ART NEWS:Sept.01

Whitechapel Gallery is transformed by over 70 creative and cutting-edge publishers for four days. The London Art Book Fair returns with a vibrant mix of art books, independent titles and magazines from around the world. Exhibitors range from publishing behemoths to independent presses and represent a diverse international cohort from 16 different countries, from Chile to Israel, Korea to the USA. An expansive public programme of talks, workshops and events includes artists Sir Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941)  and Paul Winstanley (b. 1954) in conversation with Goldsmiths Head of Art Richard Noble; Turner Prize nominated artist Tai Shani (b. 1976) on her new book Our Fatal Magic (2019); a discussion about making historically overlooked female artists more visible with publisher and curator Sarah Shin, publisher Harriet Judd and author Lucy Howarth; and readings from itinerant poetry publishing platform RIVET.  The programme is guest-curated by independent writer and curator Amy Budd, Associate Curator of Art Night 2019. Info: Whitechapel Gallery, 77 – 82 Whitechapel High Street, London, Duration: 5-8/9/19. Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.whitechapelgallery.org

For his solo exhibition, “Homo Imparfaits”, Nú Barreto is presenting a series of exclusive drawings along with several paintings from his famous “États Désunis d’Afrique” series started in 2009. All the exhibited artworks faithfully reflect Nú Barreto’s political engagement. They describe the evils of contemporary African society while also rekindling the hope that Africa frees itself from its past to invent a new future. Drawing has been Nú Barreto’s favorite medium since childhood. Children would come from neighboring villages to see his drawings, which were the pride of his parents. His works on paper have kept the imaginative liveliness of that time; but they now serve the story of his personal experience of contemporary Africa. And the artist is not complacent. Most of the time, he is bitter and fierce. With his sharp pencils and bloody red paint, Nú Barreto depicts the violence that marked the African continent. In the midst of this daily reality, Nú Barreto’s homo imperfect plays the lead role. Like a mirror, this black and red ink alter ego bring us back to our own inconsistency and confronts us to our responsibility toward Africa’s current situation. Info: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 8 rue Charles Decoster, Brussels, Duration: 5/9-26/10/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.nathalieobadia.com

Featuring several young and emerging artists, the exhibition “Domestic Horror” includes many specially commissioned works. Addressing the darker fears that arise when we encounter the unknown, Domestic Horror probes the friction between the civilized world and baser human impulses. The word “domestic” contains a potent double meaning here, alluding to the unintended consequences that can occur (in private life and in a larger national and cultural life) where internalized anxieties meet external pressures. Ndiaye and Spann confront the perils of political turmoil by disrupting familiar images of cultural stability: the office space of the state newspaper of Senegal, in shambles after an anti-government protest; an American flag, deconstructed and reassembled with a single ominous, looming star. Participating Artists: Natalie Ball, Louise Bonnet, Ginny Casey, Genieve Figgis, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Tanya Merrill, Cheikh Ndiaye, Rene Ricard, Pauline Shaw, Lucien Smith (with Glenn O’Brien), Vaughn Spann, and Chloe Wise. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 821 Park Avenue, New York, Duration: 5/9-19/10/19, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com

Featuring a new film and installation by Alexandre Singh commissioned for the Legion of Honor, “A Gothic Tale” draws inspiration from the eponymous literary tradition of nineteenth-century Europe as well as San Francisco’s place in film noir history with Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai” (1947) and Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958). Conceptualized and designed by Singh with art historian Natalie Musteata  “A Gothic Tale” begins with a selection of works from the Fine Arts Museums’ encyclopedic collection that embody one of the key tropes of the Gothic tradition: the doppelgänger. In this eerie presage to the film, works that appear to be duplicates, such as prints of Roman tombs by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and biblical scenes by Albrecht Dürer, are exhibited in a striking scenography of mirrored walls, in which the works of art, and viewers alike, are endlessly reflected. Together, these works resonate with the founding and history of the Legion of Honor, itself not only a copy of the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur in Paris but also a funerary structure, located atop a former cemetery, and built to commemorate the fallen soldiers of the First World War. Info: Legion of Honor, Lincoln Park, 100 34th Avenue, San Francisco, Duration: 7/9-12/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 9:30-17:15, www.famsf.org

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger’s exhibition “Fantasies of Autonomy”, builds on her practice of scrutinising the painting, probing its plane and its edges, and contaminating late capitalist imagery. The idea of autonomy as an ideal which one must move towards in order to find liberation is imbued with a sense of speed, progress, a movement forward. This velocity—coupled to fantasies of autonomy—is often hijacked by a representation of speed and progress that is most typically consumerist, dependent economies of status and experience, and fuelled by corporate global industries. The work of Toranzo Jaeger swiftly rearranges the symbolism of the product, the tempo (sometimes introducing total stillness within and amongst a moving vehicle) and orientation through which late capitalist images are presented, as well as the deep rooted desire through which we understand the very notion of autonomy. The largest work in the show, fitting exactly the dimensions of the gallery wall, could feel like a small nod to Mexican Muralism—exercising a form of artistic autonomy by truly occupying a wall, incorporating politically charged devotions and aspirations expressed through machinic imagery. Info: Arcadia Missa, 14-16 Brewer Street, Soho, London, Duration: 7/9-26/10/19, Days & hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://arcadiamissa.com

Humans invented cities so they could live safe and self-determined lives together and fend off assaults from outsiders and now they find themselves conned and disempowered in the heart of their cities and hustled to the peripheries. By neo-feudal mega-schemes, global corporations, real-estate speculators, and other trojans.. The city is no longer safe for its citizens. Not because marauding gangs of refugees roam the streets after midnight; they aren’t. But because big business, ever in search of profits, is descending on neighborhoods with a fleet of behemoth projects to pillage the resource that is the city and remake it in its image. These tendencies make art a good indicator of what the city has turned into and what it will (or may) yet become. The exhibition “Stadtschlawinereien” showcases selected positions—some of them by now almost historic, others still shimmering in the bright light of the present—that articulate critical perspectives on developments on the urban scene and voice objections and dissent. The neoliberal economic phantasm has been a slick operator, gradually infiltrating the urban community’s social DNA to alter its blueprint. Many artists have responded with trickery of their own, devising stratagems to counter the rationalized roguery and contesting its hegemony over the public debate. Participating Artist: Alice Creischer, Dierk Schmidt, Michael E. Smith, Arno Brandlhuber, Larissa Fassler, Adelita Husni-Bey, Peng!, Andrea Pichl, Andreas Siekmann, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Burca and Weekend & Plaste. Info: Kow Berlin, Lindenstraße 35, Berlin, Duration: 7/9-9/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, https://kow-berlin.com

In Lisa Jonasson’s solo exhibition “Act and Meaning” a larger site-specific installation and new assemblages in painted cut-out paper and wood are presented. In the new works the 3-dimensional parts are given more focus – both in carved elements and in backgrounds that are arched inwards and outwards. Lisa Jonasson describes the works as a division of bodies and surfaces. The bodies are carved in balsa wood, into a kind of anonymous objects with a purpose to carry the surface. The bodies become my partners as the motifs grow. I carve and shape something that can carry the surface towards the viewer. The feeling is that I develop the possibility of my own images. A series of works in the shape of books reconnects to Jonasson’s earlier text-based works and comic strips. Here, however, it is rather symbols, signs and information that brings to mind Egyptian murals and ancient narrative. The book spreads offer a promise of pages before and after what is unfolded right now. The story is not a whole, it both ’is’ and has a continuation. Something that in a way, is significant for Jonasson’s art in general — the images have a before and after, they continue in time and space. Info: Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm, Duration: 7/9-19/10/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com

The 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (hereinafter Seoul Biennale) is scheduled to open this September as the main exhibition in Dongdaemun Design Plaza under the theme of “Collective City”. The objective of the Seoul Biennale is to provide the public with a platform to exchange information and hold discussions on the creation and changing of cities. At a moment when cities are increasingly unequal and segregated it asks if they can continue to be perceived as collective spaces and what tools or strategies can be used to transform cities into collective spaces. “Collective City” seeks to question how modes of collective practice and action can challenge the current paradigms of city development and offer resistance to the dominant systems of spatial production. The biennale seeks to reflect on new models of co-existence, social practice, governance, research and speculation, to suggest alternative concepts of architecture, the city and the environment, to interrogate architecture’s political agency. The Thematic Exhibition is an invitation to radically reimagine the structure of our cities, a provocation to fundamentally reprioritize, shifting focus from the success of the individual and capital through real-estate speculation and the commodification of land, to foreground collective rights and to claim the city as a shared investment. Participants’ work ranges from critiques on the contemporary processes of urbanization, exploration of ecological and infrastructural systems and questions of material and production, to testing alternative models of development through typological innovation, new forms of tenure and landownership, architecture as a form of mediation and consultation, to expanding and defining new territories. Info: Directors: Jaeyong Lim & Francisco Sanin, Curator: Beth Hughes, Yim Dongwoo, Rafael Luna, Sanki Choe, Young Chul Jang, Associate Curators: Hyoeun Kim, Yoobeen Kim, Minsun Kang, Heewon Lee, Aram You, Joo Seok Hong, Jooyeon Choi, Assistant Curators: Livia Wang, Isabel Ogden, Jeffrey Kim, Youngmin Choi, 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Venues: Dongdaemun Design Plaza(DDP), 281 Uljiro, Jung-gu, Seoul; Donuimun Museum Village, 7-24 Sinmunro2-ga, Jongno-gu, Seoul; Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture, 119, Sejongdaero, Myeong-dong, Jung-gu, Seoul; Sewoon Plaza(Sewoon Hall), 159, Cheonggyecheonro, Jongno-gu, Seoul; Seoul Museum of History, 55 saemunanro, Jongno-gu, Seoul; Sewoon Plaza(Sewoon/Daelim Deck), 159, Cheonggyecheonro, Jongno-gu,Seoul, Duration: 7/9-10/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, Admission: Adult: 9,000KRW, Youth/Soldier/Police: 6,000KRW, Children: 5,000KRW, Seniors/Disabled: 4,000KRW, 5 Days Pass: 20,000KRW, Membership: 100,000KRW, www.seoulbiennale.org

“FOR FOREST – The Unending Attraction of Nature” is a temporary art intervention by Klaus Littmann that will transform Wörthersee football stadium in Klagenfurt into Austria’s largest public art installation. Inspired by The “Unending Attraction of Nature”, a dystopian drawing by Austrian artist and architect Max Peintner that Littmann discovered almost thirty years ago, FOR FOREST finally brings that vision to life. Through this monumental installation Littmann aims to challenge our perception of nature and question its future. Furthermore, the project seeks to become a memorial, reminding us that nature, which we so often take for granted, may someday only be found in specially designated spaces, as is already the case with animals in zoos. Around 300 trees, some weighing up to six tons each, will be carefully transplanted over the existing football pitch to give the impression of a native central European forest. Once transplanted the forest will take on a life of its own, change colours as the season turns and attract wildlife. After the art intervention at the stadium end, the forest will be carefully replanted on a public site in close proximity to Wörthersee Stadium at a scale of 1:1 and remain as a living forest sculpture. Info: Wörthersee Stadium, Südring 207, Klagenfurt, Duration” 9/9-27/10/19, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-22:00, https://forforest.net