I-DENT
IDENTITY AND MEDIA CONTORTION

We live in a world consumed by I-dents – advertising, sponsors, and avatars. Their ubiquity has signaled a shift in identity politics – binding us together into a digital and virtual culture that finds everyday individuals competing to become part of a streamlined whole. I-dent is a video series that pokes fun at these attitudes through acts of manipulation and transgression. By utilizing platforms traditionally restricted to advertising, such as big screens and large outdoor projection surfaces, the artists in the programme use modern media to twist and subvert I-dents and identities, along with public expectation.

More info here

Venues: FACT, Liverpool (4-5th September 2010) and Collegium Hungaricum Berlin )CBE (6-9 September 2010), and other unconfirmed venues.

Self-conscious curatorial impetuses are increasingly at the forefront of exhibition programming, a kind of self-awareness that is brought to new light in ‘Unrealised Potential’, a summer show curated by Mike Chavez-Dawson at Manchester’s Cornerhouse. The entry point for visitors is the collaboration between Chavez-Dawson and artists Sam Ely and Lynn Harris, co-founders of Unrealised Projects (2003–ongoing) – a group who investigate unfulfilled creative ideas. Together they revisit Chavez-Dawson’s own Potential Hits (2003) to present an expansive collection of proposals from a breadth of contemporary artists, writers, musicians and curators. The unproduced ideas are lined up in the first gallery, alongside a set of terms and conditions, whereby visitors are invited to purchase the artist proposals for ‘realisation’. The setting adopts a similar structure to an auction space, where a red sticker is placed on each idea sold, with the purchasing ‘producer’ being offered two years to realize the project, before it returns to the marketplace.

The scope of suggestion on offer stretches between the political and the absurd. For example, Tim Etchells, in What Your Right Hand is For, puts the audience to the task of producing a show that unearths the masturbatory fantasies of some of the world’s most famous visual artists (including Steve McQueen, Jenny Holzer and Chris Ofili). While, Doug Fishbone, in There Once Was a Man from Iraq, proposes that a monumental sculpture of Saddam Hussein be re-erected onto the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square.

Carry on reading…

“One of the most balanced, provocative and intriguing exhibition readers of the year” Dan Glaser (Neuroscientist & Head of Special Projects, Wellcome Trust)

In recent years, the relations between vision, memory and media have become of burgeoning interest in art, cultural studies and the sciences. Vision, Memory and Media is a cross-disciplinary exploration that takes into account recent scientific research concerning memory studies, and couples this with broad and accessible cultural discussion about vision and media in a web 2.0 era. The texts are accompanied by illuminating images of artworks by contemporary artists whose practice explores the interplay of memory, vision and media.

Published to coincide with the exhibition Persistence of Vision (FACT/Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center), this reader includes texts and contributions by Marco Bertamini and Rebecca Lawson, Visual Perception Lab, The University of Liverpool; memory and media ecology expert, Professor Andrew Hoskins; American cultural critic, Norman M. Klien; writer, Omar Kholief; exhibition curators Andreas Brogger and Karen Newman, as well as the artists Jamie Allen, AVPD, Julius von Bismarck, Julien Marie, Melik Ohanian, Sascha Pohflepp, Lindsay Seers, Gebhard Sengmuller and Mizuki Watanabe.

Available at a special introductory rate here.