Instagram Artist in Residence 2018 Announced!

Tuesday, September 4, 2018 – 15:45We are pleased to announce Clementine Edwards as our Instagram artist in residence for September 2018. Ponies, Sand, Ponies! Known as the international centre for judicial process and its associated organisations, The Hague is also home to a population of semi-feral ‘ponies’. The Konik horses live and graze in the sand dunes of Meijendel, part of a 2000-hectare nature reserve within walking distance of the city centre. The reserve is controlled by a public Dutch water company that uses the dunes to filter, purify and store water that it then sells to the public. Hence, conservation goes hand in hand with capitalist gain. But when the dunes were choked by invasive flora in the nineties, jeopardising industry, Dunea introduced Koniks to graze the grasses and re-establish it as a bio-diverse site for insects, birds and lizards. The dunes returned to health and these feral little horses became a staple of the local ecosystem. Although they make up less than 0.5% of the Netherlands’ land surface, The Hague’s sand dunes account for around 50% of the Netherlands’ biodiversity.  Over the coming weeks, artist Clementine Edwards will be researching the Koniks, taking feminist anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of contamination as collaboration as a starting point. Throughout the takeover, Edwards will intersperse on-site and archival images with half-feral artworks made of material sourced from the Meijendel dunes to visually articulate the unfolding research. Follow the project via Arts Catalyst’s Instagram account!#poniessandponies ABOUT THE ARTIST Clementine Edwards was born in Melbourne, lives in Rotterdam, and recently graduated from the Dutch Art Institute. She is currently developing the idea of ‘material as kin’, which emerges from her research into the material traces of social experience. This thinking expands on her work around complicating the post-traumatic state, which was the basis for her MFA thesis. With its roots in gold and silversmithing, Clementine’s practice speaks of the messy, bodily intersection between craft, language and trauma. It materialises, memorialises and extends interpersonal interactions – the personal counters the violence of abstraction – and in so doing asks to be seen as a window onto the some of the structural realities of social organisation. clementineedwards.com Image: courtesy the artist

in Publications

Raging fire tears through Rio de Janeiro's treasured National Museum

A massive fire ripped through Rio de Janeiro’s treasured National Museum, one of Brazil’s oldest, in what the nation’s president says is a “tragic” loss of knowledge and heritage. Even before the embers had begun to cool early Monday, grief over the huge cultural loss had given way to anger at across-the-board budget cuts threatening Brazil’s multi-cultural heritage. The museum’s destruction caused a social media outcry and students and researchers gathered to demonstrate outside its still-smoldering remains. “It’s not enough just to cry, it is necessary that the federal government, which has resources, helps the museum to reconstruct its history,” the museum’s director Alexandre Keller said in front of the devastated building. The fire, the cause of which remains unknown, broke out late Sunday at around 2230 GMT.

in Publications

One of the world's rarest Chinese paintings to lead Christie's sale in Hong Kong

Christie’s will offer one of the world’s rarest Chinese paintings by Su Shi (1037-1101) – the pre-eminent scholar of the Song Dynasty and one of the most important figures in Chinese history. The painting, Wood and Rock, will lead Christie’s Hong Kong Autumn Sale 2018. This is an ink-on-paper scroll which depicts withered tree branches standing dignified alongside a curiously-shaped rock, resembling, as one renowned critic put it, giant creatures and dragons appearing and disappearing from stormy seas. An esteemed scholar, writer, poet, painter, calligrapher and statesman, Su Shi was unparalleled amongst the Song literati. His artistic accomplishments, coupled with his repeated exiles in later life, made him one of the best-known literary and political figures in Chinese history. Given the preeminence of the artist and the extreme rarity of his paintings, Wood and Rock is set to become one of the most important

in Publications

Isobel Currie: From Conception to Creation

Isobel Currie’s love of thread and fine work was nurtured by her mother and developed in her studies at Manchester Polytechnic, now Manchester Metropolitan University. She creates breathtakingly intricate work using simple, traditional hand stitches, which she puts her own twist on by exploring their three-dimensional potential.

In this article, which is part of our From Conception to Creation series, Isobel discusses the creation of Fly Stitch Autumn Landscape, a piece that has been exhibited by the famous 62 group of textile artists, of which the artist is a keen and active member.

Name of piece: Fly Stitch Autumn Landscape

Year of Piece: 2017

in Publications

Retrospective is the first exhibition devoted to Balthus by a Swiss museum in a decade

With its Balthus exhibition, the Fondation Beyeler presents one of the last great masters of twentieth-century art, and also one of modern art’s most singular and controversial exponents. This extensive presentation, which has been in planning since mid-2016, takes as its starting point Balthus’ key work Passage du Commerce – Saint – André (1952–1954), which has been on permanent loan from a major Swiss private collection to the Fondation Beyeler for many years. With his multifaceted and ambiguous oeuvre, which has prompted both reverence and rejection, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (1908–2001), known as Balthus, pursued an artistic path running distinct from, or even counter to, the currents of modernist avant-gardes and our established notions thereof. On this solitary path, the eccentric painter drew on a number of art historical traditions and predecessors, ranging from Piero della Francesca to Poussin,

in Publications