niform: interactive installation by Samuel Bianchini, 2007
(via shinyslingback)
Charles Kaisin hosted a dinner entitled “The Fantasies of Charles” that featured 36 birds flying overhead while the guests dined a seven course meal and enjoyed the company of a chick that was returned to the country side the next day. At the end they each received a book with its pages folded and when assembled together it spells out a André Gide quote, “Toute chose appartient a qui sait en jouir” (Everything belongs to those who know how to enjoy it).
Kinetic sound installation “Caten” by David Letellier, 2012
Caten, 2012 a levitating kinetic sound sculpture by David Letellier for Saint Sauveur chapel (video)
Caten is a levitating sculpture, determined by gravity and guiding the evolution of a sound composition. 300 fine wires suspended from two ropes, connected themselves at each end to a slowly rotating arm, form an evanescent surface which interacts with the architecture… The sound composition is inspired by the medieval solmisation prayers, especially the first verse of “Ut Queant Laxis”… At each turn, the engines emit one of the first 4 notes of the scale (Ut, Re, Mi, Fa), creating a sequence of intervals, constantly reconfigured. Low frequencies resonate in the space and emphazise the transcendental character of a place once dedicated to faith.
Text taken from http://www.davidletellier.net/works.html#caten
Anish Kapoor artist indian born british artist, Islamic Mirror
Contemporary-Art-Blog
The Islamic Mirror installation in the Sharq al-Andalus Hall at the Santa Clara Museum propitiates an extraordinary conjunction of work and context that questions the clichéd identification of public space with street space…The search for a logic and balance among planes and perspectives proposes an “epiphanic” point for the contemplation of the piece, in a visual and conceptual play that enhances its significance in relation to the place housing it. In fact, the Islamic Mirror reflects the architectural elements, the spectators and the water of the pool, which acts itself as a mirror that brings the sky down to the earth. Islamic Mirror is a circular concave mirror measuring 2.4 metres in diameter. It is composed by a total of 4437 pieces of polished stainless steel (2241 octagons and 2196 squares) and its perfect rendering alludes to the formal, mathematical and geometrical transition between the square and the sphere, an age-old intellectual concern for architects, mystics, scientists and artists alike. The phenomenology that establishes a link between the physical and the spiritual, between past and present, between sky and earth, relates the spectator to the artwork and the place while empowering the transversal connections between Christian mysticism, the Sufi views of the poet Ibn Arabí (Murcia, 1165 – Damascus, 1240) and contemporary aesthetic experimentation. Spectators are invited to partake in a unique experience in which each individual becomes an ephemeral but essential part of the work when seeing their own image both vanishing and multiplying inside it. The echo of their voices emerges also from the concave surface. And so, in a secular, utopian, egalitarian, generative and expansive exercise, the here and now of the world within the mirror and of the mirror within the world is shown, while at once proclaiming that every being can momentarily be the centre of the cosmos.
Text taken from http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/anish-kapoor-islamic-mirror/
(via contemporary-art-blog)
On 18 June, the V&A unveiled SWARM STUDY / III, a new interactive light installation by Random International which is made up of illuminated brass rods, suspended from the ceiling in an arrangement of four large cubes. As visitors move up and down the stairs, so the light follows in swarm-like formations, varying subtly in its intensity. Tracked by a camera, the visitors’ movements stimulate the behavior of the installation. Controlled by a complex algorithm, Swarm Study / III translates collective behavioral patterns found in nature into moving light. Though apparently inanimate, the installation is brought to life by visitors’ activity, engaging them with both the swarm itself and the surrounding space of the Museum.
Text and Images from designapplause.com
Tomoko Shioyasu (1972-) creates her tapestries by cutting into large single sheets of paper with utility knives and soldering irons. As she plays with negative spaces her organic patterns begin to emerge. When asked about the content in her work Shioyasu replied, “Simply nature itself, particularly that which has existed over an extended period of time—rocks, trees, water channels, cells. I want to look into the essence and roots of life, making works that focus on these basic forms.”.
Beautiful elastic sculptures by South Korean artist Hong Sungchul.
Tokujin Yoshioka
RemembranceThe process of “remembering” is identified with memory of an infinite number of separate elements. The installation involved the use of 550,000 transparent straws which were densely accumulated. Both ends of these 60 centimeter long straws were pressed to shape them into clouds. The transparent elements overlapped one another creating a distinct ‘whiteness’, similar to the ‘airy sense’ of memory captured visually in the mind.
Untitled (Perfect Lovers)- Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991.
Conceptual Sculpture - Clocks & paint on wall, 35.6 x 71.2 x 7 cm.
These two identical, adjacent, battery-operated clocks were initially set to the same time, but, with time, they will inevitably fall out of sync. Gonzalez-Torres created this work shortly after his partner, Ross Laycock, was diagnosed with AIDS. By assigning these redundant objects the title”Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), the artist transformed these public, neutral devices used for the measurement of time into personal and poetic meditations on human relationships, mortality, and time’s inevitable flow. Of the light-blue background, Gonzalez-Torres said, “For me if a beautiful memory could have a color that color would be light blue.”
Permanent Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
(via adrowningwoman)
detail of ‘world map’ by jean denant, 2009
‘Bloom Skin’ installation by WOW
The kinetic piece consists of eight computer-controlled fans that rhythmically manipulate a single piece of hovering fabric.
Original post via designboom.com
Berlinde De Bruyckere, Into One-Another To P.P.P
2010
New York, NY… Beginning March 1, 2011, Hauser & Wirth New York will present ‘Into One-Another To P.P.P.,’ an exhibition of new sculptures and works on paper by internationally admired artist Berlinde De Bruyckere, dedicated by the artist to legendary Italian filmmaker, poet, painter, and journalist Pier Paolo Pasolini…
Graphic and disturbing, his works are parables for the degradations of modern society and the ways in which mass commercialization of the human body and sexuality can lead to the destruction of both spirituality and eros. In her work, De Bruyckere has mined the same veins of spirituality and art history – particularly the Netherlandish and Early Renaissance masterpieces of her native Belgium – and the charged, fragile state of our contemporary world, to achieve sumptuously expressionistic and deeply moving figurative sculptures and paintings on paper that are her own parables about the dualities of love and suffering, danger and protection, life and death…
In these three works, human figures writhe, torque and slump inside antique glass and wood vitrines. Fashioned from wax, the gray flesh of De Bruyckere’s subjects achieves an eerie realism and paleness – a pallor familiar from the luminous paintings of Rogier van der Weyden, Hubert and Jan van Eyck, and Robert Campin, here suggestive of terror and pain but also a sophisticated sensuality. De Bruyckere employed professional dancers as models for these works, using their movements and poses as inspiration for her own strange, sculptural choreography: Each resulting wax body appears frozen in the middle of an exaggerated dance that evokes mortification, struggle, passion, and pathos. In one sculpture, De Bruyckere has locked the torsos and limbs of two figures in such a way that it is impossible to determine whether they are struggling to break apart or clinging to one another’s life force in a last effort against an inevitable and all too mortal future.
The prospect of such a future becomes shockingly possible in the exhibition’s monumental fourth sculpture, ‘Inside Me II.’ Open to air and without the safe distance afforded by a vitrine, a tangle of flesh-colored branches, all masterfully rendered in wax, call to mind a tangle of intestines and viscera. Barely cradled in heaving slings of raw fabric supported by sawhorses, they are redolent of death and decay, a memento mori with a life-affirming subtext: Every individual, including the artist herself, is a substance of the earth that ultimately will return to the source of all living things.
These sculpted bodies and remains recall the exquisite suffering of the Catholic saints and martyrs, but also of refugees and victims of contemporary traumas. De Bruyckere’s hapless souls elicit our empathy. Headless and thus without specific identities, they make us feel their terrible vulnerability while drawing us into uncomfortable complicity as witnesses…
As in the world of Pasolini, the human body in ‘Into One-Another To P.P.P.’ becomes an object for the projection of power and a call to awareness. De Bruyckere’s fascination with the archaic mingles with – and becomes the means for expressing – a sincere preoccupation for the world as it is now. Deeply humanistic and ultimately rooted in a search for rapture and redemption, her oeuvre calls to mind these words of Pasolini: ‘The mark which has dominated all my work is this longing for life, this sense of exclusion which doesn’t lessen but augments this love of life.’
Text and Images taken from hauserwirth.com (read more at original source)
‘The Mending Project’ by Chinese-born artist Beili Liu is a performance art and installation project that consists of hundreds of chinese scissors suspended from the ceiling in a shimmery cloud. Put on at the women and their work gallery in Austin, Texas, USA earlier this year, the piece involved the artist sitting in front of a small black table, hand-mending patches of fabric together which visitors are encouraged to cut themselves near the entrance. As the performance continues, the piece grows as one continuous cloth and lays spread on the floor.
The hovering mass of the downward-pointed scissors represent the distant fear and looming violence present in today’s cultural climate. The sharp blades above the artist are put on contrast by the silent and simple act of mending. The dichotomous result of the instant fear superimposed with the calming effect of the sewing creates a surreal atmosphere in the room.
Text and images found through designboom.com
