Exhibitions at Valand

PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS

Ian Pedigo – In a Shaded Corner of the Room; The Curtains…

Ian Pedigo is a New York-based sculptor, now exhibiting in Galleri Rotor! Join us for the opening reception Friday, 2 December, 18 - 21.

Ian Pedigo invested in the parallel between a mental construct - a thought, a memory - and physical construction. Whether architectonic or natural, each retains an aspect of conceptual and material congruency contained by its form. For his solo exhibition at Galleri Rotor, he will present an ambitious site-specific installation. The artist and curator will develop a script for the space based on a series of conversations that be transformed into material and objects.
 

SF>DF>TJ>GOT
An Exhibition of Contemporary Video Art from Mexico
Curated by Julio Cesar Morales
Opening Reception: 21 October, 18-21

Exhibition: 21 October-27 November, Tuesday-Sunday, 12-17

Galleri Rotor is pleased to present the exhibition, SF>DF>TJ>GOT, a video-based project curated by Julio Cesar Morales. The exhibition features contemporary video art by artists based Mexico and the United States, including; Carlos Amorales, Yoshua Okon, Tania Candiani, and Sergio de La Torre. The four video works mix the politics and aesthetics of Mexico with issues of migration and labor—amplified by a historic lens.

SF>DF>TJ>GOT is held in collaboration with The Nordic Watercolor Museum’s current exhibition, Mexiko – Poesi & Politik, also curated by Morales, which features works on paper and animations by twenty artists, including Francis Alÿs, Dr. Lakra, Collectivo Marcelaygina, Teresa Margolles, Miguel Calderon, Gabriel Orozco and a small selection of work by historical giants including Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco and Jose Guadalupe Posada.

These two connected exhibitions and their related series of events form cultural exchanges between the Nordic Watercolour Museum and Valand School of Fine Arts, Sweden and Mexico, and contemporary and historic art narratives.

Opening Reception: Friday, 9 September, 18-21. Vasagatan 50 (entrance Teatergatan), Göteborg

STAND OPPOSITE OF THE CHORUS
Works by Magnus Bärtås (Stockholm, in collaboration with Petra Bauer, Kajsa Dahlberg, Sara Lundén, Matti Kallioinen and Karolina Pahlén), Marcelline Delbecq (Paris), Christian Jankowski (Berlin), Sara Jorenö (New York), Tova Mozard (Stockholm), Lisa Tan (New York/Stockholm), Richard T. Walker (San Francisco), and found sculptural busts.
Curated by Laura Mott

Christian Jankowski, The Holy Artwork, video still, 2001

Friday May 20 at 5 p.m. Valand opens it's gates for the yearly SPRING EXHIBITION and the exam exhibition for the Bachelor programme in Fine Art: ÄNTLIGEN FÖR SENT.

PROGRAM

Opening May 20, 5-8 p.m.
5:15 -5:45 Performance Sasha Waltå
5-6 Release fanzineproject Lagoon
6 Opening speach
6:30 Performance Mary-Anne Norberg

Open May 20-29, all days 12 - 5 p.m.
Also Open May 27 5-8 p.m.
Guided tours: at 1 p.m. - 22/5, 25/5, 29/5, OR please book at  info@valand.gu.se
Release Catalogue Äntligen för sent: May 23 maj 6 p.m.

Welcome to Graduate shows with Pernilla Ljungkvist and Unndór Egill Jónsson. Opening April 29, 5-8 p.m. Presentation at 5, followed by film and performance around 6 p.m. 

Pernilla Ljungkvist/The Psychic Artist. Don't let the Bright Lights Burn You.

Losing your arm, making a decision and talking to a cat. These are some of the elements that compose We Have Always Been Here Before, the Valand Independent Study Course exhibition. Valand proudly presents: Giorgi Makhniashvili (GEO), Matthew Rana (US) and Signe Vad (DK).

Finissage April 20, 4-7 p.m. Artist and writer Matthew Rana will present a reading in English, of his recent work The Essayist, a book-length poem written from the perspective of a rebellious house-cat. The Essayist marks an attempt to think-through and connect various theoretical strands within the history of leftist politics including Russian Constructivism, Operaismo, the Arab Spring, the work of Jacques Derrida, and the films of Chris.Marker. As a way to consider the political economy of speech, it also asks what speaking positions must be constructed in order to speak about the present, drawing parallels between the call to "make art politically," and the problem of the political poem.

Welcome to Graduate Shows with Sofie Karp and Jacob Hurtig, opening Friday March 18, 5-8 p.m.

Welcome to Graduate Shows with Ulrika Linder and Mailind Solvind Mjöen, opening Friday March 4, 5-8 p.m.

Ulrika Linder: Jag föder en folkmusiker

Mailind Solvind Mjøen: When the Penguin Sleeps

Julie Fournier Lévesque Graduate Show / Master of Fine Arts, February 18 to 27, 2011
Vernissage: Friday, February 18, 5 - 8 p.m.
Visiting hours: Tues. to Sun., 12 - 5 p.m. Closed on Monday.

 Composition of Voice, Composition of Attempts

It is about a problem of communication.
It is about emotions that do not get through.
It is about taboos.
It is about trying, and trying again.

A language of emotions exists as part of the human nature. It can be both verbalized or non-verbalized, but most of the time, it is deeply rooted in one’s instinctive body gesture. However, from culture to culture, as from individual to individual, emotions are not expressed or perceived in the same way. There is a wide range of possibilities between concealing and exhibiting emotions. Inspired by the video Noises (1993) by the artist Absalon, Composition of Voice, Composition of Attempts explores different systems of communication to make a language of emotions public, visible and hearable, and to share it with the viewer.

Julie Fournier Lévesque is a native French speaker from Québec, Canada. She owns a Bachelor of Fine Arts with major in sculpture from Concordia University, Montreal. Reflecting her personal experiences embedded in specific socio-linguistic contexts, her art projects raise universal questions. If the experience of the viewer is undeniably moderated by his/her ability to understand a given language, what can survive in the inevitable loss in translation of a work based on a specific language or a cultural background? Her awareness of being simultaneously a linguistic minority and majority motivates her to try to answer these questions regarding personal and cultural identity.

The artist has participated in group exhibitions in Québec city, Montréal and San Francisco, and presented a paper at Art in Translation: International conference on language and the arts, in Reykjavik, Iceland, in spring 2010. Composition of Voices, Composition of Attempts is her first solo exhibition.

Julie Fournier Lévesque web site >>

BETTER LIVING
Two Video Installations by Terence Gower

Galleri Rotor I www.gallerirotor.com

3 December 2010 - 16 January 2011

ARTISTS TALK and OPENING RECEPTION: 3 December, 16-18/18-21
Terence Gower and Copenhagen-based artist Yvette Brackman will present their practice and have a conversation with the audience and curator Laura Mott in The Valand Lecture Hall. Following, please join us for the opening reception of Better Living at Galleri Rotor.

This exhibition presents Ciudad Moderna (2004) and Wilderness Utopia (2008), two video installations in which the aesthetics of modernity and the architecture of a city are the central protagonists. Terence Gower's work is derived from his historical research into utopian thinking during the mid-20th Century, which has fueled his inquiry into the aesthetic and ideological entities of modernism that took root in the collective imagination during this time.

ABOUT GALLERI ROTOR I: Valand School of Fine Art has launched a new initiative to provide an active site for contemporary cultural production in Göteborg by bringing local and international artists and exhibitions to Galleri Rotor I. Starting in Fall 2010, a series of exhibitions and public programs by important and challenging contemporary artists will be presented in the gallery located at Vasagatan 50. During the spring when the graduating master students mount their solo exhibitions in the gallery space, we will continue our programming through the Rotary Program. Using Valand as its axis, the Rotary Program will explore different forms of exhibition making and artist production that take place outside the “white box”. The program aims to give a platform for works designed for the public sphere and artist practices that are performative, ephemeral or experiential.

The Big Scene

Tova Mozard: screening of new film “The Big Scene” followed by a conversation with the artist and curator Laura Mott.
Monday, 8 November 2010, 17:00 in Galleri Rotor I. 

Mozard’s new film The Big Scene begins with the artist, her mother and her grandmother applying makeup in the dressing room of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. While preparing the women speak of their age, looks, death and their relations. The women enter the stage, and with their backs against the empty audience seats, continue their conversation in the presence of a therapist. The conversation is real, but the setting in which it takes place and the appearance of those in it, skews reality. Mozard experiments with the private in a theatrical setting and stages a situation where life and its realities are unavoidable. Emotions such as sadness become the foundation for the films narrative structure and reveals insights sometimes only recognizable externally or from other perspectives. The film concerns the complexities of real life where complicated chains of events and traumas form patterns and become a story.

 

GUANTANAMERA

A film and installation by David Harding and Ross Birrell
Produced by Douglas Gordon

OPENING RECEPTION: 8 October 2010, 18-21:00
OPEN: 8 October-7 November, 2010

This project was shot on location in Cuba (March-April 2008) and Miami (January 2009) in the period immediately following the resignation of Fidel Castro. Birrell and Harding’s two films follow the recording and broadcasting of the most famous of Cuban songs, Guantanamera, by two singers from across the political divide of contemporary Cuban identity.

The original lyrics to the song Guantanamera (lit: ‘the woman of Guantanamo’) are derived from the Versos Sencillos of the Cuban national poet, revolutionary and martyr, José Martí. An inspirational nationalist hero who fought to liberate Cuba from Spanish colonialism, José Martí is claimed by both pro-Castro and anti-Castro Cubans alike. Castro regards Marti as ‘el Maestro’; he is noted in the Cuban Revolutionary Constitution and Havana’s international airport is named in his honor. For Cuban Americans, José Martí is a pre-Castro hero and lends his name to the right wing radio station Radio Marti.

The films are edited in poetic visual stanzas with a fragmented spatial-temporal framework, developed over Birrell and Harding’s two previous films, Port Bou: 18 Fragments for Walter Benjamin (2006, premiered at Kino KH Basel) and Cuernavaca: A Journey in Search of Malcolm Lowry (2007, commissioned by KH Basel). The Guantanamera films follow the recording and broadcast of separate versions of the song in Cuba and Miami.

In Cuba, the song was recorded in Guantanamo by the Changüí singer Jose Andres Ramirez and broadcast on Foxa Radio station in Havana. In Miami, the song was recorded by the famous Cuban-American singer, Renee Barrios and was to be broadcast to mark the anniversary of Marti’s birth on the right wing Government station, Radio Marti. However, after permission was denied, the song was broadcast on the US-Cuban radio station, La Poderosa, which devoted an hour-long phone-in to the project. The recording and broadcasting of two versions of Guantanamera in Cuba and Miami returns a song that has become something of a universal tourist cliché to a field of political antagonism, most succinctly embodied in the production of the a cappella versions as a Double A Side vinyl record.
(Ross Birrell and David Harding, April 2010)

SCREENING AND LECTURE: 11 October, 13:30-16:00, Valand Lecture Hall
We will screen the two documentaries that informed the film installation followed by a discussion with the artists David Harding and Ross Birrell
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