Temporary City
From 15-05-2009 until 24-05-2009
Approach Art Association
Julika Rudelius, Jan de Bruin, Nicolas Provost, Mike Stubbs, Seoungho Cho, Yael Bartana, Corinna Schnitt
Location: Pécs, Király culture-street, Hungary
We try to recycle the main street of Pécs with an artistic aim within the Temporary City program series of the Közelítés Muvészeti Egyesület. We use the empty parlors and the public places surrounding them for social and artistic purposes during the program. We convert the real estates to studios, workshops, exhibition-rooms – mobile laboratories.
Bulgarian, Dutch, German, Italian, Austrian and Hungarian artists and artistic institutions take part in the program. During the 10-day program exhibitions, performances and musical events enliven the part of the Király Str. which has had an adverse fate. Several ex-chandleries and fashion stores, the traditional pastry-shop of Pécs, the mall of the inner city gain temporarily an artistic function. Ten contemporary art galleries, video-café, recycling tailor’s workshop, doorway concerts and DJs, street projections, children’s drawings exhibition, fine art children workshops and family maying offer high-standard spare time activities.
The program series is also accompanied by a one-day theoretical workshop, during which local and foreign experts introduce different city-visions on the borderline of architecture and fine art. The aim of the program is to bring in such forms of deeds, lifestyles, patterns – “rituals”- which carry the values of the contemporary art. The program is the accentuated contemporary art event of the Pécs 2010 European Capital of Culture programs, which is realized with the support of the National Cultural Fund and the European Union Culture 2007 frame program.
Netherlands Media Art Institute. Amsterdam
Urban fragments / Urban fractures
Curator: Heiner Holstappels, director, Netherlands Media Art Institute
Jan de Bruin
The exhibition shows seven registrations of seven artists filming diverse observations, situations and happenings in various cities. Five videos (Jan de Bruin, Nicolas Provost, Mike Stubbs, Seoungho Cho) are accidental recordings, when the artist walk through the city and suddenly find a subject or circumstances which attracts there attention. The works of Corinna Schnitt and Julika Rudelius are the frame wherein the other five video-works could be shown. The best way to experience the exhibition is to start with viewing the work of Corinna Schnitt and to end with Julika Rudelius.
The video of Corinna Schnitt is different compared with the others: we could call it a documentary fiction. A five minutes lasting shot, starting with an extreme close-up where we are confronted with an idyllic scene on a summery day. In the grass under an exuberantly flowering tree, a boy and a girl are stretched out together on a rug. They are young, so their friendship still hovers between child play and grown-up desires. But the innocence is artificial by speaking the languish of adults. By slowly changing from an extreem clos-up to a wide shot the peaceful garden changes into desperate place of a small green field surrounded by highways in a suburban environment.
The exhibition can be read as one film, recorded in one city. The visitor starts at the dubious periphery of the suburban city / the fracture of the borderline between inside or outside, between innocence or guilt. Then we enter the centre of the city where the police is gathered and waiting for the moment to come in action (Nicolas Provost) while the demolition takes place in an area where no police or anybody else takes care. ( Mike Stubbs). In the meantime we see a desperate girl calling 911 from a telephone box where police, ambulance and fire brigade show up to save this crying girl. (Jan de Bruin). In the same time we are temporary observers and anomimios passengers (Seoungho Cho) with a limited view.
Julika Rudelius
Throughout the video of Jael Bartana we are witness to stolen glances directed back towards the camera and hidden faces that create a sense of threat and approaching catastrophe. Despite the costumes and the carnival atmosphere, the exceptional presence of a camera in the religious quarter and the sense of strangeness and suspicion evoked by its very presence, reveal the fear that outsiders are taking advantage of the ultra-orthodox image by entering their world with a camera capable of conveying, not the codes of that world, but only its masks to a culture that is sensitive to the power of the image. The video “Your Blood is as Red as Mine” from Julika Rudelius is a documentary investigation putting the question: \'How does it feel to be black... or dark-skinned, or white human being?\' Julika Rudelius spends some time in a black community, where she talks to people about the colour of their skin, and about the photos that she makes of them. She asks; they respond. They ask; she responds, in an investigation of identity, the meaning of and the clichés around 'black' and 'white'.
We see urban fragments and urban fractures. We see people searching for a place to be, a neighbourhood and sometimes a conversation to onderstand the other.
