Artwork: paste-up by @murmurestreet
For anyone feeling like the Christmas spirit is a no-go-zone—too stressed, bummed out, snowed under, shopped out, tanked out—whatever, here are some beautiful words from Leonard Cohen that cut to the heart of the matter:
“We are so lightly here. It is in love we are made. It is in love we disappear.” (@_nitch)
Artwork: by Levalet, Paris
Awesome :) :)
Great art installation by eL Seed in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. Initially he wanted to create a bridge-like sculpture rising about 20 metres, based on the idea of unity, peace and mutual respect. But due to security issues, this couldn’t be realized, so the result is this laser-cut horizontal artwork at the fence of the DMZ.
Describing the project, eL Seed wrote:
“Bridges are never built from one side. It involves taking a step forward from both sides. I proposed a bridge that would begin in South Korea and extend to the mid-point a gesture of solidarity. The project will remain unfinished until another art piece is installed in North Korea, thus making it the ultimate symbol of unification. 'The Bridge' feeds the memories of the older generations with the souvenir of one united country, it stands as a reminder for the younger generations that there is a shared culture, language, and traditions and that art can bring people, culture and generations together beyond political conflict.”
The artwork translates the words of a poem, via eL Seed's “calligraffiti”, by Kim Sowol, a North Korean poet who passed away before the country was divided:
You may remember, unable to forget:
yet live a lifetime, remember or forget,
For you will have a day when you will come to forget.
You may remember, unable to forget:
Let your years flow by, remember or forget,
For once in a while, you will forget.
On the other hand it may be:
How could you forget
What you can never forget?
Artwork: eL Seed, The Bridge, 2017 (photo: @t.jchoe)
Artqoek: Wang Gongxin, The Sky of Beijing, 2017 Guggenheim, New York
I recently came across this video installation by Chinese artist, Wang Gongxin. It’s showing at the Guggenheim NY: Sky of Beijing—Digging a Hole in New York, 2017.
The genesis of this piece was a mirror installation created by Gongxin in 1995. After living in New York for nearly 12 years, Gongxin returned to China and created a video installation in the floor of his courtyard house. He dug a hole, 3 meters deep, and placed a video monitor at the bottom. It showed the sky in Brooklyn and was aptly named, The Sky of Brooklyn. There was also sound featured, a brief dialogue: “What are you looking at?” and then, “It’s nothing. Just the sky.”
Both pieces play on the idea of the remote distance between the two countries; the expression “digging a hole to China”, as the only direct (and impossible) way to get there, and the disparate cultures Gongxin experienced and its impact on identity. Yet, it’s also an eloquent meditation that despite borders, distance and differences, we all live under the same sky.
Artwork: wall mural by millo, Sound of You, Shanghai, 2017
I've been meaning to post this for a while. A wonderful wall mural by millo in Shanghai for the Murmur project. It's called Sound of You—a poetic work about longing, dreams, nature and time. Check out millo's IG for the gorgeous companion piece, Twist of Fate (@_millo_).
Image: @33thirdmedia
Hilarious :)
There are books so fantastical you just want them to be real.
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities is such a book.
It’s a story of Marco Polo recounting his many and varied travels to Kublai Khan. After each journey, Kublai Khan asks Marco Polo to describe the cities he has been to. And so it goes, the explorer gives the conqueror a vision of a world he has not seen, and most likely, never will. For each city is wondrous and impossible, yet Marco Polo is only ever describing one: the city of his birth, Venice, Italy.
The story is woven with memory, desire, dreams, longing, and the constancy of change in trying to capture what is closest to our hearts.
Here’s a tantalizing sample of an exchange between Polo and Khan:
“I shall tell you what I dreamed last night,’ he says to Marco. ‘In the midst of a flat and yellow land, dotted with meteorites and erratic boulders, I saw from a distance the spires of a city rise, slender pinnacles, made in such a way that the moon in her journey can rest now on one, now on another, or sway from the cables of the cranes.’
And Polo says: ‘The city of your dreams is Lalage. Its inhabitants arranged these invitations to rest in the night sky so that the moon would grant everything in the city the power to grow and grow endlessly.’
‘There is something you do not know,’ the Khan adds. ‘The grateful moon has granted the city of Lalage a rarer privilege: to grow in lightness.”
Photo: Recording 'Kind of Blue' l-r: John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis and Bill Evans
Chilling out with Miles Davis and my all-time favourite recording of his, Kind of Blue. Here's Blue in Green—a classic and truly beautiful.
Artwork: wall mural by Seth, Wynwood Walls, 2017 (photo by John Parra)
Here's the latest work by SETH (@seth_globepainter) for Wynwood Walls as part of the 2017 Art Basel Collection in Miami. The theme for all artists participating was 'humanKIND'. Fantastic as usual.
Love this! A riveting glimpse at an ocean photographer's passion for what he does, and what it means to live his life capturing the sea with his lens. The sheer power of the ocean and beauty of this isolated stretch of Irish coastline, accompanies a poetic narrative that is a meditation on this rarely considered art form. Directed by Mickey Smith and produced by Helen Hayden, Astray Films.
Artwork: Pamela Rosenkrantz's, Alien Blue Window, 2017
Kind of drowning in words—writing, editing...need an escape! This popped up on my IG feed, and since my favourite colour is blue, it was a bit of a magnet. A cross between Yves Klein and James Turrell—Pamela Rosenkrantz's, Alien Blue Window, 2017 (@artbasel).
Cool title. And pretty tempting to walk through it—or dive into it—to see what's on the other side.
Awesome portal!
Water, water everywhere at the moment. It's been a squally, drenched few days. Trying to get into a writing headspace, listening to Radiohead, and a fave from The King of Limbs—Bloom.
Ever had that feeling of being at the edge of the world?
Obviously not literally, but a sensation, feeling that if you stepped off the place you were standing, you’d be heading into an unknown?
There are places on the planet some would dub, “the end of the world”. My aunt just sent me a photo from Ushuaia in Argentina. Located at the southern tip of South America, it’s known in tourist hype as “the town at the end of the world”. I’m a little jealous having wanted to go for a long time, but never finding my way there (I have a thing for llamas—she promised to bring me back a t-shirt with one on it—huh!). Then, she and her husband are off to Antarctica. And to my imagination, that is a place that feels like journeying into an unknown.
Before going, I told her to read Marie Darrieussecq’s novel, White.
Darrieussecq’s writing is evocative, immediate and exciting. I came across her work while studying at uni—a wonderful fictional story she wrote to accompany an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, Dans la maison de Louise. It was a text that influenced my own ‘Art Stories’ project. I’ve avidly read her work since then.
White is the story of two engineers, Edmée and Pete, both escaping their lives, to work on Project White in Antarctica, at a station 15 kilometers from the South Pole. Both seek a kind of tabula rasa—a beginning, an end; an emptiness that might wipe clean traumatic experiences they want to distance or inure themselves from. An escape that threatens to become a journey into a blanketing nothingness. Soon, the very landscape—isolated, magnificent, primal, dangerous—takes a hold of their lives, becoming a mirror for their inner struggles; a force that brings them together in a kind of fateful vortex. And then there are the ghosts. Trapped spirits who are the observers of this tale, they swirl around Edmée and Pete, a tightening web of unseen influencers.
It’s a love story at the end of the world.
Image: @oneocean_onebreath
Listening to this on repeat. If you're into deep house/electronic, this new release from Akali Akali, Parallel Dive, Endless Music Records, is definitely worth checking out.
Mesmerising.
Writing...hopefully...
A repost of one of my favourite street artists, L.E.T. (l.e.t._les.enfants.terribles)—“I'm not beautiful like you, I'm beautiful like me”.
Sometimes we just need reminding.
And to quote another of L.E.T.'s paste-ups—“Stay Weird”.
For those who love ice-scapes—and polar bears.
Here's a stunning short film of photographer, Joshua Holko, searching the sea ice of Svalbard to document the elusive polar bear.
Quite breathtaking.
Presented by Untitled Film Works, directed by Abraham Joffe ACS.
Aaah Bjork—she's in love! Here's her song, Blissing Me from her newly released album, Utopia.
Gorgeous.
Photo: Kirsten Pettifor
Yoko Ono's billboard, I Love You Earth, 2017.
Awesome.
Okay, chilling out now, thanks to Thom Yorke. Here's Atoms for Peace's single, Amok.