Doug Aitken, "Black Mirror," 2011*.
DESTE Foundation for contemporary art
New Projects take off
DESTE Foundation, Athens
Investigations Of A Dog—Works from the FACE Collections
Kerstin Brätsch & DAS INSTITUT—Treat Your Own Neck, 2011
Jakub Julian Ziolkowski—History of the Eye, 2010
Paul Chan—My Birds… Trash… The Future, 2004
Opening:
Wednesday, 22 June 2011, 8 PM
22 June–30 October 2011
DESTE Foundation Project Space, Slaughterhouse, Hydra Island
Black Mirror—Doug Aitken
Opening:
Monday, 20 June 2011, 10 PM
20 June–25 September 2011
Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
DESTE Prize 2011
25 May–30 October 2011
Award Ceremony:
Wednesday, 14 September 2011, 8PM
DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art
11 Filellinon & Em. Pappa St.Nea Ionia 142 34
Athens, Greece
T +30 210 27 58 490
info@deste.gr
www.deste.gr
The DESTE Foundation is pleased to announce its new projects for 2011. They all mark a series of new cooperations with artists and Institutions, both in Greece and abroad, and reaffirm DESTE's commitment to the development of creative synergies.
Investigations of a Dog – Works from the FACE Collections, is the first exhibition organized and curated by the FACE group and features works from the collections of the five partner institutions, namely the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, the Ellipse Foundation, Cascais, La maison rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Stockholm and the DESTE Foundation, Athens. The show takes its title from the short story by Franz Kafka (1922), whose main character, a dog, questions the limits of his canine existence, or rather, the sense of the community to which he belongs. All works in the exhibition center around the question of how linguistic innovation can entail a political dimension of art-making that precedes the content-related aspects of the artwork. The show is escorted by a special publication, with short texts commissioned by each of the FACE partners and written by local writers. With Athens as its final venue of presentation, after Turin, Cascais, Paris and Stockholm, the show will be reinterpreted, through a different curatorial approach (curator Nadja Argyropoulou) and, in this last stop in Greece, will be marked by an emphasis on Kafka's relevance in today's social reality, and the organizing of relevant parallel events.
Also installed in DESTE's building in Athens, three individual projects, act as separate pathways within the Dakis Joannou Collection:
Using the all ready existing mirror wall by Urs Fisher as a starting point for their presentation, Kerstin Brätsch & DAS INSTITUT treat the 1st room of their installation as a night club/gym space with paintings in an interchangeable display. The 2nd Room functions as a showroom for Treat Your Own Neck, where DAS INSTITUT presents an edition of scarves accompanied with a selection of Title posters. The installation has been curated by Cecilia Alemani. In History of the Eye (2010), Jakub Julian Ziolkowski has interpreted Georges Bataille's controversial short pornographic novel, Story of the Eye (1928), composing a suite of XYXY drawings in which the act of seeing is equated with desire itself.
In Paul Chan's My Birds…Trash…The Future, 2004, a digital animation, with haunting scenes of strange fowl and desolate landscapes, Goya's Disasters of War, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the Bible, Blake, Pasolini and even the late rapper Biggie Smalls, are conjured in a tale of political disenchantment and social degradation.
Black Mirror, conceived by Doug Aitken, explores the story of a nomadic individual, set in a modern wilderness: a geography constructed of calls, electronic messages, and virtual documents superimposed over the physical world. It is a portrait of people who are the products of a world that has lost track of information and is saturated with change.
Black Mirror is an artwork in multiple forms—a site specific multi-channel video installation that will be presented in DESTE's Project Space on Hydra Island and, in synchronicity, a live theatre performance set on a uniquely designed barge floating off Athens and Hydra.
The Black Mirror exhibition is produced by the DESTE Foundation.
The Black Mirror live theater performance is produced by the Athens Festival in collaboration with the Deste Foundation and was also made possible with the support of the Burger Collection.
DESTE's policy of supporting and promoting contemporary art in Greece is reaffirmed by the organization of the seventh DESTE Prize. In collaboration, once again, with the Museum of Cycladic Art, DESTE presents the exhibition of the shortlisted artists of this year's Prize in the museum's spaces in central Athens.
The winner of the DESTE Prize 2011 will be selected by an international jury and will be announced during an award ceremony in September.
Shortlisted artists: Alexandra Bachzetsis, Anastasia Douka, Irini Miga, Eftihis Patsourakis, Theodoros Stamatogiannis, Jannis Varelas.
*Image above:
Copyright Doug Aitken Inc, Courtesy of DESTE Foundation, 303 Gallery, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; Victoria Miro Gallery, London.