Art Research Communication

Breaking Step

ARC Co-Director Iliyana Nedkova was recently commissioned to write a review of the exhibition Breaking Step: a comprehensive group show of contemporary British art held at Belgrade’s Museum of Contemporary Art, 24 Mar – 10 Jun 2007. The review focuses on the impressive range of site-specific commissions including new works by Nathan Coley, Phil Collins, Henry VIII Wives, Jim Lambie, Mike Nelson, Toby Paterson and Cathy Wilkes. The review was just published in MAP Magazine, Issue 10/Summer 2007.

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Nocturne by Chris Byrne

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3/3/07, late Saturday evening. From my window, I took stills of the lunar eclipse as it loomed over Edinburgh: a phenomenon that proved quite tricky to photograph. I realised that in my attempt to capture the eclipse, I had taken so many shots, all slightly different, that the sequence of images could become a video. Here they are presented without any removed, in the order they were taken.

The images needed a soundtrack to give a sense of the eeriness of the eclipse, and the distance I felt from the goings on in the street while observing it. Mike Hodgson’s amazing sound work seemed to fit. An extract is featured from a longer piece, Transmission from the Scanner, broadcast by r a d i o q u a l i a as part of international net.radio project isol in 2002. The audio was created in 1995. I recently found out it is based on cosmology, which is something I must have realised without knowing. “Transmission from the Scanner is an audio representation of planet cycles over a month, created by mathematically assigning aural values to cosmological phenomena.”

Iliyana Nedkova on Alla Georgieva in n.paradoxa

ARC Co-Director Iliyana Nedkova was recently commissioned to write a ‘mid-career survey’ of the artistic practice of Ukrainian-Bulgarian artist Alla Georgieva. In her ouevre Alla explores the complex relationship between advertising, gender and contemporary art. Iliyana’s article Between Difference and Understanding was published in Volume 19 (January 2007) of n.paradoxa art magazine on the theme of IN/difference.

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BB4 & BB2: Berlin and Bucharest Biennales

by Chris Byrne and Iliyana Nedkova

It won’t be long before one can set off to explore the psychogeography of each world city through a contemporary art biennale. Two recent examples delineated the urban conditions of two large European cities, Bucharest and Berlin. With similar reliance on the atmosphere of certain milieux, and emphases on critical awareness, they had very different budgets and distinct curatorial approaches to art.

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Captured texts

Chris Byrne and Iliyana Nedkova elaborate on performance, video, art and philosophy in a trio of texts commissioned to accompany the premiere of Captured, an exhibition at Glasgow’s Tramway, part of the National Review of Live Art in February 2006.

The writings are also published on the web site of CRATE – a grouping of artists and curators working with Contemporary Art and New and Future Media Art, based at the University of Dundee.

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Space, Place, Interface by Chris Byrne

This text is based on a presentation ARC Co-director Chris Byrne made at a Hothaus seminar, organised by Vivid at the University of Central England, Birmingham. It outlines his experiences and thoughts around curating digital and networked art projects and their relationship to the locations where they were made and presented. It is soon to be published in a book, The Hothaus Papers: Paradigms and Perspectives in Media Arts edited by Joan Gibbons, a Vivid Publication in association with Article Press, Birmingham.

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Crossing Borders

Chris Byrne and Iliyana Nedkova are curating an exhibition by seven artists as part of the first ever Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival. The festival takes place between 16-25 September 2005, with the theme Crossing Borders.

The artists featured in the unique setting of this border town are Luchezar Boyadjiev, Heath Bunting & Kayle Brandon, Richard Fenwick, Zoë Irvine, Anri Sala, and Mare Tralla. The artists’ works will be shown in a variety of contexts: the Gymnasium gallery, the Maltings arts centre, a military cell, a Georgian shop, and the magnificent Elizabethan fortifications which surround the town centre.

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Vivid Hothaus seminar reports

Michael Connor, curator of media art happenings at Liverpool’s FACT, produced a handy write-up on the Hothaus seminar, where ARC Co-director Chris Byrne presented on Saturday. See Michael’s weblog to read it.

Here’s Furtherfield’s take on the event. Also there’s a review of the Hothaus seminar here at the BBC Birmingham web site

Women of Vision by Iliyana Nedkova

The latest piece of critical writing by ARC Co-Director Iliyana Nedkova has just been published in HI~Arts Online Journal as the new January 2005 Feature. HI~Arts Journal is the publication of Highlands and Islands Arts Ltd – an independent company aiming to promote and develop the arts in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

Women of Vision traces the elusive signs of feminism in Invisible Fields – a selection of artists’ films, videos and installations featuring the work of thirteen women artists. Guided by ‘group interaction and feedback rather than control and determinism’, the selection was executed by two of the exhibiting artists, Sarah Felton and Su Grierson.

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Mobile Realism? by Chris Byrne

This text outlines some thoughts on portable networked imaging and its antecedents. It is soon to be published in Reclaiming cultural territory in new media (Ed. Mare Tralla), a publication following from RAM 3, Tallinn, part of the workshop series RAM – Re-approaching New Media. www.ram-net.net

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