Swansong

We've posted a recently completed work called Swansong to our Vimeo channel.  Conceived as a requiem for the halogen lightbulb it features an impromptu angel and the music of Dan Wilson in the form of a double recording of "She's Gone to the Movies", which you might remember from his 90s band Semisonic.

Office Christmas Party

We exhibiting for one night only at tonight's in Office Christmas Party at Ahmed & Carpenter, Rogue Studio's.  Address is 66-72 Chapeltown Street, Manchester, M1 2WH.  The opening is 6pm - 9pm.

Other exhibiting artists....listed festively below

Exhibition in London

This Wednesday, 23 November, is the opening of Synthetic Real, a group show at Edel Assanti, London. We're showing Die Brücke (2010) and the show also features work by Stuart Bailes, Jodie Carey, Gabriel Dubois, Peter Macdonald, Neal Rock and Amy Stephens.  Edel Assanti are at 276 Vauxhall Bridge Road (near Victoria) and the show runs from 24th November 2011 to 14th January 2012.

this from the gallery website

"Edel Assanti is pleased to present Synthetic Real, an exhibition of interdisciplinary work by seven artists exploring an alternative methodology of non-representational artistic production.

Synthetic Real examines the ongoing relevance and renewal of an abstract framework for forging an artistic language. This theme is explored through the presentation of a group of artists whose practices take as a point of conception the visual substance, rule systems and aesthetics of everyday phenomenal reality. Circumventing Malevich’s maxim that the world we experience via our senses cannot present an ‘artistic beginning’, the seven artists in Synthetic Real mine this reality, deconstructing it as source material for their respective visual languages.

Disparate layers of our sensory world are processed, dismantled and filtered uniquely in the case of each artist, as traces of ‘the real’ are revealed independently in each artwork. Space and perspective are explored within fields of shifting discernability, where light, material and surface serve to conceal as much as they reveal. The works resonate with an alluring, uncanny familiarity in these properties, yet simultaneously open dialogues with a visual world beyond the real. "

Book launch in Dresden

This Sunday sees the closing of Kritishe Masse in Dresden with the launch of a reader produced by curator Jule Reuter in association with exhibiting artists and other contributing writers.  We've contributed an artist page plus a short text on Occupation which looks at the way in which both military and protest-movement occupations functions as a form of dreaming.

The reader will be lauched at at 15:00 this Sunday 20 November at Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Georg-Treu-Platz, Dresden and features texts and artwork from:
Susanne Altmann, Ulf Aminde, bankleer, Yael Bartana, Holger Birkholz, Peggy Buth, C.Rockefeller, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Birgit Dalbajewa, Lutz Dammbeck, Ingo Gerken, Paule Hammer, Sabine Himmelsbach, annette hollywood, Sven Johne, Ulrike Jordan, Antonia Low, Marina Naprushkina, Lena Prents, Reinigungsgesellschaft, Jule Reuter, Dietmar Rübel, Sery C.

Website Updated

We are very happy to announce that a long overdue redesign of the website has finally been completed - including not only a brand spanking new interface (which is really just the old interface tidied up a bit) but also the addition of 9 works in sculpture, drawing and video made over the past six months.

Also, having now migrated all our video to Vimeo, we have taken the opportunity to post our 2010 work Towards A Free Society. Based on the 1971 debate between Michael Foucault and Noam Chomsky in Eindhoven, its a piece that touches on subjects very close to our heart and will, we think, appeal to anyone concerned with what Chomsky beautifully calls 'the arbitrary, limiting effects of coercive institutions.'

The Opera in Dresden

This Thursday in Dresden see's the premiere of our new work, The Opera. 

Created over the past twelve months The Opera is a digital video work which unites footage drawn from global media channels with digital avatars produced by the United States' military.  In the resulting work a chorus of animated soldiers sing their threats and statements to similarly animated civilians.   Thus we have phrases like “Do not move or the American solider will kill you” or “We are not here to harm anyone” sung in Chinese, Dari, Farsi, French, Korean, Pashto, Russian, Spanish, Urdu.  Using melodic structures drawn from the spoken texts we've composed a musical score as the framework for an ‘operatic’ narrative, a simple story about a man who gets arrested and interrogated by an occupying military force. The Opera is being premiered as part of "Krtische Masse", curated by Jule Reuter, at OKTOGON galleries, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden.

The opening is this Thursday, 20 October 2011 from 19:00 - 21:00

Participating artists are Ulf Aminde, bankleer, Yael Bartana, Peggy Buth, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Lutz Dammbeck, Ingo Gerken, Paule Hammer, annette hollywood, Sven Johne, Antonia Low and Marina Naprushkina.

Exhibition in St. Louis

We're exhibiting Two East German Drinking Glasses as part of I'll be your Mirror at the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery, The Sheldon, St. Louis from 30 September 2011 – 11 February 2012.

"Curated by Daniel McGrath, the exhibition I'll Be Your Mirror explores the condition of mimicry and the appearance of the doppelganger. Included in this exhibition are photographs, sculpture, paintings and video works by an international array of artists including Charles Ray, Alison Jackson, Pablo Helugera, Slater Bradley, Gunther Herbst, Darren Harvey-Regan, Robert Goetz, B.J. Vogt, Juan Chavez and Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson."

Daniel McGrath is an adjunct professor in the art department at Webster University in St. Louis and a contributing art writer for Art US, Art Papers, Review Magazine and St. Louis Magazine.

Gallery Talk: Tuesday, October 18 at Noon, Daniel McGrath speaks on the exhibition, Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery, admission free.

Talk at General Public, Berlin

Not content with having had one book launch in Berlin, The Knot team are having another one tonight at 8pm. We're giving a short presentation at the launch which is at General Public, Schoehauser Allee 167c. All welcome. Also talking about their work as part of The Knot are Katharina Koch, Kai Schiemenz and Christoph Schmidt(ifau). And the current General Public show is Autofocus {and meantime belongs to becoming} which opened yesterday so you could see that too - more at General Public

Memory of Hope

Memory of Hope is a group show at Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool which opens this Thursday 4 August, from 18:00 - 20:00.

The show features all the gallery artists plus guests invited by the gallery artists - in our case we invited Simon Faithfull (Berlin) and Mary Griffiths (Manchester) to contribute. We're showing two new sculptural pieces - Moonie Wedding and Sparkle Snare. There's more background on the show and on the artists at Ceri Hand Gallery - but here's a taster......

“Ideology collapses and vanishes, utopianism atrophies, but something great is left behind: the memory of a hope”, Henri Lefebvre. Devised with gallery artist Matthew Houlding, this summer exhibition draws on a key text by Henri Lefebvre and the autobiographical writing of JG Ballard, reflecting spaces caught between construction, destruction and nostalgia. Each gallery artist was invited to select two artists in response to Houlding’s concept. The resulting exhibition includes 36 artists and over 100 art works, including film, photography, painting, sculpture, text and audio work - much of it seen for the first time in the UK.

The Knot - The Book

The Knot project has brought out a publication covering the vast range of activities that took place in Berlin, Warsaw and Bucharest last summer. (Our contribution to the project - a memorial ski lift, a community rope ladder workshop and a Machine for Looking at Warsaw Upsidedown - can be found here)

Published by JOVIS Verlag, Berlin, (ISBN 978-3-86859-115-6) the launch takes place this Sunday 17 July at 16:00 at Kotti-Shop, Adalbertstr 4, 10999, Berlin and there will also be film screenings of work by Katherina Koch and Graw Böckler.

Drawing Workshop

We're doing a drawing workshop tomorrow afternoon at Kotti-Shop, Adalbertstr, Berlin. Its on the theme of Nefertiti and displacement and has been organised in connection with our current exhibition there. Its an open workshop - for children agred 6 - 12 years - and runs from 16:00 to 18:00 hours. No booking required. The results of the workshop will be exhibited this Saturday in Kotti-Shop as part of the "GET DONE" tape bar.

We Are Here to Help the People - video

We've posted some footage for the performance we staged earlier this year at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.  Taken from our forthcoming opera this was a semi-improvised performance of an aria entitled - "We are here to help the people".  Thanks to Clive Hunte and the Whitworth for supplying the edited footage. 

Stolen Artifact

We're showing a new work this month at Kotti-Shop, Berlin {www.kotti-shop.net} - as part of a project called The Minimuseum of XXI Century Arts, curated by Domenico Quaranta.  The museum is basically a 7" digital photo frame which passes from artist to artist with each one adding a work to the museum collection (ie a 4bg memory stick) before passing it on to a recipient of their choice.  Our own addition is a piece called Stolen Artifact which we filmed at the Neues Museum, Berlin earlier this year.  The work opens next Saturday, 25 June 2011 from 19:00 - 21:00 and is then on show, by appointment till 9 July. Contact info@kotti-shop.net to arrange a viewing. This from the press release...

Stolen Artifact takes as its starting point the observation that many of the world's museums have, over the years, built their collections from the outright or covert theft of other people's cultural heritage.  The return of these objects is an ongoing discussion for many western museums and the communities which claim them and it seemed fitting that we should provide the Minimuseum of XXI Century Art with its own Stolen Artifact.  So we made a short 'guerilla' film of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, Berlin - itself an artifact which the Egyptian Ministry for Antiquities are very keen to have returned.   Beyond the idea that all 'real' museums need to have some stolen goods on show is the fact that our theft, ie the 'illegal' recording of an image against the orders of the institution, contravenes not the ownership of the object itself but the Neues Museum's ownership of that object's image. (postcards are, of course, on sale in the shop) As such Stolen Artifact is both a video of a stolen object (Nefertiti) and is itself an act of theft whose artifacts, the jagged blotches from this iphone video, are concerned with entirely different questions of ownership.

and for those of you who aren't in Berlin for the celebrations-  here's a copy of the work on YouTube

Beat Box Choir respond to The Fireworks

This coming Saturday the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester are holding an event that features a live vocal response to the installation of our work The Fireworks.  Baba Israel, the creative director of Contact, will be conducting a beat box choir responding to the musicality of The Fireworks.

The performance has been organised by the Whitworth and will be one element of an After Hours event that is part of both Museums at Night and Future Everything festival. The evening will start at 7.30pm and end at 10.30pm, the beat box choir will be in the Mezzanine Court between 8.30pm and 9pm.

Loop, 2011

We're showing work later this month at Loop video art fair in Barcelona with Ceri Hand Gallery.  We're presenting our 2010 work Die Brücke at the Hotel Catalonia Ramblas and, if you're in Barcelona or planning to go, the art fair runs from 19 - 21 May.

We Are Here to Help the People

Last Saturday night we participated in an After Hours event at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester in connection with our current installation of The Fireworks.  This included an inconversation session between ourselves and Mary Griffiths, the Whitworth's curator of modern art were we discussed such things close to our hearts as play, power and delinquency.  There was also a live set by Manchester band Patterns - more of their stuff can be found on their website - http://www.musicalpatterns.com/. 

Also we were really pleased to be able to present a live preview performance of a piece called "We are here to help the People" which is the final aria from our forthcoming, and in production, opera.  We'll have some video of the performance to post in a week or two (we hope) but here's a still of Jennifer, Amy, Rachel and Saffron singing in Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Pashto, Russian, French, Korean and Cantonese in the stairwell of the Whitworth Art Gallery.

Stefan Kiszko

We've been asked to contribute a work to an anti-deathpenalty blog over at http://artistsvsdeathpenalty.blogspot.com/ and have put together a simple memorial to Stefan Kiszko, the victim of a 1970's miscarriage of justice in the UK.  He wasn't executed (there's is no death penalty in the UK) but its pretty clear that 16 years of false imprisonment was a contributory factor in his early death.   If you don't know the details of the case there's an article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lesley_Molseed.  And here's a thumbnail of the work.

Whitworth Art Gallery

Our work The Fireworks is being presented for several months in the sculpture court at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester as part of a programme of exhibitions showcasing new works from their collection.  Opening this weekend, and continuing on until summer 2011, this is a full scale installation of the work, and the first chance to see it thus since its premiere at FACT, Liverpool in 2008.  We're also planning a number of special events to accompany the showing - details to be announced here in a couple of weeks.

The Fireworks

The Fireworks is being shown from 12 January 2011 at Isolation Room, 5723 Dewey Avenue, St Louis.  Curators Daniel McGrath & Dana Turkovic describe Isolation Room as 

"an evolving project that will focus on one artwork per exhibition cycle. each piece will be placed in a physical state of quarantine, situated in a modular viewing space inviting an extended period of contemplation. Building on an ongoing interest in containment, the constructed room allows for the smallest possible collaboration between the gallery space, curator, artist and audience. At its core one work stands in isolation. This is also an opportunity to protect work from a forced theme, loose contextualization or commercial exploitation. By placing the individual piece as a subject in isolation the work is then encouraged to exist and be perceived from an aesthetic standpoint."

Dimensions in British Contemporary Art, Artist Film Programme.

We're showing The Carriers' Prayer as part of Dimensions in British Contemporary Art at The British Council in India this month and through January/February 2011.  Curated by Film and Video Umbrella, the artist film programme can be seen at the British Council Centres in Delhi,  Chandigarh,  Ahmedabad,  Mumbai,  Pune,  Bangalore,  Chennai,  Kolkata  and Hyderabad.  The other artists showing in the programme are Marcus Coates, Melanie Manchot, Mike Marshall, Sean Dower, George Barber, Clio Barnard and Roddy Buchanan.
 

Website updated

In fact quite a major update - that is to say ten works from our recent exhibition, No Sign of Helicopters, at Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool.

Review in Art Monthly

November's issue of Art Monthly has just hit the bookstores and includes a review by Marcus Verhagen of our recent exhibition, No Sign of Helicopters at Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool.

Corridor8

Corridor8 is a contemporary annual international visual art and writing journal based in the North of England.  Issue 2, which features an interview with us and writer and pubisher Axel Lapp is being launched later this month during the Liverpool Biennial.  The lauch event takes place at the Liverpool Biennial Visitor Centre, 52 Renshaw Street, Liverpool between 6pm and 9pm on 25 October 2010.

Black Hole Hums B Flat

Should you find yourself in London during Frieze Week then be sure to also get along to Black Hole Hums B Flat - a group show of gallery artists that we are participating in with Ceri Hand Gallery.  Its a pop-up show and runs from 11 October to 6 November at 80 Duke Street, W1K 6JG.

Although open to the public from 11 Oct, the preview is on Friday 15 October from 7pm - 9pm with performances by Bedwyr Williams and Mel Brimfield.  Also there's a breakfast in-conversation event with Juneau Projects and Ryan McLaughlin on Saturday 16 October.

We'll be showing our 2007 film The Carriers' Prayer on a showreel with the more recent Die Brücke as well as some photographs and sculptural works.....so, plenty to do.  For a copy of the press release, written by gallery artist Jen Liu, click here

Re-Make/Re-Model

Coming up in October - and running through to February 2011 - is an exhibition we're in at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland.  We're showing a work from 2009 - Two East German Drinking Glasses - in what will be its first outing in a public gallery.  This from the National Glass Centre.....

Glass is theoretically infinitely recyclable – once formed, it takes less energy to recycle than to melt down the original raw materials. Glass can be melted and reused, without compromising its quality, time and time again.

We’re more aware today, than at any other time, of our impact on the environment. With Christmas approaching - the most poignant reminder of our disposable culture, fuelled by consumerism - this exhibition takes a look at artists’ work and projects that reuse and transform materials, that reconfigure or alter pre-existing objects. In some cases this touches upon the actual recycling of materials, in others it is the making of new work that is more than the sum of its parts.

Curated by National Glass Centre and Matthew Hearn.

Artists: Darren Banks, Ruth Claxton, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Jacob Dahlgren, Steven Emmanuel, Leo Fitzmaurice, Lothar Goetz, Christian Graser, Lucy Harvey, Charlotte Hughes-Martin, Amikam Toren.

The exhition runs from 14 Oct 2010 - 27 Feb 2011 with an exhibition preview on Wednesday 13 October, 6pm - 8pm.

Interview in Liverpool Echo

Interview with Ian for the Liverpool Echo around the opening of our current solo show, No Sign of Helicopters, at Ceri Hand Gallery.  Mostly concerns itself with our working processes and collaboration etc.  Also a shorter piece from last weeks Guardian about the show can be found here (scroll down)

No Sign of Helicopters

We have a solo show opening in a couple of weeks at Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool.  Entitled No Sign of Helicopters the show features a dozen or so new works in video, sculpture and photography.  No Sign of Helicopters runs from 16 September - 16 October 2010 with a preview event on 15 September 6-8pm. More information from the gallery website (link above) or download the press release

R.I.P Philby

Sad news to report that Philby, our main storage drive died unexpectedly a few days ago.  Philby was an essential part of the rack holding copies of all work files back to the mid nineties as well as documentation archives and, more lately, providing scratch disk services for video editing.  His overlarge casing and habit of blinking himself to sleep only when everyone else was already to bed were among the features that marked him out as a very special drive.  He will be greatly missed.

Website updated

Put up an installation image from the recent showing of England's Glory in Macclesfield as well as further documentation from our work for The Knot in Warsaw - mainly from the very wet Community Rope Ladder Workshop day as well as an image of the piece which concluded the process - entitled Machine for Looking at Warsaw Upside Down.

Bankautomat

On the way to The Knot today we passed a bankautomat in the process of being maintained.