http://www.leconsortium.com

From the press release

Opening: 11 January, 2008Exhibition duration: 11 January – 15 February, 2008
During the exhibition “Nord Nord West” c/o – Atle Gerhardsen will be presenting work by Vibeke Tandberg, Annika Ström, Vanessa Baird and Amy Adler.

The photo series “Faces” (1998) dates back to the time Vibeke Tandberg spent in Berlin. In this work she adopts the appearance of friends and acquaintances, not only mimicking their characteristic facial expressions, but also imitating their posture and gestures. By digitally reworking photographs, the artist is able to interweave the typical traits of the chosen person with an image of herself, thereby questioning the paradigm of well-defined bodies, stable personality patterns and fixed parts to play.

Vanessa Baird mainly works with techniques such as watercolour, pastel and drawing. In four watercolours (2007) the artist herself plays the main part in oppressive and haunting domestic scenes, in which dangers lurk around every corner. These scenes tap into a wealth of stories from antiquity, folklore tradition and fairy tales, as the everyday horror seeping into a familiar home setting.

Annika Ström, 2005

Annika Ström’s video “5 seconds” (2007) shows a textual work (acrylic on paper). “This work was made with passion” reads the text that is only presented for a 5-second time span, positioned between papers and water bottles strewn on the floor. And then the video ends. With a certain sense of humour, Annika Ström reflects on the understanding of painting, which is still part and parcel of the ongoing discussion of this medium.

Amy Adler is primarily known for the photographs of her own drawings. In recent years, however, she has abandoned this processual working method and now only shows the original drawings. “Director I” and “Director III” (2006) are pastel drawings on canvas and the technique used endows them with a transparent and filigree texture. The series “Director” depicts a movie director with her camera during a film shoot. By making use of the camera, human perception can be filtered and steered in a certain direction, providing a selection of certain moments and settings, which are then finally selected and arranged in a film. In the end, this final product is able to present a specific message.The title of the exhibition also refers to a film title. Now it is used to juxtapose the different artistic positions. Concept by Maike Fries.

For further information or visuals please contact c/o – Atle Gerhardsen: Tel.: +49-30-69 51 83 41,Fax: +49-30-69 51 83 42, E-mail: office@atlegerhardsen.com or visit our website at http://www.atlegerhardsen.com.

Annika Ström
Texts by Annika Ström
Published May 2005

Annika Ström
Call for a demonstration
Published March 2007

The self attempts balance, descends.’
Jasper Johns

he above quote, from Johns’ famous appreciation of Marcel Duchamp, is an unlikely introduction to Lisa Anne Auerbach’s ‘Unicycle Shop’, published in 2007 by onestar press. The shop, a modest endeavor, was part of the High Desert Test Site festivities in Joshua Tree California. Auerbach knows her unicycles, and documents the efforts by numerous attractive individuals not to master the vehicle, but to balance unsupported by others, or the business booth itself. Hence the Johns quote. So we have mainly a sequence of noble attempts, in addition to an inventory of some of the things necessary in operating a10 cents an hour unicycle rental establishment. The first aid kit looks particularly useful. The circus, according to Michael Bakhtin, belongs to a ‘culture of laughter’ where the fear of power is literally laughed away. Or simply put; ‘they’re out there having fun, in that warm California sun!” And does anyone else notice that an inverted unicycle strongly resembles a notorious Duchamp work of 1913?
Tim Maul, New York

Lisa Anne Auerbach
Unicycle Shop
Published September 2007

Corinne Marchetti

Liberté Sexe Education

Editions onestar press / Laurent Godin

Texte français de Cyrille Martinez / English text by Richard Dailey

BAISEURS D’ETOILES
(états des études marchettiennes, Paris, 2068)

Corinnemarchetti est le nom d’artiste de corinnemarchetti. Il y a un monde où corinnemarchetti est artiste à temps plein, dimanches et mois d’août compris, un monde constitué de longues plages de temps libre. C’est un monde de vacance, un monde où l’on s’autorisera à prendre nos réalités pour des désirs. Où être carnivore peut vouloir dire se nourrir d’animaux en peluches. Un monde semblable à celui où vivraient thebeatles s’ils étaient restés dans le jaune sous-marin. Un monde que l’on pénètre à grand coup de formules magiques, où l’on bricole les objets comme les formules. Où qui vole un œuf vole un œuf. Où les carottes d’un révolutionnaire sont aussi longues à cuire que celles d’un bourgeois. Où les carottes de mes amis révolutionnaires ou bourgeois sont : a) mes amies, b) des carottes. Un monde habité par des êtres parfois rigolards parfois mélancoliques, où les anciens rêves collectifs sont devenus des pensées partageables. C’est un monde favorable au Soyez impossibles. Un monde ami du monde des jouets tel que Lumignon le décrit à Pinocchio : « la semaine se compose de six jeudis et d’un dimanche. Figure-toi que les vacances commencent le 1er janvier et finissent le 31 décembre. »

Read entire article

M y life is better than yours”, it says with hand-painted letters on a big piece of paper. However, the melancholic setting of the photograph, showing the artist a bit sad and thoughtful looking, sitting on the floor next to her text piece, makes the assertion seem somewhat empty or untrustworthy if not pathetic. “texts by annika ström” the artist collected a series of photographs of her text pieces like: “This work refers to no one”, “I love to live but not with me”, “I am a better artist than I deserve” and “Everything in this show could be used against me”. The photos seem like they could be stills from one of her videos and the phrases could be lyrics from one of her love songs. Far from being a straightforward reproduction of her work, the text pieces are presented in various “lived” settings, often within an intimate context of her private surroundings and in the company of friends presenting her work or doing whatever they were doing, when the picture was taken. The way Annika Ström chooses to represent the text pieces transforms her book into a collection of verbi-visual poems, which play with images and words. The fact that both systems are open to multiple significations, i.e. that one and the same sentence can be perceived as an empty formal phrase as well as a heartfelt existential outcry, depending on the context. But Annika Ström’s text pieces and their visual context are hardly pointing in the same direction. Text and image are not trying to coax the viewer or anchor the meaning of the message. In fact, they rather seem to display a semantic gap, which has to do with a general confusion or openness regarding: Who is speaking? To whom? From which position? About what exactly? There is often a good deal of irony and especially self-irony in Annika Ström’s work. This is no exception when the text pieces are talking about themselves, their own making, their value and reception, commenting on the art market and addressing the viewers expectations. But the irony and apparent lightness are accompanied by an earnest tone. With the “staging” of phrases like “please help me” it seems as if the addresser is already beyond the point of rescue.
LOTTE MØLLER, Berlin.

Annika Ström
Texts by Annika Ström
Published May 2005

xploring the question of creolization in the contexts of post-colonialization and of globalization (le Tout-Monde to quote Glissant), Caecilia Tripp, recently invited for a residence at PS 1 in New York, directed a fi lm, The Making of
Americans, a « free-style opera » version of Gertrude Stein’s book. Written in 1908 and published in 1926, The Making of Americans tells in a non-linear fashion the genealogy of American culture, founded on the principles of immigration and diversity. Stein’s writing – she co-authored with Virgil Thompson in 1934 Four Saints and three acts, an opera that played on Broadway at the time when African Americans were segregated–incorporates the ideas of accident, rupture and repetition and anticipates slam and hip hop. With a soundtrack by DJ Spooky ‘the History maker’ playing notably Not in our names by Saul Williams – Caecilia Tripp filmed the rap ‘Diva’ Jean Grae cruising New York in a limo, and the slammer Postell as a street ‘Poet’ preacher, appropriating passages from Stein on the means of variation and digression of spoken word poetry. Another protagonist, the ‘Magician’, animates a marionette before performing a matrix laser show in front of closed theater curtains while two ‘twins’ tap and dance in the tradition of musicals. The characters, each incarnating an idea of spectacle as a metaphor for the construction of the American identity, moving around without ever meeting, in emblematic places of New York: the Apollo Theater (“where stars are born and legends are made”), Times Square, Harlem, the Brooklyn Bridge, Ground Zero…
“Anyone is one”… but at the same time one notices that each character of the film posseses a doppelgänger, a complementary reflection, in a game of back and forth between the individual and the collective, the plenty and the void (the ‘Twins’, but also the absent Twin Towers, the ‘Diva’ and her fans, the ‘Magician’ and his marionette, the ‘DJ’ and the ‘Poet’); the image doubles, splits and mirrors sometimes, the words are repeated, the sounds reverberate in echo, evoking in some way the two turntables of a scratching DJ, replaying history backwards and forwards, in the fashion of Caecilia Tripp’s film based onsampling and mixing, between story and history telling.
ANNE DRESSEN, Paris

Award at the Festival Cinema Paradise in Hawaii, shown at the Mostra of Venice, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and most recently at the festival de Cannes.

Caecilia Tripp
The Making of Americans
Published January 2006

udique, ingénieux, décomplexé, généreux, fonctionnel et surtout “comme à la maison” le travail d’Elvire Bonduelle emprunte toutes sortes de chemins détournés pour évoquer des petits riens du quotidien. Elle conçoit des obstacles pour nous entraîner à être plus souple, des tablettes de chocolat en céramique pour les offrir à ses amis, des sacs à pique-nique mous comme un sandwich… N’hésitant pas à se mettre en scène dans les situations les plus incongrues telle une présentatrice du télé-achat prête à tout pour mettre en avant les atouts de sa “marchandise”, Elvire navigue toujours entre performance et autofilmage à la façon des “One minute sculptures”.

Read entire article

‘inspirant de l’esthétique des films d’horreur et d’effroi, dans une ambiance minimale “postgrunge”, Chloe Piene, réalise des films troublants et effrayants dans lesquels le spectateur se retrouve souvent face à des personnages mi-humain/mi-animal… Cette jeune artiste américaine au look captivant, aime se plonger totalement dans chacun de ses projets, mêlant vie privée et pratique artistique et cherchant à extraire le maximum de chacun de ses acteurs. Suivant ce principe, Chloe a récemment mis à plat dans son livre “Phone Call”, plusieurs conversations téléphoniques qu’elle a eues avec un détenu d’une prison américaine de l’Ohio. Faisant référence à un genre « vieux » comme la littérature, la correspondance, mais sous la forme d’une transcription téléphonique, l’artiste relate l’intimité d’une conversation dont on ne sait discerner immédiatement qui parle dans ce tête à tête virtuel. Extraits de dialogues fragmentés, discussion à bâtons rompus sur l’art, les tatouages, le manque, l’absence et les relations humaines, Chloe Piene brouille les pistes et brise sans cesse le fil de cette conversation pour n’en garder que le rythme et la mélodie…
Claire Staebler, Paris.

Chloe Piene
Phone call
Published January 2006

queeze together the pages of Heidie Giannotti’s book a tale of a maiden or two + an animal streak and look at it sideways: that’s where you’ll see markings that resemble wood grain. (She might call it an animal streak.) Flip the pages of the book with your thumb front to back, back to front and the grainy moiré pattern springs to life, shifting rhythmically up and down, back and forth, from one page to the next, from thick to thin to blurry to positively cinematic stripes. (She might call it a minimal streak.) The undulating linear tracks activate the book’s interior architecture, which is built to house a streaming surplus of fi gurative images and colloquial speech. Small talk, tall talk, all talk all the time. (Check the index at the back of the book. The entire text is crunched into a stack of subject headings and type faces that read like a long shorthand prose poem composed of phrases caught in passing, snatched out of context, and salvaged in fragmentary form.)
“Who speaks,” I ask her. “Is it one voice?” “No, it’s millions,” she answers and smiles. I reconcile my desire to see her in the compendium of fast-talking, wise-cracking, soft-spoken observations that tumble into play in the pages of this book, with the inevitable invasion of all those other “maidens” (and their attendants) who lodge in her verse. Like the man said, “What’s a girl to do when she can’t?” That’s where the tale begins again and again, specifi cally from a zone of privacy that surrounds the self on the verge of a breakthrough, or is it a break-up, or a breakdown? (She might call it an epic quest.) Did someone say subjectivity? Let’s enjoy it while we can.
Jan Avgikos, New York

Heidie Giannotti
A tale of a maiden or two+ an animal streak
Published April 2005

ina Barney’s tips for making up with the family The docu-drama is everywhere these days. In the cinema (Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant”), on television (countless ‘realcase’ cop shows), and on gallery and museum walls. In the art/photography world, Tina Barney, (along with Jeff Wall), got there first. In the early 90’s Barney shifted her interest from photographing the seasonal rituals of her privileged, but complex,
family to the production of constructs - family dramas where an individual’s behavior in front of the camera was subtly tweaked by Barney’s mild direction. The resulting tableaux make visible the underlying anxieties and conflicts of every family ever photographed; happy or sad, rich or poor. In Family Portraits, her deceptively modest collaboration with Dianna Ilk, Barney steps away from her technically flawless and lavishly scaled cibachrome prints to produce both a DVD and book, available through OSP. Intimate and truly mysterious, Barney has assembled from early home movies and recent (home?) videos a work
that, while visiting some familiar territory (aging, intergenerational groupings, organized outdoor fun, etc.) also opens the door on several conditions in her work that have been left unaddressed.

Read entire article