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Exhibition of legendary Zaha Hadid in Hermitage

The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is hosting the first retrospective exhibition in Russia of British architect Zaha Hadid.

The project was prepared specifically for the Nicholas Hall of the Winter Palace – the main ceremonial historical interiors of the museum. The exhibition, organised by the State Hermitage Museum and Zaha Hadid architects, includes 300 models, drawings, photographs, sculptures and design objects: experimental designs of the 1980s, first projects and, of course, works of recent years, among them the Guangzhou Opera House in China; the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku; the MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome; the London Aquatics Center; Signature Tower and many others.

Zaha Hadid is internationally known for her built, theoretical and academic work. Each of her projects builds on over thirty years of exploration and research in the interrelated fields of urbanism, architecture and design.

Born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1950, Hadid studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before moving to London in 1972 to attend the Architectural Association (AA) School where she was awarded the Diploma Prize in 1977. Hadid founded Zaha Hadid Architects in 1979 and completed her first building, the Vitra Fire Station in Germany in 1993. Hadid taught at the AA School until 1987 and has since held numerous chairs and guest professorships at universities around the world including Columbia, Harvard and Yale. She is currently a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2004 Zaha Hadid, founder of Zaha Hadid architects, was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize (considered the Nobel Prize of architecture) within the precincts of the State Hermitage Museum, in the Hermitage Theater.

Working with her senior office partner, Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s interest lies in the rigorous interface between architecture, urbanism, landscape and geology; her practice integrates natural topography and human-made systems, leading to innovation with new technologies, as well as looking at nature's coherence as a literal option for an architecture that is driven by new developments in digital design and enhanced manufacturing capabilities.

Zaha Hadid’s early projects were very much influenced by the Russian avant-garde, in particular by the work of Kazimir Malevich and other Suprematist artists who envisioned a new idea of space and urbanism.

The Peak, Leicester Square, Berlin 2000, Tomigaya Building, Malevich Tektonik – albeit unbuilt – represent Hadid’s vital exploration and experimentation towards a new architecture to address the predicted complexity, connectivity and flexibility of our future.

The MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, the London Aquatics Center for the 2012 Olympic Games, and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku are built manifestos of Hadid’s quest for complex, fluid space. Previous seminal buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati and the Guangzhou Opera House in China have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with new spatial concepts and dynamic, visionary forms.

In 2007, Zaha Hadid won a competition to design the Heydar Aliyev Center. The building, which has become a major cultural center of Azerbaijan, breaks from the rigid and often monumental Soviet architecture that is so prevalent in Baku. Designed as a true embodiment of Azerbaijani culture, it symbolizes the optimism of the people of Azerbaijan.

This building is admired everyone – both those who have been to Baku several times, and those who came here for the first time. International stars who come here on tour, and kids who come here on field trips also admire it. The Heydar Aliyev Center immediately appeared on the list of the most amazing structures of the 21st century shortly after the construction.

The total area of the center is 15.93 hectares. The huge building includes three main sections: the three-story Museum of Heydar Aliyev, 9 floors of exhibition halls with galleries, cafes and offices, and the auditorium has four levels – a concert hall, auditorium, two multifunctional meeting rooms, rooms for official meetings and a media center. The main exhibition of the museum is a wonderful example of design, combined with high technology.

The exhibition, which runs until September 27, was prepared as part of the architectural program of the Hermitage 20/21 project, which was designed to collect, study and exhibit works of the 20th-21st centuries. The curator of the exhibition is Ksenia Malich, a researcher of the Department of Contemporary Art at the State Hermitage Museum.

Zaha Hadid is currently working on a diversity of projects worldwide, including the New National Stadium for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games, the Sleuk Rith Institute in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and 520 West 28th Street in New York, the Central Bank of Iraq and the Grand Theatre de Rabat.

http://vestnikkavkaza.net/news/Exhibition-of-legendary-Zaha-Hadid-in-Hermitage.html

www.giacobbegiusti.com

Title: Zaha Hadid at The State Hermitage Museum
curated by Ksenia Malich, Curator of Contemporary Art Department, The State Hermitage Museum, and Patrik Schumacher, Zaha Hadid Architects
Date: June 27– September 27 2015
Location: The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg - Russia

Images courtesy of Zaha Hadid Architects

www.zaha-hadid.com
www.hermitagemuseum.org

IN PICS: Goldsmiths’ Fair 2015 preview event

Kyosun Jung. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Jo McDonald. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Kyosun Jung. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Mara Irsara. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Stuart Jenkins. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Kyosun Jung. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Jo McDonald. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Flora Bhattachary. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Mara Irsara. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Jo McDonald. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Flora Bhattachary. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Jo McDonald. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Flora Bhattachary. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Ana Meneses. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Tomasz Donocik. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Flora Bhattachary. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Tomasz Donocik. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Ana Meneses. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year.

Tomasz Donocik. A small selection of designer-makers presented their wares at a Goldsmiths’ Fair preview event yesterday (May 21), including silversmiths Stuart Jenkins, Ana Meneses and Kyosun Jung; and jewellers Tomasz Donocik, Flora Bhattachary, Jo McDonald and Mara Irsara. The press-focused event also showcased the Goldsmiths’ Fair’s fresh brand imagery and unveiled that Julia Peyton-Jones, director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, will curate a selection of her favourite designs this year. http://www.professionaljeweller.com/in-pics-goldsmiths-fair-2015-preview-event/

www.giacobbegiusti.com

Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room Comes to New York

Text by Alexa Lawrence | | | Photography by © Yayoi Kusama/Courtesy of Kusama Enterprise, Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and Singapore, and David Zwirner, New York

The Obliteration Room, 2002–present, Yayoi Kusama.

The large garage doors of David Zwirner’s Chelsea gallery in Manhattan have been flung open to the street for Yayoi Kusama’s latest exhibition, “Give Me Love.” Inside, a selection of the Japanese artist’s spotted pumpkin sculptures and her bright but poignant “My Eternal Soul” paintings are on view. But what steals the show is a pale-yellow clapboard house, complete with a mailbox, a welcome mat, and an American flag. The building itself is generic—until you step inside.

The Obliteration Room in its pure state.

The interior, which started off entirely white—from floor to ceiling, including all the furniture and every knickknack—appears to have broken out in colorful spots. For the installation, titled The Obliteration Room, each visitor is handed a sheet of round stickers in a variety of bright hues and invited to affix them to any surface inside the house. The white sofa, chairs, TV, and laptop are now speckled in red, yellow, orange, green, blue, pink, and purple dots; a white kettle sitting on a white burner of a white stove set in a white kitchen is slowly disappearing into an explosion of color.

Kusama’s pumpkin sculptures also feature spots.

For Kusama, the work is a clear progression of a six-decade career in which the polka dot has acted as her primary medium. From her early performances and happenings to her more recent installations, Kusama has spread spots of all sizes and colors across countless surfaces, including her own body, in a process she refers to as “obliteration.” And indeed, over the course of the next month, as the stickers spread inside the small house, mass and volume will dissolve into a multicolor background, until nothing exists but dots. Through June 13 at David Zwirner, 519 and 525 West 19th Street, New York; davidzwirner.com

More on archdigest.com: Banker-turned-artist Paula Crown is having a moment, with an installation in Miami, a solo show in New York, and an upcoming exhibition in Aspen Matthew Marks Gallery in Manhattan presents new works by Ellsworth Kelly

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/blogs/daily/2015/05/yayoi-kusama-give-me-love-david-zwirner

www.giacobbegiusti.com

www.fulgorart.it

Tate Modern at 15: still delivering the shock of the new

The Bankside museum has transformed modern art from an elite cult into mass entertainment, but is it time to get down to some proper studying?

A spectacular light and laser show at the opening of the Tate Modern on 11 May 2000. Photograph: Matthew Fearn/PA

Jonathan Jones

Its dark Satanic hulk rising out of nondescript land on the wrong side of the Thames was the shock of the new set down in brick. It was 1999, and I was taking a hard-hat tour of the nearly completed conversion of Bankside power station into Tate Modern. In my mind I visualised Jackson Pollock paintings in the as-yet empty galleries and a heavy metal Richard Serra sculpture in the colossal Turbine Hall. Modernism was coming and it was going to change Britain.

A year after that, and exactly 15 years ago this week, a brass band pumped out Jeremy Deller’s Acid Brass at Tate Modern’s opening party. Writers and politicians mingled in the crowd, a theatrical pageant of New Labour Britain finding its perfect stage against architecture redolent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. But where were the Richard Serras? This was the shock of the new, but not as I knew it.

Instead of Serra’s steely modernism, it was the whimsical introspection of Louise Bourgeois that towered up, her giant spider spooking that great grey Turbine Hall. Instead of rooms full of Pollocks, there was an opening hang of a collection that I thought terrible. “Provocative” juxtapositions of modernist masterpieces and contemporary art seemed to me to deny visitors the chance to understand how modern art had unfolded in history since 1900, how one movement led to another. How, therefore, could visitors learn anything? Was this a museum with a mission to educate, or not?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marsyas by Anish Kapoor at Tate Modern. Photograph: View /Shutterstock

Fifteen years on and recently I was interviewing Anish Kapoor – whose vastly elongated blood-red musical instrument named after the satyr Marsyas was, in 2002, one of the defining Turbine Hall installations – at a London gallery. I asked the chromatic genius Kapoor which artists had impressed and inspired him in their use of colour. He enthused about the American minimalist Donald Judd and described a magical work in which Judd creates a delirious red space – a redness that seems solid – inside a big copper box. Everyone in the audience knew what he was talking about because Untitled (1972) is not in some remote legendary art destination in Texas where few have been, it’s in Tate Modern. It’s a highlight of this hugely popular museum’s collection. Boxes of red? Yeah, we know them. And like them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Shibboleth’, by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo. Photograph: David Levene

The fact that Kapoor could explain the surprising sensuality of American minimalist art with a work we can all see for free in our national museum of modernity illuminates how deeply Tate Modern really has transformed Britain. When people in Britain talk about art today, they mean art as Tate Modern has defined it. So what is art according to this teenaged – and teenager-friendly – museum?

Well, it’s big. Booming crescendos of scale have given Tate Modern its biggest sensations. Its Turbine Hall demanded and created a new Baroque, as artist after artist rose to the challenge of this stupendous interior. Doris Salcedo forced the very ground apart to create an uncanny seismic crack through the building. Olafur Eliasson caused a mythical sun to float spectrally in mirrored glory. Ai Weiwei laid out a sublime carpet of porcelain sunflower seeds. All of this helped not just to make the museum famous but to popularise a new understanding of what art is. Theatre, spectacle, participation: art, it turns out, is stuff that makes us say “wow”.

Scale in itself is meaningless; the underlying message that visitors have taken away from all those big hits in the Turbine Hall is that art is a thrilling game with no rules. Tate Modern has transformed modern art from an elite cult into mass entertainment. Everyone has access to it and feels empowered to enjoy it. The Turbine Hall is art as rock’n’roll – and, incidentally, a superb venue for actual pop concerts, as Kraftwerk demonstrated in their rapidly sold-out gigs in 2013.

Yet the museum’s problem has always been how to reconcile that sexy populism with the older Enlightenment idea of the museum as a place to learn. I always feel uneasy taking my child there. What is she learning? For I myself still can’t love Tate Modern in the way I expected to when I visited before it opened and pictured it as a terribly austere factory of serious modern art. Why are the permanent collection galleries still so aggressively anti-chronological?

It dulls and dims the excitement of modern art to refuse to see it in history. Take a room that has been the same for years and that I visited again the other day. It juxtaposes a painting by Giorgio de Chirico of an eerie civic space where a train puffs past and a pile of yellow bananas lies enigmatically next to a marble torso with a work by Iannis Kounellis that, featuring as it does a real impaled bird, tends to get more attention. Taken out of time the De Chirico loses all meaning. For the thrill of this troubling image is that it was created in 1913: it is one of the very first shocks of the new. It is incredible that someone saw like this more than a century ago. Why not make that clearer? You can’t claim people don’t want to be educated. The British Museum has outdone Tate Modern in British visitor numbers with a far more intellectual approach. Fifteen is a good age to get down to some proper studying.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The Parakeet and the Mermaid’ at Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs exhibition, Tate Modern. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex

In compensation for its refusal to historicise in its free galleries, Tate Modern has always put on great charging exhibitions – from Matisse Picasso in 2002 to Matisse’s Cut Outs last year – that do the justice to the modern masters that it refuses in its collection displays. And for all my gripes, many of my most intense experiences of art happen here. This is a museum that can totally take you aback. Seeing its current exhibition of the dark and disturbing painter Marlene Dumas is not like being in a museum, it’s like being in someone’s nightmares. Once again, a crack opens in the art gallery that leads to who knows where. When Tate Modern rocks, it can rock your world – not tell of the shock of the new, but deliver it.

I once asked Robert Hughes, author and presenter of the TV series The Shock of the New, which brought modern art into British homes in the dark days before Tate Modern existed, what he thought of this place. I expected a stern critical diatribe. He told me he loved it.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/10/tate-modern-at-15-shock-of-the-new-art

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www.fulgorart.it

Marina Abramovic selects 12 Australian artists for Kaldor project residence

Marina Abramovic selects 12 Australian artists for Kaldor project residence

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/marina-abramovic-selects-12-australian-artists-for-kaldor-project-residence-20150503-1mx055.html#ixzz3aJtjjdSPMarina Abramovic selects 12 Australian artists for Kaldor project residence
Marina Abramovic selects 12 Australian artists for Kaldor project residence

Sydney artists Frances Barrett (left) and George Khut have been selected by Marina Abramovic to participate in her in residence program when her exhibition opens at Pier 2/3 in June, curated by Emma Pike (centre). Photo: Dallas Kilponen

In the past, Sydney artist George (Poonkhin) Khut has made art you can control with your heartbeat and with your breath – with a little help from acclaimed performance artist Marina Abramovic, he will next make art you can control with your brain.

Khut is one of 12 Australian artists that Abramovic has selected for an 11-day live-in residency on the top floor of Pier 2/3 this winter, part of the New York artist's major takeover of the venue for the 30th Kaldor Public Art Project, a project set to be bigger than Kaldor's previous 13 Rooms.

While visitors to Marina Abramovic: In Residence move through various meditative 'Abramovic' experiences (silently, having checked their mobile phones in at entry), the artists upstairs will hold workshops, talks and develop their projects. They will also work privately with Abramovic every morning in their home and work space, which will be designed by Harry Seidler &Associates.

In an extension of Khut's exploration of 'biofeedback' – he worked with Westmead Children's Hospital on an app that wirelessly sensed heart rates and rewarded restfulness with bright colours and sounds – he will use his time to develop a project that utilises brainwaves.

"People will wear brainwave sensors that measure alpha brainwaves," says Khut, a lecturer at UNSW Art and Design (formerly COFA). So equipped, they will lie on beds fitted with large motors and speakers. "The brainwaves get stronger the calmer you are – the more open and present you are, the more sound and vibrations you will hear and feel."

"It's how the immaterial conscious state becomes tangible."

The interest in being present, in restfulness and openness, is something that resonates with Abramovic's own art – after confrontational early works (in one she invited the audience to whip and harm her), the artist has more recently focused on performance that less violently blurs the line between artist and audience, and on fully experiencing the present moment. In 2010 Abramovic famously sat at a table in New York's Museum of Modern Art and invited visitors to sit opposite her in silence.

Kaldor Public Art Projects (KPAP) director John Kaldor says the chance to be mentored by Abramovic will have "an immediate impact on the artists involved as well as a lasting legacy for the wider Australian arts industry".

KPAP curator Emma Pike worked with Sophie O'Brien (who curated Abramovic's 512 Hours exhibition in London in 2014) on selecting 65 candidates for the residency positions; Abramovic then whittled them down to the final 12. They include performance artist Frances Barrett, artist and writer Sarah Jane Norman, medium-blending artist Sarah Rodigari and Zin – artists Harriet Gillies and Roslyn Helper – all from Sydney. Acclaimed London-based Australian photographic and performance artist Christian Thompson is also among the group, along with Melbourne artists Nat Abbott and Nicola Gunn.

Performance artist Gunn, who is working on a show called Piece for Person and Ghetto Blaster, at Sydney's Performance Space in November (it will later tour to Melbourne and other state capitals) says she hopes Abramovic can help her create conflict on stage, and figure out how to use the audience to resolve it. "She creates situations in her work where there is a lot of conflict and resistance," says Gunn. "They transform into quite profound and ritualistic experiences."

Pike says the artists come from a number of disciplines – from dance to theatre and visual art – representing the "melting pot" that is 'performance art' today. And for those who find the words 'performance art' daunting she says the key is to relax.

"I think that question, 'What if I don't get it?' is the problem," says Pike. "The expectation of having an answer to something every time we go to a show is not the right approach. Go, spend time, don't try to solve the problem while you're there. Let it dilute over time. It might be several months before you see the poignancy."

Marina Abramovic: In Residence is at Pier 2/3, Walsh Bay, June 24-July 5. Entry is free and restricted to ages 12 and up.

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/marina-abramovic-selects-12-australian-artists-for-kaldor-project-residence-20150503-1mx055.html

www.giacobbegiusti.com

News

Exhibition of legendary Zaha Hadid in Hermitage

IN PICS: Goldsmiths’ Fair 2015 preview event

Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room Comes to New York

Tate Modern at 15: still delivering the shock of the new

Marina Abramovic selects 12 Australian artists for Kaldor project residence