The Poetics of a Palm Tree

I've long admired the work of Yto Barrada, so was pleased to hear that she is part of the new group show at Tate Modern's Level 2 Gallery, I Decided Not to Save The World. In an approach perhaps similar to that of Francis Alys, the artists in the show look at such topics as cultural identity, territory and globalisation by way of what could be considered gestures, small interventions that have larger implications. For me Barrada's work was the best contribution here, with a body of work that focuses on the palm tree as a symbol for modernisation in her native Tangier, its usage by thegovernment as a symbol to attract tourism. Barrada produced a fanzine that was first distributed at the Third Marrakech Biennial and here displayed in its entirety in poster form. Her film Beau Geste shows workers attempting to save the life of a palm tree on a vacant plot of the land that has been sabotaged in order that it might fall down - it is illegal to cut down a palm tree, and so in order to stop the owner of the land developing on it Barrada explains how these people have set about to save the tree and thus disrupt his plans. A simple gesture it may be, Barrada highlights the resistance that can occur in the face of a modernising and globalising economy.

Images from here.

Non-place

I went to see the newly opened Gabriel Orozco exhibition at Tate Modern today, a newly opened show surveying the Mexican artist's two decades of work in sculpture, painting and photography. These two photos stuck with me in terms of their capturing of a space in between places, something of a major concern in my own work at the moment.

(Top: An Island Within an Island

Bottom: From One Roof to Another)

Francis Alÿs

Really gutted I missed this exhibition at Tate Modern over the summer. If you have a few minutes spare and also didn't manage to catch the retrospective his website is worth checking out, with many of his videos and documentation of performances available to watch (and in some cases download) for free.

Artefacts

Before I cam home for the summer I saw a great exhibit in the Level 2 Gallery at Tate Modern by Cypriot artist Haris Epanimonda. Collating imagery from old copies of National Geographic with ancient artefacts and sculptures, she treats the space as an installation, with each element in the show creating a dialogue with the objects around it, playing with the conventions of the museum/gallery space and asking the viewer to dream up connections and connotations. The curation of a show is very much a focal point of her practice, the title of the show - Volume VI - a nod to the spatial element of the gallery space (this is number six in a series of similarly titled pieces).

Her method of juxtaposing found imagery is akin to John Stezaker, and recalls far off lands and ancient civilisations, creating the sense of being in a kind of disjointed museum where it is up to the viewer to dream up the origins and meanings of the seemingly unrelated ephemera.

Independently speaking

Last night I went to check out Tate Modern's 10th anniversary festival with a few friends. For the duration of the weekend Tate have invited 70 non for profit art organisations and collectives from around the world to set up shop in the famed Turbine Hall, creating a kind of mass market of stalls, displays and artwork for the public to navigate themselves through. Each participating organisation has been given a small square in which they are free to show what they like, and the displays range from artist's work to manifestos and propaganda to interactive installations. On top of this a programme of talks and film screenings has been put together, running throughout the weekend.

The main idea was to create an environment with no walls, allowing all these organisations to interact and engage with each other in a way that could not be possible anywhere else. Although it was rather manic and hard to really take in individual elements (it took a while to work out where one began and another ended at first) it is certainly an admirable idea for Tate to come up with, and it was really nice to see these tiny collectives and art spaces given a platform to reach out to such a wide audience. Whether or not it was entirely successful is another thing, but it was certainly an experience to wander through it all and see what is on show, and with art spaces from as far afield as Beijing, Morocco and New York it is certainly a great way to get a glimpse of what's happening on an international scale.