The work of the Italian artist Christian Niccoli traces the social mental state of the urban beings of our time. The discourse is over a generation of young adults who have fled their country roots, who have been trained to fight their way through life alone, who are always ready to do their best, but who are secretly oppressed by the question of who will take care of them if something goes wrong.

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What is common to them is also what sets them apart. The isolation of those whose existence is based on flexibility and openness, which even though they share with others, does not unite them with others, and in the end only puts them in a position in which they are compared with and played off one another. 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 »

In the art world, one thing leads to another—this is the principle by which Hans Knoll began his career as an art dealer, which remains his guiding principle up until today. Knoll began in the early 80s with a space, a weekly dinner among friends, artists, and accompanying guests, and the possibilities that arose from this set-up led to exhibitions, performances, and music. These events were at the time more along the lines of occasions for bonding. However, they eventually turned into serious gallery events and the subsequent realization that one must expand beyond Vienna in order to truly develop in the art world.

Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 1

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 2

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 3

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Hans Knoll - Art as a Form of Mediation, Interview Part 4

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In the first half of the 1980s, the young art dealer was already getting involved with the art world in Hungary. He founded an artists’ co-op in Budapest as a kind of communist counterpart to his gallery and thereby set himself apart in the art world from the surrounding East European countries. more »

“If somebody would come and wash my car, it would be nice. It would be nice, it would be done, but I wouldn’t pay for it. Sometimes I think that for many people, this is the same with art.”

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Eva Jiricka, video and performance artist from Prague, translates intellectual concepts into everyday life in her work. She deals with concepts of others, of sexuality, of the menace of the stranger, of cities, as well as of the artist’s existence. There often exist prejudices which we consciously or unconsciously carry around with us and whose traces we leave behind in the form of actions, objects, writings, and visual templates, which we are fed to us by the media and which we gladly consume. In her video work, Jiricka reenacts these collective pictures. She represents them. She exposes them. She realizes them for us. She opens our eyes. Wide. more »

Art is there for people and for the most part, people will come to the art. Sometimes, however, art comes to the people–provided that someone has enough of the enthusiasm and commitment to bring it to them. We had an interview with one such “gallery nomad” in the name of art.

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Ivana Madariová, curator of the Galerie Space, occasionally leaves the premises of her gallery on Stefánikova Road in Bratislava and goes on the road with her art. Then the Space becomes Nomadspace, in order to get closer to the people, in order to bring art onto the streets and into public spaces, and to get passers-by interested in the young artists of the gallery. In order to render the art mobile, a small transporter was converted in 2007, and the first destinations were multimedia and film festivals in Slovakia, in addition to Re:Sonance in Vienna, Artissima in Turin, Zurich, and the 9th International Festival of Contemporary Art for Women in the Slovenian capital, Laibach. more »