Monday, November 28, 2011

“39 REASONS WE STILL NEED SUPERMAN”-: 3-17 December 2011 / Havana / CUBA

“39 REASONS WE STILL NEED SUPERMAN”, Devised and curated by Tim Crowley

December 3-17 2011, 7:30 pm., Video Art Touring Festival

Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) ,Facultat des Artes Plasticas, 120 No. 110 e/.9na, Y13

Cubanacan, Playa, Havana – CUBA

Participating Artists:

Jake and Dinos Chapman / Anton Henning / Roman Signer / John Smith / TJ Wilcox / Jonathan Meese / Angus Fairhust / Guido van der Werve / Almagul Menhbayeva / Christian Jankowski / Xu Bing / Ross Sinclair / Mat Collishaw / Yang Zhenzhong / Jitish Kallat / Roslihan Ismail (Ise) / Liu Zejing / Kelste / Olaf Breuning / Wang Quinsong / Ferhat Ozgur / Hu Xiangqian / Vincent Leong / Benpa Chungdak / Tejal Shah / Dash Snow / Greta Alfrado / Paul McCarthy / John Bock / Emma Hart / Hoang Duong Cam / Priya Sen / Yeksetan Tsedal / Dihn Q.Lè / Margaret Salmon / Peter Walsh / Kang Jing / Roderic Buchanan

Introduction: The show’s starting point is an extensive overview of video work from the last 15 years. In true Myspace/ Facebook fashion, the selection is both personalized and intentionally un-private, customized and compartmentalized yet available to all. It targets the interest of artists in investigating how images operate and construct our understanding of the world. They explore aesthetic concepts, everyday narratives, and sociopolitical realities and utopias. While some artists use the video to challenge our assumptions about the mimetic nature of the medium, the curatorial focus of 18 reasons why we still need superman will be the relationship between performance and video, what reaction the works create in the audience and the subject matter as a catalyst for dialogue. Contemporary reality is an assemblage of whatever grabs our attention and we want these works to play part of the contemporary reality collage of the viewers, to form an alternative kind of map.

Video show as an alternative map: Information we are given has a direct affect on a person's mental map of the geographical world. The perceived geographical dimensions of a foreign nation (relative to one's own nation) may often be heavily influenced by the amount of time and relative news coverage that the news media may spend covering news events from that foreign region. This selection of videos is our news coverage