ART NEWS:March.01

Yael Bartana.s solo exhibition  “Patriarchy is History”, occupies all of Galleria Raffaella Cortese exhibition spaces. The title stems from the large neon work “Patriarchy is History” (2019) showed in via Stradella 4, a direct and eloquent statement prompted not only by most recent events and discourses, but as a systemic reality of global History. This new work is yet another outcome of the artist’s ongoing interdisciplinary project What if Women Ruled the World? (2017–2018). At via Stradella 7 Bartana presents, for the first time in Italy, her recent video work “The Undertaker”. Filmed in Philadelphia, the work generates from the public performance “Bury Our Weapons, Not Our Bodies!” a public ceremonial march mourns at a funeral lead by a mysterious leader. Sternly holding weapons, the crowd strides through the streets of the city towards Laurel Hill Cemetery, where the burial of the weapons takes place. Inspired by military processions as war celebrations, the project came into being within a reality which celebrates the right to bear arms and use them.  In the space in via Stradella 1 the artist presents works that are able to sublimate some of the moments of “The Undertaker”. Shot during the performance, and now for the first time showed to the public, the photographic series investigates the several nuances of gestures, elements and symbols that make up the action. The displaced composition on the wall recalls classic and modern painting collections, and acts as a current investigation by Bartana on the way to present photography. Info: Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Via Stradella 7-1-4, Milan, Duration: 28/2-9/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-13:00 & 15:00-19:30, https://raffaellacortese.com

Julia Steine’s solo exhibition title “Circular Flight” refers to themes such as “space and time”, “movement and temporality” and “beginning and end”. These fundamental topics are explored through the body’s perception of space. Due to their sheer size alone Steiner’s works on paper directly address physical feelings, making us aware of them and linking them to sight and movement. In addition, her installations examine the theme of sensing space, adding the dimension of time to a relationship of space to our bodies and lives. Walking into the large exhibition space, visitors immediately notice the three bird-like objects from the series “flight (weight)” (2016-19)  hanging from a wire so that they float just above the ground. Visitors are invited to set the birds in motion. They twist and turn in the room, until they slow down and return to a standstill. As the birds swing back and forth just above the floor surface, viewers become aware of their own position, making it seem as if the floor beneath their feet is also unsteady. Upon closer inspection you notice that the bronze objects are not perfect casts of bird bodies and their fragmentary or missing parts give them a rough appearance. The bird specimens were cast in bronze using the technique of lost mold; then the specimens were burned, and the resulting hollow form poured out once. Thus, the uncontrollable and the imperfect play important roles here. The artist is especially interested in the relationship between the massive, heavy, metal bodies and the light, ephemeral sense of flight. Info: Galerie Urs Meile Lucerne, Rosenberghöhe 4, Lucerne, Duration: 5/3-2/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, www.galerieursmeile.com

The first explorers discovered unknown worlds, thus allowing their pictorial translation. The cartography was meant to be completed, filled in with details from compiled information, and according to the meaning one wished to convey. Maps indeed represent reality, but interpret it by creating an image from multiple, more or less reliable elements. Our representation of the world is constantly evolving. Current technologies render it extremely precise, helping us see the world differently. Nevertheless, this translation into a two-dimensional surface, this fattening out, is an artifice; from the moment they take shape, maps are a testament to an artistic concern which is added to their navigational function. Completed by a selection of ancient maps and literary translations, the exhibition “Mappa Mundi” brings together more than 30 contemporary artists from across the world. It is testament to the recent interest artists have developed for a revisited Mapping according to their own aesthetic research. Some have developed numerous works on this theme, such as Marcel Broodthaers and Mona Hatoum, whereas others have periodically found world maps through their research, like Alighiero Boetti with its series of Mappa, or Wim Delvoye who conceives a new installation for this exhibition, just to name a few. The exhibition reunites around a theme rich in meanings, the map being for the artists a pretext for all sorts of comments on contemporary society, power relations, ecology, conflicts, etc. Info: Boghossian Foundation, Villa Empain, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt 67, Brussels, Duration: 5/3-22/8/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://www.villaempain.com

Lee Ufan in his solo exhibition “paintings” presents works from the “Dialogue” series that he has worked on since 2000. Lee Ufan’s works is characterized by yohaku (empty spaces or margins) that the artist intentionally leaves unmade, and these paintings continue to be based on the concept of resonance between the parts that are painted and those that are not. The color fields that appear to be single brush strokes have very simple forms giving the viewer a strong impression of white space. The part where nothing is painted makes the viewer aware of space, turning the entire exhibition space into a work of art, not just the part that was painted. One gets the feeling that the artist’s approach of continuing to create art through actual physical activity in this day and age when it has become less common for art to be made in such an ‘analog’ way is strangely in harmony with the era that produced the Mono-ha movement, which called into question the rapid modernization of the 1960s. A factor that is always important with the artist is the relationship between things that are made artificially, things that are made completely by hand, and things that only occur naturally. Info: SCAI The Bathhouse, Kashiwayu-Ato, 6-1-23 Yanaka, Taito-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 6/3-25/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.scaithebathhouse.com

“Politics of Disaster. Gender, Environment, Religion” is  the first Italian, solo exhibition dedicated to Arahmaiani, one of the most iconic and well-known artists from Indonesia. Nonconformist, blasphemous and transgressive: are some of the expressions often used to describe Arahmaiani due to her radicalism and meddling in subjects bordering on the political. The exhibition, curated by Marco Scotini, focuses on another key figure from Southeast Asia context, in the specific relationship between environmental exploitation and oppressed subjects, women and minorities. Arahmaiani’s approach to feminism is based on the opposing principles of tension and “the balance between female and male energies”, in which all aspects of life are interconnected. Her 30 years of research tackle subjects such as gender and religion, the battles for social justice and ecology as fundamental parameters for the criticism of bio-power within the profoundly patriarchal Indonesian society. From the outset, she was drawn to an artistic practice orientated towards a performative approach as a form of political activism. As a result of her controversial street performance “Independence Day” (1983) she was arrested and her historic exhibitions such as “Sex, Religion and Coca Cola” (1994) and “Sacred Coke” (1995), generated negative reactions and even death threats, as gender and religion were, and remain, taboo issues in a nation that suffered religious sectarianism and political repression up until the fall of the Suharto regime. Info: Curator: Marco Scotini, Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Via Giordano Bruno 31, Turin, Duration : 6/3-31/5/20, Days & Hours:  Fri 15:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-19:00, http://parcoartevivente.it

Allen Jones presents a solo exhibition in Almine Rech Gallery. His paintings, with their careful layering of glazes and paint, show him to clearly be spectacular colorist. In turn they evoke a classical world that here in France might bring to mind the compositions of Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, or the Henri Matisse.  His sculptures are carefully constructed parodies of commercial window shopping, which simultaneously remind the viewer of the amazing realism of Degas and his sculpture of female Parisian dancers and bathers. Like Degas, Jones has become increasingly obsessed with the theatre and cabaret – views from the balcony to the stage and back again. It gives him a particular opportunity to reflect on the way theatrical light is able to shine and create magic that in turn becomes a wonderful excuse for Jones’s virtuoso displays of color. Other paintings show intertwining lovers. Indeed another painting from the mid- to late-eighties titled The Studio was produced on a canvas deliberately the same size as Picasso’s revolutionary Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1906), itself set in a place of dubious entertainment. But the paintings of Allen Jones perhaps evoke more Matisse’s masterpiece of 1904 mentioned above, inspired of course by the famous poem of Baudelaire. Jones’s more recent paintings and sculptures, gathered in this exhibition, further develop different and complex possibilities of three dimensionality in painting itself and in the dressed-up painted object (the shop Mannequin itself has a long tradition going back to the concerns of Dada and Surrealism). Info: Almine Rech Gallery, 64 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 7/3-11/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00,  www.alminerech.com

The exhibition “Films by Morehshin Allahyari” presents three works (“Huma” (2016),” Ya’jooj Ma’jooj” (2017) and “Aisha Qandisha” (2018)) by Iranian artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari that are part of the ongoing research project” She Who Sees The Unknown”. The project, consisting of video and VR works, lectures, and installations creates a fictitious archive of feminist narratives by a selection of female or queer figures. These figures are based on so-called “jinn”, which are regarded as supernatural creatures in Islamic mythology and theology. Employing processes of animation and 3-D modeling, the artist recreates these beings, whilst simultaneously embedding them in contemporary contexts. Allahyari defines this process that was inspired by the theorists Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, as “re-figuring”. In addition to the feminist appropriation of traditional narratives and myths from the Middle East, the archive deals with notions of cultural heritage, political injustice, environmental destruction, and digital colonialism. Each video begins with a spoken mantra-like manifesto about the meaning and purpose of “She Who Sees The Unknown”. Spoken by the artist herself, the introduction describes these mythic figures as monstrous “Others”, dark goddesses, and divided or ambiguous personalities. Allahyari dedicates an individual story to each figure, holding them responsible for bringing justice to global warming (Huma), the hardening of national borders (Ya’jooj Ma’jooj) as well as the sexual desires of women (Aisha Qandisha). Info: Julia Stoschek Collection-Düsseldorf, Schanzenstraße 54, Düsseldorf, Duration: 8/3-3/5/20, Days & Hours: Sun 11:00-18:00, www.jsc.art

Hwayeon Nam draws the trajectories where historical time meets physical time. Using choreographic methods, she has focused in particular on the influences that arise as that time passes through the body, exploring ways of giving visible form to the resulting fluctuations. The exhibition n“Mind Stream” is based on the artist’s research into the dancer Seung-hee Choi  and the journey of thought that this brought about. Born during Japan’s colonization of Korea, Choi traveled to Japan at the age of 16 to study under the modern dancer Baku Ishii, before going on to undertake a new exploration of traditional Korean and Eastern dance. Both her dancing and her activities as a person illustrate the questions of identity and historical conflicts that confronted an artist situated between Korea and Japan, tradition and modernity, and East and West. Though records of Choi’s life are quite scant; for her artistic project, Hwayeon Nam began by imagining one possible path on the basis of these fragmentary records and images. The exhibition title was taken from one of Choi’s choreographic works of the same name. Using two surviving photographs of the work and a critic’s brief text about the performance from its day, the artist created a performative work one that consisted of drawings, sounds, and a poster imagining the movements of the dance. Info: Art Sonje Center, 87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Duration : 12/3-26/4/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-19:00, http://artsonje.cafe24.com

“In Habit” is the title of the exhibition of new works and drawings by Antony Gormley, centered around one immersive site-specific installation. “Run II” is a singular, continuous, square aluminum tube that fills the space of the main gallery in snaking 90-degree turns, the horizontal sections recalling heights familiar to us in our built environment: chair or table, worktop or shelf, door or ceiling. It uses the simplest means to activate and energize space, to create awareness of the way we move about in our constructed habitat.  Alongside this new large-scale work are several life-size cast iron “Liners”,  single open lines, multiple lines and endless lines without beginning or end, that explore the internal volume of the human body. Like Run II, these works are seen by Gormley as ‘diagnostic instruments’ that attempt to re-locate us in our first habitat – our body. Presented in the lower ground floor gallery, a delicate ‘Framer’ entitled Rest, alludes to body space as architecture, and is accompanied by a selection of spatial drawings. Info: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 7 rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration: 12/3-2/5/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.ropac.net

“Resounding” is  a career-spanning exhibition of Terry Adkins that surveys the trajectory of this influential artist’s expansive, improvisational practice, from rarely-shown early sculptures and works on paper to his acclaimed “recitals”—installations of related artworks with which Adkins explored the legacy of unsung but significant historic figures and moments. The exhibition will also include a robust selection of items that Adkins collected—books, records, musical instruments, and other objects from a diversity of artistic traditions that highlight the breadth of Adkins’s literary, musical, and visual influences and provide additional insight into his work. Over the course of the exhibition, the Pulitzer, working closely with artists Clifford Owens and Kamau Amu Patton, among others, will host performers from the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, a collective of multidisciplinary artists founded by Adkins to activate his recitals. A selection of monumental works in the Pulitzer’s expansive main gallery includes “Last Trumpet” (1995), one of Adkins’s best-known works. To Created as a memorial to Adkins’s father, Robert Hamilton Adkins, the instruments are called Akrhaphones, a name that includes the elder Adkins’s initials. They were intended to evoke the horns sounded by the first four angels of the Last Judgement as described in Revelations. Info: Curator Stephanie Weissberg, The Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Blvd, St. Louis, Duration: 13/3-2/8/20, Days & Hours: Thu & Sat-sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-20:00, https://pulitzerarts.org