Our weekly focus on the moving image and art in the streets. And other oddities.

Now screening :
1. Escif: Magic Piano
2. Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019
3. Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum
4. OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin

BSA Special Feature: Escif: Magic Piano

Spanish Street Artist Escif creates a museum installation that uses irony, sarcasm, and deep truths that we’re not always ready to see.

By hi-jacking some of the current interactive nomenclature enabled by augmented/mixed realities and the normalizing of tablet use, he alerts viewers to the connection of age-old mineral mining that is just as contemporary as the hi-tech gadgetry many have embraced.

Since you can use the device to contemplate human suffering and make music, it is an indictment of modern attitudes that dehumanize and turn real stories into a video game.

From the artist:

“Coltan is a mineral, found specially in eastern Congo, used to make cells and computer chips. Violent rebel groups are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war which is now in its 12^th year.

The link between the bloodshed and coltan is causing alarm among high-tec manufacturers slowly they are beginning to realise that their products may contain the tainted fruits of civil war. Since the outbreak of fighting in august 1998: an estimated 5.4 million people have died; 45.000 continue to die each month; Children account for 47% of these deaths.

Magic Piano is a music installation. With the help of a tablet (that obviously contains coltan) you will be able to play the piano. Use the device to navigate on the wall. When you pass on the screen over a charater, a sound will be activated. If you push the character with your finger a sound loop will be activated. You will also activate the animation of each character.”

Adele Renault: St+Art India. Lodhi Art Festival 2019

A couple of weeks ago we shared with you new photos by Adele’s mom of the Street Artist painting this wall for St+Art India in New Delhi. Today we share a video made of her installation.

Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean Museum

“It lacks all the give and the breath of fresh art,” the bespectacled art critic intones with all the weight of a final damnation.

“We need haters out there. They are affirmations that we’re doing something right,” says the streetwise pop star with clever sunnies and sans big hat.

Taking a break from the Banksy beat, Doug appears to put forth that supposition that Jeff Koons is proving once again that as long as you are a white guy and you reference European art history you are 80% on your way as an artist whose work will be collected and exhibited.

OS Gemeos: Flying Steps at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin

A splendid hybrid that sends heartbeats racing, even involuntarily, here is a trailer for Flying Steps and Os Gemeos as they interpret Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, the famous piano composition that has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists. Good to see museums of contemporary art truly stretching, redefining the street and Street Art.

Another interpretation by ELP from December 1970.

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