NOMADS + RESIDENTS
A forum for visitors in the arts: making connections, supporting
networks,
setting up meetings

Nomads & Residents invites you to an evening of presentations by, Nina
Katchadourian, Zlatko Kopljar, Nebojsa Seric - Shoba and Heidie
Giannotti.

Friday, May 23rd, 7 PM

THE WHITEBOX
525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, New York 10001
tel 212-714-2347 / fax 212-714.2354
info@whiteboxny.org

"'Inappropriate' Adjustments"

This session will bring together four artists from two highly
different settings, the US and the Balkans, who are separately working
with their existing social, ethical and natural limits of the world
they take as their own. No matter whether their practice is triggered
by the extremes and by the absurdities of this world, of war, of
hermetic institutionalism, of urban ecology, or of nature and
constructed nature, their work may tell of a certain inappropriate act
of adjusting both the reality and to reality. Thus by uncovering
paradoxes of what is often expected from everyday life, these artists
raise questions about the status of the appropriate act and its
weakness in new and extreme realities. With this session we hope to
further raise issues of the expected and the unexpected role of a work
of art, its relation to the realities that are beyond the ordinary or
average, and the permanence of errors that by their repetition with
duration become experienced as a standard of life.

For the last six years much of New York artist Nina Katchadourian's
work has oriented itself around "nature," as concept, construct, and
site, as a way of looking at our assumptions, needs, cravings,
dependency and resistance associated with this term. In summer/fall of
2002 she exhibited Natural Car Alarms, a traveling sound sculpture
that consists of three cars rigged with modified car alarms whose
typical six-tone siren had been replaced with a similar one made only
of bird calls. The idea for the project was in fact the result of a
misunderstanding - she heard a bird in the jungles of Trinidad that
she mistook for a car alarm - and the project took up the severely
urban car alarm as an element that was in fact completely natural to
the Long Island City landscape where the piece was exhibited several
times in summer and fall of 2002. Her most recent body of work,
exhibited at Debs & Co. gallery in 2003, continues asking questions
about where we place the border between the natural and the unnatural.
Crossdressing becomes a vehicle by which to explore both gender and
our desire for things to stay within their prescribed categories. In
Animal Crossdressing she constructed costumes to turn a rat into a
snake and a snake into a rat where predator and prey are transformed
into their opposites. In Katchadourian's video Endurance a 10-minute
film of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to the South Pole on the
ship Endurance is projected minutely onto her front tooth as she tries
to smile for as long as possible without losing composure. This work
is a response to both the fascination with adventure/survival stories
and to the more masochistic strains of the performance art tradition.

Zlatko Kopljar from Zagreb (Croatia), currently in-residence at
Franklin Furnace and performing at the Kitchen on May 21, and Nebojsa
Seric - Shoba from Sarajevo (Bosnia) who will be representing Bosnia
and Herzegovina at the coming Biennial in Venice both experience
absurd moments in reality as something that comes to be seen as
normal. Both of them deal with something that can best be described as
radical 'biting' be it in a gallery or in an urban space. War and
uncertainty may be the context for their work, however, not
necessarily the sole character of their concepts. They are rather
questioning the appropriateness of working as an artist in an expected
way within the situation that is extreme. Different in response, their
work is often triggered by the unexpected twists of the meanings of
personal acts in such realities, and proposes sets of inversions,
adjustments of how this reality can be understood.
Kopljar's installations propose heavy fundamental questioning and
physically destructive work. His recent work K4 was made as an attack
aimed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, a protest against
the general situation of institutions in Croatia. The work consisted
of a heavy and huge concrete block cast according to the dimensions of
the museum's entry. This block was placed in front of the museum
blocking the entrance for the period of one week. In spite of its
radicality in changing the use of the museum and the roughness and
brutality of its appearance, this work is not aimed at individual
museum visitors but at the institutional structure. The goal of this
piece was to work towards opening discussion about the current state
of open processes and open societies.
On the other hand Shoba's work is a lighthearted but existential
questioning of the icons of the communist era and recent history. His
Remote Control, for example, reduces a complex schema in reality such
as war, religion and happiness to commands on a remote control.
Creative Time of New York selected his work in the form of poster
design among the applicants from the visual, literary, architectural,
and graphic arts for their project entitled: Time to Consider: The
Arts Response to 9.11. This and other projects are taking to task the
manipulation of our collective experience by the media, and to our
[lack] of resistance in adjusting to it.

Heidie Giannotti is an artist living in New York City. Instead of the
narrative description for this Nomads + Residents event on
inappropriate adjustments of reality, she offers the following:
"Appropriate appropriation, prop, assembler, chance, ready-made
instructions, dislocated temporal events & fugitive elements, thought
is sought. PLUS: you know my style - I'd say anything to make you
smile."

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About Nomads + Residents:

Big cities are in a continuous flux, with a coming and going of people
who settle in, stay temporarily or move through. Newcomers enter this
flux, become part of the life of the city, and make connections with
others. The city, as a space, contains possibilities through the
dynamic Relationships between people, which may provoke an active
engagement. Strangers become friends, ideas become practice, and
models are being transformed into action.

The curatorial and organizing group of NOMADS & RESIDENTS consists of
New York based and temporary residents. They actively seek out
information about who is visiting New York and when, they invite
guests to present his/her ideas and solicit the involvement of spaces
where these presentations can take place. They welcome advice, ideas
and the enthusiastic support of others. The events will be partly
informal and casual, and will focus on exchanging ideas, initiating
new projects and networks. They will also include short presentations,
lectures, talks, sideshows, small exhibitions, performances,
discussions. Priority will be given to proposals that could become
projects that will be shared among the participants, to a practice can
make resources and ideas available for common use.

Liesbeth Bik (artist, The Netherlands)
Katherine Carl (curator/writer, New York)
Heather Felty (curator, New York)
Grady Gerbracht (artist/organizer, New York)
Kira Harris (artist, NY)
Gordon Knox (New York based initiator and organizer)
Peter Lasch (artist, New York)
John Menick (artist/writer, New York)
Phill Niblock (artist, New York)
Cesare Pietroiusti (artist, Italy)
Jos van der Pol (artist, the Netherlands)
Catherine Ruello (curator/organizer, New York)
Shelly Silver (artist, New York)
Wolfgang Staehle (artist, New York)
Valerie Tevere (artist, New York)
Liselot van der Heijden (artist, New York)
Monika Weiss (artist, New York)
Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss (architect, New York)

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NOMADS & RESIDENTS originated in New York, yet also bases its
activities on the coming and going of people who settle in, stay
temporarily or move through cities such as Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and
Amsterdam.
To read more about n+r and browse through our archive of events please
visit our web site at http://www.nomadsresidents.org.
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For program suggestions, contact us via email at:
New York: info@nomadsresidents.org
Los Angeles: nr_la@hotmail.com
Rotterdam/Amsterdam: nomadsresidents@earthlink.net