BLACCXN 2004 - ongoing

For dates and recordings of performances as BLACCXN PR guru and links to various BLACCXN metacorporation projects which celebrate our neoliberal project, see below.

BLACCXN is a global enterprise, part of our
common culture.

BLACCXN logo

Please feel free to use the BLACCXN logos
whenever the spirit moves you...

BLACCXN logo 2

*All text, images and logos under
'creative commons licence'

Formerly, www.alanajelinek.com was exclusively used as the portal for artwork:

 

a l a n a j e l i n e k

me - you - them

Original link
Situated in DearDiary.net
Rolling text link
Requires Flash
Calendar style link
similar to original
A record of everyday encounters with racism
June 30th 2001 - June 30th 2004
as a bystander, as a victim and as a racist.

Please click any of the side links for the racism 'blog'.

a l a n a j e l i n e k

At first glance this body of work may appear disparate - it takes many forms, across a variety of media.
L
inking the various projects I have done over the years is an ongoing concern with colonialism, post-colonialism and neo-colonialism. An exploration of these has been at the heart of my artwork for nearly 20 years.

In tandem with most of the work featured here - work that critiques and parodies - there is a long-term, life-long project that generates and enacts. 
It's called 'the field' - a field of knowledge and an actual field situated near Stansted.


2009 - 2014
Projects with Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge:


1 Intervention : The Archaeological Story according to BLACCXN  
    23 October 2009 - March 2010

BLACCXN sponsorship of the archaeology gallery, celebrating a version of Darwinian evolutionary theory and its links with neo-liberalism. Three cheers for the hierarchical society - it's all just part of the natural order. A site-specific intervention into a 30 year archaeology display which tells the story of human evolution and progress.
PV Thursday 22 October 2009 timed to intervene into The Cambridge Festival of Ideas and Darwin's 200 year anniversary celebrations.

2 Exhibition : Tall Stories & Cannibal Forks 
    15 September 2010 - October 31 2010

I was pawing some elegant forms made from wood from the museum's collections, admiring their shape and the skill involved. They were being photographed by Mark Adams in my office. Eventually I asked what they were. He said, 'cannibal forks'.
I sought out more information. They didn't make sense to me as a shape and I wondered about the usual forks if these were for cannibal purposes. I was told a range of stories from hair-raising missionary tales of Fijian sadism and barbarity to an idea current in anthropological circles that few if any of these were made for ritual purposes. Many, perhaps all, were made in response to 19th century tourists like misionaries and early ethnologists.
This work explores stories and story-telling. Who seeks out what type of knowledge and why? Why are we open to some stories and closed to others? It is not a search for the truth about cannibal forks.

Click for link to museum website

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more art :

online work 1: BLACCXN
online work 2: me-you-them
online work 3: Corporate Sponsorship
online work 4: The People's Vote
online work 5: Europe the Game
online work 6: The Guidebook
'The Field' a terra incognita project
Artwork since 1999

 

Curating  for terra incognita
text - essays

Capital Growth
MayDay 2009 intervention

In various sites across London and Cambridge a series of exquisite oil-paintings were placed for Mayday. The six paintings are birds-eye views of specific corporate sites including the boardroom of the London Stock Exchange and the foyer, the floor of the London Metal Exchange and the Lloyds building and the fictional BLACCXN boardroom.The paintings are comprised of 9 canvases and measure 3sqm in total. They were placed in an x-mark and left to the elements, the police, art-lovers..

image of intervention at canary wharf londonThe above image is a birds eye view of the BLACCXN headquarters, linking 'Capital Growth' to the wider BLACCXN project. Image by Kristian Buus.

For images and details of the other 5 paintings before and after the intervention, click here.

    Mayday 2009
    AM:
  • 07.00 Tate Modern, Bankside - near front lawn, on the eastern edge near Millenium Bridge. 
  • Painting of London Stock Exchange boardroom

  • 09.00 Ministry of Defence, Victoria Embankment - either in the park or on the pavement. If there are major problems with police harassment we will be taking the paintings to Rt Hon John Hutton, Secretary of State for Defence as a gift. 
  • Painting of London Metal Exchange

  • 10.00 Science Museum, Kensington Gore - in the shipping innovation part of floor two, near the BP sponsored 'Energy Exhibition'
  • Painting of Lloyds building (original interior)

  • PM:
  • 13.45 Canary Wharf, Westferry Road circus
  • Painting of London Stock Exchange computer hub
  • 15.30 Olympic site, on the Greenway, nearest tube Pudding Mill Lane
  • Painting of BLACCXN headquarters
  • 17.45 Unilever Centre for Molecular Science Informatics Building, University of Cambridge
  • Painting of London Stock Exchange foyer

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A bit of biog info:

  • AHRC Creative Fellow, Cambridge University Museum of Anthropology and Archeaology 2009-2014
  • PhD at Oxford Brookes University 2004-2008. 50:50 History of Art: Fine Art Practice,
    'Art as a democratic act: the interplay of
    context and content London 2000-2006' AHRC award.
  • MA (Gender,Society, Culture) Birkbeck college, University of London 1992-4
  • BA (Fine Art - Painting) Victoria College, Prahran, Melbourne, Australia with modules in Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne 1987-90

Published first novel 2007 'Ohm's Law' with terra incognita
(terra incognita link) ISBN: 978-0-9535045-3-4

Visual Art Exhibitions across England, Australia, Japan, and Bangkok, Thailand; Poznan, Poland; Moscow, Russia; Dniepropretrovsk, Ukraine.

Curating, art project management and exhibition design for various institutions since 1997. Co-founded terra incognita arts organisation 1997

Education context work since 1993, including schools, museums and galleries, further and higher education.

 

Contact :
(If you have JavaScript turned on, an e-mail address should appear above)
It should read: info [AT] this URL

 

 

I became an artist for the reasons that art is the expression of thoughts and feelings and the exploration of ideas - not simply another commodity. The following is a log where this freedom was deemed incompatible with art-making or exhibiting for one reason or another.

1989 - expelled from art college for taking courses in philosophy and history & philosophy of science.

1994 - satirical icon in Russian Orthodox style of Lenin stolen from exhibition at Hall  of Architects, Moscow (destroyed?). Told by ex-KGB officer in Dniepropretrovsk that 'I must be very brave' to bring images of Western steroetypes of Russia to ex-Soviet territories.

2000 - defaced life-sized tourist figure intervention at Grizedale, plus other attempts at moving or destroying similar interventions into Lake District area

2000 - Attempts made by staff of the Australian High Commission, London, to silence and end our very small intervention for 'Racist Australia Day', calling the police on three separate occasions, ending with the riot police. There were 2 of us, flowers and leaflets one early morning ending at 11am.

2001 - Writing for a Teacher's Kit for Tate Modern's 'Century City' exhibition, sponsored by CGNU (now Aviva), where the ambivalent (though not entirely negative) tone regarding globalisation was altered without my consent and changed to a wholly positive one.

2004 - While pacing out the area of Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament, to measure it for a future artwork, The Third Wing, there was a  constant presence by secret service agents, acting in the manner of store detectives. Very close up photography in my face by an undercover agent pretending to be a tourist.

2005 - a series of interventions into the Jim Thompson House, Bangkok, which aimed at disrupting the easy 'tourist gaze' and authenticity of the museum were taken away 3 months before the end of the exhibition. All documentation of the intervention was also apparently destroyed or deleted.

2007 - engage: the journal for museum and gallery education refused to print a satirical essay about the artworld, gallery education and green-washing despite the issue on green matters being published at my suggestion.

2007-9 - tampering of the parodic website for the 'metacorporation', BLACCXN. Various links broken and redirected. This first began when the parody of prize culture with BLACCXN Prize for Culture was redirected to error pages. Continued occasional tampering of the rest of the site has occured into 2009 with other redirections to error messages from all sorts of links including plans for the new wing on the Houses of Parliament, the BLACCXN House of Corporations.

2009 - Beck's Beer, past sponsors of ICA's 'Beck's Futures' exhibitions - apparently 'one of the bolder art prizes' - censored art-intervention into open submission for 2-for-1 offer 'Do Something Different', refusing to include BLACCXN's offer to run seminars on 'How to be a Hedge Fund Manager'. The artwork was even billed as comedy to help frame the experience as ironic. Perhaps the beer company is not really all that bold...

 

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External Links : if you liked this artist, you might also like:
Links:
» Mongrel
» Melanie Gilligan
» Carey Young
» Platform
» Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
» Average Citizen
» Space Hijackers
» James Accord
» Lucy Panesar
» critical art ensemble
and the US based other Alana Jelinek (alphagirl)

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