Vacant Histories
Recommended article from the current issue of Aesthetica.

Belgian photographer Reginald Van de Velde (b. 1975) stops time with reflective images of abandoned spaces. In capturing structures that are slipping into disrepair, he saves them forever, temporarily halting the progress of nature as it pulls each space back into the dust from which it came. His desire is to offer audiences a second of quiet in a fast-paced world, where buildings are constructed and deconstructed in a moment and individuals rarely have time to appreciate their surroundings. Travelling the world to find hidden locations, Van de Velde documents the crumbling interiors of derelict hospitals, monasteries, power stations, castles and everywhere in between. His work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including the Art Science Museum, Singapore; New York Photo Festival; Somerset House, London; and the Cannes Lions International Festival. The photographer has also won numerous awards and is currently nominated for the 9th International Arte Laguna Prize. www.suspiciousminds.com.

Issue 63: February/March - Out Now

Each artist featured in this issue follows the notion of drawing upon all influences to create something entirely original and interdisciplinary. Many of the practitioners are people that have backgrounds in other areas but have moved between art forms and disciplines cross-pollinating their output along the way. For example, Barbara Kasten trained as a painter and textile artist before moving into sculpture, installation and photography. A major survey of her work opens this February at the ICA, Philadelphia. Douglas Coupland’s creative output is prolific; from writing to working as a designer, his latest show everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything opens in two venues in Canada and is the largest survey to date of the artist’s work. Fashion designer Dries Van Noten creates collections that are inspired by art and music; the current exhibition Inspirations articulates his creative universe.

We present a selection of works from Viviane Sassen, who creates interplay between the body and its environment. She has just been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and is one of today’s most sought-after photographers. Robert Harding Pittman takes pictures of abandoned construction sites, scrutinising global systems and the space between the natural and built landscapes. Matthias Heiderich captures geometric shapes and transforms architectural spaces. And, in film, we speak to Robert Connolly about the latest release, The Turning, which is based on Tim Winton’s novel and comprises vignettes made by 17 different directors. This issue urges you to fuse together concepts from other disciplines and explore the possibilities of stepping outside of your routine.

1. Aesthetica Short Film Festival Open for Submissions

Having firmly established itself as one of the most exciting site-specific cinema experiences in the UK, the BAFTA Qualifying Aesthetica Short Film Festival (ASFF) promises to return bigger than ever 5-8 November 2015 following the overwhelming success of the 2014 edition. The four-day event transforms 15 of the most historic and iconic places in York into pop-up cinemas, screening the best in independent film from across the world. There will also be masterclasses, networking opportunities, talks and Q&As to engage with industry leaders, such as BAFTA, Channel 4 and Association of Camera Operators.

The ASFF team are now looking for new films for 2015 and are inviting submissions from emerging and established filmmakers pushing the boundaries of short film to new and exciting levels. Not only will finalists have the chance to present their film to a range of industry insiders and thousands of festival attendees, there are cash prizes up for grabs and the opportunity to appear in a number of other UK festivals with the ASFF guest programme tour.

ASFF 2015 Prizes:

• Screenings at the BAFTA Qualifying ASFF 2015
• All film are in competition
• Awards for Best Film in each category and People’s Choice
• Eligibility to enter the EE British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA)
• Screenings in various guest programmes at other film festivals
• Editorial in Aesthetica Magazine and on Aesthetica’s online channels (180,000 readership worldwide)

The genres accepted include, advertising, animation, artists’ film, comedy, dance, documentary, drama, experimental, fashion, music video and thriller. We accept running times up to 30 minutes and the deadline is 31 May 2015.

Find out more at www.sff.co.uk/submit

2. Aesthetica Art Prize Open for Submissions - Early Bird Offer

The Aesthetica Art Prize is now open of entries, offering both budding and established artists the opportunity to showcase their work to a wider, international audience. Now in its eighth year the award is a celebration of contemporary visual art, inviting artists to submit imaginative and innovative work that shows creative originality and technical skill.

The Aesthetica Art Prize is a fantastic opportunity to develop your presence in the international art world. Prizes include £5,000 Main Prize and £1,000 Student Prize courtesy of Hiscox, a group exhibition and editorial coverage in Aesthetica Magazine, which has a readership of 180,000 worldwide.

Categories for entry are: Photographic & Digital Art, Three Dimensional Design & Sculpture, Painting & Drawing and Video, Installation & Performance. Entries close 31 August 2015.

Visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/artprize and enter APX3 at the checkout to save 33% from the entry fee with our Early Bird Offer. Offer ends 28 February.

3. Aesthetica Creative Writing Award Open for Submissions - Early Bird Offer

The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award is open for entries. Now in its eighth year, the award is internationally renowned and judged by industry experts including Arifa Akbar, literary editor of The Independent – with £500 prize money for winners and publication in an anthology of new writing, giving you the chance to showcase your work to a wider, international audience.

Prizes include:

• £500 Poetry winner
• £500 Short Fiction winner
• Publication in the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual
• One year subscription to Granta
• Selection of books courtesy of Bloodaxe and Vintage
• Complimentary copy of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Annual

Visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/creativewriting and enter CWA15 at the checkout to save 33% from the entry fee with our Early Bird Offer. Offer ends 28 February.

4. Win a pair of tickets to How to Hold Your Breath at the Royal Court Theatre

Audiences can embark on an epic journey through Europe with sisters Dana (Maxine Peake) and Jasmine as they discover the true cost of principles in this twisted exploration of how we live now. Starting with a seemingly innocent one night stand, this darkly witty and magical thriller by Zinnie Harris dives into our recent European history.

Zinnie Harris’ credits at the Royal Court include Nightingale and Chase. Her play The Wheel for the National Theatre of Scotland, directed by Vicky Featherstone, won a Fringe First Award, jointly won an Amnesty International Freedom of Expression Theatre Award and was shortlisted for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. Her other recent credits include The Message on the Watch and The Panel at the Tricycle, A Doll’s House at the Donmar (adapt.). Her 2000 play Further than the Furthest Thing won the Peggy Ramsay Foundation Award, a Fringe First, and the John Whiting Award. On television, she wrote extensively for Spooks and is currently writing Tommy and Tuppence based on the Agatha Christie series for David Walliams on BBC1.

To enter answer the following question: What BBC Drama did Maxine Peake star in?

• A: Cotton
• B: Wool
• C: Silk

Send your answer along with your name to competitions@milktwosugars.com stating “Aesthetica competition” as the subject line. Terms and conditions apply. Prize is valid Tuesday-Saturday until 21 March 2015. Subject to availability. Prize is as stated and cannot be transferred or exchanged.

How to Hold Your Breath, 4 February – 21 March, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, SW1W 8AS www.royalcourttheatre.com.

5. Win a Complimentary One-Day Pass for PULSE New York

Celebrating its 10th anniversary, PULSE Contemporary Art Fair returns for its New York edition 5-8 March at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea. PULSE New York will continue the momentum established during its successful Miami Beach edition, which realised major sales and acclaim at the fair’s airy new mid-Miami Beach location. PULSE New York will present a tightly-curated selection of exhibitors showing work by more than 100 international artists, over 80% of exhibitors at the fair will present three artists or less, and a third will showcase two artists in conversation. As one of the longest-running contemporary art fairs in New York, PULSE offers visitors a welcoming environment in which to explore and discover the most compelling contemporary art produced today.

PULSE New York is pleased to offer Aesthetica readers a select group of day passes. The first 100 people to redeem their pass here using the code DAYAESTHETICA will receive a complimentary one-day pass to the fair. Each pass is good for one person during public hours between Thursday 5 March and Sunday 8 March. PULSE New York is centrally located at Chelsea’s Metropolitan Pavillion, 125 West 18th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, and will offers a complimentary shuttle service to the Armory Show during all fair hours. For more information about PULSE Contemporary Art Fair please visit pulse-art.com or email: info@pulse-art.com.

The code to redeem is DAYAESTHETICA and the site to redeem is: www.microspec.com/tix123/eTic.cfm?code=PNYCAF2015

1. Guy Bourdin: Walking Legs

Michael Hoppen Gallery, London
6 February - 28 March

Officially being unveiled alongside Somerset House’s show Image-Maker, Walking Legs, is one of Guy Bourdin's (1928-1991) most loved Charles Jourdan campaign series. Walking legs was shot in 1979 by the French designer and photographer, using quintessentially English landscapes as the backdrop to this high-end campaign. Photographed at locations on a road trip taken in a Cadillac from London to Brighton, many of the city and seaside scenes remain the same today and include familiar sights such as the London bus stop and the classic park bench. As with much of Bourdin’s work, the model is mysteriously absent – all that is seen is a pair of mannequin legs, adorned with Charles Jourdan’s creations.

Guy Bourdin, born in Paris in 1928, was the pioneering fashion photographer whose arresting photographs filled the pages of French Vogue for three decades from the 1950s through to the 1980s. He is notorious for breaking the boundaries of traditional commercial photography and reshaping the classic fashion picture, using a daring narrative and vibrant colour palette. Vogue’s editor introduced Bourdin to the shoe designer Charles Jourdan, for whom he became the brand's official advertising photographer, producing some of his best images during this period. The beauty in many of his pictures is that you can see small imperfections and fine details such as the models' pores. In this respect they hold an integrity that is rarely seen today.

In 1950, Guy Bourdin met Man Ray and became his protégé. The spirit of the Surrealists is ever-present in Bourdin's work: we see this in the dream-like quality of his pictures and the artist's use of uncanny juxtapositions. Taking photography as his medium of choice, Bourdin explored the provocative and the sublime with a relentless perfectionism and sharp humour. He captured the imagination of a generation, and yet his images have a timeless quality, so much so that they continue to influence the worlds of fashion and advertising today, 20 years since his death.

www.michaelhoppengallery.com

Image credit:
Guy Bourdin - Charles Jourdan, September 1979. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.

2. Krištof Kintera: Your Light is my Life

Kunsthal, Rotterdam
28 February - 7 June

For the first time in the Netherlands, the Kunsthal Rotterdam is presenting a major solo exhibition by the Czech artist Krištof Kintera (b. 1973). Kintera addresses politically charged issues with his evocative installations full of ironic, almost slapstick-like and sometimes dark humour. His work is staggeringly imaginative and powerful, subtly providing food for thought. Kintera's sculptures and installations are lifelike, can move and communicate, are dysfunctional and sometimes completely absurd.

Everyday life and a sense of wonder regarding political issues both great and small are never far removed from Kintera's work. His provocative, melancholic and poetic work explores the boundaries of contemporary sculpture, examining issues ranging from mass consumption, stress and tax, to the darker side of society. The artist creates alternative meanings by depicting absurd possibilities and unrealistic applications. Expressive, colourful and skilfully crafted using a wide range of materials, the sculptures sometimes stir up unexpectedly strong emotions.

This artist is no newcomer to creating confusion, and visitors to Your Light is My Life feel this at once. The exhibition presents work from the past 15 years including approximately 40 sculptures and over 35 large-scale drawings and sketches, such as Talkmen (1999-2003), which portrays a group of small scale humans posing critical questions about the future of mankind. Audiences can also experience the visionary grumblings of a crow, commenting on the world from the branch of a tree in the work I see, I see, I see (2009). Together with sculptures like the gigantic Shiva Samurai (2014), the colourful Demon of the Growth (2012), the poetic A Prayer for Lost Arrogance (2013) and the incredible and frustrating sound in Revolution (2005), the exhibition presents the unusual world of Kintera in which astonishment and alienation play a leading role.

www.kunsthal.nl

Image credit:
Krištof Kintera, My light is your life – Shiva Samurai (5 KM / 50 HZ), 2014 Old lamps, bulbs, cables, electrics, metal construction. © 2014, Krištof Kintera.

3. Doris Salcedo

MCA, Chicago
21 February - 24 May

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presents the first retrospective of the work of renowned sculptor Doris Salcedo (b. 1958). Salcedo – who lives and works in Bogotá – gained prominence in the 1990s for her fusion of postminimalist forms with sociopolitical concerns. The exhibition features all major bodies of work from the artist’s 30-year career – most of which have never been shown together before – as well as the US debut of her recent major work Plegaria Muda (2008–10).

Salcedo’s work is deeply rooted in her country’s social and political landscape, including its long history of civil conflicts, yet her sculptures and installations subtly address these fraught circumstances with elegance and a poetic sensibility that balances the gravitas of her subjects. Salcedo grounds her art in rigorous fieldwork, which involves extensive interviews with people who have experienced loss and trauma in their everyday lives due to political violence. In more recent years, Salcedo has created large-scale, site-specific installations around the world, including Turkey, Italy, Great Britain, and her native Colombia. Rather than making literal representations of violence or trauma, however, Salcedo’s artworks convey a sense of an absent, missing body and evoke a collective sense of loss. The resulting pieces engage with multiple dualities at once – strength and fragility, the ephemeral and the enduring – and bear elements of healing and reparation in the careful, laborious process of their making.

The exhibition begins with a selection of her earliest works made of hospital furniture and stacks of white shirts impaled by iron rebar. Salcedo re-creates the original installation of these works as they were first shown in Bogotá in 1990. A large group of pieces from her longest, ongoing body of work are exhibited together en masse for the first time since 1998: sculptures made with concrete-filled doors, tables, armoires, chairs, and other pieces of furniture – objects symbolic of the disrupted domestic sphere and its sustaining social bonds.

www.mcachicago.org

Image Credit:
Doris Salcedo. Installation view, Doris Salcedo Studio, Bogotá, 2013. Photo: Oscar Monsalve Pino. Reproduced courtesy of the artist; Alexander and Bonin, New York; and White Cube, London.

Artists’ Directory

The Aesthetica Artists’ Directory is a global network of artists engaging with the professional art world. In print, online and in digital, we have created a forum for discussion and interactivity where artists, galleries, collectors, critics, curators and enthusiasts can meet and discover the best in emerging art from around the world.

View the Artists' Directory at www.aestheticamagazine.com/directory
or for information visit www.aestheticamagazine.com/about-the-directory

Realism in Rawiya: Photographic Stories from the Middle East, Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Six female photographers Myriam Abdelaziz, Tamara Abdul Hadi, Laura Boushnak, Tanya Habjouqa, Dalia Khamissy and Newsha Tavakolian comprise Rawiya, the first all-female collective to emerge from the Middle East. With this exhibition they hold a specific focus on gender and identity, depicting the contradictions, stereotypes, social and political issues of a region in flux.
The collective’s Arabic title, Rawiya, translates to ‘she who tells a story’ and is fitting for a group of women who were all established photojournalists for various Arabic news channels and publications before becoming artists. Their previous careers provided an insider’s view of the extremities of their regions, whilst also observing how their reportage could become reframed, lose or take on new context in the international media.
The photographers look at internationally newsworthy events through a local eye, resulting in an intimate and personal insight. Their images of everyday life across the Middle East include previously untold tales: a Palestinian all-female auto-racing team to transsexuals living in Jerusalem, from cluster bomb survivors trying to rebuild their lives to the Iranian mothers of martyrs and Lebanese parents who still wait for the 17,000 missing to come home.
Many artists in Rawiya have also lived their own stories, for example Dalia Khamissy’s The Missing: Lebanon (2010 – ongoing) echoes her own experience of her father’s kidnap when she was seven years old. Artist Newsha Tavakolian states that the work of Rawiya offers “a way of breathing within the smothering world of censorship.”

Realism in Rawiya: Photographic Stories from the Middle East, 18 February – 16 May, Impressions Gallery, Bradford City Park, Aldermanbury, Bradford, West Yorkshire, BD1 1SD. For more information visit www.impressions-gallery.com

Image Credit:
Tanya Habjouqa, Untitled, from the Women of Gaza series, 2009 © Tanya Habjouqa

Read more articles on our blog:
www.aestheticamagazine.com/blog