Dominik Lejman @ art berlin contemporary

Closed Circuit, 2009.
digital video

Dominik Lejman at Art Berlin Contemporary.

def - drafts establishing future

From the 23rd to the 27th of September, 64 galleries presented projects by around 80 artists, both emerging and established, intended for the public space.

"Many of the works - some practical, others utopian - have been created of were adapted from historical proposals specifically for the exhibition, which [took] place at the Academy of Arts in Berlin's Hansaviertel. The enduring fascination of Belrin has inspried artists to take part in this year's abc exhibition. Each artist's project contributes to the ongoing public debate around the city's inner urban space, giving the discussion an international platform and generating lively publicity for Berlin."

Courtesy of abc

Domink Lejman's contribution to the exhibition, Closed Circuit (pictured above), explores explores this idea of public and private spaces by testing the boundary between.

Here are some more images of the exhibition:

Vadim Fiskin, "Ping-Pong Electronic" c/o Galerija Gregor Podnar

Monika Sosnowska, "Dirty Fountain" c/o Capitain Petzel

Cezary Bodzianowski c/o Foksal Foundation

Exhibition View

Menschenbilder 1620/2009

Michal Jankowski, Pawel Ksiazek and Zofia Kulik are participating in the exhibition Menschenbilder 1620/2009 at Museum Abtei Liesborn in Wadersloh-Liesborn.

21.6.2009 - 16.8.2009

www.museum-abtei-liesborn.de

www.kunstfreunde-blog.de/ausstellung/menschenbilder-aus-der-sammlung-sor-rusche-in-liesborn

Robert Kuśmirowski 1939-2009 in Polnisches Institut Berlin

The Polish Institut shows photos and objects of Robert Kuśmirowski.

01.09 - 13.11.2009

http://berlin.polnischekultur.de

SZYMON KOBYLARZ in Zacheta, Kordegarda Gallery

ECHELON70 is the new project of Szymon Kobylarz to be on display until 18 October 2009 at Galeria Kordegarda (Zacheta - National Gallery of Art) in Warsaw.

Opening: September 4, 2009

Szymon Kobylarz's newest project, specially prepared for the Kordegarda Gallery is the latest in the line of the artist's experiments with the gallery spaces and artistic genres. The title of the exhibition ECHELON 70, refers to the name of the powerful system of the control of the transmission of electronic data that for some time has been arousing lively discussion. The life of contemporary people is subjected to ever greater control.
It is particularly the inhabitants of cities who feel observed (by systems of urban cameras that ensure their safety). The consciousness of being controlled gives birth to a fear of the excessive limitation of freedom. On the one side, we want to feel safe in an alarming contemporary world, on the other, we start to have a feeling of a loss of control over our own lives. It is precisely this sort of Orwellian urban legend that Szymon Kobylarz, as someone that has become especially drawn to questions on the border between the fields of science, technology, the military and conspiracy theories, took as his starting material. "Odd" discoveries that emerge outside the frame of his original assumptions have become the object of the artist's particular interest.

Kobylarz likes to tell stories, build parallel realities, confuse tropes and lay traps for the viewer. Visiting an exhibition of his can at times recall a journey into the world of a virtual game. And this time the artist invites the viewer to let the imagination run free, to contemplate and find one's own answer to the intriguing questions that the exhibition asks. What are the white balls situated in the baroquely decorated interior of Kordegarda? Sometimes Doppler radars probably used in the Echelon system, a modernist sculpture, a warning against excessive enthusiasm for a utopia, or a symbol of the enslavement of a person by a state-police system?

www.zacheta.art.pl

Hubert Czerepok: devil's island, at La Criée - Centre d'Art Contemporain Rennes.

Hubert Czerepok's solo exhibition, Devil's Island, opened May 22, 2009 at La Criée. 22.05.2009 - 26.07.2009
At the core of Czerepok`s oeuvre are the connections between fiction, topicality and historical events. It is not the facts themselves that interest the artist, but rather the way they begin with shifts, mutations, and unimaginable formal and semantic transformations.For Devil’s Island (2009), the video installation on show at La Criée, the artist visited the rocky islet off the coast of Kourou in French Guiana, famed for the penal colony to which many French political prisoners – including Alfred Dreyfus – were condemned. The images he brought back are projected onto a hexagonal sculpture referencing another form of disciplinary power: the Panopticon. Part of a circular prison building, the Panopticon allows full-time surveillance of prisoners without their knowing if they are being watched or not, the result being a sense of invisible omniscience.The exhibition also includes a series of drawings, Seances, which brings together media images relating to some tragic current event, spiritualist séances or sexual scenes. The initial Seances series retained only a minimal trace of the originals, while the images made for the Rennes exhibition combine areas of flat black with line drawing. Here Czerepok pays tribute to Goya’s Disasters of War engravings and their demonstration of all the atrocious cruelty mankind is capable of. In this new look at glamorised, mass-produced media violence, the artist forces the image back into its genuinely traumatising, critical role.The Devil’s Island exhibition comprises a highly diverse selection of works that lead us to reflect on different forms of power, the way they are depicted and the impact of this depiction on our lives.

www.criee.org

Yane Calovski, Master Plan/Hollow Land at the European Kunsthalle, Köln

Yane Calovski: Master Plan/Hollow Land is presented within the exhibition series "Appearance/Auftritt", with Julia Scher, Katja Davar, Miriam Bäckström and Yane Calovski, September 11-October 10, 2009.
See also www.kunsthalle.eu

Yane Calovski, Hollow Land, video still, 2009.

Courtesy the artist, Het Blauwe Huis, Amsterdam, and Zak Branicka Gallery, Berlin.

In a place without history, what do we remember? This is the central question behind Yane Calovki's film "Hollow Land" (2009, 8:13 min), a video essay about Ijburg, a new city district in Amsterdam. Invited to make the district „his place“, „Hollow Land" refers to Jean-Luc Godard's short film about Lausanne, “Letter to Freddy Buache,” and its articulated impossibility of representing all facets of a city. The conclusion: "Fiction is necessity." Fictional moments in urban projects also play a significant role in Calovski's second work presented on Ebertplatz, "Master Plan“ (2008). Here, the artist takes Japanese architect Kenzo Tange's plans for Skopje's reconstruction in the wake of the 1963 earthquakes as a point of departure – a complex investigation with the ways in which the rational realm of diagrams and graphics overlaps with the mystical realm of illusions, and how plans for tomorrow age in their realization.

EUROPEAN KUNSTHALLE

Ebertplatzpassage; D-50668 Cologne

ph +49.(0)221.5696.140 / f +49.(0)221.5696.142

wege@kunsthalle.eu / www.kunsthalle.eu