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Carla Hyland joins the DK Arts team
July 27, 2007

A warm welcome to Carla Hyland who joins the ever expanding David Krut team! Based in Cape Town she will be assisting Alastair Whitton, manager of David Krut Publishing: Fine Art and Books, which opened in January at the Montebello Design Centre in Newlands. Response to the Cape Town project space and booksore has been very favourable and Carla’s primary role will involve building on the marketing and promotion of DKARTS in Cape Town.

Having studied for a Diploma in Electronic Publishing, Carla went on to work in areas as diverse as multimedia programming, DTP and TV post production. Currently she represents her photographer husband, Damon Hyland and says of DK Arts, “This is a great opportunity for me to explore my, seemingly unusual, blend of organisational and creative interests and I look forward to contributing towards the growth of DK Arts in Cape Town.”

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Jasmine Zimmerman at CitySol 2007
July 25, 2007

Photo by George Hirose

The weekend of July 13th saw the congregation of thousands of arts, music and clean energy enthusiasts along Manhattan’s East River. The festival was organized by Jenn Su, of Solar One, a “green energy, arts and education center,” located in Stuyvesant Cove Park, between 18th and 23rd streets. The event featured a solar and bio-diesel powered sound stage, fourteen art installations, and incentives to switch standard energy bills to wind power. Amongst the artists was Jasmine Zimmerman, currently featured at David Krut Projects New York, in the summer exhibition “HOMEGROWN” curated by Renee Riccardo. Passersby noticed something that looked like a sparkling igloo, and on closer inspection found what Jasmine calls the “Bottle House”— a dome structure made from discarded plastic water bottles. I was able to ask her some questions about her piece:

Kerry O’Connor: How did you hear about CitySol?
Jasmine Zimmerman: I was invited by one of the curators, Jenn Su, when I met her at one of my public participatory installations in Brooklyn in May.

KO: Is it fair to say you used thousands of bottles?
JZ: I definitely used THOUSANDS of bottles.

KO: What were some of the things you learned about bottled water usage?
JZ: This project was very educational: We spend more each year on bottled water than iPods. Aquafina and Dasani (Coke and Pepsi) are municipal water, but over 4,000 times the price of municipal water being in the bottle. The national average recycling rate is only 15%. Of that, only 4% of PET plastic (plastic bottles), are recycled into plastic bottles. Most of it is exported to Asia or recycled domestically into synthetic products (fabrics, etc.)
Municipal water is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, with much tighter constraints than the US Food and Drug Administration’s governing of bottled water.
The mayor of San Fransisco just banned plastic bottled water (LINK)…Yay!

KO: Anything else? More bottle houses planned?
This is a project that I would like to take around the world to raise awareness and educate people on how they can use alternative materials. In particular, third world countries with no recycling facilities, but thousands of tourists who pollute the beaches with plastic bottles. It would require a government agency sponsorship. In Rio de Janeiro someone is living in a floating house made of recycled plastic bottles that will be used as a recycling model in a government anti-pollution campaign.

Stay tuned to www.jasminezimmerman.com for more details on upcoming projects. Hopefully we will see more from her soon as her project is both beautiful and relevant in highlighting the bottled water problem. It is a somewhat heroic piece; pitting itself against what is seemingly one of humanity’s most absurd sources of trash to date.

Following are pictures from Citysol 2007, July 12th - 15th:

Solar One
Citysol
More Pictures
Other Highlights from the Festival:

Edward Morris poses with his piece Albedo Cloud. Quoting from the
Citysol Festival website, “The Albedo Cloud is part of an ongoing
collaboration with fashion designer Jussara Lee and Orlando Palacios.
The Albedo Cloud is a site-specific installation, made here as one
cloud consisting of 550 white shirts. – Why 550 shirts? Because the
European Union is seeking to get on top of rising carbon emissions by
setting a stabilization target of 550 carbon parts per million (ppm)
in the atmosphere.”

Edward Morris also helped to co-found The Canary Project, a group
documenting climate change around the world.

Citysol

Canary Project

Old Goat Karts is a project created by “The 62″, a Brooklyn based arts collective. Their carts were handcrafted electric go carts, each with their own ingenious quirks. They were found zooming in and amongst the crowd throughout the weekend. www.the62.org *floating raft picture* Natalie Jeremijenko runs the New York University Environmental Health Clinic and pictured here is a project from the clinic, a mobile office. The raft is buoyed by old soda bottles and is seen here tethered in the East River.

www.the62.org

Natalie Jeremijenko runs the New York University Environmental Health Clinic and pictured here is a project from the clinic, a mobile office. The raft is buoyed by old soda bottles and is seen here tethered in the East River.
Good Magazine

Salon.com

–Kerry O’Conner. Kerry is an artist living and working in New York City.

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New Editions by William Kentridge
July 20, 2007

mal d'afrika

William Kentridge recently completed a new suite of five prints titled “L’ Inesorabile Avanzata” with printer Jill Ross at David Krut Print Workshop, Johannesburg. These works were commissioned by the Olivetti Foundation and will be published over five consecutive weeks in the Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore.

Massacre of the Innocents opens the series with a study of Giotto’s anguished mothers from the Arena Chapel Massacre of the Innocents fresco. This print and the second and fourth works in the series use an appropriated newspaper format, fragmented to suggest images and text columns interspersed with snippets of imagery. In Newspaper Unread, Kentridge draws his own eye staring out at us, as a witness and chronicler of the events unfolding around him. Cameos of his own gasmask and sextants, and quotations from Picasso’s weeping women are cropped and scattered throughout the implied blocks of text. The central work in the series, Mal d’Afrika, is a foreboding augury, a gasmask on pylon legs with a desolate gaze behind his goggles and a wizened, old elephant’s eye that pricks our consciences. Kentridge draws comparisons between the atrocities committed in the Italian Fascist invasion of Ethiopia 1935/1936, the inaction of the League of Nations at the time, and our own observance of the genocide currently taking place in Darfur. The series closes with The World, a weary metamorphosis of the gasmask into Atlas carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, a classic Kentridge image of a burdened figure in profile, rickety legs striding across the landscape.

-Kate McCrickard, March 2007

L Inesorabile Avanzata // Suite of 5 Etchings 2007
Sugarlift, aquatint, drypoint and engravin 22 x 15.4″
Edition of 50

Also Available:

Self Portrait, State V
2007
Etching and Drypoint
16 x 14″
Edition of 8

Still Life
2007
Etching and Drypoint
22.5 x 23″
20 with hand-coloring
Edition of 40
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William Kentridge Flute

kentridge_flute_pr

David Krut Publishing Johannesburg is pleased to announce the forhtcoming publication of William Kentridge Flute.

In September 2007 William Kentridge’s production of The Magic Flute will finally premiere in South Africa after an extensive international tour – the production opened at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2005, went on to venues in France, Italy and Israel, and premiered in New York in April 2007.

The performances in South Africa will be the culmination of a remarkable artistic journey that has included the creation of the opera, an outpouring of drawings and prints on themes related to the production, and the completion of a seminal project – commissioned by Deutsche Guggenheim – called Black Box/Chambre Noire, that was unveiled in Berlin in 2006 before moving to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. To record this creative process, David Krut Publishing and William Kentridge have collaborated to create William Kentridge Flute.

Kentridge joins the ranks of a select group of artists, including Oskar Kokoschka and David Hockney, who have interpreted the powerful themes of The Magic Flute. In preparation for this major commission, Kentridge produced drawings and prints that explore Egyptian myths, baroque theatre machinery and Masonic themes in search of his own operatic vocabulary. The central metaphor of darkness and light, exemplified in the struggle between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, finds expression in the motif of the camera, an image that resurfaces as the menacing ‘eye’ of colonialism in Black Box. In this production, Kentridge studies the underbelly of Enlightenment ideals through a searing treatment of the German colonisation of South West Africa (now Namibia) that resulted in the massacre of the Herero people.

William Kentridge Flute includes commentary by Kentridge, interview with the artist, essays by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, Stéphane Roussel and Kate McCrickard, gorgeous full-colour photographs of the productions, pages from Kentridge’s preparatory notebooks and images of the many prints and drawings executed in the last several years while Kentridge was working on these two theatrical productions. The book will be launched to coincide with the South African premieres of The Magic Flute in Cape Town on 8 September and Johannesburg on 29 September.

William Kentridge: Flute
Edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen
2007
softcover
full colour
230 x 210 mm
220 pages
ISBN: 978 09584975 4 1

2007
hardcover
full colour
230 x 210 mm
208 pages
ISBN: 978 09584975 6 5
Contact us for book release date and ordering information.

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William Kentridge Prints at MoMA
June 26, 2007

In 1998, David Krut arranged the first exhibition of William Kentridge’s prints in the USA in Chicago. Previously there had been an exhibition of his films and related drawings at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. The Chicago exhibition comprised all the editions that Krut had published with Kentridge since the start of their collaboration in 1993 as well as other Kentridge works that Krut was promoting and seeking to bring to the attention of an international audience. The Print Department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York made their first purchase being the “Ubu and the Truth Commission”, and Krut introduced the work to various other Museums in the mid-west. MoMA’s print department has continued to acquire prints by Kentridge and now include some key editioned works in their collection.
These works are featured in a current show at MoMA curated by Judith Hecker, the Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum. Hecker is frequently in contact with David Krut Projects, New York and has also visited our printmaking workshop and gallery in Johannesburg where we continue to publish prints by Kentridge. Hecker has shown interest not only in Kentridge’s work but also in the work of many other South African artists with whom we collaborate and whose works we have published. Jillian Ross is the workshop manager and senior printer.
From the MoMA website:

This exhibition examines how artists from the late nineteenth century to today have explored contemporary concerns by challenging, redeeming, or personalizing historical subjects. Many of the works take a narrative approach, referring to events in history, ancient mythology, the Bible, or centuries-old fables. Traditionally, artists have used printmaking’s serial format to build such narratives; more recently, artists have exploited printmaking’s ability to easily reproduce and alter existing images to interject their own commentary. This selection of works includes key print cycles and individual prints from earlier periods by Max Beckmann, James Ensor, Pablo Picasso, and others, as well as contemporary prints by such artists as Christian Boltanski, Anselm Kiefer, and William Kentridge. The installation culminates in a gallery devoted to Kara Walker’s monumental series of prints Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005), which confronts the legacy of slavery and is a new addition to the Museum’s collection.
Organized by Judith B. Hecker, Assistant Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books.

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El Anatsui in Venice

Nigerian artist, El Anatsui, had 2 of his metal cloths featured at the 2007 Venice Biennale.
New York Times Article
anatsui_venice

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New York Times Article On William Kentridge’s Magic Flute
April 11, 2007

Artist’s Video Adds Magic to ‘Flute’

A scene from William Kentridge’s production of “The Magic Flute,” opening today at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

By ANNE MIDGETTE

For full article published April 9, 2007 go to http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/arts/music/09flut.html


Picasso’s flashlight draws a centaur in the air, Matisse’s brush hovers over the paper before committing itself to the first stroke, Jackson Pollock pours arcs of thick paint: all famous examples of the artist’s hand caught on film in the act of creation, in a particular kind of theater.

And exactly this theatricality is the hallmark of William Kentridge, the South African artist who at nearly 52 is an unlikely star of the international art scene. Mr. Kentridge’s medium is charcoal: he draws an image, photographs it, erases and redraws it many times to create evocative video animations that at once tell stories and convey the narrative of the act of drawing.

From here to live theater is a small step, one Mr. Kentridge has now attempted on his largest scale yet. After a series of puppet operas (including a moving adaptation of Monteverdi’s “Ritorno d’Ulisse,” seen in New York in 2004) he undertook in 2005 a full production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” for La Monnaie, the Royal Opera House in Belgium. That production opens tonight at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The result is an exuberant dialogue between drawing and music, a three-dimensional work of art with video projected across and around the human figures onstage. Sometimes the animations echo the characters’ thoughts; mathematical diagrams stand in for the teachings of Sarastro and his priests. Sometimes they reflect the music, with white lines reaching upward during a chorus, like fireworks. Sometimes they form antic glosses, suddenly coalescing into birds, a lion, a dancing rhinoceros.

Avant-garde? Not a bit. What makes Mr. Kentridge unlikely in the art world is his down-to-earth accessibility. His best-known video works, like “History of the Main Complaint” (involving two recurring characters, Soho Eckstein and Felix Teitlebaum, navigating post-apartheid South Africa), are at once quirkily idiosyncratic and easy to grasp.

Mr. Kentridge’s “Magic Flute” is based on the metaphor of the early camera, using the palette of a film negative, white on black, to reflect the opera’s shifting presentation of good and evil.

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Celebrating a visit from DKW’s printmaker Jill Ross and New Editions by William Kentridge

On Saturday, March 24, 2007, close friends of David Krut Projects gathered at the gallery to view new editions by William Kentridge and to celebrate the arrival of David Krut Workshop’s head printmaker, Jill Ross. This delectable evening of warm conversation and tasty India food was thoroughly enjoyed by all.

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Debunking the Jo’burg Art Scene: Avant Car Guard at David Krut Projects
April 5, 2007

Avant Car Guard appears to be proclaiming its position as the pirate of the Jo’burg art scene. Zander Blom, Jan-Henri Booyens & Michael MacGarry form the trio that staged an event at David Krut Projects this weekend. Instead of pirating goods, however, the trio are more interested in stealing the viewer’s attention in order to challenge perceptions about what it means to be an artist in South Africa.

The event was advertised as the launch of Avant Car Guard’s new album, which is a publication of photographs of their previous staged antics. The trio was present to sign the publication. The scenario, however, was quite dissimilar to any other book signing in that the artists were emerging from three holes in a makeshift pirate shipwreck. The ship was plastered with Avant Car Guard signage, a home-made skull and crossbones flag rising out of it and a chaotic pile of publications spread out in front of it. Although this and the smoke machine made the atmosphere quite melodramatic there was nothing theatrical about the artists’ demeanour. They were drinking beer, smoking and making polite conversation with those curious and even brave enough to approach them.

Avant Car Guard is not only pushing the boundaries of conceptual art in South Africa, but also demystifying the notion of the renowned and established South African artist. They achieve this by enacting satirical scenarios of their own derisive and uncertain fame and ultimately baffling others into believing it and eventually questioning it.

The newly opened David Krut Projects was the perfect venue for such an event. People poured out onto the pavement and engaged in animated discussion and debate. The space, tucked in between a sex shop and a now-defunct curry den, looks out onto Jan Smuts Avenue, on a block that is fast becoming the new Jo’burg gallery strip.. This is the perfect setting to be exposed to the contemporary Jo’burg art scene and to simultaneously question and debunk it.  -Lara

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David Krut Publishing Hosts LIGHT ON A HILL Book Launch in Cape Town

The Cape Town launch of Light on a Hill: Building the Constitutional Court of South Africa revealed that there is widespread fascination with the spectacular architecture of the Court. This fascination has been both solidified and stimulated by the book, edited by Bronwyn Law-Viljoen, in which the process of building the Constitutional Court is revealed through the remarkable photography of Angela Buckland. The book provides South Africans and foreigners, who have not yet visited the site, access to the provocative reconstruction and striking beauty of the Court.

Light on a Hill was recently launched and celebrated at three separate venues in Cape Town. The first event was held at Kalk Bay Books and was followed in the next two days with launches at David Krut Publishing (DKP): Fine Art & Books in the Montebello Design Centre and the SA Jewish Museum. All three events were well attended by a varied South African and international audience.

The launch at DKP: Fine Art & Books in the Montebello Design Centre was the first event held by DKP in Cape Town at this venue. It was a great start with an excellent response to the book and a number of other happenings on the go. These happenings included the first Cape Town screening of a documentary film on the Court and a discussion on William Kentridge’s new editions, which are currently on display and for sale at the DKP bookstore at Montebello. The documentary was screened in the old forge, where the audience were surrounded by steel sculptures which created a highly evocative atmosphere.

Light on a Hill is available from David Krut Publishing in Johannesburg, Cape Town and New York.  -Cara

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