ART NEWS: Feb.02

The expression “hidden agenda” has a questionable connotation. That makes sense as the framework of a society is often based on ideals of truth and honesty. The trouble is that not all of our ambitions are helpful when publicly revealed. Our psyches, just as society—and in it, galleries and artists—need private space. Basic fears and desires are kept behind allegorical closed doors. The works of Stano Filko and Franz West both produced psychological landscapes. They formulated subjective realities with universal qualities. The lump in all its manifestations played an important role in West’s formal vocabulary. Like its figurative sibling “the golem”, a basic sculptural form, it preempts all forms to come. There is something comical in that, to the same amount as it contains endless truths. The banality of chairs pointing in different directions can mean everything, nothing, or just the tautology that it is open for discussion. Info: Layr Gallery, Singerstraße 27, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 1/2-23/3/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.emanuellayr.com/

Angela Su’s title of her solo exhibition., “Melencolia”, is a tribute to Albrecht Dürer’s masterwork copper engraving “Melencolia I” (1514), a divining rod for understanding Su’s varied practice. In medieval philosophy, melancholy is associated with insanity, and late in the Renaissance, it was also linked to creative genius. The exhibition features work executed between 2015 and 2023, a period of immense changes for Hong Kong, Su’s home city. Key events during this period precipitated a layering in of collective and public topics with the artist’s long-time investment in the body. The works assembled—docufiction videos, installations, sculptural polyhedra, drawings, and hair embroideries—primarily employ an accumulation of referenced and appropriated imagery from two archives: historical documentary, experimental, and narrative film; and philosophical and medical drawings and prints. Accessing the liberating power of metamorphosis, hybridity, and transformation, her worlds—from micro (human cells) to macro (outer space)—turn the follies of the past and the incomplete imaginaries of the present into a magical space for self-reflection. Su’s omnivorous practice consumes and then instrumentalizes Western modern art, theory, and cultural history as a form of distancing. The fragility of the body politic is tangled up with psychedelic, magic, and morbid unhinged beliefs about out-of-body experiences, hysteria, and various other debunked foibles. They require an active counter-engagement consisting of utopic vision, liberation, levitation, and intensified resistance to the normalization of the grotesque. Info: Curator: Betti-Sue Hertz, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, 615 West 129th St, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 2/2-10/3/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-18:00, https://wallach.columbia.edu/

İhsan Oturmak’s first solo exhibition in five years, “Two-Headed” presents new expansions in the subjects that form the basis of the artist’s production. Oturmak’s unique dark humour, the most defining aspect of his language, can equally and as strongly be observed in his painting series, installation and video works. The series “Two-Headed”, which gives its name to the exhibition, presents a new phase in Oturmak’s inquiries into vehicles, especially state vehicles for private service. These vehicles, as representatives of political power, depict an indecisive and helpless existence especially in situations that require immediate action. The vehicles that are supposed to lead a rescue mission in the event of a disaster, are too far removed from their core purpose to determine which direction to move towards. The installation “Autonomous Taxi”, which is the centerpiece of the series, engraves onto our minds this stressful and inefficient existence in an unforgettable hyperbole. Info: Öktem Aykut, Asmalı Mescit, Meşrutiyet Cd. No:99, Beyoğlu/İstanbul, Turkey, Duration: 16/2-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-19:00, https://oktemaykut.com/

The exhibition “Meta/Physical Therapy” premieres a new site-specific installation by Shana Moulton, whose work captures the banality and enormity of everyday life. Through performance, video, and sculpture, Moulton chronicles the experiences of her semi-autobiographical alter-ego, Cynthia, as she navigates personal choices and physical limitations. Transforming the Kravis Studio into a prismatic environment, this installation employs the artist’s signature blend of spiritual imagery, medical technology, popular culture, and references to high art and dollar-store kitsch. An extension of Moulton’s Whispering Pines series, which began in 2002, the project continues the artist’s incisive examination of the aesthetics of pain and healing and the mass marketing of wellness, and explores the maladies of middle age. Presented as a multi-chapter narrative, the installation will be accompanied by a series of performances created in collaboration with composer Nick Hallett, bringing Cynthia’s inner world to life. Info: MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 17/2-21/4/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:30-17:30, Sat 10:30-19:00, www.moma.org/

The group exhibition “WRONGED” examines the failures of the American judicial system and the legacy of racial oppression in today’s prison and penal practices. Articulated around a range of mediums such as sculpted and worked leather, hand-sewn quilts, and analog photography, the figurative works in the exhibition bear witness to the individual and collective history of unjust incarceration in the Southern United States. Through their material and content, they emphasize the bodily presence of their subjects, akin to retroactive writs of habeas corpus in the tribunal of our cultural memory. Habeas corpus (literally “that you have a body”) is a constitutional right and legal recourse against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. It demands that a person imprisoned be brought before a court to be fairly judged or else released. It indeed seems easy to forget or ignore what can no longer be seen. Among the artists, at the age of 51, Winfred Rembert began chronicling his harrowing experiences of oppression, persecution, and political struggle in the Jim Crow South. Participating Artists:  Isabelle Armand, Winfred Rembert, and Yvonne Wells. Info: Curator: Olivier Renaud-Clément, Galerie Marguo, 4 rue des Minimes, Paris, France, Duration: 22/2-30/3/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.marguo.com/

“How to Disappear” marks the conclusion of Ana Mazzei’s ongoing project “Love Scene Crime Scene,” a three-part exhibition series centered around the fictional disappearance of a ballerina. In this latest installment presented by Green Art Gallery in Dubai, the Brazilian artist deepens the enigma by introducing a collection of bronze sculptures and oil paintings that leave the spectator wanting to play the role of investigator. Her sculptures, featuring half human, half animal creatures placed on raw concrete plinths, take center stage against an entire wall displaying approximately 50 paintings. While it may be tempting to label these creations as evidence, there is nothing evident or obvious about them. Known for the theatricality of her sculptures, installations, and paintings, Mazzei often brings the force of fiction into her practice. The artist explains that the narrative underpinning her series of exhibitions, including “How to Disappear”, is a direct reference to the detective stories of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza and Agatha Christie, as well as contemporary crime series. However, it quickly becomes clear that more than prompting her audience to solve a mystery, Mazzei is asking us to hold on to it. Info: Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, United Arab Emirates, Duration: 27/2-20/4/2024, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com/

The traveling exhibition “A Mind-Body Deal” gathers the multifaceted work of Milford Graves to explore the practices and predilections of an extraordinary jazz innovator, tireless polymath, and legendary Bennington College professor. A revelatory force in music starting in the mid-1960s, Graves liberated the role of the drummer—moving drums from the background to contribute equally with other instruments—and gave rise to the Free Jazz movement. Yet his life’s work encompassed medicine, botany, activism, and martial arts, elements that intertwined to inform his music and expansive consideration of healing and the mind-body relationship. An autodidact, lifelong experimenter, and consummate improviser, Graves saw rhythm in all the layers of existence, from subatomic particles to heartbeats to the movement of planets. He is credited as one of the discoverers of the “variable heart rate,” a breakthrough that fed his drumming and led to advancements in cardiology; his accolades ranged from a Doris Duke Impact Award to a Guggenheim Fellowship to a patent for a device that prepares non-embryonic stem cells. Info: Bennington College, 1 College Drive, Bennington, Vermont, United States, Duration: 27/2-27/4/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 13:00-17:00,  www.bennington.edu/

Hương Ngô’s exhibition “Ungrafting” examineshow our natural world can serve as an archive of colonial history. Time is crucial to Hương Ngô, who investigates the resonances of colonial histories in the present day. She explores various aspects of Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism through archival research and activates the historical record via imagery, language, and material matter. “The fate of our planet and biodiversity is on everyone’s minds, but how can we understand our future without examining the beliefs and actions that have transformed our world?” said Hương Ngô. Ngô’s first solo exhibition in Colorado displays early 20th-century photographs of foreign trees and tree grafts planted in Indochina by the French. The artist uses grafting as a metaphor for colonialism’s physical violence. Ngô reproduces the archival photographs using the Van Dyke method, altering the fixing process to make the images gradually deteriorate and darken. Ngô’s work includes photographs of altered plant reproductions and hanging fabric works with visible sutures treated with iron, copper, and soil from Colorado, and other materials found in the US Southwest, creating a connection between two distinct geographies. The tears in the works are a reminder of the violence of land control, but the mends represent resistance and repair. Info: Curator: Katja Rivera, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado College, 30 West Dale St., Colorado Springs, CO, USA, Duration: 1/3-27/7/2024, www.coloradocollege.edu/

For the past fifteen years, Lauren Lee McCarthy has worked in performance, video, installation, software, artificial intelligence, and other media to address how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and social life. “Bodily Autonomy” is McCarthy’s largest solo exhibition in the United States to date. The show brings together two major works, “Surrogate” and “Saliva”, to examine bio-surveillance. “Surrogate” takes the form of performances, videos, and installations wherein McCarthy offers her body up as a remote-controlled surrogate to individuals and couples interested in having a child. This proposition is never fully realized by the artist, but it prompts important conversations regarding familial norms, legal barriers, genetic manipulation, gender, and reproduction. “Saliva “is a series of performances, installations, and videos about DNA sampling and data harvesting through the routine collection of swabs and spit. In a newly commissioned installation at the Mandeville Art Gallery, as a counter-gesture McCarthy has devised a saliva exchange station where visitors can trade their own samples with one another through the assistance of an attendant. The process sidesteps the anonymity of medical and corporate entities, and invites active discussions on data privacy, race, gender, and class as they pertain to genetic material. Info: Mandeville Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA, USA, Duration: 2/3-25/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, https://mandevilleartgallery.ucsd.edu/