ART NEWS: Dec.02

The exhibition “Path of Contact” celebrates the 50th anniversary of ARKO Art Center opening. This special exhibition consists of an art exhibition in the main building of the Center, together with an archive section. The archive section features approximately 200 self-curated archival materials, including brochures, pamphlets, photos, and videos that document the Center’s history. In addition, ARKO Art Center is preparing to display video clips documenting significant periods of change and their distinctive characteristics with interviews with officials inside and outside of the Center. This exhibition is the result of the participating artists’ collaboration as such, exploring issues of the contemporary art scene, arising from the encounter between artists of different generations, the point of differentiation between works that end up being either collaborative or individual, and ways of interacting and contacting. It also provides an opportunity for reflection on the methodology of creating art in the process of expanding and exchanging relationships, while recalling the role of the museums in discovering and rediscovering artists and offering a creative space of experimentation, which has been their main function. The nine teams participating in this exhibition present different results of their forms of interaction: some expose the theme through differences in media properties, others take visual connections of the final product, common themes of joint projects, or differences in each other’s creative work as material for their own. Info: ARKO Art Center, 3 Dongsung-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, Duration: 8/12/2023-10/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11;00-19:00, https://www.arko.or.kr/

In their first UK two-person exhibition, “brave and pathetic is better than drowning in shame”, Josefin Arnell and Max Göran present new moving image installations featuring truckers, horse girls, and the police, all caught up in yearning for their lost and unattainable objects. Whilst the exhibition brings the artists’ individual practices in dialogue for the first time, its title stems from the motto devised by Arnell and Göran in 2014 for their long-standing collective work under the alias of “HellFun”.  Spanning two floors, the exhibition is set up as a showdown between the horse beyond reach, and the emancipating, CO2-emitting automobile. It begins with a daytime party murder scene and a policewoman’s search for her perfect horse (Josefin Arnell, Beast and Feast, 2023). Upstairs, an artist-cum-trucker journeys through unending days at a place where the sun never sets and on a Mitsubishi Carisma’s last day on earth, it returns from dusk to dawn hopping on and off Berlin’s landmarks and unremarked side views  Both in their individual and collective work, the artists use humour, class references and absurdity, mining their own life facts, such as far from perfect parental structures, to fictionalise themselves into versions of the Self unhinged from the super-ego or guided by a childlike Id. Info: Curator: Adomas Narkevičius, Cell Project Space, 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 8/12/2023-25/2/2024, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.cellprojects.org/

Inspired by a Buddha statue from 13th century at Pa Sak temple in Chiang Saen, Thailand Biennale’s, Chiang Rai 2023 theme “Open World” concept embodies wisdom, enlightenment, and the opening up of our perceptions of art and reality, prompting contemplation on envisioning a better future. The theme also encapsulates centuries of Chiang Rai’s history, integrating past, present and future. As a locus of artistic exploration and connection with other localities at the regional and global levels, the exhibition includes artists from the Mekong to the Amazon. This biennale edition serves as an arena for cultural exchange and dialogue on contemporary issues. The curatorial team embraces this complex history which reveals the perspective of small narratives, astounding cultural diversity, and lush ecosystem. Over 30 ethnic groups coexist in this melting pot, fostering a unique identity and facilitating a robust network of artists, nurturing the co-existence of the contemporary art and craft communities. Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023 is contingent upon the collaboration of the Chiang Rai community. Additionally, the close unity among artists in Chiang Rai has cultivated a thriving contemporary art community, indicating their eager preparedness to participate in the upcoming event.  The invited artists were tasked to engaged and explore diverse forms and contents, emphasizing field trips and research into Chiang Rai’s histories from various perspectives. Excursions with artists through their visit to the province have sparked ideas and reflection with Chiang Rai’s multicultural identity, indigenous wisdom and knowledge transmission through their art. Info: Curatorial team: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Gridthiya Gaweewong, Angkrit Ajchariyasophon and Manuporn Luengaram, Thailand Biennale, Chiang Rai 2023, Various venues, Chiang Rai, Thailand, Duration: 9/12/2023-30/4/2024, www.thailandbiennale.org/

The exhibition “Anonymous Fields” highlights Joseph Sherman’s versatile practice, which incorporates painting, sculpture, mixed-media collage, and installation as visual and conceptual pathways into entrenched cultural legacies indexing Blackness. Broadly, his work inhabits the cultural arenas of sports and entertainment iconography where dilemmas of Black persona are negotiated through public, communal, and personal mythologies, and between iconic and profane experiences of racialized identity. Sherman’s interventions probe formal and existential conditions of Black labor within larger contemporary spectacles to rearticulate the Black authorial and creative nuances that make these cultural formations legible, or what the artist refers to as “epiphanies.” With the exhibition, Sherman alludes to discursive, cultural, and representational terrains that have historically situated Black Americans within paradoxical relationships to their creative output. Citing foundational writings on Black music by the late poet and theorist Amiri Baraka, “anonymous fields” refers to the formulation of the antebellum plantation as a site where enslaved Blacks were forcefully rendered into anonymous bodies, save for the acts of hymnal praise that collectively preserved their human integrity through musical performance. Sherman extends Baraka’s notion to recuperate other terrains where Black aesthetic, performative, and embodied activity are exploited towards new gestures of Black cultural signification and belonging. Info: Praz-Delavallade Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles CA, USA, Duration: 9/12/2023-6/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.praz-delavallade.com/

Situated in globalized communication systems and inspired by various localities and uneven information flows, Shuang Li’s work, which encompasses performance, interactive websites, sculpture and moving image installations, studies various mediums that compose the contemporary digital landscape. A video projected on the bottom of a heart-shaped fountain makes up the central axis of her solo exhibition “Forever”. Titled “Heart is a Broken Record” (2023), it is an impressionistic montage of videos uploaded to YouTube by fans, taken during concerts of the band My Chemical Romance throughout the last twenty years. For this video, the artist collects the brief moments before the band appears onstage, drowned by lights and screams, in effect cutting off the concert footage before it even begins. Interspersed with this concert imagery are images of spattering blood that morph to form veins, intravenous lines, sparks turning into lava, as the video continually defers and suspends the sound the audience waits eagerly to hear. Thus, at the bottom of a wishing well, the installation re-stages a concert that never happens, composed of footage of concerts that have actually taken place. Info: Peres Projects, Piazza Belgioioso 2, Milan, Italy, Duration: 12/12/2023-26/1/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-18:00, https://peresprojects.com/

The works in Helen Anna Flanagan’s exhibition “A Room with a View” exist in a constellation centered around the idea of vacation – as an entrance point (and a form of escape) to hallucinate and dive deeper into alternative worlds and landscapes. Extending from the photographic cliche of the holiday snapshot and the tourist postcard, the exhibition reflects on the processes involved in image-making, representation, projection and interpretation. The works use the motif of water and sun, alongside saturated color and texture so that the gallery becomes an island, a removed and contained space to be inhabited at a leisurely pace. The exhibition premieres her new video “The Gap” (2023), as well as her video “Deeply, Madly” (2022), and several new analogue photographs and prints “Splish, Splash, Splosh” (2023). The works themselves rely on the notion of the edit as a formal structure, with aspects of the work meticulously planned, considered and constructed with a focus on arrangement, sequencing and rhythmic sensibility. The films always employ a visual and symbolic language, objects, bodies and environments often merge to suggest something else. Info: Ballon Rouge, Place du Jardin aux Fleurs 2, Brussels, Belgium, Duration: 14/12/2023-17/2/2024, Days && Hours: Thu-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, www.ballonrougecollective.com/

To mark what would have been the 250th birthday of Caspar David Friedrich, the Hamburger Kunsthalle is presenting the anniversary exhibition “Caspar David Friedrich. Art for a New Age”. At the centre of the most comprehensive show in many years devoted to the foremost artist of German Romanticism is a thematic retrospective comprising over 60 paintings, among them a number of iconic key works, as well as around 100 drawings and selected works by Friedrich’s artist friends. The main theme is the new relationship between human and nature evoked in Friedrich’s landscapes. In the first third of the nineteenth century, the artist broke new ground as he transformed the landscape genre into »art for a new age«. The enduring fascination of Friedrich’s oeuvre will be illustrated in a separate section of the exhibition that looks at his influence on contemporary art. Works by some 20 artists from Germany and abroad spanning various genres and media reveal diverse approaches to Friedrich’s central theme – how people deal with their environment. Notable here is just how topical the Romantic artist’s point of view is today in the age of climate change. Info: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Glockengießerwall 5, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 15/12/2023-1/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/

Alternative Centers offers a unique creative dialogue between two contemporary visions of art represented by the works of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Pascale Marthine Tayou. As the title refers to an idea of collective identity, the exhibition creates a social dimension of encounter and discovery, bringing together the two artists’ centres of interest. The creation of art that is open to dialogue and exchange is undoubtedly the strongest link uniting these two artists. For this exhibition, Michelangelo Pistoletto is presenting the series “Black and Light” and “Color and Light”. Begun in 2007 and 2014 respectively, they explore the relationship between color and light. Pascale Marthine Tayou is presenting a selection of sculptural works such as the “Totems Cristal” and the “Poupées Pascale:, dotting the gallery space with the installation “Pascale’s eggs”. Faithful to his use of disparate materials of diverse origins, the artist’s works embody the process of creolisation theorised by Édouard Glissant, a “mixture of arts and languages that produces the unexpected […], a space where dispersion allows for connections, where cultural clashes, disharmonies, and disorders and interferences become creative forces”. Info: Patricia Low Contemporary, Promenade 55, Gstaad, Switzerland, Duration: 26/12/2023-11/2/2024, Days & Hours: The-Thu 13:00-18:30, Fri-Sun 10:00-19:30, Sun 15:00-18:30, https://patricialow.com/