Saturday 26 September 2009

'Guided Tours' - 15 to 18 October - Auto Italia South East



Launches Saturday 17th October
9am to 1pm

From 15 - 18 October Auto Italia hosts a temporary programme of performances, events, discussions and presentations from selected on-going projects by emerging artists.

BETTINA BRUNNER / KATHY NOBLE / FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO
a permanent project for Auto-Italia organised by Katie Guggenheim

Three curators, Bettina Brunner, Kathy Noble and Francesco Pedraglio, present fictional guided tours of Auto-Italia through the medium of writing. The guided tour, an established museological convention, is used here as a means to visit exhibitions that don't exist. The tours will be permanently available to visitors, as three alternatives to the exhibition on show, for as long as Auto-Italia remains at its current location, an old Volkswagen garage which is awaiting demolition.

BETTINA BRUNNER has written a conversation between herself and Dan Graham based on interviews and the artist's writings concerning architecture and space. Bettina is Exhibitions Co- ordinator at the BFI and a regular contributor to Frieze Magazine and Springerin.

KATHY NOBLE has reviewed an imaginary exhibition, addressing authenticity through performance and re-performance. Kathy is a writer and Assistant Curator at Tate Modern.

FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO will focus on the building itself, imagining possible pasts and futures. Francesco co-founded the curatorial project space FormContent, edits the quarterly fanzine The Mock and other superstitions, and is a London editor for Kaleidoscope.

Tuesday 22 September 2009

The Mock and other superstitions at 'UTOPIA FOR SALE' - Akademie der Künste Berlin -



We are glad to invite you to UTOPIA FOR SALE, a magazine exhibition featuring the archives of the most engaging publications in the current sphere. This exhibition will be held by abc, art berlin contemporary at Akademie der Künste. Please visit us from September 23-27, 2009. Private opening reception on September 22nd, 2009 from 7pm.

This year's abc becomes 'def — drafts establishing future', and presents the work of over 80 artists on their visions for art projects in public space. These works are to feature concepts for utopian or viable projects to be realized in Berlin or elsewhere. In accordance with the theme of abc, the CMYK presents Utopia for Sale.

The title of the exhibition, Utopia For Sale, is taken from a text by critic Frederic J. Schwartz. His work describes 'what happened to the Bauhaus when its products went beyond the world of "theory" and discursive debate and confronted the real, non utopian capitalist economy that actually existed in Weimar Germany'.

From this starting point, we seek to examine the result of the introduction of 'Utopia' into the market economy. The market has a unique way of uniting art and industry, under which these utopian practices are articulated by laws, manipulated by experts, and tested by profits. Therefore the difference between a utopian versus a revolutionary project resides in our capacity to reform these laws instead of being expropriated by them.

The selected issues will be on sale turning the exhibition space into a temporary bookshop. The temporary bookshop is conceived like an experimental platform to test how the art production deals with the market and its distribution rules. The CMYK and Archive Kabinett invited GRID, an art collective based in São Paulo and Berlin to curate the display of the exhibition during abc.

Participating magazines among the others: A prior, Afterall, Archive Journal, Chimurenga, Ctrl+P, Dot Dot Dot, E-flux journal, Fillip, Frieze, IDEA arts + society, Internationalistisk Ideale, Metropolis M, Mister Motley, Mono.Kultur, Mousse magazine, n.paradoxa, Not Announced, Nowiswere, Pages, Paper Monument, Pavilion Magazine, Proximity, Reartikulacija, Script, Site, Spike, Springerin, Texte zur Kunst, The Happy Hypocrite, The Mock and other superstitions, TkH – Teorija koja Hoda, Zehar.

UTOPIA FOR SALE
Exhibition Dates: September 23 – 27, 2009
Location: Akademie der Künste Berlin, Hanseantenweg 10
Opening Date: September 22, 2009, 7pm (upon invitation)

abc, art berlin contemporary
http://www.artberlincontemporary.com
info@artberlincontemporary.com