clearly read his thoughts in a speech balloon floating above his head. But how will the girls react?

A comedy about „The End of Privacy“.

06) Javier Blanco

„Je m´appelle Abou“

This work is based on an incident happenend on May 7, 2015 at the border of Tarajal Ceuta (Spain) which separates Africa from Europe one Tarajal, Spain), Europe, of the highest «walls» that are currently in the world. Customs control, passing through the x-ray was discovered a child trying to illegally cross the border in a suitcase. When opened, this child, eight years old said: «Je m’appelle Abou» My name is Abou.

Metaphor Suitcase: Tourism or Migration. This story reflects the difference between these realities confronted, 1st and 3rd world, rich and poor, tourism and migration. Consumption and life experience. It is significant that the suitcase that serves the tourist to consume travelling, can´t be used here for an experience that might change the life of someone forced to depart, different, a better path.

07) Carolina Cristòfol

„in-Being-awake“

Already as a child, I wanted to look over the oder side of reality. Of this reality that builds walls physical walls, and psychological.

Wenn you feel a tension between what “happens” and what you absorb, you feel the need to break that Weltbild. Art has always been my way of learning how to do it.

Dreams: an invitation to go through the fog of noise into clarity, seeing and revealing.

08) Catherine Duquette

„The Cllimb“

From a wall of bodies to a body of walls. // Someone is always above; someone is always below; and they all need each other to sustain the wall. But what happens if one chooses not to climb? What happens if one pauses in the pursuit?

The Climb investigates the notion of “climbing to the top” and what we’re willing to do to get there. The top is different for everyone – political, economic, ideological, emotional, social, or cultural. But the struggle is just the same – full of fear, frustration, anxiety and no longer knowing how to place oneself in space. We create both imaginary and real walls to organize this chaos – to define space and shape identity. But how does this affect those around us? How do we perceive and (dis)connect with those climbing alongside us? The builders of walls are the selfsame people climbing them. And the original organizers of chaos become its quintessential embodiment.

09) Vicente Expósito

„Eraseentuser“

“Eraseentuser“ got inspired through a video by the artist Bill Viola, which approaches the topic of monotony. As an invisible wall that put limitations to our personal growth and expansion, when just small changes are strong enough to generate an inertia breaking those walls.

“Making History repeated itself and allowing self-isolation is not a good way to solve the problems and differences. »

10) Salym Fayad

„Metropolitan Nomads: A Journey through Joburg´s Little Mogadishu“

The lives of hundreds of Somalis intersect in the Johannesburg suburb of Mayfair: a place of opportunity, a refuge, a home for the Somali diaspora in one of Africa’s largest metropolises. A multi-layered site where Somali migrants, as urban refugees, renegotiate their cultural practices in a foreign and sometimes hostile metropolitan context, where spaces and customs that were left behind are recreated in the daily life of the neighbourhood.

Mayfair presents itself as a space where collective stories of migration and survival interweave with individual desires and hopes of seeking a better life outside a country shattered by decades of internal conflict.

11) Ece Gauer

„Woman in red“

Walls has been voice of being against authoritarianism of the government, violation of democratic rights, media censorship and disinformation, government’s involvement in the Syrian Civil War, use of excessive force by police…

Graffities and mural paintings are seen by many authorities as vandalism and that is why they are covered or removed by the authorities.

Recently a big mural painting of a famous artist JR has been covered by the police in Istanbul. In my work, I’ll try to make a point about the censorship on the mural art and graffities.

12) Rafael Gil

„Topographies of Wall & Suite Berlinesa“

To look upon, to contemplate, to read, to study, to decipher, to cover, to enjoy. That is the aim of “Topography of walls”. I want to analyse and describe the role of walls, both historically and in the present day.

Walls have been present since prehistory; as a medium for man’s ideas and concepts. Walls take many forms. In the modern age, the artistic role of the wall has been revived through street art and graffiti. Street art is a special thing. It’s very rare that man has expressed himself with so much freedom and with so few worries about whether his creation is technically well executed. The important thing for a graffiti artist is to convey a message. The spectator must instantly understand what is being communicated without any room for misunderstanding.

“Topography of walls” is a new series of works in which I allowed my imagination free rein, without demands or constrictions placed upon it. My work also represents a desire to show that even today, across our planet, walls are being constructed as barriers. They are a rejection of what we should expect in the new century: coexistence and understanding between men.

13) Roland Tim Heienbrok

„The Media Wall“

The knowledge about other cultures, countries, social classes religion and ethnic groups is usually obtained through the information people receive through the media. Despite of the fact that this information in most cases is simply poor and/or single‐sided. Sometimes it can be even misleading and wrong.

That creates insecurity, prejudices and fear. A mechanism that can be observed when looking back at the Third Reich or even the Cold War. Or in the present looking at conflicts in South America or the Refugee Debate.

That makes it easy to overlook that this media wall is no simple answer and offers no solution but on the other side are just people like you and I, with their own history, fear and happiness. Inspired through my work with

refugees in Berlin and Brandenburg I have started to collect sentences I encountered. And put them in context with portrait‐photography of people I met.

Trying not to see my own opinion but simply the person in front of me.

14) Nathalie Johann

„Le Mur (The Wall)“

I created a silent installation with sculpture and an animation “Le Mur”.

This was the beginning of my passion for architecture, and of the understanding of the ambiguous concept of wall.

The beauty and generosity of the “18591km” project immediately touched me: awareness awakening, humanitarian, linked to the whole world.

The creators of the project are the living image of their open activism: a daily act of sharing, openness, making links between different culture, people, art.

And the more I work on it, more ideas and projects in my mind.

15) D.S.León

„Labyrinth (Lost in Time)“

Freedom as a leitmotif of the exhibition, is the main reason why I decide present my project, Labyrinth (Lost in Time).

In Berlin time passes quickly, Berliners continue to coexist with the memories and remains of what once was separating his city. Many of all those families did not forget what happened, but in contrast many other have forgotten. The black wall of lies and fear is still in the minds of many people and global leaders, so consequently, even nowadays, new large walls made of concrete and steel are still erected in different parts of the planet.

I strive to encounter the audience, by interacting with the installation, provoking relationships with their inner feelings and boundaries, that make us feeling lost. This labyrinth represents our invisible walls, the challenge of daring us to tear them down.

16) Nuno Marcelino

„175Km: Where EU geographically begins but morally ends “

Not even the soldiers believe it could stop someone. Head bowed, sweating, they walk reluctantly along the imaginary line on which they were ordered to hoist a palisade. A tall, white caterpillar tread follows them through fields of sunflowers and corn, stabbing the ground with regularity every four metres down and planting a steel pole of the same height. A dull thud, followed by a puff of dust in the summer heat. The galvanised mesh must then be unrolled; the wire is already curled, like cotton candy, in a soft, pointed cloud. It is laid down on the ground, in the middle of nowhere.

This is Kübekháza, the Hungarian town which borders with Serbia and Romania, and hosts nothing less than the end point of the «wall of Orbán». The last pillar of the 175-kilometres barrier has already been planted, and it just takes a look at to sense the absurdity of all those hours of work.

Behind it, the Pannonian plain opens up in its blatant indifference. The wall ends in a meadow.

A few metres away, the monument celebrating the meeting point of the three countries stands beyond the railing, on the other side of the wall. Geographically the EU starts here But morally it Geographically, here. morally, seems to end.

175km is a photo reportage of 2 days along the Hungarian border with Serbia, showing the daily life of the surroundings of the new wall and the portrait of the refugees who needed to cross the wall created to block them.

17) Tarik Mesli

„PIECES Nº 42: We are not birds“

The phrase “WE ARE NOT BIRDS” is part of a universal truth, a blend of drama, truth and poetry. Man flies as he falls. Exhibit 42 presents a decontextualized image without place marker or time, and devoid of color.

This work is between silence and scream, between body and frame, it introduces the ideas of movement, of the displacement of limits.

My work aims to be a visual search of a new relationship to the other in a world where one is locked, and locks oneself, into a system that pits the included against the excluded, north against south, the one who speaks against the one who can’t.

18) Ira Mowen

„One cigarette“

Ira Mowen’s video for the 18591km exhibition superimposes two 10 minute long works of art spanning over many years. The first is a video Mowen made in September 2007 featuring a bird’s eye view of the Berlin Wall shot entirely by a camera suspended from helium balloons, only directed by wind. The second is an impromptu audio recording Mowen did, with vocal artist Joe Wiesenburger, about his life growing up along the wall in West Berlin. The goal was to compliment the free spirited nature of the uncontrolled aerial footage with an equally spontaneous narrative describing one perspective of life behind the wall. Both recordings were done in one take and were unscripted.

19) Maria Nitulescu

„Reflective Memory – Cultural Reflective Distance“

Focusing on the relationship between selfhood, memory and reflective distance I argue that Sartre offers useful resources for thinking about distance, the self in terms of narratives. To achieve reflective distance, you should be capable of disengagement from cultural norms and givens. A reflective return to the cultural origins that you can no longer inhabit in any unthinking manner.

Reflection and memory weave past, present and future into a consistent and meaningful life story. This story is about the self. I propose to understand the self as a fictional or imaginary entity.

Sartre attributes the emergence of selfhood to memory and reflection.

Memory, acting in an imaginative and creative manner, brings the self into fruition and thus creates experience and endows it with meaning.

In this case a photograph should not be considered a ‘mirror of the real’ but ‘material‘ for interpretation: to be solved; read and decoded, like a riddle, like clues left behind at the scene of a crime.

20) Mahdieh Shadmehr

„The Wall of Iran“

Just like in all the other countries around the world the first boundaries in Iran where made from walls. With the boundaries growing small and large the minds got expanded and contracted as well.

People’s mind made the bricks and the bricks surrounded their minds. Our Iran grew about half the size of Asia and got miniaturized to the size of a cat! These lines in the map, which show my country, look like a cat, are completely subjective.

My country built a new wall on its kitten shaped boundaries and other countries helped by completing this brick wall with TahriM (which means “sanction”), the word which in Arabic comes from Harim, means “privacy”.

A new boundary, a new line and a new wall. The bricks were thick enough to affect the communication between people, and it was called Filtering… It was like a real pernicious brain stroke which paralyzed a giant part of people’s mind.

The discussion about government should just be in a Parenthesis or Feuilleton. Talking about the government is nothing but a vainly try, just like Sanction… its distance and septum made the society cluttered like an earthquake, and made the people more versatile. shouting a soccer player while watching a match on TV.

The last words…

Here in Iran, between all these groups and thoughts, when you stand on the top of the colourless and dusty wall of sanction you will see small people who are passing the wall, jumping from it or become dry and colourless under the wall’s shadow. Just like a rock they have recorded a part of life’s perspective and geographic position, while this wall is just made of dust with pure fanaticism. A material that no one has the courage to break through.

21) Lapo Simeoni

„Tepee“

A tepee is a conical tent, traditionally made of animal skins upon wooden poles. It is distinguished from other conical tents by the smoke flaps at the top of the structure. Historically, the teepee was designed and largely used by Indigenous people of the Plains in the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies of what is now North America.

The teepee is durable, provides warmth and comfort in winter, is cool in the heat of summer, and is dry during heavy rains. Teepees can be disassembled and packed away quickly when people need to relocate and can be reconstructed quickly upon settling in a new area. Historically, this portability was important for the Plains Indians with their at times nomadic lifestyle.

This tepee, which was made with a first aid emergency blanket, is a symbol of the precarious living situation at present for nomadic refugees, especially those who are escaping from conflict zones. community and for the refugees who are exhausted by these dramas.

Historically, it was the same European (and other) states that exploited with dictatorial regimes the exhausted populations of South Africa or the Middle East, forcing them to collapse cyclically. I made a contemporary Tepee thinking about its possible use for migrants who are shifting from conflict areas to Europe, often being forced to wait behind new walls that are created to stop these exhausted people.

The idea of creating a Contemporary Teepee was inspired by a book written by my Father Angelo Quattrocchi in 1973.

Angelo Quattrocchi had lived in America at the Indian Reserve WOUNDED KNEE, which was ordered to be expropriated by the American forces. The Indians on the reserve had been forced to barricade themselves on their own land, WOUNDED KNEE for two months, bringing national “media” attention to the cause and eventually winning the battle of resistance. My father wrote daily from inside the reserve as the Indians were struggling to survive during the invasion (WOUNDED KNEE Indiani Alla Riscossa).

This book is part of my life and gave me the idea for how to confront the precariousness caused by European capitalism, which renders places of peace and hospitality to only be shared for economic benefits. I therefore created a symbol that also serves as a temporary remedy for this unstable time.

22) Guillaume Tissier

„Mass Media“

Consumption society, in general, and mass media, in particular, have always been important topics through my art.

In my opinion, mass media form mass opinions, which can be manipulated for political or economic reasons, and therefore help building walls between categories of people, religions, countries, etc. My concerns, similar to those of the group 18591km, although less literal, make me subscribe 100% to its project.

…………………………………………………………..

Art Works Price List

Ece Gauer

Woman in red———500,00EUR

Walls of censor———-300,00EUR

——————————————————————–

Anders Bigum

Black (left image)injet fine art print on hahnemühle pare 13,5x24cm on A3———80,00EUR

White (left image)injet fine art print on hahnemühle pare 13,5x24cm on A3———80,00EUR

Black and White pair———150,00EUR

The prints are a limited edition of 20

For more info: office@andersbigum.com