28 mei 2016
On saturday EX-MÊKH was invited for TALKS@Art Athina. First four platforms were able to introduce themselves and after that we had the opportunity to describe our collaboration with A-Trans from Berlin. It was interesting to hear what other initiatives had to say about their practice, Some were very pragmatic and fast moving and some were very serious and theoretical. Social and political circumstances are having a great influence on the way initiatives function, but motivated artists find their way allways!
KangarooCourt from Greece made a serious and deliberate statement about their intentions. Their presentation in the booth on the other hand, a performance called Worst Case Scenario, was light and ironical.
A video from one of their activities
As allways, George Oreopoulos moderated the talks
Linda Weiss explained about Scotty Enterprises Berlin. She made an installation of the booth of this initiative in which she worked with a poster she found in Athens to make a statement about “Strategies of the non-stratified: Thinking the outside (Power)”
The story of Amrali Ghasemi of Parking Gallery from Iran impressed me: curating exhibitions in Teheran in the garage of his parents he developed a program, constantly reacting on different kinds of pressure he continued by making pragmatic adaptations to the exhibitions.
Petri Saariko from Finland represented Kallio Kunsthalle. Petri likes to work with socially deviant people as could be concluded from the booth of his initiative. Coming from the world of computertechnology it is a great step, but the lively presentations we were happy to experience seem to suggest this is far more satisfactory than the world of ICT.
In his images we could also see that the Kallio Kunsthalle can do much with little
Then the Collaborative Projects took their place behind the table: Beaston Projects, rosalux and A Brooks Art explained how they organized their very successful presentation at Platforms projects by word of Bella Easton (left), Julia Riddiough (middle) and Tony Domingos
One of the projects at rosalux in Berlin
Peetri Saarikko was very interested in the stories of the artists
Then it was time for Greek artists collaborating: Orizontas Gegonoton and En-Flo that had the large amount of suit-cases around one of the booths. Apparently it was part a a large project that took the artists all over the country.
The last collaborative project was the project under construction of EX-MÊKH and A-Trans. Your humble servant told about the practice of EX-MÊKH and how, during the first Art Athina A-Trans and EX-MÊKH found themselves to be having a similar attitude and similar interests, which might be the basis for collaboration.
There was quite some public during the talk
Then I talked about the parallel Malieveld Project the artists of EX-MÊKH were involved in. For example here with a work by Maarten Schepers. The Malieveld is a large public space in Den Haag where artists gather on saturday-mornings to make, present and document works between 11.00 and 12.00 h
EX-MÊKH collaborates with other initiatives as here in Italy with Werkbank, Kunsthalle Eurocentre Lana and Quartair. This is a performance of mine during the opening of the exhibition called Mirror Man
And recently we started to collaborate with A-Trans. We made an exhibition called Augentausch in the space of A-Trans in Berlin, which fitted in the series Recipro-City of A-Trans
Here Isolde Nagel of A-Trans talks about the history of her platform
During Augentausch we also did performances. Ellen Rodenberg tries to have visitors collaborate in making art during the opening.
And Marian Wijnvoord, artist with A-Trans, has similar interests. She invades private space with her Living Room Project in which she has her work in peoples living space for three months. This is documented and an exhibition is made of the project later.
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