Abigail Lazkoz
Abigail Lazkoz, “story number two: a machete en las
casas” (2004), paint on wall.
The working of Abigail Lazkoz presents a narrative
series of black-and-white wall drawings in a War Stories she have Heard
depicting characters in banal settings amidst an unidentifiable conflict. Men
dressed in women’s clothes running with machetes in "story number two: a
machete en las casas" (2004) imply that the conflict is rooted in
masculine identity, while "story number five: heir" (2004) depicts a
mother holding her child in an interior domestic space. The action is rendered
in a simple, graphic manner, reminiscent of illustrated manuals and framed in
ornate patterns. The threat of violence is a constant in all the drawings,
although the characters and their actions are often presented in ridiculous
combinations.
Abbas Akhava
Abbas Akhavan’s solo show at the Darling Foundry poses
a series of questions into the relationships between war and art, destruction
and nation building, human and animal.
Akhavan activates these themes with his signature
light touch, allowing the pieces a lot of air to breathe. Materials, titles and
references interact and resonate in a way that seems so casual as to be almost
accidental, but thinking through the work makes clear none of the show’s
overall complexity is such. With just four pieces, one visible only at sunset,
Akhavan manages to fill the massive space both physically and conceptually.
The linchpin of the show is the sculpture Mortar. It
is a copy of the stone
lion of Hamedan, Iran, that Akhavan has reproduced in its
current war-, weather- and ritual-scarred state. The actual Hamedan lion is the
survivor of a pair that once stood at the city gates. Its twin was destroyed
during an ancient regime change and the survivor was knocked off its pedestal
and left to erode on the ground with broken legs. In addition to these brute
attacks, the lion has also been more slowly transformed by generations of
people coating it in honey, milk and wax as part of marriage, birth and
fertility rituals. Akhavan’s glossy abstraction of a lion is titled for a
substance that refers both to the paste that repairs buildings and to the
weapons that destroy them—it succeeds in sensually evoking both centuries of
affectionate anointing and years of violent bombing.
Like a Bat Afraid of its Own Shadow is a stack of
sandbags that serves as Mortar’s phantom twin. Sand is transitory and soft when
left to blow across a landscape, but it can quickly become heavy and absorbent
when encased in a bag. If mortar holds together and shatters, sandbags deflect
and absorb at least the physical shocks of warfare.
Outside, the actual sun also finds its way into the
outdoor piece 6:35/8:03. The title points us towards the time of sunset on the
day of the show’s opening in March and the much later sunset on the day of the
show’s closing in May. Akhavan’s positioning of a cutout ensures that each
sunset of the exhibition spells the words “second nature” in natural light on a
wall across from the gallery.
In this piece, as with the entire show, Akhavan puts
us between competing cycles. He suggests that, though precarious, it may be
necessary and potentially freeing to find our selves somewhere between past and
potential, structure and ruin, first and second nature.
Liu Bolin
Liu Bolin (simplified Chinese: 刘勃麟; traditional Chinese: 劉勃麟; pinyin: Liú Bólín)
a Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2001.
His work has been exhibited in museums around the world. Also known as
"The Invisible Man", Liu Bolin's most popular works are from his
"Hiding in the City" series; photographic works that began as
performance art in 2005.
Liu belongs to the generation that came of age in the
early 1990s, when China emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution and
was beginning to enjoy rapid economic growth and relative political stability.
Bolin was moved to create his "Hiding in the
City" series after the Chinese Beijing artist village Suo Jia Cun in
November 2005.
In his work, Liu has always given special attention to
the various social problems that accompany China's rapid economic development,
making social politics the crux of his pictorial commentaries. In "Hiding
in the City", Liu made one of his particular focuses slogans as an
educational tool used within Communist societies, pointing out that many people
become used to the slogans over time and cease to pay conscious attention to
these messages' effects on the public's thinking. By painting his body into
some such slogans, Liu forces the viewer to acknowledge the messages and, in
the process, to reconsider the circumstances of one's own life.
