LABORAL - CENTRO DE ARTE Y CREACIÓN INDUSTRIAL

BIOGRAPHIES

Steven Bode

Curator of the exhibition. Director of Film and Video Umbrella, a London-based agency who are Britain’s main Commissioners of artists’ film and video work. During his time in that role (which spans from 1993 to the present), he has initiated well over a hundred different projects, including major new works from internationally-acclaimed artists such as Isaac Julien, Gillian Wearing, Jane & Louise Wilson, Johan Grimonprez, Daria Martin, Dryden Goodwin and Mark Lewis. Alongside this commissioning activity, he has also curated a number of other exhibitions such as Airport (with Jeremy Millar), The Other Side of Zero (for Video Positive, Liverpool), and New Video from Great Britain (for MoMA, New York). He has written extensively about video, film and contemporary art for several publications, and has contributed essays to many artists’ monographs. 

Axel Antas (Finland, 1976)

He studied in London, where he now lives and works. He has exhibited widely in Europe, recently with solo exhibitions at Rokeby gallery in London and Heino Gallery in Helsinki. His work is currently on display e.g. in Landscape collection at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. Antas has been nominated for the third annual BMW Photography Prize at Paris Photo 2006, where he is represented by Heino Gallery. “Hovering between magic and manipulation, capture and production of nature, these works by Antas make us question what we see in the green spaces around us. They challenge vision, make it aware of its limits, its own position in the middle of the scene. The fog with all its nearsupernatural romantic associations and the near-blank canvas calling for projections while, simultaneously, tempting one closer – both draw attention to what happens between the viewer and the view. It is in this close encounter that the events of the scenes take place”. (Taru Elfving).

http://www.axelantas.co.uk/

Ibon Aranberri (Itziar-Deba, Guipúzcoa, 1969)

Studied Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of the Basque Country, NABA, Milan, and CCAKitakyushu, Japan. Recent solo exhibitioNs and projects: Disorder, Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2008; Integration, Kunsthalle Basel, 2007; Found dead, Galería Pepe Cobo, Madrid, 2007; On working with (Ir.T.nº 513) the cave, Iaspis, Stockholm, 2006; Cavity, Isabella Bortolozzi galerie, Berlin, 2005. Other participations include: Revolutions - Forms That Turn. 16th Biennale of Sydney, 2008; Greenwashing: pericoli, promese e perplessità, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2008; The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art, Barbican Gallery, London, 2008; Documenta 12, Kassel, 2007; The Routines of Resistance, Several ways out, UKS, Oslo, 2006; Cork Caucus, National Sculpture Factory, Cork, Ireland, 2005; Be what you want but stay where you are, Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2005; Desacuerdos, Macba, Barcelona, 2005; Die Regierung, ecession, Viena, 2005; Teasing Minds, Kunstverein Munich, 2004; Organisational Form, Skuc Gallery, Ljubljana, 2003; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, 2002. He is currently preparing a solo exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, for spring 2009.

Ergin Çavusoglu (Bulgaria, 1968)

Ergin studied fine arts at The National School of Fine Arts Iliya Petrov, Sofia, in the early 1980s. He consequently received a BA in mural painting from the University of Marmara, Istanbul, and an MA from Goldsmiths, London, where he now lives and works. Central to his practice are concepts and themes that probe the notion of place, explored in his multiple channel video and sound installations. Many of his works centre on ideas of ephemerality, rhythm, transience and mobility. He represented Turkey at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and received widespread public attention in 2004 when he was short-listed for the Beck’s Futures Prize. Recent exhibitions include Place after Place, Kunstverein Freiburg; Quintet Without Borders, Best of Discovery, ShContemporary, Shanghai; Haunch of Venison, Zurich; Point of Departure,
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; NGCA Sunderland, All Inclusive – A Tourist World, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Entanglement, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee; the 8th Istanbul Biennial; Brit ish Art Show 6
and the 3rd Berlin Biennial.

Gabriel Díaz (Pamplona, 1968)

He lives and works in Madrid. Although he was educated as a sculptor, at the beginning of 1990s Gabriel Díaz appropriated the poetics of land art through interventions in rock or with ice pieces. His origins have an expressive “stripping away” characteristic of the minimal added to the conceptual density of object art and of land art, although also influenced by the ethical-aesthetical ideology of Oteiza.
During his sculptural stage, Gabriel Díaz already combined human and cosmic values pointing at the return to the traditional reciprocity of arts and sciences. Indeed, therein lies one of the artist’s most peculiar features, namely, his will to combine fields of knowledge, to enter into dialogue with disciplines ranging from aesthetics, physics, geology or Zen wisdom. Thus, Gabriel Díaz soon began to explore other artistic media and created his first video in 1999. His first works are shot in caves, caverns, ice grottos or natural water sluices with a view to creating works which combine his preference for nature and the notions of inner/exterior, input/output or empty/full as a metaphor for the artist’s inner pursuit. This is the pursuit which took Gabriel Díaz to Tibet where he found a more
categorical concordance between the grandeur of the earth and the essence of the being itself. This journey results in El aliento de Chomolugma, a polyptych featuring the north face of Everest in four different moments configuring a unity with continuously moving clouds and shadows revealing and hiding a dynamics which contrasts with the solid stillness of the mountain. Gabriel Díaz has exhibited in major centres such as MNCARS,
Guggenheim Bilbao or Artium in Vitoria. His work is represented in collections such as Fundación La Caixa, Artium, MUSAC, Fundación Caja de Madrid and Fundación AENA, to name a few.

A K Dolven (Norway, 1953)

A K received her education at École des Beaux- Arts, Aix-en-Provence, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris and at the National Academy of the Arts in Oslo. In 1997, she moved to Berlin with the aid of a DAAD and Norwegian government grant, and she lived there for almost a decade. She has lived and worked in London for the last ten years, but has kept her Arctic home and studio in the Lofoten Islands throughout her career. In her work, Dolven often connects the contemporary life and the habits of the city with the seemingly anachronistic locations of the Arctic. In addition to video and film, Dolven also works in painting, graphics, photography and installation. She considers concepts as the central aspect of her work, while she regards the technical elements as a means. She is one of Norway’s foremost contemporary international artists. Dolven has exhibited widely in many prestigious international galleries and institutions, including Bergen Kunsthall, South London Gallery, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Nurnberg and Kunsthalle Bern. Her work is represented in collections such as Art Institute of Chicago, Goetz Collection, Munich, Hoffman Collection, Berlin. In 2000, she was awarded the German Fred-Thieler Prize and in 2005, the Prins Eugen medal in Sweden. In Spain, she held a solo show in DA2 Domus in Salamanca in 2004, and her work is in the Fundación Salamanca Ciudad de Cultura. The work ahead, co-commissioned by LABoral and Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum Tromsø, will be on show in both institutions between December 2008 and March 2009.

www.akdolven.com

Simon Faithfull (Ipsden, Great Britain, 1970)

Simon lives in Berlin, teaches at the Slade School of Art in London and works with drawing, video and writing. The first visual artist to be awarded an Arts Council fellowship to Antarctica, he travelled with scientists and technicians on the research vessel RSS Earnest Shackleton in 2004/2005. “Like Darwin's dispatches from the Beagle” is how the New Yorker described Faithfull's electronic drawings, emailed to subscribers during the two-month voyage. Ice Blink, the subsequent exhibition, toured to New York, London and Edinburgh. Recently he took part in the Whitstable Biennale with LOST, an inventory of missing things. Simon’s drawings and installations have been in numerous international solo & group exhibitions over the last seven years. His practice as an artist has been as varied and unstable as some of his experiments, ranging from installations such the Hertford Union (where he punctured the Chisenhale Gallery’s wall to pump in water from the unseen canal) to video works such as 30 Km (which uses a camera attached to a weather balloon to record a journey from his face to the edge of space). The other side to his practice utilises a Palm Pilot as a crude drawing device that enables digital sketches to be made in situ and dispatched out to the world via email or the web, the Palm Pilot as a psychogeographer’s mapping tool.

http://www.simonfaithfull.org/

Annabel Howland (United Kingdom)

She has been living and working in Amsterdam since 1992. She has exhibited her distinctive photographic cutouts internationally. Her singular approach to photography has led to various projects in the Netherlands including a large cut-out work at TENT. for the Rotterdam Photo Biennial (2003) and two major public art commissions (SLAZ, Amsterdam). Her most recent exhibitions in the UK were at King’s Lynn Arts Centre and Babylon Gallery Ely (2006, commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella and NSAD). Others include Perspective 2002 at Ormeau Baths, Belfast, and Landscape Trauma in the Age of Scopophilia, Café Gallery, London (commissioned by Autograph abp). In the Czech Republic she has exhibited at Futura, Prague, and was
commissioned to make a large cut-out for Castle Trebesice. North American venues for her installations have included Centre Vu, Québec; SKOL, Montreal (Mois de la Photo à Montréal); Hotel New York, PS1, New York; and Raid Projects, Los Angeles.

www.annabelhowland.nl

Roberto Lorenzo (Asturias, Spain)

Roberto Lorenzo is a multimedia artist, teacher and audiovisual researcher living in Oviedo. He works on multimedia and video projects as a freelance artist, and as a VJ (under the name Rob Loren) in some of the most outstanding festivals in Spain. He graduated in Graphic Design from the School of Arts of Oviedo and studied CAD at the School of Engineering and Design of Llanera. Roberto Lorenzo not only works on visual works for electronic music events, but he has also helped to promote the generic space of creative possibilities interconnecting images, movement and music. He received a grant from Cajastur, and was also awarded with a touring solo exhibition in its various exhibition halls, together with an installation at the Ancient Cultural Institute of Gijon and group shows at the Galería Vértice in Oviedo and Espacio Líquido in Gijon.
The organization of the annual festival of art and new tendencies Visionica in Oviedo is one of his most personal projects so far.

www.robloren.net

Andres Lutz (Wettingen, Switzerland, 1968)& Anders Guggisberg (Biel, Switzerland, 1966)

Both live and work in Zurich. Their collaboration started in 1996, when they did a living–room like installation in small gallery in Zurich. From then on, a work began to develop that consists of all thinkable media: sculptures, installations, videos, paintings, texts and music. They keep an eye on local and global cultures and the tensions between them. They are interested in history and how it is created. They try to widen their view on what is happening on the surface of the earth looked at from outer space. They show their work in galleries and museums all over the world. They were part of the Sharjah Biennial 8. In 2008, they had solo shows at the Kunsthaus Aarau in Switzerland, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham UK and at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. They have been commissioned with a large scale installation at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris in 2009. 

www.lutz-guggisberg.com

Alexander and Susan Maris (United Kingdom)

Alexander and Susan have been working together for more than 18 years. They describe themselves as ‘post urban’ artists for the position themselves outside our culture, almost like visitors from the future, with a detached position from which to view our world and our relationship to it.
Their studio is Rannoch Moor, a vast wilderness in the heart of Scotland, and much of their work, from planting trees to learning to fly fish, is connected with such definitive examples of place. For example, they have been planting seeds of the original primeval forest on the moor for the past six years - each seed being given its own precise GPS location to create a 'virtual' forest. The Marises may adopt whole landscapes as a space for production, and their medium might be an ‘unclimbed mountain‘, or in the case of Urriellu, a mountain that is a cultural focal point. In Uriel they have created a timeless ‘book of hours’ where the mountain is invited to instruct us in the cyclic nature of existence.

Simon Pope (United Kingdom, 1966)

He is an artist and Reader in Fine Art at Cardiff School of Art & Design. His recent work investigates the conventions of walking and landscape – walking with others, entering into dialogue to construct representations of landscape. Other work includes Painting from Memory (2008), The Memorial Walks (2007), London Bridge Recall (2007) and Gallery Space Recall (2006). Pope represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, 2003. His research project Walking Together is a study of the modes of sociality and walking in contemporary art practice, supported by Transmedia, Brussels. Simon lives in London.

www.ambulantscience.org

Erika Tan (Singapore, 1967)

Erika is an artist, curator, writer and researcher based in London. Her practice has evolved from an interest in anthropology and the moving image and is often informed by specific cultural, geographical or physical contexts. Her work has been exhibited internationally and included in the 2006 Singapore Biennale; Thermocline of Art - New Asian Waves, ZKM, Germany; and Cities on the Move at The Hayward Gallery, London. Erika has worked on commissions with Film & Video Umbrella, Picture This, BBC Radio London, Channel 4, creating both permanent and temporary projects in the UK and abroad. Her recent writing projects include And Now China? A special issue of Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, www.ctrlp-rtjournal.org and a Manchester Cornerhouse linked web publishing project Sites of Production: Asian Travelogues [http://sitesofproduction.wordpress.com/]. Erika is associated with TrAIN, the Research Centre for Transnational, Art, Identity and Nation (University of the Arts, London) where she is currently researching the transnational manoeuvring(s) of artists and she teaches on the BA Fine Arts Central Saint Martin’s School of Art, London.

www.norwichgallery.co.uk