Interviews by Brainard Carey

Xavier de Luca (Barcelona, 1980) has focused his education in the field of contemporary art, photography and cultural management. Currently, he is the Chief Curator at Fundació Suñol and Founder and Coordinator at Jiser Reflexions Mediterrànies.

His interest in artistic creation in the Mediterranean region began after a stay in Tunisia in 2004, where he worked in the organization of the Journées Cinématographiques de Carthage. It was precisely in this country that he created, together with other artists, the Jiser Reflexions Mediterrànies association, which since 2005 has organized and promoted artistic and research projects that have as main objectives the mobility of young people, the promotion of creation, the exchange of artistic proposals and initiatives, and their dissemination in the Mediterranean area. Some examples are the artistic meeting Perceptions de la Ville (Barcelona, ​​Zaragoza and Tunis, 2006) or the ongoing project Résidences de Création BCN>TNS>ALG, which began in 2010, and which establishes creative bridges between the cities of Barcelona, ​​Tunis and Algiers. After the success of the Focus Maghreb program, which was presented at Swab Barcelona Art Fair 2016, he curated the Focus Mediterrània program, expanding the number of participants, coming from the Southern Mediterranean countries (from Morocco to Syria).

Between 2012 and 2017, Jiser has actively promoted and collaborated in the Trans-Cultural Dialogues platform, which together with other Mediterranean cultural associations organized in Algiers the multidisciplinary cultural festival DJART in 2014, as well as the research project medreb, regarding the heritage of the abandoned industrial complex in the El Hamma district of Algiers. In 2017, Jiser also takes part in the Kibrit platform, whose projects seek to revive historical heritage and collective memory.

The book mentoned in the interview is Kamel Daoud's novel: The Mersault Investigation.

Omar Bey working in Barcelona in 2006, during the Percepcions de la Ciutat project.

To explore the ambiguous relationships between knowledge and love is the process in which Pau Catà blends his artistic, curatorial and research practices. Scaling them down into everydayness, he intertwines an interest in epistemology with an inclination towards amateurship. Due to a tendency to hypermobility and to play devil’s advocate, he often falls in dislocation, a condition that is translated into visual essays and creative prose.

Sharing and working with others is an important component in his curatorial practice. To work collaboratively has been the aim behind the foundation in 2009 of CeRCCa_Center for Research and Creativity Casamarles, a space that has hosted more than 100 artists, thinkers and activist knitting a net of fruitful complicities.

Despite current discourses, accademia has enhanced experimentation and engagement in his work. Combined with a disposition to test his learnings, this intellectual framework has been fundamental to challenge and reflect upon a practice that encompasses grassroots creative activism, academic texts and conversations.

Pau Cata is the initiator of CeRCCa and co-coordinator of NACMM - North Africa Cultural Mobility Map, KIBRIT and Platform HARAKAT. He is also a PhD researcher at the Edinburgh College of Art. The provisional title of his thesis is: Rilke and the pilgrims: A minor curating approach to cartography and epistemology.

The book mentioned in the interview is The Invention of Africa, full text here.

cercca_intro2: AIR at CeRCCa

First NACMM meeting at Jiwar Barcelona

Mike Messier is an award-winning Screenwriter, Director, TV host and Actor. Awards have included a Regional Emmy Nomination for work as Associate Producer on a documentary about Haiti.

Recent work includes co-writing and co-starring in the  horror film The Manor. Current projects also include Disregard the Vampire: A Mike Messier Documentary which has already won seven awards. Mike has re-imagined some of his Vampire characters into the world of Distance from Avalon and the subsequent Avalonia Festival, a film and photography festival out of Providence.

As an Actor, Mike has shared scenes with Meryl Streep and Elisabeth Shue,  Wesley Snipes and Cybill Shepherd (as her son), Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins, among others.

Mike’s TV show Messier Mantra features Mike as an interviewer and host for fascinating guests from the worlds of Entertainment, Sports, Environmental concerns and Holistic medicine. Mike's website www.mikemessier.com if full of Mike's work.

The  book mentioned in the interview was Confessions Of An Unlikely Bodybuilder by Samuel Wilson Fussell.

Agustín Ortiz Herrera’s practice is developed in the fields of audiovisual and performance. He is interested in a critical approach that challenges the semantic possibilities of narrative audiovisuals in combination with the research on installation configurations. He uses these means to explore the interconnections among diverse matters such as the intersection in queer theory, the complexities of power relations in colonial contexts, the representation of memory and the dominance of persuasive narrative in audiovisuals. He is looking for strategies that problematize the hierarchies and the automatic positions that are established between the audiovisuals and us, the audience, as well as the subversion of the expectations with the aim of shaking the interfaces and activating a critical attention of the viewer.

Agustín studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and later he studied film at the New School University of New York. After a period as a fiction screenwriter he returned to artistic production after passing through the Master of Fine Arts program at the Konstfack school in Stockholm. He has exhibited his art work in several galleries of Stockholm, Barcelona, Berlin, Madrid, Uppsala and Tromsø. He also participated in the Örebro Open Art Biennial 2015 in Sweden and he was part of several group shows in places such as Centrum för Fotografi, Supermarket Art Fair, Platform Galeri Stockholm, Uppsala Konstmuseet and Konsthall C. He recently completed a period of residence in the Center of Production and Research of Visual Arts Hangar, in Barcelona. He was also selected to participate in the Nordic Studio Residency organized by the Rejmyre ArtLab in 2017. He received the Nils Johan Sjöstedts Award in 2016. In Barcelona he has collaborated with the curating project The Green Parrot in the organization of the events ‘Opavivará!’ and ‘An Oceanic Feeling’ organized by the Antoni Tàpies Foundation.

In the interview, this is the Donna Haraway book mentioned, and this is the father of taxonomy he is researching.

 Oblivion:  Video still, Agustín Ortiz Herrera, 2018

Long-Term Potentiation:  Video still, Agustín Ortiz Herrera, 2018

Potenciación a largo plazo / Long-term potentiation from Agustín Ortiz Herrera on Vimeo.

Olvido / Oblivion from Agustín Ortiz Herrera on Vimeo.

Lisa Beck works with a variety of mediums  and modes, including painting, sculpture and installation (often in combination), involving inner and outer space, landscape, reflection, and the paradoxical relationship of something and nothing.

Since the 1980s, her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally in venues including Feature Inc. (NYC), Elizabeth Dee Gallery (NYC), Anton Kern Gallery (NYC),  Galerie Samy Abraham (Paris),  Circuit, (Lausanne), PS1 (Long Island City),  White Columns, (NYC),  MAMCO – Museé d’ Art moderne et contemporain (Geneva), and the New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT).

In 2013, “Endless”,  a survey show of works from 1986-2012, was presented at the Fort du Brussin, a hors le murs exhibition by La Salle de Bains, in Lyon, France

Lisa’s work has been included in publications including  Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting by Bob Nickas,(2009, Phaidon Press) and Are You Experienced? by Ken Johnson (2011, Prestel).  In 2015, The Middle of Everywhere, a monograph on her work, was published by Galerie Samy Abraham  and La Salle de Bains.

Lisa was a recipient of the 2012-13 Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program Studio Residency in Brooklyn. Lisa Beck received a BFA from RISD. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Elements 8 ( Rising and Falling), 2017. Aluminum leaf, acrylic paint , oil paint, enamel paint on 2 canvases, each 48x36 in.

Flare, 2012/16. Acrylic paint on wall, mylar in 6panel, total size 48x51in.

Bosko Begovic 2017 Pop-up Exhibition, group exhibition, Gallery Stab, Belgrade, Serbia

Boško Begović is a conceptual artist that combines visual art and his writing to reflect on existential issues. Born in Belgrade, Serbia, where he currently, lives and work.

Bosko is a co-founder of Belgrade Artist in Residence program in Belgrade, Serbia, and Martial artist in residence, as part of the

Center424 non-profit artist-run organization. He did several art projects that included martial arts. Bosko teaches martial arts, using the method he developed over the past 20 years.

Belgrade Artist in Residence is a program as part of the Center424 non-profit artist-run organization that supports artists, curators and martial artists via one-week to three-month residencies taking place in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. The programs aim to foster

cultural exchange between artists from different disciplines, create a dialogue and promote possible collaboration.

We are looking to collaborate with other like-minded arts organizations in the world. This sustainable partnership could lead to joint art projects and foster the mobility of local talents by way of exchange and promotion abroad/locally.

Applications are ongoing. The application should contain a CV, a brief project proposal, period of your stay (with alternative dates), documentation of earlier works and preferably some info about yourself as an artist and your artistic practice.

Bosko Begovic drawing 1, ballpoint pen on paper, 2017

Bosko Begovic drawing 2, ballpoint pen on paper, 2017

Image Courtesy of Ka-Man Tse for @TSqArts

Saya Woolfalk has exhibited at PS1/MoMA; Deitch Projects; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Brooklyn Museum; Asian Art Museum, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Frist Center for the Visual Arts; The Yerba Buena Center; The Newark Museum; Third Streaming; MCA San Diego; MoCA Taipei; and Performa 09; has been written about in the New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, Artforum, Artforum.com, ARTNews, The New York Times, Huffington Post and on Art21’s blog; and has also worked with Facebook and WeTransfer.  

Her first solo museum show The Empathics was on view at the Montclair Art Museum in the Fall of 2012.  Her second solo museum exhibition ChimaTEK Life Products was on view at the Chrysler Museum of Art in the fall 2014.  She recently completed a video installation commission for the Seattle Art Museum, and is a recipient of a NYFA grant in Digital/Electronic Arts.  She is currently working on a solo museum exhibition commission for the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City, MO and is represented by  Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, NYC and teaches in the BFA and MFA programs at Parsons: The New School for Design.

Alessandro Facente is a New York-based art critic and independent curator, and currently curator at Artists Alliance Inc. Facente holds an M.A. in Art History and Contemporary Art from La Sapienza University in Rome.

His research focuses on the crossover and interplay of art criticism and curatorship through a concept that he refers to as ‘curaticism’. Different all the time in solutions and arrangements, 'curaticism' has the goal of ‘curatorially’ identify the political and social position that the artist’s practice occupies within the current time, and to ‘critically’ investigate how the artwork’s visuality makes the piece to be politically and socially questionable.

Facente was recently selected for the 'CPR 2018 ', a curatorial program for research in Iceland, Faroe Islands, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, in August 2018.  He has curated solo, group exhibitions, independent projects, and talks in non-profit spaces, foundations, and galleries, including HVCCA, Cuchifritos Gallery, NARS Foundation, Italian Institute of Culture, Residency Unlimited, in New York, HIAP in Helsinki and Ateliê397 in São Paulo. His articles, interviews, and essays have appeared in art magazines such as Artribune, TemporaryArtReview, DROME, and DOMUS, as well as in exhibition catalogs for major museums such as  MADRE in Naples and GAMEC in Bergamo.  

Artists Alliance Inc. studios, 4th floor, the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, Lower East Side, New York

The São Paulo Episode - GAM6 [curaticism] - Spoken-Word exhibition  curated by Alessandro Facente, with artists Renata de Bonis, Flora Leite,  Maura Grimaldi, Beto Shwafaty, Daniel de Paula, and Guest curator Thais Rivitti, at Ateliê397 - São Paul (Brazil)

Vasiliki Antonopoulou lives and works in London, UK. She was born in Greece and raised in Saudi Arabia, two locations which re-emerge in her practice.

She was interviewed a second time in 2019, and that interview can be found by clicking here.

Her work combines text, performance and moving image, to explore notions of love and displacement by drawing metaphors between body and architecture. These manifest through site specific performances that delve into the emotional relationships that exists in particular spaces.

She obtained her BA in Fine Art Practice from Goldsmiths University of London in 2012, and completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice (Moving Image) at the Royal College of Art in 2018.

The book mentioned during the interview is by Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others.

XPAT, video still, 2018

Dry, video still, 2018

Kathranne Knight is a visual artist and co-editor of Correspondence Publishing.

Her drawings speak in the packed way of a symbol-- elemental, but ricocheting with associations and metaphoric possibilities.

Impermanence, multiplication, and issues of representation are plumbed through materials as various as fly paper, silver, tears, and graphite. The action and materiality of drawing are stretched, performed, and reconfigured in her series of tracings and contour studies, where she draws around her own body and that of her daughter, trying to glean the actual now of existence in their form.

Poetry and Poets are important collaborators as well and her drawings are found on the covers of books by Nate Klug and James Cagney. Knight has been artist in residence at Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation and the Connemara Conservancy Foundation, Dallas, Texas. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries including: Mass MoCA, The Des Moines Art Center, Carroll and Sons Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and Muriel Guepin Gallery (New York, NY) among others. Her work is included in several private and public collections such as: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the private collection of A.G. Rosen. Knight was an Iowa Artist Fellow in 2014, awarded an Iowa Artist Grant in 2015 and has been nominated for both a Louis Comfort Tiffany and Joan Mitchell award.

Two color pencil on paper 30” x 41 ¼”

Like Breath on a Mirror, Single channel video still