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 The World Explained

9 December 2011 until 11 March 2012

Park Hall, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam

    ‘Our view of the world consists to a large extent of suspicions, makeshift connections and personal interpretations.’ Erick Beltrán

From 9 December 2011 Mexican artist Erick Beltrán presents the art project The World Explained. Since September 2011, Erick Beltrán and a team of young anthropologists began interviewing residents of Amsterdam, assembling the results in a contemporary encyclopaedia. You can see the results of these interviews until 11 March 2012 in the Park Hall of Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.

For the occasion, Park Hall, Tropenmuseum, will be refurnished as a live print workshop: here visitors are interviewed and selected stories are printed on three printers. In Tropenmuseum you can view the 32-page volume of the latest theories.

Three editions: Amsterdam, São Paulo and Barcelona

Before this edition, Erick Beltrán produced volumes of The World Explained in São Paulo (2008) and Barcelona (2009). You can also see the personal theories he collected there, compare Amsterdam’s mentality with that of São Paulo and Barcelona. When the exhibition finishes, the three editions will be combined to form a single complete volume.

www.tropenmuseum.nl
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Antoni Muntadas

Warning: Perception requires involvement

National Centre for Contemporary Arts

Moscow

2 - 25 December,  2011

Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) is one of the first artists who started to use new technologies in the visual arts  and make  artistic exploration of virtual space. He has always concerned,  over the years, about critical rethinking of ideology, historical memory and political power structures, cultural industries, different social contexts, and interaction between public and private spaces. Muntadas defines his artistic position as one of “an interpreter of images of what is happening in the world today” and who seeks “to identify what most often remains invisible.”

The exhibition of Muntadas' works is composed of two parts. His new project “On Translation: Stand by: Moscow” specially produced for Moscow and about Moscow is accompanied by a survey of his works. The survey part of the exhibition presents projects from 1970s to 1990s. (The Last Ten Minutes - II, 1977; Video Is Television? 1989; The Limousine Project, 1990; Portrait, 1994; La Siesta, 1995, etc.), as well as a series of his recent artworks, united under the title “On Translation.” The series “On Translation” is devoted to re-interpretation of social, political and cultural processes. The aim of the project is to attract the viewer's attention to the critical issues and conflicting phenomena in the contemporary environment.

The photo series "On Translation: Stand by: Moscow,” which was created specially for the Moscow exhibition, continue the cycle of projects "Stand by" represented by the author in various parts of the world. Looking at the people crowding or standing in queue and waiting for something, the artist explores, in his own words, “modern urban rituals”. The transformation of such a unique social and cultural phenomenon as the Soviet and post-Soviet queue is traced by Muntadas with the material of archival photographs, which are of no less importance in the project than the shooting on location.

The title of the exhibition, repeating the slogan of one of the artist's works, stresses that Antoni Muntadas' projects require the viewer not to give in to passive observation but  to be a critical  and attentive participant.


www.ncca.ru
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