Artes Mundi 4 - Brychan Tudor
National Museum Cardiff, 11th March - 6th June, 2010

‘Artes Mundi (arts of the world) celebrates artists from around the world who discuss the human condition.  This exhibition presents art which questions who we are and the societies we live in.  From fresco and drawing, to photography and film, Artes Mundi 4 explores different worlds and experiences through contemporary art.’ (Exhibition Catalogue, Artes Mundi 4, 2010)

At £40,000, this ambitious and exciting international art event boasts the largest UK cash prize of its kind.  I was intrigued to delve into the selection process of this event, which represents Wales’ only fine art exhibition on this scale. 

In meeting with Tessa Jackson, Artes Mundi Artistic Director, she explained the development of this selection process since the art prize began in 2004,

“…The fundamental architecture has remained similar, where we appoint two selectors, who are curators who don’t normally know each other and (who) come from different parts of the world.  One is usually quite experienced. The other, perhaps, still gaining international experience and we bring them together and ask them to select around the very broad theme of artists who in some way or other, discuss the human condition.

The idea is that it is very broad but in the selector’s discussions, each time, whoever the selectors have been, its like compiling a book of short stories if you like.  It will have different emphasises, it will have a linking chain of ideas or themes and that is what I think is particularly interesting.

I think its been extraordinary, how all the artists are responding to their context and how the political context affects the lives of ordinary people. (….) This time, the selection has one of the strongest frameworks.”

It was interesting to chat to Tessa about this framework.  We discussed the benefit of creating a situation where the selection of artists and the exhibition dynamic are taken out of the control of the exhibition organisers.  This is a very healthy and refreshing approach and allows Artes Mundi to create a biannual exhibition with fresh impetus and curatorial insight.

A broad panel of selectors are chosen from various locations (international curators & gallery directors).  This panel is responsible for choosing a large sample of over 100 artists worldwide.  After this, a series of studio visits are made by selectors in order to choose the shortlist for the prize and the eventual exhibitors.  It was inspiring to hear that although only a fragment of this sample are included in the show, a number of artists outside of this sample get the chance to be involved with various international projects organised by the wider panel of selectors. 

Once the shortlist has been made, the two chosen curators are asked to liaise with the artists in order to select a suitable body of work.  This is truly an international project in every way.

Having visited 2 out of 3 of the previous Artes Mundi exhibitions, I feel that ‘Artes Mundi 4’ was one of the most enthralling and mentally occupying to date. 

Admittedly, the work at Artes Mundi 04 was heavy on the brain and this was certainly not an exhibition to tackle on an empty stomach.  However, the show was very tightly produced, efficiently curated and challenging throughout.  The work of each artist was encapsulating and an informed and detailed reading of the entire exhibition was best spread over two days.

This selection of work posed some very interesting questions about the borderlines between documentation and art.  Although this can be seen as somewhat of a minefield, I feel that the distinctions are fairly clear:  Documentation is a presentation of media that records an event in its ‘truest’ form.  It is the relaying of facts, figures and occurrences through documents recording a certain time and place.  For this relaying of information to become an ‘artwork’, something must take place where the artist and ‘presenter’ edits the order or dynamic of the material that is shown to re-emphasize a given point.  In doing so, the presenter is using documentation of an event to create an artwork, which translates their own thoughts and feelings regarding a given subject.  The majority of the works on show at Artes Mundi 04 can be read in relation to this latter description.

Fernando Bryce’s work greets you as you enter the first room of this exhibition.  This archive of a series of hand copied (in Indian ink) political, historical and cultural documents is hung in a thick band stretching around the room.  It provides a chronological journey of 20th Century world activity, covering portraits of world leaders, documents and publications of peace and war, statements, illustrations and articles of general interest.

The documents themselves are exquisitely and lovingly transcribed in great detail.  The style of presentation and the mass and depth of information provides the viewer with a sense of being entombed.  This ‘story’ takes you on a journey through a list of atrocities, celebrations, evil deeds and ‘great’ wars.  Some of these documents are more familiar than others but their collective impression becomes quite clear: ‘History is dictated by the winners’.

The reporting and distinction of global historical happenings are massively subjective.  Their creation and interpretation will rest heavily on the perspective of the creator and the reader.  Bryce is drawing the viewers’ attention to this fact through the selection of documents on show and the method of transcription.  Bryce’s hand copied documents infer subjective corruption through their indexicality.   In reference to Bryce and this style of edited archive, Tessa Jackson referred to him as a “… A current day editor of historical material”.

Olga Chernysheva presents a series of 33 prints mounted on lightboxes, stretching around a rectangular space at eye height.  In addition to this, she placed a film and a watercolour of her work in amongst the Museum’s main collection. 

The catalogue explains, ‘Her work goes beyond any appearance of the documentary and becomes lyrical glimpses of individuals trying to make sense of their lives’.  It is difficult to see this.  As much as any other piece in the show, this is the documentation of a visit to a time and place.  Characters are recorded through their presence and often appear inwardly interesting but the viewer is left on the outside ‘looking-in’.  Perhaps this work is so subtle that it is not necessarily easy to extract the catalogue’s suggested meaning. 

Three or four of the lightboxes are very interesting from a compositional point of view.  An image of an archived ray, meeting a boy’s outstretched finger draws compositional comparison with Gauguin’s ‘Vision After The Sermon’.  This is a massively enjoyable piece of spatial play that entices the viewer to analyse the image with a closeness of attention that other images in this series fail to achieve.

An image of what appears to be the cloakroom attendant passes for an intelligent interpretation of the banal: The everyday glumness seeping through in a tangible expression of nothingness.   This selection of images represents an archive of the documentation of an experience of a place and time.  The work’s location is a kind of natural archive in itself and adds further to this sense of recorded documentation.

Yael Bartana, unsurprisingly the eventual winner of this year’s cash prize, showed a series of films and created two huge piles of large colour prints that acted as handouts informing the public of her ongoing project in Warsaw. The first two parts of a 3 part, unfinished film highlighted Bartana’s work as some of the best featured at Artes Mundi 4. 

The first section shows an odd speech made by a Polish gentleman to an empty Polish football stadium.  The only other people present in the film are a small chorus of uniformed children.  The speech is captured by sweeping shots, filled with smart overlays and a pace that seems to match its greyness.  The haunting presence of an empty football stadium presents the feeling of a people removed.  The eerie echo substantiates the content of the speech; attempting to recall Jews of Polish heritage back to Poland. This militaria styled speech alludes to a post-Stalin Eastern block rhetoric.  The orator, who is younger than one would expect, has a black, three quarter length leather coat.  He produces a passionate speech celebrating times past; aiming to revindicate, rebuild and reignite the Jewish population in Poland. 

The second part shows the construction of a kibbutz out of wood, built on the site of ‘The Warsaw Ghetto’ where so many Polish Jews died as a result of disease or persecution during the Second World War.  The building of this structure is carried out as a kind of community project, facilitated through the artist’s creation of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP). 

Bartana works with a mixture of photography, film, video and sound and has referred to herself as an ‘amateur anthropologist’. (Exhibition Catalogue, Artes Mundi 4, 2010)

The films seem to flow effortlessly with a pace and style of editing that infers recollection and reconciliation.  There is an obvious strength and thoughtfulness in these films that is ultimately charming and heavily thought provoking.  They are complex in the best possible way.

Ergin Cavusoglu presents a series of multi-screen films. One film uses four projection screens set at varying irregular angles.  Each screen shows a different part of a film shot in a Hebridian-esq landscape:  Four films become one. 

This Bulgarian artist has created something slightly wonderful here.  One screen displays a ‘walk-and-talk’, period-styled conversation between two actors and whilst it was only semi-convincing at stages, the impact of the four screens, their content and the accompanying music achieves an emotional impact.  Other screens show a mixture of still and scrolling shots of landscape, both natural and man-made.  There is a massive sense of folly here and yet one does not feel at all duped.  The work has an orchestral quality, combining movement and stillness wrapped in a rhythmical pattern of diction, music and squawking seagulls.  The images within the fragmented film are not massively interesting in their own right but through their juxtaposition they capture an ebb and flow with an expression of timelessness and carefully composed beauty.

The Albanian artist Adrian Paci has produced a series of segmented fresco paintings.  The content of these collage-like screens record moments of human collaboration taken from Albanian wedding shots.  Each plaster screen is fixed to a large brick wall, artificially supported by exaggerated wooden structures.  The essence of human expression and everyday life is captured beautifully, with the tempera-on-plaster finish giving the images some real depth.  Given the technical proficiency and the ‘real-life’ content of these works, it was surprisingly difficult to emotionally connect with the subjects, leaving the viewer slightly cold and externalised from the depiction of these strangely melancholic celebrations.

Gulnara Kasmelieva & Muratbek Djumaliev provided an absolute mountain of work for this show, which culminated in a series of films shown side-by-side on a large arching projector screen.  These films were accompanied by a generous series of A3 colour photo prints and a number of larger prints.  The stills recorded the life and activity of Kyrgyzstany people, highlighting trade routes and pockets of colourful activity.  Whilst beautiful and well executed, the images failed to tell the full story.  Even their collective presence failed to give a full interpretation of the images content and most importantly, the lives of the people depicted within them.  In stark contrast, the larger images of children playing side-by-side with huge dusty lorries gave a wonderful sense of the struggle and reality of a harsh, enforced nomadic existence.

However, the film footage was far more illuminating and descriptive; telling the indirect story of a number of individuals import-export based existence.  One film shows the particularly spectacular process of a man wrapping, packing and stacking goods ready for export.  This alone, provided the most enjoyably visceral experience of the entire show.  The sense of Kyrgyzstany frustration at being sandwiched between larger, economically prolific countries and the affect that this has had on people’s lives since the breakdown of the old Soviet Republic, is clearly communicated through this multi-facetted visual spectacle.

Chen Chieh-Jen’s self-portrait styled film documents a series of Chinese women and their difficulty in passing through border control into Taiwan. The film is delicately and quite beautifully structured.  Chieh-Jen has an extraordinarily keen eye for detail.  The physical movement and the physical reconstruction methods used within this film are carefully composed and heavily considered.

The internal dialogues of the women translate a series of migratory-based life stories, indicating broken families, ruined lives, great determination and explicit forms of mental and physical abuse.

The calculated coldness of the arrangement within this work is particularly noticeable; it gives the film a sterile sense of futility.  The pain and frustration of these ‘real-life tales’ of anthropic struggle depict a sensitive and corrupt political situation, which prevents and disturbs migratory routes from China into Taiwan. 

In constructing a fitting denouement of this exhibition, it is easy to highlight the heaviness of the content and the depth of anthropomorphic study that is gushing out of the works from every pore.  It is a seven-course meal; each dish richly filled with stories, interpretations and documentations of the ‘human condition’.  It was however, very enjoyable to spend serious amounts of time with the works, deciphering their content and the multiple perspectives that lie behind their creation.  The nagging borderline between documentation and artistic intention is an on-going discussion point within the majority of these works and one that I still cannot settle comfortably on.  That is probably a good thing.