World Human Rights Day

Artwork: Billboard by Jeremy Deller for World Human Rights Day, UK, 2020

On December 10 in Paris, 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights document was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly. To mark World Human Rights Day, British artist Jeremy Deller (@jeremydeller) in collaboration with the designer Fraser Muggeridge and Jack Arts Agency has created a series of billboards across the UK, highlighting places in the world where people are denied their fundamental rights. These include Xinjiang Province China, Evin Prison Tehran, the Amazon Rainforest, the Mediterranean Sea, Brook House Immigration Removal Centre in Gatwick in the UK, Flint Michigan, Riyadh Saudi Arabia, the Amazon rainforest, Ecatepec Mexico, and Khirbet Humsah Occupied West Bank. 

Artwork: Billboard by Jeremy Deller for World Human Rights Day, UK, 2020

Regarding the project, Jeremy Deller stated: “Violation of human rights exists everywhere, regardless of what else is going on in the world and we wanted to say that today is Human Rights Day for people across the world, even if they aren’t having their rights respected. There were thousands of locations to choose from”. 

The posters will be up until the end of the month. And rightly, Deller said: “Really this is just a reminder. Every day should be Human Rights Day, that’s what I’m saying with this.”

someday I'll be king

Artwork: Marquise, Someday I'll be King [Tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat]. Pasteup on Boulevard de Picpus, Paris 12th

Gorgeous paste-up by Parisian artist Marquise (@marquis.streetart), titled Someday I'll be King (Tribute to Jean-Michel Basquiat), on Boulevard de Picpus, Paris 12th.

Templates of Love

Image: eL Seed with one of his early calligraffitis, one of the Arabic words for ‘Love’ (@elseed)

French-Tunisian artist eL See’s current solo exhibition in Milan at Galleria Patricia Armocida (@galleriapatriciaarmocida) is titled Templates of Love and was inspired by the 50 possible ways the word ‘love’ occurs in Arabic. He had this to say about what inspired him for this show:

“What is love? It’s an eternal question humanity is constantly seeking to answer. Try as we might that single word remains slippery, easy to say, harder to define, in different languages around the world it’s often a single word that contains multitudes. 

In Arabic there are fifty words for love. It was a fact that struck me deeply when I first learnt it. Love in Arabic is not confined to a single shape, it moves in many phrases and expres-sions, it has many forms and each carries its own name. In that expansion I discovered how love found new ways to linger in the language I was learning, and how that language had grown to encompass the varied forms love can take. I came to realise love cannot be contained. It is not a single thing, it lives among us, it is many-sided, multifaceted, at times literally: love comes to us with many faces. It’s a force that lives with and between many bodies and many minds. In this exhibition I wanted to explore and celebrate the myriad ex-pressions of love that we can find in language and in the world.

I searched for the lines we follow, working to capture a sense of the varied shapes love can take. As I painted, putting pigment to canvas, it became a dance, a choreography of its own, a manifesting of love. Taking the architecture of the Arabic language I translated the words for love into my own personal script: loops of ribbon-like brushstrokes. The canvases became alters to the templates we are given for emotion through language, but also function as a creative key to understand the limits of form itself. When I look at the works I have made collectively I now see that I didn’t use black ink as I normally do. At a dark time in history I had instead moved away from the darkness. Love works to honour the light. Without even realising it I had adapted my process to the power of love: it called for some-thing more from me.”

Shakespeare & Co

Photo: Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 2020

From one of my favourite bookshops in the world! Shakespeare and Company in Paris, this gorgeous poem by Persian lyric poet, Hafiz: “I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”

Also, this wonderful 70yr old institution is in trouble! The pandemic has hit them hard, like so many businesses world-wide. If you are in a position to buy books right now, they take online orders internationally. Every book counts! Just visit www.shakespeareandcompany.com .

The end of imagination

Central to Adrian Villar Rojas’s practice is an ongoing project to produce site and temporal specific work that poses the questions: What can’t survive? What leaves no trace? Of a dialogue between what is organic and inorganic; human made or machine made; human and non-human. Since his time at art school in Rosario, Argentina, Rojas has questioned why the work he creates should last forever given his belief that humans as a species are entropic and degradable. 

For his recent exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris titled The end of imagination he states: 

"In 2010, I proposed a hypothesis: What if, in the final moments of humanity, the last of the species decided they wanted to make an artwork? It would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. The end of art, end of the world and end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end. In my fabulations, reaching the shores of art created a vacuum, a silence that gave space for me to explore nonhuman perspectives. This is when I placed a new metaphor of an alien into this terminal landscape. What I call the ‘alien gaze’ expresses this impossible paradox: a subjectivity without culture."

This “alien” perspective is evident in Rojas inviting the viewer to explore his take-over of the gallery with figures, diagrams, images and a “panhuman” language based on past and present language systems, that are indecipherable yet with recognisable elements, placing the viewer in the position of that “alien” subjectivity—of having to make sense of what is experienced without any references to decode it. 

Rojas is also referencing the current situation of Covid-19 and the restrictions worldwide on travel, movement and experience. His nomadic practice has been curtailed, with hours spent watching CTV footage of feeds from Nasa satellites to orang-utans quarantined in zoos. Time is being experienced differently, as is life. With his overlay of language, texts and hieroglyphic images, Rojas muddles a sense of being able to place the work he has made within a knowable time frame. Time is a human-made construct. It is not “natural” or inherent within nature, but relative and subjective. 

Rojas further questions notions of ordering and collectively determining significance in relation to Western art. Part of his overall project has been to question the museum and its role of preserving, collecting and displaying work in perpetuity. He cites his own experiences at art school, where Latin American art was barely acknowledged in the colonial Western canon of art history. As students, pre-internet, and with art books too expensive to purchase, Rojas and his peers were given small photocopied booklets of text and reproduced images, and the result was a freeing of the imagination. As Rojas observes: “It was almost like these photocopies were shouting: there are no hard facts, only fabulation and speculation! Art Histories, or rather Art Stories, are for us students to reclaim and hack”. 

Rojas’s exhibition poses the question how the pandemic is altering our subjective experience of time, of language and of systems of representation, acknowledging that while “art” is also a construct, it is the result of human action that transforms matter and that relates to specific places and times.   

As for what that last human artwork might be for a future alien visitor/observer to find—it could be any of the detritus or mark making they encounter on this planet, having no idea what the human species ever defined ‘art’ to be in the first place.   

small worlds...

Artwork: Paste-up by Olivia Paroldi, Lyon, 2020

A girl sitting on the edge of her small world…

A beautifully poetic linocut paste-up by French printmaker Olivia Paroldi (@olivia_paroldi) in the streets of Lyon, one of a series she made during her pandemic isolation she calls “bubbles”. It has a dreamlike quality of looking out at the world while contemplating one’s own interior landscape.

Cola

Listening to Arlo Parks lately. She’s a poet/storyteller with a gorgeous voice. Here’s her song Cola from her EP Super Sad Generation (2019). For more great tracks check out Arlo on SoundCloud, her ‘Angel’s Song’ is a punch to the heart—just beautiful.

excetra

Image: Weniwasu, Excetra, 2020 (cover art by HKE)

Kagami Smile and MOD-COMM 81’s new collaborative album as weniwasu has just dropped this week, Excetra on Dream Catalogue. Here’s one of the eerie, captivating, dreampunk tracks, ‘Through the Ground’. Love it. Check it out.

Separate Reality/Shared Reality

Artwork: by Addam Yekutieli, Separate Reality/Shared Reality, Jerusalem, 2020 (photo: @kid_aroke)

Isreali artist Adam Yekutieli (aka @thisislimbo; Know Hope; www.thisislimbo.com/signsofhope), has created a series of “textual collage” paste-ups situated around Jerusalem addressing the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a snapshot of people’s responses to the crisis that hopefully allows viewers to connect with each other despite the isolating and potentially devastating experience. This resonates as in Melbourne we’re at the tail-end of a Level-4 lockdown. Thankfully the number of transmissions, infections and deaths in Victoria, and within Australia, have been far lower than many countries world-wide. Here’s the text featured on the two paste-ups pictured here:

Artwork: by Addam Yekutieli, Separate Reality/Shared Reality, Jerusalem, 2020 (photo: @kid_aroke)

“They weren’t able to see my difficulty with this (21).
I was disappointed to see how many people don’t understand that we’re all (14) meaningful (38).
At first there was hope (28), but in order to allow everyone (36) to fill the space that loneliness took (28), I made sure to lower expectations (34).
I’ve been trying to let go (20) the fact that I still hold a grudge against them for that (21).
It seems that the success of this (16) is the ability to be an anchor for others (23).”

“Those who make the decisions still think that they have control (34).
The transition wasn’t easy (29), but the boundaries (28) and worry were replaced with hope (28).
After all, hope (23) is a furious, large and shared prayer (23).
We will remember this year (5).”

And here’s Yekutieli’s explanation of the project:

“The happening of Covid-19 is immensely collective, but our experiences are immaculately personal. 
I recently collected testimonials written by Jerusalem residents regarding the first quarantine period, requesting them to share their experiences, reflections and lessons learned from these times.
I later created a ‘textual collage’ by extracting fragments of sentences from their texts and rearranging and connecting them to fragments from other participant’s words, to create new stories.
These stories, composed of individual and personal descriptions of experiences, now depict a ‘collective experience’, creating newfound notions and highlighting similarities and broader issues.
Posters with these texts were installed around Jerusalem’s city center for people to recognise slivers of their experience, see it in a new light and understand their part in the larger, shared reality.
This project, titled 'Separate Reality/Shared Reality' was produced in collaboration with and as part of the @israel.festival.
Thank you to all the participants who shared their stories, to @vainernimrod, @kid_aroke and @lebonsworld for the working hands and to the Israel Festival for the opportunity.” 

VELA

Something beautiful and meditative. Surfer John John Florence and Parallel Sea produced a series of short films called VELA, and here’s a short piece featuring the musician/composer Ron Artis II from North Shore, Oahu, creating original music for the series that ended up not being used, paired with footage of a surf session of Nathan Florence in Line Islands, Pacific Ocean.

Life/Love

Image: Poem by @r.cliftpoetry

This says a lot…

Art Love Life

Artwork: Paste-up by @adidafallenangel, Montreal, 2018

Massive wheatpaste 3 piece by @adidafallenangel, created in 2018 for the Underpressure international graffiti festival in Montreal.

A great reminder: Make Art. Live Free. Love Life.

face mask required...

Artwork: SETH, ‘Face covering required/Port du heaume obligatoire’ Part 1 , Paris, la Butte-aux-Cailles, 2020

A wonderful new series by SETH Face covering required, where he “took advantage of an empty Paris to paint my feelings about our new world.” (@seth_globepainter')

Black Sea: Data Sculpture

Like Studio Drift, Refik Anadol’s art centres on the intersections of art, technology and nature. Anadol’s mesmerising and immersive Black Sea: Data Sculpture explores the relationship between simulation and reality, and the human desire to create stories that mediate our perceptions of how we make sense of the world. 

From Anadol’s website: “‘Black Sea’ is a kinetic data sculpture that explores the organic interaction between representation and reflection. Using high frequency radar collections provided by Turkish State Meteorological Service of the Black Sea, this piece aims to highlight the symbiotic interplay of technology, art, and nature in relation to humanity’s quest to push the limits of possibility. Our modes of representation and inquiry become a part of our natural world, reflecting and augmenting our perceptions of reality. In our quest for resolution, stories offer us a simulated environment that are in fact just as real as nature itself. The transformation of this sea surface data collection becomes then not just a means of visualizing information, but rather a transmutation of our desire for understanding into a poetic experience.”

bind

I came across musician RY X (Australian singer-songwriter Ry Cuming) via his band The Acid and their album Liminal before I discovered his music with Frank Wiedemann as the duo Howling. RY X’s vocals are distinctive in both bands, which feature minimal electronic sounds: ghostly, meditative, intimate and a touch melancholic. Just last week Howling released their album Colure, and prior to the drop I’d been listening to the gorgeous track Bind on repeat. Check it out. 

small stories: a pink paper bird

Artwork: by @ami_imaginaire_streetart, Paris

a pink paper bird 

in a tree

unlikely

unseemly

but beautiful

© Angela Jooste

beyond the sea

Artwork: mural by Millo, Beyond the Sea, Monopoli, Italy, 2020

Wonderful new mural from Millo (@millo) Beyond the Sea in Monopoli (Italy) for @_phest_ festival.

The mural is about shelter, climate change, and the the tropicalization of the Mediterranean sea. It’s an important reminder that even while the world is focused on the pandemic, the climate change crisis is still a priority.

Millo’s description of the project : “It's typical of marine environments to change in relation to climatic fluctuations, but the combination of this change with other ecological stressors such as pollution, eutrophication, anoxia, fishing pressure, the acidification of the oceans let us think that the new species arriving in the seas are not the main problem but that there won't be any species left at all in the future if we continue to ignore how strong is our impact on the ecosystem. 

The tropicalization of the Mediterranean should not be regarded as something apocalyptic or irreversible we can make a huge difference by acting consciously towards our environment.” 

trailblazer

Artwork: Trailblazer’ by pipsqueak was here (@pipsqueakwashere)

Just a girl and her friend creating a new path in the wild…

Wonderful work titled Traliblazer from duo @pipsqueakwashere.

Morning Mist

I’ve been listening to this a LOT! Vaal’s awesome remix of Elison 404 & 404 Guild’s track Morning Mist (2020). Vaal is a big fave of mine since I heard her mind-blowing and original mix (2018) on DHA FM (Deep House Amsterdam) Mix #347 (listen here). I keep going back to it, as well as Vaal’s album Nosferatu (2019) released on her label Pale Blue Dot, which features a number of tracks from the DHA mix. Anyhow, check this out!

WHATEVER

Image: charcoal sketch by @emelimartensson_illustration

I’ve posted before about my love of the fashion brand 5PREVIEW, headed by Creative Director Emeli Martensson. The first top I bought from them was an oversized dark grey, silk-jersey t-shirt with “WHATEVER” printed in black. I wore it ragged and today, i’ve got a simple white t-shirt version that’s become an iconic part of their collection. For me, it encapsulates letting anything happen; letting go of control and just seeing what comes; that anything is possible, and confronted with the world and all it can throw at you, it’s like a shrug and a release and a giving into the moment and just letting yourself be—WHATEVER.