This blog is dedicated to announcements, time-sensitive information, or ongoing social projects by Pedro Lasch. It includes individual work, and collaborations, as well as other information of general interest, and recommended events produced by current or past collaborators. For information on completed projects please visit the main site at http://www.pedrolasch.com
Leah Gordon (b.1959 Ellesmere Port) is a photographer, film-maker and curator who has an ongoing interest in and relationship with Haiti. She first visited Haiti in 1991 and was the official photographer for the 1994 Amnesty International Report on that country. She has exhibited widely, her images featuring in numerous public and private collections including that of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Gordon has been involved in a range of projects as both visual artist and curator, including documenting experiences of homophobia in London, crossing-dressing in Vodou, links between the Slave Trade and the River Thames and exhibitions of Haitian art. Her photography book ‘Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti’ is published in June 2010.
The cover image to the Riflemaker exhibition The Invisibles: ‘Girl with Bird’, Cité Soleil, Haiti 1993, documents a territory - Cité de Soleil - classified by the UN as the most dangerous place on earth, though the image is a portrait of stillness and grace, taken during the military coup years of 1991-1994.
Gordon has recently returned to Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake. Her upcoming exhibition and book ‘The Invisibles’ will include photographs sold to benefit victims of the disaster. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make ‘Freedom Sculpture’, a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Continuing her relationship with the Grand Rue artists, Gordon organised and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in December 2009. Gordon also teaches fact-based film at The University for Creative Arts, Surrey. She participated in the Riflemaker exhibition ‘Voo-doo’ in 2009
“I’m drawn to the boundaries between art, religion and anthropology. These borderlands have a historical, and often uncomfortable, relationship with photography. A suspicion that photography has observed and policed, but never taken part. Photography has rarely been embraced as a form of representation by religions. It is as if photography, with it’s indelible relationship to the material, could only serve to disprove the divine, Although when one reflects on its alchemical past it seems rooted in magical process.
Much of my studio photography is an exploration of this, often surreal, territory. My portraits in the studio are staged examinations of the spirit world; an anthropology of the invisibles. ‘Kanaval’ is a body of my work that has a more documentary approach. A record of people that still own and transmit their own folk history. It is a unsanitised, dirty history of the people played out on the streets”. Leah Gordon.
“People originated by magic in all countries of the world. No one lives of the flesh. Everyone lives of the spirit”: Andre Pierre, Haitian artist, quoted in ‘The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou’, ed. Don Cosentino, UCLA Fowler Museum.
“Leah Gordon’s images seem to speak not only to the eye and mind, but somewhere deeper. They almost speak to the soul itself, to the long buried core of our human experience. As we peek into this powerful world, we see mankind turned inside out; the monster within worn proudly on the flesh, exposed, named and challenged. I think I will return over and over again to these images - they are a startling reminder of what lies beneath. Truly startling. Truly brilliant”. Emma Rice
Emma Rice is the Artistic Director of the Kneehigh Theatre where she has directed shows including ‘Brief Encounter’, ‘A Matter of Life and Death’, ‘Cymbeline’, ‘Tristan & Yseult’ and ‘The Red Shoes’.
An old friend and incredible artist based in the US will be in town as he is having a show at the Tate opening tonight. His show is called The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own at Tate Modern, Level 2 Gallery. The opening reception is Thursday, January 21 from 6:45-8:45 PM, and the show runs from January 22 - May 2, 2010. He will also be giving an artist talk at the Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern on Friday, January 22 at 6:30 PM.
Here is the link to information on the show, and I am also including the blurb below:
Michael Rakowitz works as a cultural archaeologist, uncovering an unexpected network of connections between historical fact and fantasy.The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own traces links between western science fiction and military-industrial activities in Iraq during and after Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Through a series of interwoven narratives this project addresses, among other things, the Iraqi leader’s fascination with the iconography of Jules Verne’s novels and the Star Wars films, and the World Wrestling Federation’s unique take on Gulf War politics.
The project centres on the Swords of Qādisiyyah monument in central Baghdad. This triumphal arch, otherwise known as the Hands of Victory, was inaugurated on 8 August 1989. The invitation card for the opening ceremony featured the heroic proclamation, “The worst condition is for a person to pass under a sword that is not his own or to be forced down a road that is not willed by him.” Rakowitz explores the multiple references and resonances of the Victory Arch, from the history of its design to its use as a backdrop for military posturing.
In this and other aspects of the project the artist explores how powerful contemporary mythologies derived from popular culture have informed the collective unconscious. Fictional characters from Darth Vader to Sgt. Slaughter coexist with historical figures in Rakowitz’s symbolic universe, in which warrior fantasies transcend the alleged divide between east and west.
Michael Rakowitz talks about recent projects including The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own in his Artist’s Talk on Friday 22 January.
Michael Rakowitz was born in Great Neck, New York, in 1973. He lives and works in Chicago.
The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one’s own is curated by Ann Coxon and Rachel Taylor.
The Level 2 Gallery is conceived and led by Tate Modern’s Assistant Curators, in dialogue with Mark Godfrey, Curator.
The Level 2 Gallery programme has been made possible with the generous support of Catherine Petitgas
We would like to invite you to the following event:
Ghetto Biennale
Tonight, 7:30 – 11pm
The show, which opened last December at the same time than the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti, has been extended until the 28th February. The Island is delighted to show the last group of sculptures by Grand Rue sculptors Eugène, Celeur and Guyodo living and working in Port Au Prince.
The artist André Eugène will join us this evening, so the event will be an exciting opportunity to talk about his work.
Please find the details below and feel free to forward this message to anyone who might be interested. Thank you.
We hope to see you then.
The Island
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GHETTO BIENNALE
Radical Relations (part III)
28/11/09 – 28/02/10
“What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art? Does it bleed?”
The Island is delighted to be the off-site partner of the first Ghetto Biennale of Haiti, using its venue to show recent works by Haitian artists André Eugène, Celeur Jean Hérard, Guyodo Klere and Claude Sentilus.
‘This is the newest art community to have emerged in the last ten years in a downtown slum neighborhood of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The ‘Grand Rue Sculptors’ have produced art that reflects a heightened, Gibsonesque, Lo-Sci-Fi, dystopian view of their society, culture and religion, and have dragged Haitian art into the 21st century. Jean Herard Celeur, Andre Eugene and Guyodo are at the core of the movement, which contains seven or eight other younger artists, all producing powerful sculptural works. Their work has opened entirely new vistas into the creative possibilities of the Vodou-inspired arts of Haiti. Their muscular sculptural collages of engine manifolds, computer entrails, TV sets, medical debris, skulls and discarded lumber transforms the detritus of a failing economy into deranged, post-apocalyptic totems’.(Leah Gordon)
Among the many existing curatorial models of art biennials all over the world, The Island project of presenting simultaneously the ‘Ghetto Biennale’ in London is directly related to the issues that give rise to the Biennale of Haiti itself, such as for Haitian artists to overcome the dual isolation of an island and of a ghetto.
Forging a successful arts career is difficult for a downtown Haitian. Refused US entry visas, the Grand Rue sculptors were excluded from a private view of their work in a major museum in Miami. A lack of government support makes them economically excluded from all major biennales. The artists have responded by hosting the ‘Ghetto Biennale’, the first arts festival located in a shantytown in the developing world. The event will explore what happens when artists from radically different backgrounds come together. When first world art objectives encounter third world artistic reality, and when Western artists try to make art in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haitian artist, Andre Eugene says, ‘the Ghetto Biennale represents positive change in my area and gives us the chance to show another face of life in the ghettos of Port-au-Prince. I think we have much to offer and much to learn.
‘The artists use all the detritus of a post-industrial global economy which uses Haiti as a dumping ground. They return the compliment, creating astounding bricolages and assemblages which express both the despair and the seemingly endless creativity of Haiti and Vodou. I have visited their ateliers on Haiti’s Grand Rue on several occasions over the last four years. I have had a chance to see their sculptures as they were being wrought from their desperate materials in a scrap yard on this wreck of a street, in this wreck of a city, in this wreck of a country. Saying all that, I would also have to add that, like Haiti, their sculptures seem to express the boundless creative energy of a people who are simultaneously the economically poorest, and artistically richest culture in the New World.’ (Donald Cosentino).
The show at The Island aims to increase cultural diversity in the arts, and to offer the opportunity the UK public to see contemporary Haitian art, created within the social, political and spiritual context of Vodou, Haiti’s national religion -and a culture that was born and survives due to its history of accommodation and inclusion-.
The Ghetto Biennale is also the last of three exhibitions focusing on collaborative - relational practices, designed as a single project, which has been running at The Island over the period between September 2009 and January 2010. The three exhibitions, collectively named Radical Relations may be associated to one another for their similar process of describing a tension between actions and movements of affinity and distance.
