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Artes Mundi 4
National Museum Cardiff , Cardiff, UK
Olga Chernysheva, from the series 'ON DUTY' (2007)
This is the fourth Artes Mundi to be held at the National Museum Cardiff and it is now very much an international art event. The eight artists shortlisted by Viktor Misiano (Director of the Contemporary Art Center in Moscow) and Levent Çalikoğlu (Chief Curator at Istanbul Museum of Modern Art) for the £40,000 prize were selected from 500 nominations from more than 80 countries. All of the shortlisted artists make work that responds to global economic and political realities. As a good documentary medium and with its ease of international distribution, video dominates.
Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Liminal Crossing (2009)
London-based Ergin Çavuşoğlu, born in Bulgaria as part of a Turkish minority, uses multi-channel video installations to reflect on displacement. His two-screen video, Liminal Crossing (2009), offers different views of a family pushing a piano – symbolic, one assumes, of the international value of music and the arts – across the Turkish/Bulgaria border, a performance accompanied by shifts in weather and light and presented on two physical structures, weighty and present like the heavy object being manoeuvred.
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope (2009)
Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, both from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, present their documentation of the traffic of goods along the Great Silk Road as a five-channel video (A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope, 2009). The packing and transportation of scrap metal from Bishkek to Western China in heavily laden lorries is set against footage of the big Chinese container rigs carrying readymade goods to wealthy markets in Kazakhstan and Russia. While the use of such a video installation is intended to makes sensorily vivid a people’s basic struggle for existence on and along such a mythic trade route, making spectacular displays from such remote and exotic locations also highlights the collision of two very different worlds and economies.
Chen Chieh-Jen, Factory (2002)
The Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-Jen’s slow, elegiac silent film Factory (2002), responds to the human consequences of transnational companies’ withdrawal of investment in Taiwan as they seek cheaper materials and labour elsewhere. In a variation on a familiar documentary subject, he returns former factory labourers to the abandoned space of what was once their place of work and gets them to pose and perform rituals, holding up the garments they used to make, cleaning the dusty chairs in the factory. As testament and memorial to the labour and lives of a people ruined by our profit-driven global economy, his redeployment of people nevertheless still remains awkward, redolent of a new power relationship, as they now play their part in an international artist’s film.
Adrian Paci, Per Speculum (2006)
In Façade 2 and Façade 3 (both 2007), Adrian Paci, who was born in Albania but moved to Milan in 1997 during the civil war, presents paintings, frescos on brick walls, propped up with wooden structures behind them. While painted from a series of stills from Albanian family videos, their effect is distinct from the transitory moving image; they are about holding on, attempts to fix, make permanent and physically present such fleeting moments. In his remarkable 16mm colour film Per Speculum (2006), children use shards of mirrors to reflect sunlight back to the viewer, dazzling flashes of light that interrupt the screen image and call attention to the projector’s beam of light. The setting for this film is an idyllic English landscape and the children, perched on the branches of an oak tree, seem to be signaling to us, with light as a medium of contact and connection. All this is in contrast to the initial violent rupture in the film when the reflective surface of the mirror, offering up a group portrait of the children, is shattered, as one kid gets out a catapult and fires a stone at its surface.
Fernando Bryce, Die Welt (2008)
In Die Welt (2008), Peruvian-born, Berlin-based Fernando Bryce counters the quick flow and obsolescence of media information by filling walls with 195 framed ink drawings, each copied from newspapers, illustrations, photographs and adverts, culled from archives and spanning a historical period from the 1885 Congo Conference in Berlin (where Europe divided up Africa), to World War I and the Russian Revolution. By drawing attention to material representing different ideologies, he starts to question the hegemony of colonial and imperial narratives of history.
Yael Bartana, Mary Koszmary (2007)
The Israeli artist Yael Bartana offers the most provocative work in the exhibition, drawing upon both the iconography of Zionist propaganda films and Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935), to produce films, Mary Koszmary (2007) and Wall and Tower (2009), which advocate the return and resettlement of Jews in Poland. When she shows barbed wire being put around the wooden construction of a kibbutz in Warsaw, it becomes clear that much as it is meant to appease the guilt of the past it only serves as a terrible reminder.
Olga Chernysheva, March (2005)
In films, photographs and watercolours, Olga Chernysheva offers lyrical observations of contemporary everyday Russian life. Her film The Train (2003), with its long continuous camera shot that moves along a train’s interior, counters the grandeur of Russian film director Alexander Sokurov’s one-take Baroque film Russian Ark, (2002) set in the Hermitage Museum, with the attention given to ordinary Russian people – animated by the performance of a beggar reciting a poem by Pushkin, and a child playing the accordion. In another film, March (2005) she observes a corporate event in front of the Theatre of the Soviet Army, concentrating on the comedy of the distractions on the part of fidgety young cadets beside scantily clad older dancing girls. In a show dominated by big global issues, Chernysheva offers a refreshingly modest, humane and open response to her social and political environment.
Mark Durden
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