Reading Group 07.08.02 -- Discussion with Pia Lindman & Lasse Lau

Contents:
1. About this Monday
2. Short description of Pia's project
3. Short description of Lasse's projects

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1. About this Monday

when: Monday at 7:00 pm
where: 16 beaver street.
See end of this mail for location details

ARTIST PRESENTATIONS + DISCUSSION w/ Pia Lindman and Lasse Lau

Today, we will have two artists presenting and discussing their work. Pia
is a Finnish artists most recently based in New York. Lasse is a Danish artist
based in Berlin. Both artists have worked on projects implicating and questioning the use of public space and a "Public Art".

All are welcome to attend, please look below for more information on each artist.

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2. Pia Lindman

Ugoku Sento
Mobile Traditional Japanese Bath
Ambulated in Kyojima, Sumida-Ku, Tokyo and Toride, Japan
10.11-17.12 2000
Special thanks to Akira Fujita and the operators:
Ryuta Iwase, Jun Miura, Taku Nagamura, Taku Saeki, and Junji Uchida

The Finnish Sauna and the Japanese hot bath, the Ofuro, share a similar history. They are both spaces of a public discourse involving the corporeal, the everyday and the political. After the II WW, this communality has been lost to private saunas or baths in homes. To highlight questions of privacy and isolation versus publicity and communality in Japan, I transformed a one person bath tub into a mobile one and inserted it into the public sphere. The operators of the Ugoku Sento halt the vehicle and unfold its structure to form an ante-room, where the bather may wash up before stepping into the bath tub. On the flags is written "Ugoku Sento" and the symbol is a redesign by the artist of the traditional symbol for "hot bath". The operators collect the bathing water from neighbors, carrying it into the tub in buckets. Neighbors and passers by are invited to bathe. When someone does indeed bathe, the Ugoku Sento collapses the public and the private into a minimal space, in which the water is the catalyst for communication.

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3. Lasse Lau

I will talk about two projects.:

1. CUDI CUDI - Centre for Urban culture, Dialogue and Information, established together with the artist Lise Skou in an apartment in the suburb Vollsmose 2000. Vollsmose is the outskirt of the city Odense in Denmark and the majority of population in this suburban area have a non-Danish background. The apartment was our private home and a platform for inhabitants and visiting artist for social gathering, dialogue, critical thinking and generation of new ideas, that was realized and exposed in the area. The project was established as an reaction to the medias representation of a reality, criminalizing people with a non-Danish ethnic background. And further more the project was in reaction to authorities explicit way to marginalize people in general.

http://www.cudi.dk

2. PARK - Privacy could only be had in public In the winter of 2000 members of the city council in Copenhagen ordered bushes removed from H.C. Oerstedsparken, a centrally located park in Copenhagen. The reason they removed the bushes was to prevent gay people for having sex in the park. In the summer of 2001 I therefore made an "exhibition" in the park where the idea was to create a counter public-space, and in the same time to criticize the city for sterilizing and commercializing public spaces. Furthermore to criticize Copenhagen's gay associations for not responding to this visible and apparent attack on gay rights.