ART NEWS:Feb.03

“I Must First Apologize…:” is the culmination of a major project by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, an exhibit featuring an extensive body of work in film, sculpture, photography, and installation looking at the history of online spam and scamming. The exhibition charts a kind of narrative itinerary ranging from various works that present intimate correspondence between scammers and victims to so-called “trophy” photographs extracted by vigilante scam-baiters and several video works that feature real or fictional protagonists of scams, including the major new installation “The Rumor of the World” (2014). Info: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, Duration 17/2-19/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-18:00, http://listart.mit.edu

The exhibition “MACK. Just Light and Colour”, focuses on the significant oeuvre of German artist Heinz Mack, who is among the founders of the mid-20th Century Avant-Garde Art network, the ZERO movement. The exhibition, encompassing the artist’s formative earlier works that informed the revolutionary philosophy of the ZERO movement, brings together paintings, monumental sculptures and kinetic works produced throughout the artist’s long career. Within Mack’s oeuvre, in which the artist travels to regions where the natural expression of light is in its most powerful form, ranging from the North Pole to the Sahara Desert, light often becomes both the material as well as the work itself. Info: Sakıp Sabancı Museum, Sakıp Sabancı Cd. No 42 Emirgan, Istanbul, Duration: 18/2-17/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.sakipsabancimuzesi.org

The exhibition “Making Use: Life in Postartistic Times” is engaged with the various avenues that lead from the field of art to daily life and in the reverse direction from life to art. The exhibition addresses one of the fundamental postulates of 20th Century Avant-garde movements, the mutual penetration or even fusion of art and everyday life, is indebted to three phenomena known from the history of 20th Century art which have remained topical and universal until the present day. The first consists in attempts to question the borders of art institutions with a view to enriching the everyday with poetic qualities or pursuing the goal of a radical social change. The second is the migration of artists from the field of art to other areas of reality. The third is the creation of new institutional environments beyond the scope of the traditional gallery and museum network and the art market. Info: Curators: Sebastian Cichocki &Kuba Szreder, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Emilii Plater 51, Warsaw, Duration: 19/2-1/5/16, days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-20:00, http://artmuseum.pl

“One, No One and One Hundred Thousand” is an exhibition inspired by Oulipo’s literary strategies based on the idea of a “workshop of potential literature.” According to one of its founders, Raymond Queneau, Oulipo’s objective was to propose new “structures” for writers that are mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that could contribute to literary activity: props for inspiration or aids for creativity. This notion of potentiality will be applied to the format of an exhibition – not as an assertion of what an exhibition should be, but as an attempt to uncover what it could be. An exhibition conceived as a “machine” that produces other exhibitions. Nine artists were commissioned to create new works, which will then be presented in a display that can change continually according to the choice of the spectator. Info: Curator: Luca Lo Pinto, Kunsthalle Wien, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 19/2-22/5/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.kunsthallewien.at

The work of the American artist Ian Cheng explores the nature of mutation and the capacity of humans to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation, and Darwinian brutality, Cheng has developed so-called “Live simulations”, living virtual ecosystems that begin with basic programmed properties, but are left to self-evolve without authorial control or end. His simulations model the dynamics of often imaginative organisms and ecologies, but do so with the unforgiving causality found in nature itself. In his first solo exhibition “Forking At Perfection” in Switzerland, Cheng presents a new piece. Info: Curator: Raphael Gygax, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Limmatstrasse 270, Zurich, Duration: 20/2-16/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue, Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat Sun 10:00-17:00, www.migrosmuseum.ch

Beginning in 1900, Edward S. Curtis set out on a monumental quest to create an unprecedented, comprehensive record of the Indians of North American. The culmination of his 30-year project led to his magnum opus, “The North American Indian”. Today this work stands as a landmark in the history of photography, book publishing, ethnography, and the history of the American West. The exhibition “One Hundred Masterworks” presents an extraordinary selection of vintage photographs by Curtis that highlights both iconic and previously little known images, revealing the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual qualities, which are the cornerstone of his art. Arranged thematically, the exhibition includes a selection of Curtis’ most compelling and rare photographs that look beyond the documentary nature of his work focusing on his aesthetic and technical contributions to the art of photography. Info: The Palm Springs Art Museum, 101 N Museum Dr, Palm Springs, Duration: 20/2-29/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:99, Thu 12:00-20:00, www.psmuseum.org

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston opens a comprehensive survey of the artist Walid Raad, a pivotal figure in contemporary art whose work across various mediums investigates the ways in which we represent, remember, and make sense of history. Informed by his upbringing in Lebanon during the civil war (1975–90) and by the socioeconomic and military policies that have shaped the Middle East in the past few decades, Raad’s work is dedicated to exploring archives and photographic documents in the public realm, the role of memory and narrative within discourses of conflict, and the construction of histories of art in the Arab world. Info: Curator: Eva Respini, Assistant Curator: Katerina Stathopoulou, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 100 Northern Ave, Boston, Duration: 24/2-30/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.icaboston.org

“International Pop” chronicles Pop Art’s emergence as an international movement, migrating from the UK and the US to Western and eastern Europe, Latin America, and Japan. Although Pop arose in distinct forms within each region, artists expressed a shared interest in mass media, consumerism, and figuration. With 150 works made from 1956 to 1972, the exhibition presents Pop art as a movement that is at turns celebratory, critical, and probing in its message. It reveals the energetic exchange that contributed to a reimagining of art’s relationship to societies in flux. American and British Pop is presented alongside lesser known but equally potent examples from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, France, Italy, Slovakia, Japan, and other creative centers. Info: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, Duration: 24/2-25/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu Sat 10:00-17:00, Wed & Fri 10:00-20:45, www.philamuseum.org

The exhibition “Verba Volant Scripta Manent”, takes as its point of departure the use of wordplay of Mel Bochner and Alighiero Boetti. Both artists were born in 1940, they are connected not only in time, but also in space. Velvet, favored increasingly by Bochner, originates in Kashmir, a mere half a day’s drive from Kabul and Peshawar, where Boetti’s “Arazzi” were fabricated. Viewed together, the works in the exhibition offer a glimpse into the prescience of these two artists. Both Boetti and Bochner, though having only met once, share a similar ethos and relentless passion for staying the conceptual course in the face of the ebb and flow of styles precipitated by their contemporaries. Info: TOTAH, 183 Stanton Street, New York, Opening 25/2/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://davidtotah.com

“Present Tense: Sixty Years of Master Drawings” is a double exhibition with 70 drawings from across Alex Katz’s ongoing career, the exhibition will occur simultaneously in Richard Gray Gallery’s New York and Chicago spaces.The exhibition asserts the vital importance of drawing to the artist’s practice. Bringing together portraits from a span of 60 years, the exhibition reveals drawing as a place where the artist’s vision is explored, structured and recorded. A central facet of Katz’s work, drawing serves as a tool of immediacy that enables him to capture the present moment in line, tone and surface. Info: Richard Gray Gallery, 875 North Michigan Avenue, 38th Floor, Chicago, Duration: 25/2-23/4/16, Days & Hours: 10:00-17:30 & Richard Gray Gallery, 1018 Madison Avenue, 4th floor, New York, Duration: 29/2-22/4/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, www.richardgraygallery.com

Galerie Daniel Templon is holding a solo exhibition of work by French artist Arman, focusing on “Accumulations”, one of the best known series produced by this leading figure of the Nouveau Réalisme, the exhibition features around 40 historical sculptures between 1960 and 1964. In his quest to construct an “Archaeology of the present”, Arman created an artistic language that had a deep-reaching effect on contemporary art, with Accumulations introducing the principle of serialization as early as 1959. Info: Galerie Daniel Templon, 30 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 27/2-6/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.danieltemplon.com

“THE NEW HUMAN” is a film and video-based group exhibition project that artistically explores aspects of our current human condition, while also presenting imagined scenarios of our future. How do we perceive and understand ourselves as humans? How do we live, socialize, organize and control each other? And what kind of future awaits us? In the second chapter of the exhibition, we instead turn our focus to the rapid technological progress and the ways it is changing and reshaping our very existence. Info: Curator: Joa Ljungberg, Moderna Museet, Ola Billgrens plats 2–4, Malmö, Duration: 27/2-4/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se

On the four floors of the Falckenberg Collection, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg presents the most comprehensive exhibition ever of works by American artist Raymond Pettibon in the exhibition “Homo Americanus”. On view are more than 700 drawings and hundreds of flyers, record covers and fanzines as well as films, artist’s books, paintings and wall drawings. The exhibition features Raymond Pettibon as a mythologist who takes up and subverts the distinctive narratives of American culture, from Woodstock to the presidencies and the war against terrorism. The artist’s vehicle is drawings, in which he combines images and texts. Since the end of the 1970s, he has produced around 20,000 works. Info: Curator: Dr. Ulrich Loock, Falckenberg Collection/Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Wilstorfer Straße 71, Tor 2, Hamburg-Hamburg, Duration: 28/2-11/9/16, Days & Hours: Every 1st Sunday of the Month or book a guided tour here, http://deichtorhallen.de/index.php