A Book About Death

OPEN ART CALL FOR PACIFIC NORTHWEST EXHIBITION "A BOOK ABOUT DEATH"
at the Almendra Sandoval Quetzalcoatl Feathersnake Gallery, Seattle Washington, USA .

In the spirit of the NYC exhibition, artists are asked to create a "page" for the unbound book about death. The art exhibited in Seattle will be archived in the permanent gallery collection. The art will be available for future exhibition opportunities to share the Seattle pages from the global unbound book about death.
“A Book About Death” is an artists’ collaborative project conceived by collage artist Matthew Rose for the Emily Harvey Foundation in New York City where the original exhibition took place from September 10 - 22, 2009. Over 500 artists contributed 500 postcards each created from artworks made especially to create an unbound book about memory and death. The exhibition has become a global phenomenon, as well as becoming part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the LA County Museum of Art Research Library. For more information about the scope and history of the project, please visit the archive: http://abookaboutdeatharchive.blogspot.com/

A very brief selection of ABAD exhibitions in Brazil:
Art call Brazil: http://www.brooklynartproject.com/events/call-for-works-a-book-about
Um Livro Sobre A Morte: http://umlivrosobreamorte.blogspot.com/
Museum of Modern Art Wales art call: http://www.mobius.org/blog/jane-wang/moma-wales-book-about-death-call-works-deadline-march-16-2010
Ray Johnson and A Book About Death SAL Gallery, Brookville, NY
http://rayjohnsonandabookaboutdeath.blogspot.com/
ABAD Italy: hhttp://unlibrosullamorte.blogspot.com/

Sponsorship: Water
Water is the most basic need for life. Without water, there is nothing.
A Book About Death Seattle is partnering with Mwanzo Proud Farmers, a US based non-profit organization. The mission of Mwanzo Proud Farmers is "To expand and diversify Kenyan cash and food crop farming as environmentally and economically sustainable business in rural communities."
The founder/director of Mwanzo Proud Farmers is Loyce Ong’udi who was a Harry Truman Scholar at the University of Washington where she studied leadership development and non-profit management. Loyce is using her education and history of international non-profit development experience to bring water and rural farming to her childhood village in rural Kenya, as well assurrounding villages. Loyce is bringing irrigated water to regions decimated by AIDS in Kenya.
To learn more about her work, please visit MWANZO PROUD FARMERS.
A Book About Death seeks sponsorship to cover the costs of the exhibition at the Quetzalcoatl Feathersnake Gallery and assist Mwanzo Proud Farmers in bringing life to rural Kenya.

www.abadseattle.blogspot.com

curator Kathleen McHugh

Global Citizenship

poster,  2011

THE DEFENSE D'AFFICHER PROJECT

  Make a poster, any subject, political, band, art, ecological, promotional

and submit it to the Defense D'Afficher Project for worldwide global distribution.

 Everything about the project is free. This is a showcase for great poster design,

distribution in the world's streets and commentary about all things "affiche."

  All the posters on this site are free, courtesy of the artist. Print out any poster

you like: Just click the download link for the high resolution PDF, print at home

or in your office and put them up anywhere, but especially the street. Take a

photograph of the work where you've put it and e mail that image back with

 the location.

curator  Matthew Rose

A Book About Life

International   Call for Artists   Mail Art Project

non profit initiative 

There are many artists worldwide and our vision is art without borders.

We are all creative in his or her country.  We are connected with similar modes of expression,free thinking, actions and visions. 

We are able to translate our vision into our works of art.

If we unite, we are more powerful than you can imagine.

We have the power to pick up on social, political and cultural phenomena, examine it and finally publish this through our art.

With this we can improve the world. I firmly believe it!

I propose we make a book of art, communicating our vision.

A book about Life

The first chapter is called:

Human Rights - The senseless death

People die every day due to war games, profit, or by negligence towards fellow human beings.

This is a book about the living for the living in memory of the victims!

The book will give hope and raise awareness; it will show the world that we as artists can create a common piece of art, without prejudices, barriers and borders.

Together we are strong!
I think it is a human right that no human being should die senselessly!

Curator Sabine Schlossmacher

www.abalcall.blogspot.com

A Book About Death

A BOOK ABOUT DEATH takes its inspiration from the late, underground American artist Ray Johnson. Conceptual artist and inventor of “Correspondence Art,” Ray Johnson mailed his original unbound “book” to friends and to his New York Correspondence School “students.” The pages, in his idiosyncratic style, were funny, sad and ironic one page visual meditations on death and life. Ray lived on Long Island, NY and committed suicide there in 1995.

The first ABAD show in 2009 was the brain child of Paris-based American artist Matthew Rose. He was influenced by the mail art work of Ray Johnson and invited artists to contribute 500 identical postcards on any aspect of the theme of death. The show took place at the Emily Harvey Foundation Gallery in NYC. Visitors were encouraged to collect one of every card and take them home. The pages, of every kind of design imaginable, approached this universal subject from every point of view–personal, metaphysical, conceptual and abstract. This original show is now in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art NYC, the MoMA Wales, UK and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,and included work from artists as well known as Yoko Ono and as obscure as Dame Mailarta.

ABAD has since grown into an international art movement that continues to travel across the US and internationally. ABAD has shown in Brazil, Belgium, the UK, Croatia, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Mexico. It has spawned dozens of collaborative exhibitions on three continents.

This new exhibition celebrates THE TIES THAT BIND all living things universally through death, as well as the creative ties which now bind thousands of artists that literally reach around the world.

The Bay Shore, LI exhibit will feature for the first time new work from worldwide artists that are actual book pages like Ray Johnson originally created in 1963, and NOT postcards. The pages will be bound by the curator into a handmade volume and displayed at the exhibition, thereby furnishing an Omega to the Alpha of the Unbound Book from the original NYC show.

There have been many performance pieces included in these shows but never any music. For this show, I would love to feature some live New Orleans Funeral Jazz! That is primarily what I am raising the money for. I also need to print up posters and fund publicity and other items for the opening reception.

Project by LuAnn Palazzo

www.abad-23.blogspot.com

www.abookaboutdeatharchive.blogspot.com

Social Values

Judging by the political and social situation in Armenia, we could notice emergence of public consciousness which became obvious since 1st of March 2008. Parallel to political demonstrations there is a resistance on the social and cultural levels as well. These social-cultural changes brought necessity to organize public events.
On the other hand many artists and curators aren’t able to find any exist exhibition space for their work, so there is a great need for alternative places, and current project could initiate events in urban spaces—in abandoned buildings, empty spaces, public places and etc, which will lead to alternative ways of presentation of art.
The situation is not unlike that of the 80s, prior to perestroika and during. Artists would present exhibitions in abandoned buildings and parks because there were no spaces for avant-garde or contemporary art. In the 90s an institutional boom fostered a parade of institutions emerging one after another. Today, some of them are closed down or lack funds. So, with the actualization of outdoor exhibitions and site-specific projects, we are calling for potential for new institutional structures that are based on collaboration and creativity.
The main goal of the project is investigation of urban space in search of open, available spaces for artistic activities. With this project we will try to make the city functional from an artistic point of view. It is also an opportunity for artists and curators to find new places for exhibitions of contemporary art.
The project is organized in the framework of Transkaukazja Festival (www.transkaukazja.eu) started in Warsaw in 2004. The project has been funded with support from the European Commission in the framework of the Culture Program 2007-2013.
Curator: Eva Khachatryan

Virtual Installations

foto,  2011

The mankind today stands in front of ecological disasters, which are a serious threat for the Earth. Earthquakes, floods, tsunamis and other unpredictable ecological disasters have become very frequent, taking away the lives of numerous people and cause economical and financial harm in different continents and regions.

  Such an earthquake took place in 1988 in the northern regions of Armenia (the city of Gyumri). Thousands of people were killed and left homeless, about 40% of the country’s industry and economy was paralyzed.

  A lot of years have passed, but up to now there are still half-destroyed constructions, which look like living memory of the disaster. This scenery is in Gyumri. Being ignored, they need interference of the human’s creative mind, modernization. These virtual images are the witnesses of the liquidation of the disaster consequences and implementation of new ideas. It also has an alternative direction to realize the importance of artistic interference as an important support to the development of life. They are also contradictions of optimism, creative mind and imagination to the disastrous environment, lost public territories. The territories, which have unique importance for the society from psychological, esthetic and other points of view.

Karen Alekyan  

Women in Art

 I am preparing a multimedial event about women, called WOMEN IN ART Show, in march 2011 in La Biennale de Montevideo, resto-pub from Sorocabana Palace.

  This is a famous Palace in art and intelectual uruguayan world and history, the walls and newspapers spoke and speake about, all intellectuals from 900 generation was there, making them artistic and intellectual activities: writers, journalists, fine artists, etc; so is a great honor be and participate in exhibitions in that place.

  Plaza Cagancha is called too the place of the artists, Biennale de Montevideo doors open on this historic centre, with neighboors as Museo Jose Pedro Varela and Ateneo de Montevideo Museum.

  Each art small room have so so 100 square metres,one of them with door to 50 metres far to 18 de Julio Avenue (thats central Montevideo Avenue)

  An exhibition to change our destiny, to change Art history (what not include women in official books about Art)

  An exhibition to become big exhibit nexts years and become itinerant project in Uruguay 2012.

  The event will during minimun 10 days (march 3 to march 17) in first exhibition and will becoming itinerant exhibit in near future for indeterminated time

with participation in international MAY 8th events of the Montevideo city.

 curator  Noemi Silvera 

Free Ai Weiwei

poster,  2011

Socialism

poster,  2010
There are only two types of socialism` one is dictatorial, another is libertarian.
Ernest Lezin

Frontal Nudity

poster,  2010

The image which you are looking at is the result of progressive valuable system,

 and the obvious nakedness- the result of irreproachable full value.

Karen Alekyan’s conceptual work likewise relates to memory: it comprises text that doubles as its title, and an old photograph kept in the archives of Mosfilm studios. This photograph by an anonymous artist of the 1920s represents a forlorn memory of building a happy society. Karen Alekyan’s work is called The image you are seeing is the result of a progressive system of values, whereas blatant nudity – of immaculate adequacy.

By putting Socialism on the same footing as Stalinism, we are guilty of unwarranted encroachment on our memory, whereas the author brings us back to the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union, where private property still existed alongside personal chattel and collective assets.

The physical extermination of private owners by the military-bureaucratic system had not yet been declared to constitute the triumph of socialism, compromising socialism and communism and departing irreversibly from Marxism. The country in the photograph is the one implementing the New Economic Policy (NEP), where collective enterprises engaged in free competition with individual entrepreneurs, demonstrating their advantages – the joy of collective labor and freedom.

       

Arman Grigoryan

Archive

foto,  2010

Gyumri as an archive of frozen memory, and archive without archivation.

Gyumri as an archive of post-historical, post colonial, post industrial, post religious

Can artists live and create in an archive?

Are we able to find the answer by research in Gyumri, as in archive?

Can memory exist without being archived?

Are the archives only for the memory?

An archive is a collection of historical records, as well as the place they are located. Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or organization's lifetime.

In general, archives consist of records that have been selected for permanent or long-term preservation on grounds of their enduring cultural, historical, or evidentiary value. Archival records are normally unpublished and almost always unique, unlike books or magazines for which many identical copies exist. This means that archives (the places) are quite distinct from libraries with regard to their functions and organization, although archival collections can often be found within library buildings.

A person who works in archives is called an archivist. The study and practice of organizing, preserving, and providing access to information and materials in archives is called archival science.

  Azat Sargsyan

5 minute

video installation,  2008

The people all over the world are equal just 5 minutes.

GAZPROM

object,  2008