One Hour Long Exhibition - New York Gallery - 9th January

One Hour Long Exhibition

with Chosil Kil, Marie Lund and Francesco Pedraglio

Wednesday 9 January 2013 / 7 - 8 pm

New York Gallery
Film Center Building
630, 9th Avenue (btw 44 and 45st)
Suite 308, New York, NY 10036

Frank! at Rowing, London - 30 Nov / 9 Feb

Frank!
Francesco Pedraglio
30 Nov - 9 Feb

ROWING
Unit F, 449 Holloway Road
London N7 6LJ
+44 (0)75 4093 4636

Frank! is an exhibition of newly produced works by Francesco Pedraglio and, at the same time, a collaboration with seven other artists (Nina Beier, Paul Becker, Alex Cecchetti, David Raymond Conroy, Chosil Kil, Simon Dybbroe Møller and Robert Frank) directly or indirectly invited by Pedraglio in relation to some of the ideas underpinning the exhibition.

[…]

The action or, if you prefer, the exhibition, takes place mostly during daytime… within office hours so to speak… from 12 to 6 or by appointment. Well, obviously it’s still there at night, when we’ve all left… out and about… thinking of something else, by ourselves or with someone else. Even then it’s there. It exists while you are walking out of that space, down the street and straight into your local corner shop to buy yourself some dinner, and it exists while the building superintendent moves slowly through the narrow backyard to shut the front gate and turn the light off in the main stairwell so that you can’t get into the building until the morning after. It exists and that’s about it… it’s there! And with this I mean it’s there even when we don’t look at it. Banal? I know… but as I’m the first to forget, it might be a good idea to remind you all about it… even if we know that what really matters is somewhere else, right? A world elsewhere. Because indeed what counts here, is that our action or exhibition, well, it’s actually a person… a real person… we need to imagine it as an individual, a being with all the component parts we would expect a being to have, all the physical and psychological idiosyncrasies that make of him or her who he or she is.

Little confusing maybe… so let’s make it all a bit less specific… or a bit more abstract if you prefer, if that’s even imaginable. Let’s say that our action or exhibition, which, as I have explained, is a person, a character really, well, let’s address this he or she as an it. Makes sense, no? It might actually help… might be simpler to tell our story if we don’t pick a definite angle yet, letting all our options lie there… wide open.

Keep it abstract. And anyway it’s too early to draw any definitive conclusions, to take upon our heads any more responsibilities than we need to. If you prefer, if it makes it easier for you, let’s think of the entire situation as a constructed fiction, a planned-out story. Note that this is not really the case: our character is real… or at least as real as you or me or all the objects you see scattered around the room. But if it helps you to imagine it as a 12-to-6-or-by- appointment kind of person, an on-stage-off-stage kind of guy, well, feel free… just if it helps… as we all know things are more complex than this, right? At least more convoluted, more elaborated… even after closing time… even when we can’t really tell what happens in there, in that space, when we’re off somewhere else and have managed to forget all about the entire business.

Now let’s give it a name. Let’s say it’s called Frank! So Frank!, our action, our show, our character – potentially mine or your story – well, Frank! is a person like any other person… it just happened to be here, now, existing as an exhibition of some sort… constructed as a series of scenarios re-enacting the psychology of a character. So every object shown or performed has to be considered per se as something existing in and from the world… out there… and, at the same time, as plots proposing possible takes on our character, as proxies for Frank!, cosmogonies for its own fiction.

Consequently Frank! itself could be seen as an abstraction defined by the narratives we project around or onto this agglomeration of objects you see here, now, leaning up against the walls or scattered willy-nilly around the room. Everything in here is a starting point, a tool for re-enactments or simple elements defining our character, standing for, and instead of, Frank! But that’s not all we could say about it. Actually we have a major problem in our until now perfectly balanced and delicately nuanced scheme. The fact is… he’s dead. Frank!, I mean. He is irrefutably dead, departed… gone forever… finito… kaput!

So, for the sake of precision, we can’t really state we have an action or an exhibition yet. We can’t because we haven’t got Frank! as such…Frank! as a walking-and-talking person doing things, thinking things. We don’t have it as a conscience or a consciousness yet. What we have instead is a constellation of elements building up a corpse, a cadaver, a dead body of some sort – like head and torso and arms and legs and fingernails – remains we decided to name Frank!… someone or something that, through our interpretation, might become my action, our exhibition, your story… all upside- down really… from bottom to top and in reverse. What we need is some sort of beginning though… a starting point, a way into the reconstruction of our character.

So now… let’s say: the audience enters the space to find the curtains already raised! Let’s agree on that. We need some sort of handhold, some sort of pretext. So this is it: you enter the space and the curtains are already raised. What else?

[...]

The Way Things Go - Part 3 - Frutta, Rome

Part 3

Neurath’s Boat

curated by Frances Loeffler

Opening 17 October 2012

Featuring works by Amit Charan, Jasper Coppes, Gabriele De Santis, Frank Heath and Francesco Pedraglio.

This exhibition takes the parable of the Ship of Theseus to reflect on the philosophical conundrum of whether an object, which has had all component parts replaced, can remain fundamentally the same. In the various versions of the parable, an object is gradually remade over a period of time. The constellation of the whole endures, while the individual fragments are replaced.

At a basic level, all things are constantly in transformation. Our bodies change continuously, turning over cells many

millions of times. In artistic terms, the parable raises questions about the nature and status of the art object.

What happens when objects do not behave as objects? When a finite form becomes a constellation with multiple starting points and destinations? While they retain their status as material forms, can objects also take on the qualities of immaterial processes, becoming fluid and transitive, like the activity of thinking, storytelling or conversation?

The artworks in this exhibition allude to or are in some way implicated in this question of material reconstitution, often balancing between movement and stasis, sameness and change. Forming part of a programme of sequential exhibitions, in which each curator responds to or develops their predecessor’s presentation, the exhibition itself is a revision, a plank replaced on the open sea.

Frances Loeffler

FRUTTA

Via della Vetrina 9

00186 Roma

Italy

BRINGING THE DEAD TO LIFE - Readings at EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS - 18 October 7 to 9

For Bringing the Dead to Life, six artists – Chad McCail, Francis McKee, Katrina Palmer, Francesco Pedraglio, Stephen Sutcliffe and Sarah Tripp – have been asked to similarly respond to our archive in the form of short readings or performances.

This event also marks the Edinburgh book launch for AGAIN, A TIME MACHINE: FROM DISTRIBUTION TO ARCHIVE, edited by Gavin Everall and Jane Rolo.

18 OCTOBER, 7-9PM
EDINBURGH PRINTMAKERS
23 UNION STREET
EDINBURGH, EH1 3LR

TICKETS £5 EACH. PLACES ARE LIMITED SO BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL. PLEASE CALL 0131 577 2479 OR EMAILOFFICE@EDINBURGHPRINTMAKERS.CO.UK

Strategies for Approaching Repeating Problems - 6 October - QUAD, Derby

David Raymond Conroy, I know that fantasies are full of lies, 2012

Emma Cocker & Rachel Lois Clapham, Fatima Hellberg, Gil Leung, Andrew McGettigan, Francesco Pedraglio, David Raymond Conroy, Alex Vasudevan

Forming part of Accidentally on Purpose curated by Candice Jacobs and Fay Nicolson and produced in collaboration with QUAD

www.accidentalpurpose.net
6 October 2012, 11am – 5pm
The Box, QUAD, Market Place, Derby, DE1 3AS


Strategies for approaching repeating problems presents a series of performances, presentations and talks around the ideas explored in the Accidentally on Purpose exhibition at QUAD, connecting the exhibition to wider contemporary issues in cultural production and discourse.

From difficulties inherent in language and communication to the way artists and writers position themselves in relation to wider social issues, such as education and the public sphere, this event will identify an array of current or ever-present difficulties, discuss their perception from different positions and consider whether notions of progress or return are clichés or inevitable fates. 

The Stone of Folly - Down Stairs - opening 29th September

The Stone of Folly

HOLLY ANTRUM, MIKE COOTER,  WILLIAM COBBING, KATIE CUDDON, BENEDICT DREW, MARTIN NEWTH, FRANCESCO PEDRAGLIO, HEATHER PHILLIPSON, NICHOLAS POPE, TOM WOOLNER

Curated by William Cobbing

The exhibition The Stone of Folly references Arthur’s Stone, a Neolithic site in the Golden Valley, nearby Down Stairs, which has become the subject of local folklore and forgotten histories.

The site incorporates a broken glacial boulder resting on an ancient burial chamber, where King Arthur (Owd Artur) mythically slew a giant, leaving indentations of his elbows in the stone as he fell to the ground. Over the years, the morphology of the stone has changed due to it being quarried, with the rubble being used in local buildings. The term ‘stone of folly’ comes from a medieval allegory of madness and stupidity (akin to “rocks in the head”), referenced in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting ‘The Stone Operation’ (1488), in which a surgeon is depicted removing a stone-like lump from a patient’s head, accompanied by the inscription “Master, cut the stone out quickly / My name if Lubbert Das.”

For the Stone of Folly, curator William Cobbing has invited artists to contribute works that play with the overlapping notions of fantastical narrative and shifting materiality. The exhibition will engage with ideas of superstition, alchemy, folly, entropy and flux that derive from the disjointed historical accounts of the site, and, more broadly, how we ascribe meaning to found objects and places. The exhibition questions the essence of temporal materiality, through sculpture and installation, digital, performance and text-based forms. The rural location in the Golden Valley, by the Black Mountains, also provides the potential for site-based works.

The Object Lessons - book launch - abc—art berlin contemporary, 13—16 September 2012

Part 1 — The Object Lessons is an exhibition.

Part 2 — The Object Lessons is a story inspired by an exhibition, considered through three parallel accounts told in the first, second and third person.

Part 3 — The Object Lessons is an exhibition inspired by the narratives, characters and artworks featured in a short story.

For the occasion of abc—art berlin contemporary, 13—16 September 2012, Åbäke and Francesco Pedraglio will introduce the Object Lessons (Part 2) and present the new book with Nina Beier and Marie Lund published by MOUSSE.