coal

Fondation d'entreprise Ricard

Du 18 novembre au 19 décembre 2009

Guillaume Janot, "Ecostream, World Park Pékin, 2007", 2009, Photographie, couleur, 5 exemplaires, 80 x 53 cm, Courtesy Alain Gutharc
Dans son denier travail, intitulé Ecostream, Guillaume Janot explore par la photographie certains environnements factices ou reconstitués, des décors. De Disneyland au jardin botanique de Sydney, en passant par Pékin ou le zoo de Vincennes, l'univers des images qui composent ce corpus est celui d'espaces à forte dimension factice, délocalisés et fabriqués de toutes pièces, dont l'usage est essentiellement voué aux loisirs.
L'exposition à la Fondation d'entreprise Ricard présente un ensemble de photographies inédites réalisées entre 2007 et 2009. Le titre de la série, qui est aussi le titre de l'exposition, est emprunté à un lieu particulier d'un grand parc public de Pékin, où le promeneur peut s'immerger dans une campagne fleurie, idyllique où l'illusion de nature (à la fois sauvage et rassurante) est savamment mise en scène.
A travers ce travail, loin de "mettre à distance" ou d'opérer un pas de côté pour révéler/dénoncer l'artificialité et cette fameuse dimension factice des lieux, l'artiste, au contraire, prolonge, sur-joue par l'image leur tentative (ou la nôtre), parfois naïve, d'immersion dans un "ailleurs".
De prime abord trompés, nous parcourons ainsi par l'image un monde et ses singularités, un monde qui nous semble familier ou exotique, et dont seul le titre des photographies, qui situe et nomme les lieux, nous révèle leur réelle nature.
Informations pratiques
Exposition du 19 novembre au 19 décembre 2009
Vernissage mardi 17 novembre à partir de 18h30
Entrée libre du mardi au samedi de 11h à 19h
Visites commentée chaque mercredi à 12h30 et samedi à 12h30 et 16h - entrée libre

28 October - 20 November 2009

Vietnam University of Fine Arts
42 Yet Kieu Street,
Hanoi, Vietnam
9.00-17.00 daily
Admission free

http://www.emergencyrooms.org/hanoi.html
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Emergency Room is a format created by the artist Thierry Geoffroy / Colonel that will be activated in Hanoi at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts in connection with the royal Danish state visit to Vietnam, November 2009.

Artists are thermometers that can measure and perceive dysfunctions in our society. Artists are experts of all perceptions. What they know or feel must reach the public opinion immediately:
Now - before it is too late.

Through Emergency Room, artists can react to reality every day. In Emergency Room the public can have access to the artist's premonitions, suspicions, visions and collected evidences before it is too late. In Emergency Room artists evolve and develop new unexpected methods and forms.

Artists, burning to express themselves about the emergencies of today, join each other daily to display their work in the circular Emergency Room. Punctuality and deadlines are fundamental when yesterday's artworks daily at 12.15 pm is removed from the Emergency Room to give space to the artworks of today. This ritual of changing the exhibition is called: "The Passage". The artworks from yesterday and previous days are then exhibited in the "Delay Museum" beside the Emergency Room.

The Queen, Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Denmark will attend the Passage on November 3rd and engage in the following discussion with the artists.

In Hanoi, a large number of Danish and Vietnamese artists will participate and cooperate over the period of the exhibition. For a list of the participating artists, visit http://www.emergencyrooms.org/hanoi/artists.html.


The Emergency Room Format
Emergency Room is a format: when an art institution has agreed to host the Emergency Room format it is given the license to activate a local version of the format, adapted to the local surroundings and context. Other formats by Thierry Geoffroy include the format "Biennalist", "Critical Run and "Awareness Muscle" .

Emergency Room is also an international movement, like a caravan, and everywhere the format is actualized the community of Emergency Room Artists expands. Emergency Room has been successfully launched in New York, PS1 / MOMA; Berlin, Galerie Olaf Stueber; Denmark, Nikolaj Contemporary art center; Athens, Ileana Tounta Gallery; Italy , Napoli PAN Art Center; Paris, Galerie Taïss.

"Artists, audience and media have been fighting for weeks in order to get to see and participate in the new and innovating exhibition that with its "art of the news" puts the art institution itself to debate.
Reuters, The New Yorker and the TV-channel ABC News are some of the leading media that have brought the story about the original exhibition, and at P.S.1 more than a thousand visitors per day have been seeing it…" (Nikolaj M. Lassen, Weekendavisen, March 30th, 2007)


Emergency Room Hanoi is organized by the Danish Arts Agency and the Royal Danish Embassy in Hanoi.

Press contact
Thierry Geoffroy
1@colonel.dk

Lone Ravn
The Danish Arts Agency
+45 25 30 25 68
lonrav@kunst.dk

Royal Academy of Art

December 3, 2009 at 6pm to January 31, 2010 at 7pm 

For more than a decade, scientists and politicians have been arguing with each other, and amongst themselves, with regard to the speed of climate change and the impact of our lives today on the environment within which the human race exists. Recent debates have centred less on the possibility and more on the certainty and speed with which change will take place. As the debate has developed, so too has our approach to the future.

This year GSK Contemporary sets out to consider the impact of climate change, and our transition to a new world, on the practice of a broad range of contemporary artists, working in a wide-variety of media. Some of the artists featured are heavily involved in the issue itself, others have shown it to find a place, or resonances, within their work but not as a singular, direct focus. Many of the artists in this exhibition have achieved success in their work by transforming the global scale of climate change into a human narrative. The works on show will create an exhibition that is close to the edge, bravely metamorphosing ‘issue’ and ‘art’, whilst beautiful, powerful and thought-provoking. The exhibition does not aim to preach nor admonish, whilst at its heart sits the overwhelming quality of the individual works and the overall aesthetic, visual and experiential impact that the exhibition strives to achieve.

Introduction

The show will begin with an introduction to the key factors that make up the natural world and the actions and activities that are impacting upon the equilibrium. Works by artists including Ackroyd & Harvey, Spencer Finch, Mona Hatoum and Marcos Lutyens & Alessandro Marianantoni, engage with the earth, air, sky, nature and carbon elements to encourage a deeper consideration of our cultural relationship to earth’s stability.

Perceived Reality

The second section of the exhibition will represent our world as we imagine it today. Artists such as Antti Laitinen and Edward Burtynsky will reflect the perceived security of our existence, safe in the knowledge that we are intelligent enough to know that the world is round and not flat, but still naive in imagining that it responds to our authority and control.

Artist as Explorer and Reflector

At the centre of the show sits a group of exhibits that help us understand the role of the artist in the cycle of our evolution. In this section we are able to consider the role of artist as communicator, reflector and interpreter of key issues of their day. Historically, in the time of Darwin, David Livingstone and Captain Cook, then subsequently in the World Wars, artists have played a crucial part in recording man’s explorations, conquerings and discoveries whilst ‘describing’ them in such a way as to make them more understandable, more striking to a wider world. Within this section artists Sophie Calle, Lucy & Jorge Orta, Cornelia Parker, the poet Lemn Sissay and Shiro Takatani hold up a mirror to our changing world, producing work that will encourage us to examine the issues from a variety of angles, to reflect and question. Other works will confront the viewer with the consequences of human behaviour through natural disasters and physical collapse, counterpoising the beauty of the planet with the damage that is being inflicted upon it.

Destruction

The penultimate section of the exhibition will confront the visitor with the consequences of human behaviour through natural disasters and physical collapse counterpoising the beauty of the planet with the damage that is being inflicted upon it.

The New (Reality)

In the final section of the exhibition we enter a world of vision and of hope, but through the glass of reality as our world, and our sense of beauty, is being re-defined by the impact of climate change. This subtle shift represents the first major change in our view of the world since the first ‘whole earth images’ emerged as photographs taken from Apollo 8 in 1968. This image was central to our new perception of the beauty and fragility of the earth; climate change is now moving us through a second stage or re-evaluation, re-looking and revised undertakings.

This has germinated new notions of care and empathy for our habitat; the beauty of the physical world, of bird migration, bio-diversity and a new sense of a shared emotional understanding. Works by artists such as the writer, Ian McEwan, Mariele Neudecker and Emma Wieslander will offer insight, vision and hope, responding powerfully to this cultural shift, some with a celebration of beauty and what we stand to lose. These artists approach this shift from various perspectives: some engaging with the rigour of scientific endeavour, others through the use of imagined worlds, film and music, delving into the emotional understanding of knowledge.

Earth navigates us through a series of realities - perceived, real, threatened and super-real, which will allow the visitor to register the conversations and stories that will guide us to a different level of understanding. Beginning in Darwin’s anniversary year, and within the very organisation where he delivered his significant lecture on the Origin of Species, the consideration of the issue of climate change through the work of artists, encourages fresh provocations in relation to the notion of ‘survival of the fittest’. It will engage more with the notion of transition than that of final endings, of new realities and possibilities as we reclaim a different future.

Ghost Forest is an original and ambitious project by Angela Palmer that seeks to raise public awareness of the connections between deforestation and climate change. It involves taking a series of 10 rainforest tree stumps, most with their buttress roots still attached, from a regulated, commercially logged tropical rainforest in Ghana. The tree stumps will be presented as a “ghost forest” firstly in Trafalgar Square in London, and then in Copenhagen to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in December.

Ghost Forest Art Installation. Trafalgar Square, London. U.K.
16-22 November 2009
Ghost Forest Art Installation. Thorvaldsens Plads, Copenhagen. Denmark.
7-18 December 2009