Ceel Mogami de HaasSelected Works 2007-2012 (not in chronological order)

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Critical Dictionary 2.0 (2012)An Ocean of Lemonade (Or The Trouble of Living in Times of Fulfilled Utopias)

Brief description of the work:

Pierre Bismuth’s invited me to produce a new work for the exhibition An Ocean of Lemonade (Or The Trouble of Liv-ing in Times of Fulfilled Utopias) which took place in Amsterdam (SMART SPACE PROJECT). Bismuth invited artists to confront his work. Here is what freelance writer Ncola Bozzi says about the piece:“Guest artist Ceel Mogami de Haas, with his highly wasteful printed edition of random Wikipedia articles (Critical Dic-tionary 2.0), provides a sardonic look on the compulsive production and sharing of knowledge. If the Dutch artist points out the massive quantity of information in contemporary society, in Aleatechnologicotoric (2011) Bismuth focuses on its meaninglessness”.The work consisted in a script running on a computer that could automatically generate random Wikipedia articles and print them in books via Pediapress, a print-on-demand website associated with Wikipedia. The books are then sent to the Smart Space Project in Amsterdam during the course of the exhibition. The work is entirely autonomous.

Pierre Bismuth - “An ocean of Lemonade - Or the trouble with Living in times of fulfilled utopias” (27 novembre 2011 - 5 février 2012 / SMART Project Space, Amsterdam)with special guests: Cory Arcangel, Cyprien Gaillard, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Matias Faldbakken, Matthijs Bouw, Aaron Schuster, John Snijders.

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Projet Refusé (2011) Festival Points d’Impact, Who’s Afraid Of Performance Art, Genève

Brief description of the work:The performance took the form of a guided bus tour. A fictional travel agency named The Future Of The Past, specialised in the visits of utopias, would take the so-called tourists to the Munda-neum (now situated in the area of Geneva’s International Airport), the unbuild city of Swiss architect Le Corbusier and Belgian philant-ropist Paul Otlet. The visist was segmented in three parts:-while on our way to the phantom town, a slide show accompa-nied with a modified version of Varèse’s Poème Electronique were played on the bus’ video screens,-as we arrived in the zone, a digital voice (so to say the guide, called Diomira) would comment on the invisible architecture of the Mundaneum (after a text by Karel Teige),-finally a collage-text was read by Soprano singer Claire Michel.

Festival Points d’Impact, Who’s Afraid Of Performance Art, Genève

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Self-Portrait As A Knocked Over Bookshelf(autoportrait en tant que bibliothèque renversée)(2011)

Brief description of this work :

This installation has been shown at the CAC in September 2011. It is a collection of objects that are all relating to encyclopaedic practices.

Description of three objects out of the growing collection of the ensemble.-On the table: 20 Critical Dictionaries 2.0 (in ref-erence to the eponymous oeuvre of Pierre Bayle and Georges Bataille) are books whose content have been generated randomly on Wikipedia.-Illustration by S. Gorsky for Gustave Flaubert’s translation of Bouvard and Pécuchet, London: H. S. Nichols, 1896.-Reproduction of the last page of Kafka’s novel, The Castle.

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Encycloplasticity - Part I (2009)

views of exhibition in University of Art and Design, Geneva, 2009

Brief description of thiswork: This is an installation Irealised as part of a spatialization(and incarnation) of differentrandomly generated Wikipédiaarticles (to be found in thering-binder), creating a sort ofWunderkammer, athree-dimensionalencyclopaedia. Here you wouldfind (among other things) apixelated photograph of a horse,two boxes containing screenshotsof clothes that are worn all alongPasolini’s movie Teorema,patterned photographs of Dutchwoonerven, drawings with black inkon an article on density (not on thepicture) while Lou Reed Satellites ofLove is being played approximatelyevery 6 minutes (the sound systemis neither on the picture) . Theseobjects have been designed after

that two or three randomlygenerated Wikipedia articles weresubjectively associated. There is awhole methodology here thatrequires unfortunately more than abrief description.The picture has been taken duringa public presentation/performance Igave.

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Encycloplasticity - Part II (2010)

Brief description of this work : This work has been elaborated as a vast bricolage of several points brought up in my overall research on knowledge technologies. The installation consists of 5 “bibliothèques renversées” (knocked over bookshelves), named in this way after an entree in the 1750’s Dictionnaire comique, satyrique, critique, burlesque, libre et proverbial ... by Philibert-Joseph Le Roux; a set of self-made black and white posters (consisting of A3s glued together) providing what I would call a parallel discourse to the overall research mostly in words; and a set of 5 inkjet printers connected to a computer in its turn connected to internet that would due to a self written computer program (script) generate random Wikipedia articles and then send one article at the time to one of the five printers (the articles would then slide down from a cardboard slide into a archive box).

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Compendium of a Compedium, part I (2009).

Brief description of this work: This work extracted from a larger variety of docu-ments (xerographs, drawings and writ-ings) was intended to be sent by post tothe visitors of an exhibition (de Door-geefshow) in NICC, Antwerp, Belgium. The installation consisted of long table where the documents were put and a copy machine that allowed the visitors to take copies of a the documents home.These documents were meant as a pream-ble and a score for a lecture/performance given at the end of the exhibition. The lecture/performance was entitled From Speusippus to Wikipedia and proposed a sort of fantastic journey from 370 before Christ to Wikipedia now.

exhibition, NICC (Doorgeefshow), Antwerp, 2009.

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Lecture-performance at the NICC, Antwerp, 2009. (the lecture can be found here: http://towards-an-essay-on-encyclopaedias.blogspot.com/).

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exhibition, Palais de l’Athénée, Genève, 2009.

Brief description of this work: again this installation is part of the series Encyclopasticity, a work that has many varia-tions. Here there is a video of 33’ min. entitled Hole, a wood-en table with a multiplicity of documents (drawings, writings, …) relative to my research on the history of encyclopaedism and entitled Compendium of a Compendium), a chair, a small copy machine and drawing pins. Visitors that would come in the room (Société des Arts, Palais de l’Athénée, Genève, CH) could thus make copies of the research in order to create a catalogue and/or pin copies that they would find relevant on the wall.

Compendium of a Compedium, part II (2009)

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video still from the film HOLE (duration: 30 mns)

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Untitled (part of the series ‘Encycloplasticity’), 2009

Brief description of thiswork: the work comprises 10burned Larousse Encyclopaediasfrom 1968. The covers have beenmeticulously detached and placedin front of each burned volumeproviding an alphabetical index.Four self edited experimentalrandom encyclopaedias are puton display in the same room.

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Walk/Talk_Bucarest with Florent Meng Bucharest Biennale-4

Walk_Talk (with guests) May 24-29, 2010Lecture at the BB4 Pavillon, May 29, 2010Invited by Felix Vogel and Katharina HohmannGuests: Ana Dabija, Dragos Badita,Maria Muscalu,Iulian Mosu, Adrianna Mihailescu.

According to Michel de Certeau the act of walking is connected to the urban system in terms of ennonciation: „The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.“Ceel Mogami de Haas and Florent Meng decide to stride along the city of Bucharest during 5 days inviting every day a new person to join them in a walk/talk. This walks, that all last for 6 hours and cover about 20 kilometers, are documented in various ways. The walk/talk project aims at producing new forms when the conventional tools turn out to be inadequate to capture everydayness.

Introduction at the lecture-performance May, 29th, 2010 :«The talk/performance that will follow is in no way a work of art. The actual work has been of course the walks and talks themselves, a form we thought to be the most relevant concerning our situation: how to make an art work within seven days, respecting the framework of the Biennale, the city and the people who leave within? This lecture is in no way a con-clusion. Flaubert said that stupidity consists in the will of wanting to conclude. We believe that it’d be stupid to conclude. These walks and talks continue outside, steady, and probably unconcerned with this lecture... and that’s our best reward.»

After our last walk, a scripted performance/lecture took place at the Biennial’s Pavilion. A fragmented text was read while 60 photographs pinned on the wall behind us were slowly taken down.The nature of these pictures is very diverse: a mix of photographs taken during our walks and of diverse documents referring to elements in our lecture.The images taken down while the lecture was hold were then dropped on the ground and left there at the end of the perfor-mance for the visitors of the biennial, thus creating a subjective and labyrinthic documentation.

Walk/Talk (2010) - Bucharest Biennale 4

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For the first performance, as a preliminary gesture I brought in the material needed for my performative /lecture, that is to say a table, chairs, a computer, a beamer and a glass of water. As I started my lecture, a selec-tion of 30 images, I considered to be a parallel discourse, were projected on a wall beside me. I paused with every chapter of my lecture and hung on a wall a poster representing my confer-ence material (in order: a table, a chair, a microphone, a glass with a bottle of water, a beamer, a man holding a computer, a printer and a woman holding a Wiki-pedia t-shirt). I considered this gesture as telling a gothic story (A Ghost story, very common in gothic novels, is a fiction/func-tion where you show what should have remained hidden).

A tale within a tale within a tale.While reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I was asked to participate in Emily Williams’ project, The Object Lag, so I spontaneously proposed a lecture with this book as key stone.I have started researching why the metaphor of the monster raises complex philosophical and political issues and how we can link these with historical and contemporary factors.I have also approached Shelley’s chaology and compared it to contemporary modes of artistic processes aiming at disor-ganizing rather than systemizing knowledge (“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” –in Mary Shelley’s Introduction to Frankenstein).This has of course led to an intertextual reading of Frankenstein and to a different experience of the book. Then such questions could be raised: Isn’t the book object in itself monstrous? And if so, is there an aesthetic of monstrosity? What is the function of this fiction?

Drift_Draft (2010)(a series of two performances)

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For the second performance I gave 5 times 8 people the 8 folded posters described above. I asked them if they wanted to hear a lecture, gave them a folded poster and asked them to stand in a semicircle. There I asked them to unfold the poster and to hold it in front of them at shoulder level. I would then start my lecture. In between the five lecture moments I would walk around an overhead projector placed on a trolley and project a selection of 30 images around the exhibition (here you can see The Straw Manikin by Goya).

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concrete and mixed media

In Reverse Proportion (2008)

Brief description or outline of thiswork: this work comprises 14 largesize photographs and 14 concreteplates. This work in progressposes diverse reflexions oneverydayness, ordinarity,architecture, authority anddelinquency. The work as suchwas very influenced by thewritings of Michel de Certau andespecially his book entitledL’invention du quotidien.

A visual enquiry. How to tell the everyday? There is a major conceptual problem here: the cohabitation of a form (the representation) that transgress ordinary, and an object (the everyday) which is defined by its ordinary character.

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In Reverse Proportion (2008) (part II work in progress)

4 phtographs published in Remote Monitoring Catalogue in 2008.

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The measure of all things (2007)

Collaboration between : Ceel Mogami de HaasTaf Hassam: BA, Photography,Gerrit Rietveld AcademieCarl Johan Högberg: BA Fine ARt, Gerrit Rietveld AcademieJohanna Suzanna Herman: BA Art History, Universiteit van Amsterdam.Imke Ruigrok:BA Philosophy, MA Modern Art, Universiteit van AmsterdamRozan Vroman: BA Bio-exact, MA Medical Biochemistry, Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Brief description or outline of this work: 'The Measure of All Things' otherwise known as 'M.O.A.T.' is an ongoing inter-disciplinary research project, which first began in 2007. The project in its design and nature is ultimately experimental and seeks to explore the relationships between what is called 'interdisciplinary' groups, theoretical thought, empirical experienc-es and the possible representation thereof in the medium of sound. With its first incarnation the project began by explor-ing various educational institutes in and around Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Rather than determiningitself to be an institutional critique the project focused itself upon researching and documenting the ambient sounds that these spaces contained, and by looking at how the architectural specifics of these spaces could then be translated into re-vealing an underlying 'rhythm' of the spaces themselves.

Measure of all things.(documentation of the exhibition that took place at Ellen de Bruijne Projects.)

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The Measure of all things II (2008-2009)(a project that took place in August 2008 in Hoyerswerda, Germany, during the

European Postgraduate Residency)

Collaboration with Ceel Mogami de Haas (artist), Taf Hassam (artist), Rozan Vroman(neurobiologist) and Karl Kong (musician).

Brief description of this work: Throughout a month's residency in Hoyerswerda, Germany as part of their project 'The Measure of all Things - Two' Taf Hassam and Ceel Mogami de Haas invited various artists, musicians and thinkers tocome and participate within the project as a means to explore the possibilities of interventions through information shar-ing. As a result various lectures and discussions took place during the whole month of August in Hoyerswerda.Theinvited guests included, Anne Korteweg (Artist, NL), Bas Medik (Artist, NL), Eliza Newman-Saul (Artist/Theorist, USA), Daphne van Velsen (Curator/Art Historian, NL), Karl Kong (Electronic Music Artist, IRE), Ohad Benshimon (Artist/Group Psychologist, ISRL), Rozan Vroman (Cell/Neuro-Biologist, NL), Sarah Burger (Philosophy/Theorist, SWZ).The opportunity for a residency in the German town of Hoyerswerda arose from the crisis that had originally developed from the disappearance of the towns industries; an event that inevitably led to a dramatically shrinking population. This has now led to the rare and peculiar decision of the town to demolish a great number of its apartment blocks (equalling whole neighbourhoods) in order to create space for a forest. As soon as the residency comes to a close the building will undergo demolition. The project thus attempts to create a document of a building that has now become redundant to its original purpose, to see as with the first M.O.A.T. ‘what value or information there is in the usually ignored?’. A musical score has been developed in situ, a cd has been released, a publication is on its way.