Today we received a nice surprise in the mail. Radmila Joksimovic, curator at Museum of Contemporary Art-Belgrade mailed us the catalogue for the Lecture Performance exhibition.

<- click for close-ups.

The exhibition and catalogue was a collaboration between MoCA-Belgrade (Serbia) and Kolnischer Kunstverein (Cologne, Germany). It’s a very nice book so we’ve very pleased. Pinky and I spent the evening reading through a couple of the essays and looking at the work of the other artists in the show.

Introduction
Kathrin Jentjens, Radmilla Joksimovic, Anja Nathan-Dorn, Jelena Vesic

Ars Academica - the Lecture between Artistic and Academic Discourse
Jenny Dirksen

Doing Lectures. Performative Lectures as a Framework for Artistic Action
Marianne Wagner

A Piece about a Lecture
Vit Havranek and Boris Ondreicka

Performing Lecture Machine
Aldo Milohnic

Performance as Research and Production of Knowledge in Art
Ana Vujanovic and Jelena Vesic

Artists & other Lecturers/Performers:

Fia Backstrom
Walter Benjamin
Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz
Dan Graham
Andrea Fraser
Mark Leckey
Robert Morris
The Pinky Show
Piratbyran
Martha Rosler
Grupa Spomenik
TkH
V-Girls
Jeronimo Voss
Katarina Zdjelar/Jan Verwoert

This is fun. I will read the rest of the essays tomorrow.

Bunny

Radmila Joksimovic, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art-Belgrade, just sent us a couple of photos of our work as it appears in their exhibition Lecture Performance. It’s neat to see our videos translated into other languages.

Pinky Show : Entounters on Radical Education : Cats in Slovenia!, installation view at the Lecture Performance exhibition, Belgrade Heritage House, January 2010. (Photo: Saša Reljić)

I can’t read this, but for our friends who can read Serbian…

[ lecture-performance-predavanje-performans-muzej-savremene-umetnosti-beograd ]

Unfortunately we weren’t able to participate in any of the dialogues or programming associated with the exhibition (there wasn’t any funding available to send us to Serbia), but hopefully we will go to Serbia ‘one day’. In the meantime, it is just very nice to be included in exhibitions, as it’s another way for our work to make contact with new audiences.

Bunny

Canada Part 2 trip was very successful. Our talks with Toronto and Sherbrooke-area cats were extremely productive. Though there is still much work to do we are definitely making good progress with forming new working relationships with our allies in Canada. Likewise, our human representatives gave good talks to the Canadian humans. We installed the exhibition at Toronto Free Gallery on time and with no major injuries with lots of help from nice people. Here are some photos.

Aaron Cain does the wiring for the data projector while Siya Chen does her thing in the corner.

Curator Milena Placentile preparing the paintings for hanging.

Toronto Free Gallery is located at 1277 Bloor Street West near the Landsdowne subway station.

Done!

The rear mini-classroom area. Thank you to Laura Paolini for letting us borrow your school-desks.

The crowd, hardly able to contain their excitement, due to mesmerizing presentation by Pinky Show HR03. (Photo: Milena Placentile) Note guy in front, head ready to explode.

Flowers got a little tired the morning after the opening. Thank you Heather.

Sherbrooke (Québec) - besides work stuff, we also got to walk around in the snow and watch midnight ice skating (we didn’t have skates but that’s okay). Also, I ate poutine (no photos, sorry).

Big wall signage at the Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University.

Pinky speaks French! Flier for the Pinky Show screenings at the Foreman Art Gallery.

Of course it would have been impossible for us to do our work in Canada without the help of many people:

Heather Haynes, one-woman tornado that is the heart and soul and muscle of Toronto Free Gallery, and Izida Zorde, editor at the extraordinary Fuse Magazine. It was an honor to work with you both.

Siya Chen, who took care of us the whole time we were in Toronto. She even cooked dinner for us, unbelievable. We wanted to bring her home with us but she has things to do in Toronto.

Aaron Cain & Amber Landgraff, thank you for helping install all the stuff.

Sayed Mohammad Afzal the taxi driver who gave us the most excellent lecture.

Stéphanie Corriveau and Vicky Chainey Gagnon at Bishop’s University in Sherbrooke. Just many thanks for ‘everything’. You two are so special and we hope one day we will meet again.

The amazing Kosasa sisters, Karen & Eiko, for their help in sending the human delegation to Toronto and Sherbrooke. We love you.

Lynette Cruz for always taking care of HR02.

And of course, curator Milena Placentile, for inviting us to come to Winnipeg last November, which then turned out to be the start of all these other great experiences for us in Canada. It is so easy and fun to work with you; now you are our friend so come to Death Valley and do stuff with us over here.

The Class Treason Stories exhibition at Toronto Free Gallery closees February 21. End of Canada 2 report.

Bunny

New Pinky Show video, and yes, I can has megaphone. It’s here.

Bunny

FUSE MAGAZINE IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE LAUNCH OF OUR WINTER ISSUE!

The winter issue features a conversation between Winnipeg-based artist and curator Milena Placentile and The Pinky Show, Vancouver’s Randy Lee Cutler writing about Truth and Reconciliation, Gita Hashemi on the Women’s movement in Iran and Francisco Fernando Granados’ column Reflections of an Ungrateful Refugee. Also in this issue, an Olympic Index by Am Johal and a call to action from No One is Illegal Vancouver. Artist projects by Mel Chin and Kevin Rodgers and reviews of the 2nd Annual Palestine film festival, Omar Fast’s Nostalgia, Roger Hallas’ Reframing Bodies, ATSA’s Change exhibition and the experimental shorts program from ImagineNative 2009.

EXHIBITION OPENING: THE PINKY SHOW : Class Treason Stories (excerpts)

Toronto Free Gallery and Fuse magazine are pleased to present The Pinky Show’s latest multi-media installation, Class Treason Stories (excerpts) organized by Milena Placentile.

EXHIBITION DATES: January 14 – February 21, 2010

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 14 at 8pm. Opening reception is in conjunction with Fuse magazine’s winter edition launch. See below for more details.

ARTIST TALK: Please join and the human representatives of the Pinky Show for an artist talk. January, 16 at 4pm.

TORONTO FREE GALLERY
1277 Bloor Street West
Toronto, ON M6H 1N7
tel. 416-913-0461

PINKY SHOW summary:

From an undisclosed desert location, somewhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, a collective of gently voiced cats produce and disseminate an educational project called The Pinky Show, intended to cultivate intellectual curiosity, openness, and compassion.

Focusing on information and perspectives that have been misrepresented, suppressed, ignored, or otherwise excluded from mainstream discussion, Pinky and her friends use a variety of formats (i.e. online videos, visual art, books and ‘zines, blogging, etc.) to explore the unseen world in ways that are easy to understand, with special attention given to reconnecting information (plentiful in our contemporary world) to its oft-ignored ethical and moral dimensions.

The Pinky Show’s video episodes are generally organized around “simple” questions: What is settler colonialism? Is the War in Iraq legal or illegal? How do we get rid of nuclear weapons? They consider the mainstreaming of progressive ideals to be a foundational component to any broad strategy to create a more aware citizenry - one that is more apt to understand, support, and participate in the vital work being done by the many thousands of social change organizations established throughout the world.

In addition to material production, they also deploy human representatives to carry out their educational objectives via diverse forms of community programming including workshops and other public presentations, exhibitions, and agitprop dissemination. Some examples include Picturing Politics: Artists Speak Truth to Power (Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, Virginia), Encounter on Radical Education (Ljubljana, Slovenia), and study circles and workshops with the Center for Hegemony Studies (Honolulu, Hawaii).

• • • • •

Class Treason Stories (excerpts) seeks to provoke questions about the nature of education and the application of knowledge for either socially beneficent or individualist and competitive purposes. It inquires about the transformations we could each undertake in order to move toward a genuinely ethical state of being.

A well-established internet phenomenon with fans worldwide, this exhibition marks The Pinky Show’s first visit to Canada organized by Milena Placentile. After launching at Gallery 1C03 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Class Treason Stories (excerpts) will join us in Toronto before moving on to Sherbrooke, Quebec.

The Pinky Show is a project of Associated Animals Inc. - a non-profit educational organization based in the United States. For more information, visit http://www.pinkyshow.org/

• • • • •

For press inquiries and photos please contact: Izida Zorde at izida@fusemagazine.org. Toronto Free Gallery is a non-profit art space dedicated to supporting work that deals with social justice, cultural, sustainability and environmental issues. We our proud to receive support from the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and Trillium Foundation.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference is going on right now (December 7 - December 18, 2009). You can follow its progress here: http://en.cop15.dk/

A couple of weeks ago the folks at WeForest (WeForest.org) asked Pinky if she would be willing to do a guest voice over for a video they’ll be using at COP15. The video is supposed to help them focus attention on reforestation using permaculture techniques as a strategy to fight climate change. Unlike some people who think that climate change is just part of an elaborate conspiracy to usher in a New World Order (hello YouTube people?), we think that human activity really does drive climate change and, if done properly, reforesting previously destroyed forest-lands seems like a pretty reasonable step in the right direction.

Anyway, here’s the video, as it came out. Just to be clear, we didn’t make the video. We just did the voice over.

Oh hey, if you want to see a good case study presentation of how this would actually work, please watch this TED video by Willie Smits. It’s only 20 minutes long but I think you will be pretty amazed, and not just by how he can seemingly talk without ever using commas and periods.

Bye. Bunny.

I’m so excited! Okay, so I’m a total work-nerd and I’ve been fuzzying around with a little software contraption that makes zoomable big pictures. It’s kind of hard to explain in words but easy to enjoy once you start playing around with it…

Click on the image below to start. [ Note: It's a big picture so it might take a few moments to load - depends on your internet connection speed. ]

Instructions:
• Mouse your cursor onto the picture to start.
• Press the SHIFT key to zoom in.
• Press the CONTROL key to zoom out.
• Click & drag your mouse to move around in the image (only works once you’re zoomed in).

Did it work? It’s neat, right?

I’m going to ask Bunny to clean up the interface later but I wanted to post this today because tomorrow is Thanksgiving and… yeah, you know.

Take care,
pinky

[note from Bunny: also added the triptych from the On Native Land series to the archive page. ]

Pinky and I have never been inside Makua Valley so Daisy was nice enough to snap a few photos for us while he was there this past weekend.

Pinky organized the materials into a slideshow format and put it in the Commons Gallery. See it here. (The pictures have mouse-over commentary by Daisy - don’t miss it.)

For those of you who never heard of Makua Valley, here is some background information from KAHEA, EarthJustice, and DMZ Hawaii/Aloha Aina.

- Bunny

[ note from Kim: I think I see the dog in the petroglyph. Did Hawaiian people know about cats before the European and American people showed up? ]

[ Bunny: I don't think so. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that cats first arrived in Hawaii along with the first wave of European "explorers" (late 18th century). Apparently we were employed on those ships as rat hunters. Anybody know? ]

[ Pinky: I heard that story too. I wonder how the cats got from ship to shore? Did they jump and swim? Did Captain Cook bring his cat friends to shore on those little boats? I wonder what Hawaiian people thought when they first saw cats? Did they like how soft we are? I wonder what was the first thing said after that first somebody touched that first cat? ]

[ Bunny: Damn. As always, so many weird questions. ]

Hi. We made this new mini-zine for the Pinky Show-inspired panel discussion going on in Winnipeg tonight: Academic Freedom? A conversation about the way things are and the way things could be… Unfortunately we had to come home before the event so in lieu of attending we just made 125 of these little mini-zines and left them with Milena Placentile, the curator responsible for inviting us to Winnipeg and organizer of the academic freedom panel, and asked her to distribute the mini-zines to everyone who attended the panel.

Download the thing here. If you need instructions on how to cut & fold it, there’s a little instructional video on how to do just that here.

Hope you find it interesting.

Take care,
pinky

The Class Treason Stories (excerpts) exhibition is now open at the University of Winnipeg’s Gallery 1C03! The talks were all well attended and exciting and the opening was fun - with Kim, Zach and Haley right outside the gallery at the IWGS table selling Pinky Show t-shirts and books and stickers we sort of felt like rock stars! lol Here’s a couple of pictures of how the installation came out.

The exhibition runs until December 12. Then it’ll be taken down and packed up and shipped off to Toronto, where it will open for a second time in January (details coming soon) at the Toronto Free Gallery.

~ ~ ~

A big THANK YOU to everybody who made the 1C03 exhibition happen: Milena Placentile, who without her invitation and positive energy and guidance we would have never, ever, EVER been able to do this exhibition; Jennifer Gibson, art curator at UWinnipeg who was so accommodating and patient with us and just all-around helpful with helping us take care of all the little details an exhibition inevitably produces; Glen Johnson - the artist who basically single-handedly installed the show for us (we don’t know how to use power tools and he’s a lot taller than we are) and kept us reassured that everything would be okay with his calm temperament and deadpan hilariousness (?) even when cables were pulling out of the wall; Kim Hunter and her incredible family for showing us a deeper level of Winnipeg kindness and complexity and beauty; Zach, Haley, Tyler, Lissie, and all the folks (Hi Roewan! Hi Fiona! Next time please!) at the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies (IWGS) for their enthusiasm, institutional support, and of course, the non-stop bake sales; the people at AceArtInc, who  allowed us to use their very cool space for a public-HR03 dialogue (Liz Garlicki, can we hang out next time?); Cliff Eyland at the University of Manitoba School of Art for his graciousness and generosity (he invited us to talk with his students and he was so nice to us even though I could tell he was sick as a dog)… and of course the dozens and dozens to people we met at the talks, the opening, and behind-the-scenes meetings & get-togethers that made us feel welcome and gave us so much to think about. We were in Winnipeg for only a week and of course there are probably about 700,000 other people there we didn’t get to meet but the people that we did meet were all very warm and welcoming and made us feel like there really is somebody out there who is engaging our work at a very deep level. To us, making work that is useful or helpful to others is the most important thing we can possibly do, so it’s actually very difficult to put into words how important this trip was for us.

We will write more about the trip a little later (we’re still getting our materials in order), probably in the blog.

Take care,
pinky

[ Bunny note: Glen and I ate bison burgers. ]