Artes Mundi's blog

Moving Drawings - An exhibition in response to Artes Mundi 4 at Oriel Davies

1 September 2010 - 10:00am - 15 October 2010 - 5:00pm

An exhibition of work by artists who have been participating in an Arts Mentoring Programme run by Celf o Gwmpas. Work was made during a visit to NMGW and workshop at the Artes Mundi 4 exhibition.

Rob Davies, Kim Gardner, Aled Hutchinson, Jenny Savage and Dean Warburton have been participating in an Arts Mentoring Programme run by Celf o Gwmpas (Arts Round About), who run high quality visual and performing arts projects across Powys, adding creativity, colour and texture to life. The programme offers the mentored artists the opportunity to discover their identity and individuality as professional exhibiting artists. Through working in a group, and with the stimulus of the studio environment, the space, availability of materials and introduction to a wide range of inspiring ideas, confidence is built.

The group visited the Artes Mundi 4 exhibition at Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales, and and took part in the accompanying education programme. Artes Mundi provides an opportunity to experience cultural expression from across the globe. The group focussed on Voyage of No Return and Liminal Crossing by Bulgarian born Ergin Çavuşoğlu and A New Silk Road by Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev. These exhibits were all films, and the group made drawings in response to what they saw.

An opening for the exhibition takes place on Wednesday 8 September, 1.30pm - 3pm in the Oriel Davies Education space.

This exhibition is a result of a collaboration between Oriel Davies and Celf o Gwmpas and has been curated by Kim Gardner.

For more information about Celf o Gwmpas, please telephone:            01597 822777      01597 822777 or email: kayte@celfogwmpas.co.uk 

'Museum of the Gaze'

By Morag Colquhoun, Artes Mundi Live Guide

My surname is Colquhoun. From early childhood on I remember spelling my name out C-O-L-Q-U-H-O-U-N and pronouncing it for people ('Cahoon'). I knew that our name signified difference that I needed to explain ('it's a Scottish name').

One of our first jobs as Artes Mundi Live Guides was to learn how to pronounce the artists' names (Adrian Paci is 'Pat-si' in Albanian - not 'Patch-i' which is Italian). I listened to a radio programme the other day about a young Turkish woman's experience of UK immigration. I knew how she would pronounce her name to the immigration official because I have learned that the 'g' is silent in Ergin Cavusoglu's surname.

One of the first things that I spotted in Fernando Bryce's artwork 'Die Welt' ('The World') was the name 'Colquhoun' on a turn of the century book cover copied in pen and ink. Was this a colonial era ancestor of mine who wrote 'The Mastery of the Pacific'?

Other things in 'Die Welt' have caught the attention of others. The map showing the Persian (Iranian) city a museum assistant was named for. The grandfather who showed his grandsons the French newspaper heading that told of British troops entering Baghdad. Only it wasn't the recent conflict. This newspaper was dated 1917 and his cousins from Dinas Powys had been there!  

Fernando Bryce has described his work as a 'museum of the gaze'. Many gazes, not just a western-centric gaze. This is true of 'Die Welt' and it is also true of Artes Mundi, this year selected by a Russian and a Turkish curator.

In Olga Chernysheva's video, 'Russian Museum', we gaze at the relation between Russian people and the paintings they gaze at. When we gaze at the artworks in Artes Mundi we bring our own experiences and we encounter more. 

When I told Chen Chieh-jen how entranced Welsh children were by his film 'Factory', he was pleased. When I told him Welsh children had said that the film had made them think he said (speaking through an interpreter): 'that is the most important thing!'

Algorithm of Survival and Hope?

by Catrin Davies, Artes Mundi Live Guide

Last Friday, year 7 pupils from Cefn Hengoed school came to the Artes Mundi exhibition.  During their workshop, we watched ‘A New Silk Road, Algorithm of Survival and Hope’, by two artists from Kyrgyzstan, Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev.  During this video we watched old trucks from the Soviet era travelling on the Silk Road from Kyrgyzstan to Western China to sell their scrap metal.  Travelling in the opposite direction are the more modern lorries from China, carrying readymade clothes to sell. 

The pupils seemed, at first a little despondent, presuming that this footage of the Silk Road was filmed several years ago.  They were shocked when I told them that the footage was actually filmed as recently as 2006.  As we watched the rhythmic process of these people working, some of the pupils stated that these sorts of jobs could be made by machines in this country.  The pupils were surprised by this more primitive way of working.  They were all in agreement that life on the Silk Road is worlds apart to their lives here in Wales, which made them question why?

Kyrgyzstan was originally a nomadic country.  As they became a part of the Soviet Union, many of the people of Kyrgyzstan were forced to settle and farm.  Today, the country is democratic.  The work here at the Artes Mundi shows how these people have adapted in order to survive and make a living.  The country doesn’t have any natural resources, and the price of importing is high.  They have reverted back to trading on the Silk Road, as they did centuries ago.  Although their lives, perhaps, seem to us like a life of hardship, one could argue that trading the scrap metal with China shows entrepreneurial qualities.  It shows these people’s resilience, and their ability to adapt with a world that is constantly changing.  Although I personally believe that the work, at times, offers a picture of hope, others disagree.  One woman that was on a guided tour thought that Gulnara and Muratbek’s video installation shows a dire situation- and thought that the black smoke puffing out of the old Soviet lorries was a good representation of this.  Despite agreeing that the videos were an interesting insight, she couldn’t see any hope in the art work at all.  We compared the video to a programme we both recently caught that followed the lives of people that scavenged and even lived on the dumps in Lagos, Nigeria. It seemed that the dump is an organized place where the most entrepreneurial of individuals can make a living.  Although it seemed like a hard life, the scavengers have their own form of democracy.  It is difficult for us to imagine what life is like for these people.  We watch their lives from the comfort of our home, or as part of a visit to a contemporary art exhibition. People will disagree whether ‘A New Silk Road, Algorithm of Survival and Hope’ offers hope or not.  What the art work does offer is an insight into the different values that people have, and the different ways these people live their lives, as the pupils of Cefn Hengoed experienced for themselves last Friday morning.

Making art in family workshops

By Catherine Stephens-Ward, Artes Mundi Live Guide

The family workshops are in full swing and are proving to be very popular with children and adults. We have been exploring the trading and manufacturing of goods through several artworks in the Artes Mundi show and making clothes out of paper. Take a look!

 

  

Half Term Art Workshops

Family workshops in National Museum Wales everyday during half term holiday. Come along for a mini Artes Mundi tour and make some amazing artworks! The family workshops are free and are suitable for all ages. They take place at 11am, 1pm and 3pm each day. Please reserve your place at the museum desk in the main hall.

There are also drop in workshops taking place today- Bank holiday Monday- in the St David's shopping centre, just off Queen Street.

Come and have some creative fun!

The Meeting of Cultures by Ruth McLees, Artes Mundi Live Guide

Artes Mundi: Arts of the World; the human condition; art from all humanity. This is what's talked about in this exhibition. Strikingly though, it's the meeting of cultures brought about by this global coming together of artists that's having a big impact on visitors to the show.

One of the most interesting things I've found as a Live Guide has been hearing the reactions of foreign visitors to the Artes Mundi exhibition. Particularly fascinating to me has been the response of UK immigrants who have come from the same countries as this year's Artes Mundi artists. Many have come to the show with no prior knowledge of what they will see and so are surprised to discover artists from their homelands showing here in Wales.

Last week I gave a tour to a group of multicultural students learning English. One of them was a young girl from Russia who became visibly emotional when she encountered Olga Chernysheva's Cactus Seller lightboxes. She was homesick, missing Moscow, and talked about visiting the Natural History Museum shown in the lightboxes as a child.

Today I gave a tour to two students, one from Colombia and the other from Mongolia, who were on a day trip to Cardiff. The artwork in Artes Mundi held particular resonance for them both. The Peruvian Fernando Bryce's Die Welt struck a chord with the Colombian because it was the first time she'd seen South American artwork recognised in the UK. From Kyrgyzstan, Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev's film A New Silk Road was meaningful to the Mongolian because the practice of selling scrap metal to China was something regularly done in her country to fuel its economy.

Both students were particularly touched by Chen Chieh-jen's film Empire's Borders. This film speaks about the difficulty Taiwanese people have when applying for a visa to travel to the USA. The girls had had similar experiences themselves when trying to get visas to study in the UK. They talked about the frustration felt by people from poorer nations who find it almost impossible to obtain visas to travel to wealthier countries such as the USA and UK, and their anger that dishonest illegal immigrants had given all immigrants a bad name.

Artes Mundi has provided a wealth of rich experiences for so many people.The girls responded positively to the show and left with smiles on their faces: recognition of their homelands and issues close to their hearts made them feel welcome here in Wales and keen to return in the future.

As the exhibition draws to a close it's legacies such as these that we must try to remember. Artes Mundi 4 has achieved true globalisation through the joining of cultures which has enabled visitors from all over the world to feel at home here in Wales. In turn I hope there will be a global response, with countries from all over the world opening their arms and extending invitations to Wales. The human being is a curious animal, always searching for new things. I think Artes Mundi is so important for it feeds our curiosity. It shows us that globalisation should not be about trying to make us all the same: the differences between people are vital and make the world into the exciting place that it is. Globalisation should be about celebrating differences and through this drawing all people together. Artes Mundi has opened our minds so we can recognise we all belong to one people, one humanity.

The day of the prize awarding

By Catherine Stephens-Ward, Artes Mundi Live Guide

When I arrived at the Museum the morning of the prize award, it was clear that this was no ordinary day. Equipment was being unloaded from lorries outside the Museum steps and taken inside, and there were lots of people bustling around looking busy. Preparations were underway to transform the main hall, the setting for tonight’s special ceremony. When I got inside to start my day, I had a phone call from Artes Mundi asking whether I could return home to pick up a folder that I had borrowed on Yael Bartana and within minutes a taxi was outside to collect me. I rather enjoyed this dash across town, as it added to the excitement of the day. Once I had retrieved the folder, it was passed to the judging panel that had congregated together not far from the Museum to begin making their decision.

In the galleries a workshop was underway. The class of school children were looking at Fernando Bryce’s work when they became momentarily distracted by the artist himself who just happened to be in the same room. It was a special moment. As news spread that other artist’s were in the building, it wasn’t long before I caught a glimpse of Chen Chieh- jen and Muratbek Djumaliev passing through the galleries. There were lots of other people too, all moving around purposefully.

In another part of the Museum a symposium was taking place, which the artist’s spoke at along with curators and other international artists. I attended the afternoon session where I managed to speak to Fernando for the first time. Although I didn’t have much time with him, I did learn more about his copying technique, and discovered that he uses a light box!

By 5.30pm guests started arriving for the big event. I took a group of very important looking people around the exhibition, dressed up in their fineries. Moments later Carwyn Jones, First Minister for Wales arrived and I took him around along with Councillor Nigel Howells. With the tours completed, it was time to join the rest of the party downstairs. The Museum’s architecture provided a spectacular backdrop to the ceremony, creating a special atmosphere. After the announcement that Yael Bartana had won the Artes Mundi prize, the celebrations began. Guests were treated to a three-course meal, wine and good talk!

Photo- The Live Guides with Williams Wilkins, Chairman of Artes Mundi

A Contunued Currency

By Katherine Bujalska, Artes Mundi Live Guide

Yesterday the newest commission for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square was unveiled. The piece ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ is by the Anglo-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare and contains a replica of HMS Victory, the flagship of Nelson’s fleet in the battle of Trafalgar.

Shonibare’s ship has 37 sails all made from fabrics which appear richly patterned in typically African designs. In fact, when the history of this fabric is unravelled, we learn that these ‘African’ styles actually came from Indonesian batik designs which the Dutch took, mass produced, and sold on in the West of Africa. This work provides a beautiful, visual way to think about the complex dynamics surrounding the expansion of the European Territories during the colonialist era, and the ongoing legacy.

I can’t help drawing a connecting line between this piece and Fernando Bryce’s ‘Die Welt’. Both artists are attempting to undo the suppositions and pre-formed ideas we have about historical events, and at the same time show the relevance of those historical events to our contemporary world. The diverse range of interlinked subjects in ‘Die Welt’ mean that almost everyone I have met in the exhibition can make a personal connection with one of them. I hope this echoes the diverse range of people living in, or visiting Cardiff. ‘Die Welt’s role in this has been to remind us to notice the details in the interlaced history that we all share, which has made up those complex, diverse relationships.

I was really excited when I heard the announcement about Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ last night on the radio. When things or ideas are important I notice that they keep coming up to the surface and demanding attention. It may be that I am more aware now, of the ideas and themes of this years Artes Mundi existing outside of the Galleries, but that they are being echoed by Artists elsewhere, gives continued currency.

Bare feet and shattered mirror

By Morag Colquhoun, Artes Mundi Live Guide

A pair of bare feet hang in a tree at a certain point in Adrian Paci's film, Per Speculum.

When I first saw this, I found it unsettling. It reminded me of a newspaper image from (I think) the Bosnian conflict: the feet of a young woman who had (presumably) hung herself in a tree.

Other viewers have been troubled by the hanging feet. One woman rushed to move her grandchildren away from the film. She did not know what was going to happen but she was worried that they were about to be exposed to something awful.

If she had stayed, she would have seen that the hanging feet merely belonged to a child sitting in the leafy branches of an English parkland tree. In the film, several children are sitting in the tree and using broken pieces of mirror to reflect sunlight towards the viewer.

Earlier in the film, we gradually become aware that the children standing before us are not 'real'. As the camera moves backwards, we realise that we are watching the children's reflection in a large mirror. One of the children, a boy, takes a catapult out of his pocket and shatters the mirror.

Suddenly we are aware of a double illusion: the mirror's reflection and the illusion of film.

In the later scene when the children use the broken mirror to reflect the sun's rays, the choice of 35mm film rather than video helps us to remember that the light in our eyes is not actual sunlight but the cinematic illusion of projected light. In the darkened room of the gallery, the projector stands in for the sun. The noisy whirring of the projector and the lines and specks on the degraded film help to break the illusion.

In Per Speculum, the children play in and with the growth and energies of nature but their actions and their ambiguous expressions disrupt a simple reading of the artwork.

Magical: unsettling.

Natural: artifical.

Redemptive: illusionary.

Paci's film is laden with such ambiguity and the effect is both beautiful and powerful.

Watching the Survival of a People by Ruth McLees, Artes Mundi Live Guide

At a window cut through a blank wall sits a middle aged woman. Hands clasped on the desk in front of her, she sits against a backdrop of winter fur coats, waiting for museum visitors to discard or reclaim their possessions. She is the cloakroom attendant inside the Moscow Natural History Museum depicted by Olga Chernysheva in one of her Cactus Seller light boxes, and one of the many whose pseudo- authoritative function illustrates the hangover of a former era so frequently the subject of the Russian Chernysheva's work.

In the Cactus Seller we see muted snapshots of a museum and its exhibits collecting dust. Amongst them works an ageing man, the cactus seller, tending his mini cacti amidst stuffed snakes and birds and skeletons in cages, his only customers the school groups which now make up the majority of the museum's visitors. At first glance he seems a comic figure, existing outside of time and place. We become a voyeur, watching him unobserved; it's a little like glancing into homes through lit, uncurtained windows whilst on a night time walk.

In these light boxes, Olga shows us three eras of Russia existing side by side: First the grand museum from Imperialist times with decorative wall paintings and patterned tiled floors. This then covered by functional boarding and furniture from communist days, and now set against evidence of today's post-communist enterprise of the cactus seller struggling to make a living on his own. Are perhaps the cactus seller's care for his miniature charges and the museum's care for its dusty specimens a metaphor for life today in post-communist Russia? Are these light boxes perhaps hinting at a desire to preserve a way of life that has past?

In another of her works, the watercolour Market Stalls and Vendors Olga Chernysheva depicts stallholders alongside their stalls and goods. Here she watches and records a way of life prevalent in Moscow today, but also one that is disappearing as global corporations and brands force homogenisation upon society.

Olga Chernysheva's work captures the turbulence of Russian life in today's post-communist era. Communism provided a shared future, a security for the Russian people, the loss of which has hit the older generation particularly hard. With no social security and few ways of making a living now that small enterprises are being stamped out, these people have been set adrift and left to fend for themselves. In the west we've been taught to see the removal of the communist regime as wholly a good thing, but in actuality I don't believe it's as simple as this. During one of my lunchtime tours I was told by a lady who lived in Russia that many impoverished elderly are forced out onto street corners to sell their personal possessions, crockery, pots and blankets in a desperate attempt to make ends meet.

Since hearing this I've begun to read more onto Olga's work: the cactus seller's slightly comical enterprise has turned into an enterprising bid for survival; the market stall vendors seem increasingly without hope for Olga told us that often it's too cold for any passerby to stop and buy anything. So for me Olga's work takes on a new poignancy. It's about the survival of a people; a recording of the passing of an old way of life. I wonder how much longer this old way can continue? In this rapidly changing world how can these people manage to exist?

How Changed is Poland?

By Katherine Bujalska, Artes Mundi Live Guide

During the last few weeks, the exhibition has had quite a few young Polish visitors and where possible, I have grabbed them for a quick reflection on two of Yael Bartana’s films ‘Mary Koszmary’ and ‘Wall and Tower’. Last week I led a group of ESOL students around the show, four of whom were Polish, so had the chance to grill them in more depth.

The overriding response appeared to be that the films did not consider Poland’s current state - that it is not as it was in the 1930s when so many Jews were relocated to the Middle East. I don’t know what Poland is like today but the only real indication we could find in ‘Mary Koszmary’ were glimpses of the activities of market traders around the rim of the ‘Stadion Dziesiecioleca’. These people are mostly immigrants to the country.

Yael Bartana is not attempting to offer up a real solution to the issue of a Jewish homeland with this film. She unravels any supposition of this in part 2 of the trilogy, ‘Wall and Tower’ where the small contingent of Jews shown settling in Warsaw do so in a structure seemingly designed to prevent integration.

My own father grew up in Poland and the lasting sentiment he held of his early childhood (during the early 1940s) was that Jewish culture was synonymous with Polish culture. Mine is a second-hand account of one household within a country, but surely his was not an isolated experience? Unfortunately it is now one which cannot be directly compared to those with a contemporary experience of the newer, post-communist Poland they grew up in, but perhaps it should be. This point has been highlighted for me by these films and by the reactions of young Poles to them.

The visual references Yael Bartana employs – the recognisable Zionist film aesthetics, the red neck-tied youths, the archetypal wall and tower architecture – come from relatively recent histories. But where are the concrete visual or cultural references to the Jewish presence in Poland (or anywhere) pre-1930s? And would we recognize them anyway? I think the lack of any deeper Jewish historical reference in these films is purposeful. It reflects its absence elsewhere. I hope that people who see these films feel this neglected part of history is worth exploring.