Johan Grimonprez at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh

Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez was propelled to international prominence when his highly acclaimed one-hour video Dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y, a smart, visually complex and imaginatively compelling cultural history of aeroplane hijackings, was first shown at Documenta X in 1997. In 2008, a first version of his new film Doubletake took the Basel art fair by storm.

After recently chatting with Fiona Bradley, the Director of Fruitmarket, this film is critical in understanding the modern world. Grimonprez is a politically engaged artist and really hitting the major topics of today. Read the interview with Fiona in Aesthetica's June/July issue.



This exhibition is the first British gallery showing of Doubletake which, like Dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y, mixes film, television and documentary footage, fact and fiction, to make a complex blend of meanings and counter-meanings, this time held together by a narrative written by British novelist Tom McCarthy in adaptation of Jorge Luis Borges’s novella The Other where Borges imagines an encounter with his own aging self. The film charts the global rise of fear-as-commodity in a tale of odd couples and double deals that casts Hitchcock’s work and persona as central to and reflective of a world in flux. It skips, or to use Grimonprez’s word zaps, from image to image and from plot to plot, weaving together footage from the kitchen debate between Kruchev and Nixon and the presidential debates between Nixon and Kennedy; the space and technology race; Folgers coffee advertisements; episodes from ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’; reports of the Cuban Missile Crisis and an account of a fictional encounter between Hitchcock and his double on the set of The Birds.

Doubletake will be shown together with Dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y and two earlier films, Kobarweng or Where is Your Helicopter, 1992 and the multi-screen installation It Will Be Alright If You Come Again, Only Next Time Don’t Bring Any Gear, Except A Tea Kettle, 1994. A sustained presentation of the work of this important international artist, the exhibition offers the chance to trace the development of his interest in the power of popular culture to create new mythologies and cultural narratives.

Doubletake is also screening on 2 June 2 at Film Forum - West Houston Street (West of 6th Avenue), with screenings daily at 1:00, 2:45, 4:30, 6:15, 8:00, 10:00. www. filmforum.org

Here’s what The New York Times and Variety had to say:

May be the most intellectually agile of this year's crop of essay films and also the least classifiable… Combines Hitchcockian dread and cold war paranoia in a wry meditation on the rise of the image and the commodification of fear." – Dennis Lim, The New York Times

"Galvanizing, elegant and wildly entertaining. Thoroughly inventive in its experimentation with the line between myth and history. As gripping a suspense movie as one of Hitchcock's own, and shows remarkable breadth of vision." – Robert Koehler, Variety

If you’re in New York or Scotland – it’s really worth seeing. The show runs at the Fruitmarket until 11 July. www.fruitmarket.co.uk

Images (c) Johan Grimonprez

From Tehran to London: New Painting from Iran

The noise and bustle of Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport at five in the morning is a little overwhelming, especially after six peaceful hours snoozing on a flight from London. Only a few years old, but some design flaws are already showing in this sleek building, particularly in the way incoming travellers find themselves in irritatingly long queues. A glass wall brings welcoming family and friends frustratingly close, and as you inch slowly towards the exit you can read improving signs that remind how ‘Respect for Islamic Dress is Respect for the Rights of Women’. Another enormous queue outside siphons off into taxis, and by the time I am on the road to Tehran, dawn has broken.



This was my introduction to Iran early last month as I went to select paintings for an exhibition in Soho. My friend, Aras, had visited her family last summer and returned to London with tales of the great art she had seen in Tehran’s galleries. We were soon thinking about how we could get some to London, and soon after gallerist Jill George had offered her premises for a show. All that remained was to actually see what would be going up on the walls. I was staying with a friend in downtown Tehran, and rolled up as he returned from the local bakery with breakfast. Glasses of hot tea washed down freshly-baked flatbread, cream cheese, honey and fresh walnuts as I enjoyed the calmest moments in four days of running from galleries to studios to artists’ homes to look at paintings.



One question I was asked whilst there was: “What do you like about Tehran?” and this is not an easy one to answer. There is little impressive architecture, and the city is polluted and overcrowded, with something like twice the population of London in a smaller area. But what makes Tehran one of my current favourite cities is the sheer warmth of its people, whose hospitality, charm and generosity belie the general media image of their country abroad. This was my third visit there, and still people looked surprised when they heard of my plans. If having a small exhibition of contemporary Iranian painting helps to undermine such assumptions – and I know I’m reaching for the stars here – then it’ll be even more worthwhile.

After breakfast, we drive across town to Azad Gallery in Yousefabad. This small artist-run basement room has been showing exceptional art in Tehran since 1999 under the Directorship of Rozita Sharafjahan. I wanted to see good painting, and Rozita knew exactly which artists I should consider. Various canvases were assembled from painters Marzieh Bagheri and Azadeh Balouchi, two young women who have been out of college for barely a year and already producing exceptionally confident and accomplished work. I wanted everything they could provide, but had to settle for two from one and three from the other. I was driven by painter Samira Eskandarfar to see her work in her flat: she proudly told me that Tate Modern had just decided to buy one of her video works that day. I saw the studios of Khosro Khosravi, Mohammad Tabatabaie and his wife Masoumeh Bakhtiary, and was struck by how little room they had to produce their magnificent images, and how modestly they wore their abilities. Hamed Sahihi brought canvases into Azad Gallery for me to choose and the resulting selection has only one guiding theme to link the paintings: quality. Everything I have selected – and of course, how could I say otherwise? – can hold its own with the finest market-approved painting from anywhere else in the world, and given that it is the first time most of these painters have shown in London, prices are very cheap.

It was not easy to whittle down all the excellent art I saw to the seven artists who make up the exhibition and, needless to say, Aras and I are already tempted to investigate another show with some of the many accomplished and talented Tehrani artists we could not include this time. Time will tell if we can do this, but a trip around the Tehran art world is a surprising and delightful experience that belies the general, woefully negative impression of Iran that still persists.

By David Gleeson - Guest Blogger & Aesthetica Magazine contributor.

To read more about Middle Eastern Art, read Contemporary Art From the Middle East a feature on Golden Gates, which ran in Paris last October.

From Tehran to London: New Painting from Iran is at Jill George Gallery, 38 Lexington Street, Soho, London W1 until 18 June. Admission free. www.jillgeorgegallery.co.uk

Image Credits
(c) Mohammad Mehdi Tabatabaie
Untitled 2008)
Triptych, oil on canvas
120 x 220 cm

(c)Azadeh Balouchi
Utopia Ophelia (2009)
acrylic on canvas

(c)Eskandarfar
She Was Alone (2009)
oil on canvas

DREAMLANDS at the Pompidou

One of the most engaging shows this summer, Dreamlands recently opened at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The show considers, for the first time, the question of how World’s Fairs, international exhibitions and theme parks have influenced ideas and notions of the city. Duplicating and reduplicating reality through the creation of replicas, embracing an aesthetic of accumulation and collage that is often close to kitsch, these self-enclosed parallel worlds have frequently afforded inspiration to the artistic, architectural and urbanistic practices of the 20th century, and may even be said to have served as models for certain contemporary constructions.

This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together more than 300 works: modern and contemporary art, architecture, films and documents drawn from numerous public and private collections. Designed as an experience both playful and educational, it will offer the first comprehensive exploration of its theme, inviting visitors to think about how the city is imagined and how this imagination finds expression in concrete projects.



World’s Fairs, contemporary theme parks, the Las Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s, 21st century Dubai: all these have helped bring about a profound transformation in our relation to the world, our conceptions of geography, time and history, our ideas about the original and the reproduction, about art and non-art.

The dreamlands of the leisure society have shaped the imagination, nourishing both utopian dreams and artistic productions. But they have also become realities: the pastiche, the copy, the artificial and the fictive have become facts of the environment in which real life is led, and they serve as models for understanding and planning the urban fabric and its social life, blurring the boundaries between imagination and reality.



From Salvador Dali’s Dream of Venus pavilion for the New York World’s Fair of 1939 to such manifestoes as Venturi and Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas and Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York (which reads Manhattan through Coney Island’s Dreamland), the 16 sections of the exhibition will trace the history of a complex and problematic relationship.

Dreamlands continues until 9 August. www.centrepompidou.fr

Q&A with curators Quentin Bajac Curator at Musée National d’Art Moderne, Chief of Photograph Cabinet and Didier Ottinger Deputy Director of the Musée National d’Art Modern


How did you undertake the process of curating art with architecture and film?
As you know we have at the Pompidou a long tradition of ambitious multidisciplinary exhibitions, which mix all the different techniques, from architecture to painting, from photography to sculpture or installation works. Dreamlands definitely belongs to that tradition even if it is probably one of the exhibitions organized at the Pompidou in which the animated image (slideshows, film extracts, videos, digital imagery) is the more central.

How did this exhibition come about and why did you select the space of the Grande Gallerie? What are the highlights of the exhibition?
The fact that many contemporary artists (from Gursky to Pierre Huyghe, from Martin Parr to Mike Kelley), worked on subjects which were related to that topic (the influence of Pop culture and entertainment architecture on the urbanistic changes of the 20th and 21st centuries) was definitely important for us. We realised that these changes and these questions were central to works of artists from very different origins (Western, African, Asian) and of very different generations (from historical Pop artists (Ruscha, Leirneir) to very young ones (Liu Wei, Cao fei). The idea was to organize a show that would very closely (and we hope subtly) mix aesthetic and social issues. Some of the pieces included in the show (Malacchi Farrell, Mike Kelley, Pierre Huyghe, Kader Attia) are pieces that need space.The big gallery of the Pompidou, in which we usually organize these major thematical shows was therefore the obvious exhibition space.

What was your criterion for selecting which artists to include?
It is always, as in all exhibitions, a balance to find between of course the interest of the piece(s) we are showing and the way such piece(s) can interact with others. The exhibition is not only about showing interesting or thrilling or exciting isolated pieces but also about establishing links and relations between these pieces. In that respect we wanted to have as many different techniques and media as possible, in order to enhance the diversity and we hope the interest of the show.

Dreamlands explores ideas of escapism in theme parks, and in the 21st century we are now seeing unprecedented levels of escapism in the digital realm through programmes such as second life. How do you see the effects of these new developments evolving our notions of reality?
It is true that these new developments have had a big influence on our perception of reality and have tended to confuse the viewer. The exhibition, and I am especially thinking about one of the last room of the exhibition –the one devoted to Dubai- is also about that phenomenon; Dubai in recent years has based a lot of its communication campaigns on that impossibility of exactly knowing if the images they are proposing are real or fictitious. The use at the same time of real documentary images and digitally manipulated ones has been one of their key techniques of communication in recent years.

The city is often romanticised, on the other hand it often becomes grotesque – have you ever had your view of a certain place profoundly affected by an artwork pastiching it?
One of the things you can grasp by going round the exhibition is that you find, from one beginning of the century to another, from 1900 to 2000, always the same models which are copied over and over again. In that respect, there is a great stability of mythologies: Venice, the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, Statue of Liberty etc. Does this phenomenon of reproduction affect in a positive or negative way the original - in other terms does it reinforces or exhausts the “aura” of the original to quote the expression used by Walter Benjamin in his texts from the thirties is a true question? The answer depends a lot on a personal experience and will probably differ from one individual to another just as the exhibition will probably affects in different ways the viewer: some will focus on the entertainment dimensions of these changes some will be probably be more conspicuous or even anxious about this phenomenon.

Images:
Manit Sriwanichpoom
Pink man in paradise : Sacré-cœur, 2002-2003
Photographie
80cm x 120 cm
Galerie VU’, Paris
© Manit Sriwanichpoom / Galerie VU’ // © Manit Sriwanichpoom


Yiu Xiuzhen
Portable City, New York, 2003
Valise, vêtements usagés
90cm x 140 cm x 30cm
Courtesy Alexander Ochs galleries Berlin/Beijing
© Yin Xiuzhen


Olivio Barbieri
Site specific, Las Vegas, 2005
Film 35 mm sur DVD, sonore
12 min 30sec
Courtesy Olivo Barbieri, Brancolini Grimaldi Arte Contemporanea, Roma
© Olivo Barbieri