Claire Fontaine

Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective artist, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today. But if the artist herself is the subjective equivalent of a urinal or a Brillo box - as displaced, deprived of its use value, and exchangeable as the products she makes - there is always the possibility of what she calls the “human strike.” Claire Fontaine uses her freshness and youth to make herself a whatever-singularity and an existential terrorist in search of subjective emancipation. She grows up among the ruins of the notion of authorship, experimenting with collective protocols of production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.

http://www.clairefontaine.ws/index.html

Arte Calle

Ana Mendieta focused on a spiritual and physical connection with the land, most particularly in her “Silueta” pieces, which typically involved carving her imprint into sand or mud, making body prints or painting her outline or silhouette onto a wall. Her “Body Tracks” Series were made it in this period.

http://www.ofillart.com

Machine Project

 Machine Project is a storefront space in the echo park neighborhood of Los Angeles that hosts events about all kinds of things we find interesting – scientific talks, poetry readings, musical performances, competitions, group naps, cheese tastings and so forth.

machine@machineproject.com

http://machineproject.com/

Art & Language

Art & Language is a shifting collaboration among conceptual artists that has undergone many changes since its inception in the late 1960s. Their early work, as well as their journal Art-Language, first published in 1969, is regarded as an important influence on much conceptual art both in the United Kingdom and in the United States.

Boat People

Boat-people.org is an Australian art gang which has been making work about race, nation, borders and history since 2001.

The government of that time, led by Prime Minister John Howard, exploited the deep vein of xenophobia in this profoundly colonised nation. Their rhetoric of ‘illegal migrants’, and ‘boat people’ took hold of the national imagination, so that the majority of Australians supported the incarceration of refugees and their children in detention camps.

In the 2001 election campaign, the expression, ‘boat people’, was continuously employed by politicians to demonise asylum seekers fleeing Afghanistan and Iraq. The inspiration for subversively re-using the term was Aboriginal activist Rebecca Bear Wingfield, who had memorably addressed all non-indigenous attendees of a local conference as ‘boat people’.

That government went on to rewrite Australian history from an Anglocentric perspective, denying the injustices of our past: preferring silence and amnesia to the kind of story-telling which might nuance and deepen our national narratives. Boat-people.org was formed in response to such policies, which over the past 12 years profoundly harmed the emergence of a multicultural and tolerant society.

http://www.boat-people.org/

Temporary Services

 ABOUT US http://www.temporaryservices.org/

Temporary Services is Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. We are based in Chicago and Copenhagen and have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.

The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public.

Jewish Art Salon

The Jewish Art Salon is an open and an innovative community of artists, and art professionals. We have informal meetings once a month to discuss our work, life, Jewish themes inherent in our art and the multiplicity of impetus and inspiration for our work.

We organize high-quality, original exhibitions, panel discussions and other events with leading international artists and scholars. Upcoming exhibits are planned for New York, Los Angeles and Detroit.

http://www.jewishartsalon.com/

Brown Council

Brown Council is the collaborative practice of Sydney-based artists Fran Barrett, Kate Blackmore, Kelly Doley and Diana Smith. Since 2007, they have collectively made performance and video works that straddle the contexts of gallery and stage, and draw on the historical lineages of both the visual and performing arts. Their work engages with concepts of spectacle and endurance, as well as the dialogue between ‘liveness’ and the performance document or trace. Starting from simple conceptual provocations devised in group discussions, Brown Council combine elements from high and popular culture with moments from the everyday to create works that critique why and how it is that we perform. Often switching roles amongst members or outsourcing the performance to hired help, Brown Council complicate distinctions between actor and performance artist, performer and self, and the role of the audience as passive observer or active participant.ant.

Contact: browncouncilmail@gmail.com

http://browncouncil.com/

Bernadette Corporation

It is the summer of 2001, and the New York—and Paris-based collective known as Bernadette Corporation has temporarily merged with Le Parti Imaginaire, a faction of post-Situationist militants and intellectuals with links to the burgeoning antiglobalization movement. The two groups have their own distinct practices and motivations, but, for the moment, they are united by the idea of making a film, which is to be set in the seaside Italian city of Genoa, amid the protests and stultifying inconclusiveness that will engulf the G8 Summit that July. The film resists knowing what it is or wants to be. And so its makers improvise, exploring what they call the “potential of community based on a radical refusal of political identity.”

http://www.bernadettecorporation.com/

Assume Vivid Astro Focus

assume vivid astro focus  the name of an international group of visual and performance artists, with French multimedia artist Christophe Hamaide-Pierson one of the main collaborators. Sudbrack was born in 1968 and moved to New York in 1998.

Sudbrack first exhibited in New York in 2000, at which time he used the name Superastrolab, switching to assume vivid astro focus in 2001, the name always rendered in lowercase. avaf’s work includes painting, drawing, photography, film and digital technology.

avaf has been featured in Art Forum, Frieze, Flash Art, L’Uomo Vogue, V Magazine, W Magazine, and a catalogue was recently published by the Whitney Museum of American Art for the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

avaf is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawing Collection.

avaf is currently based in New York and Paris, and is represented by John Connelly Presents, New York, and Peres Projects, Berlin/LA.

http://www.cheapcream.com/