Artist-run spaces are an integral part of a vibrant art community. From microcinemas to warehouse spaces to apartment galleries, no healthy art ecosystem can exist without some forms of independent and DIY organizations. With this thought in mind, we are pleased to present the VDB TV program, This Must Be the Space: A Video Conversation on Artist-Run and Artist-Inhabited Spaces, programmed by Emily Eddy, the director of Chicago’s Nightingale Cinema which recently closed their physical space of 14 years. 

Emily has also written a delightful and insightful accompanying essay that chronicles some of the Nightingale’s history and ties it into several ideas explored in the works featured in the program by Videofreex, Nazli Dinçel, Glenn Belverio, George Kuchar, Anne McGuire, and Tom Rubnitz. The works range in dates from 1971-2016, consist of disparate styles, and focus on a variety of scenes, but they all illustrate aspects of why the experimentation of the artist-run space is vital in our communities. 

We are pleased to introduce and welcome artist Jessica Bardsley to the collection through interview as a part of our ongoing series, VDB Asks!

Jessica Bardsley is an artist-scholar working across film, writing, and studio art. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University and a Visiting Fellow in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University. Her films have screened within the U.S. and internationally at festivals like CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, EMAF, Flaherty NYC, RIDM, True/False, and many more. She is the recipient of various awards, including a Princess Grace Award, Grand Prize at 25FPS, the Eileen Maitland Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Best Short Film at Punto de Vista, and numerous Film Study Center fellowships. Her research and writing have been supported by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies. She received a Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Read the interview to learn more about her life and practice!

We recently went to Guinea Bissau to research the guerrilla schools of the mangroves. Instead, we soon became ourselves the apprentices and the first lesson we had to learn was how to walk. If you walk straight, placing your heels on the ground first, you promptly slip and fall in the dams of the flooded mangrove rice field or you get stuck in the mangrove mud. You need to lower your body, flex your knees and stick your toes vertically into the mud, extend your arms forwards in a conscious and present movement. In the mangrove school the learning happens with the whole body.

In the beginning was the weave, and the transmission of its workings, a curse of mortality—so ends Quantum Creole with the fabulous words of the Papel weaver, Zé Interpretador.

While the Punch-card technology, designed for the textile loom was fundamental for the development of the computer, the binary code is closer to the ancient act of weaving than to that of writing.

Congratulations to Renée Green, who won the Finkenwerder Art Prize 2022, hosted by Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste (HfbK). According to HfbK, “the jury chose an internationally renowned position who has been known for complex conceptual installations since the early 1990s. As a traveler, Renée Green collects experiences, stories and knowledge in different places and puts them into a living connection with each other. Spoken and written language–documentary, poetic, fictional–finds expression on textiles and paintings, on documents, notes and photographs, in books, audio pieces and videos. Meanings thus become fluid, insights questioned. Her work ranges in thematic diversity from music and pop culture, film and literature, to site specificity and architecture, migration, legacies of displacement, and feminism.” As part of the award, HfbK is hosting a solo exhibition of Green’s work: Vide ma tête/Selection/Combination: All Variable Elements; Green reconfigured the newly built Galerie der HfbK in Hamburg and presented her new Space Poem #8 (Vide ma tête) in a library-like environment featuring all the publications by the artist, which now form part of HfbK’s Library collection.

In advance of this year’s career-spanning survey show at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, Poland, Susan Mogul offers viewers a tantalizing preview in the exhibition, Susan Mogul: Sneak Peek at the As-Is Gallery in Los Angeles, California from June 11, 2022 to July 23, 2022.

Tony Cokes' first solo exhibition in Germany, Fragments, or just Moments, is now open at Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany from June 10, 2022 to September 11, 2022. Taking the historical connection between the two closely located exhibition sites as a point of departure, Cokes presents newly commissioned works that span both institutions and the public space in between. The new series, entitled “Some Munich Moments 1937–1972” (2022), traces the politics of two different visual and rhetoric regimes that have materialized within the shared history of both venues, Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein München.

Nancy Holt's exhibition Inside Outside explores the artist’s rich artistic legacy through a selection of works spanning 1967 to 1992. This is the most extensive European survey and the most ambitious exhibition of her work to date. Perceptions and demarcations of being “inside” and “outside” guide this survey exhibition. The exhibition will be on view at Bildmuseet in Umeå, Sweden from June 17, 2022 to February 12, 2023.