ELI GILL Third-year art student Erick
Hidalgo tries on an an exhibit at the Wight Biennial on
Friday. The exhibit includes art from 22 artists.
By Angela Salazar
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
UCLA graduate students are uniting nations with the 2001 Wight
Biennial, merging cutting-edge art with education to encompass
themes ranging from sex to freedom.
With 22 artists coming together from 14 different schools around
the globe, the exhibit samples culture and style from the fresh
perspective of the 12 UCLA student artists who are curating the
show. After traveling to graduate schools and master of fine arts
programs in America and Europe, the curators chose one or two
artists to participate in the Biennial.
Many of the student curators also videotaped their studio visits
and presented their experiences to the group in Los Angeles in
order to open up a dialogue about the direction of art today.
“We just sat in the graduate studios that are at Warner
and we watched these videos of tons and tons of art work, which was
an amazing process because there’s a dialogue between people
who have different ideas and opinions of what art is and what art
should do,” said UCLA graduate student and curator Nizan
Shaked. “The whole idea is that there’s this fruitful
dialogue of what is happening in other grad programs, what is the
cutting edge of art today, how do we process it and also to see the
process of how curating is done because a lot of people are artists
who never see that other side.”
Biennials play an increasingly important role in the art world
and in art education, providing students with unique opportunities
to gain experience and exposure and establishing connections
between young artists, according to graduate student Karl
Haendel.
“There’s a whole thing about MFA programs in
America, and somewhat in Europe, about pumping out pre-professional
artists, and with the growth of biennials in general in the art
world “¦ there’s this internationalization which
coincides with the MFA connection and with the market,” said
Haendel. “We are trying to establish some kind of grad school
community, so we go around as grad students to other grad schools
to talk to them as grad students, not so much as curators. So, we
have this dual as being both artists and curators, so our choices
reflect very much our interests.”
Each of the students curating the International Biennial will
also be writing an essay on the works they chose to bring to the
exhibit. The essays will be included in the 2001 Wight Biennial
catalogue.
“Every curator is writing about what they’ve chosen,
so its kind of a curatorial statement too. Like, this is why I find
this interesting and this is why this should be in this
show,” said Sara Jordeno, an international graduate student
from Sweden. “We have this discussion going on but we are
also responsible for an artist and a project.”
Jordeno chose artists from Sweden when she visited home earlier
this year. One of the pieces she chose is by Conny Karlsson of the
Valand School of Fine Arts in Gothenburg, Sweden. Karlsson’s
installation consists of three TV sets displaying a man recalling
his one-night stands and telling his stories in a very
straightforward manner.
“The stories are based in a club environment and have a
lot of references to gays and subculture. It’s in Sweden but
the thing is kind of universal, you can relate to it,”
Karlsson said.
Jordeno also asked artists Luca Frei and Anna Ling of the Malmoe
Art Academy in Malmoe, Sweden to participate in the Biennial.
“Sara invited us to do site specific work, collaborative
work, and then we started thinking about the context, and the
context is an exhibition in an educational institution and it is
graduate students that are exhibiting in Los Angeles. Then we
started to think about the word freedom because it is quite a big
word in the states and also in our art education in Sweden,”
Ling said.
Ling and Frei chose to present their work as a sort of
propaganda, combining words and drawings on flyers and stickers
that viewers may pick up from a table where the works are on
display. In this way the art is open to the interpretations of
individual viewers.
“It is mainly about how freedom is given, what we’ve
seen here in Los Angeles is quite incredible, it is like a weapon
to get control,” Frei said. “It’s a paradoxical
term and these are all symbols that somehow suggest certain
activities.”
Other artists in the exhibition did not necessarily create works
to fit the context of the show, but instead brought pieces to
represent everyday life. As a curator, Haendel chose to bring the
photographic work of Lila Subramanian to the Biennial because of
her honest and captivating portraits.
“I see in her work a reinvestment in the act of picture
taking,” Haendel said of Subramanian. “She’s kind
of going through a visual vocabulary of things that we see and
things that we think are beautiful and interesting and ways that we
take photographs from snapshots to landscapes to portraits. She
kind of reasserts a positive way of looking at the world that
enjoys looking, that’s kind of guilt free looking, that we
can have pleasure in seeing things.”
The sense of enjoyment in art and the consolidation of works
from around world is what the Wight Biennial strives to bring to
students and viewers alike: A celebration and sharing of expression
and education.