Feat. works of Fleur Ouwerkerk , Raul Balai, Quinsy Gario and Antonio Jose Guzman

Piertopolis

Official opening of L3’s founder Antonio Jose Guzman new project.

In Collaboration with L3’s Ton van Beers & Raul Balai

Date: Saturday the 27th of August 2011
Time: 17.00 – 20.00 (5PM – 8PM)
Location: Museumwerf ‘t Kromhout
Adress: Hoogte Kadijk 147
City: Amsterdam

Trailer: Piertopolis Trailer

Website: www.piertopolis.com

Facebook: Piertopolis Project

Opening times:
Museumwerf ‘t Kromhout: 14.00 – 20.00 uur (27th August – 1st September)
Tolhuistuin kunstwerk: 12th – 28th August (every day at the Noordkop)

Two Sculptures for one
Piertopolis is an International art project to link and engage people from all around the world to an utopian nation called Piertopolis. By means of participation and collective interaction with the project. Piertopolis is offering a platform for people to connect to a new visual imaginary network.

For Piertopolis Guzman joins forces with L3’s Jeffry Koopman, an artist who works using modern architecture and conceptual images inspired by science fiction. Piertopolis presents two sculptures part of a monumental installation next year in Den Hague’s Gemak De Vrije academie and in Rush Arts Gallery New York City.

Sculpture # 1 Influenced by West African Art, will be presented in The Tolhuistuin and Sculpture # 2 Influenced by Guzman’s recent expeditions to Norway’s Polar Circle and South India will be presented in the Museumwerf ‘t Kromhout. Both spaces are connected to the harbor of Amsterdam. In the installations the artists evokes Joseph Beuys ideas of “artists as shamans, humanists and social reformers”.

Piertopolis would like to create a migration to the Ideal transcultural City. The project as a whole is an attempt to improve the conventional urban scapes.

Piertopolis Project
Exploring the Global Archipelago
NYC – Dakar – Amsterdam – Panama – Mumbai – Bodø

Yatra

A Twenty Year Journey

An exhibition by Antonio Jose Guzman

KNIPSU
10.06 – 26.06

Bergen, Norway
Komediebakken 9

‘I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.’ Joseph Beuys

‘Let’s talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included… something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It’s a Gigantic project.’ Joseph Beuys

YATRA comprises the photographic work of two of Guzman’s latest projects: the Bas Jan Ader and Paul Gilroy inspired research project Piertopolis, and Guzman’s documentary trilogy The Day We Surrender to the Air. Both projects comprehend a search for a new (visual) definition of notions like migration, gravity, locality, ancestry and identity. Taking his own mixed background and his twenty-year experience as photographer and visual artist as an example, Guzman tries to conceive the causes and results of human displacement.

The exhibition at KNIPSU presents Guzman’s ongoing research into DNA, movement and replacement. Focusing on the pier as both a means for connection and separation, Guzman tries to capture the ambivalences that surround the act of traveling. A pier suggests nostalgia and contemplation, as well as hope and relief. The DNA-like shape of a pier expresses change, improvement, and site-specificity.

The tables, photographs and maps of the exhibition contain the material that Guzman gathered and created during his personal journeys to the places of his origin, including his two months residency here in Bergen.

YATRA, Sanskrit for ‘journey’ or ‘destination’ involves the pilgrimage to the sacred places that are associated with Hindu epics. A YATRA is a non-obligatory but yet desirable undertaking, in which the journey is as important as the destination.

Book Launch with “The State of L3”

May 10, 2011
Book Launch with “The State of L3”. 18th May 2011 from 15-17hrs

Place: Galleri Image, Vestergade 29, 8000 Aarhus C., Denmark

After sixteen months of exhibitions research and production, we’re happy to announce that The State of L3 Collective publication it’s now available at Galleri Image. We invite you to a launch party for the publication on Wednesday 18th of May from 15 to 17hrs. at Galleri Image in Aarhus, an initiative of the the State of L3 with Galleri Image curator Beate Cegielska. With writings from Rob Perrée, Siri Driessen, Stine Kleis Hansen and Quinsy Gario. Design by Raul Balai.

At the launch you will be able to experience an interact with the final days of the exhibit, pick up your own full copy and experience the work of The State of L3 Collective.

If you can’t make the launch,  you can order a copy to have it shipped immediately.

ARTIST TALK with the international artist collective The State of L3
Time
01 April · 13:00 – 15:00
Location
Det Jyske Kunstakademi
Mejlgade 32
Aarhus, Denmark
In connection with Galleri Images exhibition “Piertopia” organized by the international artist collective The State of L3, an artist talk will be held at Det Jyske Kunstakademi.

Here the audience will meet the artists’ collective, who will share their unique quest for a common visual language that can demonstrate their unique cultural history, background, and their genetic ties to Africa.

Antonio Jose Guzman and The State of L3 will also talk about their other artistic projects, including the film trilogy “The Day We Surrender To The Air”.

The event is free and everyone is welcome to attend.

www.galleriimage.dk
www.djk.nu

The State of L3 Pan African Contemporary
Arts and Film Collective presents:

Parallel Doors of Perception
26 nov 2010 – 30 jan 2011
Parallel Doors of Perception 26 nov 2010 – 30 jan 2011
M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp

Leuvenstraat 32
2000 Antwerp

Smart Project Space
Modernity & Aesthetics of the New Black Atlantic
The State of L3 Pan African Contemporary Arts & Film Collective
10 Jul 2010 22 Aug 2010
+31204275951
www.smartprojectspace.net
Arie Biemondstraat 105
Amsterdam

SMART Project Space presents Modernity & Aesthetics of the New Black Atlantic, an exhibition by The State of L3 exploring the connection between migration, visual culture and African heritage. Based in Amsterdam, Dakar and Recife, The State of L3 has created a rhizomatic network of artworks and artists working with multimedia exchanges, projects, videos and internet archive.
Check the Photos of Smart Project Space Exhibition:

Historical Antecedents of the
Afro Renaissance
28 Augustus – 25 September
Jansdam 2
3512 HB Utrecht
the Netherlands
+31 (0)30 2367242
info@galeriesanaa.n

3 min. video interview with A.J. Guzman
about The State of L3 Collective Worldwide Installations

Mémoires de la Négritude: installation (objects, photo, video)
State of L3 Pan African Contemporary Arts & Film Collective
(Brazil, Netherlands, Senegal).
Galerie 23 Amsterdam
27 June – 20 July 2010
Migration has always been a very productive resource for art and aesthetics. Cultures formed and deformed by the coming and going of migrants and travellers. As an international collective based in the African Diaspora, The State of L3 approaches this notion of migration from an African perspective. From our bases in Amsterdam (Holland), Dakar (Senegal) and Recife (Brazil), we are creating an ever-expanding network of artists and artworks that investigate African migration and its aesthetics.

Through our multimedia exchange projects, videos and an internet archive, we try to understand the connection between migration, visual culture, and Africa heritage. Can we speak of an African collective memory? Can we find new ways to think about African identity, considering that we are dispersed all over the world? How can we express and visualize this identity? How do we relate to our aesthetic history?

NRC Handelsblad

zondag 15 augustus 2010 door Sandra Smallenburg

Link to the NRC Article

Images of the installation in Gallery 23:

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)

Giordana Jansen Perret-Gentil 4 State of L3

A.J. Guzman with Armin Kane Dakar 4 State of L3

Niel Fortune 4 State of L3

Siri Driessen & Roos Van Haaften

Raul Balai 4 State of L3

Mateus Sá (Canal03) 4 State of L3

Beto Figueiroa (Canal03) 4 State of L3

Beto Figueiroa (Canal03) 4 State of L3

Siri Driessen Research Images 4 State of L3

Isha Stuart 4 State of L3 Flying Boat

Radcliffe Bailey

Storm at Sea, 2006 Piano keys, African sculpture, model boat, paper, acrylic, glitter, and gold leaf 212 x 213 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York © Radcliffe Bailey

The work of this artist is part of the archive created by the State of L3
(No part of the Collective)

Tess & Armin Kane in Dakar working on the car covers of L3

Galerie 23 ready to host L3

Armin Kane Celebration Figures 4 State of L3

Radcliffe Bailey

Storm at Sea, 2006 Piano keys, African sculpture, model boat, paper, acrylic, glitter, and gold leaf 212 x 213 inches
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York © Radcliffe Bailey

The work of this artist is part of the archive created by the State of L3
(No part of the Collective)

Gustavo Araújo

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)

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