swimming lessons and universal wishes

Magda Bielesz

shots taken from "swimming lesson" video, no sound, 00:01:34, 2004

Swimming lesson:"I'm fascinated with states which I can not (perhaps as yet) experience. I can’t swim. I fell down in the water when I was the child, so the only way for me to swim is to paint this, and I also made a swimming lesson video. The video is about this feeling: the only way to go to the sea for me is to go like a Jesus over the sea, because I’m afraid of the water. Thanks to this video my dreams come true."

I also made 12 pillows to swim in dreams. The 12 pillows have a special swimming license (in the Communist era, everyone who wanted to swim in a lake or sea needed a special license card called 'Karta pywacka', like a driving license. I took the original swimming license and used it in my project, changing only the name of the person who give the license to my name - the teacher of swimming in a dream.

Universal wish:When I was a child I used to paint everything that I wanted to have. At that time they were child’s wishes, like to be a princess or to have a dog, but now I’m going this way. Mike Kelly said: "Artists are people who are allowed a certain social privilege to act out in ways that adults aren't supposed to act out". And it is great. Thanks to that I feel safer and more sure of myself…

I asked people that I met on my way in the small village of Mooste in Estonia what is their dream, the most important wish in their life, and I made small pictures as a representation of this wish - so that finally every person who I met has got their own wish... their wishes come true.
I want to make a utopian vision of happiness using a paint as material. In my idea I appeal to Jacques Lacan's theory of perception of subjects. I tried to make a reconstruction on canvas, a picture seeing into other person’s mind. The most important aspect of this work is perceiving and the challenge of moving the picture from one mind into another: we can at last see things in a different way. Thinking "a window" or "a plant" we think of different windows and plants. There could be a difference between the dreams I painted and the dreams in their minds, but I took on this risk.
I put polaroid pictures on opposite walls - one on side the owners of the wish, and at the same level on the second wall the painted wish.

Magda also sells some pills with wishes like: meet E.T./ change your life/ tears stopper/always fresh breath/change Your sperm taste - banana, nuts, carrot etc./feel success and happiness/have a best friend/feel beauty/fall in love/connection improver/refreshing smile/be afro/be me/be born again

You can buy them in:KIG, kukus and several other places

And finally there´s the Universal Wish blog (in collaboration with Babel),everybody who feels bad at this moment can write their wish here.

more works by Magda Bielesz

Petrina Hicks

Deb, 2006, Lightjet print, 97 x 117cm, edition of 8 + AP

Aicha, 2005, Lightjet print, 127 x 152cm, edition of 5 + AP

Rachael #1, 2006, Lightjet print, 84 x 110cm, edition of 8 + AP

Petrina Hicks has an attraction to unsullied young people, women and men, at the edge of adulthood. Is it a sense of untouched purity that she is drawn to? Looking more closely, however, this is not perfectionism. Each of her subjects has subtle, or not so subtle, flaws. This is often the second thing that becomes apparent in these portraits, and instantly manifests as part of their fascination, a sort of attraction/repulsion. The work hovers in an unsettling place, between allure and strangeness...
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Petrina Hicks at Stills Gallery

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3. ZEBRA poetry award

ZEBRA poetry award, the first festival and award worldwide that is solely dedicated to films based on poetry, opened yesterday in it´s third edition. The biannual festival that will continue till saturday at one of Berlin´s most charming cinemas, the Babylon Mitte, started with a selection of highlights from the two previous festivals. Among them, to my surprise, Just because I'm standing here, doesn't mean I want to. 02 by Guido van der Werve, mentioned here only a few days ago.
Beside about 150 films based n poetry are special programs, one of them, Rattapallax will present the New York Independence label by the same name. Ram Devineni, publisher of Rattapallax, will present this fusion between contemporary writing and film that is also released as a DVD and avaiable at the counter for enjoyable 5 Euro only. Love is the Law by Eivind Tolas, shown as a teaser, is reason eniough not to miss this special tonight at 9h30 pm.
Love is the Law is based on a text written and performed by the Norwegian stunt poet and musician, Ole Mads Vevle. His subjective and, at times, pornographic interpretation the Christian message of love, has the form of a news program.

Angélica Chio, Ram Devineni at the opening

Another gem of the Rattapallax special will be the Casagrande Poetry Bombings. As a counter reaction to Pinochet’s bombing of the Presidential Palace in Santiago, Chile, a poetry guerilla organization called Casagrande dropped 100,000 poetry bookmarks over the Palace from a helicopter in March 23, 2001. The bookmarks twirled in the air and rained on the 10,000 spectators who came to witness the spectacle. Since then, the group has rained poems on several other bomb sites around the world, including Guernica and Croatia. The film is a repertoire of these peaceful bombings.

Also tonight, as part of Beziehungsstreifen, will be he screening of Let us first be friends by Angélica Chio, a well known name to friends of the Directors Lounge as she participated since the first edition back in 2005.
The score of Let us first be friends, a bluegrass song, comes with lyricsbased on online adds published by women and men looking for partner. Hilarious.

Mannaka No le (The House In The Middle)

On the screen tomorrow, friday: Mannaka No le (The House In The Middle) by André Werner, shown in world premiere on this years Directors Lounge will be screened at 3h30 pm as part of Gesellschaftsspiele. Mannaka No le, pure japanese poetry, entirely filmed in the deserts of Nevada, is also on air at Directors Lounge television. This will be the first major screening of Mannaka No le (The House In The Middle) with it´s new, brilliant remastered score, an achievement by Dan of tagez fame.


• Rattapallax thursday 9h30 pm

• Let us first be friends Beziehungsstreifen, thursday 10 pm

• Mannaka No le Gesellschaftsspiele, friday 3h30 pm

Kino Babylon berlin:mitte
Rosa-Luxemburg-Str. 30
10178 Berlin

Torkil Gudnason

bautiful works by fashion photographer Torkil Gudnason, to be found in his personal portfolio

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SLOW SPACE at TIE

Slow Space, a film and art project by fellow curator at the Directors Lounge, Klaus W. Eisenlohr will be screened tomorrow at The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (TIE), the highly acclaimed exhibition of avant-garde cinema in Denver, Colorado.
Slow Space takes the viewer on a visual trip through places of glass architecture in Chicago. Filmed entirely within the urban constructed environment that makes up this contemporary North American city, Slow Space is a visually arresting investigation into how space is described, defined and ultimately experienced. Berlin filmmaker Klaus W. Eisenlohr commutes this relationship with the outside ‘world’ via an array of constructed transparencies in the glass domes and atriums that formed so much of architecture’s modernist preoccupation for a constructed inside/outside dialectic. Descriptions and ultimately opinions on the status of public space in Chicago form part of the film’s identity via a series of interviews conducted from the participant’s private domains. Street scenes with performers complement this film essay. With his project in Chicago, the artist Klaus W. Eisenlohr has investigated the relationship between the body and the urban architectural environment over the time period of three years.

SLOW SPACE in American Premiere at
The International Experimental Cinema Exposition
on Thursday, October 12, 2006
at 5 pm, at Starz Film Center in Denver, Colorado

related: SLOW SPACE

First Person Shooter • Aram Bartholl

Aram Bartholl, previously featured with his public installation SPEED, is on show tomorrow in Berlin as part of FIRST PLAY BERLIN, presented by trampoline at Hebbel am Ufer.
Aram exhibits First Person Shooter, more an object than an installation.
First Person Shooter is the definition for a computer game genre which is played in the first person view while shooting is the main action of the game. A typical element of the game is the virtual arm of the player. Pointing with a weapon to the center of the screen this arm stays in the foreground all the time. The Object First Person Shooter is a card and a do it yourself set. The result of cutting and glueing all parts of FPS is a pair of glasses with the arm and weapon visible from out- and inside.

If you have no chance to see the show, click here to download your personal
First Person Shooter-do it yourself set.(pdf)


Trampoline - Platform for New Media Art during 'First Play Berlin'

Thursday 12th October 2006
Hebbel am Ufer
Berlin

Arno Schmidt - Vier mal vier (4x4)

Arno Schmidt (January 18, 1914 in Hamburg - June 3, 1979 in Celle) is widely known as a German author, mostly for his magnum opus Zettel's Traum, in which an elderly writer comments on Edgar Allan Poe's works in a stream of consciousness, while discussing a Poe translation with a couple of translators and flirting with their teenage daughter.










Much less known is the fact that Arno Schmidt was also a photographer. While his early photographs are mainly private snapshots, used as a personal diary in black and white, his later pictures, shot since 1964 as colorslides develop a certain quality in the photographic media itself. He used the extremely rare 4cm x 4cm format, thus the title "Vier mal vier" (four x four) of an exhibition, curated by Janosz Frecot, that presents an assortment of an archive of about 2500 photographies.


The opening tonight will see a lecture by Joachim Kersten, Bernd Rauschenbach and Jan Philipp Reemstma (the heir of a German cigarette manufacturer, who was one of his admirers and financially supported Arno Schmidt during the last few years of his life) of Arno Schmidt´s "Großer Kain"

Aspekte Gallery
Kulturzentrum Gasteig Munich
oct. 11th - dec 17th

opening: oct 10th 6h30 pm