ART NEWS: Oct.01

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s solo exhibition title  “Dirty Evidence” comes from his definition of evidence in which a truth value is derived from its very inadmissibility before the law. It is precisely the evidence’s figurative dirt and dirtiness that works toward the production of truth. Testimony is integral to understanding violence, human rights violations and state abuse. Abu Hamdan’s work in this exhibition draws us not only towards questions of testimony’s presentational circumstances and conditions of use, but also towards questions of who can speak in which spaces, what kinds of talk can and cannot be heard, and what conditions establish the possibility to make claims. The exhibition creates space for listening to testimony that might otherwise not be heard. For example, that of Bassel Abi Chahine, whom Abu Hamdan interviews in the two-channel video “Once Removed” (2019) and whose testimony not only concerns a war-crime but as a reincarnated subject upends given assumptions about presence and witnessing. Or as in the piece “Earwitness Inventory” (2018–19), comprised of 96 custom designed and sourced objects all derived from legal cases in which sonic evidence is contested and acoustic memories need to be retrieved, which challenges what we know about memory and testimony. Info: Bonniers Konsthall, Torsgatan 19, Stockholm, Sweden, Duration: 1/9-7/11/2021, Days & Hours: Wed 12:00-20:00, Thu-Sun 12:00-17:00, https://bonnierskonsthall.se

Mohamed Bourouissa’s solo exhibition “HARa!!!!!!hAaaRAAAAA!!!!!hHAaA!!!” presents a selection of early and recent works and spans many media: photography, sound, installation and video, including the video “Temps Mort” (2008-09), in which the artist exchanges messages and grainy smartphone images with an imprisoned friend. Also featured are portraits of youth culture in central Paris, “Nous Sommes Halles” (2003–05), and staged depictions of French suburban ghetto street life inspired by canonical art-historical references in the series Périphéries” (2006-08). These works challenge contemporary image culture and the media’s portrayals of young people with minority backgrounds. The sound installation “Hara” (2020), after which the exhibition is named, highlights Bourouissa’s interest in language, codes and communication. The word ‘hara’ is used in Marseille by young people acting as lookouts: they shout it as a warning, for example to inform drug dealers that the police are approaching. Here, the distorted word becomes a sound installation poised somewhere between everyday language and abstract sound, veering in the direction of concrete poetry. Info: Curator: Henriette Bretton-Meyer, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Charlottenborg Palace, Nyhavn 2, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 9/10/2021-6/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-20:00, Sat-sun 11:00-17:00, https://kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk

Kunstmuseum Den Haag’s fashion collection was developed with a West European focus. But delve into their repository and you will soon discover common threads with other cultures all over the world. Hand-painted cotton from India, soft Chinese silk, imaginative batik designs from Indonesia and colourful variations on the Japanese kimono: each of these garments represents the world, and tells a story of inspiration and connection. Lovely but also painful stories, for many of these textiles were made during the age of colonialism and unequal power relations. The topical exhibition “Global Wardrobe – The Worldwide Fashion Connection” comes at a time when ideas about fashion as a global phenomenon and about cultural appropriation in the fashion world are in the spotlight. Kunstmuseum Den Haag will invite visitors to look beyond the splendour and see clothes as part of the world history they represent. Special attention will be focused on makers who design with an open view of the world, bringing their own cultural background to the fore. Info: Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Stadhouderslaan 41, Den Haag, the Netherlands, Duration: 9/10-2021-6/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.kunstmuseum.nl

The exhibition “Submerged Histories”, consists of new paintings and sculptures by Lucy Teasdale and Jon Pilkington. Lucy Teasdale’s sculptures span a range of different subject matter. From historical references and monumentalizing (1848 and Spanning the Globe); to the idea of heroism (In the Dark Woods) and the more formal qualities of sculpture. There is, additionally in these works an underlying reference to the absurd. The absurdity, for example, of going nowhere (both physically and perhaps also idealistically) in 1848, or the precarity of the base in Two Flighting Men. Jon Pilkington’s paintings, like Teasdale’s sculptures also contain displaced references to history and popular culture. He closes in on the details of these objects and imagery, creating an intimacy with the subject matter and studying its more formal qualities; therein reducing the associations to culture and taste. His compositions include fleeting yet obfuscated references, including football and collectible crockery. These ephemera now repeated onto the canvas, together with other more organic forms, transform as they are resituated into a fine art context. Info: Galerie Mikael Andersen, Bredgade 63, Copenhagen, Denmark, Duration: 14/10-20/11/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-14:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, http://mikaelandersen.com

Liz Johnson Artur presents her solo exhibition “of life of love of sex of movement of hope”. Liz Johnson Artur’s work is about the encounters she had over the last 30 years. Through site-specific photographic installations, she retells the stories of these meetings to her audience. This past year, Johnson Artur has developed five presentations specifically for Foam, encouraging the visitor to experience their own personal encounter with the work, but more so with the story, scene or person that the photograph presents. Brooklyn is where it all started for Russian Ghanaian artist Liz Johnson Artur. While visiting in 1986, she stayed with a Russian family in a predominantly Black neighborhood and began experimenting with her first camera. Having grown up in Bulgaria, Germany, and Russia, she was inspired by her visit to use photography as a way to connect with other people of African descent. Since moving to London in 1991, she has employed photography not only to make a living—publishing work in magazines such as “i-D” and “The Face”—but also to document the multiplicity of everyday life in Africa, Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. Info: Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 15/10-5/12/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10:00-21:00, https://www.foam.org

Elliott Mickleburgh the 2020 SpallArt Prize Salzburg Award winner will present new work. An advertisement is an image that has been selected from a litany of outtakes, influences, alternatives, and sketches. But whether we encounter this ‘final’ image on a billboard or smartphone, what we are seeing is not built up from its precursors, but is actually rendered down from all the visual matter that preceded it. “XX.XX.XX (Under the Scene)” is a project that interprets the Annunciation through the eclectic materials that emerge during the production and representation of luxury commodities. By reworking this story of religious devotion through the stylized languages of fashion, the project explores the intersection between a longing for the ineffable and the lust for self-gratification. The artist uses chromakeying, a technique in photographic post-production whereby a field of color, most frequently blue or green, is selected and excised from an image in order to create space for compositional elements produced asynchronously from the image at hand. With this gesture, the world seen through the window of a vehicle or a room, even sprawling computer-generated environments, can be inserted into images shot on a barren cycloramic stage that’s been selectively treated with the appropriate color.Info: Salzburger Kunstverein, Hellbrunner Straße 3, Salzburg, Austria, Duration: 16/10-5/12/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.salzburger-kunstverein.at

“Ante mare et terras” is the first solo exhibition in Italy by the New York-based Croatian artists TARWUK (Bruno Pogačnik Tremow and Ivana Vukšić),comprising four large-scale sculptures and a series of drawings displayed in the Pattern Room and on a long wall at Collezione Maramotti’s entrance. TARWUK conceived the sculpture “Tužni Rudar” (2018) as the opening work in the project, the first phase of a process of metamorphosis that develops through the other three sculptures/stagings on display. A constant depiction of the human form – exploring the multiple ways it can exist and the flowing, expressive quality of the body – represents the formal result of TARWUK’s deep, probing research into identity and the marks that memories and subconscious tensions leave on our bodies, shaping them physically. Different levels and layers of times and materials coexist in their shape-shifting works, balancing being and becoming. Info: Collezione Maramotti, via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia – Italy, Duration: 17/10/2021-20/2/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:30-18:30, Sat-10:30-18:30,  www.collezionemaramotti.org

The major group exhibition “Écrits d’Art Brut – Wild Expression & Thought” brings together the myriad writings of thirteen international Art Brut authors. These writers, most of whom lived or live as hermits or outcasts on the fringes of society, create their own world without even knowing that what they are doing belongs to the realm of the fine arts. They leave their mark on all sorts of supports, including embroidered cloth and painted walls. The works from a dozen museums as well as public and private collections in Europe and Brazil are being shown together here in Switzerland for the first time. The documentary films and photographs flanking them portray these unusual creators in their own homes or at their place of work and so invite visitors to immerse themselves in worlds that were never intended for public consumption. The texts, written in peculiar calligraphy or hastily noted, at times embroidered or fervently carved in stone, are often supplemented with pictures or drawings. They reveal an impressive creativity, spring from an urgent or even compelling need to express oneself, and represent a kind of silent resistance. Info: Curator: Lucienne Peiry, Museum Tinguely, Paul Sacher-Anlage 2, Basel, Switzerland, Duration: 20/10/2021-23/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.tinguely.ch

Cecily Brown presents “The end is a new start” her Brown’s first solo exhibition in Japan The is best known for her large-scale gestural paintings that blend abstraction and figuration, often looking to sources that range widely from the work of old and modern masters to pop album covers in her interrogation of critical themes such as sexuality and desire. In this new suite of twelve paintings, Brown presents two bodies of work—one that continues her recent investigations into historical representations of shipwrecks, and another that looks to major works from her own oeuvre spanning thirty years as fertile grounds for new inquiry. For Brown, a painting is not finished, but rather it stops at a given point. This lack of, or flexibility in the notion of finality allows for Brown’s paintings to potentially take on many different outcomes. This infinite potentiality, or painting-as-multiverse mentality, is something Brown has sought to bridle with recent techniques that incorporate digitally capturing the painting at a nascent moment, and then printing it at scale on the same linen substrate sometimes several times over. These replicas are then used as beginnings of new paintings. Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, Harajuku Jingu-no-mori 5F, 1-14-34 Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan, Duration: 22/10/2021-5/1/2022, Days & Hours: by appointment only (book here), www.blumandpoe.com

For five decades, Claudia Andujar has dedicated her life and work to the indigenous Yanomami communities in the Amazon region of Northern Brazil. In the late 1970s, when the community found itself subjected to severe external threats, the Swiss-born photographer, who is based in São Paulo, began fighting for the Yanomami’s rights. Her fourteen-year battle alongside Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa and other concerned parties led to an official demarcation of the community’s land in 1992. The exhibition “Claudia Andujar – The Yanomami Struggle” which brings together photographs, audiovisual installations, Yanomami drawings and other documents, is based on two years of research in Andujar’s archive. It is the first major retrospective dedicated to the work of the Brazilian activist, a survivor of the Holocaust, who has devoted her life to photographing and defending the Yanomami threatened by public and private greed. Since 1971 Andujar has been documenting this community, a people living in relative isolation in the northern Amazon rainforest. She subsequently went on to join the community, thus deepening relations between them. Info: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45, Winterthur Switzerland, Duration: 23/10/2021-13/2/2022, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.fotomuseum.ch