Contemporary Art Space Research Articles

Rurality and Minimal Architecture: An Inquiry into the Genealogy of Tate Modern’s Bankside Gallery Spaces

When the Tate institution first announced its plans to build a ‘Tate Modern’ gallery on London’s Bankside it stated its preferences for a ‘rural’ and ‘minimal’ architecture. These are contested terms whose significance for the resultant contemporary art space is by no means apparent. Focusing on the suites of gallery-rooms built on levels 2, 3 & 4, as part of the initial power station transformation, which opened to the public in 2000, this paper will examine the notions of rurality and minimal architecture that underpin the contemporary art space. It will weave their genealogy out of three themes: First, the Tate’s stated interest in the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek as a potential model for the new gallery. Second, the influence of the artist Remy Zaugg, who had worked with Tate’s architects for the project, Herzog and de Meuron, on a number of studio-gallery projects prior to the Tate commission. Third, the modernist tradition of the ‘white cube’ and its post-modern critique dating from the mid 1970s.

The gallery as therapeutic venue: Exploring visitor perceptions in a contemporary art space

Abstract This prospective qualitative study explored the social and psychological impact of an exhibition at a contemporary art gallery. Three focus groups, including eight people aged 45–69, were held following a guided tour of an exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary gallery. The exhibition ‘Uneven Geographies’ featured the work of a variety of international artists focusing upon the politics of globalization through different media including film, installation and photography. Focus group transcripts were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six-phase model of thematic analysis. Three themes were identified: (1) ‘It’s almost like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle’, (2) Interpreting the message and (3) Dissolving social barriers. Results indicated that the exhibition facilitated sense-making, that art interpretation was used as an educational tool, and attending the gallery promoted social inclusion. These findings confirm the potential of cultural institutions, to promote education, health and wellbeing at individual and societal levels.

ФОРТЕПІАННА МУЗИКА ДЛЯ ДІТЕЙ У ТВОРЧОСТІ УКРАЇНСЬКИХ КОМПОЗИТОРІВ

The article is devoted to the retrospective analysis of Ukrainian piano music for children, where the artwork of Ukrainian composer O. Yakovchuk, his place and role in the contemporary art space are studied.

Educación artística y prácticas contemporáneas: producir la relación con arte, ciencia y tecnología

This paper reflects on a project of production, development and understanding of educational mediation forms, targeted to teenagers, through a program based on the relationship between Arts, Science and Technology. These are actions that "parasitize" the contents of contemporary art proposals developed in a contemporary art space in the city of Montevideo. Relationships are established with such content, produced by "others”, in this case, artists and visual creators, to generate creative alternatives regarding new possibilities of meaning and representation. Analysis is proposed on the basis of a teaching laboratory condition and public mediation associated to contemporary artistic production, with a format linked to an educational curatorship of the exhibition under a visual culture perspective.Keywords: Visual culture, contemporary practices, educational contents.

O índio na fotografia brasileira: incursões sobre a imagem e o meio

The article explores contradictions and convergences between a medium (photography) and the image of the Brazilian Indian from the perspective of the history of Brazilian photography. During the first of three distinct moments, the image of the Indian was of someone exotic, in contradiction with the modern meaning of photography under the Second Empire. During the second moment, in the first fifty years of the twentieth century, the boundaries between ethnography and Brazil as a nation were blurred, as exemplified by the Rondon Commission/Indian Protection Bureau's Research Section (Serviço de Proteção ao Índio) and Brazil's modern photojournalism, as found in the magazine Cruzeiro. During the third moment, the expressions of an ethno-poetry present in the photographs of Cláudia Andujar can be seen to blend medium and image as an ethnographic space in contemporary art.

Unframing Immigration: Looking Through the Educational Space of Contemporary Art

This article uses the lens of contemporary visual art as a counternarrative to explore the racialization of immigration in the United States and its relationship to education. Drawing on critical race theory, I argue that today several artists use their artistic practice to intervene strategically in the immigration debates. These artistic interventions are pedagogical because they open spaces for students to address the topic of immigration in both secondary schools and universities. As pedagogical sites, these art practices precipitate debate, dissent, and dialogue about immigration in the United States, generating another avenue for civic engagement, which is a crucial component of democracy.

The first portuguese Art Agency: a case study

At a time when new places for art are emerging, the search for a critical reflection on agents and dealership processes is extremely relevant, in an attempt to attain something new that is sociologically significant and also able, perhaps, to contribute to an understanding of certain features of the present context of the Portuguese contemporary art space. The general questions at the base of this article are as follows: appearing in December 2003, what did the Vera CortsArt Agency model bring to the space of contemporary art? How is it to be understood within that same panorama? An art agency not taken in a merely descriptive sense but as an immersion zone, in an attempt to unveil a nexus of reciprocal interactions, i.e. by creating a dialogue between the configuration of the artistic field and the singularity of the case-study and then seeing how they question each other, and how both question the paradigms and the sociological corpus relating to art.

A (Con)text for New Discourse as Semiotic Praxis

AbstractContemporary art requires that art and cultural educators reposition encounters with artefacts, images and performances into a context for new discourses. Whereas digital media and other aspects of visual popular culture predominate the frames of reference of school‐age children, their context (codes) of reference, in large part, do not contain those used by art and cultural education professionals. Most art professionals (con)textualise their interpretations from a more formalistic tradition, unlike school‐age children, whose use of iconographic elements from their experiential subcultures, are projected into the content of their visual encounters. In order to find relevancy for today's art education, interrelationships between the codes of the participant and visual experiences must be built upon the development of new strategies between viewers, artefacts and experts. This article presents the background and use of dialogic strategies for new discourse from the‘Open Dialogue Club’programme between the Department of Art Education at Charles University and the Galerie Rudolfinum, a contemporary art space, in Prague, Czech Republic.

Curating Beirut: A Conversation on the Politics of Representation

The following roundtable conversation, conducted via e-mail during November 2006, assembles a group of curators to consider the stakes and conditions of the national and international exhibition of Beirut-based practices. The participants all bear hands-on experience working in Lebanon and enter into dialogue from unique perspectives: Sandra Dagher, who directed the gallery Espace SD for seven years, is developing a new nonprofit contemporary art space in Beirut and, with Saleh Barakat, is organizing the first Lebanese pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007); Catherine David, artistic director of Documenta X, is the organizer of the long-term project Contemporary Arab Representations. Rasha Salti, an independent curator and freelance writer based in Beirut and NewYork, oversees New York's CinemaEast Film Festival; and Christine Tohme directs the Beirut-based Ashkal Alwan (Lebanese Association for Plastic Arts), which, among its many activities, organizes Home Works, a semiannual series of symposia and exhibitions inaugurated in 2002 and dedicated to Middle Eastern cultural practices.

Typicals/Típicos

Typicals is a series of 12 colour photographs digitally created from photojournalistic images from Colombia combined with "typical" craft textiles and text from guest writers. Typicals was first exhibited as photographs 50cm x 75cm in size, each with their own magnifying glass, at the Contemporary Art Space at Gorman House in Canberra, Australia, in 2000. It was then exhibited in "Feedback: Art Social Consciousness and Resistance" at Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne, Australia, from March to May 2003. From May to June 2003 it was exhibited at the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia Santa Fé Bogotá, Colombia.
 
 In its current manifestation the artwork has been adapted from the catalogue of the museum exhibitions. It is broken up into eight pieces corresponding to the contributions of the writers. The introduction by Sylvia Vélez is the PDF file accessible via a link below this abstract. The other seven PDF files are accessible via the 'Supplementary Files' section to the left of your screen. Please note that these files are around 4 megabytes each, so it may be difficult to access them from a dial-up connection.