Category: mixer collaboration

‘The Light and the Heavy’ collected tales from Hungary by Sophie Durand and Magali Rifflart-Villeneuve is presented as a multi-media installation and a book of the same name. These stories: a journey through shared experiences and dreams in Hungary oscillate between the felt, the imagined and the experienced.

Sophie Durand is an interdisciplinary artist from Perth, Western Australia. Durand’s practice extends from the intersection of sculpture and performance art.  Durand’s work draws from anecdotal histories and archives for subject matter.

Magali Rifflart-Villeneuve is a French artist based in Paris, whose practice explores the connection between altered states of consciousness and the act of creation. Rifflart-Villeneuve uses paintings, photography, writing, video and multimedia installations provoke a destabilization of the perception and to arouse an unconscious ecstasy.

Words with Friends was born in a café in Vienna when a conceptual artist from Belgium and a writer from Australia sat down to a game of Boggle. They never actually figured out how to play, but a love of narrative and a strong desire to take things out of context lead to the works you see in these pages.

In this collaborative work, the idea of text as both an object and experience is central, proposing the notion of reading as indivisible from the act of reading. The reader—as positioned in time, space and experientality-is fore-fronted through an approach that draws from the strengths of the two artists’ disciplines. The result is a body of work where text, narrative and context combine to create something more than the sum of their parts.

On Friday, September 2nd, 2016, Michael and Sam created a performance piece at the D’CLINIC studios in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. This performance was the result of a month-long artist residency called MiXER, wherein the two artists, from Edmonton, Canada, and Taipei, Taiwan, respectively, were brought together to create a collaborative exhibition that combines traditional and new media.

Through this performance, the artists explored the idea of the false identities that people create using modern technology, such as Photoshop and social media. These technological advancements allow people to alter their appearance and falsify their identities in order to create the persona that they wish the world to see as opposed to presenting their true selves. This creates a sense of self-satisfaction that is both temporary and false, yet serves to fill the emotional gap created by the sense of alienation inherent in an increasingly impersonal society that relies on the instant approval of others that social media provides.

This concept was explored through live painting and real-time mapping. During the performance, Michael painted over a projected image of himself, which Sam then photographed and project onto Michael using the computer program open Frameworks. Both the painting and projection were built up in layers until the original photograph of Michael was indistinguishable. The final piece was a live sculpture with a projection of the many layers of the painting. The live sculpture was ephemeral, lasting only the duration of the exhibition, thereby representing the temporary satisfaction of creating a false identity through the use of modern technology. The remaining piece was a painting, which served as a relic of the performance just as social media acts as a memento of the false identities that people present to the world.

KÉP KLUB is an international group of uniformed ‘art workers’ who who first formed in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. The three artists: Amy, Kieran, and Rob use expanded drawing, photographic and installation practices to create site responsive, often public, artworks in the context(s) they find themselves in. Adopting a methodology of collecting images and stories KÉP KLUB works to question the role of the contemporary artist, their context and the relationship between artist and audience. Who is the ‘art worker’, what value does a community assign them, and how can they collaborate (or work together).

KÉP KLUB invited the people of Zalaegerszeg to donate a space or object of their choosing. Surfaces included, but were not limited to, walls, garage doors, fences or objects such as a bicycle or an item of clothing. After a site visit and interview the artists design colours and imagery specific to the individual or family in their own artistic style. In this way KÉP KLUB becomes not only a collaboration between the three artists, but also a collaboration with the local community. In an attempt to understand this unknown environment, the artists create a new connection with the places and people they meet.

To be human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: to be human is to know your place.

Through observation and documentation, Jana and Marko focus their attention on traffic, space, and density of people in the streets of Lendava. Their project is, therefore, responding to everyday inhabitation of places and their experience of this location. They reflect on these different kinds of behavior from a view of an outsider through a number of various works; proposing a different way of seeing a town.

URBAN CONTEXT
An interactive drawing illustrates a physical city of roads, buildings, parks, and related infrastructure. The density of traffic and usage of cars is changing the face of the city. A decision of using a vehicle is in everyday life almost unconscious. The urban context is pinpointing four main places, Parking lots, main streets, by-streets, roundabouts/crossroads. Gathered information documents, but at the same time recreates into something more physical through the use of maps, drawings, and strings, which help to enhance this.

HUMAN CONTEXT
Spirit of the place goes beyond the built environment. A mosaic reflects how a town functions in ‘real-time’, in terms of everyday life. The main protagonists are people and their consciousness which is occupying a space in the given moment. It creates a new place, a conceptual one – A place is not just a location, it is an experience of it. A feeling is not just a response, it is an action.

UNTITLED
A video describes a way of looking at the environment in Lendava. Using static video frames of nature, which is visually a major portion of the town, while alternately there are sounds of cars and traffic. This represents only a small excerpt of everyday life, suggesting and presenting a view of our unawareness, obvious of what is there and stays almost unnoticed.

PLACE/EXPERIENCE
The installation represents a connection to the place and simultaneously it is a point in a place. Four circles represent different relationships we unconsciously have to the places we inhabit. A location, non-place, private space, and nature. Each space is gaining its importance on our personal concept. Therefore the installation is representing a moment in an artist’s life, where the studio is an important space, but for each person, it could be different. In someone’s garden, living room, shop, office, woods, etc.

By examining the sweet experience of an ice cream cone, SLADOLED SOCIAL is an attempt for artists Elena Feijoo and Eden Mitssenmacher Tordjman to connect to the local context of Lendava. Coming from different yet often overlapping personal and artistic backgrounds, Elena and Eden have come together to create a body of works which seeks to open up questions surrounding accessibility, identity, and gender by utilizing the physical and visual allure of ice cream. Through deconstructing the form, use, and context of this seemingly casual and bubbly subject, they have created a new dialogue through the lens of an all time favourite in the form of installation, performances, photography, video, and painting.

Building, buzzing, creeping, crushing, documenting, drinking, shaking, shivering, spinning, switching, teaching, testing, trembling, walking, wishing.

Is it the exertion of holding up these possible futures which causes a space to tremble like it does?

On Trembling Spaces is a collaborative project between J. Pascoe and Henry Andersen which will take the form of a book and accompanying exhibition. The project looks at dis-used spaces around Lendava, attempting to map and document these spaces in text, photography, and objects.
The term ‘trembling’ may be applied to a space when its function is un-fixed (or no-longer fixed). As a concept, trembling is a way to re-position these spaces not as unproductive or ‘dead’ spaces but as possessing limitless potential. We are interested in the possibility and ‘arrested time’ that these spaces represent.

In an attempt to lose ourselves in Lendava, We found ourselves at D’CLINIC!

Reaching Lendava through Budapest, Yuko and Zeina watched large trucks pass by… Listening to locals, they soon realized how multicultural and diverse Lendava is and how the borders are blurred across the region. Yuko and Zeina roamed around the town, trying to discover its little secrets and in their quest they found the subject of identity, borders, and bees really intriguing and interesting.

After researching and interviewing young people from the region, Yuko and Zeina designed an artist book that expresses their experience and thoughts about identity. The book express the idea of how diverse the concept of identity is through a multitude of opinions and opens up this discussion through a set of cards that will transfer this discussion to the self and others.

The book also contains an abstract expression of how our road maps and the bee paths are very similar in their borderlessness. Bees fly about; borderless. A sentence that reminds us of the importance of bees in our lives, and how they travel endless paths that we may choose to do too. An abstract honeycomb cut-out that transforms itself into an interesting form.