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International İstanbul Biennial events continue to take place with '9B Talks - VIII' with the participation of the American artist Daniel Bozhkov and the curators of the 9th İstanbul Biennial.
"Everybody. One at a Time. All the Time." The eight lecture in the series of '9B Talks' realized within the 9th International İstanbul Biennial will take place on the 23rd of May, Monday at Yıldız Technical University, Art Design Campus, "Temel Tasarım Atölyesi" in Çukursaray building with the participation of the American artist Daniel Bozhkov and the biennial curators; Charles Esche and Vasıf Kortun. The lecture titled '"Everybody. One at a Time. All the Time." will start at 17:30 pm. The '9B Talks -VIII', in which Daniel Bozhkov is going to speak about his art practice and recent projects previous works and his project as well as introducing his project for the İstanbul Biennial, will be free of charge and carried out with simultaneous translation. Afterwards, Charles Esche and Vasıf Kortun will address the issue of the Biennial Debate. The discussion will focus upon the pros and cons of the large-scale international exhibitions, the expanding international art market and institutional support, engagement in local political conditions, periphery to periphery relations, and continuing need for transient structures. Do the biennials serve a social function within the public sphere and provide a context for experimentation and reinvention of specific models? Are Biennials processes or products?
Daniel Bozhkov will be talking about his project Darth Vader Tries to Clean the Black Sea with Brita Filter (2000), for which he posed as the Star Wars anti-hero engaged in a large scale ecological intervention. In another project entitled Training in Assertive Hospitality (2001-2004), Bozhkov took a training course and worked as a People Greeter at a Wal-Mart in Skowhegan, Maine. In between shifts, he painted a fresco in the Layaway department of the store. Later on, the fresco was half-obscured with Wal-Mart merchandise. In 2003 he consulted the visiting Italian restorer Renato Giangualano about the condition of the fresco. The artist and the restorer showed how the store was efficiently functioning as a deterioration time-machine, which, by rubbing into the fresco, was producing visible traces of its own accelerated archaeology. Later, Bozhkov will introduce Learn to Fly Over a Very Large Larry (2002-2003), in which he created a 100m x 85m crop sign with the likeness of CNN host Larry King in a hayfield in Maine, and took flying lessons over the site. He timed the release of the information about the piece to coincide with the release of the Hollywood film "Signs." Since 2003, Bozhkov has explored his interest in mediated experience through his project entitled Fastest Guided Tours. Upon arriving in a foreign city, he studies tourist guidebooks for a few hours, and then leads a 35-minute running tour of the city. Fastest Guided Tours of Prague, Krakow and Budapest are planned for this spring. At the end, Daniel Bozhkov will introduce his 9th International İstanbul Biennale project "Eau d'Ernest", for which he is collaborating with a perfumer and media company to launch into the market a scent inspired by the persona of Ernest Hemmingway, a man as quintessentially American as Gershwin or Jackson Pollock. Hemmingway allegedly stayed in Buyuk Londra Hotel in Beyoglu section of İstanbul when he was working as a war correspondent for the Canadian newspaper "Toronto Daily Star". "Eau d'Ernest" captures the very essence of contemporary man. He is confident, independent and infinitely seductive, but he is openly sensitive and able to show darker complexities. Daniel Bozhkov is a Bulgarian-born conceptual artist based in New York City. He has done special projects for the First Biennale of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Center and for the 8th İstanbul Biennial. His work has been shown in New York at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, the Sculpture Center and Andrew Kreps Gallery.
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Daniel Bozhkov works with professionals from different fields, using numerous strategies to activate public space. He enters worlds of genetic science, department mega-stores, world-famous tourist-sites, as an amateur intruder/visitor who also functions as a producer of new strains of meaning into seemingly closed systems.
