ART NEWS:Oct.02

For his first significant presentation of Carlos Garaicoa’s work in Sweden, the exhibition “…a borderless reality, like gardens of the eternal…” consists of two parts and is a collaboration between Skissernas Museum and Lunds konsthall. The city is the point of departure for Carlos Garaicoa’s art. Since the early 1990s, he has explored how the city and its architecture both reflect and affect society. In his both poetic and political work, reality and fiction meet with people and citizens at its core. Garaicoa work explores how the city always exists in a political and economic landscape. Sketching and building models are key to Garaicoa’s artistic process, just as they are to the architects and urban planners who shape public spaces. He builds models and sketches and draws with both pen and thread. Info: Lunds konsthall, Mårtenstorget 3, Lund, Duration: 4/10/19-2/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed, Fri & Sun 12:00-17:00, Thu 12:00-290:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, https://lundskonsthall.se and Skissernas Museum, Finngatan 2, Lund, Duration: 4/10/19-2/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:-21:00, Fri 11:00-18:00, Sat-sun 11:00, 17:00, www.skissernasmuseum.se

Acclaimed for his exploration of the intersections between art and science, the Koen Vanmechelen tries, through his projects, to understand and respond to the great challenges of the 21st century. “Koen Vanmechelen. The Worth of Life 1982-2019”, is an exhibition of more than 65 pieces, all realized between 1982 and 2019, intended to highlight the more strictly plastic aspects of this artist’s body of work, with particular reference to his neo-baroque disposition. Sculptor, painter, performer, filmmaker and scholar, as well as human-rights activist—throughout the course of an almost forty-year-long journey—the artist has rounded out his projects for the hybridization of both animals and plants with the contamination of figurative arts, materials and media, making formal proliferation within conceptual complexity his own, personal earmark in a creative universe that is as unique as it is unmistakable. Info: Curator: Didi Bozzini, Academy of Architecture – USI Mendrisio, Teatro dell’architettura, Via Turconi 25, Mendrisio, Canton Ticino, Duration: 4/10/19-2/9/20, Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 14:00-20:00, www.arc.usi.ch

Michael Rakowitz’s  complex body of work includes sculptures, drawings, installations, video, collaborative and performative projects. The exhibition “Imperfect Binding” presents major artworks envisioned in his over-twenty-year practice traversing architecture, archeology, cooking practice, and geopolitics from ancient times to nowadays. His artworks speak with an urgent voice to historic turning points due to wars or other trauma, with an acute perspective poised to critique the paradoxes and contradictions of globalization. The exhibition establishes a dialogue with Lamassu, 2018, a human headed winged bull that Michael Rakowitz reconstructed from an Assyrian statue as part of his project “Fourth Plinth” standing on Trafalgar Square’s, London, until March 2020. As an addition to the survey, a newly commissioned artwork by Michael Rakowitz is presented in the frame of the exhibition. Paying homage to the Cerruti Collection and the sets of skills the collector and entrepreneur Francesco Federico Cerruti brought to Italy over the years of his company Legatoria Industriale Torinese (LIT), Rakowitz commissioned Luciano Fagnola, a master crafts bookbinder and friend of Cerruti’s,  to rebind a Hebrew and Arabic-Jewish prayer book printed in 1935, belonging to the dispersed Iraqi Jewish community, from which the artist’s maternal family comes from. Even though damaged volumes should be buried, according to Jewish tradition, the artist brought his own to Turin to repair their words and generate a new artwork from memories and collaboration with a binder. This artwork, titled “Imperfect Binding. A Homage to Francesco Federico Cerruti” (2019), is on view at Castello di Rivoli and has been gifted to the museum. Info: Curators: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Iwona Blazwick, Marianna Vecellio and Habda Rashid, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Piazza Mafalda di Savoia, Rivoli Turin, Duration: 8/10/19-19/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri: 10:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-19:00, www.castellodirivoli.org

The complex thematic setting of “The Dark Side” project is organized into three exhibitions spread over three years, and dedicated to: “Fear of the Dark,” “Fear of Solitude,” and “Fear of Time”. The first event in the new exhibition programme “The Dark Side. Who is afraid of the dark?” brings together 13 of the most important international artists with large site-specific installations and large-scale artworks by established artists as well as new protagonists on the contemporary art scene. The majority of the site-specific works has been produced especially for the exhibition, while others are loans from various institutions, galleries and some others are part of the Jacorossi Collection. All of them were selected for their power to draw the viewer in and encourage reflection on the topic while, at the same time, introducing some essential aspects of current contemporary art research. Visitors will be able to analyse their own reactions to sensory and tactile experiences, theatrical and magical visions, rituals and settings, anxieties that take different and unexpected forms only to melt away. Info: Curator: Danilo Eccher, Musja, via dei Chiavari 7, Rome, Duration: 9/10/19-1/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-20:00, www.musja.it

In her poetic film installations, Grada Kilomba combines performance, theatre, choreography, and music. She reworks ancient Greek myths and stages them together with mime artists. Drawing inspiration from African oral traditions, she takes on the role of a contemporary Griot, a storyteller who lets the classic tales speak directly on the current political issues. The precision of the artistic expression combined with its urgent message make Kilomba one of today’s most interesting artists. Grada Kilomba for “A World of Illusions”, her first solo exhibition,  in Scandinavia presents a trilogy of poetic film installations that use antique dramas to highlight postcolonial issues of racism, gender oppression and violence. In Grada Kilomba’s film trilogy “Illusions” we encounter the well-known fables of Narcissus and Echo, Oedipus, and Antigone reworked and performed by mime artists. Through ancient mythology and colonial history, “Illusions” speaks of human rights directly into our contemporary times. The precision of the artistic expression and an urgent message rooted in her own experiences makes Grada Kilomba one of today’s most interesting artists. Info: Bildmuseet, Umeå Arts Campus, Östra Strandgatan 30B, Umeå, Duration: 11/10/19-8/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.bildmuseet.umu.se

Kimsooja will install her work at 13 sites around the city of Poitiers for the first edition of Traversées, a new international artistic and cultural event. The Traversées project is inextricably linked to the future of a major landmark at the heart of the city’s history and heritage, the Palais des ducs d’Aquitaine.  Taking the visitor from India to Morocco, via South Korea, Peru and Japan, Traversées is an invitation to embark on a kaleidoscopic journey around the world through installation and performance. The artist transforms historic sites into sensorial experiences : different variations of “To Breathe”, featuring mirrors and glass windows wrapped in diffraction grating film, transform the space around them, like a skin that shelters our displaced bodies today. As part of the event, Kimsooja has invited other artists such as Tadashi Kawamata, Thomas Ferrand, Subodh Gupta, Jung Marie, Stephen Vitiello or Rirkrit Tiravanija, to observe the city and to contribute their own perspectives. Info: Traversées 2019, Poitiers, France, Duration: 12/10/19-19/1/20, www.traversees-poitiers.fr

Drawing on the languages of theatre, gardens, and sacred and vernacular architecture, Abbas Akhavan creates presents a site-specific exhibition and public installation that speaks to our desire for rituals and collective mythologies. In “Script for an island”, a thin platform resembling a theatrical stage bridges the full width of the gallery, seemingly suspended above the floor. Bowed slightly in the middle, the platform appears precarious and somewhat neglected, as water from a hose pools on its surface before spilling over into a shallow pool beneath. Nearby, a garden hose lies in large loops, partially unspooled from its reel. The whole is enveloped in a warm yellow glow cast by stained glass installed in the second-floor window. The glass itself mimics strand board, a type of structural panel made of compressed shards of wood, and yet conveys a reverential atmosphere. In parallel with the gallery exhibition, Akhavan has conceived of an outdoor installation on Brown’s Point in Joe Batt’s Arm. A 20’ x 12’ black velvet curtain repurposed from an actual theatre runs a length of scaffolding erected along the shoreline, facing the water. Open to the elements, the work creates a billowing counterpart to the stark solidity of Fogo Island Arts’ Long Studio, which stands like a two-dimensional plane across the bay. The curtain appears freestanding when viewed from the water and renders the island as a stage in anticipation of a performance. Info: Fogo Island Arts, 210 Main Street, Joe Batt’s Arm, Fogo Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Duration: 12/10/19-16/2/20, hwww.fogoislandarts.ca

Although many of Hantaï’s works of pliage feature jewellike hues, he also created a number of these works featuring only black paint on bare canvas. The exhibition “LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR” explores this subset of the artist’s oeuvre: unmediated by color, the monochromatic paintings and prints celebrate the aesthetic form of the crease and document Hantaï’s evolving relationship with the act of painting. Born in Bia, Hungary, Hantaï studied at the Budapest School of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1946 before moving to Paris in 1948 to study and then in the wake of the escalating Sovietization of his homeland deciding to stay. In Paris, he joined André Breton’s circle of Surrealists, completing several fantastical biomorphic paintings before encountering the work of Jackson Pollock and breaking with Surrealist ideologies in 1955. Pollock’s action paintings directly inspired Hantaï’s own turn toward monumentally scaled abstraction. Hantaï began creating pliage paintings in 1960, conceiving of the process as a marriage between Surrealist automatism and the allover gestures of Abstract Expressionism. The technique dominated the work he made during the rest of his career, reemerging in diverse forms. Info: Gagosian Gallery, 26 avenue de l’Europe, Le Bourget, Duration: 13/10/19-14/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/

In his practice, Sebastián Díaz Morales creates a quasi-magical visual realm focused on a subtle yet relentless questioning of our conceptions of reality. He plays with time and space, exchanges narrative for ideas and concept, giving leeway to the associations and interpretations of the viewer. His often explicit references to the (film)camera, perspective and point-of-view question how we see, experience and understand the world around us. For his solo exhibition “Talk with Dust” Díaz Morales shows for the first time his most recent work with the same title “Talk with Dust” (2018-2019) in its entirety. In a succession of projections and screens, Díaz Morales presents eight fragments or sequences. The sequences in and of themselves do not constitute a straightforward narrative or plot. There is no story, only singular details, movements, shapes, sites that create an atmosphere, a succession of different sensations. Through his fragmented narrative, Sebastian Díaz Morales intends to explore an idea of the fantastic. Info: Curator: Karen Verschooren, STUK—House for Dance, Image & Sound, Naamsestraat 96, Leuven, Duration: 16/10-15/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 18:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 14:00-18:00, www.stuk.be

For one month, as part as the season dedicated to the “French Scene”, the Palais de Tokyo will host the various métiers d’art that have been rewarded and supported by the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller for the last twenty years, without trying to hierarchize the works or the crafts displayed. The sentence that has been chosen as the title of the exhibition, “L’esprit commence et finit au bout des doigts”, is from “L’Idée fixe ou Deux Hommes à la mer”, a novel by Paul Valéry. It sets up a dialogue with the lines by the author inscribed on the pediments of the Palais de Chaillot, a building located nearby and dating from the same period. The exhibition – is organized into four sequences which play on the variations of light intensity and on the dilation of space. It opens with a contextual introduction, designed as an astonishing cabinet of wonders and putting on display hundreds of pieces from the collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris which celebrates the hands alone.  Info: Curator: Laurent Le Bon, Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, Duration: 16/10-10/11/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 12:00-24:00, www.palaisdetokyo.com

Guido Casaretto’s new solo exhibition titled “The Ghosts of Matter” takes place at MOCAK in Krakow. Guido Casaretto is interested in matter per se – the sea, mountains, the universe, but also stone and wood. He also investigates processed matter, analysing the characteristics of furniture and ceilings. The corollary of such pursuit is his interest in the ‘human matter’. In respect of primary materials he uses traditional techniques, incorporating the experience of painters, sculptures and craftsmen. With manmade objects, his methods are more complex – for example, he pulverises wardrobes, and fashions the resultant powdered wood and glass, mixed with glue, into useless replicas of the original objects. The strangest is the technique that the artist has employed in relation to human beings. On the internet he has found universal models of the human figures, produced for use in computer animations. On the basis of a few hundred of shots of specific persons – or their ‘matter’ – a total image was produced. Guido Casaretto has used this synthesis in his sculptures. Info: Curator Agnieszka Sachar, MOCAK-The Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, 4 Lipowa St, Krakow, Duration: 24/10/19-22/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, https://en.mocak.pl