BOOK LAUNCH - Second Edition of the Anatomy of a Street including a diary and documentation of the Anatomy of a Street exhibition and the "Researching and Shaping Post-Socialist Urban Space' traveling symposium.
AUBERGINE:NW8 from Giv Parvaneh on Vimeo.
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PARALLEL GAZES - SZABOLCS KISSPÁL
21 January - 18 February 2011
PRIVATE VIEW: 20th January 2011, Thursday from 6 pm
10 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 7NA
20th of January, 7 pm - Edwin Heathcote (architecture critic, FT) in conversation with Szabolcs KissPál
Opening hours: Monday-Friday, 9 am - 5 pm or by appointment
An exhibition by Szabolcs KissPál, shortlisted project of the HCC open call for site specific installation at the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Covent Garden, London.
photo by Szabolcs KissPál
Public monuments are forms and tools of ritual representations which enhance, control and contribute to the construction of collective memory and identity. Parallel Gazes is a photographic project investigating public monuments dedicated to historical personalities. Erected both in London and Budapest, these figures outline an alternative map of shared cultural values of two distant locations, and highlight connections of their collective memories. The photographs, taken from the viewpoint of the statues themselves, focus on the urban landscape and surrounding environment that these figures have been continuously “looking at” since their erection, making explicit also the differences between the two societies and their contemporary realities.
Parallel Gazes exhibition guide
photo by Szabolcs KissPál
On the occasion of the opening, 20th of January, at 7 pm, please join us for the artist talk: Edwin Heathcote will be in conversation with Szabolcs KissPál
Szabolcs KissPál lives and works in Budapest, Hungary. In his multidimensional practice he is working across a wide range of media, including photography, video, installation and conceptual interventions. Moving on the intersection of new media and visual arts, KissPál focuses on social and political issues of the Hungarian and global contemporary society. His works were widely shown internationally in Europe, Asia, and the United States, in venues such as the Venice Biennial, the Whitstable Biennial, W139 Amsterdam, NCCA Moscow, the Seoul Media Art Biennial, Apexart and ISCP in New York.
Edwin Heathcote is an architect, critic and designer living and working in London. He is the Architecture and Design Critic of The Financial Times and the author of over a dozen books on architecture including Monument Builders. He is currently working on a book about memory and death in modern architecture.
curated by Eszter Steierhoffer
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SYMPOSIUM – RESEARCHING AND SHAPING POST-SOCIALIST URBAN SPACE
What are the new methods and tools with which the contemporary city can be approached? Where are the junctions between architecture, urbanism, art and activism? What is the role of research and intervention in cultural projects addressing the city? What are the capacities of cultural projects to make pressure on decision-making institutions? The meeting coordinated in collaboration with the KÉK, the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design and the Budapest University of Technology and the Bec miana Foundation is looking for answers to these questions.
I. in BUDAPEST
2-8 pm, on 7th of November 2010
in LABOR Gallery (Kepiro utca, Budapest 1053)
14.00 Steierhoffer Eszter & Polyák Levente: Anatomy of a Street: Budapest, Pécs, London
15.00 Dagmar Petrikova: Anatomy of a Street: Bratislava
16.00 Gregorz Piatek (Bec Zmiana, Warsaw): Debating the City: Art and Cultural Organisations
16.30 Jakob Hurrle (Multicultural Centre, Prague): Cultures from Around the Block
17.00 Constantin Goagea (Zeppelin, Bucharest): Interventions in Socialist Neighborhoods + urban report project
17.30 Ivan Kucina (Faculty of Architecture, Belgrade): Conditions of Self-Regulated Urbanity
Host: KEK - Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre
II. in WARSAW
11.30am – 4pm, 20 November 2010
11.30 Meeting at Mokotowska and Hoża st. corner, Warsaw
11.30-14.00 Common walk trough Mokotowska street guided by Magda Śliwka (accompanied by Wojtek Kasperski)
14.00-16.00 Open discussion at Info Qultura at Plac Konstytucji
Participants: Levente Polyak, Eszter Steierhoffer, Grzegorz Piątek, Ola Wasilkowska and Wojtek Kacperski.
Host: Bęc Zmiana Foundation
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SECOND SKIN - ÁDÁM KOKESCH
15 October - 12 November, 2010
PRIVATE VIEW: 14th October 2010, Thursday at 7 pm
10 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, WC2E 7NA
A site specific installation by Ádám Kokesch in the Adamesque theater building that hosts the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Covent Garden, London.
photo by Miklós Surányi
The objects and installations of Ádám Kokesch are marked by both peripheral and ephemeral curiosity. Kokesch's works combine traditional painting techniques with collage, his blueprints of subjective ideas are made out of leftover materials, garbage, everyday objects and junk. These base materials - transformed and prepared with meticulous care - depict symbols reminiscent of languages of computer technology and other sign systems, opening up an uncanny, fictional and highly utopistic world, often with a playful and ironic approach toward objects of the everyday. As one of his critics put it, Kokesch's work plays on "banality disguised as a laboratory situation".
curated by Eszter Steierhoffer
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PUBLICATION LAUNCH
Anatomy of a Street Publication launch, 6 July at 6 pm, The Showroom Gallery
London, 63 Penfold Street NW8 8PQ
Coinciding with the Anatomy of a Street exhibition on Church Street (26 June – 4th of July 2010) a corresponding publication will be launched. The case studies of the Anatomy of a Street publication (high streets from Hungary and London) are locations in cities where top-down national or municipal planning, corporate development, small businesses and bottom-up initiatives of the civic sphere intersect. The AoaS project reads urban transformation through 'uncommon' cultural, economic and social indicators, and questions some of the general assumptions that describe the relationship between public, private, civic and corporate elements in their effect on the city, the side-effects of top-down, large-scale urban development.
The publication's focus on the transformation of various urban sites will be highlighted by a roundtable dicussion. Invited guests include: Edward Quigley and Marco Torquati (Church Street Neighborhood Management), Neil Bennett (Terry Farrell's Architects), Nicholas Lobo Brennan (House of Jonn), Emily Pethick (The Showroom Gallery), Chole McCarthy and Magda Novoa (MyCityToo) and Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice Group).
Contributiors of the publication include: Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, Nicholas Lobo Brennan, Edwin Heathcote, Deepa Naik&Trenton Oldfield, Allan Siegel, Péter Rákosi, Ders Csaba, Péter Lowas, Emőke Kerekes & Anna Mózes, Béla Káli, Gergely Kovács, László Munteán, Gabó Bartha, Ádám Albert, Bea Dávid, Réka Schutzmann & Csilla Zsuzsanna Vizl and Miklós Surányi.
Anatomy of the Street publication is edited by Levente Polyák & Eszter Steierhoffer and designed by Pedro Cid Proenca, Sophie Demay & Afonso Duarte
The Anatomy of a Street Project was shortlisted for the 'Silver Pigeon Prize - 2010' of the British Council and The Architectural Foundation.
For more information visit: www.anatomyofastreet.org
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LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE
ANATOMY OF A STREET
exhibition: 26 June – 4 July 2010
Church Street Paddington, London NW8
photo by House of Jonn
Anatomy of a Street is an on-going research project portraying epicenters of an accelerated urban transformation: two examples of the ‘high street’ from Pécs and Budapest in comparison with Church street in Paddigton (London).
Focusing on urban development and regeneration , the project explores the fluidly changing relationship of the public, the private and the corporate; the interactions of the top-down and bottom-up organizational processes thematically through mapping local communities, migration, gentrification, local businesses and industries, food production and contribution as well as diverse traditions and new cultural enterprises. Based on an international and interdisciplinary platform, Anatomy of a Street attempts to connect different discursive fields and disciplines as well as networks belonging to different geographical locations, cultures and histories between eastern and western Europe after the cold war.
photo by Emőke Kerekes
photo by Ewa M. A.To navigate through Church Street and the exhibition, a map and audio guide by House of Jonn is avaliable at Church Street Library (Church Street n.97-97)
PV: 25th June, Monira Cafe, 56 Church Street, NW8 8ET
Opening times:
Tuesday - Friday: 10 am - 7 pm
Saturday: 10 am - 5 pm
Sunday-Monday: closed
EVENTS AND PERFORMANCES:
- Situated amongst the daily market traders, AUBERGINE:NW8 - "Share a Recipe, Take an Aubergine!" is a subtle public intervention in Church Street Market. A project that seeks to explore and further understand the ethnically diverse community that surrounds and benefits from the street market. A market store table and seating will be set up to provide an area for exchanging the cross-culturally popular staple ingredient “the aubergine” for humble home-cooking recipes. Project by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad.
- Dates:
- June: 26th (12am - 4pm),
July: 2nd (12am - 4pm), 3rd (12- 4pm)
Brunch with Gabo Bartha and Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad on the 4th of July from 12- 4pm
Coinciding with the exhibition a corrisponding publication will be produced comprising research material. Publication launch: July 6, 6pm - 8pm in The Showroom Gallery, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8 8PQ
Exhibition curated by Eszter Steierhoffer and Levente Polyák.
Anatomy of a Street is supported by the European Capital of Culture - Pécs 2010 in collaboration with the Hungarian Cultural Centre and the KÉK - Contemporary Architecture Centre in Budapest, British Council Budapest and the Church Street Neighbourhood Centre in London. Screenings by no.w.here and the Free Cinema School are organised in collaboration with The Egware Road Project of the Serpentine Gallery.
The exhibition is part of the International Architecture Showcase organised by the British Council and The Architecture Foundation for the LONDON FESTIVAL OF ARCHITECTURE 2010.
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Art Network Agency (ANA) launch and roundtable discussion 1st of April, 5.30-7.30 pm, Whitechapel Gallery
photo by Eszter Gero
PARTICIPANTS: Marsha Bradfield (Critical Practice Group, Chelsea); Nicholas Lobo Brennan; Carmen Billows (Department21); Rita Kálmán (ACAX); Catalina Lozano (gasworks); Jonathan Miles (RCA); Trenton Oldfield (TIANG); Eszter Steierhoffer (ANA); Ildikó Takács (director, HCC); Jack Tan (Chair); Pieternel Vermoortel (FormContent); apologies: Polly Brannan (publicworks); Will Holder; Sophie Hope; Magda Raczynska (Polish Cultural Institute)
AGENDA:
I. Introductions
II. Introducing the work of ANA (Eszter Steierhoffer)
III. A word about networks (Jack Tan)
IV. Discussion (transcript available soon)
Beyond tracing the contemporary art scene in London, ANA endeavors to fulfill the role of a specialised mediator, providing space for discussion and reflection. Before our first public event – the launch of the IMPEX book “We Are Not Ducks on a Pond, but Ships at Sea" – we held an informal salon discussion at the Goshka Macuga roundtable at the Whitechapel Gallery. Central to the shaping of ANA, the three inter-related points under discussion were 'network', 'translation - mediation' and 'self-organisation'. As starting points to the main discussion we considered the following quotes and texts:
"Network is a concept, not a thing out there. It is a tool to help describe something, not what is being described."
(Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press)
"A shape, an object, is stable and singular if it is configured within a stable set of links with other entities. Within a stable grammar or syntax of those links. Hull, spars, sails, stays, stores, rudder, crew, water, winds, all of these entities (and many others) have to be held in place, so to speak functionally, if we are to be able to point to an object and call it a ship (7). Now notice this. A working ship is, yes, a continuous Cartesian object, a constant set of Cartesian co-ordinates ... On the other hand, however, it is also a constant and continuous network object, a ‘network shape’."
(Law, J. (2000). Objects, Spaces and Others. Available:
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/sociology/papers/law-objects-spaces-others.pdf
Last accessed 29 March 2010.)
"In all language and linguistic creations there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language, the latter in the evolving of the languages of themselves. And that which seeks to represent, to produce itself in the evolving of languages, is that very nucleus of pure language. … to turn the symbolizing into the symbolized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the tremendous and only capacity of translation."
(p. 80 The Task of the Translator, pp. 70-82 Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, Pimlico, London, 1999, translated by Harry Zorn.)
"I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental factors that help to explain the consistency of self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up over time, and which gives the members of a group the capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same referential universe, even when they are dispersed and mobile. ... The second is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance : the exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding in specific locations. This exchange of information and affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an "ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations ; but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger environment of the earth and its populations, because of the shared horizon that links the participants together in what appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical or religious beliefs are at work)."
(Holmes, B. (2006). Network, swarm, microstructure. Available:
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/Network-swarm-microstructure.html
Last accessed 29 March 2010.)
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BOOK LAUNCH
“We are not ducks on a pond but ships at sea*
independent art initiatives, Budapest 1989-2009”
1st April 2010, Thursday at 8 pm
Hungarian Cultural Centre, 10 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden
London, WC2E 7NA
On the occasion of the ANA launch we will present the book WE ARE NOT DUCKS ON A POND BUT SHIPS AT SEA* introduced by Rita Kálmán.
To book please contact: info@artnetworkagency.org.uk
"This book endeavors to introduce the independent art scene of the past 20 years in Budapest as well as to provide assistance to interpret its relation to the economic and 'ideological' framework of society. The book offers a missing biography, providing a reference for understanding the relationship between the self-organized and the institutionalized, and the manifold ways in which these structures mutually shape one another. It is about projects set up by non-bureaucratic structures which emerge and are transformed along various schemes before disappearing. It is about sites, which elude self-definition and almost never leave behind any documented trace." (Katarina Sevic)
Edited by Rita Kálmán and Katarina Sevic (IMPEX), design by Kasia Korczak.
* title freely quoted after Lawrence Weiner
