Drawing Documents
With Peter Blegvad, Ivan Grubanov, Christine Meisner, Xisco Mensua, Rinus Van de Velde, Florian Zeyfang
Project Room Extra City:
Emre Hüner: Adverse Stability
19 November 2010 – 6 February 2011
Opening:
Thursday,18 November at 19.00Tulpstraat 79, 2060 Antwerp, Belgium
www.extracity.org
The upcoming groupshow Drawing Documents in Extra City Kunsthalle Antwerpen will show works by Peter Blegvad, Ivan Grubanov, Christine Meisner, Xisco Mensua, Rinus Van de Velde, and Florian Zeyfang that explore, within a broad variety of perspectives, the medium of the drawing in its relation to memory and the representation of history. While doing so, the exhibition will not only question the medium in relation to the existing notions of the document, but far more, question this notion, through the particular qualities of the medium.
Parallel to the widespread current artistic concern with history that focuses on the politics of historical narrative, and the ambiguity of photographic or filmic documents, a renewed interest has emerged in drawing as a means of recording reality and relating to past events. Found somewhere between the genres of history painting, writing, and visual documents such as photography and film, the medium presents unique possibilities and asks particular questions concerning the reception of reality and historiography.
Drawing Documents explores how drawing establishes new relations between the imaginative and the evidentiary. The works bridge the visible and invisible, image and text, subjective desire and inscriptions of the real, authorship and witnessing, individual and collective memories, imaginaries and experiences. Drawings, this exhibition suggests, create a distinctive space that allows us to survey the condition of historical consciousness, particularly in relation to the image-economies of present-day mass media.
For Drawing Documents Rinus Van de Velde (b.1983, Leuven) creates a new series of wall drawings. Over the past years, Van de Velde has used a vast personal collection of images as templates for his drawings, combining them with textual fragments that introduce subjective experience into fragmentary narrative scenographies. Although the artist has long been working with a fictional Alter Ego, he has recently begun to approach historical figures and enter into an imaginary conversation with them through his work. Christine Meisner (b. 1970, Neurenberg) works both in film and drawing. Her work is based on extensive historical research and traveling, which is then cast into the form of essayistic video-works and series of deviated drawings. In the new works presented in this exhibition, she focuses on the history of slavery in the United States, creating topographic maps that explore fugitive routes and communication systems based on specific literary accounts. In his practice of painting and drawing, Xisco Mensua (b.1960, Barcelona) refers to poetic, literary and philosophic sources from the twentieth century, creating tableaus that mobilize transient layers of the historical imagination. Musician and cartoonist Peter Blegvad (b.1951, New York) will be represented with his long-term project Imagined, Observed & Remembered, a series of what he calls comparative drawings, conceived as an inquiry into the role of the “mind’s eye”. Here particular illustrations and objects are depicted first as imagined, then based on actual observation, and after a period of time, once again from memory. From Ivan Grubanov (b.1976, Belgrade), paintings and the G-series, a new series of drawings are on show. In his work, Grubanov explores political historiography and puts to the test what specific modes of representation, such as the monument, contain, thus traversing the distance between official and personal histories. Florian Zeyfang (b.1965, Stuttgart) looks critically at a globalized world of media signs and at the consequences of it for society and the individual, taking into account historic aspects of both art and political movements. His Transmission Attempts is the only video-work in the exhibition. The black and white animation is based on a montage of scenes from films by Harun Farocki/Andrej Ujica, Jean-Luc Godard/Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Marie Straub/Danièle Huilliet.
With special thanks to SEACEX, Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior for the support.
Emre Hüner: Adverse Stability
In his multi-facetted artistic practice Emre Hüner (b. 1977, Istanbul) inquires into the imaginary of modernity and its afterlives. Based on an extensive archive of imagery and found materials, Emre Hüner’s work investigates the language of modernist progress and its paradoxical heritage. His works are a systematic exploration of the relations between projection, imagination and materialization and application, mapping out the territory between visual form and the social-political impact of technologies.
Following his participation in the collaborative project Manifest Destiny (Extra City, 2009) and his first European solo exhibition at Stroom Den Haag (The Hague, 2010), Extra City presents a solo-presentation by the artist in the project room.
Alongside sculptural objects and drawings, the presentation centers on Emre Hüner’s film Juggernaut (2009) that stages a scenario which revisits WWII and the Cold War era, and explores the intersection between scientific and social utopias, political propaganda, and mass culture.
This exhibition is supported by RODEO gallery Istanbul www.rodeo-gallery.com
Wednesday 8/12 | 19.00
Pelin Tan: Beyond Biopolitics
Art historian and critic Pelin Tan (b.1974, Hilden) will
give a lecture on the work of Emre Hüner.
A project in collaboration with 0090 festival
Drawing Documents and Adverse Stability will be the last expositions of 2010 and also the last curated by outgoing artistic director Anselm Franke. Extra City would like to thank Anselm Franke for his invaluable contribution to the development of Extra City, and wishes him a very successful future.
Extra City – Kunsthal Antwerpen
Tulpstraat 79 – 2060 Antwerp – Belgium
www.extracity.org – info@extracity.org
Opening hours: Wed – Sun 14.00 – 19.00 / Thu 14.00 – 20.00
Guided tours on request
Press contact: Joris Vermeir – joris.vermeir@extracity.org T +32 3 677 16 55
