REVIEW | Klangkarussell @ The Nest
Austrian house duo Klangkarussell showcase an impressive ability to mesh thrusting bass lines with electronica and jazz-infused house.
You’re in a dry, dust infused desert with nothing but the hot hot sun beating down on your neck, a lost cause, clinging onto the visions of a river that once flowed; breathing, meandering, in and out and you’re tired. Your mouth is dry, your feet blistered and you need water.
And then suddenly, as if burst forth from your own teardrops, you see a cloud. Its drops of rain hit you like stones to water and you feel graced, graced by the reassuring sensation that is life. Living. Water never tasted so good.
Put that feeling into a song and you get ‘Netzwerk’ by Austrian house duo Klangkarussell (Tobias Rieser and Adrian Held) who showcase an impressive ability to mesh thrusting bass lines with electronica and jazz-infused house.
Following on from the release of their hugely successful single ‘Sonnentanz’, their new album in 2014 stood out for its jolting pulses of twisted beats and synth driven bass lines that propelled the tracks forward to culminate in a fusion of beatific synths, vocals and sunny melodies. What made this album so special was its ability to evolve so steadily, each track effortlessly combined like the sequence to a good film. The intoxicating beats of Sternenkinder for example, climaxing in a meticulously edited patchwork of African chants and tribal baselines. These are tracks that would erupt even in the biggest of venues, so when Klangkarrussell announced a set at Dalston’s intimate venue, The Nest, I was beyond excited.
Truth be told, few of the album’s tracks were played, but I took comfort in the fact that it is not always the technical skill of the performer, explicitly, that makes a performance. Often the energy that fills the room is of utmost importance and Klangkarussell did well to prove exactly that. And when they did play some of their better-known tracks, Dalston’s dark cavern of a venue erupted within seconds, the crowd’s energy in complete symbiosis with the duo’s, feeding off of one another to ensure the extremely up-tempo, infectious layers of electronic house were kept going up until the early hours.
Their set marked an album that few will grow tired of and a combination of tracks that are only going to get bigger and better.
Catch them next at London’s XOYO, Sunday 3rd May
Michael Porten: The Spinning Beach Ball of Death
Made up of 50 self-portraits of near pop-art impact, The Spinning Beach Ball of Death collection typifies the artistic intensity and creative endurance of one of America’s finest surrealist painters.
Made up of 50 self-portraits of near pop-art impact, The Spinning Beach Ball of Death collection typifies the artistic intensity and creative endurance of one of America’s finest surrealist painters.
Born in Huntsville, Alabama, Michael Porten earned a B.F.A. in illustration from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2004. Despite waylaying plans to work as a computer animator after rooming with a particular gifted fellow student, Porten’s work at Georgia’s prestigious SCAD institution bares more than a ghost of his early intentions.
Traditional portrait work is often laid-over with bold, clean edged lines, repetitive pictorial refrains or, as in the case of the Spinning Beach Ball of Death series, a primary colour filter. A quick glance at Beach Ball would have it as little more than the result of a Photoshop drop down box, or perhaps homage to the head rupturing Tizer man. A further glance shatters the initial reading.
50 24inch by 24 inch portraits stand side-by-side, each painted in oil. The first shows the back of Porten’s head and shoulders in bright red. The second, third and fourth fade to yellow then green and blue as his exceptionally bearded bust turns face on.
Porten says that the title of the collection borrows a metaphor from Mac’s rotating wait cursor, a spinning beach ball as seen from above that indicates processor-intensive activity. “For example,” tech website Thexlab aptly explains, “applying a Gaussian blur to an image in Adobe Photoshop.”
Such convenient clarification alludes to the artistic intentions of the digital designer turned painter.
The ease of computer based image replication and manipulation is parodied by Porten on the canvas. Each click of a button becomes a painstaking act of perfectionism and minute, barely detectable yet integral changes of perspective and pallet. What takes seconds on Photoshop is drawn out into a relative age. The motivation, Porten says, is to create a set of paintings undercut with an allusion to surrealist literature.
Surrealism first infiltrated a scene otherwise occupied with modernism through André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s 1920 work Les Champs Magnétiques. The principal piece of automatic writing, Les Champs Magnétiques is the fruit of shambolic sessions of free flowing thought underlined with a desire to be rid of classic literary influences.
The connection between Spinning Beachball and works born of such conceptual anarchy is clear. Porten’s portraits are at once striking works of pin-point accuracy with a photorealistic quality, and absurd, comic manifestations of self-examination; the product of an artist intentionally shackling themselves in terms of style and medium.
The end result of weeks of work, the product of far-gone literary movement and born from an ability to stare unwaveringly at his own image, The Spinning Beach Ball of Death is both a remarkable artistic achievement and a stunning collection.
Images via © Michael Porten’s website
Marlene Dumas Retrospective – The Image as Burden
“Art is not a Mirror. Art is a translation of that which you do not know.”
Born in Cape Town 1953, Marlene Dumas has had a long and distinguished career. After studying psychology, Dumas focused her energies upon painting, often referencing the darker side of the human psyche. Sex, Death and Love, are often explored in depth, as well as Homosexuality, Shame, Celebrity, Religion, Gender and Race.
This retrospective shows a diverse plethora of work spanning her entire career. In the first room we are greeted by her ‘Rejects’, almost monochrome and darkly melancholy paintings of larger-than-life faces that fill an entire wall and intimidate all that enter. To begin a retrospective with paintings that you essentially been rejected from other projects is a bold move curatorially, and one that in this instance has definitely paid off. Dumas is not one for convention, and in this the show doesn’t disappoint.
These gritty portraits set the theme for the whole show, and some even appear as if they have been painted with real dirt. It is difficult to avoid the icy chill that these works issue down your spine. On a few of these paintings the eyes have been cut or burnt out, to reveal other painted images beneath, peering through. This twinned with the vast foreheads and blank stares, makes these paintings appear as if they are deathmasks of the recently deceased. A chilling indication of things to come, and an apt way to begin the show.
In room two the large blueprint collage ‘Love verses Death’ poses much subtler and unusual questions. It is less bold and striking than the first room, and for this reason could be overlooked. Simple line drawings of people, with the recurring image of the Caritas Romana (a man being breastfed by his daughter to save him from starvation), show not only her true skills of draftsmanship, but also her knowledge of, and interest in, the darker and more esoteric sides of art history.
Dumas’s paintings are dark and dangerous, the skin on many is painted so thinly and transparently that it appears as real skin. Not the perfectly smooth and radiant skin of the classical portrait painters, but pale and unctuous and unglamorised. Like that of a corpse.
Many of the paintings are larger than life sized and hung higher than eye-level, two devices that are utilized to emphasize the haunting and forceful nature of the works. Dumas paints things that are often swept under the carpet, but here she brings them out into the open and forces us to look.
Her colour palate is unusual, choosing blues and greens for areas that are usually pink and red. This serves to heighten the feeling of unease felt upon viewing the works, as one is forced to wonder what purpose this strange juxtaposition serves. A panorama of navy blue and purple spans the forehead of one African male, suggesting immense wisdom.
Corpses also feature heavily in the show, sometimes life-size and prostrate. One of these is titled ‘Dead Girl’, and is painted from a photograph that Dumas found and then kept for twenty years before painting it. This kind of connection to a subject is how she has been able to paint such a haunting and yet beautiful portrait, long after the girl has gone.
Displacement is often hinted at throughout her oeuvre, which echoes her own displacement from South Africa to The Netherlands in 1976, where she still lives and works today. Censored paintings of a nude woman being led away by two soldiers still retain the black modesty boxes added by the publisher of the source photograph. These boxes do nothing more than heighten our awareness of her nakedness, and show how out of place and vulnerable she is in-between these two men, who hold her arms apart to expose and display her frailty. Dumas did two different paintings of this same photograph, both of which are in the show.
Another key element in this show is the text, cleverly written titles such as ‘Evil Is Banal’ and ‘The White Disease’, add another dimension to the already poignant paintings about evil and race. The painting ‘Magdalena’ in room seven, for example, has exaggerated birthing hips that represent fertility and traditional ideals of beauty, but small and awkward breasts that hand limply on her chest. This is hung with the contradictory subtitle ‘Out of Eggs, Out Of Business’, suggests and then subverts what the painting itself depicts.
As well as these clever titles there are many quotes and poems by Dumas herself. Her quote; “Painting as a form of exorcism or therapy”, suggests what she sees as the values of art.
Dumas has compared her paintings to ‘action paintings’, which are focused more on their gesture and method than on their subject matter. Dumas would often disregard the brush and paint with her hands or other parts of her body, if the painting necessitated it. The paintings are not there to depict exactly something as she has seen it (often she will do two completely different paintings from the same source photograph), but as a way of creating something new. “Art is not a Mirror. Art is a translation of that which you do not know.”
Her work is unapologetic in its starkness and brashness, and the viewer is merely a voyeur to many of these paintings. In describing a nude painting of her daughter Dumas remarked, “She is not there to please you. She pleases herself.” The painting exists as an autonomous entity, unconcerned with our opinions on its meaning or our pondering on the ethics of the subject matter. This quote is also important as it sets a clear boundary between this type of non-sexualised nudity depicted in her paintings of children, and the other forms of erotic nudity in her watercolours.
Never one to fall in line, this show breaks many rules. Paintings of Princess Diana are hung in the same gallery as Osama Bin Laden. Innocent portraits of children are given haunting titles, and nothing is deemed too controversial.
Marlene Dumas is a painter that shows the world as it really is, rather than how we wished it were. Her paintings are honest and brutal, showing us things that we would often turn away from. She rejects how media often glamorizes the vacuous and ignores the important, and she forces us to do the same.
Marlene Dumas once said that “Painting is about the trace of the human touch”, and in this show she has shown that this includes not only the pristine and the perfect, but also the dark and macabre elements of human life. This show proves that there is a true and unique beauty that exists in the obscene, and it shows us that we cannot experience one fully without also understanding the other.
Shorts On Tap present WOMEN IN REVOLT
There doesn’t need to be a special day to celebrate the talents and triumphs of women, particularly in film. As this event proves in every essence, celebrating the theme of women by female filmmakers.
The Art of Female-film-making
On April 6th Shorts On Tap will present its first recurrent series: Women In Revolt in London’s Stow Film Lounge. This will be the first of three screenings that will take viewers on an exploration into female-film-making. The programme is in collaboration with Club Des Femmes: a positive female space for the re-examination of ideas through art and is funded by Film London’s Boost Award.
The night promises to deliver the best of female film- making talent with a selection of extraordinary work depicting, challenging and describing every essence of womanhood.
The series also investigates the female form and the casual use of female nudity that is a topic silenced by our generations commodification over sex and sexuality. This event aims to give power and ownership of the female body back to the women who possess them.
But this is not a warning to men, who are welcome to join women on this emblematic march for equality through film.
The first chapter of the series The Chase focuses on the pursuit of a normal childhood. The transition into womanhood and the interior conflicts and challenges encountered along the journey. Chasing happiness, normality and dreams as well as being chased.
As always with Shorts On Tap, the films will be unveiled on the night and after the films have been screened there will be a platform for discussion and Q&A with the films directors and guest speakers.
Apart from a guaranteed good night out it will be an amazing opportunity to watch some radical independent films, debate social and political ideas and pave the way for more female recognition in the film industry.
What more could you be doing that evening?
Films screening start at 8pm. Show ends approximately at 10pm
RSVP & tickets | Apr 06 2015 20:00 - 22:30 | Stow Film Lounge
Orford House Social Club 73 Orford Road Walthamstow London E17 9QR , E17 9QR London
52 Words a Year
On Tuesday 7th April the Nancy Victor Gallery in Fitzrovia will display the culmination of a year’s intense work from three London based artists.
On Tuesday 7th April the Nancy Victor Gallery in Fitzrovia will display the culmination of a year’s intense work from three London based artists.
52 Words a Year is an online project that had Mayumi Mori, Leni Kauffman and Oliver O’Keeffe each draw an illustration a week, every week for a year.
The three sets of works that will fill the Nancy Victor were inspired by 52 words, chosen by the artists and taken off in different directions and styles.
These include a New Year’s Restart, prompting a germinating bulb in watercolour from Oliver, Evolution and a clean, tree-filled landscape from Leni and style; a sumptuous patchwork of colours from Mayumi.
The progression of artistic flair and competence that can be tracked across the course of the year is similar to several other projects. Californian artists Alberto Calleros spent 2008 creating daily work for his Blogspot, Drawing Every Day for a Year, exhibiting an immense creative capacity and commitment.
The real uniqueness of 52 Words a Year therefore lies in the tweaking of a tried and tested idea. To view an artist’s year of toil is engaging, but to walk along the diverse branches of inspiration spread by 3 individuals, all emerging from the same point, is to receive a real glimpse into the artistic process.
52 Words a Year runs from Tuesday 7 to Saturday 18 April 2015, Tuesday to Friday 10am–6pm, Saturday 12–6pm.
Nancyvictor or for a taster of the exhibition, Wordsayear
Pictoplasma Festival 2015 | Berlin
The world’s largest Conference and Festival of contemporary character culture is back and bigger than ever, with an exciting line-up of interdisciplinary artists ready to whet your appetite and get those juices flowing
A celebration of international design and art with loads of character
Last year, Berlin’s Pictoplasma Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary with a series of remarkable exhibitions, live talks, workshops, presentations, screenings and performances that shaped the five-day festival of contemporary illustration and character design. This year it’s back, bigger than ever and with an exciting line-up of interdisciplinary artists ready to whet your appetite and get those juices flowing.
Since its launch in 2004, the Berlin festival has been identified as the the world’s leading international conference and festival for uniting visual like-minded creators and producers and has since developed a second annual conference in New York. It is also a very accessible festival that gives you the chance to hear some of todays most innovative and inspiring artists working with a range of mediums using art and the digital.
Confirmed speakers for this year include Joan Cornellà, Sticky Monster Lab, Andy Ristaino, Animalitol and, Birdo, Lucas Zanatto, Yomsnil, Hikari Shimoda, Mr Kat, Brosmind, Loup Blaster, Stefano Colferai, TAFO and the super talented, award winning mixed media storyteller Yves Geleyn.
Also on show will be an exciting display of art works by young, emerging and established artists. Recent graduates from the newly established, annual master classes at Pictoplasma’s Academy are also set to show case their works at Friedrichshain’s popular Urban Spree Galerie.
Babylon will also be bringing some new characters to the foreground in a series of four feature film length animation programs for you to feast your eyes on. Expect motion graphics, experimental animations and a bit of everything in between. Not to be missed are Encyclopedia Pictura (former creators of music videos for Bjork and Grizzly Bear).
And if that wasn’t enough, the Festival will culminate with a final blowout, not to be missed Pictoplasma party that will be held on Saturday 2 May. Details of the line-up to be revealed on their website soon.
April 29 – May 3 2015 | Pictoplasma Festival