The Building, e-Flux Video Rental

The Building, en Berlín, presenta algunos proyectos que nos parecen interesantes:

e-Flux video rental (EVR), un proyecto de Anton Vidokle y Julieta Aranda que funciona como un videoclub de videoarte, gratis. empezó en NY, pero ha viajado por numerosas ciudades, aumentando cada vez su archivo, con la colaboración de artistas, curadores y escritores, que seleccionan las piezas en cada ciudad.

Y el proyecto Stadium X, sobre la reutilización de una antigua ruina Comunista, que desde los 90 se ha transformado dándole nuerosos y variopintos usos, hasta que Joanna Warsza ha comisariado algunos proyectos artísticos en el sitio, publicando el libro: "Stadium X — A Place That Never Was (publicado por Ha!art y Bęc Zmiana Foundation).

Aquí el artículo desde Art&Education de Artforum, de Abril.

"The building is pleased to announce three events in April:Thursday April 16, 7:30 pm e-flux video rental screening organized by Adina Popescu: So what does it actually mean, "to be political"?"Art is not what an individual mind is able to conceive, but what men, in times of change, envision in order to give themselves a future."The idea of the political dissident, which is linked to the idea of individuals resisting a repressive regime, has shifted into the idea of organization itself. How are information, knowledge, trade, labor, production etc. being organized? Being political is not necessarily any longer associated with the dissidence of an individual because it is often not entirely clear what this individual may rise up against, or if the means being used are not, in fact, part of the problem. I don't believe that an artistic practice, which is 'being political' is about conveying a specific content. It might rather reside in a gesture. But what could this be?We believe that the art institution can serve as a place for creating awareness. But is it really so? And if it is not, how should we approach artistic practices of writers, theater-makers, architects, engineers or media theorists, whose works exist in other realms than within the art context, but which can still clearly be described as artistic practices? Should we bring them into the art space or leave them where they are?

The evening will consist of a collage of different approaches from Eyal Sivans' Izkor: Slaves of Memory, (1991) Santiago Sierras interventions into the infrastructures of cities, the attempt of the Radical Software Group to turn Guy Debords' A Game of War into a computer game, we will talk about films which are supposed to exist, but which no one seems to be able to find and I will promise NOT to show Alexander Kluges' nine-and-a-half hour long film version of Marx The Capital.

Adina Popescu is a writer born in Romania and living between New York and Berlin. She is a contributor to Artforum, and has been included in several books with her plays and theoretical essays. She has lectured at the Sculpture Center NY, the Wissenschafts Akademie Berlin and other institutions. She has curated an "Intervention" at the 2007 Moscow Biennale, has 'curated' a radio show on sound pieces with W PS1 Radio at 2007 Venice Biennale and recently a show at Nyehaus in NY.

e-flux video rental (EVR) is an ongoing work by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, comprising a free video rental, a public screening room, and a film and video archive that is constantly growing. This collection of over 850 works of film and video art has been assembled in collaboration with more than 400 artists, curators and critics. EVR is a poetic exploration of alternative processes of circulation and distribution, and it is structured to function like a typical video rental store, except that it operates for free. VHS tapes can be watched in the space, or, once a new member fills out a membership form and contract, they can be checked out and viewed at home. Originally presented at a storefront in New York, in 2004, EVR has traveled to art venues in Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Seoul, Paris, Istanbul, Canary Islands, Austin, Budapest, Boston, Antwerp, Berlin, Miami, Lyon, Lisbon and Cali. Every time EVR opens in a new city, local artists, curators and writers are invited to serve as selectors, choosing artists whose work is added to the collection. In addition, a special program of screenings of works from the EVR collection is part of the project.

Saturday, April 25th 4pm Stadium X at The Building, BerlinLive Art Projects in a Communist Ruin, a Reader and its Various ContextsThe 10th-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw was built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated capital, and was to preserve Communism's good name for forty years. In the early 1990s it fell into ruin, being 'revived' by Vietnamese and Russian traders, pioneers of capitalism. Since then the Stadium and the open-air market surrounding it have become an Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of discount shopping, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, a spontaneous piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for archaeologists and botanists. The heterotopic logic of the place and its long-standing (non-)presence in the middle of Warsaw, inspired Joanna Warsza's curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader, Stadium X — A Place That Never Was (published by Ha!art and Bęc Zmiana Foundation).

A Trip to Asia: An Acoustic Walk Around the Vietnamese Sector of the 10th-Anniversary Stadium by Anna Gajewska, Joanna Warsza and Ngo Van Tuong (2006); Boniek!, a one-man re-enactment of the 1982 Poland-Belgium football match by Massimo Furlan, with commentary by Tomasz Zimoch (2007); or Radio Stadion Broadcasts by Radio Simulator and backyardradio (2008) were subjective excursions undertaken by artists into the reality of a Stadium 'no longer extant'.

The projects, of a participative and semi-documentary nature, touched upon issues of memory, deterioration, or the problematic exoticism of the place."(...)