Question time with Victor Burgin

Vicor Burgin ©

A video of the event including 10 question to Vicor Burgin during the opening at Museo Fotografia Contemporanea in Cinisello, Milan.

http://undo.net/eventinvideo/100/

A collaboration between Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa and Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea. For more infos: Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia Alle otto. Solito posto & Voyage to Italyhttp://www.bevilacqualamasa.it/

Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo (MI)Alle otto. Solito posto & Tales from Freudhttp://www.museofotografiacontemporanea.org/

Peter Bialobrzeski, Neon Tigers

Peter Bialobrzeski ©

Over the next few weeks Cinisello Balsamo is hosting an exhibition by German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski. "Neon Tigers" is an open air event in the main square of Cinisello, north of Milan. The exhibition includes 24 works by Peter Bialobrzeski around the cities of Shangai, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Shenzhen and Kuala Lumpur. Asian megacities wirh their high-rise buildings and rapid development and are the focus for this photographic research.Organized The Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea in collaboration with Contrasto the show will be on display until July 13. An interestin article about the artist: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/arts/design/11GOLD.html?position=&ei=5007&en=5154a9ac3f0ee0eb&ex=1397016000&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=all&position=

Forum on Landscape and Photography

Guido Guidi, Martesana, Cologno Monzese,1991

This weekend a very interesting forum took place at Colonia di Renesso near Genoa. "Lezioni di Paesaggio" is a forum with a series of meetings, lectures, exhibitions and installations.

The forum focus is on the following subtopic: Planning the Landscape - Defining the Landscape -Landscape Culture - Il Cinema and Landscape - Photography and Landscape - Contemporary Art and Landscape.

Landscape Lessons’s objective is to spread and excite a common culture starting with the definition the word landscape, with the belief that knowing it adequately makes it possible to establish a new and different relationship between disciplines, artefacts, reflections at the base of a contemporary culture. Therefore these Lessons are aimed to involve residents thoroughly by freely discussing information with architects, artists, curators, museum directors, geographer, photographers and writers. This careful thought on landscape will be carried out by the Colonia’s park where will be placed a series of site-specific works with the creation of temporary architectures (made by zerozoone and altro_studio), a work by landscape architects Land-I and two art installations (made by Silvia Cini and Guido Affini). A tribute will be given to the artist Ugo La Pietra by installing videos made in the Sixties. In addition you will enjoy a video by Fabrizio Basso, a screening of different artists focusing on landscape, by Elvira Vannini, a selection of videos from the archive Careof, by Mario Gorni and a special work created just for this occasion by Emilio Fantin. At the same time we will organize “Sguardi nel paesaggio”, a photographic exhibition, in order to show results of several searches carried out by a group of artists rising out of the international scenery.

Some of the guests invited to the photography forum:

Roberta Valtorta, Director of Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea,Vittore Fossati, Photographer ,Guido Guidi, Photographer - Roberto Maggiori, Director of the magazine Around Photography -Antonello Frongia, Historian of photography.

More infos http://www.archphoto.it/

RCA at Museo Civico di Modena

Annabel Elgar ©

What surely promise to be an interesting exhibition is In Our World. New Photograpy in Britain curated by Filippo Maggia. The show includes works of 18 artists who over the last 10 years have attended the Royal College of Art Photography Masters offering a contemporary vision of research photography. The presence of artists from a variety of nations (Germany, Portugal, the United States, Switzerland, Ireland etc.) underlines the key role played by Royal College of Art into photography research. The artists in the exhibition are: Becky Beasley (1975, UK), Bianca Brunner (1974, Chur, Switzerland), Lisa Castagner (1975, Northern Ireland), Simon Cunningham, Annabel Elgar (1971, Aldershot, UK), Anne Hardy (1970, London), Lucy Levene (1978, London), Gareth McConnell (1972, Northern Ireland), Brígida Mendes (1977, Tomar, Portugal), Suzanne Mooney (1976, Ireland), Melissa Moore (1978, Nottingham), Harold Offeh (1977, Accra, Ghana), Kirk Palmer (1971, Northampton, UK), Sarah Pickering (1972, Durham City, Uk) Sophy Rickett (1970, London), Esther Teichmann (1980, Karlsruhe, Germany), Heiko Tiemann (1968, Bad Oeynhausen, Germany), and Danny Treacy (1975, Manchester).

A catalogue of the exhibition by Skira is available. Open Until July 13th at Palazzo Santa Margherita, Modena. More soon

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe Plate 179. Untitled (self-portrait). 1973/75

By KAREN ROSENBERG for The New York Times

Since Polaroid announced in February that it would stop manufacturing instant film and that supplies would run out next year, artists like Chuck Close and Lucas Samaras have been passing through stages of grief. Nothing, they say, can replace the Polaroid — awkward, dated, a little sleazy, but miraculous nonetheless. The beloved instant photograph could not have hoped for a better sendoff than the Whitney’s exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroids. During his 20s, between 1970 and 1975, Mapplethorpe made more than 1,500 photographs with Polaroid cameras. This may surprise viewers who are more familiar with his posed and polished studio photography of the ’80s.
“Polaroids: Mapplethorpe” offers some 100 examples drawn largely from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, including portraits, still lifes, erotica and works that fall into more than one of these categories. All the themes of Mapplethorpe’s mature work — the body as a site of pain and pleasure, the ideals of classical beauty, the celebration of alternative lifestyles — are here, but rendered in a more spontaneous medium.
As Mapplethorpe once said, “If I were to make something that took two weeks to do, I’d lose my enthusiasm. It would become an act of labor, and the love would be gone.” continue http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/16/arts/design/16mapp.html?scp=2&sq=photography&st=nyt

World Press Photo 2008 in Milan

A retired circus artist won Polish photographer Rafal Milach

The 51st annual World Press Photo contest attracted a record 80.536 entries from 5.019 photographers across the globe. An exhibition is on show at Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan http://www.galleriacarlasozzani.org/ images from all winners for the 2008 edition are on display until May 25th.

Victor Burgin Museo Fotografia Contemporanea and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa

Victor Burgin © , Portia ( Tales from Freud), 1984

This week I attended a very interesting show at the Museo Fotografia Contemporanea di Cinisello Balsamo, Milan. The occasion was " Alle otto. Solito posto & Tales from Freud" by Victor Burgin curated by Filippo Maggia - a photographic exhibition of images and text and a new video to be projected contemporarily with Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice.
Victor Burgin is an artist and theorist of the image, both moving and still. His theoretical writings are steeped in the ideas of poetical, psychoanalytical and theorists such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes.
Burgin can be described as a conceptual artist and a researcher who has developed his artist practices while his theoretical work has created critical debates. My advice is to buy " Thinking Photography" a precious reading for people interested in photographic research.
Going back to the opening, Victor Burgin was answering questions formulated by Filippo Maggia and gave a very interesting lecture about his work and his approach to art, and exploring its relationship with memory, femminism, politics and psychoanalytical theory. Lets hope to see more events of this kind at the Museo Fotografia Contemporanea.
I was told that a video with the interview should be available soon at: http://www.museofotografiacontemporanea.org/fotografia/index.html?document=mostre

Fotografia Europea Reggio Emilia

A third edition of Fotografia Europea has just open in the town of Reggio Emilia with exhibition until 8 of June. Curated by Elio Grazioli for the second year running it is one of the most important event for photography in Italy. During the first week Fotografia Europea is packed with meeting, events, talks and performances around the theme of "Human, Too Human" intended as bodies and their representation in photography and contemporary visual arts. As most contemporary festival is divided in the official and off section with a large number of works on display, impossible to see all in one day so be prepared for long walks.
Edward Steichen is surely one of those exhibition that can`t be missed, divided in two different sites "Un Epopea Fotografica" at Palazzo Magnani an exhibition of the entire career of the artist and a second exhibition at Chiostri di San Domenico with works from 1923- 1927 during the years at Conde` Nast. In the same building you could see "Heroines"by Bettina Rheims, a series of large sculptural portrait depicting actresses and models in couture and nude.

A series of colour polaroid by Paolo Gioli is on display at Palazzo Casotti, just behind the main square, with images of torsos, busts, anatomy. A research into the use of polaroid from an artist that has creatively explored this medium in his work.
Together with Paolo Gioli this section includes Raoul Hausmann, Jorge Molder, Pierre et Gilles and Wols that you could visit accross Reggio Emilia.
Bruno Cattani works are on display at Musei Civici exhibiting black and white photographs of sculptures from various museum. The artist says that his work " wasn’t carried out by following academic clichés, but with an aesthetic choice in which figures communicate and exchange looks of complicity, repeating the gestures that are part of their history". This photographic research project on the theme "Human, Too Human" together with projects by the italian artist Jarno Zaffelli and Patrizio Esposito are on diaplay at the same museum together with stuffed animals, old paintings and antiques. Works by Elio Mazzacane Vanni Codeluppi, Fabio Donato and Benedetta Alfieri, enhances and completes the exhibitions on offer at Fotografia Europea 2008.

On the international front, Aneta Grzeszykowska at Palazzo Torello-Malaspina and Ann-Sofi Sidén at Spazio Gerra are showing visual performance of the body. Performatives experience that in the case of Ann-Sofi Sidén involved filming over 200 persons in Reggio Emilia sliding down a fire station emergency pole. Other international artist includes Antoine D’Agata from France and Erwin Olaf from Holland.

Human, Too Human could is as a visual retrospective into the body, that the curator describes as a "body of photographic images, a body that has developed and changed over the years as much as the human body, incorporating new materials, new techniques and new devices, right up to the apparent immateriality of digital technologies" .