27/09/2003 – 09/11/2003
Various indoor and outdoor locations throughout Albisola, Savona, and Vado Ligure (Riviera Ligure, Italy)
Founders and artistic directors: Tiziana Casapietra and Roberto Costantino
Co-curators: Nelson Herrera Ysla; Vasıf Kortun; Young Chul Lee; Gianfranco Maraniello; Hans-Ulrich Obrist; Olu Oguibe.
During my first trip to Albisola, the word “ironical” was mentioned concerning the artists I had invited to the exhibition. This comment further registered a degree of reciprocality between myself and the artists I wanted to work with in this exhibition.
My arrogant, biting, cynical, defiant, derisive, double-edged, and sneering comments were neutralized during my few days there. My body first ticked to a different clock, and I began to preposterously fantasize about a languid Italian Riviera, where time dilates in the heat. The visits to the master craftsmen, the remains of the colossal factories testifying to a hyper-industrial second half of the twentieth century, and finally, a communist institution organized Festa dell’Unità high up in the hills of Liguria, anchored it as a place that has endured with its customs. It was evident that taking time does not imply sluggishness, but we often lack the understanding of how different moments, paces, and seasons can co-perform. Time is incomputable and in acutely short supply. It is not just the artist’s time that may be fickle and arbitrary; the time of making, drying, baking, and waiting involved with clay becoming ceramics is not so precise either. It is not an exact science but a belief resulting from patience and familiarity. One can never reasonably predict the result.
As it has distinctively presupposed self-consciousness, irony has been one of the paramount metaphors of art for much of the twentieth century. But, the artists I wanted to work with are hardly ironic. They do not employ irony, but resort to humor, and part of the joke may also be about them. Humor is open-ended. It eases the way to infinite contemporary concerns, catches the viewer off-guard, suggests implausible alternatives, and offers a hospitable climate for a problematic issue that may follow. Humor is the privilege of the underdog, the trickster, and the court jester. It is also a flexible maneuvering tool to seek freedom outside the highbrow culture, narratives, and generated trends.
The attraction of ceramics for non-media-bound contemporary artists also derived from the fact that ceramics was often considered a lowbrow medium not in the premier league of high culture. This is what Björn Kjelltoft’s works in the exhibition are also about. He unhooks from the crisp lucidity of the lifestyle design languages of his home country, Sweden. Björn uses loud colors and decorative patterns and adopts a working strategy of aesthetics borrowed from the pariah of high taste. Ulrica Hydman Vallien is an extremely popular glass artist who has an established reputation as a ceramicist. Within the realm of ceramics, he expounds on this particular taste without any hint of irony. He applies it to the indicators of the shopping industry, such as shopping center anti-theft devices.
Nedko Solakov, by far the funniest storyteller in contemporary art today who has in the past remade himself a 106 kg snowflake, is a trickster who has proven that the world is flat. In his work for this exhibition, Nedko displays evidence of his fear of flying, which is truly a curse for an artist who travels incessantly. The little deformed pieces of baked clay carry the impressions of his fingers squeezing the raw material during flights. The work is, in effect, a failed attempt to exorcise his deepest phobia.
Hale Tenger used to be very humorous at the end of the 1980s, humorous to such an extent that her work for the 1992 Istanbul Biennale, a glittering wall installation of see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil statuettes and ancient fertility figures with enormous erect phalluses landed her with a ticket to jail. With an MFA in ceramics — an idiosyncratic distinction in this exhibition — she conflates a new version of the fertility figure with Ottoman Nicean decorations to create a jovial if not palatable, cultural hybrid.
Gabriel Lester is similarly concerned with working with a readymade but with slight alteration. A copy of a bust of Julius Caesar is animated by the onlooker peering through his imperial eyes, but watch your back! Gabriel asks what statues look at, and if we were statues ourselves, how would we look stuck in a museum during the day and after hours?
“You can never say to a child that raisins are candy and get away with it. Ceramic art is akin to the raisins of the art world.”
Björn Kjelltoft
vasıf kortun 