Interview

Daniel Mirer was born in Brooklyn New York, currently resides in Bay Area of California where he works as an artist/photographer and educator. Mirer received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute and his Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the California Institute of the Arts.

Mirer has participated in numerous artist-in-residency programs including the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ Artists in the Marketplace, Baxter Street at CCNY, Workspace Residency Program in New York City and the Starry Night Artist Residence in New Mexico. Mirer was also the recipient of the New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for photography and the Dana Artist Fellowship for continuing education. The Kunststiftung (Art Foundation) North Rhine Westphalia & Landesverband Westfalen-Lippe (Foundation for the Region of Westfalia- Lippe to begin the creation of a body of work titled “Thingstätten in Deutschland.”

Mirer has taught photography at institutions including Fashion Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, Tampere Polytechnic School of Art & Media Finland and Webster University Leiden, Netherlands.

Daniel Mirer is currently represented by Elliott Halls Gallery in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Joël Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He lives and works between Antananarivo and Paris, France.

Andrianomearisoa originally studied at the Institut Métiers Arts Plastiques. He obtained a diploma degree in architecture from Ecole Speciale d’Architecture, Paris, France in 2003.

Solo presentations include: De Profundis, Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid, Spain (2015); Je ne suis plus une femme noire, Kinani Festival, Maputo, Mozambique (2015); a special project in Tu M’Aimes at the  Bamako Encounters Biennial of African Photography, Mali (2015); Perfection, the grave of our own existence, Mikael Andersen, Berlin, Germany (2014); Sentimental, Maison Revue Noire, Paris, France (2013); Une Histoire, Centre Culturel Albert Camus, Antananarivo (2008) and Black Out,mentalKLINIK project space, Istanbul (2007).

Born in 1984 in Antananarivo, Madagascar, Curator Rina Ralay-Ranaivo lives and works between Antananarivo and Berlin.Rina Ralay-Ranaivo started his career at the Institut Français of Madagascar. For twelve years (2006 to 2018) ha was in charge of the artistic programming of this flagship institution of Malagasy cultural life.

This transversal work enabled him to design  produce and manage several projects in the field of visual arts and dance. It gave him the opportunity to work with countless Malagasy artists (Joël Andrianomearisoa, Madame Zo, Rijasolo, Ariry Andriamoratsiresy, Pierrot Men, Christiane Ramanantsoa), Pan-African artists (Kettly Noël, Omar Viktor Diop, Ballaké Sissoko) Oceanic artists (Pascal Montrouge, Hans Nayna, Davy Sicard…) and artists from Europe (Claude Brumachon, Moise Touré, Bernardo Montet, Pascal Maitre, The Shopping)

Rina Ralay-Ranaivo is also a visual artist and his work has been shown in art centers and contemporary art events in Africa and Europe. He has curated several exhibitions, all in his country, the most important of which is entitled “Ici la limite du royaume est la mer” (2018): a collective and retrospective exhibition of the last twenty years of the history of Malagasy contemporary artistic expressions.

Previously, Rina Ralay-Ranaivo had been a cultural journalist for the Malagasy newspaper La Gazette de la Grande Ile (2003 to 2005), after studying Information Science and Communication at the University of Antananarivo. This proposal by the Ministry of Culture and Joël Andrianomearisoa to curate the Malagasy Pavilion at the 58th edition of La Biennale di Venezia is an essential mission for several obvious reasons.

It is a tremendous honour that comes at the right moment, on the eve of a new orientation in my career. It is also a commitment that I accepted out of friendship, for the artist and for the association Revue Noire, with whom I have maintained both a complicity and a working relationship for about fifteen years.

This invitation to write together, in a dialogue and collectively, a page in the history of Malagasy arts is an act that brings us even closer together. This curation is an unprecedented exercise: interacting intimately with the artist on his way of making poetry, drama, emotion and give them shape.

Finally, it is a personal source of pride to be able to participate in this project and to bring this work on aesthetics – deeply Malagasy in its soul and in its approach – to a prestigious event with worldwide outreach.

Agustin Pérez Rubio was born in Valencia, Spain in 1972. He has a degree in art history from the Universidad de Valencia . He has curated over one hundred and fifty exhibitions at important museums and art centres, biennales, etc. mainly in Europe and Latin America. Before he was Chief curator and Director of MUSAC 2003- 2013, he organized monographic exhibitions of major artists like Pierre Huyghe, Julie Mehretu, Dora García, Pipiloti Rist, Sejima + Nishizawa / SANAA, Elmgreen and Dragset, Harun Farocki, Dave Muller, Ana Laura Aláez, Ugo Rondinone, Azucena Vietes and Lara Almarcegui. Later, as an independent curator, he curated projects that include solo shows by artists such as SUPERFLEX, Sophie Calle, Nestor Sanmiguel Diest, Rosangela Rennó, Carlos Garaicoa, and many group shows thematically related to gender, linguistics, architecture and politics. He is currently a member of the board of Istanbul Biennial and CIMAM for the period 2017-2019.

He has been the Artistic Director of MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires since May 2014, where he developed a socio-political programme dedicated to female Latin- American artists that already included the exhibitions of Teresa Burga, Annemarie Heinrich and Claudia Andujar plus the ones planned for the future. In addition, Pérez Rubio worked together with Andrea Giunta, on a new curatorial script of MALBA’s collection titled VERBOAMERICA a postcolonial revision of the Collection. He curated solo shows of artists such as Jorge Macchi, Yoko Ono, Voluspa Jarpa, Carlos Motta, Alexander Apóstol and the retrospective show of the collective “General Idea: Broken Time” which will tour though Latin America. He is the curator of the Chilean Pavillion at 58th Venice Biennale with the decolonial project of the female artist Voluspa Jarpa and one of the curators for the 11th Berlin Biennale 2020.

Gözde Kırksekiz (Istanbul & Cappadocia), is an Interdisciplinary artist.

As Stuart Hall mentions, “Identities are the names we give the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within the narratives of the past.” Identifying a location, a body, a room, a house, a society which molds you or a country which separates you from the others is the same as identifying your identity.

Since 2005, I’ve been using environments that are both mine and not in my art works. I have been using my new relationships and the adaptation period within them. I have been making observations regarding people, situations, memory and identity. I strive to preserve my identity within my connections with these people and places. I use my memory as my location and aim to constantly transfer my ever changing concepts into and this is why it is crucially important to me.

The most important factors which define our identity (religion, language, race, and family) also play a vital role in defining our characters. Our characters which we can also identify as our essence, are bound to change as we communicate and interact with other people. I believe all these changes happen in accordance with what we have coded as appropriate and acceptable through our life experiences. These are the moments where the memories come in to the play. Using the “materials” I inherited, I aim to define subjects such as belonging, being disposed, processes of adaptation, finding one’s self and communication. I sometimes use fictional ideas alongside my own real life experiences to define these subjects.

My focus shifts between being tied down to a location and being ripped away from it and what lies in the middle of the relationships occurring between. The reason for the contradiction between form and content in my work, lies in the belief that it’s not whether you win or lose but that the actual importance is in the journey. This is the reason behind my preference for adapting childhood games- which have no winner or loser- in my performances.

If I were to describe the environments I created in my work, I would say they are a collection of feelings taking place in the present. I use my memories as a bridge between my past and present. I use my past experiences to create moral codes which help me make decisions in my present life. As a result I do not use these codes to define and reminisce about my past but rather to live my present life. Because of this bridge between my past and present, all my actions take place in the present tense. Just like with time, these environments I create are neutralised by reason and understanding. In some instances these locations are more complicated than time and memory itself. They have a direction, a shape and repeatable order which make it easier for us to naturalise these locations.

With this perception, it is correct to assume that the environments I create in my works are not a product of anything physical but are a result of a wide collection of memories that I have accumulated.

I create autobiographic works that reflect my feelings generated by homelessness and a nomadic life. Since 2012, I have been creating a great number of performances, installations and videos exhibited in collective shows. In 2015, I have curated the PEFORMATIVITY WAVE week-long event in Den Bosch / The Netherlands under the theme “Where Should I Go Now” in Artots Gallery, also having my own works exhibited as artist-in-residence. From 2015 on, I started leaning towards more universal issues as environment, communications and relationships etc.