Marabouparken

Olivia Plender
Information, Education, Entertainment
12/10 - 2/12 2007 Marabou Park Annex

With a motto adapted from BBC founder John Reith's remit to "Inform, Educate, Entertain", Marabou Park has the pleasure of opening this autumn's exhibition of works by the British artist Olivia Plender.

About the artist
In her works Olivia Plender investigates clichés about "the artist as outsider", "the creative genius" and "the bohemian lifestyle" - as anachronisms and in their contemporary updated guises. In a collage of references, from pulp literature and academic history books to documentary and fictional narratives, she delves into historical occurrences, often focussing on the evolution of industrial society.

An interest in didacticism and the narration of history is clear in how Olivia Plender presents her works. Her installations, publications, posters and lectures are rife with references to - and borrowings from - popular material such as satirical comics, as well as authoritative museum tableaux.

Olivia Plender's latest work is the graphic novel A Stellar Key to the Summerland published by Bookworks. This autumn her work will be shown in Art Now Live at Tate Britain, the Athens Biennial; How to Endure in Athens, Mystic Truths at the Auckland Art Gallery and Le Truc at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Olivia Plender currently holds a residency at Iaspis and is co-editor of Untitled Magazine.
Since May 2006, Olivia Plender is collaborating with a group of artists and designers around the mobile platform Canal. She is also co-editor of Untitled Magazine.

About the exhibition
Information, Education, Entertainment is a thematic solo exhibition which focuses on the TV medium and the art world portrayal of art and artists.

The work Monitor (2006-7) is a slide show essay with an accompanying soundtrack based on the screenplay from a TV programme Private View. The original episode was a part of the BBC's first arts series Monitor, screened in 1960. The photographs in the slideshow are images of contemporary London based around the narrative of the soundtrack. Together, slide show and soundtrack, tell the story of the changing conditions of art and the gentrification of working class areas of London. The piece was originally presented as a performance at the Tate Triennial but is here shown as an installation.

The installation Ken Russell in Conversation with Olivia Plender (2005) includes the video documentation of an interview between Olivia Plender and the controversial filmmaker. The interview took place before an audience in a stage set reminiscent of TV studios from the 1970s. The topics covered include the experimental documentaries and artist's portraits Ken Russell made for the BBC in the 60s, the Romantic idea of artistic genius, questions of taste and style and the controversies about him as a media celebrity and filmmaker. Russell's media persona becomes an image of double-ness as he simultaneously tries to represent and live the role of the artistic genius. With the moralising narrative tone of a nineteenth century temperance movement pamphlet, the most recent episode of Olivia Plender's ongoing comic book project The Masterpiece (2001-) follows the fate and adventures of the young artist Nick. At Marabou Park, the latest edition The Road to Ruin (for Öyvind Fahlström) (2006) will be presented both as a comic book and as an installation with the characters as life-size cut outs. This episode takes place in the 1980s and we follow Nick as he grapples with the sponsorship ideas of the mega-corporation Bucks, demonstrating how the Romantic notion of genius reinvents itself to adapt to a neo-liberal logic.

Filmklubben/Marabou Park
During the exhibition Information, Education, Entertainment a programme of film screenings and talks has been put together in cooperation with Filmklubben (the Film Club), a mobile platform for political film. The programme will focus on how the artist is portrayed by television and the art world and on public service media as an ideological tool. Dates and times will be available on Marabou Park's homepage from October 11th.

Mmmore...
4/5 - 17/6 2007 Marabou Park Annex

Fia Backström, born in Stockholm, was educated at University of Stockholm and Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design (Stockholm) and at Columbia University (New York). For over the past ten years Backstöm has lived and worked in New York. Backström has become known for a number of exhibitions and performances, which she has staged in her home, in public spaces and at commercial galleries. In May, she will be presenting her first solo exhibition in Stockholm, at Marabouparken annex.

Fia Backström's work highlights the parameters of what defines an exhibition; such as an artwork, a collaboration, or an audience. The generative logic of the work unfurls across a stretch of situations, usually of her own design, encompassing activities and their documentation, environments, gatherings, performances, artworks by other artists, her own texts, prints, recordings, readings, and ephemera. Through a development of format and display methodology, Backström engages peers and visitors in her excavations of the shifting faces of ideology, politics, advertisement and propaganda.

Since the mid-nineties, Fia Backström has participated in a large number of international exhibitions. Her work is currently included in the exhibitions Happiness of Objects (Sculpture Center, New York, 2007) and The Price of Everything (Whitney ISP, Hunter Graduate Center, New York, 2007). She is also a participant in the United Nations Plaza recidency project in Berlin.

About the exhibition...
The exhibition title Mmmore... plays on the satisfaction and the addiction that both sugar and images create in us. In addition to a selection of new and old works, Fia Backström will set up an outdoor happening in Marabou Park on June 3rd. Eco Day; a corporate-friendly get-together with a touch of the green movement of the seventies, relates ideas on recycling, life-style and "good" ideologies from a marketing perspective.

In Blonde Revolution (a fia backström production, New York, 2004) Backström confronts the self-conscious goodness and fake fairness of the art world, as displayed in so-called "minority-exhibitions." The work consists of a manifesto and an environment, into which works by exclusively blonde artists has been lifted.

In lesser new york (a fia backström production, New York, 2005) Backström continues her investigation of display and what an artwork can be. She emphasizes the activity space of collaborations, minor publications, posters, sound works, etc, which according to the artist constitutes a crucial part of an art scene. Just as the distinction between the underground and the establishment is blurred, the logic of the display method, which here transforms the material into a hyper-decorative, form-and-colour coordinated wall newspaper, fuses a strategy of communist propaganda with the seduction of commercialism and shopping.

A New Order for a New Economy – to Form and Content (A proposal to re-arrange the ads of Artforum) (Andrew Kreps Gallery, White Columns, Whitney Curatorial Studies, New York, 2006-7) investigates content displacement via formal qualities. Backström rearranges the ad pages of the world's largest art magazine; Artforum, according to colour, form and theme. The commercial iconography of the art world, originally designed and arranged to give advertisers maximum visual impact through clashing contrast, is streamlined and redirected into categories such as "animals", "crying and laughing men" and “collectivism."

In Herd instinct 360° (New York, 2005-2006), the darker sides of human collective behaviour are investigated, in the art world as well as in society at large. During three Sunday afternoons, Backström staged a situation with sacred undertones, including lectures, performances and common meals. In Marabouparken annex, this environment will be partially re-created. On Sunday May 13th Backström will enact her performance Herd Instinct 360° followed by a screening of the talks included in the initial gatherings.

Events:
Eco Day
Herd Instinct 360°

Alexander Gutke
8/2 - 15/4 2007 Marabou Park Annex

On February 8th a solo show with the Swedish artist Alexander Gutke opens at Marabou Park Annex. Significant for Alexander Gutke's artistic practice is a material self-reflexivity, where the works, busy chasing their own tails, manages to create a larger, parallel story. Everyday objects, technology and abstract narratives are transformed into installations for reflection over their own inherent qualities.

About the exhibition
The audience is led into the exhibition by the wall drawing Horizon (2001); a work that with simple means creates a "mental horizon" for our experience of time and space. A several metre long number comes to an end with a laconic "dagar" ("days") through which it creates a comprehensible frame for the unfathomable. Similarly, the slide projection Lighthouse stretches (2006) our established way of perceiving the dimensions of a room by creating a picture plane that seems to extend beyond the surface of the wall. Alexander Gutke often repeats an event or a section of an event and lets it loop in a "time-space" of its own. In The White Light of the Void (2002) we follow, over and over again, an empty film that gets stuck in the projector and melts in the heat of the projector lamp. The melting film is a familiar way of communicating a feeling of nostalgia, loss or the end of an epoch in film. In 9 Ways to Say it's Over (2006) the artist again shows us how our relationship to reality is shaped through images. A series of "The End" signs from films from the 1920's and onwards in a number of languages speaks of the universal in the experience of a romance or a loss. The "The End" signage, however obvious it may seem today played a huge role in defining how our experience had come to an end. The film arrives at its final narrative destination while the psychological room created between the viewer, the characters and the story continues to live a life of its own. In Exploded View (2005) this self-reflexivity reaches a crescendo with a slide projector that seems to ponder its own interior and its own projection. This is the tautological artwork "par excellence"; a projector that shows its own insides in a slideshow, while at the same time managing to transform the images of its own components into a fantastic journey into the microscopic.

Om Alexander Gutke
Alexander Gutke was born in Gothenburg in 1971. He graduated from the Malmö Art Academy in 2001. Since then he’s been based in Malmö and Berlin and has exhibited extensively internationally. Right now he is participating in Die Wörter, die Dinge (Kunstverein, Düsseldorf) and is also a resident artist at Centre des Récollets in Paris. The last years exhibitions include; Dreamlands Burn (Mucsarnok kunsthalle, Budapest, 2006), Objet à Part (La Galerie, Noisy Le Sec, Paris, 2006) and Temporary Import (Art Forum Berlin, 2005).

Jakob Kolding
16/11 2006 - 28/1 2007 Marabou Park Annex

Opening on Thursday November 16, 5-8 pm

In the lovingly crafted collages by Jakob Kolding, the artist mixes his trademark visual vocabulary of modernist art and architecture, sociology phrases and characters from electronic music, comics and football. All these things seem to have overlapped in Koldings own upbringing in a suburb of Copenhagen and now form the ingredients of an ongoing work in progress. Kolding approaches the question of what happens when we let architecture structure our lives from a multitude of different angles. An idiosyncratic "Koldingesque" cityscape arises out of the mix, where one senses the artist’s own fascination and scepticism with the modernist utopias. In this urban space, art and architecture are often invaded, by people and phenomena that weren’t at all planned to exist there. One such figure is the skater who takes liberties with for example a minimalist sculpture by using it as a skateboard ramp.

In his collages he uncovers underlying ideas and attitudes behind our built environments and makes unexpected connections between popular culture and architecture in an effortless fusion of aesthetics and politics. In spite of his misgivings about settled life in the suburbs as envisioned by city planners, the artist betrays a clear preference for the spare design ideals of 60's and 70's architecture. A taste that recurs in the artist's interest in the formal analogies between the repetitious beats of electronic music, modernist architecture and the paired down aesthetics of minimalist sculpture

About the exhibition…
The title of the exhibition 'Pattern Recognition' refers to the process by which machines can find patterns in unclassified or randomly arranged information. The expression serves as a loosely held frame both for the works in the show and for the working method of the artist. 'Pattern Recognition' spans 10 years of Jakob Kolding's work. Audiences will find examples of most aspects of his art practice. There will be drawings from 1996, old and new collages, a documentation of public art projects, an improvised sculpture and examples of the artists sleeve design for the pop group St Etienne. Parts of the exhibition will be presented at OVERGADEN – Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in the spring of 2007.

About Jakob Kolding
Jakob Kolding was born in Albertslund, Denmark in 1971. He studied sociology at Roskilde University and later went on to study art at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. He currently lives and works in Berlin. Jakob Kolding exhibited in the group show 'Organising Freedom' at the Modern Museum in Stockholm in 2000 and had a IASPIS residency in Stockholm Winter/Autumn 2005-2006. Selected exhibitions from 2006 include a solo-show at Team Gallery in New York, the Busan Biennale, South Korea and a public art project for the dutch public art agency SKOR in Amsterdam.