Curatorial

Edinburgh Feed the 5000

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Edible Edinburgh

Reposted from Edinburgh City Council / University of Edinburgh – see Edible Edinburgh for more information or download Edible Edinburgh 5 Oct flier 500kB – thanks to David Somervell for alerting us to this,

Please join us on Saturday 5th October in Bristo Square and Potterrow, University of Edinburgh for this Feeding the 5,000 event, with community stalls showcasing local food related action and a discussion about the future of Edinburgh as a sustainable food city.

Community stalls open from 11am in Potterrow, with a free lunch being served outside in Bristo Square from 12pm until 5,000 portions run out or we close at 4pm!

The purpose of this event is to:

Inspire awareness about local food production, food waste and social responsibility.

Engage Edinburgh residents about the proposed strategy to develop Edinburgh as a Sustainable Food City and launch “Edible Edinburgh” – an action group of the re-established Edinburgh Sustainable Development Partnership.

Feeding the 5000 is a campaign launched in 2009 to raise awareness of the amount of food wasted locally, nationally and globally and how we can solve this. Following successful events in London, Paris, Bristol, Manchester and other cities across Europe, we are planning Scotland’s very first Feeding the 5000 event in Edinburgh on Saturday 5th October 2013.

5,000 people will be fed with a delicious free meal created by celebrity chefs and community groups from ingredients that might otherwise have been thrown away. Along with participatory cooking sessions, educational and campaign stalls and more, the two days are sure to be a must for anyone who enjoys good food and cares about food waste.

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.
It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.
Go to EcoArtScotland

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[UN]NATURAL LIMITS – Austrian Cultural Forum New York

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Jan 23 – April 1, 2013

Austrian Cultural Forum New York 11 East 52nd Street – New York, NY 10022

Artists: Desire Machine Collective, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mathias Kessler, Superflex, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lois Weinberger
Curated by Dieter Buchhart & Arnaud Gerspacher
Curatorial Advisor: Mathias Kessler

The new international group exhibition [UN]NATURAL LIMITS, which opened on January 22nd, gathers together different artistic reactions to the alienating effects of the unfettered global exploitation of resources, and offers insight into the denial and myopia of current political responses to what increasingly appears to be a perpetual crisis.
It focuses on the environmental relays sent back in response to our human activities (or failures to act), while giving voice to various groups, thinkers, and artists who seek to interrupt narcissistic and destructive self-involvements in society.

The exhibition, which was commissioned by the Austrian Cultural Forum’s director Andreas Stadler and curated by the Viennese-New York team of Dieter Buchhart and Arnaud Gerspacher, maintains a deep ambiguity towards the modernist legacies of endless expansion and selective prosperity, as our social and political systems slowly begin to confront the limits of growth and sustainability. Each artist or collective poses a challenge to the perceived limits that condition our understanding of the world: on the one hand, the limited prospect for action, compassion, and change, while on the other, the limitless drive for resources and capital in all its forms. A reversal is necessary: it is compassion that should be limitless.

The show will include an installation by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn titled Resistance-Subjecter (2011), which was first shown as part of his Crystal of Resistance at the Venice Biennial 2011. The bodies of the eight mannequins have seemingly been infested and corroded by 1 million year-old crystals. We are left to guess whether the crystals were produced in the body and stand for a material resisting cultural, economic, social, ecological, and aesthetical habits, or whether the body was produced by the crystals, now hosting them in order to resist the jaded times we live in.

Austrian artist Lois Weinberger’s Invasion (2005/2011) also plays with the limits of the organic and inorganic. The installation consists of a group of mushrooms that climb, protrude, and seem to grow from the Austrian Cultural Forum’s gallery walls. The work is a striking confluence of nature and artificiality, though the limits between the natural and unnatural are not as clear as they may first appear: the walls themselves were once organic growths in a forest and the artificial lighting is itself produced by natural sources of energy.

Equally engaged in uncovering the often-arbitrary limits between ecology and the economic functioning of the urban landscape, Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been committed to interrogating the social role of art within these processes. Her Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! (1969) states that art should be concerned with maintaining life, its systems and environments. In her yearlong performance documented in Touch Sanitation Performance (1977-80), Ukeles shook hands with 8,500 sanitation employees, while sharing and documenting their stories, and thereby drawing attention to the ecological underbelly of New York City and its often socially stigmatized workers.

In Experience Climate Change As… (2009), the Danish collective Superflex advertises a series of hypnosis sessions offered in conjunction with international global climate change summits. The first one took place in 2009 at the UN Global Climate Summit in Copenhagen, and future events are planned through the year 2050. These hypnosis sessions allow participants to experience climate change as a specific animal, in a relatively playful gesture that nevertheless points to the serious relationship between the natural limits of global ecosystems and the seemingly limitless capacity of world powers to defer action due to realpolitik and economic reasons.

The rapacious capacity to excavate natural sites is documented by Mathias Kessler in his piece,Jarrells Cemetery, N37o53.96’ W81o34.71’. Eunice Mountain. West Virginia. (2012). The artist traveled to a commercial surface mining site in West Virginia to document the operation and the local stories mourning the lost landscape, the political situation, and the area’s history. Verbal accounts are audible to visitors outside the gallery, before they are confronted inside by a massive wallpaper depicting the carved out hillsides which appear overwhelmingly dry and diseased. In serious irony, the only remnant and survivor in an otherwise lifeless scene is a cemetery, now even more cut-off from the living.

Finally, [UN]NATURAL LIMITS includes a documentation of Periferry – An incomplete Balance Sheet (2013), a nomadic space for hybrid art practices mounted and maintained by Desire Machine Collective. Located on a ferry barge on the Brahmaputra River in India, this project provides a space for experimentation and new media approaches, public and community arts, which are relevant to immediate local concerns and aim at the empowerment of the community and reclaiming the public space, while at the same time connecting with the global.

For more information, visit acfny.org

Reposted from eflux newsletter

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Whitney Museum of American Art: Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art

THURSDAY, MAY 27, 2010  5–8 PM   Calendar event download icon

THE KITCHEN: 512 WEST 19TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10011

Please join us for the free opening reception of Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art, curated by the Whitney Independent Study Program’s 2010 Curatorial Fellows Anik Fournier, Michelle Lim, Amanda Parmer and Robert Wuilfe. This exhibition considers the concept of ethical cohabitation – how to negotiate our differences within our shared environment. Cohabitation implies power relations in flux; relations that seem at first harmonious can in fact be antagonistic. In this context, how does one choose to act? The exhibition includes projects by: Gina Badger, Amy Balkin, Rachel Berwick, Matthew Buckingham, ecoarttech, Pablo Helguera, Alfredo Jaar, Tatsuo Miyajima, Lize Mogel, Andrea Polli, Emily Roysdon, spurse and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Please note that Undercurrents does not take place at the Museum. The Kitchen is the primary site of the exhibition; additional sites include the High Line, the Little Red Lighthouse and the North River Waste Treatment Plant. Please consult individual calendar listings for details. All events are free and open to the public.

via Whitney Museum of American Art: Opening Reception: Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Recent Art.

APInews: Panel: Art + Land Reclamation, Urban Ecology

The role that art, architecture and design play in land reclamation and urban ecology is topic of an upcoming panel at Parsons the New School for Design in N.Y.C. The panel, set for April 10, 2009, will discuss transdisciplinary fieldwork in art, landscape architecture and industrial reclamation, focusing on the field methods of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech and the Incubo Atacama Lab in Chile. Land Arts, directed by Chris Taylor, is a field program that investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construction beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. The Incubo Atacama Lab project began when the curatorial exchange organization Incubo invited Taylor to bring the working methods of Land Arts to Chile. Taylor will participate along with Incubo artists and more.

via APInews: Panel: Art + Land Reclamation, Urban Ecology .