Raimundas Malašauskas (born in Vilnius, lives and works in Brussels) is a curator, writer and tutor at the Sandberg Institute. From 1995 to 2006, he worked at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, where he produced the first two seasons of the weekly television show CAC TV, an experimental merger of commercial television and contemporary art that ran under the slogan “Every program is a pilot, every program is the final episode.” He co-curated “Black Market Worlds,” the IX Baltic Triennial, at CAC Vilnius in 2005. From 2007 to 2008, he was a visiting curator at California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and, until recently, a curator-at-large of Artists Space, New York. In 2007, he co-wrote the libretto of Cellar Door, an opera by Loris Gréaud produced in Paris. Malašauskas curated the exhibitions “Sculpture of the Space Age,” David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2009); “Into the Belly of a Dove,” Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2010), and “Repetition Island,” Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2010). His other recent projects, Hypnotic Show and Clifford Irving Show, are ongoing. Malasauskas is an agent for dOCUMENTA 13 and on the advisory board of Kunstverein.

In collaboration with Kunstverein Publishing, Sternberg Press, Sandberg Institute and The Baltic Notebooks by Anthony Blunt, Malašauskas has published an anthology of his writings since 1998, which will be launched on the evening.

The already infamous Vilnius Sling cocktail will be served at cocktailbar Door 74, reguliersdwarsstraat 74, from 22.00 onwards.

Please contact info@amsterdam.goethe.org or call +31 20 5312900 for reservations.

Especially for ARCO, Kunstverein Amsterdam, Milan and New York have collectively set-up an unique auction featuring works by artists who have collaborated with one or more of the Kunstverein venues. KV Auction is a two-hour performative venture hosted by artist Gabriel Lester, in which alternative means of fundraising are explored. Works to be auctioned are by amongst others Sarah Crowner, Richard Kostelanetz, Gabriel Lester, Raimundas Malasauskas, Renzo Martens, Simon Martin, Willem Oorebeek, Adam Pendleton, Michael Portnoy, Alexandre Singh, Barbara Visser and Robert Wilhite.

28 February 2012, 14.00 – 17.00
Location: Bijzondere Collecties, University of Amsterdam, Oude Turfmarkt 129

The Quiet Volume is a whispered, self-generated and ‘automatic’ performance (Autoteatro) for two at a time, exploiting the particular tension common to any library worldwide; a combination of silence and concentration within which different peoples’ experiences of reading unfold.

Two audience members / participants sit side-by-side. Taking cues from words both written and whispered they find themselves burrowing an unlikely path through a pile of books. The piece exposes the strange magic at the heart of the reading experience, allowing aspects of it we think of as deeply internal to lean out into the surrounding space, and to leak from one reader’s sphere into another’s.

“This now of the page is what grips me – the present moment, this one, summoned here with this arrangement of marks/code, ink/pixels, letters and words.”
- Tim Etchells

Members Only
Please note that seating is very limited so we advise you to RSVP before 26 February 2011. For reservation, please contact office@kunstverein.nl

In continuation of Kunstverein’s survey-as-shop series, Closer – The Dennis Cooper Papers profiles the influential literary figure of Dennis Cooper (1953, Pasadena, USA), acknowledging his important impact across literature, poetry, performance and visual art.

The exhibition hinges on the George Miles Cycle (1989 – 2000), a series of interconnected novels that include graphic scenes of violence and desire, of pedophilia, mutilation and necrophilia. The complex structure of the cycle could be seen as literary sculpture; one that is layered and constructed out of geometrical forms.

Dennis Cooper’s literary aspirations were explored early on and often took the form of imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, De Sade, and Baudelaire. He wrote poetry and stories in his early teens that explored scandalous and often extreme subjects.

In 1987, Cooper moved to Amsterdam where he finished writing the first novel of the George Miles Cycle entitled Closer. Closer was awarded with the first Ferro-Gumley Award for gay literature and has since been translated into seventeen languages.

Cooper was 15 when he met George Miles, the 12-year old brother of a friend. They immediately became very close and continued their affection and friendship after George developed a severe bipolar disorder in his early teens, causing him to go through phases of serious depressions, manic episodes, suicide attempts and occasional periods of institutionalization.

In the early 80s, after they had been out of touch for over two years, Cooper began to write a cycle of novels in tribute to George, which consist of Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997) and Period (2000).

“Over (the) years, I’d developed a game plan or overall structure for the cycle. It would take the form of a novel being gradually dismembered to nothing. The first novel would construct the themes, archetypes, subjects, style, and atmosphere of the cycle. (…) Each succeeding novel’s form would reflect the damage caused by the violence, drug use, and emotional turmoil of the previous novel. (…) Parallel to this dismemberment in stages, the structure would be a mirrored structure where the first novel would seem to gradually move through a mirror and eventually, over the course of the cycle, become a backwards reflection of itself.”
-Dennis Cooper

In 1997, after publishing the fourth novel in the cycle, he found out that George had committed suicide ten years earlier. The fifth novel, Period, was therefore written with the awareness that George was no longer alive and would never read the cycle attributed to him. The novel is inspired by and dedicated to the artist Vincent Fecteau.

In the collaboration with the Fales Library & Special Collections of New York University, Kunstverein presents the archive of the George Miles Cycle, comprised of manuscripts, journals, posters, correspondence, scrapbooks and videocassettes.
In addition, works by Vincent Fecteau and Falke Pisano are shown alongside the archive material. Artist Trisha Donnelly has been commissioned to produce new work based on the five novels.

Prior to the opening, on 22 March at 19.30, the director of the Fales Library & Special Collections, Marvin Taylor, will give a keynote lecture on the structure of the George Miles Cycle.

A booklet containing an interview with Dennis Cooper, Marvin Taylor and Krist Gruijthuijsen will be available.

Closer – The Dennis Cooper Papers is conceived in dialogue with Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales Library & Special Collections of the New York University