About
Bureau presents work by Olaf Breuning as part of Trade City. Organised as part of Contemporary Art Manchester (CAM) in conjunction with Manchester International Festival (MIF 09).
Venue: CHIPS Building, Old Mill Street, New Islington, Manchester. M4 6BU
(Please note: this exhibition is not held at Bureau)
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Commingling reality and illusion, authenticity and artifice, barbarism and civility, Olaf Breuning (b. 1970, Schaffhausen, Switzerland) creates works that draw heavily from popular culture and a collective visual iconography. He combines these contemporary aesthetics with more primal, shared drives: violence, sexuality, ritual, and companionship. The divergent impulses collide, often with absurd and hilarious results, as he exploits the thin line between humor and pain.
For Trade City Bureau presents Breuning's latest film Home 2, a tongue-in-cheek anthropological study and travelogue, addressing ideas of tourism and Westernisation, and questioning the value of cultural exchange. The film explores slippages in communication and understanding and highlights the difference between lived experience and knowledge gleaned through the saturation of information in the digital era.
Olaf Breuning currently lives and works in New York, USA. He has had solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures, New York; Conduits Gallery, Italy; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Australia; Galerie Air de Paris, France; Swiss Institute, New York; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; and Centre D'art Contemporain, Geneva. Breuning has also exhibited in a large number of high-profile international group exhibitions, including: Whitney Biennial 2008, New York; Looking At Music, MoMA, New York; All About Laughter, Mori Art Museum, Japan; Let's Entertain, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. His work has been the subject of several monographs, such as Olaf Breuning Queen Mary (JRPIRinger, 2006) and Olaf Breuning UGLY (Hatje Cantz, 2001), and features in a number of international private and public collections.
The exhibition Trade City is the inaugural project for Contemporary Art Manchester (CAM). Featuring a number of Manchester and UK premieres and new commissions, Trade City has generated innovative forms of exchange across the citys art scene.
Contemporary Art Manchester is a new, not-for-profit consortium of visual arts organisations, representing the breadth of the current contemporary arts infrastructure in Manchester, UK. In bringing together the art production of thirteen diverse organisations, Trade City reflects the trading and exchange that has taken place between the artists and curators partnering in CAM.
Each participating organisation has selected artists to work with that are representative of their curatorial approach or position, alongside exploring multi-faceted interpretations of trade. As a result, the presented works of twenty-six emergent to established international artists trade off each other in one space, creating aesthetic and spatial interplays, whilst addressing ideas of cultural, economic, geographical and political exchange.
In collectively working on an exhibition and presentation format CAM explores the ways in which contradictions or tensions and harmonies can co-exist within such frameworks, and in the case of Trade City, under one roof.
An open system, the nature of co-operative working through CAM engages with notions of democracy, collectivity and self-organisation, examining and revealing the practices of people engaged with creative work within Manchester, who may be operating through less formal structures, or on the periphery of the city. Through collaboration CAM aims to redress this balance, creating a new central structure or core for the production and dissemination of contemporary art.
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Trade City is organised by Contemporary Art Manchester (CAM), in association with Manchester International Festival 2009 (MIF 09). Supported by Arts Council England and Urban Splash. Contemporary Art Manchester is supported by Arts Council England.
