Carlos, born 1976, Jason, born 1981, surname Sanchez, together, “The Sanchez Brothers”, are an extremely promising, young photographer collective. The work of the two young artists from Canada has already been shown in numerous solo exhibitions in Canada, the USA, and Europe.

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Their photography, produced in a Montreal studio located in a factory buildings owned by their uncle, has been successful, although, or perhaps because, they shed light on the dark sides of life and human actions: pain, insanity, death, natural selection, injustice, abuse, disaster, mourning, degradation, isolation, exploitation. One can find among these, that which one turns a blind eye to in life. more »

In 1771, Louis Sébastien Mercier published the novel 2440, which depicts an utopia of a convenient, more ideal, distant future world. Utopias had already existed in the past. However, in Mercier’s utopia, the ideal world is not stumbled upon – for example, through a storm in which one is shipwrecked and washed up onto the shore of the ideal place – but rather a result of a linear history that is played out through human action.

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“Some were immediately enlightened from the beginning, but the majority of the nation was still careless and childlike. Gradually, the population became more intelligent. We still have much more to accomplish than what we have created so far. We are only halfway there,” according to the caretakers of the future regarding the intermediate conditions of the half-realized utopia. Mercier’s narration of the gradual realization of an ideal world carried out by mankind is a modern vision – with human capital, reason, and faith, as applied to technical, rational progress, as its focal points. more »

For a long time, contemporary art was strictly a national phenomenon in Turkey and was therefore, to a large extent, ignored internationally. This has changed. In the 1970s and 80s, artists such as Füsun Onur, Ayse Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger have begun to break through traditional and national orientations and to bring in international influences. As international attention grew stronger in the 90s and the Istanbul Biennales offered venues of presentation and publicity to the more progressive contemporary art of Turkey, awareness of the value of this art and its development was promoted locally. The recent generation of Turkish artists profited from these changes both thematically and professionally.

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One of the internationally renowned Turkish artists of the post-2000 generation is Ahmet Ögüt. The past twelve months of the 27-year-old artist, who lives and works in Istanbul and Amsterdam, have been densely packed: his work has been featured in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, Athens, Eindhoven, Seoul, Helsinki, Santa Fe, Nimes, Malmö, Stockholm, Zagreb, London, Banja Luka, and Stuttgart. In addition, he has had solo exhibitions in Basel and Barcelona, three Biennales, as well as numerous online and print contributions. more »

As you are looking at this podcast, you are looking into a monitor, be it on your laptop, your iPod, your mobile phone, etc. But how much time do you spend actually looking at your monitor, a physical object that one has come to take completely for granted? The point of a mobile world, in fact, is that these objects, through which we stay connected with an information-saturated world, are disposable—toys that we purchase and update on a regular basis, and, at the same rate, discard and forget about just as quickly.

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In Noah Fischer’s work, one returns to looking at this neglected object, the monitor, in all its different versions and models over the ages—a technological “era” which only really covers about thirty years of time. The Brooklyn-based artist was first drawn to the monitor by noticing the predominance of them in trash heaps on the streets of New York. more »

Sculptures and installations of the artist Thomas Baumann possess the quality of being alive. Usually, they are moving. They de-form, they make noises, they move their observers: emotionally, in terms of their beliefs, through the challenge to participate even physically. Movement, says the artist, is a language of our time. We understand it and feel addressed by it on different levels.

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Thomas Baumann’s produces his work from mechanical, technological, and electronic materials. The units of construction have their own aesthetic, and do not remain hidden behind the façades of design. In this way, the sculptures retain the quality of being mechanically engineered works of art which create the effect of being the siblings of those machines that are used in the production lines of industrial manufacturing. more »

As the artistic duo SIGNA, Signa Soerensen and Arthur Koestler provide our world with replicas of itself. They install reproductions of the original, three-dimensional parallel worlds, habitable cartographies: a run-down flophouse is the setting for the hopeless world of six Eastern European prostitutes who are ruled by their social degredation and the brutality of their pimps — a mystical nightmare universe consisting of forty areas filled with religious, political and social rituals. The wing of a closed-off psychiatric station, led by the female doctor, Dorine Chaikin, and her team, subject amnesia patients to a procedure that includes welfare service and discipline.

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The parallel worlds of SIGNA are replicas which have lost their historical and geographical attributes. The colors, costumes, furniture, in their tiniest details: these seamless properties offer temporal and regional associations, but the where and when remains indefinite. more »

The openness of her parents — to both traditional Islamic positions as well as the value system of the recent secularly oriented republic — was passed on to the children. Their upbringing allowed for independent thinking and provided the incentive to take autonomous positions. Füsun Onur studied with Hadi Bara at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul, who broke with the tradition of sculpture in the form of official monuments in the fifties. A five-year postgraduate degree in the USA followed, after which she returned to Istanbul, where she has been continuing her artistic work in Kuzguncuk.

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Füsun Onur has played an important role in the development of modern Turkish art, possessing the power not only to invent her own view of things beyond reality, but also to create the space for such a world. Füsun Onur, among other artists, is responsible for avant-garde currents making their way into the primarily traditionally-oriented art enterprise of Turkey in the early 70s. Her independent approach not only strengthened other modern artists at this time, but she also continues to affect and inspire recent generations of Turkish artists. more »

To flare up, to freak out, to lose it—to see red. Red stands for danger, the red stoplight, red stands for pain and suffering, the red flag, red stands for love and desire, glowing-hot red, blood red. “The Eye” sees red. Exclusively. At least according to the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, whose installation “The Eye” currently takes place at the Wiener Secession.

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Thomas Hirschhorn is a fan of philosophy. He admires Foucault. In one of his early works, Foucault investigates “The Order of Things”, which gives us a clear view of the world, putting some things together according to a relation, while others are incomparably set apart. The order of the things, according to the philosopher, is not self-evident, various possibilities exist. Foucault quotes from J.L. Borges’ book “The Book of Imaginary Beings”, an encyclopedia which arranges the world in a decidedly unexpected manner. more »

Intensity can be fascinating. However, levity also holds a certain charm. The artist’s name, ILA — which stands for the sentence in German: einen “Immens Langen Atem haben” (literally, “to be long of breath”, i.e. “to have stamina or willpower”) — expresses the difficulties of an artist’s existence: facing setbacks, keeping up endurance, rolling with the punches. The business of art often seems like hard work, however, the work process and artistic expression of art is more like play. He wishes for his works to appear like they happen effortlessly, minus burdening concepts like “genius” or artistic self-sacrifice. His work, he says, is inspired by the idea of giving something. They should be considered as invitations to stick around, to wake one up but not to win one over. The viewer then must choose his or her own way through the works, unguided by the preconceptions of others.

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After getting a degree in geology, ILA turned his attentions towards art. His preoccupation with natural science can still be found in his work. Exhibition titles such as “All in All” are reminiscent of the systematic paradigm of nature. In his work, “Earth Plugs” — which was honored with First Prize at the International Biennale for Miniatures in Belgrade — he drilled holes into pavement curbs, house facades, and boulders using a diamond drill bit, thereby inoculating the socio-geological ground of these public spaces and found locations as a kind of artistic intervention. more »