Those sunny days seem to be gone forever but our friend Vanessa from INEEDMORERINGS brings back memories of summer. Take a break form winter and its grey skies and check out her gorgeous New York photos.

Do you like our IWISHUSUN logo T-shirts and want to show your colours, too?  The T-shirts are now available in our online store.

Check out Vanessa’s interview with IWISHUSUN here.

Vanessa Leyssner, co-founder of the jewelry label INEEDMORERINGS, graphic designer and one of our lovely supporters, says “Hi” from New York! While we try to remain in high spirits under a dull grey sky Vanessa catches the last rays of autumn sun at New York’s famous Central Park. Thank you for this nice photo!

Do you like our IWISHUSUN textile ambassador and want to show your colours, too?  The T-shirts are now available in our online store.

Check out Vanessa’s interview with IWISHUSUN here.

IWISHUSUN goes New York! Yesterday Maya Hayuk and other artists had open studios for the residency they did at the Clocktower Gallery in Lower Manhattan this month and we got excited about watching Vanessa from I NEED MORE RINGS and her husband representing IWISHUSUN.

Do you want to show some love for IWISHUSUN too? Our logo T-shirts are now available in our online store. With every Tee sold online, we finance a pair of glasses for a school child in Bangladesh through the “National Childhood Blindness Project (NCBP)” with ORBIS. Help us fight blindness!

Read Vanessa’s and her partner’s interview with IWISHUSUN here. Also, check out Maya Hayuk’s work here.

Photo via @mayahayuk Instagram.

Let’s hope that we all are lucky and don’t live in countries that are war-torn! In any case, even if we grew up and live in peace, pictures of violent conflicts come along with our daily lives, our media and news coverage, art and exhibitions. All day, every day. In this age of seemingly permanent global warfare, the experience of violent conflict is continually restaged in visual culture – regardless of its particular communication medium, whether films, documentaries, mainstream journalism or user-generated media, all of them serve as “the ideological, consensus-building theater of conflict.” Based on this fact, the new international group exhibition “An I For An Eye” at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York brings together different artistic reactions to the ways in which media representations of violent conflict are increasingly rendered through an individualised or even banal perspective.

“An I For An Eye” which will open in mid-September features artists who work in different regions and from within different contexts,

all sharing a particular focus on personal and distributed media, the cinematic, and the contemporary culture of spectacle. Using a number of strategies, these artists deconstruct—and contest—the affective means by which violent conflict is presented, imagined, experienced, and consumed.

 . . . Seen most clearly through the intimate renderings of soldiers, agents, and politicians, the identificatory power of the personal overwhelmingly occludes the broader constructs of the political. The artists in AN I FOR AN EYE foreground this complex politics of attachment, detachment, and affect in their counter-representations of conflict.

Curated by Stamatina Gregory & Andreas Stadler. Visit acfny.org for more information.

Artists: Wafaa Bilal, Anetta Mona Chisa & Lucia Tkáčová, Ad Van Denderen, G.R.A.M., An-My Lê, Rabih Mroué, Isabel Rocamora, Gerhard Rühm, Larissa Sansour, Dread Scott, Tarzan & Arab, Sharif Waked, Christoph Weber, Anna Witt.

AN I FOR AN EYE, Counter-Representations of Geopolitical Conflict, 18 September 2013– 06 January 2014, Austrian Cultural Forum New York (ACFNY).

Image: Isabel Rocamora, Still from Body of War (2010), 16 mm transferred to HD, single channel color projection, stereo, 20:49 min. Courtesy of Galeria SENDA, Barcelona (Spain).

This scenes recalls a performance which is a few month ago: the grande dame of 1970s performance art, Marina Abramović, spent three months in silent vigil at New York’s Museum of Modern Art alongside a major new retrospective of her work (“The Artist is precent“, March 14–May 31, 2013). Yesterday we saw another performance which involved viewer participation too. The protagonist: Jay-Z. The location: Pace Gallery in New York.

Similarly, Jay-Z, who just relased his new LP “Magna Carta … Holy Grail”, invaded the exhibition space and performed his song “Picasso Baby” for six straight hours – a performance that will be compiled into a music video. Guests included Marina Abramović herself, among other celebrities and local New Yorkers. See Jay-Z and Marina Abramović on stage:

videos via Cedar Pasori.