Haaning, Sydney—Do Son, Hai Phong (Chair Exchange) (detail), ­2004. Photo of intervention, twenty-three metal chairs, and twenty-six plastic chairs. Courtesy of the artist and Artist Pension Trust in London.

Past Exhibitions in the Walter and McBean Galleries

Jens Haaning

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and Other Works

Curated by Hou Hanru


Panel Discussion on Art and the Immigrant Experience
Saturday, 16 February 2008 at 4:00pm
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

Exhibition on view: 24 January–8 March 2008
The Walter and McBean Galleries
Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Free and open to the public

Opening reception: Wednesday, 23 January 2008, 5:30–7:30pm
The Walter and McBean Galleries
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture: Wednesday, 17 October, 7:30pm
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public


For this project, Haaning will extend his ongoing examination of the living and working conditions of immigrants in the West by importing scenes from their everyday reality into the space of the Walter and McBean Galleries. In mediums that include installation, photography, and performance, he challenges conventional Western perceptions of the “other” in order to create dialogue on the kinds of cultural misunderstandings such perceptions engender. Following previous work that critically questions the definition of Western nations (for example, France), Haaning will be constructing a site-specific project that addresses the problematic notion of the United States of America—a project that emphasizes as indispensable the organic relation between the artist’s work and its local context. An extension of World Factory, Haaning’s project is part of the New Models of Production component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs.

Haaning lives and works in Copenhagen. He has recently had solo exhibitions at Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne (France); Secession in Vienna; Galleri Nicolai Wallner in Copenhagen; Goodwater Gallery in Toronto; Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona. Group exhibitions include Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen; Espace de l’Art Concret in Mouans-Sartoux (France); Apexart in New York; Kumho Museum of Art in Seoul; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (MoMA) in New York. He participated in the 9th International Istanbul Biennial, Documenta 11 in Kassel (Germany), and the 2006 Gwangju Biennial. www.jenshaaning.com

SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Additional funding for the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series has been provided by Bob and Betty Klausner. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA and Other Works, as well as Haaning’s Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture, is also supported by a grant from the Danish Arts Council; the exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco.

Download a PDF (28k) of the full press release here.


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Allora & Calzadilla, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech), 2007. Foam, white plaster, and audio recordings (subsequent to opening reception performance). Photo credit: Ryan Hendon and Seza Bali.

Allora & Calzadilla

Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech)

Curated by Hou Hanru


Exhibition on view: 19 October–15 December 2007
The Walter and McBean Galleries
Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Free and open to the public

Opening reception: Thursday, 18 October 2007, 5:30–7:30pm
The Walter and McBean Galleries
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

The reception included a live operatic interpretation of texts selected by the artists and performed by students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Advance video preview (see below): starting Friday, 5 October 2007
The Walter and McBean Galleries
Tuesdays–Saturdays, 11:00am–6:00pm
Free and open to the public

Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture: Wednesday, 17 October, 7:30pm
Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut Street campus
Free and open to the public

The third and final movement in a trilogy of site-specific sound-focused installations, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) carries forward lines of investigation Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla opened first in Clamor (at the Moore Space in Miami in 2006) and then in Wake Up (at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2007). The trilogy of exhibitions comprises a series of works that counterpose militarism and war with adroit manipulations of sound, music, and—in this new project for the first time—spoken word.

Strategically seeking out the sounds of combat as their sonic media, Allora & Calzadilla redeploy petrified—if still petrifying—riffs like reveille in ways that fundamentally challenge the ostensible glories the drumbeats of war traditionally encode. Part of their collaborative task has been to track such martial sound effects to their precognitive hideouts “under the skin,” where the body is agitated and stirred before the mind has had a chance to reflect—the hangouts, in short, of an unthinking patriotism. Allora & Calzadilla’s endeavor to reissue sounds whose meanings have grown far too familiar is an effort to restructure, at the source, those corporeal conformities—always marked in and on the body already—through which violent and potentially devastating action first becomes possible. In the new work for the Walter and McBean Galleries, this same system of undoing is set in motion against the equally inured fixations of the word—from the grain of the speaking voice to the artificial diction of operatic language and political oration.

Never limiting themselves to a single medium, Allora & Calzadilla complement their far-resonating, site-sensitive interrogations of sound and word with a suite of recent works in video: Returning a Sound (2004), Under Discussion (2005), Amphibious (2005), Sweat Glands, Sweat Lands (2006), Unrealizable Goals (2007), and There Is More Than One Way to Skin a Sheep (2007), the last of which recently premiered at the 10th International Istanbul Biennial. As a literal testimony to their thematic precedence in Allora & Calzadilla’s oeuvre, these videos will be on view starting Friday, 5 October in the Walter and McBean Galleries, that is, two weeks before the opening of the exhibition proper. The preemptive presence and visibility of Allora & Calzadilla’s video work on the SFAI campus—in particular, Returning a Sound and Under Discussion—will reinforce the deeper context of the ensuing installation, namely, Allora & Calzadilla’s active participation, from 2001 to 2004, in the acts of civil disobedience in Vieques (the island off Puerto Rico used by the US Navy as a weapons-testing range from 1941 to 2003) that eventually led to its partial evacuation by the US government.

Consistent with the comprehensive rearticulation of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs, which look beyond the traditional histories and narratives of exhibition and curatorial practice, Allora & Calzadilla were invited to exploit, as fully as possible, the intricacies of the SFAI campus—to conceive of it, in other words, as what Hou Hanru, SFAI’s director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, has called “a dynamic site of production instead of a static venue for mere representation.”

Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) occurs under the Global Figures component of Exhibitions and Public Programs, which is divided into five discrete but intersecting directions for investigating current constructions of contemporary global culture. Global Figures presents solo exhibitions of major artists from different cultures who have importantly influenced the current global art scene. The third and final movement in an ideologically critical, three-city trilogy, Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) could literally not have assumed the concrete, site-specific form it will in fact assume anywhere else than at the Walter and McBean Galleries.

The entire project will be captured and reflected upon in a joint publication slated to appear in 2008.

In addition to the installation in the Walter and McBean Galleries, Allora & Calzadilla are participants in SFAI’s Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series. They will give a talk in the Lecture Hall on the 800 Chestnut Street campus on Wednesday, 17 October at 7:30pm.

Allora & Calzadilla first exhibited internationally in 1998 at the 24th São Paulo Biennial. In group exhibitions they have shown at the Tate Modern in 2003, the 2005 Venice Biennial, and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. In solo exhibitions they have shown or will show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2004); the ICA in Boston (2004); the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2006); the Serpentine Gallery in London (2007); the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2007); the Whitechapel Laboratory in London (2007); the 10th International Istanbul Biennial (2007); and the Lyon Biennial (2007).

Allora & Calzadilla’s work can be found in major public collections at the Tate Modern; the Fonds Municipal d’Art Contemporain (FMAC) in Paris; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC in Paris; the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Ghent (Belgium); the Dallas Museum of Art (Texas, USA); and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Ohio, USA).

Sediments, Sentiments (Figures of Speech) is sponsored by the Franco Soffiantino Gallery in Turin, Italy, and is presented in collaboration with the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Moore Space in Miami. It is also presented concurrently with the exhibition Apocalypse Now: The Theater of War, co-curated by Jennifer Allora, Guillermo Calzadilla, and Jens Hoffmann at CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco, on view from 30 November 2007 to 26 January 2008.

SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Additional funding is provided by InSight. Through educational activities, community outreach, volunteer opportunities, and social programming, InSight’s mission is to advance the visibility and promote the success of SFAI within the Bay Area community and beyond.

Download a PDF (131k) of the full press release here.

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Wherever We Go: Art, Identity, Cultures in Transit

Phase 1
Opening reception: Thursday, 10 May 2007
5:30–7:30pm
Exhibition dates: 11 May 2007–7 July 2007

Phase 2
Opening reception: Thursday, 19 July 2007
5:30–7:30pm
Exhibition dates: 20 July 2007–15 September 2007


In Wherever We Go: Art, Identity, Cultures in Transit, the concept of identity—like the artists in the exhibition themselves—has taken leave, at least partially, of its origins. For here identity is defined in terms not so much of geographical roots as of cultural experiences and relationships. Informed by subtle reflections on this mutating concept, each of the works in the exhibition is the fruit of a reflection-action that recounts things about the world in which its maker was born, but also about the world in which he or she now lives. Thus, identities are represented and exemplified as no longer fixed once and for all, but as floating free, as resisting the urge to be oversimplified and boxed in. This process also makes a significant impact on the transformation of each locality the migrants travel to and settle in.

An open field for comparisons and a mise-en-scène of crucial contemporary questions, Wherever We Go is curated by Hou Hanru and Gabi Scardi and first premiered in October 2006 at the Spazio Oberdan in Milan. Presented in association with the Province of Milan and the Museo della Fotografia Contemporanea, the exhibition comprises fifty works by twenty-three artists.

The artists for phase one are Adel Abdessemed; Yael Bartana; Banu Cennetoğlu; Latifa Echakhch; Ni Haifeng; Huang Yong-Ping; Mella Jaarsma; Koo Jeong-A; Tsuyoshi Ozawa; Adrian Paci; Shen Yuan; and Nari Ward.

The artists for phase two are Nindityo Adipurnomo; Kristine Alksne; M. T. Alves; Keren Amiran; Carlos Amorales; Maja Bajevič and Danica Dakič; Magali Claude; H. H. Lim; Elena Nemkova; and Pascale Marthine Tayou.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing color photographs and biographies of the artists as well as critical essays by Elvan Zabunyan, Gilane Tawadros, Pier Luigi Tazzi, and the two curators.

Support for Wherever We Go has been provided by Paule Anglim and Deitch Projects, New York. SFAI's exhibitions and public programs are supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund.

Download a PDF (30k) of the press release here.

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World Factory

1 Active Witness
Thursday 1.25.07 opening 5:30 - 7:30
runs through 2.27.07

2 Resistance and Dreams
Wednesday 2.28.07 opening 5:30 - 7:30
runs through 3.27.07

3 Making our Place
Wednesday 3.28.07 opening 5:30 - 7:30
runs through 4.21.07

Curated by Hou Hanru

Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and chair of the Exhibition and Museum Studies Program, Hou Hanru is curator of the exhibition World Factory at SFAI's Walter and McBean Galleries. Effectively a kind of testing ground for a section of the 2007 Istanbul Biennial (Not Only Possible but Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War, for which Hou was recently named artistic director), World Factory is the second exhibition in Hou's newly organized program at SFAI. The program consists of five discrete but intersecting directions for investigating current constructions of contemporary global culture: Global Figures, New Models of Production, Acting Out in the City, Pacific Perspective, and New Voices. Internationally known as a dynamic and innovative curator and critic of contemporary art, Hou most recently served as the artistic director of the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial and, in addition to the 2007 Istanbul Biennial appointment, was also recently named curator of the Chinese Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale.

World Factory -- an exhibition-in-progress that ran in three phases from January 26 to April 21, 2007 -- has been conceived and will be configured so as to transcend the traditional histories and narratives of exhibition practice. With its nonconventional and evolving format -- overlapping time segments for gallery installations; workshops; film screenings; seminars; off-site and site-specific projects; and web-based works -- World Factory can be said to quote and reappropriate, in both arrangement and presentation, a number of the very conditions (caused by rampant globalization) from which it derives its name. In the "flat world" (Thomas Friedman) created by the ever-escalating outsourcing of goods and services from the so-called First to the so-called Third World, entire regions and nations have become factories for the other "half" of the globe -- the "half" that promulgates and profits from the universalization of the "free"-market economy.

Originally envisaged as a way to evade a long but tenuous history of fair labor practices in the West, these strategically located "world factories" are run along 19th-century, Dickensian lines. They demand intensely hard work and long hours for very little pay. They destroy or radically alter the inchoate infrastructures of the developing regions they overrun. They leave a deep footprint, lasting and noxious: pollution, displacement, depleted natural resources, and an aggravated local imbalance between rich and poor. Their impact doesn't end there, however. In much the same way, it ramifies laterally as well -- that is, within the so-called First World nations.

What Hou and the 30 international artists he has gathered together for World Factory have made plain, however, is that as with their 19th-century counterparts, the oppressed people working in and around the world's factories today have not been taking their exploitation lying down. On the contrary, many of them have been mobilizing new forms of social consciousness and resistance, new projects and strategies for staking their own claims on the more and more complex global map. Not only are they negotiating for a say in the socio-political, economic, and technological debates of the coming global community, but they have already begun to construct that community through an energetic and explosive cultural and artistic expansion the lasting effects of which have only just begun to receive commensurate exhibition and reflection.

Indeed, part of the rationale for housing the various phases of World Factory on the historically engaged SFAI campus is to emphasize the relevance of that kind of reflection which is open-ended, dialogical, and interactive, the kind that invites not only colleague-to-colleague exchanges, but intergenerational, as it were "cross-platform," conversation and conviction. In short, World Factory is not so much an exhibition as a complex and dynamic deconstruction of the institutional matrix through which it has been instigated and by which it is sustained.

Download full Press Release PDF(92K)

View KQED's Gallery Crawl video and podcast of the exhibition

ARTISTS

1 Active Witness
Michael Blum
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Young-Hae Chang and Marc Voge)
Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre
Jean-Baptiste Ganne
Jens Haaning
Omer Ali Kazma
Map Office (Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix)
Raqs Media Collective
Mario Rizzi
Allan Sekula
Zhou Hao and Ji Jianghong

2 Resistance and Dreams
Cao Fei
Chen Chieh-jen
flyingCity (Yong-Seok Jeon and Jang-Jong Kwan)
Jean-Baptiste Ganne
Andreja Kuluncic
Lu Chunsheng
Tadej Pogacar
Julien Previeux

3 Making Our Place
Cao Fei and Ou Ning
Teddy Cruz
Sanja Ivekovic
Sora Kim
Julio Cesar Morales
Lordy Rodriguez
Pascale Marthine Tayou
Zhu Jia

LECTURES

Map Office Wednesday 1.24.07 7:30pm
Teddy Cruz Monday 4.16.07 7:30pm

SCREENINGS

Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre's MAQUILAPOLIS

Tuesday 3.27.07 7:00pm
Berkeley City College Auditorium
2050 Center Street
Berkeley
(Lupita Castaneda, promotora (community activist) and former factory worker, will be present for Q & A)

Saturday 3.31.07 7:00pm
Sunset Church
3635 Lawton Street
San Francisco
(between 42nd and 43rd Avenues)
(Lupita Castaneda, promotora (community activist) and former factory worker, will be present)

Monday 4.09.07 7:00pm
Noe Valley Ministry
Community Center
1021 Sanchez Street (at the corner of 23rd Street)
San Francisco

Tuesday 4.10.07 7:00pm
The Women's Building
Mujeres Unidas y Activas
3543 18th Street, #8
San Francisco

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

Didier Faustino and Teddy Cruz

SFAI's Public Programs are supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. World Factory is supported by Lombard-Freid Projects, New York, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Consulate General, San Francisco; it is presented in conjunction with the 10th International Istanbul Biennial, Not Only Possible but Also Necessary: Optimism in the Age of Global War.

Cao Fei's project is presented in collaboration with the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California, and supported by Lombard-Freid Projects, New York.

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Sarkis: Alive and After

Sarkis: Alive and After is the first major US exhibition to examine the new work of Paris-based artist Sarkis, bringing long overdue attention to this prominent figure of the global art scene. Organized by Hou Hanru, SFAI's new Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, the exhibition presents an installation of over 40 films, a suite of watercolor drawings, poetic texts, photographs, and a site-specific neon work. A public reception will take place on September 21 from 5:30 to 7:30pm. The artist will give a public lecture at SFAI on September 26 at 7:30pm, and a complementary series of rare avant-garde films, selected by the artist as influential to his work, will be screened at SFAI in October and November.

"This complex and enduring project opens up a space in which the audience can enter into a continuous dialogue with the artist, and with the fantastic world that the artist has created through his infinite dialogue with other creators," says Hou Hanru, curator of the exhibition.

"With Alive and After, SFAI's galleries become a site of production, a laboratory, a workshop, a place to practice," Hou explains. "Sarkis' practice not only includes his own productions, but also the exchanges between himself, his works, and the audience. His work represents the oscillation between exile and freedom, cultural difference and social restructuring, which are highly significant and influential ideas in our age of globalization."

Born in Istanbul to an Armenian family, Sarkis currently lives and works in Paris. Evolving out of his experience as an "exile," Sarkis' work can be seen as a meditation on the tensions between memory and space. His works are profoundly concerned with humanity, and, in the words of Hou Hanru, "His works unfold a personal universe from the contrasts between light and darkness, green and red, material and immaterial, appearance and disappearance . . . ." Simultaneously, Sarkis illuminates the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. As writer/critic Erik Bullot writes, "At a time when the relationships between cinema and contemporary art are multiplying and questioning the different frontiers of artistic practice, it is enlightening to observe the delicate and violent film work of Sarkis."

Download full Press Release PDF(75K)

The exhibition Sarkis: Alive and After and Sarkis' public lecture are supported by a generous grant from etant donnes: The French-American Fund for Contemporary Art. This exhibition has also been made possible by the support of Galerie Jean Brolly, Paris. SFAI's Public Programs are supported in part by the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax fund.

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Kehinde Wiley


Work Zones: Three Decades of Contemporary Art from San Francisco Art Institute
May 11 - July 29, 2006

Featuring a selection of seminal works from some of the most important artists today, Work Zones offers an examination of the impact of San Francisco Art Institute on the field of contemporary art. Organized for SFAI's Walter and McBean Galleries by world-renowned curator and SFAI's Dean of Academic Affairs, Okwui Enwezor, the exhibition will present work from 15 artists who graduated from the school between the 1969 and the 1999. Encompassing a variety of media, including photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and installation, Work Zones features a range of distinct artistic approaches, and thus illustrates the breadth of perspectives that are fostered at San Francisco Art Institute and which continue to be key to the school's academic programs. Highlights of the exhibition include a series of photographs by Lewis Baltz, rare video works from the 1970s by Paul McCarthy and Paul Kos, contemporary monumental paintings by Kehinde Wiley, and a site-specific work by Barry McGee.

Download full Press Release PDF (75K)



William Kentridge

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William Kentridge
January 25 - March 25, 2006

San Francisco Art Institute named South African artist William Kentridge as the 2006 McBean Distinguished Lecturer. Kentridge will delivered a public lecture on January 25, 2006 at SFAI's 800 Chestnut Street Campus. In conjunction, an exhibition of Kentridge's films, WEIGHING...and WANTING (1998) and Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), will be on view in SFAI's Walter and McBean Galleries from January 25 to March 25, 2006. An opening reception will take place January 25 from 5:30 to 7:30pm preceding the lecture.

Known internationally for his drawings, animated films, sculptures, installations, and stage work, Kentridge explores the history and post-apartheid political transformations of his native South Africa. Through his films -- made by a process of constant modifications via erasures to charcoal drawings that are photographed in sequence and then projected as an animated picture -- Kentridge goes beyond South African politics and ultimately addresses the human condition by exposing the nature of memory, emotion, and social conflict. Kentridge's works propose an incisive investigation to the way identities are forged and provide insights into changing notions of history and belonging.


Download full Press Release PDF (75K)