ART NEWS: April 04

The exhibition “Wordless–Falling Silent Loudly” is dedicated to exploring possible ways of shattering the phases of silence that result when people suffer collective trauma. Based on the works of the poet Paul Celan, the presentation examines, from a multitude of angles, how poetry opens up a pathway out of speechlessness and offers a space for empathetic remembrance. It presents items from the Völkerkundemuseen in Dresden and Leipzig, in dialogue with contemporary works of art probing the circumstances and effects of silence—in photographs, videos, mixed-media installations and conceptual works. Among other things, the exhibition reflects on colonial power relations and ways of dealing with the controversial contexts in which items from the Völkerkundemuseen collections were acquired. A string of poems accompany and comment upon the exhibits and works by the seven artists and activists. This presentation clearly reveals the sociohistorical causes of collective trauma and how it is dealt with from a global and highly nuanced perspective. Info: Japanisches Palais, Palaisplatz 11, Dresden, Duration 16/4-1/8/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-sun 10:00-18:00, https://japanisches-palais.skd.museum

Callum Innes’s solo exhibition “A Pure Land” comprises a group of fifty watercolours constituting a single, major work by the artist. Watercolour has been an integral part of Innes’s practice for several decades, and the artist cites its luminosity as the reason he continually returns to the medium. Innes eschews the looseness and quickness often inherent to watercolour, instead relying on his methodic style of painting to explore the possibilities of color and form. As is common for the artist, these works possess a harmony between simplicity and complexity, as well as control and chance. Innes made these fifty watercolours in his Oslo studio, where he has been working since early 2020, and this is the second-ever group to be designated as a single work. When viewed collectively, the variations in combinations highlight the complexity and depth of exploration within the series. The delicate subtleties possible with this medium, such as bleeding edges and veiled colors, invite intimate viewing, and the artist’s rigorous study of light and color is particularly powerful when experienced en masse. Info: i8 Gallery, Tryggvagata 16, Reykjavík, Duration: 16/4-29/5/2021, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 12:00-17:00, https://i8.is

With the title “Cultura Profiláctica” , Hamlet Lavastida opens his solo exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, making use of a term from the health sector, which he believes has revealed numerous structures of a prophylactic culture during the pandemic, not only in his country of origin, Cuba, but worldwide. Lavastida is showing two immersive installations made of paper cuts on opposite walls. On one side, the transcription of Javier Caso’s “interrogation” (2020), which went viral, is linked to a letter by the poet Heberto Padilla written to the revolutionary government in 1971. Caso, a photographer based in the United States with Cuban roots, was interrogated by the Cuban security authorities due to his friendly relationship with independent filmmaker Miguel Coyula and actress Lynn Cruz, whose documentary “Nadie” circulated in international media but was censored in Cuba because of its critical position towards socialism. The name Heberto Padilla also represents an historical caesura in the perception of the Castro regime in Cuba during the 1960s and ’70s, which dealt harshly with the criticism and dissent expressed in Padilla’s later poems. Under pressure, Padilla was forced to distance himself from his own statements, committed to the Castro government and was only able to correct this years later. For many left-wing political intellectuals in Latin America and Europe, the “Padilla Affair” meant the end of their support for the Cuban revolution. Info: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kottbusser Strasse 10, Berlin, Duration: 16/4-16/5/2021, Days & hours: Tue-sun 14:00-19:00, https://www.bethanien.de

In the exhibition “Marking Time” is on show a selection of works by  Stephen Antonakos.  On presentation are wall works with neon, works of the “Alphabet” series, parchment paintings, project proposal drawings as well as the engravings from his “Tears” series. Antonakos’s work with neon since 1960 has lent the medium new perceptual and   formal meanings.  His use of spare, complete and incomplete geometric neon forms has ranged from direct 3-D indoor installations to painted Canvases, Walls, the well known back-lit Panels with painted or gold surfaces, his Rooms and Chapels.  Starting in the 1970s he installed over 55 architecturally-scaled permanent Public Works in the USA, Europe, Israel, and Japan.  Throughout, he conceived work in relation to its site – its scale, proportions, and character and to the space that it shares with the viewer. He called his art, “real things in real spaces” intending it to be seen without reference to anything outside the immediate visual and kinetic experience.  Colored pencil drawings on paper and vellum, often in series, have been a major, rich practice since the 1950s; as has his extensive work with collage.  Other major practices include the conceptual Packages, small-edition Artist’s Books, silver and white Reliefs, prints and several series of framed and 3-D Gold Works. Info: Citronne Gallery, 19 Patriarchou Ioakim, 4th floor, Athens, Duration: 17/4-19/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Fr: 11:00-20:00, Wed & Sat: 11:00-16:00 (by appointment only, book here), https://citronne.com

Titled “Bodies of Water” and unfolding progressively over several months between 2020 and 2021, the 13th Shanghai Biennale advocates for processes of planetary re-alliance. Considering how discharging, breathing, transfusing, flushing, menstruating, ejaculating, and decomposing are ways in which bodies exist together, beyond the confines of flesh and land, the Biennale reflects on how collectivities are made tangible and bodied in wet-togetherness. It will convene artists to think beyond human-centered and nation-based narratives and to explore forms of fluid solidarity. With 64 participating artists presenting projects, including 33 new commissions, presented at the PSA and other venues across Shanghai, to challenge the traditional biennale format and explore the participant-public divide, the Biennale is unfolding over the course of nine months as an in crescendo project. It began in November 2020 with PHASE 01: *A* WET-RUN REHEARSAL, a five-day inaugural program, and was followed by PHASE 02: AN ECOSYSTEM OF ALLIANCES, five months of activity and programing. This allowed the artists, thinkers and curators involved in the Biennale to develop their work in close collaboration with the City of Shanghai, its people, networks of activism, organizations, and institutions. Info: 13th Shanghai Biennale, Chief Curator: Andrés Jaque, Curators: Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Mi You, Power Station of Art 678 Miaojiang Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, Duration: 17/4-25/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.powerstationofart.com

The exhibition “Bottomless” features arly works of Shusaku Arakawa, whose renewed attention and reevaluation of his oeuvre follows the 10th anniversary of his death. While the system of values and our understanding of the past is being called into question, we are asked what kind of training is necessary to “think through” the present, using all the cognitive means allowed to us. Arakawa’s paintings respond to this proposition by becoming a gathering place of images, shifting perceptions, thoughts, and exercises of the natural sciences and philosophy. Adding a temporal dimension to the intellectual quest in flat planes, the two experimental films are considered an emotive and affectionate form of this expression. In “Why Not (A Serenade of Eschatological Ecology)” (1969), a nude woman wrestles with a door and a table in a room questioning the nature of existence. This subject is further explored in “For Example (A Critique of Never)” (1971), which documents a homeless boy wandering the streets of New York, tracing changes of his body and surrounding environment. Info: Scai Piramide, Piramide Bldg. 3F, 6-6-9 Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Duration: 22/4-29/5/2021, Days & Hours: Thu-Sat 12:00018:00, www.scaithebathhouse.com

Antonio Obá is presenting his first solo exhibition in Europe entitled “Outros Ofícios”, the exhibition is composed of new works on canvas and on paper, all made between 2020 and 2021. While Obá’s work on canvas is visually alluring in color and subject matter, each composition carries with it a rich tapestry of allegory, metaphor and historical reference that begs to be deciphered. Obá’s compositions draw on a vast pantheon of sources, from personal family photographs and archival images of historical events, to popular culture, myth and legend. He succeeds in cross-pollinating a wealth of symbolism drawn from the Western Judeo-Christian religious tradition with mystical elements of the syncretic religious systems that developed in Brazil and South America, a result of the influx of large numbers of African enslaved people who were trafficked there by the colonial powers. These African diasporic religions, such as Candomblé, Voudou and Santeria, blend the Christian imagery of the colonizers with the African religious practices brought across the ocean to the New World. Info: Mendes Wood DM, 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat, Brussels, Duration: 22/4-6/6/2021, Days & Hours: Open by appointment, book here), https://mendeswooddm.com

Eske Kath explores a fundamental uncertainty that is a condition of our time. Where humanity’s imprint radically changes the climate and landscape as well as our basic understanding of our role in nature and in the world. It is a time where we must accommodate not just the localised landscape in our minds, but that of our entire world, not just the tangible global landscape and nature under enormous pressure, but also the vast political landscapes and fear of a future apocalyptic landscape. With his solo exhibition “Containing Landscapes”, Eske Kath gives his take on what a landscape painting can be in a time where the landscape we must contain and relate to is no longer a local landscape, but a global abstract landscape with a myriad of vanishing points. The concepts of degradation and construction have been a long running theme in Kath’s work and his motifs can often be seen as a balancing point where both are possible. In his paintings, the disturbing and violent become ornamental, contorted and beautiful. Info: Galerie Mikael Andersen, Bredgade 63, Copenhagen, Duration: 22/4-28/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, http://mikaelandersen.com

The group exhibition “Language for Sale” puts nonsense at its center. Laced with humor, the exhibited works engage with rhetorical and linguistic moments of transition—a change marked by the increasing appearance of nonsense language. Rhetoric as persuasive public language and its current crisis is also a focus of the other works in the exhibition. Rhetoric is a difficult performative genre. Political rhetorical culture is currently undergoing profound changes, witnessed in today’s speeches and communiqués. Several pressures on rhetorical culture are changing the climate of speech: from mistrust in politicians, to the deterioration of attention spans, to anger-driven social media use. But it is the decline of institutions of open debate and of access to longer argumentative forms that have ushered in the most profound change in political communication: the transforming role of the lie, morphing from a secretly used weapon into an openly used tool of propaganda. The exhibition tracks several ideological changes from the 1970s up to now, demonstrated through the use of public language, and looks at the performative challenges that speakers try to overcome to master these transitions. Participating Artists: Harun Farocki, Nicoline van Harskamp, Stefan Panhans, Elemér Ragályi, Peter Rose, Kim Schoen, John Smith. Info: Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Katharinenstraße 23, Oldenburg, Duration: 22/4-13/6/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.edith-russ-haus.de

Gilbert & George present a selection of 25 major works from the series “THE PARADISICAL PICTURES”, which marks the artists’ first solo exhibition in the Sprüth Magers Berlin gallery. Completed in 2019, Gilbert & George’s studies of the relationship between humans and nature here take on new relevance and significance in the current context of the global pandemic. Gilbert & George appear across the many panels of the PARADISICAL PICTURES, meandering through a violently vivid array of psychedelically colored natural forms, including flowers, leaves, petals, fruits, tree limbs and branches. Individually, each picture presents a mesmeric world unto itself, replete with lush surfaces and vibrant hues, but likewise filled with references to aging and exhaustion. Together, they comprise an overwhelming, compelling yet ambivalent concept of paradise: gorgeous, abundant and attractive, yet elsewhere resolutely nightmarish. Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 28/4-3/7/2021, https://spruethmagers.com