Download pdf version of issue no. 16 (4 Mb) - Pavilion

Vesna Pavlović
Vesna Pavlović (Serbia/US) obtained her MFA
degree in visual arts from Columbia University
in 2007. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at
Vanderbilt University where she teaches photography
and digital media. She has exhibited
widely, including solo shows at the Frist Center
for the Visual Arts in Nashville, Museum of
History of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, and the
Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. She has
been featured with a solo presentation at the
Untitled, 12th Istanbul Biennial, 2011, and in
group exhibitions at the Le Quartier Center for
Contemporary Art in Quimper, France (From
Closed World to the Infinite Universe),
Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade
(Conversations), Serbia, Tennis Palace Art
Museum in Helsinki, Finland (Situated Self,
Consfused, Compassionate, Conflictual),
Photographers' Gallery in London
(Mediterranean, Between Reality and Utopia),
Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, UK (Rear View
Mirror), and FRAC Center for Contemporary
Art in Dunkuerqe, France (De-Collecting).
Vesna Pavlović is the recipient of the Robert
Penn Warren Fellowship at Vanderbilt
University, and Copenhagen Artist-in-
Residence grant in 2011. Selected publications
include: Office Taste, co-authored with
Casey Smith, Belgrade, Skart, 2005 and An
Idyll on the Beach, Belgrade, Samizdat, 2001.
Anahita Razami
Anahita Razmi (* 1981, Hamburg / Germany)
is a video and performance artist.
Her works often are dealing with issues concerning
identity and gender, employing objects
with a national and cultural significance or citing
the work of high-profile artists. Working
within the tradition of appropriation and reenactment,
Razmi detaches cultural symbols
from their established meanings by employing
them in unexpected situations and contexts.
Within this, her work often builds up a relation
to contemporary Iran. Recent solo and group
shows include "Videonale 13", Kunstmuseum,
Bonn, Germany (2011), "Division by Zero",
Carbon12, Dubai (2011), "Iran Via Video
Current", Thomas Erben Gallery, New York
[198]
(2011), "Make - Believe - Remake",
Kunstverein Friedrichshafen, Germany (2011),
"The State: Social? Antisocial?", Traffic, Dubai
(2011), "Leinen Los!", Kunstverein Hannover
(2010), „Ikeallahu Akbar“, Interventionsraum,
Stuttgart (2010), "Robberies", Kunstverein Das
Weisse Haus, Wien (2010). In 2010 Razmi
received a work stipend from the Edith Russ
Site for Media Art, Germany for her work "The
Paykan Project", in 2011 she was awarded
"The Emdash Award" (Frieze Foundation,
London) for her project "Roof Piece Tehran".
Wael Shawky
Wael Shawky is born in 1971 in Alexandria,
Egypt, studied visual arts in Egypt and the US.
Recent solos have taken place at Nottingham
Contemporary (2011) and Cittadellarte-
Fondazione Pistoletto (2010). Shawky has
participated in Istanbul Biennale (2011) and
(2005), The Santa Fe Biennial (2008) and the
Biennial di Venizia (2003). Recent awards
include the Schering Foundation Art Award
(2011) and Abraaj Capital prize (2011).
Shawky founded MASS Alexandria, educational
space (2010)
Alexandre Singh
Alexandre Singh is a visual artist and writer
based in New York. Singh who was born in
Bordeaux, France to Indian and French parents
was brought up in Manchester, UK before
studying Fine Art at the University of Oxford,
UK. Singh’s work derives at once from traditions
in literature, performance, photo-conceptualism
and object-based installation art. Often
starting with elaborate, publicly presented lectures
that blend historical fact with narrative
fiction, Singh’s practice resists categorization.
Taking in such diverse genres as writing, collage,
installation and performance, Alexandre
Singh’s works are characterized by obsessive
details and linkages. Drawing upon a dizzying
constellation of themes and characters; culled
as much from classical history and philosophy,
as popular and consumer culture; Singh’s universe
is one of absurdist junctures and juxtapositions
in which Adidas founder Adi Dassler
is re-imagined as Faust; Piero Manzoni creates
a camera that eats the Universe; and
Molière’s send-ups of 17th century snobbery
are translated to modern-day New York. If figures
such as Molière, Lucian of Samosata,
and even Woody Allen, appear as characters
in Singh’s world, it only seems natural, his
works perpetuating a like spirit of wit, imagination
and fantasy.
Alexandre Singh's work has been exhibited in
venues throughout Europe and the United
States including The Serpentine Gallery,
London; New Museum, New York; PS-1
MoMA, New York ; Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Sprüth
Magers, Berlin. Singh’s work is held by a number
of private and public collections including
MoMA, New York and the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Mounira Al Solh
Born in Beirut in 1978 Al Solh studied painting
at the Lebanese University in Beirut (LB), and
Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in
Amsterdam (NL). In 2007/08, she was a resident
artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Her work is playfully conceptual, and includes
videos, installations, magazines, drawings and
performances, while it “queries the possibilities
and impossibilities of roles accessible to contemporary
artists, and their impact in a globalized
consumer culture. The experience is – to
say the least – schizophrenic. And thus comes
in the voice-overs, role-play, invented personas
(such as Bassam Ramlawi) and dressing-up,
as characteristic of her practice. More
often than not, Al-Solh does not provide an
answer but keeps pushing questions.” (By Nat
Muller)
Thus, “gray humor” is recurrent in her work
and while starting from the autobiographical
she proposes specific socio-political and aesthetic
questions, where the futile becomes the
essence. She often reflects on specific artworks
including them into her fictions and
invented stories that are finally neither so fictional
nor really invented.
Rinus Van de Velde
Rinus Van de Velde (°1983) lives and works in
Antwerp. His practice mainly consists of drawings
that hearken back to a personal archive of
photographs derived from vulgarizing scientific
magazines such as National Geographic, from
biographies of artists and scientists... Lately,
he often re-enacts found footage or even
stages non-existent scenes in photographs,
which he then uses as source material.
Van de Veldes overtly narrative drawings are
confronted with texts in installations that tell a
new and personal story. This fiction takes
place in a mirror universe that is peopled by
courageous alter egos and who serve as ideal
representatives of the actual artist. At the
same time, this drawn world is delineated by
its own subjectivity: it can be nothing but a fantasy,
a fiction, and so beyond its borders lies
the great nothingness of the “real” world.
As such, Van de Velde moves through the borderland
between system and unsystematic
reality, between self and ideal, between the
ordinal subdivisions of the I and the Other. His
artistic practice is characterized not only by a
personal desire for self-actualization, control
and structure, but also “shows” us something;
namely, that fiction and reality need and even
imply each other.
[199]