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    Hiroyasu Tsuri aka Twoone – RAW MARK MAKING

    RAW MARK MAKING – Hiroyasu Tsuri (b. 1983)

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    Hiroyasu Tsuri aka Twoone – RAW MARK MAKING

    “Raw Mark Making is quite a simple idea. It’s literally the meaning of the words. Mark making. In my context, it is making marks that are not commonly used in traditional art practice. Unusual movements, using any kind of tools, embracing a mood or attitude, mixed with the physical speed or controlling the level of impact on to the surface… that’s what I call raw mark making.”
    – Hiroyasu Tsuri

    Since pre-historic times it has been an instinctual human behaviour to make marks. Whether an individual or a group of people, mark making has been a constant outlet for human beings to leave behind a record of their existence and experiences. Hiroyasu Tsuri (TWOONE) is driven by this same innate behaviour. Tsuri creates marks with a childlike freedom of expression, open mindedness and this instinctual human desire to leave behind a legacy of visual depictions of the his interpretations of the human experience. Tsuri calls this ‘Raw Mark Making’.

    The concept of ‘Raw Mark Making’ is the culmination of a decade of experience taking every opportunity to paint marks whenever and wherever Tsuri finds himself around the world. This experience began in the early 2000’s, studying composition and mark making techniques with graffiti writers in Melbourne Australia. In 2014 Tsuri relocated to Berlin Germany and it was this move that sparked a philosophical desire to survey his practise over the last decade and acknowledge and consider the concepts, motivations and ideas behind why he creates marks, and why he chooses to do so in his distinct manner.

    Since 2012 Tsuri has exhibited four unique solo exhibitions with Backwoods Gallery – SevenSamurai (2012), Outsiders (2014), 100 Faces (2016) and Object (2018). Raw Mark Making (2020) celebrates Tsuri’s history, and development of, the different kinds of ‘Mark Making’ that have been exhibited in these exhibitions and that have become pivotal to first decade of his oeuvre. The selected works represents the different stages of discovery of Tsuri’s own unique expression of, and place within, the human history of ‘Raw Mark Making’.
    hiroyasutsuri.com
    Youtube channel
    @T_W_O_O_N_E
    BACKWOODS GALLERY
    25 Easey St Collingwood, Victoria, Australia
    www.backwoods.gallery More

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    in Street Art

    Banksy in Nottingham, UK

    Banksy just returned to the UK with a brand new piece that appeared a few hours ago on the streets of Nottingham.b-sm = 300×250; sm > none; The British artist painted a great concept using the bike’s missing tyre. This is another tongue in cheek piece to add to B’s collection of humorous street works… More

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    A French Museum Puts Its Genghis Khan Exhibition on Hold After China Pressures It to Rewrite the History of Mongol Culture

    Censorship pressure from Beijing has prompted a French museum to postpone a planned exhibition on Genghis Khan that involved loans from China. The Chinese communist party reportedly insisted that the show omit any use of the words “Genghis Khan,” “empire,” or “Mongol,” as well as demanding control over exhibition texts, maps, and brochures.
    “We made the decision to stop this production in the name of the human, scientific, and ethical values that we defend,” said Bertrand Guillet, director of Nantes’s history museum, the Château des ducs de Bretagne, in a statement.
    The “censorship of the initial project,” he claimed, was characterized by “biased rewriting of Mongol culture in favor of a new national narrative,” such as the attempt to change the exhibition’s title from “Sun of the Sky and the Steppes: Genghis Khan and the Birth of the Mongolian Empire“ to “Chinese Steppe Culture of the World.”
    The show, which was being organized in partnership with the Inner Mongolia Museum in Hohhot, China, had already been postponed from its October opening. Now, instead of debuting in February, it is on hold until at least 2024 as curators scramble to replace Chinese loans of artifacts with works from European and American collections.
    Monument to Ghengis Khan—the world’s largest equestrian statue—in Tsonjin Boldog, Mongolia. Photo via Flickr Creative Commons.

    During the 13th century, Khan united the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia and conquered much of Eurasia through deadly invasions, founding what became, after his death, the largest contiguous empire in history.
    Today, China has a fraught relationship with its ethnic Mongol population, which lives largely in the Inner Mongolia province. School reforms passed in August replaced ethnic Mongolian with Mandarin as the official language in school instruction in three subjects. The move was met with widespread protests in the province.
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    in Street Art

    Discovering Banksy – Part 1

    Over the past decades, Banksy have been one of the biggest (if not the biggest) names in the street art scene. Banksy’s rise to fame and notoriety was born from his controversial and often politically-charged stencilled graffiti works. Originally from England, Banksy’s work grew out from the Bristol underground art scene into a global phenomenon.

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    While it is exceedingly difficult to narrow down a handful of works that define his style, we present below a selection of Banksy’s early and obscure street art installations.

    Crossing in Dalston

    Installation in Hackney, 2004

    Brick Lane, London, 2007

    Banksy’s Removal van seen in 2004

    Banksy’s Removal Van

    Water Tank installation in Los Angeles, USA, 2011

    Banky’s Painted Elaphant, 2006

    Banksy’s painted elephant was a part of the show “Barely Legal” held in an industrial warehouse in Los Angeles, California in 2006. the show was meant to address important issues such as poverty, which is ignored by most people, the animal refers to the metaphor of the elephant in the room.

    Banksy Carved Tag

    Banksy’s Barcode

    Installation in Bournemouth, England, 2004

    “Traffic Cones” Installation

    Installation in London, 2011

    Installation in Bristol, England in the late 90’s

    Inside truck view of “Siren of Lambs”

    “Sirens of the Lambs” and it features a bunch of cuddly puppet animals peeking out of a truck, squealing (or at least squeaking) with fear. Its purpose was to bring attention to the cruel conditions real animals suffer when being transported from factory farms to slaughterhouses. More

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    in Street Art

    Nafir “Emptiness Of You” Limited Edition Original Artwork Edition – October 22nd

    Iranian artist Nafir have collaborated with StreetArtNews for this series of limited edition artworks entitled “Emptiness Of You”. These artworks will be released by October 22, Thursday, 5PM UK time. It comes in 4 different editions and a unique one. The artworks will be priced at 590$ and will be available on StreetArtNews store.

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    “Emptiness Of You” features stencil portraits over traditional Persian carpets. The map of the carpet was  originally from Kashan City. Most Iranian Kashans follow a medallion-and-corner pattern. Kashan stands for the highest standards and traditional production of the finest craftsmanship, and are mostly knotted from very good wool.
    Additionally, these carpets used were old and damaged. It was repurposed as canvas for the stencil paintings.
    These artworks will be released by October 22, Thursday, 5PM UK time. It comes in 4 different editions and a unique one. The artworks will be priced at 590$ and will be available on StreetArtNews store.

    Edition 1 – 60 X 70 cm

    Edition 2 – 50.5 x 73 cm

    Edition 3
 – 60.5 x 71 cm

    Edition 4
 – 61 x 76 cm

    Unique
 – 50 x 75 cm

    Nafir is a self-taught Iranian artist born in Tehran whose works are influenced by traditional Iranian art and culture. As he call himself vandal street artist his art focus on social problems of Iran and whole world. Nafir start tagging in 2008 on crowded walls of Iran to fight with censorship political and social problems. 
    His paintings can be found around the world in Iran, Malaysia, Afghanistan, Italy, Germany, Norway, Netherlands, Turkey, India and Georgia. Nafir currently lives and works in Tehran, Iran. More

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    in Street Art

    New Mural by Etnik in Turin, Italy

    Graffiti-artist Etnik is back with another big wall. This new mural is located in front of a school in Turin, Italy. The idea of this wall was born during the lockdown. Etnik with this paint wants to create a window with a fantastic landscape behind, for the children that will come back to school after 7 months of staying home.  So it is a sort of surprise for the younger kids and the people who walk in front of the wall.

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    Alessandro Battisti aka Etnik is considered as one of the most active and accomplished urban artist in Italy. He has experienced and assimilated the transition to post-graffiti and Street Art. From 2001 his style started to evolve into geometrical and architectural forms with letterings and a mixture of urban landscapes.
    Take a look below for more images of Etnik’s mural. More

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    Artist Amalia Ulman Will Become a Model-for-Hire in a New Exhibition Held in a Very Exotic, Very Secret Location: the Dark Web

    New artworks by six contemporary artists, including Amalia Ulman, David Horvitz, and Joshua Citarella, are going onto the dark web next month as part of “Time Out of Joint,” a new exhibition curated by New York-based artistic partners Eva and Franco Mattes.
    The show, which is part of the online-only Yerevan Biennial, can only be accessed through a special browser. 
    Worried about web safety? As far as internet activities go, getting on the dark web is about as safe as surfing Amazon (perhaps even more so, many would argue). But the location is sure to scare some people—and that’s the point. 
    “One of the goals of this show is to bring people to a place they are not familiar with—even if it’s just one click away,” Eva and Franco Mattes tell Artnet News over email.
    David Horvitz, Nostalgia 500 (2020).

    “If the surface internet is like Art Basel, then the dark net would be your artist-run space in a dirty basement in Bushwick—a place that’s a bit harder to find, that works mainly on word of mouth, but where you might discover something unexpected.” they say.
    From now until January 2021, a new artwork by one of the six participating artists and collectives will debut on the site every two weeks. The first up is Horvitz’s Nostalgia 500, a project for which the artist is permanently deleting 500 digital photographs from his personal archive, one image at a time. 
    Artist Vladan Joler will introduce a map and essay based on what he calls “New Extractivism,” the process through which biodata is harvested by commercial and governmental interests.
    Meanwhile, Ulman’s contribution is a video piece in which she turns herself into a model-for-hire on a crowdsourcing platform. “The result is a supposedly funny-online-challenge video, which calls into question stereotypes and beauty standards, and is so incredibly awkward,” the curators say.
    Vladan Joler, New Extractivism (2020).

    Indeed, for Franco and Eva Mattes, these projects represent the artistic potential of the dark web, an arena that exists far from the corporatized, data industrial complex that is the internet.
    “Art could benefit from a less monochromatic, less centralized, less controlled, and less profit-driven environment,” the duo say. “Maybe the dark net is just a metaphor for something we are struggling to find in the artworld, an alternative.”
    To visit “Time Out of Joint,” download the Tor Browser at www.torproject.org and visit http://fjroxjgxhmd2ymp2.onion.
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    ‘How Does Information and the Body Travel Now, When People Cannot?’: Frieze Live’s Experimental New Format Probes New Possibilities for Performance Art

    A performer was stomping around on the second floor of a vacant townhouse on London’s Cork Street last weekend, as Frieze’s Live program played out in an unusual year. Visitors to the gallery down below might have heard the thumps above from Cécile B. Evans’s piece, but only I—and others taking in the performance remotely—could see the performer’s face. As I watched online from Berlin, she gazed and spoke to one of the several cameras on set: “The revolution will be uncertainty—not me.”
    In a year of paramount changes, the art world has lost nearly all of its usual rituals. This year’s unusual edition of Frieze London opened bravely online last week, with visitors clicking and scrolling across diverse presentations all flattened to fit the grid. In trying to save the concept of Frieze Live, the fair’s performance platform, Frieze London’s new artistic director Eva Langret tapped curator Victor Wang to establish an “institute” of performance and sound that could be seen partially online and in-person during the “fair” week.
    “Performance art is always in the process of being made,” Wang told me over the phone on Thursday, speaking from the stoop of his three-storey Institute for Melodic Healing. Performances took place over 111 hours, featuring new works by Evans alongside artists including Alvaro Barrington, Anthea Hamilton, and Zadie Xa. Events were live-streamed online via Instagram TV, with some also viewable in-situ to a select group of visitors.
    Intimacy Over the Buffet
    your words will be used against you by Mandy El-Sayegh at Frieze Live 2020. Courtesy Frieze London.

    Wang wasn’t disappointed by the low number of in-person visitors. London’s coronavirus cases have doubled in recent weeks, and Boris Johnson is expected to deliver even more restrictive rules today, October 12. Given that the M+ Woods curator has been based in Beijing for the majority of the pandemic, Wang has an acute understanding of the severity of the situation, though he did not let it permeate the energy of the weekend.
    “I prefer this, the intimacy over the buffet,” he said. “I’m masked up and making sure everyone is safe. The energy high, people are curious.”
    The curiosity is multifaceted. Not only was Wang’s selection of artists timely and tapped into an intergenerational cohort of some of the brightest figures in the London scene, but the format of a performance event meandering between offline and online has piqued the art world’s imagination. As bans on public gatherings are here for the long haul, there has been a race to find a solution for performance art, and facilitating engagement through screens has posed a challenge. The Institute for Melodic Healing demonstrates that a third way—a hybridized sort of gathering—is possible.
    New Possibilities for Performance
    Shama Anwar and Alvaro Barrington. Frieze Live 2020. Courtesy Frieze London.

    Each artist experimented with the digital-physical split in different ways. I tried to catch as many presentations as I could over the weekend—logging on felt, admittedly, a little less atmospheric than experiencing something IRL, but the ways in which each artist took up Wang’s brief showed that live-streaming offers a whole new gamut of possibilities for performance.
    Like Evans’s “dress rehearsals” for her video piece Notations for an Adaption of Giselle (welcome to whatever forever) that took place upstairs throughout the weekend, Mandy El-Sayegh’s performance piece your words will be used against you addressed very current concerns. Masked performers, including the artist, entered and exited past Anthea Hamilton’s installation-cum-stage that consisted of two black mannequins standing in as viewers to the performance.
    The dancers moved in and out of contact with each other in isolated acts of intimacy (taking a jacket on and off of each other in an act of care, for instance); they filmed each other from afar, the two meter distancing that we have all become used to this year becoming a tight rope between bodies. It was a tense and beautiful performance. As a poignant inversion, Denzil Forrester’s electric 1980s paintings depicting dancing bodies of London’s reggae and dub nightclubs in East London, looked on from the walls of the Cork Street space.
    Screenshot of Zachary Fabri’s performance in New York, which was live-streamed as the final chapter of Alvaro Barrington’s three-part series.

    Alvaro Barrington, who is known for his innovative collaborations, hosted a multi-chapter piece that took place over two days. There was a DJ set by Shama Anwar in the basement of Cork Street; over the weekend, East New York comedian Gastor Almonte was live-streamed for a comedy hour. On Sunday, New York performance artist Zachary Fabri took over Frieze’s Live feed with a piercing (if a little bit choppy) performance piece. Fabri attached a police body cam to his chest—one camera captured his movements while the gestures from the bodycam’s perspective were shown on a screen. It was a meditative performance that even reflected the street behind the screen—at one point, a jogger ran by.
    Along for the Ride
    While not directly commercial, the performance event added dynamism to Frieze London’s static “booth” offerings. The artistic director Langret told me that Live was not about making a marketplace of work as much as giving it ground for creation. “I hope that it has demonstrated the potential of performance and the possibilities for creative exchange, despite the challenges we all find ourselves working in today,” she said.
    Indeed, the power of performance to transform itself into the digital space could also prove to be much more fruitful than the digital “exhibition.” While some tried to subvert the limitations, paintings and sculptures do not hold the same dynamic space online as a moving figure. Outside the art world, more than 12 million players logged on to watch rapper Travis Scott perform in the video game Fortnite this spring—on top of another three million who streamed it. While the slow-to-tech art world seems to be limited to Instagram for now, the explorations in the Institute for Melodic Healing give me a sense of optimism for the creative production that will come out of this painful pandemic year.
    “The aim was to allow for experimentation without a defined outcome,” said Wang, who believes we need to rethink the parameters of what live art can be and how we can form community in a new epoch of remoteness. “How does information and the body travel now, when people cannot? We’re all along for a ride without a destination in mind.”
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