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FABRICA AND COLORS GO TO KOREA
Two exhibitions of Fabrica and Colors in Seoul, in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute-Seoul
When: 14 November, 2006
Where: Seoul, Korea
What: Exhibition
COLORS – 15/69
15 years in 69 covers
at the National Library of Korea
from November 14 to December 9 2006
The first issue of COLORS featured a photograph of a newborn baby girl with her umbilical cord still attached to her mother. On one of the most recent issues there’s the calm, dignified face of an AIDS victim. Life and death: the whole history of COLORS is contained in these two extremes and maybe a piece of history of these past years as well. 69 covers, some ironic and fun, others harsh and shocking, that reveal the theme of an issue with a single image.
COLORS was founded in 1991, before internet (the first editorial mentions the fax machine as one of the new technologies making the planet smaller...) and nobody could have imagined that we would end up here. There was a company – and fortunately it’s still here – that had been breaking the rules of advertising for several years and had been building its image in a ground breaking way. The product had slowly disappeared from its campaigns to make room for ideas. But the ideas had become so important that it was getting more and more difficult to confine them to a poster or an advertising page. They needed a whole magazine, preferably a new and different one, that wasn’t about fashion, famous people or current affairs – a magazine that used images to talk about the world through important themes, founded around a unique, great idea: difference is a positive thing and all cultures have the same dignity. And so COLORS was born, “a magazine about the rest of the world”, where the concept of central and peripheral become relative, they merge and lose all meaning.
Over the past 15 years COLORS has seen many changes. Its nomadic editorial offices have moved from New York to Rome, then to Paris and Treviso – where in the interim Fabrica, the Benetton group’s communication research center, was founded – with a few interesting parenthesis: a small town in Cuba, Baracoa, and a refugee camp in Lukole, Tanzania. Then back to New York and finally back to Treviso. In actual fact the COLORS editorial team doesn’t have a real base and it survives mostly thanks to contributions from over 70 correspondents worldwide who offer a different point of view each time. The people have changed – from Oliviero Toscani and Tibor Kalman to all the people who have contributed over the years. The formats and themes have changed. And the world has changed and is changing and so has the method of producing COLORS: from the fast information and “pop” graphic design of the early issues – that has been made obsolete by the internet – to more in-depth, reflective writing, clean design and images taken almost entirely by COLORS photographers, who have contributed to changing the way of producing reportage photography – as the prestigious World Press Photo recently acknowledged.
COLORS has changed, but maybe it has simply changed in order to remain true to itself, to remain faithful to that unique, great idea at its core; the positive value of diversity. These 69 covers talk in different ways about different themes – shopping, war, food, AIDS, slavery, animals, prison, Telenovelas, toys and madness. Ultimately they say exactly what they want to say.
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FABRICA: I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU
An exhibition of Interactive and Relational Artworks
Triad New Media Gallery
from November 16 to December 17 2006
I've been waiting for you is a major exhibition of interactive art created by Fabrica at the Triad Gallery, Seoul, as part of the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale. The exhibition will open on November 16 2006 and run until December 17 2006.
The 4th Seoul International Biennale is called 'Dual Realities'. The artistic director is Wonil Rhee, chief curator of the Seoul Museum of Art and a curator of the Shanghai Biennale.
The interactive works proposed by Fabrica for Seoul have been selected to reflect recent movements in contemporary art practice. I've been waiting for you situates new interactive art practices within the wider framework of contemporary critical discourses. The artworks presented in the exhibition encourage the viewers to become creative participants in the work and to negotiate the relationship between technology and artistic expression. These works investigate new forms of representation and challenge the viewer with the questions: 'what is art' and 'what is interactive art'?
Over the past 5 years Fabrica has built a reputation for innovation in interactive art and design. The creative focus at Fabrica is not on new technology, but on new languages of communication. In October 2006 Fabrica opened a major exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris to popular and critical acclaim. Several of the interactive pieces featured at the Pompidou are included as part of 'I've been waiting for you' in Seoul.
I’ve been waiting for you features recent works in interactive media developed by artists at Fabrica. These works share a preoccupation with creating connections and relationships: among the artists, between the artists and the audience, between the audience and the artwork, and among the audience themselves.
The title I’ve been waiting for you signifies an unfulfilled relationship, an unbalanced equation, a situation in need of another person. I’ve been waiting for you is a show where the artwork is unstable – where the exhibited works are only the catalyst for the creation of a sense of sociability, and in which the viewer is required to play the protagonist and complete the work. This show demands intervention from the audience and in turn offers the resulting encounter as the art itself.
Although each installation in the exhibition uses at least one computer, I’ve been waiting for you is not about technology, but rather about the things which technologies allow us to do. The show reflects the emerging aesthetics of media arts in which networks, interfaces and sensors play an increasingly important role in the creative process. However, I’ve been waiting for you is primarily informed by older debates about the nature of art, the artist and the audience, reaching back from Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’ through Fluxus and beyond, whilst at the same time exploring the languages and the poetics of interactivity as an artform.
For further information:
Italian Cultural Institute-Seoul
Tel. +82.2.796-0634
Fax. +82.2.798-2664
segreteria.iicseoul@esteri.it
segreteria@italcult.or.kr
www.italcult.or.kr
Triad Gallery
tel. +82. (0)2.512.9053
www.triadnewmediagallery.com
http://www.italcult.or.kr
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