Critical Writing & News - Stephen Lee

Movement, Anomalies and Distractions

A group show at Wolfson College, Oxford, curated by Katalin Hansel- see web link:

http://maad.moonfruit.com/#

‘Aural Contract: The Freedom of Speech Itself’, by Lawrence Abu Hamdan. 1st Feb.- 17th March 2012, The Showroom, London, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, commissioned by Artpapers, May/June, 2012

‘Museum Show’ Arnolfini, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, commissioned by Art Monthly, issue no. 353, Feb. 2012

‘Public Domain’ interventions in cityscape.

A project by  Lo and Behold www.loandbehold.gr Curated by Artemis Potamianou, Giorgos Papadatos

17-19 February  2012 SUPERMARKET - Stockholm Independent Art Fair, Kulturhuset, Stockholm , Sweden

www.supermarketartfair.com

‘Between Heaven and Earth, Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia’ exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly, issue no. 351, Nov. 2011

‘Between’ is a position that Central Asians are historically and geographically familiar with. Artists are caught between the pressure to make art that wears an internationalist face, and that which honestly reveals both the subtle and overt identity of a vast region. The work of 26 artists from the post-Soviet areas centred on Kazakhstan is carefully juxtaposed over two galleries: the result, described by the curator David Elliott at the opening, is a show that is overridingly suggestive of passion.

Duba (cleaning the soul), 2007, by Shaarbek Amankul, is a video work with a large-scale image of the round face of an Asian woman with a shawl who violently rocks to and fro, making sounds of spitting, hissing, vomiting, chanting, belching, crying, wailing and talking in tongues, while her expressions contort akin to Antonin Artaud’s cathartic screaming. The impact, unease and scale make this an experience of the other as gargantuan. Shaarbeck Amankul isn’t an artist as shaman, rather the artist’s role is diminished; he is documenting the methods of the shaman in the film as symptomatic of wider cultural needs in an era of change.

The public space of the corridor of a train is transformed into an ascetic interruption of crawling prayer, meditation and the Caravaggesque re-enactment of crucifixion in Ulan Djaparov’s small, understated video Train Art, 2003-05. For those of us brought up to think that religion is the opiate of the masses, this work initially looks to be a counter-reformation-type resurgence of religion following the dissolution of Soviet power. However the extreme out of context nature of the work enables it to raise questions rather than affirm religious practice. 

Many of the artists in the show are keenly aware of how they are perceived by both the West and by the East. They play to stereotypes about Central Asia.  Northern Barbarians,2000, a film by Rustam Khalfin, is adjacent to Duba in the exhibition, it has a similar scale and directness. Developed from 19th-century Chinese erotic drawings, a newly-wed couple affectionately make love on horseback in a nostalgic, orange-tinted film conjuring a Hellenic, Scythian golden age of Barbarian life. The film is gently tongue in cheek while celebrating the sensual mystique of nomads. The catalogue fills in the reality behind the scenes: the leading lady is from the red-light district in Almaty and her dalliance has been given leave from the Kazak army to make the film. The couple are certainly not pornographically wooden; they appear to be glad for a reprieve from their neo-liberal era ‘jobs’. Whereas the bravado, authenticity and primitivism of Mongolia are satirised for an artistic, bourgeois audience, the celebration of erotic stereotype likely aggravates the perception of vulnerable people in oil-boom states.

The tin pot materialism of industrial products is melded to heavenly heights in Erbossyn Meldibekov’s Seasons in the Hindu Kush, 2009. Four enamelled kitchen pots have been crushed, embossed and hammered into a paradoxically sensitively sculpted topography of mountainous landscapes. These four upside-down pots from a distance have the appearance of humorously animated, battered helmets, ham-fisted into shape. Close-up, each terrarium has a summit with ridges and valleys with accumulated dust, where the enamel paint splinters into contours and tonal variation.

The Great Game, called the Tournament of Shadows by Asians and popularised by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, consisted of power play between Russian and British empires, focused on Afghanistan. That the Great Game is still operating through the political manoeuvering and exploitation of natural resources with consequent social upheaval is the subject of Galim Madanov and Zauresh Terekbay’s 40 A4-size acrylic paintings that appear to be bronze plaques with small embellished texts. ‘K Leverman the Great Game Blood and Oil in Central Asia’, is one example. The paintings, together called the Defragmentation of History, 2010, provide political markers where the art game of trompe l’oeil facilitates a monumental archive of political truths. 

The Aral Sea is dying; the rivers that support the sea have been diverted to irrigate the cotton industry. There are also several ex-soviet toxic sites in Kazakhstan. Almagul Menlibayeva’s film, Transoxiana Dreams,2011, takes as point of departure the accumulation of cultural deserts. Dreams occur in the film centred on the magical inferences of a child in relation to her sister and father and their comprehension of life in a dust bowl village at the edge of the dried-up sea: ‘Ashes from my dead ancestors cover the windows.’ ‘Today at school my sister read Gogol and has awakened the centaurs and foxes who have stolen the sea.’ Like Noah, her father heroically searches for and finds the lush sea. His driving quest is vividly depicted in the film as black and white upside-down footage along the dry sea bed. The centaurs are Soviet costumed temptresses, responsible for toxic deeds and, with additional legs, they cut alluring images. They dance mischievously with their friends the foxes among the rusting hulks of once proud fishing boats. The magical realism and careful composition of the shapes of boats, hats and symbolic figures, upside-down footage and dusty homeland scenes bring the visual and narrative forms together with convincing precision. Almagul’s work has been described as ‘archaic atavism’. She describes her intention thus: ‘historical roots enable people to look to the future with confidence’

The title of Aleksander Ugay’s film Bastion, 2007, can be applied alternatively across two metaphorical images. Again the format is a large-scale, grainy black and white movie exuding nostalgia where the recent past seems archaic. Three adult Kazhaks sit on a bench talking, gazing at the sea. They testify to the survival of central Asian community through generations, just as a grand image of Tatlin’s tower ghosts by, accompanied by the sounds of a wooden sailing ship. The tower epitomises the aspirations of the Russian avant garde, two dialectical cones weave around one another thrusting toward the heavens while anchored in materialism. The tower was never built – it is a dream tower. As a spectre of a Marxist revolution it is perhaps too close, as is the living memory of the three people on the bench, to the ghosts of Stalin for us to yet be able to re-envision its spirit.

Stephen Lee is a sculptor and a writer.

‘New Cartographies, Algeria-France-UK’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 347, June 2011, pp nos. 28-29.

www.artmonthly.co.uk

New Cartographies: Algeria-France-UK    
Cornerhouse Manchester 8 April to 5 June   

    ‘New Cartographies’ maps out changes in cultural perception of boundaries inside and outside of Algeria. The exhibition is arranged over three floors using these themes: migration; resources – physical, economic and human; and memory and history. Both emerging and established artists reflect the diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds of the Algerian diaspora. Indicative of a raised level of consciousness across North Africa, ideas have been conceived with political acumen in new media formats yet the subject matter is expressed and espoused with considerable feeling.
    Katia Kameli’s large-scale video and sound installation Dissolution, 2009, forms a locus of many of the critical issues in the show. A short, looped video sequence intends to place the viewer in the position of an Algerian, perhaps a child, gazing across the Bay of Algiers where the occident, as Katia describes, ‘blurs like a fiction’. In the background haze lie stationary tankers out of focus. In the foreground the tops of two industrial chimneys exhaust heat and smoke into the middle-ground of this seascape, where a colourful tanker traverses the screen as it makes its turn into port. Just as the tip of the ship touches the chimney vapour, a small tug enters the screen from the left-hand side. The miniature guide escorts the flaming colossus as it liquefies through industrial heat. Katia describes this event as a ‘transition or rebirth’ as the tanker enters the orient. The dissolution of the ship is echoed by a wall of sound that engulfs the viewer in the installation. The sound is the audio equivalent of the visual evidence of heat emanating from the chimneys: a discordant and meditative hum. Dissolution uses the moving image to demonstrate where radical opposites momentarily fuse.
    ‘Harragas’ means to burn or transgress boundaries and is a term used to describe migrants desperate to leave Algeria for the West. The metaphor of the flame develops as transcendental homelessness in Harragas, 2010, the title of Zineddine Bessai’s installation of small photographs of male figures with candles strapped to their backs like effigies. Bessai, an Arab Muslim, is a recent graduate from the School of Fine Arts in Algeria and was not granted a visa to come to the opening of the show: immigration authorities stated that he might not return home.
    Most of the work in the exhibition does not make reference to Algerian history beyond the War of Independence of 1962. Where reference is made it is as spectre or as erasure. Amina Menia’s photomural Chrysanthemum, 2011 is a comparative study of grave monuments shown in immaculate upkeep or in various states of neglect, depending on the political acceptability of those commemorated. Sophie Elbaz’s video installations L’Ile Fantastique, 2007, and Qacentina, 2007, trace her Sephardic Jewish heritage. Born in France she returned to Constantine, in Algeria, which boasts a landscape of large gorges and natural rock arches; her video journey records simultaneous layers of enchantment and lamentation. In conversation with me she described the pre-Roman beginnings and the subsequent history of Jews in Algeria. The video evokes her family’s experiences, now completely disconnected from their origin. Portraits of her grandfather from the colonial era, her father and herself are superimposed, merge and fade to become enveloped, dream-like, by billowing sand. The memorable image of a down-turned bed is suggestive of her phantasmagorical journey.
    Personal accounts of journeying, as the curators Joseph McGonagle and Edward Welch state, are the main thrust of this exhibition. Visual journals and oral history accounts address the complexity of current issues around identity politics with directness. Bruno Boudjelal’s Algeria from East to West, 2001-03, is a photo-journal presented as a large mural with vivid imagery, following the 1990s civil war, of encounters with relatives in Algeria. Yves Jeanmougin’s photographs revisit sites associated with the pied-noir poet Jean Segnac; the silhouetted image of a famous haunted house – a shell that is now a monument following the war of independence – resonates with Segnac’s absence. ‘…while drawing water from a well’, is a fragment of a caption from Omar D’s understated and poignant A4-size slide presentation A Biography of Disappearance, Algeria, 1992-2007. The captions follow ID photographs of men who disappeared during the civil war. Each image offers about a minute of viewing, enough to remember the face, and is followed by a caption which states where they were last seen. John Perivolaris’s North to North, 2011, a journey from the north of England to the north of Algeria, includes a photograph taken of a Muslim woman entering the underground in London. Seen from behind, her flowing garments and purposeful stride synthesise a gamut of conflicting feelings, from vestiges of orientalist exoticism to politicised awareness of a culture in ambitious transition.
    Edward Said has argued that the west’s view of the orient has transferred from colonial, paternalistic fantasy to a U.S. dominated ‘matter of policy’. This has resulted, he says, in an increasingly dehumanised view of the orient. It follows that the landscape of Algeria is seen primarily as a material resource. Kader Attia’s severe work Oil and Sugar, 2007, a video installation, has no obvious human or literary element. Crude oil poured over a stack of processed sugar dissolves into cultural sludge as a conceptual critique of the reduction of both nature and culture to policy. The use of video as an extension of the seductive power of mass media imagery always risks critical impotence and complicity. Yet the significance of Attia’s work is that the concoction of oil and sugar remains jarring and conceptually difficult to consume. The soundtrack that accompanies the video is of the barely audible sound of someone singing, the only human element that suggests reprieve in this otherwise stark work.
    The War of Independence of 1962 was an intellectual revolution that was spurred by writers and artists. This is affirmed by Zineb Sedira’s Gardiennes d’Images, 2010, a large-scale video installation on two adjacent walls that records conversations with Safia Kouaci, the wife, assistant and now archive keeper of her husband Mohamed Kouaci’s photographs. The photographs document the revolution, but it has not been possible to find an official home for the archive. The camera angle, the juxtaposition of images and the editing allow a relaxed viewing of Safia’s engrossing first-hand account of the events leading to independence. The video enables the viewer to become familiar and connected to Safia’s cause, as she speaks of preserving her culture for the future. New Cartographies is about traversing boundaries, yet the show culminates with a change of pace, in Gardiennes D’Images Safia Kouaci acts as a sentinel, a guardian of a fragile cultural border made of photographic paper.

Stephen Lee is a sculptor.

Current Gallery, Baltimore, ‘Self Portrait as a Rock Star’.

Current Gallery and Artist Cooperative

Jan 28th- April 10th 2011

Curated by Gary Kachadourian, this exhibit is a collection of self portraits in which the artists imagined themselves as a rock star.

Tank Gallery, London, ‘eye of the black bird’, Maria Chevska and Stephen Lee. Fri.11.Feb.2010 - Sat.05.Mar.2010.

Private View Thur.10.Feb.2010 6-9pm

Collaborative exhibition
Tank, The Ladywell Tavern
80 Ladywell Rd, SE13 7HS
London
info@tanklondon.co.uk
http://www.tanklondon.blogspot.com/
http://tankgallery.weebly.com/current-exhibition.html

Press Release:

eye of the black bird.
Landscape and painting, expanded in terms of materiality and metaphor is the point of departure for this collaborative exhibition over two floors in an old carriage house in South London. The country and the city are thematically inter-woven in an elaborate upstairs/ downstairs dialogue.
Maria Chevska’s painted cobblestones displayed in the ground floor gallery refer to the materiality of the street. Retrieved from just below the surface of the road, these slightly subterranean objects have considerable gravity as paintings. The painted stripes on the surface of the stones are records of palettes used on her main body of paintings. The cobblestones therefore act as a storage or file-code of colours. They also form a direct connection between the art produced in the studio and the urban landscape.
The title, eye of the black bird, is a fragment of a poem by Wallace Stevens that provides the common ground of modernism, language and materiality for the collaboration. The poem is described by Maria Chevska thus: ‘I enjoy the poem’s proposal of ordering the world and it’s sensations (Art), even if compressed into haiku-like form which amongst all its other qualities contains humour’.
The upstairs gallery houses Stephen lee’s juxtapositions of Plein- Air landscape painting of countryside with sculpted animals, human forms and objects. Characterised by a feeling of light, air and space, the work has the structural appearance of a poem of objects, clustered across continuous shelving. Closely tied to literary qualities of narrative and time, intrinsic to landscape, Lee describes his choice of subject matter: ‘I am particularly interested in places where human activity and objects interact with the surrounding environment to create a heightened sense of time as metaphor. This could be for example, a group of people fishing and picnicking by a river; a train-line, canal or motorway connecting to the city like a vein; or a post-industrial zone, which has been partly re-absorbed into surrounding fields like a ruin’.