ART NEWS:June 04
What at first appeared to be no more than an unspectacular artists’ book by Michael Oppitz and Lothar Baumgarten, published in 1974 by Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf, gave the impulse for Michael Oppitz’s solo exhibition “Mobile Myths”. Michael Oppitz’s works elude any clear categorisation. They are concerned with among other things mythology and oral traditions, with the anthropology of religion and with visual anthropology. Michael Oppitz has also been acclaimed well beyond the boundaries of his discipline, in particular for his film “Schamanen im Blinden Land” which after its premiere in 1980 in New York had an impact at the Berlin International Film Festival that can be felt to this day. Taking as its starting point this 223 minute film, which will is shown in full in a newly restored version, the exhibition present for the first time a selection of objects and documents that give a deep insight into Michael Oppitz’s researches, his working methods, and the genesis of the film. Info: Curators: Anja Dreschke & Barbara von Flüe, Kolumba, Art Museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne, Kolumbastraße 4, Cologne, Duration: 21/6-3/12/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, www.kolumba.de
The exhibition “READYMADES BELONG TO EVERYONE” features more than 50 artists, architects and collectives from 16 countries with 17 new commissions. The exhibition extends contemporary understandings of the readymade, as it has filtered through histories of art, design and architecture to become mutated, redoubled, and accelerated in urban environments of commerce and control. It has been more than a century since Marcel Duchamp reorganized aesthetic categories with his seminal “Fountain” (1917), creating new attention to context and found or manufactured materials. By the 1980s, such artistic conversations had evolved into strategies of appropriation even more explicitly associated with critique, especially in regard to mass- produced objects and commercial imagery. Just as Duchamp was responding to the rise of industrial production with his readymades, so too were architects reflecting on the reality of the machine age in their work. Drawing on these overlapping histories, the exhibition creates a cityscape of readymade objects, staging an urban environment that emphasizes issues of security, real estate and surreality and echoes everyday life in many of today’s major metropolitan areas. Info: Curators: Niels Olsen and Fredi Fischli, Swiss Institute, 38 St Marks Pl, New York, Duration: 23/6-19/8/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 14:00-20:00, Sat 12:00-20:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.swissinstitute.net
An exhibition that bring together the work of Pearl Blauvelt and Aleana Egan for the first U.K. presentation of the late artist’s drawings alongside new and existing sculptural work by Egan is on presentation at MARY MARY gallery. On presentation is a selection of Blauvelt’s pencil illustrations with a new version of Egan’s large scale work, “little surface pictures” (2014/2018). Both artists demonstrate an interest and examination of domestic space and the furniture, clothing and architecture of everyday life existent in the early stages of the 20th century: Egan through literary texts and archival research and Blauvelt through lived experience. Through a consideration of everyday objects and an intimacy of thoughts and ideas, Egan and Blauvelt create unique languages of expression and develop narrative threads. Aleana Egan’s sculptural installations often address the archive, personal history, modernist literature and literary figures in indirect and associative ways. Making use of household objects, fabrics, handmade garments, paint and metal, Egan’s compositions bring together everyday materials, layering tangible visual registers and authoring certain moods through her arrangements. Info: MARY MARY Gallery, 51 Oswald Street, Glasgow, Duration: 23/6-4/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.marymarygallery.co.uk
The group exhibition “Fiction Art” is like a labyrinth of words and visual images, weaving between the visible and the imagined. It demands a certain level of patience from the viewer, the patience to immerse themselves in the text, and to view the images with fascination, taking in every little detail so that they can find Ariadne’s thread, penetrate the mysteries of the labyrinth, and make their way out. In this light, it is also an anti-spectacle, anti-rapid consumption exhibition, one which demands a “slow pace” that is out of step with the times. And if you ask what fiction art is for? Beyond the new possibilities provided by the linguistic explorations of artists, and the inspiration we derive from the artists’ consideration and responses to various questions, reflections on our time that run “against the current” are equally important. Info: Curators: Fang Lihua, Li Rongwei and Gong Linlin, OCAT Shenzhen, F2 Building, OCT-LOFT, Enping Road, Nanshan, Shenzhen, Duration: 23/6-12/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:30, ocat.org.cn
The group exhibition “Shell // the politics of being” is a journey through the self-portrait of life and history themselves, a documentation of the struggle for survival and advancement. The curator of the exhibition invited 21 contemporary artists from three generations to discover, through their cross-disciplinary visual vocabulary, their own thread of the story of the building. They follow the footprints of a mythology that is closely dependent on the location (site-specific) and will respond to its conceptual parameters (context-defined and site-responsive), simultaneously reflecting the reconsideration of values and those multidimensional emotional territories that co-exist and are all linked together. This is the second chapter of the exhibition that activates significant historical buildings of the area, whose trajectory was in parallel terms with those of all neighbouring buildings including the Zarifi residence wich was the subject of the first exhibition. Participating artists: Katerina Apostolidou, Maria Adromachi Chatzinikolaou, Evangelos Chatzis, Mary Christea, Aikaterini Gegisian, Kleio Gizeli, Apollonas Glykas, Yannis Kondaratos, Eleni Lyra, Despina Meimaroglou, Giorgos C. Palamaris, Rena Papaspyrou, Andreas Savva, Dimitris Skourogiannis, Rania Schoretsaniti, Marianne Strapatsakis, Yannis Theodoropoulos, Nikos Tranos, Pavlos Tsakonas, Betty Zerva, Eleni Zouni. Info: Curator: Dr Kostas Prapoglou, 15th Kypseli High School, 46 Kypselis and Paxon Streets, Kypseli, Athens, Duration: 26/6-24/7/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 14:00-20:00, Sat 12:00-20:00
The exhibition “Drawings” features works by the Malaysian artist Shooshie Sulaiman, who has gained attention in recent years since her participation in the Yokohama Triennale 2017 “Islands, Constellations & Galapagos”. Born in Malaysia in 1973, Shooshie Sulaiman is currently recognized as one of the most important contemporary artists of Southeast Asia. Of both Malay and Chinese origin, the history of Southeast Asia, the culture of her homeland of Malaysia, as well as her personal memories and her own identity, serve as significant themes within her work. An almost mystical air permeates Sulaiman’s oeuvre, with works produced through diverse approaches such as drawings, collages, installations, and performances that at times appropriate natural elements from trees, soil, to water that are native to the land. Through them, the works inform viewers of the complex and inextricably connected relationship between human beings, nature, and art. In 1998, Shooshie took part in the ARCUS project (Artist in residence programme in Ibaraki, Japan) as well as several group exhibitions. Info: 8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery, Shibuya Hikarie 8F, Tokyo, Duration: 27/6-16/7/18, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-20:00, http://tomiokoyamagallery.com
A.M. Qattan Foundation inaugurates its new building, with the group exhibition “Subcontracted Nations”. The exhibition questions differing concepts of nation. In these times, we are seeing major transformations in these concepts through rhetorical and political discourse across many corners of the globe. The exhibition draws its title from the proliferation of the processes of sub-contracting found in our world today, whether it is the sub-contracting of health services, or the privatization of public resources including education. These processes have been instrumental in the fragmentation and compartmentalization of public services and the diminution of the role and obligations of the state. Another question the exhibition will pose is how the different forms of neo-liberal orders in societies are being kept within socially and economically acceptable limits, in a manner considered optimal for preventing dissent and thus serving to maintain the delusion of social agency. The effects of these neo-liberal mechanisms have become intrinsically entrenched in the production of day-to-day relationships, from family to sexual relations, to the status of citizenship and the structure of politics. This imposition of neo-liberal mechanisms has contributed in numerous ways to the transformation of the individual through reformatory techniques, pre-designed lifestyles, dependency, and so forth. Info: Curator: Yazid Anani, Assistant Curators: Abed al-Rahman Shabaneh and Aline Khoury, A.M. Qattan Foundation, 22 Al-Jihad Street, Ramallah, Duration: 28/6-29/9/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat 11:00-20:00, http://qattanfoundation.org/ar
The exhibition “Disjunctures” is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging survey of Vivan Sundaram’s work at a European institution. It comprises early paintings and two sets of drawings that reflect on the aftermath of 20th century wars. It includes performative sculptures, photography and video; an important sequence of works that reconfigures urban detritus as the basis of a rumination on “reality at the poverty level of consumption” and on the “Junkspace” of the globalized, late-capitalist present; and multi-part installations, which confronts the specter of communal violence in India. The display is conceived as a sequence of juxtapositions suggesting how formal and thematic preoccupations ricochet from one work to another. History, memory, archive: the three keywords that the artist has designated as the overarching concerns of his practice are the signposts for articulating the overall structure of the exhibition, an open-ended framework for exploring the connections and disjunctures between these terms and themes. Info: Curator: Deepak Ananth, Assistant Curator: Anna Schneider, Haus der Kunst, Prinzregentenstrasse 1, Munich, Duration: 29/6-7/10/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-20:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, https://hausderkunst.de
In his first major solo exhibition, Wendell Dayton presents stainless steel sculptures spanning six decades of the artist’s oeuvre. His works range from small-scale pieces detailed with bright splashes of auto retouching paint to stark, monumental stainless steel structures that nod to David Smith, Alexander Calder, and John Chamberlain. These industrial materials are hard and severe-each work manipulated by Dayton for months on end by gantries, plasma cutters, pipe benders, and welding machines-meant to endure the elements and time. Shapes cut from steel, spliced curling metal pipes, and the parts of a dismembered drill press meet in these totemic compositions and seem to effortlessly rise from the ground toward the sky. Dayton transmutes these crude mediums into graceful abstracted forms, welded gestures representing the birth of a child, lovers lost, and the celestial bodies above. Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. la cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 30/6-18/8/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com
The exhibition “ᖷacing” is N.S. Harsha’s largest solo UK exhibition to date. One of the most significant Indian artists of his generation, Harsha’s diverse practice includes paintings, works on paper, wall and floor works, sculptures and site-specific installations and public projects; he is inspired by Indian and Western painting traditions. His practice is concerned with the relationship between the local and the global, drawing together details of his everyday life in India with world events. The exhibition includes three core works: a new installation “ᖷacing” (2018), the UK premiere of “Reclaiming the inner space” (2017), and the seminal earlier work “Sky Gazers” (2010). In addition to these works the exhibition will also include several other wall and floor based paintings, recent sculptures and the recreation of “Future” (2007), a collaborative workshop with local children and young people where they are invited to imagine their future by decorating over-sized shirts that they will then theoretically grow into. The shirts will then be on display as part of the exhibition. Info: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Alexandra Road, Swansea, Duration: 7/7-9/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-17:00, www.swansea.gov.uk