N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A,
a blog about photography by Sofia Silva
About 9 months ago, a colleague invited me to collaborate on an academic project that asked us to produce both a written essay and a video. I accepted thinking it would be a good incentive to finish a text I’d been writing about Nagika (one of the dogs that lives with me), particularly about her…
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How does art critic work in other countries? I don’t know. In Portugal, it’s changing. The online magazines and blogs have created platforms where different people write about art and publish critics on exhibitions, publications and short stories on art events overall. So yes, there’s a lot more time spent of the activity of writing…
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This is not one of my usual posts. In conversation with Rotem Rozental, the editor of the Shpilman Institute for Photography blog, she suggested I should take a look at a couple of her posts and that’s how I came to encounter Yaron Lapid‘s work. Featured here is Rotem’s conversation with him, along with images…
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“[…] What I am calling “vulgar appropriationism” is this: the way in which pop/commercial media today often appropriate formal structures from more-or-less “high art,” or even avant-garde art, of the 20th century, and use them in ways that negates the aesthetic or conceptual radicality of those structures. […] Another example is Gaspar Noë’s recent video…
Read MoreA Place so good that is worth its own post. Videos, Lectures, Conferences, Debates, Conversations…Fora TV…Click image to access video
Read MoreA great documentary about the extraordinary Pearce family and the world of radical sports. Director Lucy Walker.
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Boris Groys’ text “Politics of Installation” (2009) is a relevant text for several reasons, as is locating installations between the artist and the curator, but mainly because it draws a parallel between installations and sovereignty. Contemporary artistic practices fall in several traps: on one hand they suffer from a narcissistic complex that prevents them from…
Read More© Sandro Ferreira, Não lhe digas para onde vais amanhã (Don’t tell her where you’ll be tomorrow), from the project “6174” Set of a hundred booklets, with dimensions identical to those with speeches of some dignitaries of the Portuguese dictatorial regime: “Estado Novo”. © Sandro Ferreira, from the project 6174. The left card reads The…
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p “To discover an avant-garde film-maker who is able to combine theoretical and formal sophistication and widely accessible pleasure always seems something of a miracle. And yet it’s a miracle that Arnold has accomplished twice, in Pitce Touchie (1989) and Passage c l’acte (1993), two exhilarating, often laugh-out-loud-funny short films that demonstrate that avant-garde work…
Read More“The book — the first mass-produced object — raises a number of questions concerning its conception and distribution. What do we mean by the expression « artist’s book » ? Is Cover to Cover a book of reproductions of an artist’s « originals » or a hand-crafted book containing illustrations of texts, printed on quality…
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© Shira Klasmer, Walking the Line, 2012. 10’34” in loop “The ‘painting’ is performed by the artist holding a ‘brush’ made up of a line of LED lights. The act (of painting) is photographed by two still digital cameras creating a single still frame of long exposure, capturing the traces of the action on to…
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© Terike Haapoja, Anatomy of Landscape, Durational images, 2 parts, 2008 Glass, plywood, live plants, light, electronic, water, 150 cm x 90 cm x 20 cm When one stands before a landscape, two lines of thought appear. One treats the landscape as a framed fragment of our field of vision, distanced plane of forms and…
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© Micael Nussbaumer, from “Tempo Imprime no Espaço” (lit. translation: Time prints in Space), installation © Micael Nussbaumer, “Desfiar”, installation, several different documents from the abandoned Fábrica da Fiação de Tomar (The Weaving Factory), 2010 © Micael Nussbaumer, video stills, from “O Registador”, 2010 “Each video depicts an intervention in the abandoned space of Fábrica…
Read Moredetail from installation by Christian Jankowski – The Matrix Effect. Photo by Berenice Berlin-based Christian Jankowski is a problem artist. His problems are not, however, of the kind familiar to, say, formalist painting, with its “problems” of color and composition. Rather, he is interested in the creative potential of life’s awkward moments, embarrassing situations, mistakes,…
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© Hélio Oiticica, Bólide Caixa 22, Mergulho no Corpo, 1966-1967 © Hélio Oiticica, Parangolé, 1964 © Hélio Oiticica, Tropicália PN 2 and PN3, de 1967 © Hélio Oiticica, Cosmococa 5 – Hendrix War Sorry but I couldn’t find the following text in English and it really is the one presenting the kind of analogy I wanted…
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“The theme of dehumanization was the subject matter of many works in a variety of media. None was clearer or more appropriate to the exhibition than Portrait, a video tape by Harmut Lerch and Claus Holtz which consists of 100,000 photographic portraits viewed consecutively at a gradually increasing rate, up to 20,000 faces per second.…
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from Karl Hansson‘s essay Screening the Figural in Film an New Art Media
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© Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Life Mixing, 1975 © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Untitled, 1980 – a clear glass jar with lid containing 5 pieces of paper with type-written text and black string. © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, from It’s Almost That, 1977 © Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Exilee, 1980 “From the mid-1970s until her…
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© Adad Hannah, Safari #2, from the project Safari, 2011 “Safari is a collaboration between film director Denys Arcand and artist Adad Hannah produced for the exhibition Big Bang, which celebrates the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ 150th Anniversary and the opening of a new pavilion. The set for Safari is the Safari Seating Environment…
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N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 