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Vassili Balatsos, Independent Landscape #36, 2012, multicoloured tape on wall
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Vassili Balatsos, Installation View, 2012, The Agency , London
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Vassili Balatsos, Installation View, 2012, The Agency , London
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Vassili Balatsos, Installation View, 2012, The Agency , London
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Vassili Balatsos, Installation View, 2012, The Agency , London
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Rebecca Birch, The Yeargoing, 2011, digital film, 70 mins
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Jim Hobbs, Still Image , 16 mm film _______________________________________________________________
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Amanda Beech and Diann Bauer, Predators and Pests, Installation View _______________________________________________________________
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Vassili Balatsos , The Civilization Project, Gallery 1
Seeing and Telling , Gallery 2
feat. Amanda Beech, Rebecca Birch,
Anthony Gross, Al Cameron and Karen di Franco
and their invited guests
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The Agency is pleased to present the first London solo exhibition by Athenian artist Vassili Balatsos. The works of Vassili Balatsos are based on "landscape", both as genre and also as socio-economic landscape, represented by architecture. Balatsos has created his own conceptual categories of the genre: The "Independent Landscapes" are wall-drawings of buildings made with adhesive tape, which also refer to distant modernist utopias. Their perspective opens a virtual space where the ephemeral construction denies monumentality. The "Logical Landscapes", the second unity of works, consists of sculptures. For his forthcoming exhibition at the Agency the artist will build a site-specific installation based upon the "Independent Landscapes". In addition to the mapping of the space with taped landscapes, a series of shelves will bear the contents of the artist's studio. Obsessive collections of toy soldiers, screen printing masks and nautical maps all feature as objects revealing the artist's thought processes, psychological , social and geographical identity.
In a sense Balatsos will combine the mapping of the independent landscapes with archaeology of the studio. The studio in turn bears traces of the reflection of a social macrocosm such as national territories or wars as much as it looks inwards. For Balatsos the economy of means strengthens the resistance to the stereotyped image and enhances an interpretation of reality more than its disinterested acceptance.
Born in 1966, Vassili Balatsos has had a number of solo exhibitions including Ozon, Athens and Villa Arson, Nice. He has recently participated in a number of museum exhibitions at Maison Blanche, Neuchatel, the State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki and The National Contemporary Art Museum in Ahens. His works have been aquired by prestigious public collections such as the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MAMCO), Geneva, The Art Cologne Foundation, Cologne and the Benaki Museum, Athens. His work was recently included in Monodrome: the 3 rd Athens Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud. The exhibition is supported by the Agency London and The Apartment Gallery Athens.
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Seeing and Telling Gallery2
The Agency is presenting Seeing and Telling in Gallery 2. The space will be dedicated to the informal presentation of works using film or video within the context of a forum for debate. Artist and curators present their own work or that of their peers in discussion with either the audience or an invited speaker. Seeing and Telling is about breaking the rigidity of the exhibition code as a space of silence and largely passive consumption and attempts to hand back some of the power to the audience. Seeing and Telling refers as much to the artist's role as a catalyst for experiences which are narrated through their artistic language to the audience as it is about the audience experiencing the work and providing feedback. The experimental format of the show reminds of the reciprocity of cultural creation. Each Saturday during the show one artist, curating team or single film piece will be presented and given over for discussion by an open audience and some invited speakers. The screenings are free and some refreshments will be offered.
Rebecca Birch, The Year-Going, 2011 film still, DVD, sound, 50 ', 14 Jan, 3-6pm
Rebecca Birch is presenting her recent acclaimed film piece entitled "The Year-Going", a compression of a live observation of the process of making a clock. Birch captured the journey and craft of the clockmaker Johan Ten Hoeve whilst he created a precise replica of the Year-Going Tompion for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.The resulting footage exposes in intimate detail the craft of clockmaking, and Johan's personal process of creating.
Rebecca Birch has recently had solo projects incat Quare Gallery, "Whitescreen" at The Agency, London and a commissioned local project for the inauguration of The Hepworth, Wakefield. She has co-authored and participated in "Field Broadcast: West " exhibited at The City Gallery, Leicester: "I will talk with anyone who will talk with me", at the Fishmarket, Northampton: "Census" and the group exhibition: "A Portrait of Space ", Dublin, curated by Rose Lejeune and Teresa Gillespie.Rebecca Birch lives and works in London. She invites Jim Hobbs.
Jim Hobbs, presented by Rebecca Birch, 14 Jan ,3-6pm
Jim Hobbs is an American artist, based in London. His work utilizes a variety of media, including 16mm film, video, and new media works. His work has been exhibited internationally. In 2010 Hobbs along with Maria Glyka and Vassilis Vlastaras, created a temporary installation of works at the Institute of Contemporary Greek Art in Athens. Hobs works with 16mm films constantly run on looping machines, implicitly guiding the viewer through various environs and monuments. By manipulating the complex relationship between film and sound in a way that disregards a traditional or linear narrative, the work contemplates the fluid and evocative nature of memory and place.
Anthony Gross, 21 Jan, 3-6pm
Anthony Gross looks at ideas of television and film reference and how the artist becomes culturally nomadic through that experience, overriding and substituting real personal biographies. He will show two early video works:
'Parallelines', 2mins30sec, 2004 (training sequences from Rocky I and Rocky II side by side) and 'Culture Cycle', 5mins, 2004 (a re-edit of the cult classic film Stormwaves) Has shown internationally including Pratt Manhattan, MOCA Shanghai, The Guangzhou Triennale, and The Sharjah Biennale. Selected solo shows include 'Crimes Scenes', Superfront LA, 2010, 'Testbed 1', Beaconsfield, London (residency & film commission), 2010, 'Retrogeno', ICA bar commission, 2007, 'Platform for Art', Piccadilly Circus, London (public commission), 2004, 'Object Passing', The Economist Building, London (commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Society), 2004. Anthony Gross co-curated 'Event Horizon' at GSK, The Royal Academy,2008, is director of The Old Police Station, co-director of temporarycontemporary and Cartel. He presents Sarah Baker.
Sarah Baker, 'Le Fan Fan', 9mins, 2011, presented by Anthony Gross, 21 Jan 3-6pm
Sarah B aker examines and exploits Chinese soap opera techniques as cultural insider/outsider.
John Sealey, The Greatest Escape, '13, 2003, presented by A. Gross, 21 Jan 3-6pm
Sealey looks at race and misrecognition via uniforms in a Second World War exploitation movie.
Amanda Beech, "We Never Close" , ' 50'', 28 Jan, 3-6pm
Filmed in Las Vegas, USA, as the primary site for understanding the materialisation of neo-liberal power. And so it goes the truth of Capital is revealed as 'spectacle', alienation and mass consumerism.
Amanda Beech in conversation with Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Amanda Beech and Jaspar Joseph-Lester open up a discussion on image, power and force, not forgetting LV itself and the economy of art, chance and money. The authors of this new spirituality direct us to new spaces of power, of abstract determinations without rational ground; new sites of pleasure and violence.
Amanda Beech's recent exhibitions include the group show The Edge of Luxury, Fold Gallery London, 2011, the solo show Sanity Assassin, with accompanying publication (Spike Island, Bristol, 2010, and Tate Britain, The Real Thing, 2010), Predators and Pests, collaborative installation with Diann Bauer, LoBe Gallery Berlin, 2010 and Greetings Comrades, The Image Has Now Changed its Status, Brunswick Arts Centre, Melbourne, Australia, and Arnolfini, Bristol. Curated by Bridget Crone.
Jaspar Joseph-Lester's work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space, and everyday praxis. Recent work has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in urban regeneration projects. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad with solo exhibitions at Asprey Jacques Gallery and The British School at Rome. His video work was nominated for 'Pilot: 1' and selected for 'All for Show: an international retrospective of UK Video'. He is currently developing a new photo-essay titled 'Some Berlin Casinos' for the forthcoming issue of Collapse; completing two new edited publications, Art and Collaboration and Re-Taking LA; and is lead artists for the Dallas Pavilion, commissioned by SMU for the 2013 Venice Biennale. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2009), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008), Transmission: Annual (Artwords 2010-12), Transmission: Speaking and Listening (Cornerhouse, 2006-2008) and a director of the Curating Video research group and the Berlin based residency programme LoBe.
Al Cameron and Karen di Franco present: 11 th Feb 2012
Cameron is the Assistant producer for Film and Music at the Arnolfini gallery Bristol. Together with curator Karen di Franco he presented a curated screening " Zones without People" as part of Bridget Crone's exhibition " A Theatre to Address" at Cartel gallery in late 2010. By taking the material of film as a receptacle for a set of temporal and incorporeal concerns, this screening will act as a starting point for a discussion around recent artists' works that reflect upon a tangle of images and modes of remembering, on the simultaneous collapse and persistence of stored time, and on dream work with the wrecked, accusatory objects of history.
Steve Reinke, Not Torn (Asunder from the Very Start) , 2010, Video, 9 mins
A film which problematizes the operations of re-collection, and its inevitable encounter with death, in which the archive is described as a "mausoleum that pretends to be a vast garden", and memory is "an irradiated zoo in which the various animals are mutating extravagantly and dying slowly".
Kerry Tribe, The Last Soviet , 2010, Video, 11 mins
Collapsing official and personal histories, reconstruction and archival footage, Tribe's installation piece both recalls and imagines the cosmonaut Serkei Krikalev's lonely looping orbit, abandoned in space as the USSR collapsed below.
Tommy Hartung , Anna, 2011, Video, 20 mins
Using grubby, limbless maquettes and fragments of Soviet film, Hartung'sstop-motion creates a bleak world out of the decayed emancipatory dreams of Russian realism, in order to obliquely foreground the pathos of collective promise.
Manon de Boer, Resonating Surfaces , 2005 Video, 39 mins
A triple portrait, of a city, a woman and a life, in which Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik reminisces on moments of her past: the Brazilian dictatorship of the sixties as well as her relationships with Deleuze and Guattari in the Seventies.
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