ART NEWS:Apr.03
For the exhibition “Becoming Soil”, Ugo Rondinone turns the Carré d’Art space into a vast landscape associating the large paintings of starry nights and the monumental landscapes done in Indian ink or large blue skies. The exhibition reveals the artist’s attachment to what may be termed the “classical” media, namely painting, drawing and sculpture. In his exhibitions Ugo Rondinone creates a very peculiar relationship with time and space for the viewer. The show becomes scenery for both the mind and the senses and in which time stands still. The tone of the black and white set may come as a surprise to anyone familiar with his taste for colour, and there is a return to colour at one point in the exhibition. Info: Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain, Place de la Maison Carrée, Nîmes, Duration: 15/4-18/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://carreartmusee.com
Across six installations, the works of “Ellipsis” manifest both intellectually and phenomenologically, with/in the body. The exhibition invites visitors to listen, look, touch, taste, and pause, celebrating the senses and embracing a range of individual and collective experiences with art. Experience is at once inseparable from the space and dependent upon duration, and throughout the exhibition, threads and traces carry over from work to work, crossing into each other. At the entrance, a selection of artworks is installed on a rotating schedule, rendering them alternately present in and absent from the exhibition. Sounds of choral performance and breath emanate from the heart of the building. Your name and the time of day are inscribed on the gallery wall. Info: Curators: Tamara H. Schenkenberg & Kristin Fleischmann Brewer, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Duration: 15/4-5/7/16, Days & Hours: Wed 7 Fri-Sat 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-20:00, http://pulitzerarts.org
How to work together launches three major new commissions. Over the past three years, the organizations have produced a thematic commissioning and research program around the subject of “how to work together?”, comprising a series of exhibitions, events and an online think tank. This exhibition series constitutes the conclusion of How to work together’s artistic program. Sharon Hayes in “In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You”, uses photography, film, sound and performance to examine the intersections between the personal and the political. Drawing particular attention to the language of 20th century protest groups, she invites viewers and participants to re-experience moments of political and cultural oppression by staging protests, delivering speeches, and re-performing demonstrations. Info: Studio Voltaire, 1A Nelson’s Row, London, Duration: 15/4-5/6/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18, Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.studiovoltaire.org
“Young Blood” is the first large-scale exhibition to explore the dynamic artistic equilibrium between brothers Noah Davis and Kahlil Joseph. Both Davis and Joseph grew up in Seattle; in recent years, they lived and worked in Los Angeles. Celebrating the life and legacy of painter, curator, and visionary artist Noah Davis (1983–2015), Young Blood places Davis’ work in the context of an ongoing visual dialogue with his elder brother, artist and filmmaker, Kahlil Joseph. The title of the exhibition, “Young Blood”, comes from a name Joseph bestowed on Davis, both a term of endearment and a declaration of a common starting point. The exhibition highlights the notion of a narrative continuum built through varied mediums of contemporary storytelling, including painting, sculpture, film, and installation. Info: Frye Art Museum Seattle, 704 Terry Avenue, Seattle, Duration: 16/4-19/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-19:00, http://fryemuseum.org
Maria Eichhorn’s “5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours” is a two-part work examining contemporary labour conditions. The exhibition opens with a one-day symposium, featuring lectures by Isabell Lorey and Stewart Martin, chaired by Andrea Phillips. Info: Chisenhale Gallery, 64 Chisenhale Road, London, Duration: 23/4-29/5/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.chisenhale.org.uk Koki’s Tanaka “Provisional Studies: Action #5 Conceiving the Past, Perceiving the Present”, departs from his curiosity about histories in The Showroom’s neighbourhood to stage a series of collective actions that suggest how to read the present through the past, and how working collaboratively in this way can be a starting point for new social possibilities. Info: The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London, Duration: 29/4-18/6/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.theshowroom.org
Assuming the role of architects or planners, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys in the exhibition “White Suprematism”, choreograph the process of production by embracing the machinery and the complex relationships they have set up, the labour of numerous people, who mediate between the artists and the post-Soviet steel industries in order to produce something that none of them have done before. By staging similarly detached and tense scenarios in their work, typically inhabited by impassive characters the artists create tragicomic portraits of contemporary society and humanity. Info: Curators: Ūla Tornau & Asta Vaičiulytė, Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vokiečių 2, Vilnius, Duration: 15/4-29/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-20:00, www.cac.lt
The multimedia exhibition “Time” by Gigi Scaria consists of recent photographs, films, a large sculpture and an outdoor commission located in Laumeier’s Ferring Family Foundation Museum Lawn. Gigi Scaria’s work focuses on “social mapping”, whether territorial, cultural, environmental or of the hierarchies and systems of our global communities. Each element draws on these themes, continuing Scaria’s inquiry into time, migration, community collapse and the beauty in labor and collaboration. He explores the layers of ancient cultures as they get subsumed in the world’s mega-cities and reflects on the unique form of city-building that exists in St. Louis by cross-pollinating the disappearing architecture and symbols from New Delhi with the Woodhenge at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site. Info: Curator: Dana Turkovic, Laumeier Sculpture Park, 12580 Rott Road, Saint Louis, Duration: 16/4-24/8/16, Days & Hours: Laumeier: Daily 8:00-30 minutes past sunset, The Adam Aronson Fine Arts Center: Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.laumeiersculpturepark.org
“In the Power of Your Care”, is an exhibition about health and health care as a human right, and the interdependencies of care in our culture, from personal relationships to government policy. Addressing issues such as the politics of institutionalized care in hospitals and military detention centers, the FDA’s ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men, and the challenges posed by medical treatments of cancer and HIV, In the Power of Your Care proposes that health care as a human right can be upheld through community-based efforts and policy change. A common theme connecting many of the works in the exhibition is the unstable definition of physical and mental health, its relationship to beauty, and the illusive nature of being cured. Info: The 8th Floor, 17 West 17th Street, 8th floor, New York, duration: 19/4-12/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, www.sdrubin.org
“Shape of Time–Future of Nostalgia” presents works from the Art Collection Telekom, a growing collection founded in 2010 with a focus on contemporary art from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe that places recent works alongside important historical works from previous decades. The exhibition emphasises the strong narrative quality of Eastern European art, relating the history of the countries of Eastern Europe through individual and personal stories from the artists. These narratives reveal an engagement with the past and at the same time a vision of the future. All are characterised by a reflection on how history is constructed and modified. Info: Curators: Adriana Oprea, Nathalie Hoyos & Rainald Schumacher, National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC, 2–4 Izvor St., The Palace of Parliament, Wing E4, Bucharest, Duration: 20/4-9/10/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.mnac.ro
The site-specific project of Santiago Reyes Villaveces, “Reside” inaugurates MLF|Marie-Laure Fleisch new space in Ixelles, the contemporary art district of Brussels. Reyes Villaveces’s work stretches the physical limits of matter, challenging the concepts of scale, volume, weight, tension, gravity, surface, resistance, pressure, limits, perspective and depth. His sculptures are represented as singular and visually forceful instruments, expressed both as the synthesis of form and proportion that each single work takes on in respect to the rest. In this way, a few simple elements, sharply positioned in the exhibition space, question the sense of perception, and as such activate a relation between the architecture of the exhibition space, the viewer’s perception, and the temporal element of the viewing experience. Info: MLF|Marie-Laure Fleisch, 13 Rue Saint Georges , Sint-Jorisstraat, Brussels, Duration: 20/4-28/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.galleriamlf.com
Oliver Laric’s exhibition “Photoplastik” transforms the Secession’s main hall into a sculptural grand assembly, bringing together works across the ages from antiquity to the present. Most of the 3D-printed objects bear a close relationship to Vienna, where Laric took his 3D scanner to public settings as well as renowned institutions, to digitize a large number of objects. The selection is informed by Laric’s current research into the history and development of 3D technology as well as the increasingly heated contentions over authorship in the digital age. In today’s internet culture, where content and information circulate and are recycled beyond anyone’s control, anarchic structures effectively render the notion of singular authorship moot. Info: Curator: Bettina Spörr, Secession, Friedrichstraße 12, Vienna, Duration: 22/4-19/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.secession.at
“A Slant of Light”, Wang Yahui’s solo exhibition, is a continuation of her exploration of the concept of time and space through mediums of image expression. Through constantly pondering, the artist seeks to narrate the outside world, universal experiences, and intangible feelings through a visual language. Wang Yahui tests the boundary of visual perception by delving into concepts of “empty” and “solid,” “inside” and “outside,” the elasticity of time, and the field of vision. Later on, the artist incorporates elements of memory and life experience. On view at Wang’s solo exhibition are a photography series, two video installations, a kinetic installation, and one sculpture, where the artist tracks the trajectory of movement in a space in the form of minimalist graphics, eliminating real-life scenarios and past experiences. Info: TKG +, B,1 No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei, Duration: 23/4-5/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.tinakenggallery.com
Within his artistic practice, Shahryar Nashat uses means and ways to steer or interrupt the contemplative gaze, thereby directing the focus on the unheeded, the unsolicited. To achieve this, the artist resorts to various media such as video, photography and sculpture. The core of his exhibition “Model Malady” is composed of two new works, in this work, we see the human body not as a whole, but only in detail,up of the knee or the hand. The focus is on fragments, showing the mechanical moving “parts” of the body and isolating their function as tools. “Chômage Technique” is a new series of sculptures. consisting of plinths resting on lounging display structures that the artist says are designed for them to “relax”, those obsolete pedestals have no artwork or body to support anymore. Info: Portikus, Alte Brücke 2 / Maininsel, Frankfurt, Duration: 23/4-19/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.portikus.de
As we adapt to the present day conditions of our digital world, we also change the way we perceive art. These days, anyone can easily take a look at exhibitions by the click of a button. How do exhibition venues deal with this tendency towards dematerialization? Can the expectations placed upon an exhibition be entirely satisfied if its content is transferred into a virtual archive? “L’Exposition Imaginaire” seeks to answer these questions in a variety of formats, presenting lectures, talks and discussions featuring artists, art historians, architects and scholars that will take place live in the exhibition space or broadcast through the format of a video projection. A film collage also comprises part of the exhibition, visualizing aspects of the debate on the dematerialization of art and its reception. Info: Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 27/4-26/6/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.kunsthallewien.at
“From Away” is the first retrospective in Canada devoted to the American multimedia artist Joan Jonas. The exhibition gives insight into the artist’s oeuvre, spanning over 50 years. It begins with her early choreographic works and pioneering video performances, and culminates with her most recent piece “They Come to Us without a Word”. Jonas’s practice is rooted in her knowledge and passion for art history, mythology, poetry, literature, history, and cinema. She has traveled around the world, weaving together a multitude of inspirations and sources. Info: Curator: Barbara Clausen, DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art, 451 & 465 Saint-Jean Street, Montreal, Duration: 28/4-18/9/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://dhc-art.org
Throughout his three decades-long career, Mark Flood has created collages, paintings, and sculptures, and has altered found ephemera that serve to exuberantly disclose and critique the perverse ethics of the art world. “Mark Flood: Gratest Hits”, is his first survey of his work, with pieces dating from the 1980s to 2016. The exhibition shows the deep wisdom and humor of Flood’s work while ultimately revealing the true achievement of an artist who has produced many highly praised works and has maintained an active career despite remaining barely visible at the museum level. Info: Curator: Bill Arning, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, Duration: 30/4-7/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri10:00-19:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, http://camh.org/