EL AURA DE LA REPETICIÓN EN Every…
El trabajo de Idris Khan (Reino Unido, 1978) tiene la virtud de dialogar con la tradición fotográfica desde una posición original, para luego su reflexión personal. Entre las obras expuestas en el último Paris Photo05, las copias de Khan desprendían el magnetismo de aquella aurea que extrañaba Walter Benjamin: la reproductibilidad de la fotografía inauguraba un nuevo estadio en el arte.
Sze Tsung Leong en la galería Yossi Milo, (Nueva York)
Sze Tsung Leong
February 17–April 2, 2011
Artist’s Reception
Thursday, February 17, 6:00–8:00 pm
Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Cities, a new body of work by Sze Tsung Leong. The exhibition will open on Thursday, February 17, and close on Saturday, April 2, with a reception for the artist on Thursday, February 17, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This will be Mr. Leong’s third solo exhibition at the gallery.
Cities is an ongoing series of photographs, begun by Mr. Leong in 2002, that depict a wide range of urban formations throughout the globe, from medieval towns to recent constructions, and that together form a picture of the world, specifically through its cities, at this particular moment in time at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Cities continues the artist’s visual investigation of the world, as explored in his two previous series: Horizons (2001–ongoing), an international collection of images of natural terrains and urban landscapes that considers the relationships between far and near, foreign and familiar; and History Images (2002–2005), which examines the erasure of history and the reshaping of society through the built environment.
The photographs of Cities, both individually and collectively, combine expansive views and sharply defined detail that simultaneously render a range of scales, from the large to the small, and reflect how each city is an intersection of the monumental scales of civilization and society, and the more intimate scale of daily life. The scope and influence of this intersection make cities a fundamental and constant aspect of human existence, and the resulting complexity of these interactions has manifested in innumerable global variations. The range and nuance of these variations, expressed through the patterns of urban form, are depicted in each picture through an elevated vantage point that suggests the informational clarity of a map, but contains the dimensional rendering of a photograph. The consistency of point of view, formal composition, and descriptive detail of these photographs—which include views of cities as diverse as La Paz, Seoul, Nairobi, Antwerp, Houston, Havana, Amman, and Nagasaki—foreground both parallels and contrasts between social and historical structures as they have unfolded in urban form at different times and in different locations around the globe.
Viewed at the large scale, the photographs show the diverse forms and typologies that compose cities—the geometries of city planning, zoning layouts, street patterns, open spaces, monuments, towers, developments, churches, mosques, houses, offices. These elements are shown not discretely, but in relationship to each other and in their wider and manifold contexts as reflections of the powers, beliefs, traditions, and economies that built them. The accumulation of these forms also show how cities are prolonged accumulations of time— from a Roman amphitheatre overlooked by a cliff of recent concrete construction in Amman, to a Medieval cathedral rising above a flat, seemingly endless landscape in Ghent, to a colonial city center undulating over the Andean topography of Quito, to the postwar patchwork of histories of London, to the sinuous lines of highways engraving the attenuated landscape of Houston.
Upon closer inspection, the photographs reveal a smaller, finely-grained scale composed of the details of daily life that can unfold within a city: chance combinations of colors created by clothes hanging out to dry in Mexico City, early-morning commercial deliveries in Lisbon, concentric striations of patches of mowed lawn in an outskirt of Antwerp, spray-painted political slogans in La Paz, clusters of people waiting at a bus stop in Dublin. The clarity and abundance of these details, together with the expansive portrayal of the larger scales of urban form, coincide on the surface of the photograph to create a dense concentration of visual information about the myriad cities, and ultimately the world, we live in.
The photographs are taken primarily with an 8” x 10” view camera and are darkroom-printed analog chromogenic color prints.
Sze Tsung Leong was born in Mexico City in 1970, spent his childhood in Mexico, Britain, and the United States, and is currently based in New York. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Deutsche Börse Art Collection, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. His work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico; and group exhibitions including An Atlas of Events at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the 2006 Havana Biennial, New Photography at the High Museum of Art, the 2004 Taipei Biennial, and Painting as Paradox at Artists Space. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, his book History Images was published by Steidl, who will also publish his next book Horizons in the fall of 2011.
Shubhankar Ray, The times They are A-Changin’
A finales del siglo XX se empezaron a utilizar conceptos del discurso científico para comprender los nuevos modelos culturales de un mundo en proceso de globalización. Se derribaron los muros que delimitaban los compartimentos estancos y se marcó un único terreno de juego. Las unidades de información cultural emprendían viajes muchos más largos y el resultado final era más imprevisible porque eran infinitas las posibles combinaciones. El nuevo modelo parecía ajustarse mejor con nociones como el caos, la iteración, la entropía, la virtualidad o el azar.
La Mediateca CajaGranada Francisco Ayala propone hoy, 16 de diciembre, un nuevo encuentro perteneciente al programa del ciclo Memoria Joven, el último del año 2010. En este caso, se trata de un diálogo entre lo literario y lo visual llamado sugerentemente “Sin título”, que tendrá lugar hoy a las 19:00horas. Continuando con la esencia de esta iniciativa, coordinada por la escritora Ángeles Mora, la propuesta creativa corre a cargo de dos valores emergentes en el ámbito de la literatura y las artes visuales, como es el caso de Marta Rebón y Ferrán Mateo, que ofrecerán un recorrido combinando la trama urbana, el silencio de la escritura y la crónica sentimental, a través de una combinación de palabra e imagen, ofreciendo “recortes de historias visuales impregnadas de traducciones intercaladas. Sueños reales y viajes ficticios”, según proponen los autores.
Esta iniciativa, organizada por la Obra Social de CajaGranada y concebida para el diálogo entre diferentes géneros de expresión artística, propone un cruce desde diferentes perspectivas y sensibilidades que necesita de la complicidad del público. Sin título nos habla del vínculo entre la fotografía y la palabra, de la representación de espacios que sugieren un universo creador, y de cómo modifican los textos literarios la propia mirada del fotógrafo. Es el caso de las imágenes de los lugares más significativos vinculados a Borís Pasternak, el poeta ruso que escribió la mítica novela El Doctor Zhivago, recientemente traducida, por primera vez, del ruso al español, por Marta Rebón, con la colaboración del propio Ferran Mateo en la traducción de los poemas de Yuri Zhivago.
