ART NEWS:Feb.01
In this solo exhibition, Belgian photographer Geert Goiris explores the subconscious, instinctive defence mechanisms at work in the human brain. The exhibition “Fight or Flight” is an allusion to a term widely used in psychology and neuroscience to describe the defence and flight responses triggered by the sympathetic nervous system. For Geert Goiris,
this mechanism is a metaphor for reactions to the complexity of the modern world and the dilemma it creates: should we take on board constructive realism or take refuge while we wait for the radical rupture (as prophesied in apocalyptic narratives) to occur? Info: FRAC Haute-Normandie, 3 Place des Martyrs de la Résistance, Sotteville lès Rouen, Duration: 23/1-10/4/16, www.frachautenormandie.org
The exhibition “Staging Film: the relation of image and space in video art” builds on Busan’s international reputation as a city of film, and its legacy as the host of one of the most important global film festivals. It seeks to explore the link between films seen in traditional cinema settings, and those that are experienced as an installation within a museum setting. If Cubism allowed for the painted image to exist along a multiplicity of vantage points, and if Pollock’s drip paintings, with his body moving across the canvas, introduced temporality into the act of painting, similarly, video art has stripped the fixedness of still images and traditional film, collapsing their one point perspective and linear narrative. Info: Busan Museum of Art, 58 APEC-ro, Haeundae-gu, Busan, Duration: 29/1-17/4/16, Days & Hours: Daily 10:00-20:00, http://art.busan.go.kr
Fancesco Vezzoli, one of the most internationally renowned Italian artists, is curating an exhibition on the Museion collection as guest curator, and presenting, as an artist, the first retrospective of his sculptural work. Entitled “Museo Museion”, the double exhibition is set to take over the whole of the Bolzano venue. Short-circuiting the history of art, he reinterprets part of the Museion collection by making it interface with masterpieces from Western art history kept in major European and American museums. In the role of curator, the artist is presenting the first themed exhibition of the Museion collection, linking it up to historical masterpieces. By relating the collection to the past, Vezzoli forges new, multiple levels of interpretation of the works and reflects on the explicit and hidden connections in art and the interpretative frameworks ingrained in its system. Info: MUSEION of modern and contemporary art Bolzano, Piazza Piero Siena 1, Bolzano, Duration: 30/1-16/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-22:00, www.museion.it
The realm of the imaginary, which has always been regarded as the primal domain of art, has expanded progressively under the influence of new technologies in the early years of the 21st Century. Through a process of mutual interaction, the imaginary permeates and shapes reality and vice versa. The imaginary potential of the visual image has become increasingly significant. The artists featured in this exhibition respond to the permanent transformation and free circulation of images with a gesture of focused attention. Existing images are reformatted without concern for their materiality. Info: Fridericianum, Friedrichsplatz 18, Kassel, Duration: 31/1-1/5/16, Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.fridericianum.org
Canvases finely layered by traces of molecular paint pigment, flashing sequential imagery of an overturned milk truck, the unctuous fluid spreading across an indistinct American highway, a hanging metallic shard, an imposing vestige of Everett’s performative sculpture. These are but elements of the recent works by Jeremy Everett, which explore as part of his solo exhibition “Floy”. Reflecting Everett’s ongoing investigation with painting and its making, these works were created by igniting a pump through which a dispersion of gas permits smoke pigment to adhere to the canvas. Capturing the fabrics’ folds and delineating the works’ hidden supporting frameworks, the paintings convey a titillating sense of sensitivity and vulnerability, whilst conveying a notion of tonal abstraction. Info: Edouard Malingue Gallery, Sixth floor, 33 Des Voeux, Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 4/2-12/3/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-19:00, http://edouardmalingue.com
For “Indigenous Shadow”, her first major retrospective, Edith Dekyndt has created new works and has brought existing ones together. The appeal of her works lies in their strongly material, physical character. Dekyndt gives shape to complex forms and surfaces that are in a permanent state of transformation and change, through interactions between substances, a location and a support, and through biochemical, organic or inorganic processes. The scenario she has constructed for the context of the post-industrial space at WIELS (a former brewery) consists of works based on copper, yeast, earth, water from the local river Senne, and the bacteria used to brew the Brussels beer, gueuze. In this way, she links the specificity of the site with the characteristics and general qualities of natural elements, and forges connections between the particular and the universal, the concrete and the abstract. Info: Curator: Dirk Snauwaert, Assistant curator: Charlotte Friling, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, Brussels, Duration: 5/2-24/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.wiels.org
The exhibition “Screens” is part of Jason Gringler’s ongoing investigation about what constitutes a screen and how it relates to contemporary culture. A screen has many functions, often simultaneously,a shield, a reflective surface, a painting and a neutral medium of transmission such as a computer or cinema screen. A screen is the connection between observer and the observed. Gringler has camouflaged Solivagant*, replacing the glass facade of the gallery with two large doors fabricated using expanded and mirror-polished steel. The reflective surface sits directly behind the diamond-patterned grate creating an industrial and armored exterior. The treatment of the gallery exterior has an inherent relationship to the neighborhood surrounding Gringler’s workspace. Gringler allows the viewer one small window into the gallery, about the size of a laptop, which he has cut toward the center of the doors. Info: SOLIVAGANT*, 53 Orchard Street, New York, Duration: 5/2-6/3/16, Days & Hours: by appointment, www.solivagantnyc.com
“Everywhen: The Eternal Present in Indigenous Art from Australia” surveys contemporary Indigenous art from Australia, exploring the ways in which time is embedded within Indigenous artistic, social, historical, and philosophical life. For Indigenous people, the past is understood to be part of a cyclical and circular order known as the “everywhen” conceptions of time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds. While the exhibition focuses on the last 40 years of Indigenous art, it also includes historical objects from the rich collections of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to underscore both the continuity of cultural practice and remarkable adaptive innovations. Info: Curator: Stephen Gilchrist. Harvard Art Museums, 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, USA, Duration: 5/2-18/9/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.harvardartmuseums.org
The Jewish Museum’s exhibition series Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video concludes with a five-month presentation of highlighted works, featuring one film from each of the 25 participating countries. Since November 2013, Sights and Sounds has presented 100 new works selected by 25 international curators. Each curator selected new film and video works from his or her regions for one-month screenings in the Museum’s newly refurbished media center. Info: The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Ave, New York, Duration: 5/2-30/6/16, Days & Hours: Fri 11:00-16:00, Sat-Tue 11:00-17:45, Thu 11:00-20:00, http://thejewishmuseum.org
A pioneer of temporal, vernacular materials, audacious colors, and unapologetic sensory pleasure, Lynda Benglis has brushed wax, poured latex and phosphorescent foam, layered video, air sprayed metals, stretched paper, and cut-up ceramic. Diving straight into the humorous rebuke of her minimalist contemporaries and their heyday exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum in 1966, Lynda Benglis’s opening installation in Bergen, “Primary Structures (Paula’s Props)”, 1975, inaugurates the yearlong inquiry into her practice by PRAXES. An odd collection of campy ready-made objects, this work is a stand-alone gesture in an artistic oeuvre that has continuously valued drastic departures, foreign materials, and collaborative experiments. Info: Tårnsalen, KODE 4, Art Museum of Bergen, Rasmus Meyers allé 7, Bergen, Duration: 6-28/2/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 11:00-1:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, http://bergenassembly.no
The work Dionisis Kavalieratos reveals a personal universe of a Post-Pop mix of mythology, history, politics and religion, facing fundamental issues of good and evil, life and death, sex, heroism and immortality through a surreal and ironic look. Kavallieratos reconciles all these elements, building a personal poetic cosmology with narratives that reflect the human species at heights and depths of greatness, with iconoclastic humor. Equipped with detailed knowledge of comics, animation films, and other underground obsessions, his surrealistic and excellently crafted sculptures are full of sarcastic humor and ironic comments on mass culture, male stereotypes and violence. His new exhibition “This witch all want none shall ever have” at: Bernier/Eliades Gallery, 11 Eptachalkou Str., Thisio, Athens, Duration: 11/2-31/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:30-18:30, Sat 12:00-16:00, www.bernier-eliades.gr
“Jo Spence: The Final Project”, is an exhibition of the work of British photographer Jo Spence produced in the last two years of her life before her death from leukaemia. Spence began “The Final Projec”t upon her diagnosis in 1991. It occupied her until her last days. Over the previous decade or so, she had become a key figure in the radical visual practices that had emerged in the UK. Beyond her direct working class experience and a long bout of cancer, she was galvanised by feminism, collective politics, and the work of the artist John Heartfield. Info: CuratorDavid Campany, Richard Saltoun Gallery, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London, Duration: 11/2-25/3/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.richardsaltoun.com
Anawana Haloba works with performance-based sound and video installations that are often the result of longer periods of research. In the process, she also produces textual material and poetic writing. Anawana Haloba revisited Zambia, the country where she was born, to do research for the exhibition. She has investigated the economic, ideological, social and cultural frameworks that helped shape the Zambian society of her childhood in the 1980s. With Zambia as a starting point, the exhibition “Every day is for the thief and one day is for the owner” reflects on post-colonial developments in southern parts of Africa in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. Info: SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Skippergata 24B, Kristiansand, Duration: 11/2-24/4/16, Days & Hours: tue-Wed & Sat 11:00-16:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sun 12:00-16:00, http://skmu.no