review/ www.portlandart.net

http://www.portlandart.net/archives/2011/04/youll_never_wal.html

thanks all of you - who made this show possible

work of Ray Anthony Barrett

work of Modou Dieng

You’ll never walk alone

Curated by vanessa van obberghen

This show was based on the encounters you make while having an exhibition ‘parcours’ – you life intense moments of relationships during the time you are installing shows – to leave each other on your journey – to bounce on each other back by hazard ;in yet an other show sometimes years later. The green dots of those artists friends on skype are like little lights in the night who will keep you warm.

As artists we are featured in shows often to prove a concept of a curator – we become raw material – this show just wanted to present and represent artists that I encountered and which I appreciated the work from. No discourse just artists and their work. For the time of this show.

We want to make this show move and the participating artists will change along our route - Next time we take two artists of Portland with us - Modou Dieng and Ray Anthony Barrett.

INSTALLATIONSHOTS - back room

off shore world - vanessa van obberghen

INSTALLATIONSHOTS - second room

sculpture Kris Fierens

Installation shot - photography of Alex Salinas

Dot Dot Dot - David Wauters

Cuba and Bus stop - Moshekwa Langa

attack an installation of Carla Arocha and Stephane Schraenen

INSTALLATIONSHOTS - first room

A poster project of objectif-exhibitions / objectif-retribution
Paintings Though Luck David Wauters and short movies David Wauters and Roberto Dewulf-Ortega
Installation of portraits of Alassane Babylas Ndiaye

Framed Fushia and Green a work of Carla Arocha and Stephane Schraenen
video of David Hominal

installationshots video of David Hominal and sculpture of Kris Fierens

party

'DIVISION' A PERFORMANCE OF DAVID GHERON TRETIAKOF with the participation of Brittaney and devon

OPENING NIGHT - TONIGHT IS THE NIGHT -

we are on the move

the works sent by fed ex arrived - so let's go people !!!

OUR HOST worksound PDX

820 SE Alder Portland, Ore.US

http://worksoundpdx.com/

VANESSA VAN OBBERGHEN

http://www.vanessavanobberghen.com

http://www.susannakulli.ch/event/190

Vanessa van Obberghen (b. Seoul ) lives and works in Antwerp.

“The title 'Off shore world' is derived from off shore companies—which are companies where the main

activities often do not happen where the company is officially registered. Off shore world is a world that

is situated on a fine line between reality and an imaginary world. It is inhabited by people whom you

cannot situate in a clear racial or social group. Off shore people are people who fit in nowhere and

everywhere—they are like chameleons.”

Like earlier works of the artist, Vanessa von Obberghen’s current project stimulates a discourse about

identity and belonging. She puts the focus on people who, in specific situations, defy clear assignment

to a group, directing our attention to otherness and the position of the outsider.

Using crayons, Vanessa van Obberghen adds artificial color to black-and-white photographs of exotic

flower blossoms and human models. She displays these pictures next to drawings of genealogical

trees and strands of DNA she realizes in a deliberately playful fashion rather than copying them strictly

from scientific sources.

Small LED screens framed like drawings present material that contrasts with these defamiliarized

representations: video recordings of traditional African dances. The footage was shot during the

Festival du Niger held in Segou, Mali, by Alassane Insa Babylas N’diaye, a Senegalese artist and

friend of Vanessa von Obberghen’s: “I wanted images made by an African recording traditional dances

because his gaze would maybe be different then mine, but it turned out almost similar.

Vanessa von Obberghen is particularly interested in differences of perspective, in the process of

appropriation and the ambivalence it entails between proximity and distance, a characteristic feature of

the experiences for example of tourists and immigrants. She uses the term métissage to describe the

productive interferences that result:

“The métissage can be biological or circumstantial, but it is not the result of a mixture where each

component loses its properties on the way. Each component can be fully integrated: one meets one to

create one—people are the results not of half and half but of one plus one."

CARLA AROCHA AND STEPHANE SCHRAENEN

http://www.arocha-schraenen.com/

'DEPTH OF FOCUS

The Antwerp-based artists Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen jointly make

art works of which installation sculptures and photography are currently the

most frequent manifestations. Sleek, smooth and reflective, the works readily

reference design culture.' ken pratt

CARLA AROCHA °1961, Caracas / VEN STEPHANE SCHRAENEN, °1971 / BEL Both artists are working and living in Antwerp and work together since 2006
The art of Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen evokes many relationships with preceding movements in art. Almost all of these associations relate to the umbrella of Modernism and the gradated ontology of its progeny later in the twentieth century; it evokes the formal qualities of Minimalism as much as the optical illusions of Op Art. And yet, it is actually neither. It is not what it is and it is not what it seems. Hidden beneath the outward layers of immediate similarity is a practice that, while never denying what it admires about or has learned from these movements, remains fundamentally post-modernist; post-modern not as a visual facsimile of the received vernacular from the 1980’s, but in terms of the oft-misunderstood philosophies and bodies of theory accurately associated with the term. Their focus is less on objects as manifest things and more with the perception of things as objects. Ultimately, their installation sculptures are flat, composed of many small components but they can be perceived a monumental and emphatic. This overt presence of the formal and conceptual in Arocha-Schraenen’s work can be deceptive. Everywhere within works – whether bluntly opaque or deceptively transparent- we encounter the narrative.

OBJECTIF-EXHIBITIONS

http://www.objectif-exhibitions.org/

OBJECTIF EXHIBITIONS is a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art in Antwerp.

objectif [retribution] as a project finds its origins in a visit to Caracas, Venezuela in 2005, where we saw a socio-artistic project by two artists, Jaime Gili and Luis Romero.

Tipos Moviles is an on-going series of posters by different artists, executed in a printing workshop dating back to the 1920’s, that Luis Romero and Jaime Gili wanted to preserve. The posters appear in public space as a somewhat surprising sign of the existance of advanced artistic practice in a third world metropolis. With the years the project has evolved internationally into a visual archive of artistic activity in Caracas, Buenos Aires, London,...

objectif_exhibitions’ own poster project, that stands apart from Tipos Moviles, because in Western Europe the conservation of post-industrial heritage is taken care of via specific networks, intends to visualize the organisations public character and pay respect to local artistic practice.

10 artists were invited to design their own poster within the constraints of a set technical format that could function in public space as a signal for the critical potential and social relevance of all artistic activity, even the most elliptical.

ROBERTO DEWULF-ORTEGA and DAVID WAUTERS

Roberto Dewulf- Ortega is a writer - David Wauters is a painter - they made a movie together called Thierry's recipe -

Thierry’s recipe.... for a perfect roast.

Thierry’s recipe.... for a perfect dress.

Thierry’s recipe.... for a perfect health.

Thierry’s recipe.... for a perfect life.

For Thierry, home isn’t there yet. Where he lives looks like home but isn’t quite yet.

His girlfriend isn’t the one he needs, yet. She appears to be, but she has too many flaws.

He knows he will only feel at home in the future. So he decided to stay put and guard his future home, life and family untill they arrive. He ‘s sure that one day they will nock on the door and replace this life of his.

In the meanwhile he perfects his skills. The perfect roast? He has the recipe. The fanciest dress? He has the perfect design. Laying out the perfect table? He knows how. Maintaining a perfect health? He is his own coach, grows his own vegetables on the roof, cleans only with selfmade biodegradable products, doesn’t smoke nor drink.

His perfect future will come. Because he knows he has the recipe. He has just to get rid off some things, some people, that stand in the way of his future entering his home.

KRIS FIERENS

http://www.krisfierens.com/

Em que hei de pensar?

Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
(I am nothing.
I will never be anything.
I cannot want to be anything.
Apart from this, I have within me all the dreams of the world.)1

Like the speaker of Fernando Pessoa’s Tabacaria, the artist Kris Fierens insists on the negative
choice – he always knows what he doesn’t want, whether or not he can clearly articulate what
that means in terms of what he does. Yet above all – and in light of the foregoing this may seem
paradoxical – Fierens never wants to remain vrijblijvend, literally noncommittal, without
obligation. Art, according to Fierens, is obliged to stake claims in order to succeed, to pretend to
something as to a throne for which there may be many contenders. At first glance, it is a
balancing act between vrijheid and vrijblijvendheid, between freedom that chooses and
cowardice that does not. Between the real reality outside, where there are tobacco shops and
trams and street urchins, and the reality within where all things are endlessly possible because
everything is an illusion anyway.

Saio da janela, sento-me numa cadeira. Em que hei de pensar?
(I turn away from the window, sit down in a chair. What should I think about now?)
In that case, what should we think? The way this paradox is articulated in practice is perhaps best
approached through a brief archaeology of Fierens’ oeuvre. Works from the eighties – some of
which are on view in the present show – were more directly engaged with materiality, with the
delicate boundary between painted surface, sculpted form and found object. The combination of
pictorial restraint and found, often coarse materials (a scale, a piece of grooved, deep red foam)
at times earned comparisons with Arte Povera. Which is not entirely accurate, as this diverse
ensemble – however much it withholds itself from fixed categories like ‘painting’ ‘sculpture’ or
‘found object’ – manages to stage itself in a formal, aesthetic context. It manifestly claims to be
sculptural work has evolved from recent works on paper, perhaps via wall painting/the mural –
which has always been an important part of Fierens’ repertoire because it is manifestly spatial.
The new work emerges more literally to take its place. To take a position, which is never
determined in advance. To pretend to something – which is the nothingness of the act.

Visto isto, levanto-me da cadeira. Vou à janela.
(Given that, I get up from the chair. I go to the window.)

To return to the tobacco shop, it is also important to remember that the rejection of
vrijblijvendheid does not entail a collapse into absolute certainty or over-determination. Like the
‘I’ of Pessoa’s Tabacaria, the artist’s position is marked out by a kind of hesitancy born of selfdoubt,
which vacillates endlessly between metaphysical conundrums and the concrete physical
world outside the window. Vacillates is probably the wrong word: it would be more apt to say
that the poet/artist is trying to stitch the two together, and the motion of hesitating between one
and the other by turns ultimately has the force of a thread, however tenuous, drawn between two
unlike fabrics.

To escape the conundrum it is necessary to evert. With a word and a wave, the world is
reconstituted in all its concrete splendor – and metaphysics somehow restored in the act of
choosing.
text by Irene Schaudies, January 2009

1 For the Portuguese and Dutch versions of Fernando Pessoa’s Tabacaria (by the heteronym Álvaro de
Campos), I consulted Fernando Pessoa Gedichten. Keuze, vertaling en nawoord van August Willemsen
(Amsterdam, 1978), 176–87. The English translations are my own.
2 See, for example, Philippe Pirotte’s apt characterization of Fierens’ early work in “The Refusal of Any
Excuse,” in Kris Fierens (Antwerp, 2001), n.p.
3 Idem.
4 On the notion of theatricality as applied to contemporary art, see Michael Fried’s now classic essay “Art
and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, 1998), 148–72.
5 The interested reader might begin with G. Harman, Tool-Being. Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects
(Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2002).