With the aim of giving visibility and opportunity to international artistic production for artists with different career levels, as well as establishing alliances that expand our radius of action, artist residency programme airWG will welcome the 15th edition of the Miami New Media Festival 2020 CENSORSHIP Art and new media censorship in the information age, from this 30th of October to November 1st at puntWG , 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Daily.

Thanks to the invitation from Jimmy Yánez, International Official Curator & Museographer for the insular and Caribbean representation, we will show a selection of 9 video artworks by artists from different countries. This 15th edition also includes a special guest, Olga Gabrielle (Aruba) with recent artwork entitled SOTAVENTO.

The Miami New Media Festival is a multimedia platform held in Miami by Arts Connection Foundation since 2006.

PLEASE!
REMEMBER TO FOLLOW THE COVID-19 PROTOCOL,
We are allowed a maximum of 4 visitors inside the space at the same time. Announce your visit by sending an email to airwg@atelierwg.nl.

GUIDELINES VISITOR - KEEPING YOU SAFE!
In adherence to the protocol for cultural spaces due to COVID19 we kindly request you to consider the following before and during your visit; Refrain from visiting when you are experiencing (minor) health issues such as a head cold, a runny nose, a cough, a sore throat, a raised temperature or fever, and/or shortness of breath. You are required to always keep a minimum distance of 1.5 meters from other visitors and staff and wear your mask.

Enfleshed is a multisensory exhibition reflecting on shamanisms of Inner Mongolia and Manchuria (Northern China) in relation to the serious pollution, electromagnetism, heavy industry and rare-earth mining in the region, global capitalism and the artist’s own body. 

Central in the exhibition is Kristiina Koskentola’s film, Flesh and Metal. Light and Oil. (2020) in which rituals such as for example the healing ceremony of Shaman Liu (who, embodied as her Fox God, healed the artist’s shaking hands) dialogue, drumming and singing intertwine with atmospheric electronic soundscapes and (industrial) landscapes. The film examines the potential of ‘non-living’ or 'spectral' subjectivities and time as active political and ethical actors and agencies. It searches for a deeper relationship with natural and spiritual worlds through alternative knowledges and explores the boundaries of human rationalism and knowledge production and the environmental injustice and slow violence of the logic of (global) capitalism. The film draws on dialogues with involved shamans, healers and musicians, local knowledge, lived experience, nonhuman knowledge and theorising by Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn and Jussi Parikka.

puntWG will be transformed to a sensory environment that functions as incubator of other knowledge and experiences and  as a space for healing.

This inquiry is further expanded and sensitised in installations of the program Enfleshed- Elaborated. 

Fresh Mongolian Milk Tea is provided hourly for the audience.

Event
Public Program as Installations 
Fetauring: Zoènie Liwen Deng, Rick Dolphijn, Mark Kremer, Pia Lindman, Jussi Koitela, Han Xiaohan, German Popov, Bo Wang
Integrated into the exhibition throughout its opening times

Enfleshed-Elaborated is a programme as installations consisting of essays, healing sessions, music performances, interventions and poetry. It is a programme in which, for example, theory might become a poem, an essay a recipe, ancient Manchurian and Uralic music a contemporary soundpiece and a bone setting session of Finnish oral tradition an installation of the subsensorial.     

Group of artists, philosophers, cultural theorists, researchers, musicians and curators from Eurasia were invited to reflect on the context of the exhibition Enfleshed – in words and bodies, in flesh. They have delved, among other, into diverse ideas of closeness to nature, spirituality, and the conflicting realities created today’s global economy, as well as the power structures of knowledge and science.

Fresh Mongolian Milk Tea is provided hourly fort the audience.

Supported by: Amsterdams fonds voor de kunst, Kone Foundation, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Avek.

We live in a time where death is referred to as a statistic. Never have we been more aware of the fragility of life and yet to many of us death remains a notion as abstract as ever.

Throughout history there have been diverse practices that meditate on death as a way to accept the transitory nature of life. It is believed that by practicing dying one becomes able to see through one's fear and move beyond it.

The audio installation This body that once was you is such an exercise in dying. Seated in a field of fine bone dust - originating from human bone - the visitor visualizes her/his own body after death. Babs Bakels (artist and former curator of funerary museum Tot Zover in Amsterdam) and Vibeke Mascini (artist and writer) based their installation on The nine cemetery contemplations, a Buddhist meditation from the Maha Satipatthana sutta that focuses specifically on physical detachment and death consciousness. Bakels and Mascini underwent the meditation under the guidance of the American Zen priest Joan Halifax. It begins with the phrase “You died today” and follows the body's disintegration into nine stages, up to the moment when bones become dust and dissolve completely in their environment.

The decomposition process is described plastically, but what happens on a biological and molecular level when our body falls apart? In what way do we return into the elementary chain? Which chemical processes coincide with this? Bakels and Mascini have asked scientists and other specialists to respond to the stages of decomposition described in the The nine cemetery contemplations. 

This body that once was you is the result of these conversations: an intimate audio experience available for one person at the time. In a spoken stream of conscience the listener is guided from the last breath to the transformation into shiny beetles and fragments of DNA in the universe.

All matter is impermanent, scientists, philosophers and Buddhists alike agree on this. To what extent have us mortals internalized this notion, can we embrace death as the formative principle of life? Reflecting on the question “what is death”, This body that once was you reveals a reality in which death has a tangible place.

The individual audio experience lasts approximately 30 minutes and is accessible free of charge and by appointment on: 17, 18, 23, 24 and 25 October from 11: 00-18: 00. Time slots can soon be booked on the Facebook event page This body that once was you, or via thisbodythatoncewasyou@gmail.com

Photographic documentation by Ilya Rabinovich

Friday 02/10, 19:00:  Drum-n-Pix, Pixeltrance or Expressionistic Minimalism on a Subpixel ,  performance by Maxim Tyminko
Saturday & Sunday:  14h-19h 
Sunday 04/10, 18:00: Finissage

Toon Fibbe & Laura Wiedijk, Céline Mathieu, Maxim Tyminko Presented by: La Cocina. [Lore Gablier I Alejandro Ramírez]

Not LESS-MATERIAL marks the opening of the festival ‘A Matter of (In)digestions’ organised by La Cocina in different venues in Amsterdam in October-November 2020. With the festival, we want to call attention to what we tend to take for granted – that is, what we consume –, and highlight some of the socio-political, historical and cultural intersections that consumption implies. What do our appetites tell us about taste and infrastructure, crops and identity, recipes and botanics?

At PuntWG, we present installations and performances by Céline Mathieu, Toon Fibbe & Laura Wiedijk, and Maxim Tyminko. Drawing on the phenomena of online communities driven by erotic fantasies, on homeopathic practices and on algorhythmic calculations at machinic speed, the artists invite us to reflect on consumption in relation to fluid and more volatile objects such as songs, beliefs, desires, or data. How do these objects change and evolve over time? How do they consume and move themselves from place to mind, from mind to space? 

Toon Fibbe & Laura Wiedijk sound installation, To Stick My Head Into Your Mouth and Lick Your Tongue, elaborates on the phenomenon of Vorarephilia: the desire and fetish of being swallowed up in one piece. Unable to fulfill such a desire, vorarephiles perform their fantasy by way of collective fiction. Bewitched by fear and excitement, a question arises: Is the desire to dissolve into something larger than oneself a form of surrender, or is it a courageous attempt to oppose the pervasive force of hyper-individualism? 

Alluding in her title to the process of diluting a substance in a homeopathic preparation, Céline Mathieu presents 7 CH (Airwaves, Person, Flowers, Homeopathy, Technics SL-1200, Test Press of ‘Blusens Fasong’ by Gaute Granli): a series of liminal gestures that explore, through sound and space interventions, the invisible ‘effect’ of the act of feeding – be it mind or space.

Maxim Tyminko presents an iteration of his installation and performance Drum-n-Pix, Pixeltrance or Expressionistic Minimalism on a Sub-pixel Level, in which he delves into Vernor Vinge’s utopian/dystopian concept of technological singularity: a moment when machine intelligence surpasses the cognitive capacities of the human brain. Exploring the process of digesting visual data, the piece is an inquiry into the logic behind A.I. image analysis that evolves into a psychedelic experience of repetitive rhythmic audiovisual patterns.

Check the full program of ‘A Matter of (In)digestions’ HERE. As part of the festival, the artists also produced online works that are published on La Cocina’s website:

Performance as Text: Neuroplasticity by Céline Mathieu.
I Want to Be Eaten by Celebrities by Toon Fibbe and Laura Wiedijk.
A Musical Piece for Marimba and One Million Colored Squares by Maxim Tyminko.

‘A Matter of (In)digestion’ is supported by the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and the French Institute in the Netherlands. 

The performance will be streamed: more info to come. 

airWG Amsterdam is pleased to announce the exhibition INDIGO PHASE by Kentaro Yokouchi, Japan 1979. Opening on Friday 18 September 5-7 pm at puntWG exhibition space in Amsterdam.

Yokouchi, the airWG artist in residence since July, will show a selection of works created during this residency period, where the use of indigo and other natural pigments on supports such as paper and silk predominates. His research addresses various historiographical aspects in relation to these natural materials, especially the interaction of Japanese, Indonesian and Dutch cultures concerning its production, use and commercialization.

Kentaro has a special interest in the use of old techniques and historical images which enable a new poetic encounter of cultures, thereby re-establishing bridges and approaches between Eastern and Western art. Also, he reveals traces of links between images of the past, whose silent voices and gestures point to a different configuration of our human condition.

The exhibition will close on Saturday September 26th at puntWG with a special meeting between the public and the artist, in a live connection with curator Mizuho Fujita from Kyoto City University of Arts Art Gallery @KCUA in Japan, who will speak with Kentaro about his recent works exhibited in Japan under the title: SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, a work that Kentaro made during his stay at airWG Amsterdam.

Photo documentation by Ilya Rabinovich

We count on your presence, next Friday September 18th for the opening and Saturday 26th for the closing and farewell of Kentaro Yokouchi.

Open everyday 1-6pm. Closed on Monday 21/9

Visitor Guidelines - Keeping You Safe!

In adherence to the protocol for cultural spaces due to COVID19 we kindly request you to consider the following before and during your visit;

• Refrain from visiting when you are experiencing (minor) health issues such as a head cold, a runny nose, a cough, a sore throat, a raised temperature or fever and/or shortness of breath
• We will allow a maximum of 5 visitors inside the space at the same time. Individuals, couples, roommates and small families of two or three people.
• You are required to always keep a minimum distance of 1,5 meters from other visitors and staff

VISIT on 5, 6, 10, 12 & 12 September 2020 2-6 PM or by appointment

With such rocky and reversing terrain, seasons persevere and nature transforms itself anew, but also into certainty. Keeping Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016) close at hand, Avant Gardener delves into interwoven matters around frontiers and borders, botany, spiritual presence, interspecies cooperation and kinship. The artists in this exhibition explore the transitory phases between natural and cultural landscape presented in forms of drawing, installation, photography and audio-visual documentation of sonic work.

Anthea Bush’s tall drawings entitled Growing Stone sprung as she watched potatoes grow with multicolored branches into unusually shaped forms. Patiently observing how these alien bodies contain themselves over many months, Bush keeps record of time and collects data of the alternative world they inhabit, similarly to 16th-Century botanists. These magnified watercolor illustrations of outgrown potatoes are accompanied by the protagonists themselves—the real life vegetable in its full eerie botanical glory, displayed on various glass plinths.

Conceived in its entirety, Christina Della Giustina’s you are variations - tree house invites the visitor to the second floor as if climbing the nearby tree trunk for an intimate and closer experience of the work. Initiated in the artist’s studio almost a decade ago, Della Giustina’s artistic project emanated from a wish to listen to the neighboring tree facing her studio at Atelier WG, in puntWG’s immediate environment. Studying the water cycles of trees, you are variations transform empirical data into a musical score that is performed through collaborative live performances and audio-visual installations. The tree house installation presents visually animated documentary material alongside you are variations’ last performance of the artist’s nine-year research at Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace in Prague. 

Capturing her research around intimately observed rituals and myths connected to landscape, Emily Bates’ 100 Days photographic series narrates meditation practices through scenes of stillness with hidden intricacies. Documenting a shaman temple on the coast of South Korea, the artist follows traces of nature worship, animism, rituals of misfortune and how these traditions navigate around power references of water and mountains. Bates partners her photography with five flags of colored silk hung on the wall that refers to the Korean shamanic ritual “Obansinjanggi.” The banners of the guardian gods are used in divination and the colors are associated with five directions according to traditional cosmology: blue is for the east, misfortune and distress; white is for the west, the Cheonsin (Celestial God) or blessing for the dead; red for the south, and good fortune; black for the north, symbolizing death; and yellow for the center, which stands for one’s ancestors.

Servet Koçyiğit entwined pieces of various shades and patterns of green fabric within themselves resembling topography maps and tree rings in his most recent textile map Medical Green. With reference to the color palette used to demonstrate the spread and the intensity levels of the COVID-19 virus throughout the map of the Netherlands, the artist amplifies the structuring of frontiers and borders, as well as the inevitably contagious. Suspending the work outside the balcony above the gallery space, Koçyiğit brings the debatable distinction between private and public to front. 

The exhibition is entitled by a mischievous wording attempt of a song* that not only discusses gardening as a way to escape one’s own thoughts, but also portrays the familiar sentiments around deprivation based upon unusual circumstances. Living in troubling times with unjust patterns of both pain and joy, Haraway indicates that the task should be to make kin by means of inventing connections to practice learning how to live and die well with each other. Sticking with such difficulties, she adds, requires learning to be truly present. As a way to hold one’s ground, the artists look into interrelations of representation, kinship and spirituality.

*Avant Gardener by Courtney Barnett
The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas, 2013

Further readings 

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
Duke University Press, 2016

Korean Shamanism: The Cultural Paradox by Chongho Kim
Routledge Revivals: Vitality of Indigenous Religions, 2003

Online Encyclopedia of Korean Folk Culture
Korean Folk Beliefs