ART NEWS: Nov.03

Sound Effects Seoul (SFX Seoul) is a sound art festival based in Seoul, South Korea, started in 2007 with the first international sound art exhibition in Korea. Since then, there has been a rise in sound artists, noise artists, and various experimental forms of sound-oriented experimentation in Korea. For “Simple Acts of Listening / SFX Seoul – Den Haag 2022”, the second foreign edition of SFX Seoul Sound Art festival the work of six Korean artists is shown in the former US Embassy to the Netherlands, designed by Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer. Korea is still today under the occupation of the United States. Its current social, economic and cultural conditions are all deeply affected by this pseudo-colonial position. The infusion of the sound work of Korean artists into the architecture of American foreign power now provides an opportunity to listen to and rethink these relations in the here and now. The invited artists will also explore the architectural and acoustic elements of the courtyard and street-facing windows, where the apparatus of world power can still be sensed. Info: Curators: Ji Yoon Yang & Baruch Gottlieb, West Den Haag in the Former American Embassy, Lange Voorhout 102, Den Haag, Netherlands, Duration: 5-27/11/2022, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-21:00, www.westdenhaag.nl/

If the paintings of Leslie Amine in her exhibition “Disparence” are imbued with a diffuse exoticism, with its landscapes of palm trees with scarlet mists, its scenes of carefree palaver, and its waves of tropical vegetation intermingled with the nonchalance of the characters, it never falls into the picturesque figuration of an African of junk. By drawing inspiration from her travels in Benin, Haiti, or in the neighborhoods of Yaoundé, the artist builds up a photographic corpus that she strips of any borrowings from an imaginary postcard, taking care to evacuate the sentimentality of the images. Leslie Amine fully claims the influence of the poetic vision of Victor Segalen seeking to promote a new sensibility of the aesthetics of travel, and the search for an Elsewhere at the very heart of everyday life. By invoking an “aptitude to feel the Diverse”, against the current of the increasing homogenization of subjectivities under the regime of globalization, the author of the Essay on Exoticism was already inviting art to move in the direction of heterogeneity ever greater modes of perception. Info: Galerie Anne de Villepoix, 18 rue du Moulin Joly, Paris, France, Duration: 9/11/2022-14/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 9:30-18:30, www.annedevillepoix.com/

With “The Colours of Time” exhibition, the couple, Pierre et Gilles unveil a series full of sensitivity, bearing witness to the contradictions of our time. In a carefully designed layout, Pierre et Gilles present the works they have produced over the last three years. Their paintings, all unique, are meticulously executed in the intimacy of the studio, using life-size custom-built sets. Pierre directs the initial photo session, with Gilles then undertaking a slow process of hand-painting directly onto the canvas print. The result, an artisanal and ambiguous photographic painting, offers a vision of the world that is both enchanting and disturbing, a universe where the sensuality of colour transfigures each subject. Their attentive, solemn and unconventional vision is then expressed through a vast gallery of portraits with contrasting atmospheres. Like a newspaper, the exhibition testifies to the turmoil of current events as well as the artists’ many encounters and their most visceral concerns. Info: Galerie Templon, 28 Rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, France, Duration: 10/11-30/1/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.templon.com/

When we talk about the latent forces that are inherent in Kitty Kraus’ works in her solo exhibition, the prospect of their destructive realization resonates. This possibility is part and parcel of Kraus’ works, which are seemingly designed and constructed to test their own material limits. They do so in a latently active process, an almost performative act during which the material and immaterial interact and counteract each other. Kraus’ frugal sculptures and installations are no quiescent objects. The dilemma of these constructions, be it lamps, ice blocks, glass structures, is built-in. Their hardware consists mostly of recurring materials such as glass, mirrors, ice/water, fabric, ink, cables, tape, microphones, or other rather simple technical components. Physical quantities and phenomena, circumstances such as extreme fragility, temporality, change and the changing, the consideration of probabilities, all these steer the “functioning” of the objects towards the possibility of their decay or failure. But this type of judgment presupposes a specific system of reference in which “functioning” is defined as a ruling out of deviancy. Info: Galerie Neu GmbH & Co. KG, Linienstraße 119 abc, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 12/11/2022-14/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.galerieneu.net/

The exhibition “Game of No Games-Instructions for Walking in High Spirits” presents historical and contemporary works by artists who have received little attention throughout art history. Their participation in society and the art world has been limited, as a result of conservatorships, disenfranchisement, or discrimination, to name a few. This is closely associated with the lack of stable institutional footholds or larger (art) networks and support systems. Conventional categorizations, such as Outsider Art or Art Brut, along with the concurrent emphasis on their alleged distinguishing characteristics—which have so far often been read as narratives on the spontaneous vs. planned, innate vs. learned, naïve vs. sophisticated, or even primitive vs. modern—are currently considered outdated and must be critically challenged. Accordingly, this exhibition intends to encourage a different understanding concerning established ways of thinking in the art world, as well as consolidate an approach to exhibiting and representing different artistic practices that is more readily assimilated. Info: Curators: Nikola Dietrich and Susanne Zander, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Hahnenstraße 6, Cologne, Germany, Duration: 13/11/2022-5/3/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://koelnischerkunstverein.de/

The exhibition “La pensée corps” brings together the work of Alexandra Bircken and Lutz Huelle, both of whom are linked to questions of identity, intimacy, permeability and vulnerability of the human being. What links them is a style with forms that are alternately fractured and assembled, cut and sutured, and a long history of friendship.  This exhibition is not about the relationship between art and fashion, even though it is a natural one.  The focus is on the mechanisms, the gestures, the thinking of the contemporary body and our experience of it as human beings. Both sectionalise and fractionalise objects and clothes as adjustable models for new ways of living, feeling and representing. This essential relationship to the body and materials was affirmed for Bircken and Huelle during their design studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London in the 1990s. There they were able to project their ideas onto the body as a medium. This period led them to define their own identity by re-inventing themselves as one wishes to do at 20. It was also their taste for music, Culture Club and Boy George among other queer personalities, that made them choose London. Info: Curator: Claire Le Restif, Fondation d’ entreprise Pernod Ricard, Duration: 15/11/2022-28/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-Sat 11:00-19:00, Wed 11:00-21:00, www.fondation-pernod-ricard.com/

Lee Ki-bong has continuously explored and experimented with his interest in structures and flows that constitute the essence of the world, crossing painting and installation. His work, which paradoxically evokes longing for the fleeting moment, along with nostalgia for the past and the past, creates an uncanny balance between the unconscious, the real, and the fantasy. In many cases, the landscape drawn on the artist’s screen, which is described as dreamy, exists as a landscape of another dimension that transcends time. The exhibition “Where You Stand” also consist of about 50 pieces of the artist’s own ‘vanitas’, which contain reflections on the cycle and disappearance of nature. Lee Ki-bong’s paintings constantly observe and question the depth of what the vision captures, and at the same time make the viewer obsessively observe the surface. Water is the most important element used in his work, which seeks to evoke the experience of facing the world in a variation on the ‘concentration of reality’. Water does not have an absolute form by itself, but has the property of generating form and meaning by forming a relationship with an external object. Info: Kukje Gallery, 54 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea,Duration: 17/11-31/12/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, www.kukjegallery.com/

The exhibition “MANIFEST Yourself!” aims to demonstrate the unabated vitality of (queer) feminist manifesto culture since the suffragettes and reflect its variegated, sometimes contradictory aspects. To do so, it surveys different regions, cultural contexts and mediaThe exhibition “MANIFEST Yourself!” retraces the development of (queer) feminist manifestos through a selection of public, often politically motivated statements issued by women, trans and non-binary people in different contexts. These various feminisms have evolved from the white and academically influenced beginnings of the 1960s and 1970s towards an inter- sectional understanding: besides categories such as biological sex and gender identity, age or (dis)ability, and class or religious affiliation, experiences of discrimination caused by segregation, colonial power structures or late-capitalist work conditions are increasingly coming into focus. In parallel with the #MeToo movement, which in recent years has led many prominent women to express their dissent collectively, Black Feminism has gained a noticeable presence in society as a whole, amplified since 2013 by the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Info: Curator: Valeria Schulte-Fischedick, Assistant Curator: Luise von Nobbe, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kottbusser Strasse 10, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 18/11/2022-22/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.bethanien.de/

Luzia Simons, who was born in Quixada in the northern region of Brazil in 1953, attended La Sorbonne in Paris to study history before switching to the visual arts. She relocated to Germany in 1986. She currently resides and works in Berlin.  Luzia Simons’ photographs in her exhibition “Récits en fleur”, give the impression of being three-dimensional. Even when cut off at the edge of the frame, it appears as if the flowers would lie in display cases or float in a diffuse space without direction, without an above or below. Luzia Simons showcases her flowers in a unique combination of material accuracy, beauty and vanitas. She uses a special scanner that allows her to obtain an incomparable spatial depth. What makes her scanograms so special is the effect instead of the classical vertical-horizontal picture division, it emphasises foreground and background.  Her works removes the viewer from a hazy dream without defined space-time. These works oscillate between an extreme proximity and an extreme distance, questioning the limits of our reality. Info: La Patinoire Royale | Galerie Valérie Bach, 15 rue Veydt, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 18/11/2022-14/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.prvbgallery.com/

Cassandra Press was founded in 2016 by artist Kandis Williams as a pedagogically based independent publishing project. At its core, Cassandra Press examines tools of perception and racism, and their dominant role and expressions, within the current sociocultural systems. Cassandra Press presents the two-part project “On Self-Defense”. The first part of this project opens with a reading room installation with the full catalogue of Cassandra Press readers and a new series of artist zines. This is the first presentation of artist zines and special edition readers since Cassandra Press’ participation in the Whitney Biennial 2022. For the second part of the project, Williams and artist Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) will carry out a research project on self-defense. Williams and Puppies Puppies will come together to discuss issues of safety, especially for people who identify as a part of the trans and BIPOC communities. By meeting with martial arts, self-defense, and mental health coaches, as well as researching past self-defense movements, the two will be in conversation about physical and spiritual forms of protection. Info: Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, Bergen, Norway, Duration: 18/11/2022-11/4/2023,, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.kunsthall.no/

For the exhibition “We breathe together”, D Harding’s first large-scale solo exhibition outside of Australia, the question of transfer and, in a literal sense, transport becomes a conceptual focus. Some of the works in the exhibition are made with colors painted directly on the wall or on paper. The pigments used for these paintings are ochres that are sourced from soil and that can have as such a spiritual dimension. Some of the ochres were transported by Harding in woollen felt blankets made in homage to ancestral cloaks made of possum skin. While Harding’s works seek direct connections to traditions in Aboriginal cultures in many ways, it is also mindful of maintaining protection and care, working against a tendency to exoticize or exploit ownership of a tradition. In the past, Harding frequently concealed elements that were drawn from traditional techniques by imposing them with more abstract visual formats, in some works on canvas reminding of colour field painting, for example, and playfully touching on Western artistic traditions. Info: Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, Bergen, Norway, Duration: 18/11/2022-8/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.kunsthall.no/

Nazzarena Poli Maramotti in the exhibition “Una fòla” alternates a series of oil paintings on canvas and on wood: portraits that in colors and even more in poses seem to emerge from a not so distant but already elusive past, landscapes built by reinventing those landscapes with still lifes of wild game typical of the Seventeenth-century Flemish painting, and ceramics that are sometimes declined as ornament and others as autonomous objects and that allude to funerary sculpture. They are organic elements that are grafted onto paintings or zoomorphic frames that draw the wall to signify an absence, or even offerings that rest on bases and urns placed on shelves. In paintings and ceramics the same type of sign returns: a graphic hatching that sometimes overlaps the surface sometimes incorporates it as a constructive element and refers in a more or less evident way to an animal presence. The frames are in fact made up of intertwined tails and the reclaimed wood bases that support some of the ceramic elements have lion’s paws. Info: z2o gallery, Via della Vetrina, 21,  Rome, Italy,Duration: 19/11/2022-11/1/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 13:00-19:00, www.z2ogalleria.it/