Visual Foreign Correspondents presents
Issue 4
12 February – 10 March 2008
Artist: Igor Stromajer, Slovenia
Title: The Netherlands is respectful. Russia is corrupt.

In collaboration with The Globalized Crystal Ball this is the fourth issue of Visual Foreign Correspondents. VFC is an independent platform in which 11 distinguished artists from around the world are invited each month to give their personal visual commentary on events and situations from their locally situated perspective. Their works especially created for urban screens and online platforms. This project will give people in the streets of Amsterdam a brief window into other regions, peoples and other kinds of imagination.

The Slovenian artist Igor Stromajer describes himself as an ‘intimate mobile communicator’. He started his career at the academy for theatre in Ljubljana. From 1989 he worked together with Bojana Kunst on his theatrical experiments, which they called ‘theatrical installations’. Together they studied relations between the body of the actor, dancer and spectator, physical energy, intimate plot, and the private examination of the actor in public (theatre) space. With the arrival of internet his interest in multimedia performance and especially net art grew. More than theatre the internet gave him the possibility to build on a more intimate relation with his audience. His performances on the web are working on themes like emotion and trauma, whereby he uses advanced but simple technologies that he develops in his own production house: Intima Virtual Base. His most well-known award winning works are amongst others Ballettikka Internettikka and Oppera Internettikka. His work is part of international renowned art collections and he travels across Europe and North America as artist in resident and guest lecturer in academies, universities and art organizations. At the moment Igor concentrates on political aspects of mobile, intimate, digital communication. In the form of intermediate guerrilla actions he is constantly searching for intimate communication.

In his work ‘The Netherlands is respectful. Russia is corrupt’ Stromajer is in search for current verdicts about the different countries from East and West Europe. Stereotypical sentences and surprising quotes are running across the screen in two hard lines, two subtitles in front of a black hole. The top one symbolises Western Europe, the bottom one Eastern Europe. This hierarchy in form seems harsh and inevitable, divided by the black background, without colour or light, but changes when reading the phrases. The speed of the sentences makes the words tumble, meanings are inter-changing and Europe becomes again one. According to Stromajer: “Politics is the poetry of today”.

Visual Foreign Correspondents is connected to The Globalised Crystal Ball, a series of monthly international seminars hosted by De Balie on globalisation and the future of the international community and spread over a full year. These monthly seminars feature internationally renowned speakers, examining the changing nature of globalisation. The screen-based artworks play an important role in contributing an alternative perspective to these meetings. Artist’s contribution to this event is not simple illustration but provides another kind of imaginative response to these subjects.

The work will be launched during the seminar event of the Globalised Crystal Ball in the conference space. An introduction to the work will be given, making a connection to the seminar and the ideas of the artist. Independent from the seminar the work will then feature on the urban screen outside the ‘Balie’ every night for a month, on the The Contemporary Art Screen, at the Zuidas and in 11-Reatuarant Bar Club, part of Post-CS, museum of modern art, Amsterdam. These screens will be in relationship to a specially designed website and ‘Oog’. The VFC website will show the work and contextualize it with political, social and cultural background information. Furthermore it will give information about the project and a possibility for the audience to interact. The work will also feature in ‘OOG’, a commentary and opinion platform that is part the online edition of De Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily national newspaper. Here the work will feature for a week as part of the continuing series of artist commentaries.

http://www.visualcorrespondents.com

Screen locations
De Balie: Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10, Amsterdam
http://www.debalie.nl
CASZ: Zuidplein, Amsterdam
http://www.caszuidas.nl
11/Restaurant bar club: Oosterdokskade 3-5, Amsterdam
http://www.ilove11.nl

http://www.volkskrant.nl/oog

Visual Foreign Correspondents
Artistic director: Nanette Hoogslag
Editors: David Garcia, Nat Muller, Petra Heck and Eric Kluitenberg

For more information please contact Nanette Hoogslag at info@visualcorrespondents.com

Visual Foreign Correspondents is made possible by Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunsten, VSB, De Balie and the Netherlands Media Art Institute

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*Marieke Istha *
*Communication*
*istha@nimk.nl *

*Netherlands Media Art Institute*
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T 31 20 6237101
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www.nimk.nl

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*Program*
Vertigo by Daan Brinkmann
Opening 8/2, 17:00
Presentation: 9/2- 15/2

Sonic Acts XII exhibition
Opening 21/2, 17:00
Exhibition: 22/2 - 22/3 2008
With works from: Boris Debackere, Kurt Hentschläger, Ulf Langheinrich, Julien Maire

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 5:13 am and is filed under Conference, Resource, [2]News & Events, online/offline event.