Artes Mundi

YouTube video: The Visitors | Ragnar Kjartansson @HangarBicocca  

Artes Mundi is an internationally focused arts organisation that identifies, recognises and supports contemporary visual artists who engage with the human condition, social reality and lived experience.

Don't miss the chance to see contemporary art on the subject of 'the human condition'. There are artworks to view in three venues: the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, FfotoGallery at Turner House in Penarth and at Cardiff's Chapter Arts Centre. 

I spent a wonderful hour watching,  listening, sitting, wandering around  Ragnar Kjartansson's  The Visitors (2013). If as I do you enjoy  live music, art and people this is an overwhelming and emotionally affecting work, it  left me feeling rather positive about the human condition . 
http://www.artesmundi.org/en/artists/ragnar-kjartansson



Other works are more difficult and deal in dark subjects, I am thinking particularly of Dutch artist Renzo Martens 'known for his satirical and disturbing video documentaries in which he travels to war-torn countries and places himself narcissistically at the centre of the action, demonstrating how Western spectators consume distant trauma. In 2012, Martens helped found the Institute for Human Activities and initiated its five-year Gentrification Program. By means of strategic inversion Martens comments on the ways in which Western media depict the non-Western world'.
http://www.artesmundi.org/artists/renzo-martens

A Conference will be held at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Straight from the Horse's Mouth, in partnership with Cardiff Metropolitan University School of Art and Design will be a series of talks and conversations offering a rare opportunity to hear the Artes Mundi 6 shortlisted artists speak about core themes and concerns that are central to their practice.

Cardiff Metropolitan University School of Art and Design, Llandaff
Wednesday 21 January 2pm - 6pm
Thursday 22 January 10am - 5pm
Tickets and more information here (conference followed by a social gathering at Chapter, Canton at 7pm).


Read about all the artists here

Artes Mundi employs a team of Live Guides as mediators who have met the shortlisted artists and have extensive knowledge of their work.If you would like to walk and talk with one of the Live Guides in the Museum in Cardiff  join a  tour.  Lasting 45-60 minute the friendly and informative tours are led by one of the  Live Guides and give an overview of the exhibition and its themes.
2pm daily at the Museum (book on arrival at the Information Desk)
For talks and tours at Ffotogallery and Chapter , check their websites for further details.

Images help us 'see': The Refugee Project: an interactive map

photo by Heaferl: Demo "Gleiche Rechte für alle" (Refugee-Solidaritätsdemo) am 16. Februar 2013 in Wien
	'Every day, all over the world, ordinary people must flee their homes for fear of death or persecution. Many leave without notice, taking only what they can carry. Many will never return

They cross oceans and minefields, they risk their lives and their futures. When they cross international borders they are called refugees.
The Refugee Project is an interactive map of refugee migrations around the world in each year since 1975. UN data is complemented by original histories of the major refugee crises of the last four decades, situated in their individual contexts'.

The Refugee Project
http://www.therefugeeproject.org/

(Best viewed in Chrome and Firefox)

Click the About tab (top right ) to read  how to navigate the map. 

You will discover where refugees come from, where they go and articles documenting their stories and the political contexts to their plight.

Family Photo archive, a new addition to the Library at the Bishopsgate Institute

Lucy feeding the pigeons in Trafalgar Square in 1981

There is to be a place in London where old family photos will be collected for researchers to view. News in from Spitalfields Life the wonderful daily blog by the Gentle Author (check it out!) tells us that Stefan Dickers, Archivist at the Bishopsgate Institute is offering a home to unwanted albums and family photographs, where they will be safely stored as an archive. It is to be called the London Family Photo Archive . He is happy to take receipt of  digital copies of photographs if you wish to keep the prints.
“We are looking for family and personal photos of everyday life, no matter if you have lived in London since birth or are a recent arrival to the city,” Stefan explained to me, “We are also looking for photos that depict Londoners on day trips and holidays outside of the city.”
If you might wish to contribute albums or pictures and would like to know more please contact library@bishopsgate.org.uk

This sounds like a wonderful resource in the making....and look at what else they have!
Since opening in 1895, Bishopsgate Library has built up through its collecting policy a record of the development of photography in the capital, alongside it's ever growing collections of books, maps, directories and press cuttings. The emphasis is on the everyday life of London and the Library has specialised in collecting street photography and social and cultural images of London, rather than portraiture or people. The collections are also not limited to famous photographers.
Library Collections cover London History, Labour and Socialist History, Freethought and Humanism, Co-opertaion, Protest and Campaigning, Parliamentary profiles and they hold the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia archive

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The Inspiration Business

The Do-Lectures are now on Pinterest
here are some titles...

What if we could build a database of dreams?

Be excited. People want to work with the excited person

Build the company that you wouldn't sell

Why you should create something everyday  

Short inspirational talks about lives lived well, businesses that work and ways to be fulfilled. Sound a bit 1960's? But these people run businesses and make good things happen for themselves and for others, that's good for any decade

Photogrammar: Archive of 170,000 Photographs Documenting the Great Depression

A migrant agricultural worker in Marysville migrant camp, trying to work out his year’s earnings. Taken in California in 1935 by Dorothea Lange.

In the 1930's The Farm Security Administration—Office of War Information (FSA-OWI) hired photographers to travel across America to document the poverty generated by the Great Depression, hoping to build support for New Deal programs being championed by President Roosevelt. Marvellous photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein were among the photographers who took part. In all 170,000 photographs were taken and lodged with  The Library of Congress. A link to these LC webpages for FSA is to be found in Cardiff Met Electronic Library>Databases A-Z>Farm Security Administration (Cardiff Met password required).

Now Yale University has launched Photogrammar, a   platform for organizing, searching, and viewing these  historic photographs.
The Photogrammar platform gives you the ability to search through the images by photographer and alsoprovides an interactive map twith  geographical information about 90,000 photographs in the collection.

Calling all performers!!! Scratch Platform - Sunday, August 31st 2014 - Four Bars, Cardiff - From 7pm

Scratch Platform is a brand new event in Cardiff and the showing of work on Sunday August 31st is the first of what will be a regular event happening every other month. The idea is to give Live Artists, Sound Artists, Cabaret Performers, Poets and other artists who perform an opportunity to show their work (whether it is ‘finished’, ‘polished', in development or otherwise) to an interested and supportive audience. The showing will start at 7pm and the venue will be open until pub closing time!

Any work that is designed to be performed to an audience needs at some point to be performed!

It will be free to take part in and free to watch. There are no ‘rules’ as such other than that any piece shouldn’t last longer than ten minutes - in order to give everyone a fair chance. There will be no competitive element and we want to encourage a very open, pressure free and supportive environment.

It’s a lovely intimate venue and we are able to provide some technical assistance- we have a PA, lighting rig and access to a projector and screen. Will will also be filming the event to offer the performers a copy of the documentation (this will be free, basically bring a memory stick or external drive and we will copy the footage to it).

At the end of each event we will have a performance from an invited artist. On August 31st this will be Foxy and Husk

We hope to draw artists and an audience from the artist communities in Cardiff and further afield. There will be an opportunity for the performers to display business cards, CV’s and other information that they might wish to share. We will also offer feedback forms that members of the audience can fill in.

If you would like to show your work then please can you send me your technical requirements (will you need music playback for example or a microphone(s)?) and give me a very brief breakdown of what your 10 minute piece will be.

bring your friends!
any questions? 

Rowan Talbot

rowan@fizzievents.com

       

Lights Out on August 4th

“The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, August 1914

National Library of Wales Cymru 1914 archive

Everyone in the UK is invited to take part in LIGHTS OUT by turning off their lights from 10pm to 11pm on 4 August, leaving on a single light or candle to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War .

Millions of people are expected to participate and hundreds of local authorities, iconic buildings, national organisations including the BBC and the Royal British Legion, parish councils and places of worship have already pledged their support. Iconic landmarks such Blackpool Illuminations, the Houses of Parliament, Eden Project, Imperial War Museums and Tower Bridge will turn off their lights; the Royal British Legion has launched a campaign for at least one million candles to be lit across the UK and theatre productions including those of the National Theatre’s War Horse, both nationally and internationally, will invite their audiences to take part in LIGHTS OUT after their curtain calls.

 Leading international artists have been commissioned by 14-18 NOW to create special public artworks, for one night only in the form of a light source.

Bedwyr Williams’ work Traw will be a large-scale video and sound installation  at the site of the North Wales Memorial Arch, Bangor. The memorial takes centre stage in front of images projected onto the enormous facing wall of Bangor University’s new Pontio Arts and Innovation Centre.

Taking photographs found in the Cymru 1914 archive, Williams has created a sequence of images of local soldiers and civilians   affected by WW1. Excluding all uniform and references to rank, the close up faces reveal something of the individual’s personality and personal sacrifice in a war where death was measured in millions.

Bedwyr Williams is one of Wales’ leading visual artists. In 2013 he represented Wales at the Venice Biennale.

Commenting on the project Bedwyr Williams said: “As a young art student I walked past the memorial arch in Bangor many times and I have to admit that I never gave it a huge amount of thought. Working on this project I’ll never be able to walk past this place again without thinking of the lives lost fighting in the First World War.”