Vasi Hîrdo
Vasi Hîrdo is the Editor and Founder of Ceramics Now.
He posts interesting recommendations, talks about ceramics, contemporary art and events, and posts works in his portfolio.
He is a dreamer and he loves Iceland. 
Vasi Hîrdo is the Editor and Founder of Ceramics Now.
He posts interesting recommendations, talks about ceramics, contemporary art and events, and posts works in his portfolio.
He is a dreamer and he loves Iceland.
Zona Maco México Arte Contemporaneo Art Fair 2012, Mexico City
The 2012 edition of Zona Maco, the international art fair in Mexico that took place in mid-April at Centro Banamex in Mexico City, presented the program of more than 90 galleries from around the world. In addition to the Main Section of the fair that hosts galleries with more than five years of experience, the fair also has section for younger galleries (New Proposals), a project section (Zona Maco Sur), and Zona Maco Design, a pavilion that shows national and international design galleries. This video provides you with a walk-through of the fair on April 21, 2012.
Video by Diego García Sotomoro.
Watch more VernissageTV videos. / Frieze Art Fair New York 2012
One of my favorite musicians, Damon Albarn, is about to release his new project, titled Dr Dee.
Dr Dee is 18 tracks of songs and music inspired by the life of John Dee, mathematician, polymath and advisor to Elizabeth I. Described by Albarn as ‘strange pastoral folk’, Dr Dee is a fitting companion to the end of another Elizabethan age. The album combines Albarn’s voice with early English choral and instrumentation alongside modern, West African and Renaissance sounds.
Dr Dee was recorded late last year in Albarn’s West London studio and also in Salford with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The album was mixed by Valgeir Sigursson in Reykjavik.
The first single, “The Marvelous Dream”, was released a few days ago.
Charline von Heyl at Tate Liverpool
February 24 - May 27, 2012
Distinctive, imaginative and always surprising, Charline von Heyl’s work offers a fresh and exciting approach to the world of abstract art. Curator Gavin Delahunty and the artist herself take us around the exhibition currently at Tate Liverpool, the first major exhibition by von Heyl to be held in the UK. Featuring forty two of her large canvasses and a number of unique works on paper, the exhibition explores von Heyl’s work from 1990-2011.
Born in Germany in 1960, von Heyl studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Jörg Immendorf and Fritz Schwegler. She witnessed first hand painting’s resurgence in the 1980s through the vibrant Köln-based art scene, where radical and experimental approaches to painting by artists such as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen began a dramatic expansion of the field.
Reconstructing Mogadishu
I’ve been following news related to Somalia and Somali people since last summer. I started reading about the situation when the UN declared famine in the region and I couldn’t understand why millions of people have nothing to eat in the 21st century, and most importantly, who’s fault is this.
A number of factors put Somalia in a very disturbing situation last year. After being without government and without laws for over 20 years, and in a continuous civil war between a transitional government and an Islamist group called Al-Shabaab, the country was hit by an extended famine, which killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands in refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, but also in the capital city of Mogadishu.
Responsible for the famine was the severe drought in the Horn of Africa, but the drought was a consequence of global warming. Severe droughts occurred once every three or four years in the region, but in the last decade they occurred almost every year.
Though, the situation has now improved. In August 2011, the African Union have re-established control over the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and they are striving to push back the terrorist group out of the surrounding region.
The residents of Mogadishu now have to do a very strange memory exercise - to remember how to live in times of peace.
Videos: Inside Mogadishu (11.51) / The fragile peace (01.34)
News: Hunger and Homelessness (Al Jazeera) / Hitting the beach (BBC)
Features: 2011 East Africa drought (wiki) / Somalia, a failed state (Nat Geo)
More on Somalia - BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera
“It’s this ability to attack problems as a beginner, to let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure, that’s the key to creativity.”
Live session by Bon Iver at AIR Studios, London, October 16, 2011.
Playlist:
1. Hinnom, TX
2. Wash.
3. I Can’t Make You Love Me
4. Babys
5. Beth/Rest
A great sculptor who’s work I have been following since last year has been interviewed by a magic group called OneMinuteWonder, who are making a series of video portraits of wondrous people, telling their personal story in 60 seconds. The list includes artists, entrepreneurs and designers.
Joep Van Lieshout has been producing pieces of beautifully bright colored polyester since the 1980’s. The award winning output of his atelier has become world recognized for its ability to cross the boundaries of art, architecture and design.
Feel Flows
Slow Magic by Feel Flows
Contemplating about what if.
A Tale of Two Baghdads / Cairo Undone
Eloquent and prescient. Graceful and gripping. His death on Thursday, from an apparent asthma attack while on a reporting trip in Syria, has deprived American journalism of its most gifted foreign correspondent in a generation. His coverage of the Middle East — from Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, and beyond — was, simply, the best. He set the standard. If you cared about the region, if you really wanted to understand what was going on, you read Anthony. Rajiv Chandrasekaran about Anthony Shadid (FP)
His stories from the Middle East remind me about Yasmina Khadra’s books.
Heather Larmour (producer) wrote an amazing play which aired today on BBC Radio 3 (Drama on 3). Set in Russia, 1984, Andrei Demidov, an internationally-acclaimed - and controversial - novelist has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Outspoken and notoriously critical of the Soviet authorities, Demidov’s novel ‘Sunset’, an exploration of the realities of the Soviet Union’s involvement in Afghanistan, has been banned in his homeland, but thanks to the actions of Andrei’s English publisher, Michael, has qualified and been awarded literature’s most prestigious honour.
Living under a restricted movement order in the countryside outside Moscow with his wife Alexandra, Andrei is faced with a difficult decision. The Soviet Authorities are not about to let one of their most vociferous critics travel to make an acceptance speech in Sweden denouncing the regime to an international audience. They might permit him to leave the country and live out the rest of his days as an exile, never to return to his beloved Russia. Or, he could acquiesce with the authorities, refuse the award, and in doing so ensure the freedom of his estranged son Nikolai.
But in a world where everyone is manipulating everyone else for their own private or political ends, how much autonomy does Andrei really have? Is he master of his own fate, or a pawn in a game with greater stakes than he might imagine?
The history of the Nobel Prize for Literature is no stranger to such controversies. From Boris Pasternak - who was awarded and then rejected the prize for ‘Doctor Zhivago’ - to Harold Pinter, who used his Nobel acceptance speech to denounce American foreign policy regarding the war in Iraq, the prize has frequently brought into focus the polemics of that eternal triumvirate which Pinter himself addressed in his speech: ‘Art, Truth and Politics’. How far should art and artists engage in politics? Is personal veracity more important than utilitarianism? At what price does artistic integrity come? In this new drama for Radio 3, Doug Lucie pits such ideals against that of ‘family’ as Andrei’s own future and that of his wife and son hang in the balance. For Andrei and his family, the prospect of freedom becomes as much of a prize as the award itself - but what exactly is freedom anyway?
Yayoi Kusama, Tate Modern
9 February – 5 June 2012
The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation. It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as “Accumulations”, to her “Infinity Net” paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977 Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessively charged vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.
At the centre of the art world in the 1960s, she came into contact with artists including Donald Judd, Andy Warhol, Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg, influencing many along the way. She has traded on her identity as an “outsider” in many contexts - as a female artist in a male-dominated society, as a Japanese person in the Western art world, and as a victim of her own neurotic and obsessional symptoms. After achieving fame and notoriety with groundbreaking art happenings and events, she returned to her country of birth and is now Japan’s most prominent contemporary artist.
