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l a n a
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interventions
| Intervention n- an action or an object within a specific context that is made or staged specificallyto illuminate the subtext within that context. |
I would say I am an interventionist and that intervention is the single best description of my work, whichever medium I'm using. I use any medium I can and I intervene into any context I think derserves it. These are usually sites of "bad faith", Sartre's bad faith, where a person of conscience (and - unlike Sartre - I realise that not everyone is a person of conscience), acts in a way that is contrary to their conscience. They do this by either pretending that they're not the one doing the action, or that nothing that offends their conscious is really going on. (for a less glib understanding of bad faith, see Being and Nothingness. I also emphatically read Sartre as against the bourgeois morality of his day and not anti-ethics. In fact, his existentialism is a profoundly ethical proposition.) Occasionally I am invited by galleries or exhibition organisers to intervene, but generally, I am an uninvited public nuisance - a most noble job for art. |
| BLACCXN | 2006-ongoing Intervention into the corporate takeover of Britain - and globally. Website, novel, conceit and also a performance as a Public Consulation. Click for more information. |
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2005 One contribution to the citymine(d) Urban Interventions toolbox. Also shown at 'Hiroshima Imaginary' on the 50th anniversay of the Hiroshima-Nagaski outrage, Brunei Gallery, London, 2005 |
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Sponsorship
At "The Guidebook" we are proud to announce our new foray into sponsorship of The Arts. |
2005 Critique of Corporate Sponsorship of the Arts - also incorporated into the BLACCXN project (above). |
Our most recent Sponsorship Deals:- EAST
International 20 July - 20 August 2005 TOURISM
and PERFORMANCE Conference The
Illegal Art Show, London, |
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2005 site-specific intervention into Jim Thomson House After 6 weeks on exhibition, this intervention was censored and not allowed to be seen or refered to again in any future press or documentation according to the Directors of Jim Thompson. The paintings were consequently re-hung within the 'safer', less relevant context of the gallery. Officially, it never existed as an intervention. |
24 x oil paintings on the back of silk 'canvases'. The paintings were of everyday objects (ladders, plastic buckets, mops, etc) taken from photos that the local community took of themselves at my request. The paintings served as interventions into the "authentic" museum context of the Jim Thompson House, where ancient and beautiful Buddhas and paintings are housed as the real Thailand. |
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2001 - 2004 www.alanajelinek.com 2004 The Arena, Oxford 2002 Chisenhale Open Studios (shown as projected rolling text) |
A 3 year online diary of racism started on June 30, 2001 in which everyday encounters with racism were recorded as bystander, victim and perpetrator. This work may be regarded as an intervention into life, my own life, or into the generally smug, complacent and wingeing phenomenon of blogging. |
The Guidebook
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2004
The Arena, Oxford |
An online work that mimics online guidebooks and tourist websites which readily supply 'information' and services for a global mass and bourgeois tourist market. |
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2005 Site-specific intervention into the 2005 Open Studios event at Chisenhale Studios Also |
Audiences were faced with the back side of this life sized canvas with head-height hole. As audiences put their head through the canvas, they were confronted with a mirror image of themselves as the Queen of Clubs - not my best work, but made for the context of Open Studios. |
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2003-04 2004 open mike session, Beaconsfield Gallery, England 2004 Arena Gallery, Oxford Brookes University, England 2003 Priory Meadow Shopping Centre, Hastings, England 2003 Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, England |
A game with 54 pieces. Players are asked to choose which of the 54 landscapes to place within a frame that can fit a maximum of 36. The choice is to be made on which landscapes the player believes is 'Europe'. In its final incarnation, players take it in turns to fill the frame and - inevitably - haggle over the results. |
2001 Arsenal Gallery, Poznan, Poland
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Originally
made for ArtSway in response to a 6-week residency, 56°N 1°W became an X-marks the spot of Englishness when exhibited abroad. |
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2001 site specific intervention into gallery in Poland |
Raw paint pigment, directly on gallery floor. | |
2001 site-specific intervention into Grizedale Gallery in Grizedale Forest, Lake District, England |
Raw Paint pigment, refering to a history and construction of landscape painting | |
| 2001 site-specific installation of life-sized oil painted figure. The Pilbara, outback Western Australia | One of a series of specifically sited oil paintings left to the elements in perpetuity. 'Shooting the Natives' is on outback farm land in the Pilbara, Western Australia, across from Aboriginal Land and within a large international mining zone. | |
| 2000 site-specifc for ArtSway, New Forest, England | Conceived and painted to fill the first main gallery at ArtSway so that viewers are forced to walk around the outside of the canvas, respecting a depiction of a sacred site that tourists frequently trample. | |
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