"Take Care of Yourself"

[Clive]

An article in the Independent today lists a forthcoming Miranda appearance (I think from a stage show?). There is very little information that I can find at the moment : -

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Sophie Calle, France: 'Take Care of Yourself'

When Sophie Calle received an email from a lover who was breaking up with her, she decided to send it to 107 women and put their responds together to form her poignant and witty show. Women taking part include the actresses Miranda Richardson and Jeanne Moreau as well as a sexologist, a UN expert in women's rights and a moral philosopher.
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The full article (mainly about Tracy Emin) can be found at
news.independent.co.uk/europe/article2631549.ece

If anyone can find any more information, please post to let us all know!

[goddessqueen]

ohhhh exciting!!!

[EarlyBird]

think it may be a book found this Sophie Calle’s book intitled Take care of yourself. So might be. Not sure lol

[avalon]

I recieved it as an E mail alert 3 days ago...got no clue.

How Emin is not the only woman flying the flag at Venice Biennale
By Arifa Akbar in Venice
Published: 08 June 2007


France is a collective response to a lover's letter of rejection, Poland is an artistic ode to failed creativity, and the Czech Republic is a macabre selection of body parts placed delicately inside cardboard boxes.

They range from the witty to the whimsical to the downright weird, but one thing unites these wide-ranging and often spectacular shows at this year's Venice Biennale: they are all the work of women. As Tracey Emin unveiled a collection depicting her abortion and neon nudes that were heralded as her "most feminine ever", Britain's representative at the premier international show for contemporary art was not flying the flag for female artists on her own.

The launch of the British Pavilion, which has been given a clean-up and makeover in pale pink on Emin's instruction, was supported by Isa Genzken, one of Germany's leading artists and the French firebrand Sophie Calle, whose display is tipped to win the coveted Golden Lion Award this Sunday - the art festival's biggest accolade.

Women have also been chosen by Poland and the Czech Republic to represent their respective national art scenes, while a host of countries including Brazil, Romania, Scotland and Russia elected more women to take part in group exhibitions. Until recently, women have been seriously under-represented at the Biennale and in the world's major galleries in general.

As her collection was unveiled, Emin said she felt this was changing, and was proud to describe her show as "feminine" which "no man could have made the work... because it has a lightness of touch."

She said she was delighted to be part of a Biennale with a dominant female presence which had changed the festival's atmosphere. "It has a nice karma. All the girls are meeting and saying 'Have you cleaned up the pavilion yet?'" she said.

The bill for Emin's clean-up and refurbishment of the pavilion was £100,000 - far higher than previous years - but for her, the site at which her work was showcased was just as important as the pieces themselves, some of which included deeply personal "abortion watercolours", inspired by her termination of twins in 1990, which had never been shown before.

Andrea Rose, curator for the British Pavilion, which is sponsored by the British Council, hailed Emin's work as ladylike. "One of the first things Tracey did was put her hand across the stairway railings to check for dust... She uses femininity in her work without embarrassment and with freshness," she said.

Emin, 43, is only the second solo female artist to be picked to represent Britain since the Biennale began in 1895 - the first was Rachael Whiteread, in 1997 - but she said she was convinced that a female artist would be picked for the British Pavilion when a campaign by the "Guerrilla Girls" at the last Biennale in 2005 highlighted the fact that more women had shown their work in the Afghan Pavilion than the British one. Emin said becoming one of Britain's pre-eminent artists had required her to make a choice between career and a family. "I would have had lots of children if I had been a man," she said. "My career would have been very difficult with children if I wanted to do this. I'm too old to have children so it's great I'm doing this. This is my reward for being loyal and passionate about what I do."

Curators have noted that the women who have been chosen for the Biennale tended to have a radical edge to their work. Emin admits she may be seen as a "loose cannon" by some, while Calle is regarded as an establishment outsider in France, previously having produced art that has flummoxed traditionalists.

The Czech Republic's Irena Juzova has produced life-size casts of her own naked body in fetishised positions, with casts of body parts placed next to stylish fashion boxes, while Germany's Isa Genzken has been referred to as the "Great Unknown".

Their shows are also notable for the personalised content. While Juzova draws on her own body for inspiration, Emin famously draws on intimate experience to inform her work. Calle used an email she received from a lover who was ending the relationship as the starting point for her Biennale show.

Sophie Calle, France: 'Take Care of Yourself'

When Sophie Calle received an email from a lover who was breaking up with her, she decided to send it to 107 women and put their responds together to form her poignant and witty show. Women taking part include the actresses Miranda Richardson and Jeanne Moreau as well as a sexologist, a UN expert in women's rights and a moral philosopher.

Irena Juzova, Czech Republic: 'Collection-Series'

Irena Juzova has made a life-size cast of her body for the biennale as well as of body parts, some of which are placed inside cardboard boxes. She wanted to explore the idea that "we continue to produce ourselves as a subject..." Born in 1965, she trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and has exhibited widely.

Isa Genzken, Germany: 'Oil'

Born in 1948, Genzken has been producing diverse work for more than 30 years including sculpture, photography and collages. For the biennale, she has covered the outside of the pavilion with scaffolding and her pieces inside include sculptures of astronauts, trolleys and suitcases, which incorporate her theme of tourism and technology.

Monika Sosnowska, Poland: '1:1'

The artist, who at 34 years old, is among the youngest, likes to study architecture "from the point of view of its failures" and her work in the biennale is a large scale architectural structure which fills the entire room and is broken or crumbling in parts.

[avalon]

Arts and Letters

Pax Americana in the Serene Republic
Venice Biennale 2007

By DAVID COHEN
Special to the Sun
June 11, 2007

will Miranda be a part of the VENICE BIENNALE...?? SEEMS SO.

The Nordic Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale includes the work 'Action painting!'


[Continued from page 1 of 2]Full article link.
www.nysun.com/article/56274

A statistician analyzes the length of 22 sentences in the letter; a clown reads aloud with personal asides, interpreting the letter in positive terms, grasping at straws, feeling the tenderness of his ellipses and parentheses; a pair of Talmudists debate its meaning dialectically; an actress — Miranda Richardson — reads it dramatically and then performs origami.

The Venice Biennale has been the Olympics of the visual arts since its inception in 1895

With so many Americans elsewhere, the actual American pavilion is given over this year to a deceased Cuban: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, who died of AIDS in 1996 at age 38. His spare, minimalist heaps of candies and stacks of posters that visitors can take away elegaically symbolize a dispersal of essence. The show offers a welcome moment of quiet and repose amid the clamor of the Biennale.

National pavilions are each chosen by a named commissioner, who is sometimes also that show's curator. While following their own tastes and local agendas they often respond to the mood set by the Biennale director. The British artist Tracey Emin has played down her carefully cultivated popular persona as the "bad girl" of the British art scene with an elegant, almost prim display. There is nothing like her earlier slept-in bed or tent embroidered with the names of everyone she has slept with. While her imagery continues to play on a harrowing personal mythology of teenage angst — evident in monotypes shown here taken from earlier sketchbooks and delivered in a knowingly pathetic, spindly line — sexual languor does not prevent her paintings from looking like polite salon abstraction riffs on Cy Twombly and Joan Mitchell.

Next door, in one of the strongest shows in the Giardini, France's Sophie Calle picks up Ms. Emin's self-pity and takes it in a totally different direction. When the artist was jolted via e-mail by a boyfriend, she sent his crass missive to over a hundred women chosen for their different professions and skills and asked each to interpret the letter and propose a reply.




This year, for the first time, the director is an American: Robert Storr, a former Museum of Modern Art curator and recently appointed dean of the Yale Art School. The title he has come up with is "Think with the senses, feel with the mind: Art in the present tense." While his selections and reasonings reflect a notion of art in troubled times, his generally neat, sober, focused festival is a deal less anarchic and querulous than biennials past. Pax Americana has arrived in the Serene Republic.

[EarlyBird]

It turns out they play the videos on those screens in the Art Gallery and they are supposed to pick at it and used their profession. It said sing act dance and so on. I hope they do something about it on tv cause I want to see Miranda's reaction:)

[electrostrike]

this whole project sounds like a conceptualists dream. im in love with it