10 Nov 2010

The Abrons Arts Center presents exhibitions by Tania Candiani and Yonamine

The Abrons Arts Center presents exhibitions by Tania Candiani and Yonamine

The Abrons Arts Center brings innovative artistic excellence to Manhattan's Lower East Side through diverse, cutting-edge performances, exhibitions, and residencies. Some of the most adventurous artists of the past century have trained, taught, or performed at the Abrons Arts Center, including John Cage, Aaron Copland, Dizzy Gillespie, Martha Graham, Alicia Keyes, Alwin Nikolais, Jackson Pollock, Denzel Washington, and Orson Welles.

The Abrons Arts Center is proud to announce that Miguel Amado is the first recipient of the newly created position of curator-in-residence. A native of Portugal, he has worked with Portuguese institutions such as the PLMJ Foundation, the Museum Berardo Collection, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Visual Arts Center. Currently, he is also curator-in-residence at Context Gallery in Derry, Northern Ireland, and in recent years he was a Curatorial Fellow at Rhizome at the New Museum and a Curator-in-residence at the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. The jury panel that selected him was very impressed with his qualifications and commitment to organizing challenging exhibitions, projects, and public programs.

As curator-in-residence at the Abrons Arts Center, Miguel Amado is organizing exhibitions by artists Tania Candiani and Yonamine for the fall season. Born in Mexico City in 1974 and based in Tijuana and New York City, Candiani is presenting the first installment of the research project From Floor Plans to Confection Patterns: Apartment Houses in New York City, 1900-1914, which reflects her interest in the relationship between architecture and the experience of everyday life and follows on her community-driven practice that examines the political condition of social groups in consumer society. Yonamine was born in Luanda, Angola, in 1975, and currently lives in Lisbon. Dipolo is his US premiere and addresses the connection between contemporary African iconography, colonial history, and identity politics.

Candiani has also been researching the 'Classic 6,' a prominent example of New York City's pre-World War I residential building boom. These apartment houses were built from the 1880s to the 1910s for the middle and upper classes, and are today among the most coveted, least available properties in Manhattan. Candiani has collected reproductions of floor plans, advertising captions and photographs of several 'Classic 6' dating between 1900 and 1914, and has created different works motivated by them. On view are, for example, typewritten copies of the descriptions of the apartment houses alongside contemporary exterior views and hand-made garments based in their floor plans. Candiani examines a significant period of New York City's urban planning, one that has marked the connection between taste trends and the spread of bourgeois ethics, and which is an allegory to the hegemonizing of a conservative lifestyle in the US.

Yonamine has often employed silkscreening techniques on newspaper pages, as is the case of Dipolo, a poster-like installation that he is showing in display cases. 'Dipolo' is an expression that refers to a diplomatic bag, and that is used by Angolans as a by-word for drug-running. Appropriately, he has assembled an engaging pop-driven imagery comprising brands of consumer goods like 'Omo' and popular figures such as Razbula, the nickname of a young man whose source of income is the recycling of a state-owned national daily. Bringing together his native country's mythologies and Western narratives, Yonamine represents the grassroots lifestyle of most Angolans, who have to develop underground, community strategies in order to live in a post-conflict society like that of Angola.