Actors and Agents – Props, Events and Encounters

September 21, 2010 | No comments

VOLUME ONE

Actors and Agents – Props, Events and Encounters

30th September – 30th October 2010

Athanasios Argianas, Jonathan Baldock, Hannah Barton & Xavier Poultney, Matthew Coombes, Michael Dean, Marcus Foster, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Andy Holden, Nick Hornby, Mimi Norrgren, Conrad Shawcross, Franz Erhard Walther and Franz West

Volume One – Props, Events and Encounters is an international group exhibition that explores ‘the triumphant return to theatricality’ within contemporary sculptural practices. Fourteen international artists present existing and newly commissioned works within a specially conceived installation. In his seminal 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, Michael Fried criticized the overt theatricality of minimalist sculpture, which replaced the ‘presentness’ of compositional sculpture with the staging of the viewer as performer. Props, Events and Encounters presents a selection of works, which re-evaluates this argument within the context of current sculptural production.

The selected works are imbued with a theatrical status and represent complex systems of rhetoric, which are enlivened and expanded through the engagement of the viewer. Through this independent agency we see a move away from contemplative engagements with form and space and instead encounter multiple narratives and dialogues between the object, viewer and context.

Formally, the artists actively engage in various dialogues surrounding materials and processes. The works are united again by the idea that matter itself can be creative and subscribe to an object orientated philosophy. More and more within contemporary practice, we are seeing a return to objects; Props, Events and Encounters responds to this shift and questions how the various cultural, economic, political, social and ecological environments have shaped sculpture to become a vehicle through which artists are not only placing objects in space, but simultaneously creating opportunities for social interaction and performative engagement.

Where// The Hub, 5 Alkminis & 3 Sfittion str., Athens (Keramikos metro station)

Duration// 1 October 2010 – 1 November 2010

Visiting Hours// Thursday – Saturday: 11:00 – 20:00, Sunday: 11:00 – 17:00, Monday: Closed

OPENING // Friday, 1 October 2010, 20:00

Performance by Andy Holden

Façade projections by 2monochannels

22:30 – … Opening party

PRE-OPENING// Thursday, 30 September 2010, 19:00

19:00 Artist’s Talk in collaboration with the British Council

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Team//

Curated & organised by:

If-untitled architects – Martha Giannakopoulou, Annika Grafweg, Seki Hirano

Spratt and Winkle – Fiona Boundy

Consultant: Yiannis Vasileiou

Production: Viki Topalidou, Nadia Diamantopoulou

Art Direction: Angelo Pandelidis

In partnership with the British Council

A percentage of the profit will go to the MERIMNA charity organisation, dedicated to the care of children and family in sickness and death (www.merimna.org.gr).

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