Bodil Furu’s (NO) accomplished screen works reflect on the social and environmental dynamics that shape change.The work draws on closely documented encounters with people living in vastly different situations – as far apart as an excessively polluted and overpopulated city in Peoples Republic of China and the remote region of northern Norway where an island might have a population of one.

Tommaso Corvi-Mora is proud to present a group exhibition including work by Dee Ferris, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Adam Buick, Noor Ali Chagani and David Jones.
The aim of the exhibition is to present different ways of addressing an extended notion of landscape: landscape as the spirit of a place, touching both space and time.

Gasworks presents an exhibition of newly commissioned work by London-based artists and researchers Model Court, an ongoing collaboration between Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Lorenzo Pezzani and Oliver Rees.
 
Model Court investigate the spatial, aesthetic and geopolitical aspects of legal procedure. Using video, sound, drawing and installation, the group interrogates the production, dissemination and transmission of the law, addressing the many technical problems encountered in the administration of international justice today.
 
Their exhibition at Gasworks comprises a newly commissioned film and installation focusing on the recently concluded trial of François Bazaramba, a Rwandan national convicted of genocide by a small district court in the Finnish town of Porvoo. Bazaramba’s trial was particularly unique because it made use of so-called ‘telepresence’ technologies in unprecedented ways. During the course of the trial, Finnish judges and prosecutors travelled to Rwanda and Tanzania to gather testimony, eventually setting up temporary courts in the Rwandan Supreme Court and a Hilton hotel room. Meanwhile Bazaramba was held in Finland and became a Skype participant in his own trial from his Helsinki prison cell.
 
Owing to these peculiar circumstances, Bazaramba’s trial is an unparalleled case study for understanding the relationship between media technologies and the much debated principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’ – whereby states or organisations can claim criminal jurisdiction over accused subjects regardless of their nationality or where an alleged crime was committed. To what extent do emerging technologies used in these forums reorient the process of justice geographically? And how do fibre optic cables, video conferencing software such as Skype, and cameras alter the conventions of testimony?
 
Written from the perspective of an unnamed technician responsible for the audio-visual setup of Bazaramba’s trial, Model Court’s film uses a semi-fictional narrative to explore the trial’s relationship to notions of aid, neo-colonialism and the production of history. Housed within an installation that appropriates settings and the infrastructure present in the original trial, as well as in other courts of law, the film critically examines the complex and often dysfunctional, audiovisual infrastructure used to bridge the jurisdictional divide.
 
Taken together, the film, installation and an accompanying series of events aim to interrogate this extraordinary yet naïve attempt by a regional Finnish court to intervene in a genocide that took place many miles and years away. The intention is not to present a history of Rwanda or to contest the culpability of Francois Bazaramba, but rather to tell a story about the transmission of the Finnish legal space into Rwanda, thereby engaging with the cultural specificity of so-called ‘international’ justice and its vision for Africa (so far the only continent to have been investigated by the International Criminal Court).
 
The series of events accompanying the exhibition will feature invited guests, including international artists, media theorists and filmmakers, who will engage critically with the exhibition and expand upon the key issues raised by the project.

Preview Friday 31st May, 6 to 9pm
 
Opening in the presence of the artist: Friday 28 June, 6 to 9pm
 
Im Wald, im Wald! da konnt ich führen
Ein freies Leben mit Geistern und Tieren;
Feen und Hochwild von stolzem Geweih,
Sie nahten sich mir ganz ohne Scheu.
 
Heinrich Heine (from Waldeinsamkeit)
 
(In the woods, in the woods! There I could lead /A free life with spirits and animals; /Fairies and deers with proud antlers /they approached me without fear)
 
The times you wish to walk out, withdraw, pull out of the game because it has become just a game. Disengage…
Suffering from a sexually transmitted disease, Heinrich Heine spends the last years of his life semi paralysed and partly blind in Paris. There he composes Waldeinsamkeit, in which he recalls a nature retreat in Helgoland shortly before his decision to divert his Romantic energies away from poetry and into the political battles of restoration Europe. Twenty years on, 1851, looking back, the incompatibility he used to make between poetry and his philosophical and political writing seems nonsensical; he now assesses, through his renewed poetic drive, that the revelry, the myths, the magical world of tales and the private realm of the imagination, are in fact an essential part in the struggle against the reactionary -religious or Jacobins- forces of his time.
 
Around the same time in Concord, USA, a man sets out to live in a forest for two years, two months and two days. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life”. In Walden or a life in the woods, this man, Henry David Thoreau argues the importance of solitude, contemplation, and closeness to nature in finding the true self and transcending “the life of quiet desperation which most men lead”.
 
The creation of public parks attempted the reciprocal taming of nature and men, offering “public walks calculated to promote the health and comfort of the inhabitants”, because “want of recreation generated incipient disease, discontent; which in its turn led to attacks upon the Government”. But from the outset, parks were used in ways which deeply disturbed some public minds. Ensuing moral panics, regulation and further, constantly shifting, uses, they remained ideal spaces of appropriation, contestation and debate; where norms of behaviour could be forged, contested or established; and where behaviour beyond the norms could retain the Romantic appeal of transgression.
 
“A Walk in the park” is a feature length work by Stefan Hoderlein filmed using a thermographic camera. This technology developed for security and military purposes is used here to capture the perimeters of a bucolic cruising ground near Düsseldorf.
 
The camera operates outside the spectrum of visible light: it maps the territory of heat. All objects emit a certain amount of infrared radiation as a function of their temperature. Trees, benches, people. The film’s thermal images are bright, intense colours, pseudo-colours. Each colour represents a different temperature: white and red, traditionally but subjectively, used for higher temperatures, to green, blue and violet for colder ones. Darkness transforms into light. For Hoderlein, directness, honesty, the celebratory and rude pride. By other means, what can’t be seen will be made to be seen.
 
The individual with intentional stance enacts a temporary walkout; performing the pragmatic in the face of impossibility, joining in an irrational illusory social loophole, celebrating the joy of this delimited pastoral precinct, where the weight of society is lifted collectively in the company of men.
The halted traveller surveying the countryside; the hermit in the undergrowth, shed of his possessions, seeking simplicity in the poverty of connections; the nature, empty screen to project our grief; the hunter in the solitude, cock as bait, catching a reflection of himself; the magical pull of some untamed wilderness, domesticated; and the moments of madness; trolls and living nightmares caught between the liminal dreamscape, fog and redemption, wanderlust in a timeless idyll; and the walker slow-pacing with affected nonchalance, measuring the territory, roaming down utopia drive; the loneliness, the eternal pain, the horror, awe; the bug chaser catching his death; desire and apprehension, the ritualistic and the kinship.

A site-specific installation by Lebanese artist Raed Yassin, curated by Amanda Abi Khalil. ‘Noon’ is a series of eight photographs produced by Yassin between 2010 and 2011. Shown together with a new sound piece, they compose the site-specific installation entitled ‘Postponed Noon’, which transforms the connotations of both spaces: the square outside on the one hand and the space inside the vitrine on the other.
 
Taken from different bedroom windows in Beirut, these eight photographs conjure the atmosphere of a latent dream the artist finds himself in when he wakes up – the moment when perception is blinded by daylight around noon, and becomes by alchemy a protracted contemplation, a musing daydream.
 
Both parts of the installation alter the perception of the space in which they are placed. The eight windows in the photographic series are confined to an interior space, although the images open to an exterior cityscape, a distant one: the city of Beirut. In the square, a 24-hour-long sound piece recorded in the artist’s apartment in Beirut matches this intimate terrain of reverie, albeit interrupted at times by mundane sounds that transform Vitrine into an apartment.
 
‘Postponed Noon’ invites us to this “escapade of imagination” through the “finesses of experience of intimacy”, in which the intimate space activated by the sound piece opens up to a view of a strange yet familiar city, appearing blurred through eight windows.
 
Inspired by Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the concept of this indoor-outdoor installation confuses the obvious geometry and dialectics of division between outside and inside when brought into play in metaphorical domains.
 
“In any case, inside and outside, as experienced by the imagination, can no longer be taken in their simple reciprocity; consequently, by omitting geometrical references when we speak of the first expressions of being, by choosing more concrete, more phenomenologically exact inceptions, we shall come to realize that the dialectics of inside and outside multiply with countless diversified nuances.” Gaston Bachelard, “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside” in The Poetics of Space.
 
Supported by the British Council.
 
BIOGRAPHY
 
Raed Yassin was born in Beirut in 1979. He graduated from the theatre department at the Institute of Fine Arts in Beirut in 2003. An artist and musician, Yassin‘s work often originates from an examination of his personal narratives and their workings within a collective history, through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. He has exhibited and performed his work in numerous museums, festivals and venues across Europe, the Middle East, the United States and Japan, including the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2013), the Beirut Art Center (2013), the New Museum in New York (2012), Kalfayan Galleries, Athens (2011), Museum of Photography Thessaloniki (2011); “Sharjah Biennial 10” (2011), Delfina Foundation in London (2010-2011) where he has completed a residency program, “Manifesta 8” in Murcia (2010-2011), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2011), De - Ateliers in Amsterdam following a 2-year residency, “Home Works 5” in Beirut, (2010) and Photo Cairo 4 (2008). Upcoming shows include: Singapore Art Museum (2013) and the 4th Thessaloniki Biennial of Contemporary Art (2013). Yassin was awarded the Fidus Prize for The Best of Sammy Clark at Beirut Art Center’s Exposure (2009), the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2012), the AFAC grant for production (2010), the YATF grant for production (2008 & 2012) and the Cultural Resource grant for production (2008). Yassin is one of the organizers of IRTIJAL Festival, and has released 11 music albums and founded the production company Annihaya in 2009. He is also a founding member of “Atfal Ahdath” a Beirut based art collective. He currently lives and works in Beirut and represented by Kalfayan Galleries, Athens.
 
VITRINE Bermondsey Square
Bermondsey Square, London SE1 3UN (Tube: London Bridge)
Daily 24-hours. FREE.
www.vitrinegallery.co.uk
info@vitrinegallery.co.uk
02074076496