International Pastimes: Ricardo Valentim & Tirdad Zolghadr
A project by Bosko Blagojevic and S.C. Squibb


3pm Sunday 18 MAY 2008
347 W. 36th St (betw. 8+9th ave) New York NY

Running time is aprox. 50 minutes.
A Q&A with the artists will take place after the screening.


The temptation to anthropology arrives by way of an ostensibly complicit silence. In the translations of moments, motions, forms and bodies into narratives of people and history, silence persists. The constitutive insufficiencies of this language are in this sense both catalyst and climax. Thus this transfer is not, as has been supposed, merely violent -- rather it is specifically destructive, a targeted demolition of possibility in return for a progressively impoverished self-knowing. Having built the world in glass we can see forever, only.

Ricardo Valentim's The World Must be Upside Down is a three-part film program that sets a lobotomized anthropology loose on a normalizing, amnesiac culture. Comprised of two films authored by the artist that function like raw documentary film footage, and a third found film, the program sets in motion certain frictions between a displaced strategy of representation and its subjects.

Tirdad Zolghadr's Tropical Modernism is a short video about the fate of the Iranian Left in the wake of the 1979 revolution. Told by Dr. G Rahati, a member of the Iranian Leftist intelligentsia, the narrative is assembled solely from video footage shot by the subject himself. This method, championed by certain anthropological filmmakers working in Africa, is used by Zolghadr to elliptically trouble the nature of his own investigation.


Ricardo Valentim (born in 1978 in Loulé, Portugal, currently living and working in New York) received his undergraduate degree in anthropology at the Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias, Lisbon, and his M.F.A. in visual art at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His exhibitions include Film Festival at e-flux at unitednationsplaza, New York (2006), Contrabando curated by Carolina Grau at Luísa Strina Gallery, São Paulo (2006) and Art Statements at ArtBasel38, Basel (2007). Valentim has recently started a new series of works comprised of lectures including Growth and Culture at Galeria Pedro Cera, Lisbon (2008) and is producing a new project for Manifesta7, Trentino Alto Adige, Italy.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a freelance writer and curator based in Berlin. He has curated events in a wide range of venues, writes regularly for frieze magazine and other publications, and is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine. Zolghadr is also a founding member of the Shahrzad Art & Design collective, the co-director of several documentary films, and has published his first novel "Softcore" with Telegram Books London (now available in German and Italian). He is currently teaching at the Centre for Curatorial Studies, Bard College NY, and curating the long term project "Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie" with Nav Haq.

writings

Couple new writings

On Tino Sehgal at Marian Goodman

On the New Museum

links, re-scheduling etc.

Next Practical Theater will be in 2008.

Review of Thomas Demand up at Artcal.

Happy Holidays

Pictures, Links, Updates

Halloween Horror!

Pictures up of our Halloween Practical Theater over at the site.

It was a great time.

Our next one is scheduled for December 16, stay tuned for details.

Also, I've a review of Pocket Utopia's Lawrence Weiner Salon up over at Artcal.

last and least

Look under W...

Reviews, News etc.

I've got a piece up over at the Artcal Zine about the Jillian McDonald show at Moti Hasson.

Also, the latest practical theater went very well, pictures should be up soon.

Halloween Horror - This Sunday!

Come see. Part of the practical theater series.

Sunday October 21, 2007 8-10pm prompt
Ignivomous presents: Halloween Horror
a Screen++ event
as part of the Practical Theater Series
@ Abingdon Theater Arts Complex
312 West 36th Street, in Manhattan NY
$FREE event (like the spirits though there also will be unfree spirits to
cloud your vision of the night)

Featuring -
Vampiric Videos/Frightening Films:
Skull and Blackberries + Punkin Guts - by Eric Ostrowski
the gibbering horror of howard ghormley - by Steve Daniels
Dual Ghoul - by Nate Boyce
Vile Bodies - by Inju Kaboom + Steve Schitz
Small World + Nature Channel - by Angela Perrone + Neal Snyder
Slomo Horror - by Raphael Cohen
Monster's Vertigo - by Jesse Johnson
The Isle of the Dead - by Miss Liz Wendelbo, Lisa Skogh, + Monica
Hellstrom

Phantasmal Performances:
BALTIMORE CHAINSAW CLUB, WITH TUXEDO LAUGHINGGAS (with vile video)
DPRK (Blakeula)
Yomul Yuk (6 feet under earth music)

Spooky Soundscapes:
Sons epeurants d'Halloween V1
Mudboy (Hungry Ghosts)

Apparitional Art:
Mummy, Cyclops, Fleshface, Wolfman, and 3 surprises - by Sto

artcal zine

artcal recently launched its new zine, featuring writing on art from all over, definitely worth checking out.

Halloween Horror

Over at Practical Theater, we are pleased to announce the Call for Submissions for the next chapter in the screenings series: Halloween Horror, presented by Ignivomous.

Halloween Horror will take place on October 21st, 2007 at the Abingdon Theater Arts Complex's June Havoc Theater. To submit work for consideration please see the Call for Submissions below.

Ignivomous is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that presents, nurtures, and develops new genres, art forms, media and extremes of expression.

*******Call for Entries*******

Ignivomous presents: Halloween Horror as part of the Practical Theater Series.

Ignivomous is calling for submissions of videos and films for a Halloween themed festival.

Selected entries will be screened on Sunday, October 21 at the Abingdon Theater Arts Complex's June Havoc Theater located at 312 West 36th Street in Manhattan.

Movies can be produced in any medium but submissions must be made in a digital format on a mini-DV tape or DVD.

Maximum length is 20 minutes and all entries must be received by Monday, October 8. This is a receipt deadline, not postmark deadline.

There is no entry fee.

Entries should include:
Title, Duration, Production Date and Credits, Contact Information (address, phone, email, website), and a brief (50 word maximum) Synopsis.

Mail submissions to:
Ignivomous
PO Box 1135
New York, NY 10116

Email: ignivomous[at]yahoo.com with any questions.

Halloween with Practical Theater

We've announced the next screening in the Practical Theater series.
See the site for details.

Practical Theater

Practical Theater: The Film | Video | Praxis Series at Abingdon is a developmental screening series produced by Stephen Squibb and Chris Reitz in partnership with the Abingdon Theatre Company. The mission of the series is to offer filmmakers, curators, artists, and other digital media producers a discursive space in which to screen and develop their work.

Practical Theater screenings are held irregularly on Sundays from 8 pm to roughly 9:30 or 10 pm. Admission is free and drinks are offered for a suggested donation.

The Abingdon Theatre Company is located at 312 W. 36th Street, New York, NY http://www.abingdontheatre.org/

For information about participating in the Practical Theater series please check out the website.

Irony and Ideology in Les Freres' Hell House

For the month of October, a friend of mine will spend his evenings playing a school shooter in Les Freres Courboisier‘s Hell House, – a meticulous recreation of the evangelical’s proptainment take on the traditional neighborhood Haunted House.

Replacing peeled grapes with Gay AIDS victims, and rubber masks with a cheerleader’s aborted fetus – Les Freres’ aim to turn St. Ann’s Warehouse into new kind of Halloween treat – an instance of pitch- perfect ideological voyeurism – complete with entrance literature and Christian Rock after party.

Hell House, Les Freres’ website informs us, dates back to the 1970’s when Jerry Falwell and his minions set up the first such place illustrating what awaited sinners and secular humanists in general. Apparently staged for the first time in New York City, Les Freres’ asserts that Pastor Keenan Roberts’ text will be performed, (produced, realized) in its entirety, with no winking or nudging to let us know where they stand. In fact, the Pastor himself stopped by the other day for a preview and pronounced it to be, quote, ‘good preachin’;’ throw in an a NYU student protest, and the production becomes one of the most fully realized found-object installations in recent memory.

All of which begins to beg the question of the place of negativity in a performance like Hell House. Turning to Les Freres’ mission statement, we find them identifying as “A theater that is continually conscious of the apparatus, but which simultaneously reaches beyond mere ironic deconstruction… towards a more sophisticated form of positive analysis…” I find the degradation of mere-ness interesting in this context. Certainly there are more didactic and simplistic methodologies than ironic deconstruction – however we wish to approach the terms – many of them present in Hell House itself – before, that is, it was staged in Brooklyn by a gaggle of high-gloss post-pranksters. Indeed, in speaking of the apparatus it is too simple to assert that had the Moral Majority (or some such nasty) produced House, it would be receiving a decidedly different reception. Instead, one must take into account not only Les Freres’ dexterous display of passwords but also the community of Brooklyn itself.

Brooklyn, as everybody knows, has found itself home to a rather virile and consolidated renaissance of the hip. (One could wonder at the justice of this characterization, repeated, as it is, ad nauesem and often in the place of a more sustained analysis or consideration of borough-wide happenings, but no matter) A quick walk down Bedford reveals a constituency not just comfortable with, but profoundly at home in irony. A sense of style, it would seem, is now coterminous with the negative capability to juxtapose historical bits of cultural detritus against one another in a conscious act of subject-construction or place-making. In a kind of mass paranoia, brought on, no doubt, by an over-developed politics of authenticity, we see hipsters going to greater and greater lengths to frustrate any sense of aesthetic expectation or industrial iterability. Nothing new there, except that now we have Hell House, which, in addition to being a wickedly appropriate conclusion to the appearance of the Trucker Hat, seems to have really fooled ideologues on the right (the good pastor) and the left (the adorably ignorant NYUers.) Or has it?

But that is the very delight of this particular House, isn’t it? For if Hell House works as both irony bath and ideological program than perhaps that is where it exceeds the aforementioned mere-ness of ironic and/or deconstructive intentions and becomes something more positive. For a forced reckoning follows, revealing the uncomfortable truth that there are, at least, two very distinct economies of representation operating at the present moment. And that the contrast between these takes place not on the level of content, on the yay/nay of the Pastor/Pupils, but on the level of form - insofar as it is Hell House, what it itself is, or is taken to be, as a performance, and its resulting place within either currency that formally distinguishes the competing registers of its reception. And finally, the coincidence of each strand presents Hell House as a limit case, a boundary question for both the competing dogmas of Damnation or Tolerance and the overarching ironic-backdrop-cum-zeitgeist from which the hipness gets its thick. Coexistence here is mercifully impossible, leaving Hell House to put the finest of points on an otherwise absent confrontation. Good preaching, indeed.