Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson’s Making a Record (Diamond) features an interview with graduate gemologist and jeweler Karen L. Davidson, who discusses the characteristics of diamonds, celebrated both for their flawless beauty and unsurpassed durability, and expresses her thoughts from over 30 years of experience working with the gem. The artists explore the diamond’s dual function as an object of adornment and as an industrial tool. On view is the album cover, with a photograph depicting the process of cutting the record and a transcript of the interview, and the album itself, cut using the gemstone being described. Although it is a relatively common stone, society has successfully branded the diamond as precious and exclusive, revealing little about its other functions. This work is from the series ‘Making a Record l Diamond l Ruby l Sapphire l Emerald’.

A Perfect Human
Curated by Milena Hoegsberg and Megha Ralapati
January 31 – February 28, 2009
www.dorschgallery.com

“A Perfect Human,” includes the works of seven artists working in video, sculpture, sound and film. The artists are Zhao Bandi, Martin Basher, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Joergen Leth, Patrick McElnea and Sreshta Premnath.
Curated by Milena Hoegsberg and Megha Ralapati, “A Perfect Human” aims to explore notions of perfection and the ideals and the cultural systems and symbols that reinforce them. In a variety of ways the works question how we stage, package, and present ourselves, and how we communicate and connect with each other and the world.

Stephanie Kiwitt at Galerie B2  -  17.1. - 28.2.2009

The consumer world has long since dispensed with the simple display of commodities for everyday use. Shopping miles court us with architecture, product design and the aesthetics of advertising in an attempt to market theme worlds. With a narrative eye, Stephanie Kiwitt picks up on the aesthetic of these locations and photographs shop windows and their displays.
She combines and condenses her motifs and image planes into absurd-comic stories that allow things to abandon their context and scale. Her images seem like the science fiction notions of our previous generations turned into reality or the trash of the future.
The surfaces of her work in colour and in black and white are conscious combinations of technoid processes. Kiwitt inverts, plots in colour on colour or fixates the textures of simple contemporary prints.
The title I WANT TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT NOT THE PAST, itself a shop window motif, is a call to live in the now or a compulsive premise of the need to be ahead of the time. With an indulgent wink, Kiwitt challenges us to be wary of visions and formal projections. Welcome to the present.

Book By Stephanie Kiwitt at onestar press

x caligine, nova insigna : anaphoros | Gegenschein (2008) is the Klat group’s first monographic exhibition in France and only the second gallery exhibition (after “One for the Money, Two for the Show” at the Francesca Pia gallery in Berne, 2001). Yet this group of artists from French-speaking Switzerland are not novices. Klat started out almost fifteen years ago, when its members were still self-taught teens–a rare enough event in the art world to be noteworthy. Today Klat has totted up over fifty exhibitions in all formats and twice represented Switzerland at international events (2nd Montreal Biennial, Palais du Commerce, 2000; International Pusan Biennial, Korea, 2002).

Klat decided from an early stage to almost exclusively inhabit the “public” art realm, as opposed to the “private” one represented by galleries–not so much in order to reject the market and its associated values as to focus their criticism on public cultural institutions, from city museums to alternative cultural spaces. Though frequently caustic and tinged with irony, this “criticism” is never cynical. Klat is first and foremost a way of occupying the ground, of living and working in it as effectively and above all as freely as possible

In 1997, when invited by Lionel Bovier and Christopher Cherix to Forde, an alternative exhibition space which they went on to program the following year, Klat decided to take over a wasteland hidden by construction site hoardings for 24 hours. The exhibition space on the second floor, emptied for the occasion and open for the duration of this “performance” (”Klat 1440′”), became a simple observation post from which to look out onto the other side of the street and watch a gang of teenagers camping out in the city, sleeping, listening to music, hanging out with friends and cooking sausages.

For a Mamco monographic exhibition in 1999, Klat dismantled the series of rooms allotted to them and used the wood to build a gigantic doll’s house on wheels that served as a showcase for a massive collection of contemporary punk and anarchist fanzines. The group also set up an office containing a photocopier and a computer and manned this improvised “information kiosk” every day, inviting viewers to photocopy the fanzines they were interested in or else to make their own. Simultaneously, Klat presented a selection of “difficult”–to say the least–or even unshowable works found in the Mamco reserve collections, notably a far-out Condo (before his painting became popular again), a John Saint-Bernard (a farce orchestrated by the marvellous Collin de Land) or a pile of soft toys signed Charlemagne Palestine. Installed on a slant, each work was lit in turn for a few seconds before being plunged back into obscurity. (”Gimme 5″, Mamco, and “15° Plan B”, Forde, 1999).

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