1989 Part II
Artists: Silvia Amancei & Bogdan Armanu, Nikola Dabić, Frank Lahera O’Callaghan, Music X Habitat X Art (Amelie Jiang, Yaoyue Huang, Scott Lowell Sherman), Hamed Shafie, Maciek Stępniewski, Marta Stražičić, Tea Stražičić & Peter Christenson, Igor Vaganov, Kate Walker, Klara Woźniak, Keoni K. Wright.
Curated by: Ilknur Demirkoparan and Vuslat D. Katsanis
On view: January 28, 2022 – February 13, 2022
Regular Gallery Hours: Fri, Sat, Sun 1pm-5pm
MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is pleased to present part two of 1989, a video screening of shorts by a group of international contemporary artists and collaboratives.
To speak of 1989 is to speak of revolutions. It is to speak of the many ends and many beginnings that carve out multiple centers and peripheries. It is to speak of the absurd and the absolute, the fantastic and the fragmented contours of our contemporary moment. To speak of 1989 is to speak of collapse.
This second installment of 1989 brings the work of established and emerging artists from Romania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia, Poland, Cuba, Suriname, USA, China, Iran, and New Zealand. Their works offer poetic and philosophical reflections on the exhibition theme through a range of experimental video and documentary film, photography, digital animation, music composition, poetry, and performance. Taken together, this screening of shorts highlights postcollapse as a critical framework for contextualizing the contemporary practices of artists from these dynamic regions since 1989.
1989 opens on January 28 and runs until February 13, 2022. MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is located at 2505 SE 11th Ave Suite 233, Portland OR 97202. The total runtime is approximately one hour.
About the artists of 1989, part II:
Nikola Dabić (b 1994, Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is a visual artist working across printmaking, sculpture, installation, and video. Often employing found object, dark humor, and irony, his work reflects on the complexities of home, belonging, identity, and place. Dabić is a graduate of the Academy of Arts of Banja Luka University. He currently lives and works in the Republic of Serbia.
Keoni K. Wright is a Boston-born visual artist and filmmaker who has shed light on the tiny Amazonian nation of Suriname since 2018, often with an experimental lens. His non-linear portrayal of six Afro-Surinamese artists, entitled “ReleaseD,” was nominated for Virginia Tech University’s 2020 Virginia Dares Cinematic Arts Awards for Decolonizing Film and Media.
Silvia Amancei and Bogdan Armanu, also known as SABA, are a Romanian artist couple working in collaboration since 2012. Together, their practice gravitates around the utopian imaginarium, working with concepts like labor/immaterial labor, design/speculation, future/history/ideology, all under the umbrella of critical deconstruction and denouncing the (semio) capitalist society with its social ruptures. They currently live and work in Iasi, Romania.
Igor Vaganov (b. 1959) is a Russian rock journalist, visual artist, filmmaker, radio presenter, organizer, and participant of a number of media and art projects in Russia and abroad. His extensive body of work has been shown widely and garnered critical international acclaim.
Peter Christenson (b. 1979) is a conceptual artist working across emergent and antiquated media, psycho-social sculpture, and immersive installation. He is co-founder of Left of Centre, a guerrilla-marketing firm and artist collective, the catalyst behind the interventionist collaborative Null Set, and Director of the Guest House Cultural Capital Residency scholar program. Christenson’s intermedia practice and creative research continue to be significantly informed by his past experiences working as a social worker and licensed psychotherapist, often examining the complex sociopolitical, psychological, and cultural systems related to identity, place, and community. He lives and works in Seattle, WA, USA.
Marta Stražičić and Tea Stražičić, also known as Schwesternsisters (SwS) is a radical and futuristic duo based in Zagreb, Croatia. Using a variety of digital and mixed technologies, the sisters create immersive videos, visuals, environments.
Maciek Stępniewski is a Warsaw-based audiovisual artist focusing on digital, abstract and generative design, animation and music. He has earned both BA and MA at Polish-Japanese Academy Of Information Technology, new media arts department. His work has been shown in Punto Y Raja, Athens Digital Art Festival, AniFilm, Interference, Patchlab, O!PLA, Animafest, Synthetic Mediart, Cinematika, ROMBAK, ICONA and OFAFA. His albums were released by local netlabels Trzy Szóstki and Nagrania Somnambuliczne.
Klara Woźniak (b 1999 Warsaw, Poland) explores social and political concerns through imagined worlds. Working primarily in computer generated short video form, Woźniak merges the real with the surreal to juxtapose absurdities in the world around us.
Frank Lahera O’Callaghan is an artist based in Santiago, Cuba. His work spanning photography, video, performance, and installations is a practice in pursuit of the social, spiritual questions. Often taking the form of a meditation of a singular idea, his work reflects on the issues of brevity of life within the larger national and international political contexts.
Music X Habitat X Art is a collective founded on the idea of “classical performance as art installation” by Scott Lowell Sherman, Yaoyue Huang, and Amelie Jiang. Sherman and Huang are performing classical pianists based in the US, and Amelie Jiang is an exhibiting photographer and curator based in South China. MxHxA seeks to create new ways to experience contemporary art, classical music, and film, where the need for human connection through collective experience brings a sense of community and belonging.
Kate Walker’s work encompasses painting, performance and videos. Recent projects focus on queer bodies, and utopian and dystopian imaginings in popular culture. Walker has shown her work nationally and internationally including at Performance Arcade 2020, NZ, City Gallery Wellington, NZ. The Suter, Nelson NZ, West Virginia Mountaineer Short Film Festival, WV. Queer Cultural Center, SOMArts, San Francisco, and Abstracta, International Cinema Exhibition, Rome. Walker (USA/ New Zealand) received her MFA from the University of Arizona, 2005 and teaches at Boise State University.
