Frieze Foundation seeks curator!

Frieze Foundation is looking for an experienced curator for Frieze Projects, Frieze Film and The Cartier Award.

Since the inaugural Frieze Art Fair in 2003, Frieze Foundation has pursued an ambitious curatorial programme, inviting artists to respond specifically to the fair context. Frieze Projects, the critically acclaimed programme of artists commissions, has realised 56 new works by established and emerging artists from around the world, including Ceal Floyer, Jeppe Hein, Mike Nelson, Paola Pivi, Richard Prince, Martha Rosler and Mario Garcia Torres.

Job title: Curator, Frieze Foundation
Requirement: Part time, initially for one year, from 1 November 2009. Based in London.
Salary: Dependent on role and experience.

The job requires:
• An understanding of the complexities of commissioning and producing site-specific projects;
• An understanding of the opportunities and parameters the Fair context provides;
• The ability to commission a relevant programme of artists' projects and to manage that process from start to finish;
• An informed perspective and strong network of relationships with both emerging and established artists and the curatorial field worldwide;
• A strong track-record in critical writing and editorial skills;
• The ability to work with the existing Foundation team and Frieze Art Fair staff;
• The initiation and maintenance of ongoing relationships with a range of collaborating institutions, public funding bodies and corporate sponsors;
• The skill to support applications for major funding grants;
• The ability to work to deadlines and within budgets.

Interviews will be held in London.

To apply, please send your CV and a covering letter to cv@frieze.com, putting 'Curator' in the subject field.
Deadline: 24 July 2009

For further information on Frieze Projects please visit http://www.friezefoundation.org/

Michael Snow @Àngels Barcelona

As a video artist, Michael Snow is revered, especially among critics and curators, for his ground breaking work in experimental cinema. But his films can also be easy to dismiss: his work is often so fragmentary, so seemingly incomplete, that it can be hard to understand what all the fuss is about. Yet no other artist has done so much to destabilise our approximation of the visible than Michael Snow. By threatening the very tools we rely on to process what we perceive, the artist creates unnerving yet frequently poetic works. His avant-garde film-making is less about a way of understanding the camera as a device for recording than as an instrument whose structural, material properties can form the main focus of the work. Michael Shaw´s rich and rigorous meditations on cinematic practice can be seen in his first solo show in Spain at Àngels Barcelona with two new video-installations and a film that will rank among Barcelona´s best exhibitions this month.

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Michael Snow
5 May - 13 June
Àngels Barcelona
www.angelsbarcelona.com

Rastros (Traces) @Fundación Foto Colectania, Barcelona

Gert Jan Kochen, Queen Wilhelmina (the Past and the Present), 2005
©Gert Jan Kochen

Photography often maintains a certain friction in the play on absence and presence; at least this is the theme that is at the centre of the exhibition, Rastros, currently on display at Fundación Foto Colectania, in which several contemporary artists explore the idea of traces and marks as signs of human activity. Works by Javier Ayarza, A. Ferrer, Gert Jan Kocken, Ulrich Gebert, Matt Packer, Sven Johne and Lewis Ronald by and large comprise unpopulated photographs that point to human influence through what has been left behind in the landscape. At its best, the photography on show here is discreetly perceptive and rendered exquisitely, but, at its worst, is nondescript and unremarkable. If you like your art to be clever and complex this one is for you.

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Rastros (Traces)
16 April - 31 July
Fundación Foto Colectania
www.colectania.es

Lisa Ross: To Mark a Prayer-Uyghur Mazar

Via the exceptional Daylight Magazine comes this beautiful multimedia piece on Lisa Ross. Go and put the kettle on while you let it buffer and then sit back with a nice cuppa and enjoy!

Kelly Shimoda

All images ©Kelly Shimoda (Click to enlarge)

I guess you don’t want to talk to me anymore is a project by Kelly Shimoda which, as she explains, "serves to document mobile phone text messages and preserve a form of communication that is fleeting by design and rarely seen by anyone other than the original author or intended recipient. Taken as a whole, it also begins to ask deeper questions about human communication.

Because people can use texting to avoid the most uncomfortable parts of face-to-face interaction, they often feel liberated to spontaneously communicate intimate and revealing thoughts, but by being forced to encapsulate those thoughts in a mere 160 characters, the best messages read like haiku poems – brief, but full of meaning.

In my approach to shooting and editing the messages, the project becomes an informal sociological study, creating an intimate yet fragmentary portrait of a disparate network of people.

In the end, these enigmatic photographs ask as many questions as they answer, and force the reader to reflect and draw upon his or her own experience to make sense of them, ultimately pointing to the fundamentally fragile nature of human communication."

Kelly has been working as a documentary photographer since graduating from the International Center of Photography in 2005. She freelances for The New York Times, and a variety of European magazines. She was included in the 2008 PDN Photo Annual and won an award in the ASMP Image08 contest for her work on the last days of the Empire Roller Skating Centre. In 2007, she was among the winners of Hey, Hot Shot! at the Jen Bekman Gallery, and also received an ICP/ Johnson & Johnson Fellowship. In 2006, she was awarded an Honorable Mention in The Magenta Foundation’s Emerging Photographers.