Ackroyd

Carbon 13: Ballroom Marfa and Cape Farewell team up

This post comes to you from Ashden Directory

In Marfa, Texas

Kellie Gutman writes: Marfa is a small town of 2,121 people in western Texas.  In 2003, Virginia Lebermann and Fairfax Dorn converted a former 1927 ballroom into a performance and exhibition space called Ballroom Marfa.  In this intellectual environment, issues and perspectives are explored through film, music, art and performance.

Ballroom Marfa contacted Cape Farewell’s David Buckland to curate Carbon 13: From the High Arctic to the High Desert, which runs from 31 August until 20 January 2013.  Eight artists who have traveled with Cape Farewell to the Andes, the Arctic and Scotland’s island communities are presenting newly-commissioned works to highlight the effects of climate change.  The exhibit is supported in part by an Artistic Innovation and Collaboration (AIC) Grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation.

The artists represented are Ackroyd & Harvey, Amy Balkin, Erika Blumenfeld, David Buckland, Adriane Colburn, Antony Gormley, Cynthia Hopkins and Sunand Prasad.

In the online art newspaper, artdaily.org, the reviewer of Carbon 13 wrote:

Ballroom Marfa continues its ambitious mission of presenting art as a transforming media capable of addressing the most pressing issues of our time.

“ashdenizen blog and twitter are consistently among the best sources for information and reflection on developments in the field of arts and climate change in the UK” (2020 Network)

ashdenizen is edited by Robert Butler, and is the blog associated with the Ashden Directory, a website focusing on environment and performance.
The Ashden Directory is edited by Robert Butler and Wallace Heim, with associate editor Kellie Gutman. The Directory includes features, interviews, news, a timeline and a database of ecologically – themed productions since 1893 in the United Kingdom. Our own projects include ‘New Metaphors for Sustainability’, ‘Flowers Onstage’ and ‘Six ways to look at climate change and theatre’.

The Directory has been live since 2000.

Go to The Ashden Directory

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Symposium: “Animal Ecologies in Visual Culture”

This post comes to you from Cultura21

By Ronja Röckemann

Reposted from: www.antennae.org.uk/Symposium

The symposium on October 8th 2011 at University College London proposes an exploration of artistic practices involved with animals and environments. In the recent re-surfacing of the animal in contemporary art, emphasis has been given to mammals, mainly because of the most immediate relational opportunities that these animals offer to us. However, a number of very interesting artists has been recently trying to bridge the abyss between ‘us’ and more ‘taxonomically remote’ creatures through the use of art and science as active interfaces. This new focus reveals the interconnectedness between humans, amphibians, reptiles and insects, and the environments in which we all live. Through a multidisciplinary approach, the symposium aims at facilitating a dialogue between artists, scientists and academics interested in informing wider audiences through visual communication.

Speakers Include: Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey / Ron Broglio / Maja and Reuben Fowkes /Rikke Hansen / London Fieldworks / Joyce Salisbury / Linda Williams. See www.antennae.org.uk for registration.

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

Bunker forms part of the network entitled Imagine 2020 – Arts and Climate Change

Bunker forms part of the network entitled Imagine 2020 – Arts and Climate Change, which tackles the issue of environmental challenges through the prism of artistic actions and by means of certain other instruments of production.

The aforementioned initiative precipitated production of performance by Betontanc Ltd: SO FAR AWAY introduction to ego-logy in 2010 and also gave rise to a grass-made installation by the British artistic tandem Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey entitled On the field, which had been featured on the platform next to the Slovene Ethnographic Museum in the framework of The Mladi levi Festival. Both works of art illustrate our specific approach to the issue in question, namely flexibility as to genre and theme, since our understanding of art defines the latter as the field of arising questions instead of that of already laid-down answers.

We are opening a call for production of artistic works, predominantly addressed to young artists coming from the fields of performing arts (this, however, is not a necessary requirement) to submit their projects, which in one way or another tackle the issue of contemporary environmental challenges in the widest sense possible.

Bunker will choose one or more projects applied and support it/them in terms of production, promotion and finance as well as by arranging their guest-staging or its/their introduction to the international sphere.

We kindly invite all interested parties to send a short outline of the project proposed (one page), a reference list and a budget estimate to info@bunker.si by February 28th. Any further information may be obtained at info@bunker.si or 031 694 559. Applicants will be notified of their application results by 31st March.