Doomsday Celebration

castillo/corrales
65 Rue Rebeval 75019 Paris
15-17 February, by appointment until 23 March 2007

We had heard the gallery didn’t send out invites, which were mainly by word-of-mouth. I understood almost nothing and didn’t recognise any of the works when I first saw the exhibition at castillo/corrales gallery. Then the gallerist brought the show to life with a friendly twenty minute narration about the artworks: in Jay Chung’s there was no film in the camera over the two years the movie was made (the actors got mad), in Vito Acconci’s a girl tried to kill herself after a three-way-love- experiment failed in 1970, in Maurice Girodias’ novel about Henry Kissinger, a girl who planted drugs on the author went suddenly missing before he was arrested and deported, and in Gardar Eide Einarsson’s poster after every absence there was a blank. Yesterday a well-known critic told us that she rarely actually sees an exhibition she writes about (ahead of time) for art magazines because of deadlines. Then the gallerist had told us that this was the last show of the gallery and they would now work towards the first because they would start by being exhausted and knowing, as in this one, and end with the first being fresh innocent and optimistic about the gallery’s future. So SPEECH decided to invite ten people (read the reviews) to write about Doomsday Celebration without having seen the exhibition that took place from February 15-17. This is part of a series of reviews about not-knowing as a shared space.
Geoff Lowe
read texts by Pelin Uran, Rosemary Forde, Nadia Fartas, Cecilia Canziani, Elizabeth Presa, Hao Guo, Judicael Lavrador

images:
Vito Acconci Score 1970
Jay Chung Nothing Is More Practical Than Idealism 2001

2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville

The Unhomely, Phantom Scenes in Global Society
creative director Okwui Enwezor
26 October 2006 - 8 January 2007

The second Seville Biennale marked Okwui Enwezor’s return to the “mega-exhibition” format for the first time since 2002’s Documenta_11. It also marked a shift in his critical focus: from the series of postcolonial displacements that underpinned Documenta_11, to a single-city exhibition grounded in a single theme. Enwezor reprised Sigmund Freud’s theory of ‘das unheimlich’ (literally translated here as ‘the unhomely’) and filtered it through contemporary geopolitics after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, with particular reference to the ‘unhomely’ internment camp at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and the ‘bare life’ of its generally rightless and unsighted inhabitants.
click here to continue reading Anthony Gardner's review
image, Thomas Hirshhorn installation 2006