Een speciaal gebouwde expositietent met de spraakmakende installatie van ‘The State of L3‘ is de plek waar de jongerendebatten worden gehouden.
‘The State of L3‘ is een in Amsterdam gevestigd internationaal collectief van beeldende en videokunstenaars uit de Afrikaanse diaspora. De coördinatie van dit collectief, opgericht door de Panamese Nederlander Antonio Jose Guzman, is in handen van de Organisatie van Latijns Amerikaanse Activiteiten (OLAA).
De expositie is aanleiding voor één van de onderdelen van het jongerendebat dat in het teken staat van de dekolonisatie van de geest en de controverse rond herstelbetalingen. De debatten, die georganiseerd worden i.s.m de Rotterdamse studentenvereniging ASAH, worden gevoerd in de vorm van wedstrijden en staan o.l.v. Andrew Makkinga. De inleiding wordt verzorgd door Sandew Hira.
The Dakar Biennale & our Presentation at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris
were a huge sucess for the Collective!
Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain
Dak’Art 2010 7 May – 7 June 2010 Dakar, Sénégal.
Next shows are: Gallery 23, Amsterdam 27 June
Keti Koti Festival 1 July
Smart Project Space 10 July
MC Mansour at the L3 Vernissage in Medina, Dakar
Two Installations at the Dakar Biennial
A.J. Guzman, Ton van Beers & Raul Balai 4 State of L3
STATE OF L3
Location: Medina, a suburb of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. Time: 10 p.m. in the evening. Temperature: 22 degrees.
Locals are still on the streets. They provide a continuous noise. Trading in the rickety stalls and small shops continues. On TV screens they showing the latest football games.
A single car is parked in front of a long low building with a brownish red coating. From the roof a video is projected, hidden inside a stylized, white painted wooden boat. On the opposite, on the ’sidewalk’, stands an old white minivan, witch is used as the screen.
The Pan African collective STATE OF L3 founded and coordinated by the Latin American Dutchman Antonio Jose Guzman – give an intermediate presentation of a long term project in which a constantly changing group of artists and filmmakers dealing with the triangle of Amsterdam’s, Dakar’s and Recife’s historical benchmarks. Within this, the participants searching for their roots and thus their identity. This intercontinental project stands for the African Diaspora in a concentrated form. The videos are a series of rough-cut images, recorded at various locations. Short conversations, records of building operations, fragmented travel and staged scenes alternate. Sometimes there are explanatory subtitles, usually not. That structure makes a cryptic works to contemporary video compositions.
For the temporary display a group of children has gathered. They jump and dance enthusiastically through the light and pictures. Their shadows build up an extra dimension in front of the recorded images. Through that suddenly they belong literally and figuratively to the context. The other residents on the street look curious, they have never seen such a thing. No idea how to deal with this new form of heritage reconditioning. A few foreigners, mainly Dutch and Scandinavian, watch the show.
STATE OF L3 is a project that turns up every time. Short notice, in different locations at different forms.
Back in Europe the upcoming exhibitions will take place at Gallery 23 and Smart Project Space in Amsterdam as well as in Utrecht in Sanaa Gallery and The M HKA Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art.
Translated from Rob Perrée text.
L3 Draft Imaginary sketches, Mix visuals from “The Day We Surrender” with Footage of the L3 Participants.
A selection from our archive most favorite artists & inspirators!
This is just to give you a flavor of the L3 archive, the artists we work with, installations we have made and some of the international artists we consider important for our work.
A.J. Guzman, Ton van Beers & Ischa Stuart 4 State of L3
Mickalene Thomas
The work of this artist is part of the archive created by the State of L3
(No Part of the Collective)
Pieter Hugo
YOSSI MILO GALLERY
525 West 25th Street
February 25–April 17
Taking pictures in Nigeria is a tricky business: Between a public savvy about the monetary value of commercial photography and a police force leery of external documentarians, one can spend weeks in Lagos or Abuja and come up short. This is not the case for artist Pieter Hugo, whose previous work offers thematic investigations of the quotidian and extraordinary in this vibrant but poorly understood region.
The photographs on display in “Nollywood,” his latest exhibition, recall film stills but are neither narrative nor cinematic. Instead, these works offer carefully staged portraits of familiar archetypes and tropes within the entertainment industry, and all were shot in the southeastern Igbo city of Enugu. Hugo focuses on mundane buildings, streetscapes, and minor dramas fused with local iconography, including ghosts and witches or Yoruba deities. With its mash-up of digital technology and the cheek-by-jowl cosmopolitan anachronism of the city, Nollywood is a thoroughly idiosyncratic—and twenty-first-century—form.
One will find, then, a double dose of representation: Hugo framing and picturing his actors with the help of a noted local production designer, and the actors in turn creating a mediated, ambiguously documentary vision of the megastate. While the individual characters that inhabit these pictures—from a curvaceous sailor to a sword-wielding “little person”—are front and center, the real treat is the assemblage of smaller details, such as a hand-scrawled billboard, the juxtaposition of equatorial jungle and dilapidated walk-up apartments, and battered oil drums, which give texture to the bewildering landscape that is Nollywood’s stage.
Ian Bourland
Source: artforum
The work of this artist is part of the archive created by the State of L3
(No part of the Collective)
Las Cosas que me Arrastran (The Things That Drag Me Along)
1996/2008
Dimensions variable (approx. 25’ across)
Mixed media
Photo: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.
The work of this artist is part of the archive created by the State of L3
(No part of the Collective)
José Braulio Bedia Valdés (born January 13, 1959 in Havana, Cuba) is a Cuban painter. Bedia studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes “San Alejandro” and then finished his art studies at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana.
His artistic work has been presented in several individual shows, such as ‘”Final del Centauro”‘,1989 , Castillo de la Real Fuerza, Havana, Cuba. In 1994 was presented “José Bedia: De donde vengo”, in the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Also exhibiting at “InSite94: A Binational Exhibition of Installation and Site Specific Art”. San Diego Train Station, San Diego, California.
The works of Atlanta-based artist Radcliffe Bailey have earned the young painter comparisons with other African-American artists, including Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Bailey’s “uneven carpentry, smeared paint, and weathered objects function as window dressing for an examination of the environmental moorings that shape black culture,” wrote Anastasia Aukeman in ARTnews. Thousands see one of Bailey’s most arresting works when they pass through Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport, the second-busiest terminal in the world; it was hung in time for the 1996 Olympic Summer Games.
Few artists achieve such recognition and acclaim so early in their career, but critics have often remarked upon Bailey’s solid training in and incorporation of many European-based artistic traditions, such as the geometric forms of Russian constructivism, along with his ability to bring in subtle, but provoking ideas reflecting the African American experience to his art. “His stance makes it possible for many different kinds of people to relate to his work,” wrote Joe Lewis in Art in America.
Source: Answers.com
Renee Cox: River Queen, from Queen Nanny of the Maroons 2004
Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic: Friday, 29th January 2010 – Sunday, 25th April 2010 in Liverpool UK.
This major exhibition, inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), identifies a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe. The exhibition is the first to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism and will reveal how black artists and intellectuals have played a central role in the formation of Modernism from the early twentieth century to today.
From the influences of African art on the Modernist forms of artists like Picasso, to the work of contemporary artists such as Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher and Chris Ofili, the exhibition will map out visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has arisen from the journeys made by people of Black African descent.
Divided into seven chronological chapters, from early twentieth century avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around ‘Post-Black’ art, this exhibition opens up an alternative transatlantic reading of Modernism and its impact on contemporary culture for a new generation.
One of the most controversial artist at the exibition is photographer mixed-media artist Renee Cox. She is known for her remake of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper with a nude Cox sitting in for Jesus Christ, surrounded by all black disciples, except for Judas who was white. See, Yo Mama’s Last Supper. In 2001 some Roman Catholics and former mayor Rudy Giuliani were not amused.
Tunga (1952, Palmares), is one of the leading Brazilian artists of his generation. His principal media, sculpture, installation and performance, are customarily presented as an integrated body of work which establishes an associative interplay of mirroring and self-reference between the individual pieces. Through rigorously constructed structures, the symbolic and the imaginary perform a decisive role conveying new meanings to familiar objects. His oeuvre’s subversive psychological force carries constructivist and surrealist influences, which delineate his original and sensual territory. Tunga is based in Rio de Janeiro and his work can be seen in permanent collections of major museums and institutions throughout the world, such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and Moderna Museet, in Stockholm.
Source; Wikipedia
The work of this artist is part of the archive created by the State of L3
(No part of the Collective)
Contemporary Arts & Film Collective Exchange Established in 2006
The State of L3 is an Amsterdam based art collective working internationally on art, multimedia exchanges, modern tendencies and political issues.
The State of L3 is founded, curated and directed by Antonio Jose Guzman
Cultural Exchange Coordination by OLAA
The State of L3 archive library collection is originally based on our projects as a collective and the works of international artists who inspire our projects.
The State of L3 is sponsored by:
VSB Fonds
Mondriaan Foundation
Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development
The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture
2010-2011 Exhibitions
Dakar Biennale
Senegal, May
Maison de l’Amérique Latine
Paris, June
Gallery 23
Amsterdam, June/July
Smart Project Space
Amsterdam, July/August
SANAA Gallery
Utrecht, September
M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art
Antwerp, Nov/Dec/Jan
Galleri Image
Vestergade 29
8000 Århus C
“Piertopia”
8 April – 22 May 2011
L3 T shirts designed by Raul Balai are now back and available by popular Demand!
If your work appears in our archive and infringes copyright laws, please contact us and we will remove it immediately.
The State of L3 is a non-profit, educational, noncommercial organization, seeking a worldwide art exchange between artists from different disciplines.
L3 is limited to educational exchange, research, archive, criticism, review, and news reporting. Under the Copyright “fair dealing” U.K, “fair use” U.S.A.
