K9 & NOMADS + RESIDENTS

Dear friends,
finally i'll show my new peace K9 at 21.05.at 5.30 pm in Kitchen.

Address is The Kitchen 512 W.19th Street NY 10011
212.255.5793 

please be there on time. 
best,
zlatko

zlatko.kopljar@zg.hinet.hr 


1. Zlatko Kopljar, FF Fund for Performance Artist, at The Kitchen,
May 21, 5:50 to 5:55 PM sharp!

Franklin Furnace-supported artist Zlatko Kopljar's K9 is a video
record
of performances made at various places around New York City, with
narration taken from Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalgia. The software that
enhances the video moves the pixels of each frame to new locations
within the same frame. Using the artist's genetic data and digital
media as artistic tools, K9 exemplifies the link that digital art
creates between technology and life.

Contact: Franklin Furnace or
Michael Chagnon
The Kitchenp: 212.255.5793 x25
f: 212.645.4258
e: michael@thekitchen.org

2. A forum for visitors in the arts: making connections, supporting networks, 
setting up meetings

Nomads & Residents invites you to an evening of presentations by, Nina 
Katchadourian, Zlatko Kopljar, Nebojsa Seric - Shoba and Heidie Giannotti.

Friday, May 23rd, 7 PM

THE WHITEBOX

525 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, New York 10001 
tel 212-714-2347 / fax 212-714.2354
info@whiteboxny.org 

"'Inappropriate' Adjustments"

This session will bring together four artists from two highly different 
settings, the US and the Balkans, who are separately working with their exis
ting social, ethical and natural limits of the world they take as their own. 
No matter whether their practice is triggered by the extremes and by the 
absurdities of this world, of war, of hermetic institutionalism, of urban 
ecology, or of nature and constructed nature, their work may tell of a 
certain inappropriate act of adjusting both the reality and to reality. Thus 
by uncovering paradoxes of what is often expected from everyday life, these 
artists raise questions about the status of the appropriate act and its 
weakness in new and extreme realities. With this session we hope to further 
raise issues of the expected and the unexpected role of a work of art, its 
relation to the realities that are beyond the ordinary or average, and the 
permanence of errors that by their repetition with duration become 
experienced as a standard of life.

Zlatko Kopljar from Zagreb(Croatia), currently in-residence at Franklin 
Furnace and performing at the Kitchen on May 21, and Nebojsa Seric - Shoba 
from Sarajevo (Bosnia) who will be representing Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 
coming Biennial in Venice both experience absurd moments in reality as 
something that comes to be seen as normal. Both of them deal with something 
that can best be described as radical 'biting' be it in a gallery or in an 
urban space. War and uncertainty may be the context for their work, however, 
not necessarily the sole character of their concepts. They are rather 
questioning the appropriateness of working as an artist in an expected way 
within the situation that is extreme. Different in response, their work is 
often triggered by the unexpected twists of the meanings of personal acts in 
such realities, and proposes sets of inversions, adjustments of how this 
reality can be understood. 

Kopljar's installations propose heavy fundamental questioning and 
physically destructive work. His recent work K4 was made as an attack aimed 
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, a protest against the general 
situation of institutions in Croatia. The work consisted of a heavy and huge 
concrete block cast according to the dimensions of the museum's entry. This 
block was placed in front of the museum blocking the entrance for the period 
of one week. In spite of its radicality in changing the use of the museum and 
the roughness and brutality of its appearance, this work is not aimed at 
individual museum visitors but at the institutional structure. The goal of 
this piece was to work towards opening discussion about the current state of 
open processes and open societies. 

For the last six years much of New York artist Nina Katchadourian's work 
has oriented itself around "nature," as concept, construct, and site, as a 
way of looking at our assumptions, needs, cravings, dependency and resistance 
associated with this term. In summer/fall of 2002 she exhibited Natural Car 
Alarms, a traveling sound sculpture that consists of three cars rigged with 
modified car alarms whose typical six-tone siren had been replaced with a 
similar one made only of bird calls. The idea for the project was in fact the 
result of a misunderstanding - she heard a bird in the jungles of Trinidad 
that she mistook for a car alarm - and the project took up the severely urban 
car alarm as an element that was in fact completely natural to the Long 
Island City landscape where the piece was exhibited several times in summer 
and fall of 2002. Her most recent body of work, exhibited at Debs & Co. 
gallery in 2003, continues asking questions about where we place the border 
between the natural and the unnatural. Crossdressing becomes a vehicle by 
which to explore both gender and our desire for things to stay within their 
prescribed categories. In Animal Crossdressing she constructed costumes to 
turn a rat into a snake and a snake into a rat where predator and prey are 
transformed into their opposites. In Katchadourian's video Endurance a 
10-minute film of Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to the South Pole on 
the ship Endurance is projected minutely onto her front tooth as she tries to 
smile for as long as possible without losing composure. This work is a 
response to both the fascination with adventure/survival stories and to the 
more masochistic strains of the performance art tradition.

On the other hand Shoba's work is a lighthearted but existential 
questioning of the icons of the communist era and recent history. His Remote 
Control, for example, reduces a complex schema in reality such as war, 
religion and happiness to commands on a remote control. Creative Time of New 
York selected his work in the form of poster design among the applicants from 
the visual, literary, architectural, and graphic arts for their project 
entitled: Time to Consider: The Arts Response to 9.11. This and other 
projects are taking to task the manipulation of our collective experience by 
the media, and to our [lack] of resistance in adjusting to it.

Heidie Giannotti is an artist living in New York City. Instead of the 
narrative description for this Nomads + Residents event on inappropriate 
adjustments of reality, she offers the following: "Appropriate appropriation, 
prop, assembler, chance, ready-made instructions, dislocated temporal events 
& fugitive elements, thought is sought. PLUS: you know my style - I'd say 
anything to make you smile."

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About Nomads + Residents:

Big cities are in a continuous flux, with a coming and going of people who 
settle in, stay temporarily or move through. Newcomers enter this flux, 
become part of the life of the city, and make connections with others. The 
city, as a space, contains possibilities through the dynamic Relationships 
between people, which may provoke an active engagement. Strangers become 
friends, ideas become practice, and models are being transformed into action.

The curatorial and organizing group of NOMADS & RESIDENTS consists of New 
York based and temporary residents. They actively seek out information about 
who is visiting New York and when, they invite guests to present his/her 
ideas and solicit the involvement of spaces where these presentations can 
take place. They welcome advice, ideas and the enthusiastic support of 
others. The events will be partly informal and casual, and will focus on 
exchanging ideas, initiating new projects and networks. They will also 
include short presentations, lectures, talks, sideshows, small exhibitions, 
performances, discussions. Priority will be given to proposals that could 
become projects that will be shared among the participants, to a practice can 
make resources and ideas available for common use.

NOMADS & RESIDENTS originated in New York, yet also bases its activities on 
the coming and going of people who settle in, stay temporarily or move 
through cities such as Los Angeles, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam.

To read more about n+r and browse through our archive of events please 
visit our web site at http://www.nomadsresidents.org.
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For program suggestions, contact us via email at: 

New York: info@nomadsresidents.org
Los Angeles: nr_la@hotmail.com
Rotterdam/Amsterdam: nomadsresidents@earthlink.net