Sorry We're Open: installation shots

Sorry, We're Open, Unit 2, London Metropolitan University. 
Installation view from the entrance with the video Fremdkorper by Katja Pratschke and Gusztav Hamos (2002, 35 mm, duration 28').

Left: Charlotte Braicegirdle, Nightgown, 2010, paint on photograph.
Right: Nathalie Guinamard, Interior 3 (Doors), 2008, collage.

Sorry, We're Open, Installation shot from the back

Dylan Shipton, Luminal, 2010, timber, damp proof, plasterboard, screws, dimensions variable

Left, from bottom then up and right: Martina Geccelli, 3 Books With Gold, 2008, Digital C-Print, Aluminium board, 50 x 60 cm; 2 Books - 1 Leaning, 2010, Digital C-Print, Aluminium board, 50 x 60 cm; 2 Boxes - Liter, 2004, Digital C-Print, Aluminium board, 50 x 60 cm. Right: view of Nathalie Guinamard's second collage (in detail below)

Nathalie Guinamard, Round Round, 2009, collage.

Sorry, We're Open: Installation shot towards the bottom

Left: Sophie Vent, Dancing on Kekule' (B-End), 2010, video.
Right: Silvia Iorio, Odyssey, 2010, 160 switches, enamel, MDF, aluminium, wood, 224 x 118,4 cm. 

Russel Charter, iwozeree17pf, 2010, window cleaner, glass.

All images: Courtesy Digby Washer, 2010.

The Bay Window Project: Luana Perilli

THE BAY WINDOW PROJECT

Six Artists in a Frame
curated by sybin

OPENING: Thursday 22 July at 7:30 pm
Until Thursday 12 August.

SybinQ Art Project
The window on Cleveland Street
London W1T 6NW

Tube: Great Portland Street
(the window is visible when Cleveland St meets Carburton St)

Information: sybin@inwind.it

The Bay Window Project continues exploring the concepts of perception and representation by using the ordinary frame of a window as a display device, disconnecting it from its normal function of a private threshold.

The second artist invited to exhibit in The Bay Window is LUANA PERILLI. 

(Born in Rome, 1981, where she currently lives and works).

Exhibiting in London for the first time, Luana’s choice of expression is focused on language, instruction for use and memory. She is interested in the concept of refrain, of breaking a sequence and therefore disconnecting the objects from their normal function, making them, according to Duchamp’s lesson, “bachelors”. Perilli uses the mediums in a spurious way, putting audio and video in relation to other forms of narrative by images. Her research started through theatre, where a compromise between the scenic illusions and the representation of reality always stands: since then, she has been looking for a relation between automatisms and their reproducibility.

For The Bay Window Project, Luana is presenting the video Sì Dolce è il Tormento, 2009 

(duration: 1’09’’. Courtesy: The Gallery Apart, Rome).

The title – So Sweet is the Torment – refers to a tune conceived by the Italian composer Monteverdi in the XVII century for a castrato voice. In a video which features objects, the castrato is perceived as the first bachelor, a human being deprived of his reproductive function and turned to a full-blown singing machine. In opposition to this, ordinary objects are shown coming to life, satisfying that little poetic childhood fantasy about the secret life of toys when the house is empty. However, these objects cannot have a life of their own: the imprint of those who inhabited the house for a temporary period of time and were then replaced by others determines their will. In a present time characterised by people’s frantic mobility, the concept of home has become transient, and houses are transformed into spaces concentrating the residual energy of different lives. The objects are then silent witnesses of desires, frustrations, hopes, dreams and little daily cruelties of the household occupants. The video spies on them behaving in a passionate and incongruent way, as to summarise in a whole act their unresolved wish of becoming human, which, according to the artist, is often imbued with cynicism. 

To respect The Bay Window’s neighborhood, the video will be shown with the sound at the opening only and will then be projected muted from 9 to 11:30 pm every day.

The Bay Window Project is kindly supported by Invite Me to Dinner

NEXT: SALVATORE MAURO in August.

The Bay Window Project: Martin Westwood

A new exciting project space is opening in Fitzrovia, but this time it's not another commercial gallery.

THE BAY WINDOW PROJECT
Six Artists in a Frame
curated by sybin


OPENING: Wednesday 9 June at 6:30 pm
Until Sunday 23 June.

SybinQ Art Project
The window on Cleveland Street
London W1T 6NW

Tube: Great Portland Street
(the window is visible when Cleveland St meets Carburton St)

Information: sybin@inwind.it

A private residence with tenants. A square bay window that overlooks the street, looking like a huge frame hanging on an anonymous building’s façade. When the curtains are open, from the street it is possible to gaze - peeping inside other people’s home and lives. Derived from its shape and meaning, the bay window has been designated as a functional place, like a white cube – to host art. This unusual, limited space (193 x 180 x 60 cm), is offered to six artists to create, one after the other, a site-specific works, which will engage with the concepts of home and gallery, private and public, gaze and voyeurism, disruption and continuity.

sybin is a young curator based in London and interested in supporting young and established artists, especially through the creation of peculiar show settings outside the so-called normal exhibition parameters. One interesting aspect about this is being able to bring art into the street, like an open-air gallery, for every passer-by to enjoy. SybinQ Art Project is a not-for-profit organisation aiming to create networks and sustainable conditions for the commissions of new artworks.

The first artist invited to exhibit in The Bay Window is MARTIN WESTWOOD
(Born in Sheffield, 1969. Lives and works in London).

Martin’s projects investigate the state of contemporary society, with a recurring focus on themes of bureaucracy, commerce, economy and corporate culture. He created complex systems of codes and symbols that incorporate and reference familiar objects – suspended ceilings, watercoolers, chequebooks, promotional balloons, invoice sheets - artificially decomposed and then reconstructed. His artworks vary in scale and format from large installations to paintings and multi-layered collages.

For The Bay Window Project, Martin is presenting Flat-field, a work which takes inspiration from the social relations we experience every day. The eye is captured by the bright background, on which different images, deprived of their three-dimensional status, are reduced or enlarged to the same size. The viewer can recognise objects, details, places and situations we are so familiar with that we experience them almost automatically. The street, the advertising signs, the private dimension of the window switching to public: everything constitutes a hierarchy of objects that the artist is trying to disassemble and analyse on the base of the Actor Network Theory (ANT) studies. Developed, among others, by Bruno Latour, ANT is a branch of Sociology trying to map relations that are at the same time material (between things) and semiotic (between concepts), and tries to understand how certain relations (networks), which imply human interaction with inanimate things, are formed and kept. If a network ceases to work, each single element in it can be examined and re-interpreted: as Latour puts it, speaking about Pandora's Box, when closed it is perceived as a box, whereas when opened the elements inside are visible. It is about communication, the messages we give and receive in the working and private dimension, the signs we interpret and how unwittingly we relate to all of it, performing our social interactions over and over again to avoid our created network to dissolve. This is the artist's aim in The Bay Window to present a flattening out of the hierarchy that organises social relations, to suggest a suspension of the performance of the social.

Part of The Bay Window Project is also the creation of The Fitzrovia Map, which will be available on line soon and highlight places of interests in the area, from the famous art galleries to the less known landmark buildings, from fancy restaurants to interesting shops.


Take a stroll with your nose up!


Next: LUANA PERILLI in July.

Behind the scenes

It is a customary complaint nowadays to say that we are continuously bombarded by images. 

This can be a valid example...

...watching TV with The Bay Window on can become quite interesting.

Peeping Toms

G: Passers by!
sy: Coming!
G: Where is the video camera?
sy: Here, here, you're laying on it!
G: Whops...
sy: ...
G: Ah. they're walking away...no, they're looking!
sy: Yeah, they are!
G: (filming)
sy: (staring)
G: (whispering) ...one is filming with a mobile phone...
sy: (whispering) Why are you whispering?
G: Don't move the curtain, they'll see you!
sy: Oh, they're going. Did they looked like they liked it?
G: ...
sy: Quiet again.
G: More people coming!
sy: Look! One saw it!
G: Yeah, but they are keeping on walking...
sy: Film it!
G: Naah, they won't stop. Trust me, I saw it several time: when they keep on walking they don't stop.
sy: (bemused) OK...but that guy is laughing.
G: Yeah, and now he's kissing his girlfriend. Another typical reaction.
sy: ???

Now, this isn't the newest antropological or social experiment: this is an ordinary evening since we started showing the video for the second Bay Window Project. We might well apply for a job as professional stalkers and start a whole new career.

Perhaps Kate Fox would be interested in hearing from us.

Wicked. A nostalgic bohemian feeling

Yesterday, Hackney Wick opened its doors, and artist's studios doors, to the other side of the world for a three-days art festival. 

For a non-English mother-tongue obsessed with grasping every nuance of words' meaning, the name of the festival is a delightful and clever language game, swinging between "cool" and "bad": wicked. Very appropriate, if you consider that, as soon as you get off the overground, in normal days you would find yourself in the middle of nothing. Instead, the industrial and unattractive buildings (which, in fact, I find fab) are studios and homes for a large community of artists.

It feels like landing in another world, which you have to explore just with the aid of the - few - tools in your possession (a map of the area highlighting the main events' location) and a good dose of interpersonal skills, especially in  matter of orientation. The territory is not hostile of course, but you do feel like an outsider and start following the other +people, who know exactly where to go, like a stalker.

The many events were just unfolding around us, we could hear some music and percussion coming from the train station exit, and we had just missed our place at the dinner/performance organised by the curatorial collective Cosmicmegabrain. I just had the time to see one of the curators rushing to the terrace in Oslo House, wearing a shiny yellow foil hat with some flowers and cherries sprouting out of it. This is what I call landing on the job. After having bumped with pleasure in the only artist I know in the area (Martin Weswood, ndr), Habda and I ventured to see the studios and some art in the making. That was when I had the bohemian attack.

Known also as the Late Bohemian Sindrome, this rare and unlikely illness strikes subjects who are particularly sensitive to large, loft-like spaces, possibly with mezzanines, where art, great second-hand furnishings and private life are equally mixed. The first symptom is that the mind starts to wonder, imagining night parties like sin and a continuous, often stimulating confront with your neighboring peers. The attack carries on with drooling, a good dose of envy, loads of mental notes like the-day-I-will-have-my-own-house-I-must-remember-this-arrangement and, finally, it quickly fades away with the very down-to-earth thought: "But there is a common loo. No shower." The bohemian feeling lingers, though. The idea of something going on which maybe won't lead to the next generation of star artists to be born, but it will certainly be a tale to remember and tell: When I was twenty, I had a studio in Hackney Wick which I transformed into a living unit. I was painting everyday and partying every night - or the other way round -, we would talk a lot about art with the others and sometimes young critics and curators would join us. We organised shows and events, made things happen and... All right, I'll come off it.  It just made me think that all the famous artists and curators we know must have started like this: with a beer, a romantic kennel and a good chat. That's what they must still be doing, actually.

Moving on, we managed not to miss Roberto Ekholm's performance The Magnetic Man inside the show La Perruque: inspired by Michel De Certeau's writings around cultural practices and relationships, the show tries to manipulate commonplaces and make them habitable, which is to say, to use your own creativity space into the rigid and framed working society.

The evening was concluded with a quick - rainy - shower and my venturing up an emergency iron ladder to go to one of the building's roof and have a glance at the city landscape. On the other side of the river, the Olympic Village is taking shape and I couldn't help but wonder what will it be of these guys once this is turned into a fashionable residential area. Below, lights were glowing from the opened spaces, with people milling around, commenting the latest works. Looking down, De Certeau sprung to mind again for his most famous writing about the practice of everyday life (1984): the city seen from above is the result of the institutionalised bodies, who organise it in a grid and try to direct the experience and gaze of the person traveling in it. Below, people continued to get lost or get rid of the map, following their instinct instead, enjoying the dérive.

Mario (a post for connoisseurs)

22 July 2010.

The Bay Window is officially turned into a light projection box. Meaning: if you happen to stroll by Cleveland street, you will bump into Luana Perilli's magnificent video.


No picture can give it justice (especially if made by me and my antediluvian camera), therefore you will need to wait that my confidence in using Final Cut increases just that tiny little bit in order to edit another video, possibly in a better way than this.

The second Bay Window Project taught me a couple of important things that other budding curators might find useful:

The first: if you are projecting a video outdoor, in London, in the month of July, check the sunset's precise time before sending the press release out. This will avoid you panicking because at 7:30 pm you can't see anything and start hoping, wishing and praying that people will arrive the usual late. Which, in fact, for once doesn't happen.

The second: no matter how big the problem is, there is always a Plan B concealed as an ingenious idea. In our case, a little monitor with the video on in the lower part of the window solved the trouble of the poor visibility and became quite performative.

Finally, the third is Mario.
Mario is the famous art critic you must know and have to have at your openings. As reserved and uncatchable as Charles Saatchi, this eminent intellectual rounds on exhibitions undisturbed and has the power to launch or demolish whoever at glance. From where his words will fall upon you, is not for you to know. If he reviews a show, no one who attended is really sure they have seen him there. Most of all, Mario is so ineffable and so incredibly famous at the same time, that there is the tendency to forget his name.

A - You know, I know that famous art critic...
B - Do you?
A - Yes, you know...he's a very famous one...you must know him! Oh God, what was his name again?
B - (encouraging) Mario?

That's it! Mario.
Mario is everywhere, and there is always a Mario for every opening. In the end, aren't we all waiting for Mario?

I would like to thank the artist, G2, my G, curator Francesca Cavallo from cosmicmegabrain, Alessia, Tati and all the others who attended the opening, making it a very nice and funny evening.