Céline Condorelli Support Structures

Book Launch
Thursday, November 05, 2009, 6 pm
Platform Garanti Istanbul, at Bilsar Building
Mesrutiyet Caddesi 90


Céline Condorelli
Support Structures
A manual for what bears, sustains, props and holds up.

Sternberg Press and Platform Garanti are pleased to present Support Structures by Céline Condorelli.

With essays by: Céline Condorelli, Mark Cousins, Jaime Stapleton, Andrea Phillips, Bart de Baere, Wouter Davidts, Eyal Weizman & Rony Brauman, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Jan Verwoert

With works by: Michael Asher, Artist Placement Group, Can Altay, Conrad Atkinson, Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Filippo Brunelleschi, Banu Cennetoglu, Christopher D’Arcangelo, Martin Beck, Cevdet Erek, Flatpack 001 (Mark and Stephen Beasley), Andrea Fraser, Buckminster Fuller, Ryan Gander, Ella Gibbs, Gareth Jones, Frederick Kiesler, Lucy Kimbell, James Langdon, El Lissitzky, Gordon Matta-Clark, Enzo Mari, Antoni Muntadas, Peter Nadin, ‘The offices of Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Jenny Holzer, Peter Nadin, Richard Prince & Robin Winters’, Radim Pesko, Lilly Reich, Jane Rendell, Support Structure, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kurt Vonnegut, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, Carey Young, a.o.

Support Structures is a manual for what bears, sustains, and props, for those things that encourage, care for, and assist; for that which advocates, articulates; for what stands behind, frames, and maintains: it is a manual for those things that give support. While the work of supporting might traditionally appear as subsequent, unessential, and lacking value in itself, this manual is an attempt to restore attention to one of the neglected, yet crucial modes through which we apprehend and shape the world.

Support Structures is a critical enquiry into what constitutes “support,” and also documents the collaborative project “Support Structure” by Céline Condorelli and Gavin Wade. While registering and collecting reference projects in a new archive of support structures alongside its ten-phase project, different writers, thinkers, and practitioners were invited from various fields to elaborate on frameworks and work on texts, which form the theoretical backbone of the publication. The collection of contributions offers different possibilities for engaging in this unchartered territory, from propositions to projects, existing systems to ones invented for specific creative processes.

Support Structures offers support through potential methodologies, inspirations and activations for practice, and addresses important questions for art and architecture practices on forms of display, organization, articulation, appropriation, autonomy, and temporariness, and the manifestations of blindness towards them.

For press inquiries and orders please contact mail@sternberg-press.com.

Produced in co-production with Support Structure:
Céline Condorelli & Gavin Wade with James Langdon
Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York
October 2009, English
21 x 14.8 cm, 438 pp., 8 full-colour and 400+ two-colour ill., softcover
ISBN 978-1-933128-45-0

This book was made possible through essential structural support from Platform Garanti, Istanbul, and the generous support of Henry Moore Foundation, Arts Council England, Essex University Gallery, London Metropolitan University, and Eastside Projects, Birmingham.

October 24 Saturday, 14:00

Aesthetics and Politics in the Age of Spectacle
Nikos Papastergiadis

October 24 Saturday, 14:00
Garanti Galeri - Platform Garanti
İstiklal Caddesi 115A

"Throughout modern history we can see a common expression of discontent held against the existing social order in artistic, political and philosophical statements. They all proceed from the shared starting point that human potential is restricted. They may differ in relation to identifying the restrictive forces and articulating the form of human subjectivity, but they all possess the aim to overcome the perceptual and real constraints that are imposed by habits, norms and rules. Within this core aim is a vision that I am calling a cosmopolitan imaginary. It is the affirmative side of the exilic drive, which also runs throughout modern culture."

In his talk Nikos Papastergiadis will discuss the relationship between art and politics of our time by comparing the thoughts of Jacques Ranciere, who has written on the significance of avant gardist experiments with everyday life and new techniques of visual and literary representation, and those of Gerald Raunig who is fascinated with the shared aspects of artistic and activist techniques of communication as framed by a new kind of cosmopolitan political and aesthetic consciousness.

Nikos Papastergiadis was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne; Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts; lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. He has published books including Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (Rivers Oram Press, 2006), Metaphor + Tension: On Collaboration and its Discontents (Artspace Publications, 2004) and The Turbulence of Migration (Polity Press, 2000),

Cultural Agencies Panel

Red Thread
Thursday, September 10, 2009 / 15.30 - 17.30
Ex-Platform Garanti Building - Istiklal Caddesi 136

Presentation and panel discussion including contributions by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz, Oda Projesi, Shahab Fotouhi, Shahira Issa, Gregory Sholette and William Wells. Moderated by Nina Möntmann.

The panel “Cultural Agencies” seeks to expose new forms of cultural collaboration and institution building. The participants will present projects that have either subverted the conventional infrastructure of cultural institutions for political and social agendas or have deliberately left the comfort of globally networked cultural operations or state-animated cultural infrastructure. Instead, they explore the largely ignored narratives of volatile, local, political, social and cultural contexts. Hidden to the gaze of the outsider, the apparent void is occupied by a multitude of new forms of “agency”, which are informal, semi-formal, familial, kinship based, communal, religious, or political. While lack of funding and support is ubiquitous, the absence of a formal state infrastructure has been counteracted through the combined spirit of free agency, self-help, improvisation, or an expression of simply surviving. Panel presentations will explore the contexts of Cairo, Teheran, the urban transformation of Istanbul, and the Beyond of the centre-specific, cultural bubble.

A project by Cultural Agencies/ Kültürel Aracılar is a non-profit initiative curated by Nikolaus Hirsch, Philipp Misselwitz and Oda Projesi. Hosted by Platform Garanti/ Garanti Galeri in collaboration with Mimar Sinan Güzel Sanatlar Üniversitesi, Städelschule Frankfurt.
The project has been made possible through the generous support of the German Allianz Kulturstiftung and RHYZOM - a collaborative network for local cultural production and trans-local dissemination funded by the European Commission.