ART NEWS:Oct.01

Michael E. Smith’s sculptures in his solo exhibition at Modern Art in London are made out of objects combed from the by-products of today’s world. Sometimes these are nondescript things, for instance, a black sweatshirt and a fog machine, or a rusty bicycle frame and a used water pitcher. They appear as articles of disuse, retrieved from a wasteland. Other times, death itself is present in Smith’s work, such as dried bones of animals, or taxidermy. Combined and arranged, Smith’s sculptures become orators in a language that is difficult to pin to words. They operate instead through affective and lyrical registers, suggestive of political and social experiences that may be shared — ecological crisis, capitalist consumption and waste — as well as those that are not always shared – such as violence, death and social injustice. Smith’s work is often contextualised in reference to an economically depressed urban landscape. But his work is not allegorical, nor illustrative. Indeed, the qualities of poverty and vacancy with which his exhibitions are imbued recall such conditions, yet these attributes of Smith’s work are as much in dialogue with the lineage of minimalism and conceptualism of the USA’s 1960s and ​‘70s. Info: Modern Art, 50-58 Vyner Street, London, Duration: 1/10-14/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://modernart.net

The exhibition “Feminism in Italian Contemporary Art”, brings together Silvia Giambrone and Marinella Senatore, two Italian leading artists, to explore Feminism in Italian Contemporary Art. The exhibition is a visual representation of struggle, resistance and growing awareness in the belief that art can trigger a constructive dialogue–overcoming differences in gender, class, race and religion. Works in the exhibition represent two aspects of the feminine: on the one hand the home–the domestic environment, that warm nest of family intimacy that all too often, rather than providing a shelter from the world, can become a deadly trap of inevitable frustrations and conflicts. On the other hand: activism, the street, slogans, songs, banners, marches, raised fists or hands joined high over the head to form a triangle–that symbolic and powerful gesture that appeared during the late 1970s, then disappeared and now, finally, has reappeared in recent demonstrations. Info: Curators Paola Ugolini, Richard Saltoun Gallery, 41 Dover St, Mayfair, London, Duration: 2/10-9/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-17:00, www.richardsaltoun.com

Using absurdist satire to address critical issues of our time, Mika Rottenberg offers subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her videos and installations interweave documentation with fiction, and often feature protagonists in factory-like settings who manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls to millions of brightly colored plastic items sold wholesale in Chinese superstores. Presenting several recent projects including Rottenberg’s newest video installation “Spaghetti Blockchain” (2019), which explores ancient and contemporary ideas about materialism, the exhibition “Easypiecestraces” central themes in the artist’s oeuvre, such as labor, technology, and the interconnectedness of the mechanical and the bodily. Her investigations reveal the unseen connections between the basic items that we manipulate and consume almost without thinking “from luxury goods and plastic objects to emails, Bitcoin, and particle beams” and matters of the universe beyond our control. Info: Curator: Margot Norton, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Duration: 2/10/19-8/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-21:00, Wed-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.mcachicago.org

Artist, architect, and filmmaker, Alfredo Jaar has a multidisciplinary practice and expresses cultural and political crisis in the austerity of a minimalist vocabulary. His consistent, dedicated research on human rights violations and social injustice seeks to dismantles information forged by contemporary media, and shed light on margins of reality through humanitarian insight. For this exhibition, his uncompromising strategy is realised as a critical reflection of global media culture. Central to the exhibition, “Lament of Images” is the artist’s 2002 installation of the eponymous title, conceived as a renewed interpretation. The work consists of two aluminium-framed light tables—an illuminated device for viewing photographic film, in which one is suspended from the ceiling upside down, precisely mirroring the other. As the hanging table lowers to meet the base, a thin silver line dissects the exhibition space. The two light surfaces eventually collide to black out the surrounding space—a metaphorical gesture for the blinding effect of a contemporary society that is ever more exposed to visual information. Info: SCAI The Bathhouse, Kashiwayu-Ato, 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 4/10-2/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.scaithebathhouse.com

Over the past two decades, JR has expanded the meaning of public art through his ambitious projects that give visibility and agency to a broad spectrum of people around the world. Showcasing murals, photographs, videos, films, dioramas, and archival materials. Working at the intersections of photography, social engagement, and street art, JR collaborates with communities by taking individual portraits, reproducing them at a monumental scale, and wheat pasting them (sometimes illegally) in nearby public spaces. The multimedia installation “Chronicles” traces JR’s career from his early documentation of graffiti artists as a teenager in Paris to his large-scale architectural interventions in cities worldwide to his more recent digitally collaged murals that create collective portraits of diverse publics. The centerpiece of the exhibition is “The Chronicles of New York City” a new epic mural of more than one thousand New Yorkers that is accompanied by audio recordings of each person’s story. All of the projects on view honor the voices of everyday people and demonstrate JR’s ongoing commitment to community, collaboration, and civic discourse. Info: Curators: Sharon Matt Atkins and Drew Sawyer, Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, Duration 4/10/19-3/5/20, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-22:00, www.brooklynmuseum.org

Pascal Convert’s solo exhibition “Trois Arbres” is held at the Eric Dupont Gallery. With this new exhibition, the artist uses the figure of the tree as a witness to the destruction, figure that bears the remnants of history. Pascal Convert questions what survives the destruction in our recent history, through three historical upheavals;. A birch tree of the Crematorium V of Auschwitz-Birkenau, an atomized cherry tree of Hiroshima, stone trees of life on the khachkars of the Armenian cemetery of Julfa: in front of this trilogy, through familial, cultural and historical archaeology, a fragile glance tries to imagine what can survive destruction in our recent history: in 1941, with the concentration and annihilation of the Jews of Europe; in 1945, with the Allied Victory and first atomic bomb on Hiroshima; in 2006, with the final destruction of three thousand khachkars of the old cemetery of Julfa, the Armenian territory annexed by Azerbaijan. Info: Eric Dupont Gallery, 138 rue du Temple, Paris, Duration: 5/10-23/11/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, hwww.eric-dupont.com

The exhibition “Art & Porn” shows the development in art from the 60s legalization of visual pornography to the current fourth-wave feminism, and highlights how art is influenced by changing the law on pornography. The exhibition except international artist like Marina Abramović, Monica Bonvicini and Jeff Koons, includes a number of new: Vika Kirchenbauer, who challenges the viewer’s gendered perceptions of sexuality, as well as Kuki Jijo and Zanele Muholi, whose works help direct attention to the hugely restrictive censorship still applying to most of the world. Also, the exhibition showcases a number of younger women artists such as Maja Malou Lyse, recently featured on Danish TV with her show Sex with Maja, in which she uses her gender and some of the devices and tropes of pornography in her fight for women’s right to their own bodies, including how they choose to display them. Social media often form the battlefield of such struggles as artists regularly challenge the censorship exerted by large private companies like Instagram and Facebook. Info: Curators:  Erlend G. Høyersten, Lise Pennington, Gry Stangegård Schneider, Rasmus Stenbakken, Anne Mette Thomsen and Michael Thouber, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Nyhavn 2, Copenhagen, Duration: 5/10/19-12/1/20, Days & Hours: tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk

American Artist’s practice makes use of video, installation, new media, and writing to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. “My Blue Window” is an immersive multimedia installation in which American Artist furthers an exploration of anti-Blackness as it operates algorithmically within systems. The exhibition focuses on predictive policing technologies, artificial intelligence tools intended to help dispatch officers to high risk crime zones before incidents are reported. My Blue Window highlights the collective bias that is encoded within such seemingly neutral or scientific tools. Invoking the divide between the Blue and Black Lives Matter movements, Artist connects this phenomenon to the legacy of slavery as an ever-present condition of racialized society in the U.S.  American Artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) attended the Whitney Independent Study program as an artist. Artist is currently a resident at Abrons Art Center, and were recently a resident at Pioneer Works and Eyebeam. Info: Queens Museum Of Art, New York City Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, Duration: 6/10/19-6/2/20, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://queensmuseum.org

“Resonating Spaces” is the title of the exhibition at Fondation Beyeler at the end of this year. The artists featured in the exhibition are Leonor Antunes, Silvia Bächli, Toba Khedoori, Susan Philipsz and Rachel Whiteread. Instead of making a comprehensive group show with numerous works, the exhibition will present exemplary works by a few internationally renowned contemporary artists. The works of these artists create a specific quality of spatiality in very varied forms – acoustic, sculpted and drawn. Although different from one another, their works create spaces rather than being perceived as single objects only. They have in common that their visible appearance seems to be unobtrusive, understated, whereas the effect they have is strong and powerful. These works evoke spaces between the identifiable and the elusive. They create sites and respites, in which the capacity of remembering is elicited and images and memories come to life. Info: Fondation Beyeler, Baselstrasse 101, Riehen/Basel, Duration:  6/10/19-26/1/20, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 10:00-18:00, Wed 10:00-20:00, www.fondationbeyeler.ch

With the exhibition “Tadeusz Kantor: Où sont les neiges d’antan”, Museum Tinguely presents one of Poland’s most important theatre and visual artists of the 20^th Century with one of his expansive works for the stage. Tadeusz Kantor’s (1915-1990) independent underground theatre, devoted to the reality of everyday life and often critically concerned with Poland’s suppressed history, is still influential for a young generation of theatre artists today. The exhibition is accompanied by the Virtual Reality-simulation “Cricoterie” (2019), by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn. Visitors are invited to be the hands directing a virtual stage filled with a cast of uncanny characters and props, inspired by Kantor’s Theater of Death and simultaneously, the audience watches as things get out of hand. Jean Tinguely and Tadeusz Kantor met around 1960 through Theodor Ahrenberg, a Swedish collector settled in Chexbres. Both artists blended their personal history with the cultural memory in their works. Tinguely and Kantor shared the same interest in process-related art and hybrid media, attempting to break down categories and boundaries between art and real life. Info: Curators: Małgorzata Paluch-Cybulska, Bogdan Renczyński, Natalia Zarzecka / The Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor CRICOTEKA in Krakow, Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 2, Basel, Duration: 9/10/19-5/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch