Three exhibitions in Porto and Lisbon
Culturgest, Porto
5 February–23 April 2011
The Way it Wasn’t (Celebrating Ten Years of castillo/corrales, Paris)
Culturgest, Lisbon
19 February–22 May 2011
1+1+1=3
(Hermann Pitz, Michael Snow, Bernard Voïta)
Gedi Sibonywww.culturgest.pt
The Way it Wasn’t (Celebrating Ten Years of castillo/corrales, Paris)Curators: castillo/corrales
Artists: Aaron Flint Jamison, Aglaia Konrad, Amy Sillman, Barry Le Va, Cao Fei, CS Leigh, Gabriel Orozco, Guillaume Leblon, Haim Steinbach, Heimo Zobernig, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Jimmie Durham, Joe Scanlan, Kathryn Bigelow, Melanie Gilligan, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nils Norman, Oscar Tuazon, Willem Oorebeek
When can an independent art space feel it is old enough to revive its own history in the form of a retrospective exhibition? When is it right to think its record of activities deserves a historicizing publication? The answer is ten years. It is the convention that seems to apply here. Ten years is what distinguishes real proof of accomplishment from self-aggrandizing thinking.
The Way it Wasn’t questions the ineluctable establishment of a once-considered-alternative organization. It addresses the illusion of coherence that such a day-by-day endeavour often gains in retrospect, as well as the overblown importance that a small, localized structure can take in the view from afar.
Celebrating ten years of trials of castillo/corrales in Portugal means to show more than there actually is. The Way it Wasn’t draws from exhibitions and projects which did take place in the 29 square-meter Paris-based gallery, and from ones which almost did. Some were only discussed but got postponed. For others, it just wasn’t the right time.
This exhibition and the (forthcoming) accompanying publication are co-produced with Midway Contemporary in Minneapolis.
1+1+1=3 (Hermann Pitz, Michael Snow, Bernard Voïta)
Curator: Friedrich Meschede
This is the second in a series of exhibitions taking place at Culturgest, all based on a simple premise: the presentation of three concurrent solo exhibitions that establish a dialogue between one another and ultimately come together to form a group exhibition.
The starting point of this exhibition is the studio in which an artist develops and realizes his work. As a place where art is produced, the studio has, in recent decades, moved out into the public space. Large site-specific installations have been defining exhibitions, making them seem like studios open to the public, so that the artist’s visual imagery is also influenced by documentary characteristics, or by the given situation.
This exhibition expresses a range of different concepts of the studio, which go beyond the public and the documentary. In the versions developed by Hermann Pitz (b. 1956), Michael Snow (b. 1929) and Bernard Voïta (b. 1960), the studio is a place to which artists can retreat to invent images of their own in an atmosphere shielded from reality. Behind this must surely be a romantic attitude that is the opposite of the expressive voyeurism described above. Yet it also relates to the idea that art is always something different, which has to be seen outside of a constantly expanding norm and thus creates new visual experiences.
Gedi Sibony
Curator: Anthony Huberman
Like anything else, objects come and go, falling in and out of use, breathing in and breathing out. They are cherished, but then forgotten and broken, or else revered and enshrined. As they pass through time and space, living their lives, their surfaces accumulate the marks of past accidents, miracles and encounters. What emerge are the fundamental power of bare essentials and the effortless magic of the mundane.
The New York-based artist Gedi Sibony (b. 1973) locates the materiality of experience in the life of castaway objects and pulls them from extinction. His plastic sheets, plywood, hollow core doors, metal pipes, picture frames, curtains or carpet fragments protest against a civilization that leaves them behind in its frantic over-production, becoming evidence of a new sense of equilibrium. These are not only autonomous sculptures, but arrangements that are strung together in space like musical notes, telling a tale of human touch, intuitive correspondences, careful pauses and small epiphanies.
Culturgest, Lisbon
Edifício-sede da Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Rua Arco do Cego
1000-300 Lisbon, Portugal
T +351 217905454
culturgest@cgd.pt
Culturgest, Porto
Edifício Caixa Geral de Depósitos
Avenida dos Aliados, 104
4000-065 Porto, Portugal
T +351 222098116
culturgest@cgd.pt
www.culturgest.pt
