Monday 22 February 2010

ARTIST TALK: NADA PRLJA: IN SEARCH FOR BLACK COMMUNISM, 9TH MARCH AT 6.30PM

Tuesday 9th MARCH 2010
6.30 - 7.30pm, Room 433 (4th Floor)
University College London, SSEES, 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW**

Heavily influenced by the Black Wave or dissident Yugoslav cinema of her childhood, artist Nada Prlja considers its unique balancing act between iconoclasm and idealism, individualism and communism to be exemplary.

In the presentation on TUESDAY 9TH MARCH at 6.30pm, Prlja will talk about the cultural context of communist Yugoslavia and its mutation into a consumer culture, a shift that her artwork pivots on.


image: ONE CITY TWO VOICES - NP, 2007
Site Specific Installation
Sizes variable, metal construction 3x3m, 120 light bulbs.
Exhibited at: National Gallery of Macedonia, Skopje


"Nada Prlja was born in Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia in 1971, and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Skopje, Macedonia. She has lived and worked in London since she moved here in 1999. She was one of the few artists to graduate with MPhil degree in Royal College of Art in 2002 who was clearly political in her intent. Her work has progressed with a fearless determination since then.

Her work deals with complex situations of inequality within different political, economic or religious formations. Working across media (video, installation and a wide range of material including flags and neon) her artistic work is site-specific, as well as ideas rather than media driven.

Prlja claims to come from a ‘Red Bourgeois’ background but would like to live now in ‘black communism’." Text by Stefan Szczelkun

*Artist Talks series organised by artist Margareta Kern for the Centre for South-East European Studies.

** UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), 16 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW. Nearest tube: Euston Square Underground, Euston Train and Underground Station. Room 433, is on the 4th floor (will be signposted). The talk is open and free to all. Followed by the wine reception.*

www.seriousinterests.co.uk

www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/seecent.htm



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Monday 11 January 2010

Artist Liane Lang Talk at UCL-SSEES, Tuesday 9th February 2010 at 6pm



LIANE LANG: MONUMENTAL MISCONCEPTION
TUESDAY 9TH FEBRUARY, UCL/SSEES, ROOM 433 (4th floor),
6 – 7 PM
(see address and map below)


Join artist Liane Lang on Tuesday 9th February, as she presents her work from the Residency at Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, Hungary.

The work of Liane Lang, ranges from photography to film, from kinetic objects to installation, all the while questioning the status of the object as an instrument of power and knowledge. This conjunction of instrumentality and ruin is nowhere more palpable than in Lang’s treatment of figurative sculpture—itself taken as artifact and cultural form, imbued with special powers: terror or tradition, fetish or taboo.

In the path of her most recent body of work, and the trajectory of intellectual endeavor, Lang’s notion of the object and its many lives revises all notion of the monument. In a residency in 2009 at Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, Hungary, the artist produced a compelling series of sculptural interventions with the Communist monuments, as well as visually engaging in the rhetoric of monuments and sculptures around the city. The life-like figures employed in the work double the artificial; they are latex casts made in her Hackney studio. Here the oblique strategies contend with oppression, as she states, “My strategy for intervention in Budapest was to approach figures that are monumental in scale and oppressive both in their physical presence, as well as in their original locations, with life-size objects and figures, attempting to re-animate and re-activate these historical objects. Drawing attention to the inherent properties of the objects, the absence of women and the nostalgic aesthetic they seem to be acquiring.”
Text by Brooke Lynn McGowan, in conversation with the artist, Nov 2009.



Liane Lang (b. Germany in 1978, lives and works in London) was educated at Goldsmiths College and the Royal Academy graduating in 2006. Her work has been exhibited extensively, in solo shows at Kunstverein Heidelberg, T1+2 Gallery in London and Offspace, Vienna and in group exhibitions including Anticipation at OneOneOne Gallery, Artfutures at Bloomberg Space and Animations at Kunstwerke, Berlin and PS1 New York. Her work is part of the collections of Deutsche Bank, The Royal Academy, Saatchi Gallery, Arts Council England, Ernst and Young and numerous private collections.

www.lianelang.com
www.ssees.ucl.ac.uk/seecent.htm

Artist Talks series organised by artist and MA student at UCL/SSEES Margareta Kern. Next artist talk will take place on 9th March 2010, by artist NADA PRLJA


Photographs from the series 'Monumental Misconception', top: 'Grand Gesture', middle: 'The Parachutist', bottom: 'Tread', Liane Lang 2009.

UCL - SSEES, CENTRE FOR SOUTHEAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
UCL SSEES, 16 TAVITON STREET, LONDON WC1H 0BW
This event is free and open to all. MAP


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