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Athanor

Athanor is a magazine about visual arts & culture. Search through tags:

The operations are:
1.

Athanor is a magazine about visual arts & culture, initially published in four printed issues. Each issue is devoted to one of four operations performable on pre–existent cultural artifacts (therefore excluding creation and contemplation). appropriation
2. accumulation
3. disclosure
4. destruction

We consider culture as a rhizome, a complex non–hierarchical structure: in this context, these opera

tions melt into each other and form the core of a fluid body, which is the content of Athanor magazine. The tumblr log is an extension of the printed magazine, its paperlessness allows us to infinitely add contents and mix the four main categories. Its title pays homage to the alchemists’ furnace, the occult hill, the Philosophical Tower which knows no death (Α-Θάνατος).

21/04/2018

Libros Mutantes live now!

20/04/2018

🌐Hola mundo! It's a pleasure to finally hold these catalogues, freshly printed in limited edition and today available on sale at Libros Mutantes. Come say hi from 5pm! 🕳

04/04/2018

After a long time, we are glad to announce that Athanor n. 5 Catalogue will be officially launched at Libros Mutantes Art Book Fair, in Madrid from 20th to 22nd April 2018, and it will be available for sale. See you soon!

You can still enjoy the online exhibitions on http://www.athanor.world/5/

Many thanks to all of our contributors
Giorgio Ruggeri Jeroen Bouweriks Kasper Lecnim Nicolas Vamvouklis Paolo Patelli Antoine Lefebvre Editions Farah Khelil Ryota Matsumoto Furen Dai Carla Rak Alberto Cuteri Udit Mahajan Fabian Yürgen Leandro Estrella R. Prost Nicholas Lockyer Tyler Henry

http://librosmutantes.com/exhibitors-18/

22/03/2018

After a long break, we're ready to present "New Sculpture", Athanor's closing web exhibition.

"New Sculpture" gathers three projects by four young international artists. At the acme of a conceptual philosophical tower, these three artworks deal with transmutation of matter as the central process for the artist / alchemist.

Browse the contents by Udit Mahajan & Tyler Henry, Fabian Yürgen, Leandro Estrella at http://www.athanor.world/5/

03/10/2017

Introducing “Copy Paste Culture”
http://www.athanor.world/5/

The fourth web exhibition featured in Athanor №5, presents four projects which rely in different ways on appropriation practices such as the copy or the remix, in order to propose new — yet mediated by the original — artistic contents.

— Kasper Lecnim, Malevich’s Black Square turned 400 times
— Carla Rak, Collage #1
— Nicholas Lockyer, Tombstone
— Alberto Cuteri, Opening Fold

24/05/2017

Still ongoing on our website: Collecting Queerly, the log by Nicolas Vamvouklis initiated as part of Athanor's exhibition "Mythologies of Accumulation".

Starting from historical imagery depicting collectors and their possessions, the log outlines the turbulent existence of the Greek collector and gallerist Alexandre Iolas, the relationship with his collection and the villa which housed it.

Read the log at this link:
http://www.athanor.world/5/vamvouklis_collecting-queerly.html

20/05/2017

Carla Rak
ARTIFACTS
2016—2017

Artifacts by Italian visual artist Carla Rak takes into account a more subtle process of corruption. Since its very beginning, photography has been considered a perfect medium to archive our memories. With the digital shift, a much wider amount of memories are collected and stored on binary files on our machine, yet their nature has become more ephemeral and short–lived. Referring to the inconvenient occurrence of digital damage, the artist has intentionally corrupted a series of still–life images from the archive of Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. As these digital reproductions are accessed with an ordinary text editor, they reveal their true nature of nothing more than a sequence of words set in a machine language. Rak nonsensically operates on this unknown language, making minor edits that cause images to lose some details, colors, tones. Still readable by machines, they are decaying, losing identity. As the disintegrating flowers in seventeenth–century painting were an allegory of human frailty and transience, these corrupted artifacts aim to recognize how feeble our memories could be in the digital milieu. Rak finally reproduces her decomposed images on big sized lambda prints, as a symbolic gesture to deliver their memory again to the realm of physicality.

http://www.athanor.world/5/rak_artifacts.html

16/05/2017

R. Prost
BOOK OF BABEL
2014

Book of Babel, by the American artist R. Prost, is “an electronic world tour, an algorithmic travelogue” which records all the outcomes of a reiterative process operated on a textual paragraph. This text has been translated with an online tool into another language — namely, Portuguese — and the rendered version has been then translated into a third language, and so on to cover all the world’s languages and finally return to English. Funnily enough — as one of the common standards for comparing languages is the Christian Lord’s Prayer — the starting point is a passage from the English version of the Bible. Each consecutive translation though, by virtue of the absence of direct human interaction in the interpretative process, turns out to be misleading and inaccurate, suggesting a feeling of oddity which recalls the legendary confusio linguarum (confusion of tongues) which is also the topic of the above–mentioned passage (1). Although online translators became a common practice, experiencing this lack of accuracy is still something we are all familiar with. Since this issue affects the whole process, the returned English text completely loses its original meaning in favor of a babbling farce in which the most relevant comprehensible sequence is ironically the sentence: “it is a s**t message”.

(1) Book of Genesis, 11:1–9

http://www.athanor.world/5/prost_book-of-babel.html

13/05/2017

Furen Dai
LANGUAGE PRODUCT
2015—2016

Dealing with a different kind of meaning loss, Language Product depicts a fictitious factory in which words and sentences are manufactured. Furen Dai’s work began with her research on a “Secret Women Language” called NüShu, which was originated and developed as a secret code among women from the Yao minority in Jiang Yong, Hunan Province, China. Though nowadays the language has lost its functionality, women who still know the language have been pressured from Chinese government into performing their cultural activities as entertainment for tourists for menial wages. Mirroring this absurd commodification, the video is a weird journey through the act of producing the secret language as art object to be sold to people who are unable to decode the language. In Dai’s words "history lives through language"(1), and through the fictional and almost satirical story narrated by the video we are witnessing how both Yao community history and NüShu language are undergoing a process of mystification and corruption.

(1) Furen Dai, Artist’ Statement

http://www.athanor.world/5/dai_language-product.html

27/04/2017

Introducing “On different Kinds of Language”
http://www.athanor.world/5/

The third we exhibition talks about language both as a means of communication and as an encoding–decoding tool for human and nonhuman processes of interpretation.

— R. Prost, Book of Babel
— Furen Dai, Language Product
— Carla Rak, Artifacts

08/04/2017

Antoine Lefebvre Editions e Farah Khelil
ALL THE MEMORY IN THE WORLD,
TOUTE LA MÉMOIRE DU MONDE
2014—2016

A sense of awe is what the two artists should have felt while browsing shelves in the Avranches Library, which houses precious manuscripts from the Abbey of Mont Saint–Michel but also worn out books, devoured by book–eating insects. As a part of their ongoing project bookworms, the two artists, both book lovers, reflected on the importance of books as factor of knowledge transfer. Appropriating the title of a documentary movie by Alain ResnaisA — a display of the intricate mechanisms of cataloguing, storing, retrieving books in the Bibliotheque Nationale Française — ALL THE MEMORY IN THE WORLD sees the risks of physical damage to a book object as a metaphor for those ones, much more dangerous, which affect cultural transmission as a whole.

A Resnais, Alain (1956). Toute la Mémoire du Monde, 20’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0RVSZ_yDjs

http://www.athanor.world/5/lefebvre-khelil_all-the-memory-in-the-world.html

01/04/2017

Paolo Patelli
THE HUT OF EUROPEAN IDENTITY
2016

Initiated by Paolo Patelli within the framework of ‘New Europeans’, the arts and design programme of the Netherlands Presidency of the Council of the EU Council in 2016. The project plays around the inciting statement that there is no such thing as an “European identity”, at least not in a definite and conclusive way. Starting from the concept drawn for the House of European History (HEH) — a museum recently opened in Brussels with the aim of providing access to “transnational processes and events in Europe through museological interpretation” — the project’s theoretical framework highlights the lack of concrete points of reference transversally agreed by all the cultures forming Europe. Rather, this work-in-progress identity is made up of military conflicts and ideological clashes; the harmony and equity figured by EU institutions seem to be no more than the bridges depicted on € banknotes: an archetypal, distant, fake version of reality.

http://www.athanor.world/5/patelli_the-hut-of-european-identity.html

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Página web

http://athanormag.tumblr.com/

Notificaciones

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