ARTLAND

Some spring-photos to celebrate Easter and the come-back of sunshine!

If you happen to be in Baltimore soon, don’t miss the Kinetic Sculpture Race.

Every year the amazing American Visionary Art Museum's arranges this parade. The self-made vehicles and their entourage moves though the streets, on the water and into mud. Imaginative, inventive, intensive. Workshops are arranged on the museum in beforehand for those who would like help in construction. The winning vehicle is not the first one over the finishing line, but the one which arrives somewhere in the middle. This year it is on May 3^rd.

I share one photo from my visit last year. If you are in Baltimore, don’t miss the museum, it is a one-of-a-kind-museum of visionary art.  You bring it with you in mind and thought for a long time.

The architect of Kunsthalle Rostock travelled to Louisiana to get inspiration in the sixties.  The city art gallery of Rostock was built in the end of 1960 in a park, almost like the museum of Modern Art in Denmark, but by a lake instead of the sea.

It was the first modern contemporary art gallery in DDR and it opened with grand ideas of an international program under the motto “Tor zur Welt”. The large windows with a view to the park, a beautiful inner courtyard and spacious rooms in several floors creates the impression of a little sister to Louisiana. Their collection hosts paintings, sculpture and graphic art, a lot from the DDR-times, but it also spans back from 1920 and forth.

The Baltic Sea-Biennial (Ostsee/Mare Balticum) was created here in the 80ties and 90ties, and now our co-operation within Art Line will awaken the idea of art in the Baltic region again, despite the tough economic times.

Here are some photos from Art Line meetings in Rostock Kunsthalle. On the photos are project coordinator Kristina Koebe, director Uwe Neumann, curator Ulrich Ptak, curator Agnieszka Wolodzko from CCA Laznia, curator Martin Schibli from Kalmar Konstmuseum and Art Line crew Annika Thelin and Aje Björkman.

A cardboard with a few holes was tied to a tree-trunk in the centre of Rostock. When getting closer I discovered that there was paper tied to many trees. When coming even closer one could see a hand-written text saying “Hilfe!”, as if a note from the trees themselves. When almost tipping over the small valley one could see their friends, already sawn off.

Here’s a photo of an important machine.

When using it a wonderful smells spreads in the neighbourhood. Not many have the strength to resist.

Since the spring is reluctant, we have to rely on this machine.

Can you guess what it does?

With it you bake the cones, awaiting to be filled with Italian ice-cream…

The blue anemones are in bloom under the giant oak-tree but hardly visible in the thick fog of today.

When in Poland the last two times I met sunshine and warmth and I expect Germany to salute the spring when it’s time to take the ferry over this week.

In a performative art project taking place at the City Gallery of Gdansk, the artist Iwona Zajac is letting young students transform her. Every third day she also invites an artist to create an installation on one wall of the gallery, in dialogue with her project.

The Ideal Lab is a project Iwona Zajac has been working on since 2008. This time it’s students working in her studio at the Gdansk shipyard, “The Young Crew”, who re-make, re-create and change Zajac into an ideal woman. Or, try out different ideals for women, ideals flooding over media.

In what seems like a never-ending make-over-mania in magazines and TV, you need to change to become a person of significance. The message is easy to understand. I thought it was an April fools' joke when I read that a handbook “All you need to know about surgical operations” was published in Sweden. Such an everyday title. Could have been “All your need to know about Italian cooking” or “All you need to know about travelling in Spain”.

I come to think about the video “Doll-clothes” from 1975 where Cindy Sherman dresses herself up in different clothes, in a paper cut-out-doll-manner. She gets out of her flat plastic pocket in an album and realizes, like Eva, that she is naked.  After picking a dress she dances around on a chest of drawers, when large hands seize her and put her back into the album again. Watch technique from the beginning of the video-technique-era for artists, still of present interest:  http://vodpod.com/watch/1092523-cindy-sherman-doll-clothes-1975

Gdansk Galeria Miejska is open a few days more for this project, until April 8. Here you can also cuddle up in a small dark video-room with wall-paintings.

If you are not in Gdansk this last week of the project, you can see a permanent work of hers - one of Zajac' murals can be seen during a visit at the Contemporary Art Centre Laznia. In the staircase on the highest floor you can even meet her in a self-portrait, or is it maybe her own mother? You can’t be sure since the mural is about the relation between herself and her mother. Still, one white spot on the murals remains, but the work is soon to be finished Zajac and curator Agnieszka Wolodzko says.