News
20.11.2011 Ghazel in Gulf News, "Maps that defy borders"
Article by Jyoti Kalsi.
web link13.11.2011 James Clar in The National
Article by Chris Lord
web link08.11.2011 Congratulations Erwin Olaf, Johannes Vermeer award winner 2011
web link08.11.2011 Erwin Olaf
web link08.10.2011 "Daring to Dance"- The Financial Time, article by Liz Jobey
Set to be shown at London’s Frieze Art Fair next week, Anahita Razmi’s video installation featuring 12 rooftop dancers shows a rare expression of freedom in modern Iran
article by Liz Jobey, 8th of October 2011
If you go to YouTube and enter “Tehran 2009” into the search engine, you very quickly come to “Roofs of Tehran”, a sequence of blurred and rather beautiful colour photographs of Iran’s capital city at night, edited together and set to a soundtrack of blaring car horns and general street noise mixed with human voices shouting into the night: “Allahu Akbar!” – Allah is great – and “Marg bar dictator!” – Death to the dictator. Over the background noise, a woman can be heard speaking quietly in Farsi. A translation is given below the frame: Tomorrow is Saturday. Tomorrow is a day of destiny. Tonight, the cries of Allah-o Akbar are heard louder and louder than the nights before. Where is this place? Where is this place where every door is closed? … Where is this place where so many innocent people are entrapped? Where is this place where no one comes to our aid? … Where is this place that the young shed blood and then people go and pray – standing on that same blood and pray. … Where is this place? You want me to tell you? This place is Iran. The homeland of you and me. This place is Iran.
“Tomorrow” would be June 13 2009, the day when the results of the disputed presidential elections were announced in Iran and the conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad would be reinstated for a second term. In the protests that followed, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to be met by violent attacks by riot police and Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Some died there – such as Neda Agha-Soltan, the young music student shot by pro-government forces, whose death, caught on video and played thousands of times on social networking sites, became a symbol of the post-election crackdown. Many others, including hundreds of women activists, were arrested, imprisoned, beaten, tortured and, in the case of the women, raped. Many of them are still held as political prisoners as the government tries to prevent support for the opposition Green Movement spreading throughout the country.
Even Pietro Masturzo, the young Italian photographer who took the rooftop pictures, had been arrested and detained by police for three days, and was released just before the elections began. In another YouTube clip he describes how he spent several nights in a row trying to capture the night-time protests, and how one picture – of a woman on her roof, her hands covering her face, crying out to the heavens – later became the 2009 World Press Photo of the Year.
“Roofs of Tehran” is one of hundreds of similar videos, just a tiny slice of the viral movement that spread the protests in Iran across the rest of the world. And although she wasn’t in Tehran during the 2009 elections, the rooftop protests sowed a seed in the mind of the artist Anahita Razmi for a piece of work that is about to come to fruition during next week’s Frieze Art Fair in London, where her “Roof Piece Tehran” will be shown for the first time.
Last week, Razmi – her father is Iranian, her mother German – was working in a small studio at the Gasworks arts space in south London. Her three-month residency there comes as part of the Emdash Award, a new prize given jointly by the Emdash Foundation, a private arts foundation that supports emerging artists, and Frieze Projects, the commissioning arm of the Frieze Foundation. It is open to artists working outside the UK, who are under 35, or fewer than five years beyond graduation. Alongside the residency, it gives the winner funding (up to £10,000 production costs) to complete a new work, outside a gallery environment, which will be exhibited as part of the Frieze Art Fair. In Razmi’s case, this will involve 12 separate screens located at different points throughout the fair, a layout that replicates the architecture of the work itself, which was performed by 12 dancers improvising movements in sequence across 12 rooftops in Tehran.
Razmi’s proposal to the selection committee had been a simple one, though it would be anything but simple to carry out. She wanted to re-stage the seminal “Roof Piece”, first performed in New York 40 years ago, by the American dancer and choreographer Trisha Brown and 11 other dancers, across the rooftops of the area south of Houston Street, later to be universally known as SoHo.
Brown was a central figure in the community of downtown artists in the 1970s and her works were performed in lofts, before an audience of friends and fellow artists, or out in the streets, where she used the architecture in performances such as “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building”, in which her husband, Joseph Schlichter, wearing a harness that was invisible from below, walked down the side of their seven-storey building in Wooster Street. Brown described this work as, “A natural activity under the stress of an unnatural setting,” a definition that would certainly apply to the transposition of Brown’s performance to the rooftops of Tehran.
When we met, Razmi was sitting with two computers working on the final edit. The studio, which has very little natural light, would have been a handicap for a painter; for Razmi, it is probably a bonus. She speaks English fast and fluently. “Definitely this is a political piece,” she said. “I mean, the actual movements themselves are not political, they are just movements on the roof, but since the protests in 2009, the rooftops have become politicised spaces. They have always been domestic spaces.
“In New York in the 1970s there was this sense of a community, this mix of visual art and architecture, this close relationship between the audience and the performers. In Iran there are no dance performances. For artists there are rules and every exhibition has to go through these rules. So in the re-enactment of this performance, there were lots of differences in the concept that I had.”
Appropriating other artists’ ideas is something that Razmi has done before, with works by Tracey Emin, by Sophie Calle, and even by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who famously wrapped the Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985 and the Reichstag in Berlin, 10 years later. (In 2009 Razmi wrote to the Iranian ministry of culture with a proposal to wrap the Azadi Tower, Tehran’s most famous monument; she received no reply). She is, though, interested in pieces she can reinterpret and recontextualise, rather than simply “quote” in a postmodern way.
“I would never repeat something just for the beauty of repetition. Definitely not. But this roof piece is a real re-enactment. It is taking the same parameters of Trisha Brown’s performance: 12 dancers, all dressed in red; the movement is going from dancer number one to dancer number 12 in one direction and then from dancer number 12 to dancer number one. So we’re taking the same set- up but just by changing the location, by going from New York in the 1970s to contemporary Tehran, and then to London to this art fair, in every step the piece automatically gains different associations, different values. I am not changing anything, but still it changes. At some point, if you have two images in your head and you connect them, then something comes out that you didn’t anticipate.”
Sarah McCrory, the curator of Frieze Projects, was on the selection committee for the Emdash Award. “There were two interesting points about [Razmi’s] proposal. It was a political work without being didactic, without being too straightforward. If she had wanted to show something like an underground meeting of dissidents, something directly political, it might not have worked as well. [But] showing people dancing quite beautifully makes a much stronger point. And it had a relationship with history, with a seminal art piece from the 1970s. When it references Trisha Brown’s piece, it is a reinterpretation, rather than a plagiarism or a critique.
“As the selection process continues,” McCrory explained, “the selection committee puts together a series of questions to ask the artist: How possible is it? How dangerous is it? How much of a risk is involved in making it?”
In Razmi’s case, the answers were yes it was possible, yes it was dangerous, yes there was a lot of risk involved – including the possibility that, due to factors out of the artist’s control, the work might not be made at all.
“Whatever you commission,” McCrory said firmly, “you are putting your trust in the artist to be able to pull it off.”
This is not the first work of Razmi’s to make reference to the situation in Iran. She went there for the first time in 2005 when she was 24. She doesn’t speak the language, nor was she raised in any particular religion, but when she was growing up it was always there in the background. Her father left after the revolution in 1979. “I have this special connection to the country because in my whole childhood we never [went] there, particularly because of the political situation. So there was just a strange link to this country that you couldn’t even go to.”
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When she did go there, she went as a tourist, and made sure she stuck to the rules. “You have to dress properly, wear a headscarf, not show any cleavage, not show your legs. No, I don’t stand out.”
This seems unlikely. She is strikingly good looking; six feet tall, slender, dressed all in black – ankle boots, mini-skirt, leggings, leather jacket – with her long black hair cut into a thick fringe and hanging loose down her back. I find myself imagining how she would look in a chador.
Among these earlier works are “Trying Tackling Iran” (2005), a video piece in which dancers create seven different kinds of movements to seven different pop songs, highlighting the restrictions on public performance in Iran, and “White Wall Tehran” (2007), which she made after she was stopped in the street by Revolutionary Guards for filming them with her video camera. Instead of confiscating the camera, they pointed it at the blank white wall of their headquarters and recorded over the top of the section that showed them, erasing 27 seconds of footage but recording the ambient sound, so in the background you can hear a radio receiver, a spoon stirring a cup of coffee, music playing. It’s a particularly potent little video that makes the manner of the guards’ censorship somehow more sinister than if they had smashed the camera to bits.
Last year, she was in Tehran putting together “a kind of road movie” that involved driving a Paykan – for 30 years Iran’s most popular car, based on a 1967 model of a British Hillman Hunter – from Iran to Germany. It took a month of solid bureaucracy followed by another month of driving and filming. The final installation consisted of the car, the video of the journey (edited down to 11 hours), and 38 framed documents from the massive amount of paperwork involved. Once again she was interested in the transformation of values that occurs in the shift from one society to another: “…the journey of this everyday object in Iran to this object that has special status in Germany”. On Ebay, she said, somebody had paid €25,000 for a Paykan, and in the US a man had paid $40,000. “So it has very different connotations in Europe than in Iran.”
All these works, in a way, were preparation for the “Tehran Roof Piece”, which was only completed a week before she came to London at the end of last month. The early preparations were done on Google and Skype. Then the challenge was to find the dancers. “Officially there are no dancers in Iran,” she said. “There is no contemporary dance on stage anywhere. It’s all underground. But you can find dancers, and I had some good contacts through a friend who knows a lot of theatre people in Iran, and also the choreographer – she had some of the best contacts.”
They were able to find a rehearsal space, and gradually they put together a team of dancers. To begin with, some of them dropped out, and there were changes in the group, but eventually she put together the final 12: four male dancers and eight women. When it came to filming, some of the performers were worried that they would be identified, and Razmi was careful not to show them in close-up. Others were less concerned. “Although dancing is banned,” Razmi said, “apparently there is something allowed called ‘rhythmical movement’. One of the dancers said to me, ‘Don’t worry, we don’t call this dancing…’”
The final movements would be improvised, as they were in Brown’s piece, but the rehearsals helped the dancers get to know each other, and because they couldn’t have real-time rehearsals on the roof, they had to be completely prepared.
“We had to set up some basic rules – like don’t be too fast, and like, be large [she makes expansive gestures, opening her arms wide] because there are big distances between one dancer and the next. [Trisha Brown had required similar qualities: “Vast scale. Clear Order”.] So when we rehearsed we were just trying some movements, not even saying, ‘You are the first’ or ‘You are the 12th.’ So everyone had the same basis to work from. But the final piece was definitely improvisation, within the basic rules we had set.”
Then they had to find a location. They chose a quiet residential neighbourhood in the north of Tehran. From the rooftops, looking north, are the Alborz mountains; to the south, the city, looking like any other modern city, a mess of skyscrapers and satellite aerials, which are officially illegal and regularly torn down.
“We started on a friend’s roof,” Razmi said, “and from there made our way somehow. Even with the roofs, we had to be flexible, because people changed their minds. One day they said, yes, OK, you can use the roof, and then somehow they got afraid, and said no. We used Google Maps, but we had to be really fast and really flexible. We had to have a definite plan.”
Brown’s original piece was performed by 12 men and women, across the roofs between 53 Wooster Street and 381 Lafayette Street in 1971. The piece was performed again, in 1973, between 420 Broadway and 35 White Street, and this time it was photographed by Babette Mangolte and later transferred to video. (Some of it can be seen on YouTube, set to The Blue Nile’s 1983 “A Walk Across the Rooftops”, and also in a film narrated by curator Lydia Yee, from the exhibition Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s at the Barbican Art Gallery earlier this year.) In June, the Trisha Brown Dance Company celebrated the 40th anniversary of “Roof Piece”, performing it around the High Line, the old elevated railway line that runs down the west side of Manhattan, which has recently been made into a park. Ten (rather than the original 12) dancers improvised on a series of roofs near the southern end of the line, in Chelsea.
In 1971, Trisha Brown had only asked permission from the tenants in the building, not from the city authorities. Razmi, though, planned to film each dancer separately, and needed some kind of official sanction. “If you have 13 cameras, it definitely looked like a big thing, so we decided, OK, we should ask permission, so we said we were doing a documentary about neighbourhoods and architecture in Iran, and making a really nice story about it, so we got permission no problem at all.
“We used some construction sites, because it was easier to ask the workers if we could go up, rather than to ask private owners. So we used construction sites and ordinary roofs. I tried to use the different levels, so that you could be looking down and then up. There is really bad smog in Tehran, so the visibility is always bad. And we had to be really fast. We needed to have perfect timing, because we only had a small window of time.”
In the end it took three tries, on three separate occasions. The first time, the cameras didn’t turn up until the mid-afternoon, when it was too late to start working. The second time the man in charge of a building in which they had originally been given permission to work suddenly became suspicious and angry and threatened to call the police. So, once again, they had to stop. In fact, there couldn’t be a better trailer for Razmi’s project than the video footage of this encounter: in the background is the composed figure of a male dancer dressed in red, going gracefully through his movements, while the furious man in charge lurches in and out of the frame, in close-up, yelling into his phone. It doesn’t really need translation.
Finally, on the third take, they completed both sequences, back and forth. Razmi transferred the footage on to her computer then emailed it home.
The installation at Frieze will be the first time the film has had an audience. I wondered to what degree Razmi felt it was putting the dancers or herself at risk. If Trisha Brown’s original roof piece came to symbolise the freedom enjoyed by her community in its time, Anahita Razmi’s re-enactment suggests the opposite, highlighting the restrictions that not only dancers and artists but hundreds of thousands of Iranians have to live with.
For herself, Razmi said, if she was to be prevented from going back to Iran, “OK I can work with that situation,” but for the dancers: “I mean, we’re not shouting, we are not making any movements that suggest protest. We are relating to political issues, but not directly. We are doing it in a very poetic way.
“I definitely want to see things change there. But when I make work that relates to Iran, I always want to emphasise [that this is] an outsider’s point of view. I am raising questions, rather than saying, ‘OK this has to be like this.’ I don’t want to speak on behalf of other people who live with these restrictions every day.”
Inside Iran, very few of those people will see her work. She plans to send some copies of the finished piece to the dancers, but, “Showing it? Officially there’s no way.”
Anahita Razmi’s ‘Roof Piece Tehran’ will be exhibited at Frieze Art Fair, Regent’s Park, London, October 13-16, www.friezeartfair.com.08.10.2011 "Staged to touch a Chord", Gulf News, article by Jyoti Kalsi
Erwin Olaf has explored themes ranging from metaphysical concepts to controversial issues such as gender and sex. The Dutch photographer's work has been called daring and provocative. But he believes that if he cannot create some tension between his images and the viewers, it is empty work.
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Olaf's style is defined by elaborately staged photographs, with visual drama and emotional impact. He has won many awards, both for his independent art projects and his commercial assignments with top magazines and international brands. He made his mark on the international art scene in 1988, when he won the first prize in the Young European Photographer competition for his series, Chessmen. He has recently won the Lucie Award for his oeuvre and also the Johannes Vermeer Award 2011, the Dutch state prize for the arts.
Olaf's first solo exhibition in Dubai, titled High Tension, provides an overview of a career spanning three decades. It includes photographs from his iconic series, such as Rain, Grief and Hotel, and his work for international magazines. Weekend Review spoke to him about his work and evolution as an artist. Excerpts.
How do you find the themes for your work?
The idea could come from something I see or hear. But ultimately, my themes reflect my personality and my state of mind at that point of time. For instance, I was going through a low phase when I did Rain and Grief, which were about momentary actions and reactions. In Rain, I portrayed situations where a couple has broken up, and I tried to capture that split second before the woman realises what has been said. And Grief was about the start of the first tear of realisation. My recent series, Hotel, stems from my own experience of time spent in lonely hotel rooms during my travels around the world.
How does the idea develop into an entire series?
I work like a filmmaker to create a world of my fantasy. The abstract idea is developed into a narrative through the inputs of my set designer, my make-up artist, my costume designer and other crew. Every detail is planned. But the pictures will work only if I get the right look in the eyes of the model. So I have to create the right atmosphere in the studio and capture the right moment. Often, the spontaneous inputs by my models enhance the pictures.
How has your approach changed over the years?
I have realised that instead of creating many repetitive images, it is better to do a few iconic ones. And instead of telling the whole story, I now leave it to the viewer to fill in the details. I used to be an aggressive young man who wanted to conquer the world. Now I do not care about the opinion of others and enjoy expressing myself freely. I have made many short films, but now want to make a feature film. Also, for the first time, I am planning to move out of my studio and shoot on location in Berlin for my next series. I also want to experiment with telling many parallel stories in every photograph.
You have been accused of selling sensation because you use very good-looking models and choose provocative themes.
I used regular people in my early work but found that all the attention got focused on that aspect rather than the story I wanted to tell. Good-looking models are less of a distraction because people are used to seeing them as part of a narrative in advertisement campaigns and films. My early work was considered daring and provocative, but it only reflected the Punk Movement, the Squatters Movement and the sexual revolution happening in Amsterdam at that time. My themes still reflect contemporary life and the society I live in.
How do you feel exhibiting your works in this region?
The Western world seems boring when compared to the energy you can feel here. I am excited to be here, especially at this time, because my work is essentially about freedom. But I do not want to preach my idea of freedom. I just hope my work sparks discussion. I am keen to see how art here develops in the next decade.
What is your advice to young photographers here?
Be patient, it takes some years to become technically good. And always find time to do projects in which you can follow your heart. Be true to yourself, even if your ideas are not fashionable now. Do not imitate, but do not be afraid to take inspiration from others. You must learn from art history. I used to be obsessed with being completely different and it took me some time to learn that you must always stand on the shoulders of those who come before you.27.09.2011 "High Tension exhibition features dramatically wound-up art"
Article By Christopher Lord, THE National, UAE
A woman sits at a table looking serene with her Jackie Kennedy-Onassis hairstyle. White light streams in through thin, closed curtains behind her.
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But look closer, and she’s shielding a half-full glass of something. Look closer again and the black-strapped watch on her wrist reads quarter to 12. We’re invited to say, “It’s a bit early, don’t you think?”
The direct impact sought by war photos, reportage and advertising have become, as Erwin Olaf puts it, like being “slapped in the face”. But the scenes that this Dutch artist creates are lessons in the slowing, pacing power of detail.
Everything is staged, faked, using the same studio in Amsterdam for almost all his work. Olaf can build the fragile, mundane setting of a boardroom in 1950s America or an anonymous hotel room in Kyoto. It’s all just a matter of atmosphere and painstaking set design.
High Tension, at Dubai’s Carbon 12 gallery, is a concise overview of his work from the past seven years. In 2011, Olaf bagged the Johannes Vermeer Award – the highest for the arts in the Netherlands.
It is fitting that he would be recognised now with an award named after one of the most famous Dutch masters, as the recent evolution of his practice has been influenced so much by painting.
“I shared my studio for a long time with a figurative painter and I was very jealous,” says the artist, when we meet on the opening night of his solo show. “You have two or three layers in a painting and I wanted to know how I could achieve that.”
Earlier projects, such as Chessmen (1987) and Mature (1998) – models geared up like masochistic chess pieces and provocative images of older women pensioners, respectively – embraced the immediate impact of a powerful image. But since 2000, the artist has looked for how best to slow his photographs down. This has extended into his prolific magazine work across Europe and the US.
After an initial revulsion to photo-editing software, Olaf has since embraced it. But its use is contained. There’s none of that shiny, opaque hyperrealism here that many manipulation-heavy photographers adopt. Instead, he uses it to control the viewer’s eye that bit more. “You move them through the image. That’s very painterly, Rembrandt knew how to do it with the depth of shadow.”
Add to this the care given to set design in each work and Olaf creates a layered photograph that we instinctively read slowly, building our own narrative as we do.
Hope – The Hallway and Rain – The Boardroom, two of the strongest pieces in the Carbon 12 show, were enquiries into how best to represent a charged moment, he says.
In Hope, a man and a woman stand in an apartment block corridor. The man seems to have just turned away, his face a startled void.
“I told the actors, the girl has said to her boyfriend, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ That’s all I said. This is that split second between action and reaction. It’s one of the most important seconds that you’ll ever have.”
Olaf created Hope in 2004. “After 9/11, I felt society was caught in this moment of reaction and action. This thought led to me looking more at the United States, and I came to Norman Rockwell.” Indeed, there are traces of Rockwell’s 1950s America in the formalism of these shots. But some underlying decay, an unnerving lonely centre, has taken hold. “I realised that Rockwell was gone. Instead, we’re left with Edward Hopper,” says Olaf, referring to the isolation that each character broods over in his work. “That’s where we are now.”
High Tension offers a timeline of the artist’s recent development of ideas, from the 1950s-inspired Hope and Rain, the suburban housewife world of the 1960s in Grief (“the start of the collapse”) and through to the recent global economic crisis, represented in the Liberation series, depicting the breakdown of a marriage in the wake of financial meltdown.
“What is our future, where will we go to? There’s boredom in all this buying – how much Chanel can you wear?” Olaf explains that Liberation was shot for a French daily newspaper. He was asked to create a shoot that reflected the global crisis, and chose to use clothing to help make his point, ending the series with a disturbing image of a woman, clad in high-end fashion, walking away as her husband swings by his neck in the parlour room.
Dark stuff, indeed. Each of the images in High Tension invites us into a fishtank world of Olaf’s creation. We read them slowly, picking our way through until we come upon the disturbing kernel of story at their centre. Then, if they’re successful, we’re caught there – held over a shadowy abyss between action and a rather uneasy reaction.23.06.2011 "Setting the World o Fire"-Gulf News, article by Adrienne Harebottle
The Swiss' innate quest for self-expression and discovery, along with their diverse cultural influences, has given rise to a growing band of contemporary artists.
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Swiss art and culture go back hundreds of years and are characterised by diversity, says Kurt Blum, General Manager, Swiss Art Gate UAE, a platform through which cultural and artistic projects between Switzerland and the UAE are organised. The multilingualism of the country also adds to this diversity, he says, as Switzerland has four languages being German, French, Italian and Romansh.
"Historically, traditional Swiss art is based on architectural and interior design. However, today we have a very diversified arts and culture scene, a consequence of the multicultural aspect of the country," says Blum. "Switzerland is not only chocolate, cheese, Roger Federer, Martina Hingis and all the famous Swiss watch brands. We also offer some of the finest visual and performing artists and musicians."
Tradition is important to the Swiss but they are very receptive to unconventional forms of expression, says Blum, adding that the history of research in Swiss culture shows they like to investigate and discover new things. "The Swiss are open-minded when it comes to a fusion of different cross-cultural events, or contemporary art. The Swiss are researchers and creative people," he says.
Reflecting this diversity and out-of-the-box creativity are the Swiss artists profiled in this piece. Having different backgrounds and working in various artistic fields, each has made a significant contribution to art around the world.
Name: Olaf Breuning
Region: Born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, in 1970
Discipline and work: Breuning, who currently lives and works in New York, was formally trained in photography, but also creates installations, sculptures, films and drawings. While his work is varied, he uses vivid colour, repetition, humour and often incorporates organic forms and people in his oft-satirical creations. Despite an eclectic collection and working across numerous fields, there is a uniformity of boldness, which makes his work identifiably Breuning: a beautiful and provoking collaboration of sublimity and absurdity.
The artist's work has been shown in countless museums and exhibitions, both solo and group, around the world.08.06.2011 Tobias Lehner-solo exhibition "Friktion", gallery SCQ
web link08.06.2011 Birgit Graschopf in 967 arte
web link04.05.2011 Andre Butzer in Frieze Magazine
web link26.04.2011 Katherine Bernhardt in Haute Living
web link25.04.2011 Katherine Bernhardt in Satellite Voices
web link24.04.2011 Rites of Spring Passage in Gulf Today
web link05.04.2011 Carbon 12 in Flashartonline
Article by Gea Politi
web link29.03.2011 "There is no big idea"
Gulf News weekend review, by Jyoti Kalsi
web link19.03.2011 Carbon 12, Sara Rahbar, and André Butzer in FT
Article by Georgina Adams, copyright The Financial Time.
"In what is now dubbed “Art Dubai Week”, art galleries in the city staged a joint opening before the fair actually got under way, and were virtually mobbed – Carbon 12 almost sold out its show of André Butzer’s faux-naif, expressionist paintings...
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The fair attracted extraordinarily diverse buyers – one Indian-born entrepreneur, who divides his time between Biarritz in France and Oman, bought a tapestry work by the Iranian artist Sara Rahbar from Dubai’s Carbon 12 for $40,000."02.03.2011 Ralf Ziervogel in La Maison Rouge, Paris
web link02.03.2011 Ralf Ziervogel in L'agenda du golfe
web link19.02.2011 Philip Mueller in Time Out
web link29.01.2011 Sara Rahbar, Carbon 12 in Art Forum
web link10.12.2010 "Checking Out Zoom..."
web link26.11.2010 Katherine Bernhardt's work on another magazine cover.
web link06.11.2010 Sara Rahbar in Art Asia Pacific
web link06.11.2010 Ghazel on FM4 Radio/Austria
The fabulous video/performance artist Ghazel presents her work on FM4 in the frame of the exhibition "Living Across-Space of Migration", The academy of fine arts in Vienna.
web link19.10.2010 "In the End Everything Comes Back to the Body"
A conversation with Ralf Ziervogel, by Daniel Völlkze, on Deutsche Bank art mag.
web link14.10.2010 "Picture This: Icing Sugar by Ralf Ziervogel"
Article by Timur Moon, The National
web link09.10.2010 "Iranian Artist Sara Rahbar Textile Revolution"
web link26.09.2010 Carbon 12: Dubai Eye
Carbon 12's interview on Dubai Eye
web link16.09.2010 Lens Crafter- by Kevin Jones
Blue Skie'd and Clear review, in Chinartree
web link26.06.2010 Carbon 12 in THE National "Picture Perfect-Dubai's artistic Summer", by Ed Lake
Carbon 12’s new show, Blue Skie’d and Clear, approaches photography from more of an aesthete’s perspective. Maria Maeser pastes photos of the night sky on light boxes and then picks out unlikely constellations – a donkey, a large-headed child – using the kind of wobbly, pixilated line familiar from experiments with MS Paint.
Jamie Baldridge bridges the distances between Edwardian portraiture, early surrealist photography and contemporary magazine work with his mystifying scenes. In one, a girl looks to the hole in the roof through which a metal safe has fallen, crushing her pram. In another, a girl in a lacy gown sits in a chair by an open window. An arrow pierces her heart, wooden ladders are propped up around her on all sides as though she were a fortress under siege, and she gazes glumly off the edge of the picture.
There’s a kind of high silliness at work here, but the most striking piece in the show is altogether cooler in temperament. Vienna Rain is a lenticular print from the Bulgarian photographer Maximilian Pramatarov. Lenticular prints are the ones that come with a finely corrugated plastic lens over them so that when you move, the image springs into motion or appears in three dimensions.
In a sense, this particular one does both: it’s a view of one huge mansion block taken through the high window across the street. As you walk past it the image refocuses between the drizzly view and the raindrops on the near-side windowpane, mimicking the back and forth movement of the eye and creating a sense of the intervening space that, unlike a few of the 3D movies currently making the rounds, actually feels like something – a cold, sad distance, at once impersonal and strangely comforting.
web link19.06.2010 Sara Rahbar in Guernica Magazine, "Fighting Flags"
web link06.06.2010 Carbon 12 in "The National"
By Ed Lake.
Meanwhile, Carbon 12’s Blue Skie’d and Clear, to judge from the promotional shots on its website, also seems to do a creditable job at capturing the urban spirit. Birgit Graschopf, Yuko Ichikawa, Maria Maeser, Jamie Baldridge, Maximillian Pramatarov and Hazem Mahdy are the cosmopolitan crew of photographers whose work is on display. Graschopf has a bird’s-eye shot of pairs of figures along a deserted street. The image packs a Last Year at Marienbad charge of metaphysical uncanniness, which is surely a major feature of any trip into town, says the chap from West Sussex. And Pramatarov has a shot of vast Soviet-style mansion blocks seen through the rain on a high window. Even just looking at it on my scuzzy monitor, it’s producing a sense of inexpressible, though oddly pleasant, desolation. One can only imagine what the full effect is like.
web link26.05.2010 Carbon 12 in "The National"
web link26.05.2010 Gallerists Nadine Knotzer and Kourosh Nouri in "Die Presse"
web link26.05.2010 Florian Hafele in "Kunstforum"
web link26.05.2010 Carbon 12 during Vienna fair in "Kleine Zeitung"
web link06.05.2010 Sara Rahbar in Time Out
web link07.04.2010 Tobias Lehner's exhibition at Union Gallery, UK
web link20.03.2010 Katherine Bernhardt Solo Exhibition "Lila dit Ca"
Loft 19
web link
C/O Suzanne Tarasieve13.03.2010 Sara Rahbar in FT
web link06.03.2010 Thierry Feuz Exhibition "Flowers" in Laleh June Gallery
Opening on Tuesday 11th of March, in Basel/CH.
web link04.03.2010 "Lehner's Illusion", Time out Dubai
Article by Nyree Barrett
web link24.02.2010 Sara Rahbar on Fluxcore Magazine
web link28.01.2010 Tobias Lehner's "Pluton" on Artslant
web link26.01.2010 Philip Mueller exhibition "Energie aus der Maske" (Energie from the mask)
The young, yet talented, Philip Mueller, will be opening his solo exhibition on the 10th of Feb. 2010 in Kunstraum Praterstraße 15, 1020, Vienna at 19:00. The show will go on till the 21st of Feb. 2010.
22.01.2010 "A New wave of Art", The National
web link06.01.2010 Farzan Sadjadi's exhibition on ARTSLANT
web link06.01.2010 Carbon 12 at Art Dubai
web link04.01.2010 Tor-Magnus Lundeby in THE NATIONAL
web link06.12.2009 Tor-Magnus Lundeby in Al Bayan
web link29.11.2009 "The Artist in the Machine"
Article of Tor-Magnus Lundeby's exhibition in THE NATIONAL.
web link29.10.2009 "Slightly later than planned (something about a customs strike at Lisbon airport)"
Review by Chris Lord.
web link08.10.2009 Gil Heitor Cortesao in TIME OUT
web link07.10.2009 Tobias Lehner's exhibition "Anthrax"
Do not miss Tobias Lehner's exhibition at the Gallery Kleindienst in Leipzig from the 16th of October till the 21st of november.
web link06.10.2009 "Art in Dubai", previews of October in TIME OUT, by Chris Lord
web link06.10.2009 Mario Neugebauer's exhibition in the Akademie der bildenden Künste
The talented painter Mario Neugebauer will have a solo exhibition in the prestigious university of fine arts, in Vienna, tittled "Speed".
web link03.09.2009 Carbon 12 on "DUBAI MADAME"
web link21.08.2009 The magnificent seven, by Emily Meredith
Carbon 12's "seven Positions" in Khaleej Times
web link20.08.2009 Carbon 12 on Twitter
Art lovers can follow now Carbon 12's adventures on TWITTER.
Join us at Carbon12artgallery on Twitter.20.08.2009 Gil Heitor Cortesao's "Memories of the Future"
ArtSlant
web link10.08.2009 Thierry Feuz on YOUTUBE
web link20.07.2009 THE NATIONAL, "Summer of Culture", by Gemma Champ
web link06.07.2009 Sara Rahbar participates in "Iran Inside Out", Chelsea Art Museum New York
web link17.06.2009 "Seven Positions" in Al Bayan
web link16.06.2009 "UAE's Oneness" By Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, in Khaleej Times
web link15.06.2009 "Seven Positions" in TIME OUT
web link09.06.2009 "An Eye for Emerging Artists", THE NATIONAL
By Katie Boucher
web link04.06.2009 Carbon 12 Blog
web link03.06.2009 Bernhard Buhmann on "L'agenda"
web link31.05.2009 "Seven Positions" on Artslant
web link18.05.2009 Bernhard Buhmann's exhibition in "Al Bayan"
web link09.05.2009 Bernhard Buhmann on "Austrian National Radio Oe1"
web link07.05.2009 "Traditions and New Methods", Bernhard Buhmann in THE NATIONAL
By Emily Baxter
web link06.05.2009 Sara Rahbar on "Wikipedia"
web link05.05.2009 Bernhard Buhmann in "Dubai Lime"
web link30.04.2009 Sara Rahbar's art work at Christie's
On the 29th of April, Sara Rahbar textiles/mixed-media "Flag", executed in 2006, reached a record of $ 40,000, at Christie's sales in Dubai.
web link20.04.2009 "One of Dubai's Best galleries..." Wknd by Khaleedj Times
Get cultural tonight and head down to Carbon 12, one of Dubai’s best galleries, for a glimpse at New York-based Katherine Bernhardt’s Wonder Woman exhibition. As much statements as paintings, Bernhardt’s bold work take a wry look at the female image in today’s obessive world. Thought provoking, brilliant and beautiful, this is one exhibition not to be missed.
web link06.04.2009 "Brushes with Fame", article by Ed Lake in THE NATIONAL
web link05.04.2009 Carbon 12 on Saatchi Gallery
web link31.03.2009 Katherine Bernhardt in GULFNEWS
"CAPTURING BEAUTY"
web link30.03.2009 "Girls, girls, girls", Katherine Bernhardt in Week-end magazine of the National
web link29.03.2009 "The Rhythms of Celebrity", Katherine Bernhardt in The National
web link24.03.2009 Katherine Bernhardt's "Wonder Women" in Dubai Lime
web link23.03.2009 Gallery Hopping- The New York Times
web link18.03.2009 Austrian lacquer master Thierry Feuz tells Time Out about his world and work to date…
web link17.03.2009 Katherine Bernhardt's "Wonder Women" on ArtSlant
web link14.03.2009 "Carbon 12 Goes Abstract", in Week-end Khaleej Times
web link12.03.2009 Interview with Thierry Feuz on DE51GN
web link04.03.2009 Katherine Bernhardt in "Artillery" Magazine
web link02.03.2009 Carbon 12 on Spiky Penguin
web link28.02.2009 "Hold the front page: serious new art gallery outside Al Quoz shock"
web link17.02.2009 "Art Market during Financial Crisis, London Calling"
In London 5.9 Million Pounds in total sales was realized, on the 12th and the 13th of February, at a Phillips de Pury Auction. Earlier in the same week, Christie's achieved sales of 12.7 Million Pounds on Contemporary Art Auction, after earning 63 Million Pounds on the sale of impressionist and modern works. All this on the heels of a Southeby's Auction achieving 25.3 Mllion Pounds in sales.
Impressive totals in these times of financial Crisis which begs the question: Is the Art world immune? It certainly appears to be!!!17.02.2009 Postcard from Utopia on ArtSlant
web link12.02.2009 Carbon 12 on ArtSlant
web link11.02.2009 Carbon 12 and START "5 children from Gaza-5 reasons to care"
web link11.02.2009 Carbon 12 and START "5 children from Gaza-5 reasons to care"
web link11.02.2009 Thierry feuz in "Event gossip"
web link11.02.2009 Thierry Feuz "in Dubai Lime"
web link02.02.2009 Sara Rahbar in the Independent
web link02.02.2009 Alireza Massoumi's exhibition
web link01.02.2009 Sara Rahbar in Art Radar Asia
web link01.02.2009 Sara Rahbar in Times Online
web link18.01.2009 "Talents from around the globe", The National
web link12.01.2009 Alireza Massoumi's interview on DE51GN.com
web link05.01.2009 Sara Rahbar with Carbon 12
Carbon 12 is proud to represent Sara Rahbar in the UAE. Her solo exhibition is planned for 2010.
29.12.2008 "Cavalier colour", The National
web link16.12.2008 "Canvassing ideas for 2009" Carbon 12 in 7 Days
web link16.12.2008 Carbon 12 introduces Farzan Sadjadi
web link15.12.2008 Carbon 12 has joined artfacts.net
web link10.12.2008 Alireza Massoumi in "Dubai Lime"
web link27.11.2008 Opening event "Carbon 12 in Dubai"
On the 28th of November 2008, Carbon 12 opens its doors to art lovers, for an exclusive opening event. Contact us if you are interested to join the party.
web link30.09.2008 Carbon 12 on the Art Map
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