Tag: Iraq

Linkalicious

Voila, Play Anon’s latest batch of neat cultural and human-interest stuff found through a week of online trawling. Enjoy, and please feel free to leave your own suggestions too.

Photographer Viviane Sassen captures a gorgeous Africa
. According to PLANET magazine, the fashion photographer’s work is “(n)ot quite haute couture, not quite documentary” but is “the result of directed African pilgrimages. (They) fall into an enigmatic category incorporating personal memory, imperialism, and sensual beauty.” The exhibit, on now through April 10th at Danziger Projects in New York City, is the photographer’s first American exhibition and incorporates images from past series based around the cultures and peoples of Ghana, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Beautiful stuff.

Photographer Izabella Demavlys documents scarred lives in her latest series. The former fashion photographer took pictures of women in Pakistan who survived acid attacks in Without A Face; she also document their family time with Saira. In an interview with Eyeteeth, she explains her move away from the world of fashion, to a wider definition of beauty:

One of the reasons I shifted over from fashion photography was its conceptualized views of women. I came to a point where I couldn’t work in that environment anymore….nor did my work change perceptions, behaviors, or engage the viewer in any issues. I simply fueled the fashion world with more images of young women who would represent what I believe is a distorted idea of beauty.

It’s so encouraging to see Demavlys actually living the old adage, of being the change she wants to see in the world. She has a real artist’s eye for the female face, combined with an unerring love for her subjects. Inspiring.

Zimbabwean artist Owen Maseko has been arrested. His crime? Daring to question the government in his latest exhibition of graffiti work, 3D installations, and paintings. Artist Voti Thebe, who is also the director of the National Gallery where Maseko exhibited his work, was also arrested. Maseko’s own website is here. I’m angry and disappointed this didn’t make bigger news, or garner outrage from fellow artists in North America; Maseko and Thebe are both hugely talented and they truly deserve every bit of support here.

Photographer Matthias Heiderich captures a colourful Berlin. Despite rising rents and a rapidly homogenizing “underground” culture, I’m still sensing the weird, wonderful, experimental Berlin of old through Heiderich’s beautiful shots contained in his series, Color Berlin. Anyone else?

A moving collection of photographs captures seven years of war in Iraq. March 19th marked the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq; the Denver Post has an incredible compilation of photos that are tragic, heartening, funny, sad, infuriating, inspiring, and will, frankly, give you a whole new appreciation of the art of photojournalism, and the resiliency of those who do it.

English artist Antony Gormley gets spacey in his latest New York exhibit. Gormley’s bio describes his work as “a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation” and the exhibit, Breathing Room II (running at the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York City through May 1st) takes those notions and uses you, the viewer, as a prime subject. Heady, fascinating, and ultimately revealing about the comfy, pre-conceived notions we hold about space and time.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is featuring the concept of time too. Running through August 1st in Toronto, Sculpture as Time: Major Works. New Acquisitions features a bevvy of international artists’ works including that of Tino Sehgal, whose last exhibit at the Guggenheim caused a stir about the role of performance art in the 21st century. Prepare to re-think ideas and preciously-held beliefs. In other words, you may get uncomfortable -which is sometime a good thing. Right?

Loopy (pun unintended) Frenchman Sebastien Tellier has a cheeky (pun intended) new video out to commemorate the tenth anniversary of stylish French music label Recordmakers. This video really makes me want to pick up line drawing again. Surreal, funny, sexy… I see Bunuel smiling at this one. Nice tune too.

Man writes Shakespeare anagrams, s=l=o=w=l=y. No, it isn’t a joke. K. Silem Mohammad, a published poet and professor, is using a painfully meticulous process based around anagrams whereby he’ll render all 144 of the Bard’s sonnets into new expressions of poetry. So far, he’s finished 68. I like that he’s into both traditional, metered poetry, as well as the “collage” approach. Re-defining the definitions is what keeps art -and life -interesting.

This week: Posts on Hot Docs, Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… , the latest Daniel Lanois video, and more food features and recipes. Happy last-week-of-March!

 

A Dublin Tale

There are many memories around St. Patrick’s Day for me.

I recall parties thrown by Irish friends, where the adults drank whiskey and us kids got milk with mint syrup. I remember more debauched celebrations in university that involved continual tar-and-malt-coloured libations through the day (and into night). In 2003, I met my mother at an Irish pub. She made the black remark that, “we’d better get good and drunk; there’s going to be a pile of dead people tomorrow.” The second Iraq war was on the cusp of starting; that sore festering pimple left the pallor of St. Pat’s particularly scarred, especially since pub patrons were taking sips between quick, nervous glances at the telly, as if CNN was the band-aid one could put on the bruised complexion of the world. Of course, my mother was right: three days later, we awakened to news of bombs, rockets, blood and screaming. And plenty of speeches and chest-thumping. Drinking didn’t make it that much better but the communal experience of being in a pub helped immeasurably.

St. Pat’s also has a personal dimension for me: today marks the day that, in 2007, I moved from a bittersweet, happy/sad life in Stratford, Ontario. I toasted my new circumstances that night, with dirty hands and sore arms, in a newly-painted room with a gleaming hardwood floor. The future was a huge question mark yawning forth with fangs and tongue flicking. Everything was new and old at the same time. “Woe to me,” I thought between bouts of self-pity, “if I wound up nothing but the undigested afterthought of a Beelzebub offering sin and redemption one foul swoop.” I still can’t figure out if I’m cud or steak, but one thing’s clear: that painful St. Pat’s made me stronger.

Before the fortifying challenges of adulthood however, I remember another St. Patrick’s Day. I was living in Dublin (yes, Ireland). I was in my early twenties, and my definitions of love, worth, security, friendship, play -hell, even art -had been turned upside down in the six months I’d been there. After weeks of gloom and wet, the dampness so keen it stained the walls of our ancient flat and made wearing three layers de rigeur, St. Pat’s was bright, sunny, and mild. Joyful crowds lined O’Connell Street: apple-cheeked grannies, sozzled students, North African immigrants, people from the numerous outlying suburbs, all enjoying a day off. Everyone was smiling, even the Gardai, in their uniforms, with buttons eye-searingly shiny casting rings of light along the cracked cement.

I’d stood on the thick concrete rail of the O’Connell Street Bridge weeks before, a friend holding a leg each, imploring me to “hurry up!” as I happily, manically snapped pictures of the buildings and houses cupping the Liffey like a cooing grey dove. Cold winds had whipped me to and fro, as hands gripped my ankles, then pant legs, and then the inevitable comment of “you’re insaaane!” floated through the rain-soaked air, chiming in harmony with the metallic ca-chunks of the camera lens. I’d gone to Dublin because, as a first-time move-out, I thought it would be easier to negotiate than the busy, buzzy shock of Gotham-like London; I was also in love with words, and had been intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually sustained by the likes of Yeats, Heaney, Joyce, Beckett, Behan and O’Casey for years. It’s no accident I wound up living mere blocks from the Dublin Writers Museum, the Gate Theatre -and the GPO.

As I stood that day in Dublin slowly inhaling the joy, the sunshine, and riotous celebration, there flashed a pang of sadness in my chest -that familiar, oh-so-Irish sense of doom, drama, and joy, melded together. I was already making plans to move to London. I didn’t know what the future held. I wasn’t even sure why I was leaving. And then I saw it: a float, featuring players from the popular television series Father Ted. I’d come to adore the show before I’d moved, thanks to PBS airings, and living in Dublin cemented my adoration. It was a ringing success in Ireland for simple reasons: the gentle mocking of the Church, the ironic winks to tradition, the celebration of community and friendship. Pauline McLynn, who played Mrs. Doyle, and Ardal O’Hanlon, who played Father Dougal, were on the float, and were greeted with manic waves and cheers. But their appearance was tinged with sadness: their co-star Dermot Morgan (who played the title role) had died very suddenly the previous year.

I came out of a darkened pub to blinding sunshine later that day, feeling overwhelmingly sad yet happily content, all at once.

“Moving?!” an Irish co-worker and friend had exclaimed, “you’re moving? Why??”

Bittersweet. Good and bad. Yin and yang. Stout and whiskey. That’s Ireland. That was my life there. And Dublin gave me the greatest St. Patrick’s day ever.

Father Ted – Lingerie

Just ‘Cause

A few items of interest presented themselves today.

The first is a fantastic piece courtesy of the New York Times’ video site detailing a new theatre piece that involves the use of mobile phones and computers. I confess, I initially had a few doubts about this, but seeing the participants’ reactions, thinking about the intimacy being created (especially via modern technology), well… I’m a believer. Check it out.

Still with the Times is a video covering the recent art show in Baghdad called The Art Of Reinvention (along with a written article). Fascinating for the way politics is so deeply interwoven with art -art’s taken on a whole different significance for the people of Iraq. To quote the article,

“Isn’t it pessimistic?” a person in the crowd of visitors asked the exhibition’s curator, Asad al-Sagheer, as he described an unsettling composition of death masks, painted in thick strokes of red and blue. The artist, Halim Qassim, found inspiration in Baghdad’s central morgue, near his home in Babalmuabhm, a place once overflowing with corpses.

“He thinks there’s beauty in the faces,” Mr. Sagheer said, “even after they’ve been killed.”

Closer to home, people are getting the role arts and culture plays in daily life. Apparently the National Endowment for the Arts is getting additional funding as part of President Obama’s stimulus package, and artist Chuck Close thinks there’s no better time than tough times -now -to be an artist, despite his opinion that the Depression didn’t produce especially good art.

“When we’ve had major times of financial distress in this country.. .a lot of people argue that some of the best work was made. I don’t think it was America’s greatest hour; art… the best period for me in American art was the 50s and early 60s… That could be seen as a time when America opened its arms to … immigrants, and we became a beacon as a free and open society, and attracted some of the best and brightest from all over the world.”

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