Museum director David Neuman gives a guided tour of the exhibition Museum Magasin 3 – presentations from the collection – Cosima von Bonin, Per Kirkeby and Tal R. In Swedish.

Curator Richard Julin gives a guided tour of  Andrea Zittel, Lay of my Land

In her lecture Eyecatcher Marijke van Warmerdam talks about her films, photographs and sculptures since the early 1990s. In her work she focuses on the seemingly insignificant and allows these occurrences to widen and deepen into poetic studies. During fall 2011 Magasin 3 presents a selection of van Warmerdam’s films.

Marijke van Warmerdam was born in 1959 in Nieuwer Amstel in the Netherlands. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale and institutions such as Wiener Secession, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, ICA in Boston, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. Her collected works can be seen in a large traveling retrospective starting at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam this fall. Van Warmerdam lives and works in Amsterdam and has a professorship in Karlsruhe at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste.

The artist talks about her work and how she uses her home and studio A–Z West in Joshua Tree, California to explore ideas about what humans need for survival.

Since the early 1990s, I have used the arena of my day to day life to develop and test prototypes for living structures and situations. By using myself as a guinea pig I often use my own experiences to try to construct an understanding of the world at large. The experiments have at times been extreme – such as wearing a uniform for months on end, exploring limitations of living space, living without measured time. However one of the most important goals of this work is to illuminate how we attribute significance to chosen structures or ways of life, and how arbitrary any choice of structure can be. I do not mean to deny the personal significance of these decisions, instead, I use my work in order to try to comprehend values such as “freedom,” “security,” “authorship,” and “expertise.” I am interested in how qualities, which we feel are totally concrete and rational, are often subjective, arbitrary or invented.

/Andrea Zittel

Curator Richard Julin shows Chapter III of the exhibition “Thrice upon a time”.

Sir John Soane: Architecture, Collecting and ‘…the Museum of museums…’

Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the most innovative and forward thinking architects in British history. His house/museum at No.13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, was opened as a museum initially for his students in 1809 and left to the British nation by a special Act of Parliament in 1833. Although trained in the neoclassical tradition, Soane’s work anticipated much of modernist and postmodernist architecture in his approach to style and use of technologically advanced building materials. He was also one of Britain’s most important collectors of art and antiquities creating unprecedented installations of objects within his house. These too have provided inspiration for many contemporary artists.

Whilst looking at Soane’s architectural career this lecture will also focus on his equally important role as a collector, where he distinguished himself in showing contemporary British art to the public when other national museums were reluctant and whose displays of antiquities, paintings and sculpture, installed within the interiors of his house, challenge conventional readings of the nature of neoclassical art.

Jerzy J. Kierkuć-Bieliński is curator at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. Richard Julin, Deputy Director at Magasin 3, will open the lecture by presenting the Magasin 3 collection.

Free admission. Welcome!

Curator Tessa Praun shows Chapter II of the exhibition Thrice upon a time.

What do I look like? What am I like? Who am I? Faces are used to comunicate, be recognized, or be sought after. In the portraits of others be mirror ourselves. Art history has traditionally been most interested in the question of who has been portrayed. In chapter I of the exhibition Thrice upon a time that question is secondary. In this part of the exhibition curator Elisabeth Millqvist has extended the definition and focuses on portraits as contemporary subject matter.

Curator Elisabeth Millqvist gives a special viewing of the exhibition together with invited guests; Karin Sidén who has a PhD in art history and is a curator at Nationalmuseum, Stockholm as well as the artists Gunnel Wåhlstrand, Matts Leiderstam and Cecilia Edefalk who participate in the current exhibition at Magasin 3.

Limited number of participants. The tour is included in the entrance fee.

A unique possibility to visit the studio of the artist Jens Fänge. The studio is situated close to Magasin 3. Curator Tessa Praun will give an introduction to Chapter II of the exhibition Thrice upon a time focusing on Fänge’s art. After the introduction we will visit his studio. Please note that only a limited amount of places are available so booking is essential.

Wouter Davidts will in his lecture ”You specify it, we fabricate it: The art of production” talk about studio production refering to different examples. Starting point will be the conceptualist turn in studio production, a turn that was initiated by Tony Smith’s  ”Die”, a sculpture of which he ordered the production by simply telling the instructions over the phone to the steel company.

Wouter Davidts is professor of modern and contemporary art at VU University in Amsterdam and co-editor of the book “The Fall of the Studio. Artists at Work”. After the lecture follows an artist talk with  Maria Hedlund, Carl Hammoud and curator Tessa Praun from Magasin 3.  They  will share their view on the studio and their work process. Exhibition and café are open from 5 pm. Free admission.

Image taken in Carl Hammoud’s studio.