ART NEWS: April 04

Lauren Halsey has been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to create a site-specific installation for its Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden.  The monumental, full-scale architectural structure is imbued with the collective energy and imagination of the SouthCentral Los Angeles community where the artist was born and continues to work. Titled “the eastside of south central los angeles hieroglyph prototype architecture (I)”, the installation is designed to be inhabited by The Met’s visitors, are able to explore its connections to sources as varied as ancient Egyptian symbolism, 1960s utopian architecture, and contemporary visual expressions that reflect the ways in which people aspire to make public places their own. Lauren Halsey is rethinking the possibilities for art, architecture, and community engagement. She produces both standalone artworks and site-specific projects, particularly in the South Central neighborhood of Los Angeles where her family has lived for several generations. Combining found, fabricated, and handmade objects, Halsey’s work maintains a sense of civic urgency and free-flowing imagination, reflecting the lives of the people and places around her and addressing the crucial issues confronting people of color, queer populations, and the working class. Info: The Met (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, 18/4-22/10/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue, Thu & Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.metmuseum.org/

“Mutant Passages” is Monira Al Qadiri’s first solo exhibition in Austria. The Kuwaiti artist has developed new works that follow in-depth research, forms and ideas developed by the artist over the last decade around the subject of oil, culminating in this body of work. Monira Al Qadiri is one of the most important artists of the Gulf region. Born in Senegal, she grew up in Kuwait and left for Japan when she was only sixteen. Her identity, she explains, is hybrid, her homeland unclear. “I am a mutant,” says Al Qadiri. The war in Kuwait prompted her to look for subterfuges. The artist has since gained recognition for her videos and sculptures dealing with “petro culture” and the dependency of modern life on fossil fuels. “Oil is a destructive force, but in a way, it is also a miracle. It is like a very strange alien being that has landed from outer space and will eventually disappear again.” She presents objects covered in car paint. They look like jewels in a treasure trove, reminiscent of phallic rockets, futuristic explosive devices, or science fiction. They shine mint green, ultramarine, or in the colors of brass. Some are mounted on white pedestals and rotate; others are monumental in size and found in public space. In fact, they are drill heads. Al Qadiri does not alter their forms, but merely determines their dimensions and colors. Info: Kunsthaus Bregenz, Karl-Tizian-Platz, Postfach 45, Bregenz, Austria, Duration: 22/4-2/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at/en/

The name of Cem Sonel‘s solo exhibition “Binary”, refers to the binary coding system and revolves around concepts that take their expressive power from their simplicity. By using computer codes and led panels, Sonel explores new production techniques in the intersection of new media and street art. Additionally, the artworks in this comprehensive selection are made of upcycled materials such as digital screens, MDF, LED panels, and plexi plates that are considered waste or have lost their function. Sonel’s exhibition explores the notions of existence and non-existence as thesis and antithesis that could be transformed into each other. Sonel demonstrates that the language of digital communication can also be translated into a form of creative expression through unique combinations of zero and one. By establishing a modern connection between technology, existence and meaning Sonel aims to question the similarities between nothingness, existence, and non-existence in an analytical way. Reinterpreting the system of values that underpins daily life from a philosophical standpoint. Info: Anna Laudel Gallery, Mühlenstrasse 1, Düsseldorf, Germany, Duration: 22/4-1/7/2023, Days & Hours: Tu-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-15:00, https://annalaudel.gallery/

The exhibition “mOTHERTONGUE” surveys the past fifteen years of Mithu Sen’s compelling art practice, alongside a series of major new commissions. the exhibition is presented as a mind-map, moving between interior states and visible surfaces, charting Sen’s language-based articulations and interventions. The ehibition  explore the ways in which language is channelled into forms as diverse as drawing, media and performance to create complex artworks which resist definitional categories and elude institutional power structures related to race, gender, ethnicity, caste, and location. Returning time and again to the idea of myth and initiating its unmaking, Mithu Sen’s Work explores myths of identity, and their intersection with the structures of our world, whether social, political, economic, or emotional. Sen works fundamentally as a performer, tangling with politics of language, disciplining of bodies, conventions of society, and polite impositions of the art world. Known for her provocative, alluring, and playful examination of these hierarchies, Sen is committed to perpetual unbecoming through performative interventions. Info: Curator: Max Delany, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank, Melbourne, Australia, Duration: 22/4-8/6/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://acca.melbourne/

The first institutional solo exhibition by the collective (LA)HORDE features a selection of video installations that stem from their choreographic practice rooted in ritual, classical dance, subcultures, and the everyday. (LA)HORDE have made a name for themselves by expanding the boundaries of classical dance. Their approach focuses on understanding how bodies are represented in public space, social networks, and on the stage which they consider to be a political place of intersecting choreographic languages. To describe their practice, they coined the term “post-internet dance,” a genre influenced by the digital circulation of a wide range of styles and rhythms. Through dance, or more generally through the body in motion, (LA)HORDE examine individual and communal gestures of transgression and resistance by performing protest, inserting themselves into festival crowds, and inviting nonprofessionals to take center stage. (LA)HORDE’s practice encourages viewers to consider how, over the last fifteen years, our movements and behaviors have drastically shifted due to the ubiquity of phones, surveillance cameras, and social media. We have adapted to performing for the camera in both private and public spaces, whether we give consent or not. At the same time, the possibility of challenging what performance and dance can do through the widespread access of recording technology and mass distribution circuits has created new modes of expression and identification, defined by communal codes that in some cases lead to political dissent—the recent videos from Iran of women and girls dancing in the streets in defiance of the regime are just one example. Info: Curator: Lisa Long, Assistant Curator: Line Ajan, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, Berlin, Germany, Duration: 24/4-30/7/2023, Days & Hours: Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, https://jsfoundation.art/

With drawings, archive material, Tom’s of Filand personal clothing and memorabilia, letters, publications, magazines, films, and a new VR experience, the exhibition’s “Bold Journey” narrative employs the biography of Tom of Finland (born Touko Valio Laaksonen, 8) as a guiding thread in examining six decades of his practice. It uses different moments and settings from his early life in Finland, such as his rural upbringing, military service, his move to the city, post-war period and his numerous travels in Europe and the USA. Tom’s characters such as the logger, biker, white collar worker, serviceman or police officer, denote an engagement with uniforms and gear in a playful manner that subverts conventional behaviours and defies expectations. The fantasy situations depicted by Tom of Finland project a world of enjoyment and pride, which then and now opposes conceptions of non-normative or non-confirming identities bearing guilt or shame. The exhibition contextualises the artist’s work within wider narratives, linking directly to the history of the international LGBTQI+ movement and culture. Info: Curators: Leevi Haapala and João Laia, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Mannerheiminaukio 2, Helsinki, Finland, Duration: 28/4-29/10/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-20:30, Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 10:00-17:00, https://kiasma.fi/

In his solo exhibition “City Racing”, Keith Coventry brings together several of his most celebrated bodies of work, as well as a new series he has been ruminating on for nearly three decades. Taking inspiration from the urban environment of contemporary London, Coventry’s practice is preoccupied by the gritty reality of city life. Working in a diverse array of mediums and subject matters, Coventry’s work sheds light on the often overlooked or unquestioned aspects of daily life. Through a simultaneously witty and serious modernist visual language, Coventry dissects notions of capitalism, addiction, and social housing. Coventry’s incisive view of society is articulated through his signature balancing of opposites: serious and humorous, lauded and dismissed, familiar and obscured. He explains, “Even in the most impoverished places, you can bring about the ennobling of something ignoble.” Split across two levels, the ground floor gallery will hold a bronze sculpture of pigeon spikes. In magnifying this commonplace device to more than three meters in height, Coventry confronts viewers with the often unnoticed, violent architectural interventions that pervade cities. Info: Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 28/4-28/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.pacegallery.com/

Τhe exhibition “Inner Island” explores an essential driver of creation, as powerful as it is common: the distancing of reality as to reveal an interiority. In the beginning are landscapes and bodies, landscapes in bodies then, as dreams often like to produce, a tangle of situation, situations that are blurry, pleasant, and sometimes disturbing. Faced with work acting as mirages, the gaze wanders. While contemporary art has never been as political or engaged with the world as it is now, a whole section of creation, and particularly in painting, is seemingly breaking away from it in order to offer vertiginous immersions into inner worlds and recesses. What is the significance of this current distancing from reality? More than 80 works by fifty artists, from private and public collections, including the Carmignac collection, but also new productions, will draw the dotted outlines of an inner island, inviting each visitor to fill in the gaps in their own way. From Peter Doig to Anna-Eva Bergman, from Ali Cherri to Auguste Rodin, the exhibition  proposes to confront visitors with these different worlds floating outside of known geographies and temporalities. The exhibition will feature archipelagos, as with Agnieszka Kurant’s installation sculpted by termites, under the water ceiling of the Villa Carmignac. Info: Curator: Jean-Marie Gallais, Villa Carmignac, Porquerolles, Île de Porquerolles, La Courtade, Hyères, France, Duration: 29/4-5/11/20233, Days & Hours: April, May, June, October & November Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, July & August Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, www.fondationcarmignac.com/

Some of the best-known projects by Haus-Rucker-Co, an exuberant and rebellious Vienna-based collective of architects and artists are presented in the exhibition “Mind Expanders”, The works were made between 1967 and 1972, a period during which the collective developed its most distinctive and innovative architectural projects. Central to their work, which is still very topical today, were imagination, experimentation, and breaking with conventions. The exhibition includes works like “Balloon for 2”, a transparent PVC membrane inflated into a large air bubble, “Environmental Transformers”, and “Mind Expander II”, as well as films such as “Yellow Heart”, and “Food City” I, showing the construction of an edible urban scale model. The highlight of the exhibition is the the interactive, legendary installation “Giant Billiard” (1970). Especially for the exhibition, designer Yvo Zijlstra joined forces with cameraman Henk Leurink and sound artist Charly van Rest to create the video work “HRC Environment Transformer Simulator” (2023) for which he manipulated film images of the Kunsthal’s immediate surroundings. Info: Kunsthal Rotterdam, Museumpark, Westzeedijk 341, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Duration: 29/4-3/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.kunsthal.nl/