CULTURETV Museum blog

Gilbert&George until 11.01.2009, Brooklyn Museum

2008-10-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

The Brooklyn Museum is the final venue of an international tour of the first retrospective in more than twenty years of work by the internationally acclaimed artists Gilbert & George. The exhibition comprises more than eighty pictures created since 1970, among them more than a dozen that are only in the Brooklyn presentation. The exhibition traces their stylistic and emotional evolution through their pictures and art in other media, ranging from charcoal on paper sculpture from the early 1970s to postcard pieces to ephemera dating back to the 1960s. Gilbert and George met in 1967 while students at St. Martin’s Art School in London. They began to create art together, developing a uniquely recognizable style both in their pictures and in their presentations of themselves as living sculptures. Over more than forty years, they developed a new format that created large-scale pictures, which are visually and emotionally powerful, through a unique creative process. Most of their pictures are created in groups and made especially for the space in which they are first exhibited.

The artists’ art, which is sometimes seen as subversive, controversial, and provocative, considers the entire cosmology of human experience and explores such themes as faith and religion, sexuality, race and identity, urban life, terrorism, superstition, AIDS-related loss, aging, and death. Included in the exhibition are selections from the Ginkgo Pictures, which was part of the exhibition that represented the United Kingdom at the 2005 Venice Biennale; examples from the 1974 Cherry Blossom Pictures: Finding God, 1982, a huge, complex composition featuring images of the artists, several young men, and a cross; and more recent works, among them two pictures from the Six Bomb Pictures, created for the inaugural presentation of the exhibition at Tate Modern. The Six Bomb Pictures was intended by the artists to be seen as modern townscapes reflecting the daily exposure in urban life to bomb threats and terror raids.

“Roppongi Crossing” until 14.01.08 Tokyo

2007-12-24T16:58:00.000-08:00

“Roppongi Crossing” is a series of exhibitions produced by the Mori Art Museum to introduce Japanese creative talent working in a wide range of genres. The first in the series was held in 2004 – and is to this day used as a reference point for contemporary Japanese visual culture. For “Roppongi Crossing 2007” four curators focused on the idea of 'intersection,' selecting 36 artists whose work has an energy and sphere of influence that spreads beyond the confines of conventional artistic categories.

Their art takes a variety of forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, design, video, manga, games, and even unlikely genres such as dollmaking and bathhouse mural painting. In addition to artists who are emerging on the scene right now, the list also includes others who drove the scene in its formative period in the 1960s and 1970s, and whose feverish output continues unabated today. Surprising juxtapositions provide an opportunity to discover unexpected similarities and also to trace some of the unseen webs of influence and homage that connect the artists of the last three decades.
Delicate handwork, carefully thought-out concepts and a tendency for interactive mechanisms are just some of the other characteristics that unite the works in the exhibition, many of which are new works produced especially for the show.
Surveying this interlocking web of art, linking genres and generations in the present, a faint but common beat can be detected – a beat like a pulse that reverberates throughout the Japanese contemporary art scene and provides a clue as to where it is headed in the future.

Curatorial Team

Amano Kazuo (Art Critic; Professor, Kyoto University of Art and Design),
Araki Natsumi (Curator, Mori Art Museum), Sato Naoki (Art Director, ASYL),
Sawaragi Noi (Art Critic)

Sots Art, Political Art in Russia from 1972 to today, La Maison Rouge, Paris

2007-11-25T10:56:00.000-08:00

Until January 20th, la maison rouge presents Sots Art: Political Art in Russia. The exhibition will retrace the development of a movement which, from the early 1970s and in the wake of Socialist Realism, would stand out as the first original art movement in Russia since the 1920s avant-garde. Sots Art will be chronologically staged in all the foundation's rooms, from the origins of the movement to its influence on contemporary works. The term was coined in 1972 by two Moscow artists, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, as a take on Pop Art, "Sots" being a contraction of Socialism and Art.

Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms until 13.01.08 Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

2007-11-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

Forty years after the first major European Warhol exhibition in Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum has organised an exhibition to shed new light on the oeuvre of the celebrated Pop Art master. With film, photography, video and famous icons ranging from Marilyn Monroe, Mao and Campbell Soup Cans, Andy Warhol – Other Voices, Other Rooms is a window onto the artistic thinking of this trendsetting artist, revealing the ‘conceptual soul’ of his work.

"Yuo_ser:The Consumer Century¨" until 31.12.07 ZKM, Karlsruhe (D)

2007-10-21T12:30:00.000-07:00

On the occasion of its anniversary celebration “10 Years of ZKM in Hallenbau A,” ZKM | Center for Art and Media turns its attention to the effects of net-based, global creation on art and society with the exhibition “You_ser: The Consumer Century.”
Over the past years, the ZKM | Media Museum has already presented in the context of its collection of interactive art, the largest in the world, the most important pathfinders and currents in participatory art of the twentieth century: Op-Art, kinetic and cybernetic art, Arte Programmata, Conceptual art, Fluxus, and Happenings, interactive computer-aided installations, and virtual environments. Instructions for use and changeable objects activate beholders. In this way, you, the visitor, take part in the construction of the artwork. In the Internet, portals such as www.flickr.com, www.youtube.com, www.myspace.com; and virtual worlds, such as www.secondlife.com or blogs now offer a newly structured space for the creative statements of millions of people. The artist no longer has a monopoly on creativity.
Users deliver or generate the content or put it together. They become producers and program designers and thereby, competitors to television, radio, and newspapers, the historical media monopoly. Audience participation reshapes itself as consumers’ emancipation.
These transformations concern not only the global expanses of the Internet, but also the museum. It reacts to the changed cultural and social behavior and supports those tendencies, which, in an Enlightenment spirit, are applied for democracy and the idea of access to education for all.
The new installations presented in the exhibition transfer the potential for co-designing by the user that has been developed on the Internet into the context of art and allow the visitors to emancipate themselves.
They can act as artists, curators, and producers. The exhibition visitors, as users, as emancipated consumers, are at the center of focus. YOU are the content of the exhibition! The museum is bound to a fixed location and set times. Through the Internet, it can develop into a communicative platform independent of place and time. The historical model of culture, in which Darwinist selection takes place and only a few select find acceptance in its storage and distribution apparatus, embodied by the principle of Noah’s Ark, has been displaced.
The new Noah’s Ark of the Internet has an endless storage space, which, in principle, is open to all inhabitants of the industrial and newly industrializing countries.
Is this the new cultural space for the emancipated consumer, the visitor as user who will decide the culture of the twenty-first century, just as slaves, workers, and citizens as historical subjects have done in the past?

Von Bill Viola bis Aernout Mik until 24.02.08 Hambuger Bahnhof, Berlin

2007-10-09T18:31:00.000-07:00

This autumn, in addition to its permanent exhibitions of 19th century works from the collection at the Alte Nationalgalerie and of 20th century works at the Neue Nationalgalerie, the National Gallery is presenting a selection of newly acquired works in the fields of contemporary video art and painting at the Hamburger Bahnhof. The recently acquired filmic work "Refraction" by Dutch artist Aernout Mik is at the heart of the exhibition. Flanking it are films by the group "Die Tödliche Doris" and American artist Jack Goldstein. In addition, we are showing paintings by artists including Eve Aschheim, Dexter Dalwood, Eberhard Havekost, Sergej Jensen, Johannes Kahrs, Raoul de Keyser and Chris Newman.

China Now until 27.01.2008 Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (NL)

2007-09-30T15:30:00.000-07:00

With its impressive "China Now" exhibition the Cobra Museum is the first to launch a series of exhibitions devoted to Chinese avant-garde art. Other museums in our northern provinces will shortly follow suit. In China a true explosion of contemporary forms of artistic expression have been taking place since the nineteen nineties. In "China Now" the most remarkable and significant developments in Chinese contemporary art are revealed. The round 100 works by 42 artists in the show are part of the famous collection of contemporary art from the Essl Museum (near Vienna).

Land of Crystal Mai-Thu Perret 11.09.07-06.01.08 Bonnefanten museum, Maastricht (NL)

2007-09-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

This decontextualizing of historical fragments is a recurring interest of mine. I like the idea that you can make a thing mean something new, without completely erasing its original signification, so that you get an effect which is layered, almost ghostly. Mai-Thu Perret As one of the young generation of artists weaving new stories around the visions and shapes of twentieth-century avant-garde movements, Swiss-born Mai-Thu Perret (1976, Geneva) is an exceptional talent. While melancholy and satire are rarely absent from it, Perret’s work in particular also conveys a kind of down-to-earth optimism. Her texts are a mixture of historical fact and fiction. In her sculptures and objects, she parodies the history of lofty ideals employing a matter-of-fact ‘I can do that too’ aesthetic. Conceptual thinking and the strategy of claiming existing images go hand in hand with craftsmanship and a belief in the magic effect of sculpture. Fictitious story Mai-Thu Perret has been writing a fictitious story entitled The Crystal Frontier since 1999. Employing part imagined and part annotated diary fragments, letters and texts from handbills, she sketches a kaleidoscopic image of a group of women who have retreated, disillusioned, from the city and from Western, i.e. capitalist, society. They pick up their lives again in the desert of New Mexico but on a different footing with work, nature and themselves. Perret describes the objects and sculptures she makes in addition to writing her story as ‘hypothetical products’ of this women’s commune. The objects are without exception elegant and sometimes haunting improvisations on mostly classic modernist themes in which the boundaries between practical, decorative and autonomous objects are systematically crossed. Perret based ‘The Family’, a group of papier-mâché figures representing a woman with children (2007), on a picture from a 1935 Hollywood musical (A Midsummer’s Night Dream).

Her ceramic wall reliefs are reminiscent of the fifties and Lucio Fontana, while her handmade flags and motives made of neon lights are copied from Georgian latticework or from a painting by Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862-1944). Land of Crystal The exhibition Land of Crystal is built up following the ground plan of the museum. An outdoor minimalist spiral covered with cotton fabric printed with Perret’s own designs is on display in the great hall. In the four smaller ‘domestic’ rooms, she arranges the group of figures, flags, neon lights, wall reliefs and texts in a traditional museum fashion according to type and materials. Perret explores how her objects and the Crystal Frontier story, which usually serves as a fictional setting for her work, relate to this ‘old-fashioned museum presentation’.

The Museum's collections New Hangings until 12.05.08 Centre Pompidou, Paris

2007-08-12T15:50:00.000-07:00

After two thematic exhibitions, the Museum will be showing its masterpieces as part of two new chronological presentations, occupying once again all of the 4th and 5th floors. The modern collections – over 1,300 works, more than 500 periodicals, in a denser and more diversified itinerary to highlight the artists and the works of the first half of the 20th century, and to present the museum's latest acquisitions in the field, followed by the contemporary collections: in 2007, the Musée national d'art moderne will be back to its blissful self.

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN AND ROXY PAINE: SELECTIONS FROM THE COLLECTION, MOCA

2007-08-05T15:54:00.000-07:00

Thomas Hirschhorn and Roxy Paine: Selections from the Permanent Collection presents two important installations from MOCA’s permanent collection that investigate destructive forces associated with contemporary life and art. Non-Lieux (2002), created by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, is a complex landscape that addresses the often-conflicting inter-relationships of social, cultural, political, and religious value systems. Produced shortly after the attack on the World Trade Center towers, this tableau, whose title was inspired by Robert Smithson’s non-sites, is constructed primarily from “low” materials, such as paper, wax, and packing tape. Like many of Smithson’s non-sites, Non-Lieux is an abstract three-dimensional metaphor for an absent, blighted site. However, unlike Smithson’s sculptures, which represent specific locations through collections of real materials, Hirschhorn’s ravaged landscape is clearly metaphorical. Boxes of cleaning supplies stand in for buildings; paper flags proclaiming “Democracy” top mountains that are constructed from cardboard and candle wax; and the track of a functioning electric train, upon which “connecting people” is inscribed, links a landscape that is populated by cutout silhouettes of Afghani soldiers surrounded by pictures of glamorous Western women taken from popular cultural sources. Surrounding this juxtaposition of products, images, and references to world events are Xeroxed pages of a utopian essay titled “Empire,” in a seeming critique of the kind of nation-building that results in a surreal and unstable terrain suggestive of political and social deterioration. Similarly, Roxy Paine’s hyper-realistic natural environment, Weed Choked Garden (2005) observes the clash of competing systems, in this case the natural versus the manmade. On an eight-by-eleven-foot table, an exquisitely hand-crafted vegetable garden features 13 different species of weeds that encroach upon a crop of late-season vegetables. Evoking a multiplicity of universal themes, including the cycle of life and death, the destructive forces of both man and nature, as well as the struggle between the natural and the artificial, this work questions the fragility of life within the context of a seemingly inevitable decay and collapse. Over five years in the making, the intense realism of Weed Choked Garden, combined with its scale and complexity, represents a tour de force in trompe l’oeil sculptural installations.

EVOLUTION--2007 GUANGZHOU PHOTO BIENNIAL until 08.07

2007-07-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

Guangzhou Photo Biennial, was initiated in 2005, with its basic principles of maintaining both international and humanized perspectives of image sociology, to participate and promote development of contemporary Chinese photography and culture. The overall theme of the first biennial was “Re (-) viewing the city”, focusing on the problems of urban development in the process of modernization and man’s double statuses in such a context both as a “viewer” and a “viewee”. Photography verbalizes the issues in an expressively unique and direct language, and, as a result, the First Guangzhou Photo Biennial gained the massive attention and favorable comments. Now the publicly expected second biennial, the 2007 Guangzhou Photo Biennial has finally arrived. The main theme of this biennial is entitled “Evolution”, shifting its focus from the topic of space to time in an effort to highlight and characterize the highly effective dynamic visual text communications within the self-defined framework of Chinese contemporary photography history. A tentative study on the issues of generation, division, transformation and evolution of the contemporary diversified photography, and the interactive and responsive patterns generated between Chinese photographers, artists and the attractions of alien cultures against the coming internationalized background has become the major academic goal advanced for the biennial.

Poor Thing 10.-02.09 Kunsthalle Basel

2007-06-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

The exhibition POOR THING brings together works by eight international artists in the historic architectural setting of the Kunsthalle Basel. After an extensive renovation, completed in 2004, the original architectural character of the five spacious halls in which the exhibition is being held has been modified, yet is still clearly visible in the details of friezes and pilasters, as well as in the skylight structures. With their impressive appearance, white walls and top light, the halls are consistent with the model of a contemporary art space that emerged over the course of the 19th century and has been challenged by many artists in the 20th century. Each of the artists featured in POOR THING has reacted individually to this location: some have examined the existing architectural features or the historical context of the Kunsthalle, while others have transformed the space with large-scale interventions, objects or fragile, process-based sculptures that produce altered spatial perceptions. The artists’ works reference the minimal and conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s, but in the indirect manner of a reformulation: they borrow motifs and appropriation strategies from minimal and conceptual art in order to find ways of articulating their response to the changed conditions of today’s society. The artists in this exhibition work with preference with simple, untreated and unstable materials, similar to those used, for example, by Robert Morris (felt) or Eva Hesse (string, rubber and latex) since the mid-1960s in their rejection of the permanent materials and industrial coolness of minimal art. For the artists featured in POOR THING, these commonplace, crude materials enable them to address personal themes and present their own observations on everyday life. They examine the sculptural qualities of the materials in a playful manner or work with everyday objects, which they remove from their familiar context by means of unusual presentations. Varying between abstraction and the representation of inanimate objects and anthropomorphic forms, as well as found objects, the works set up associative narratives and create new layers of meaning. In this way they are in a productive sense both ‘pure’ and ‘poor’. The approach of Norwegian artist Knut Henrik Henriksen (*1970) is that of an improvising architect who underscores or alters existing spatial situations by means of sculptural interventions. At the Kunsthalle, Henriksen has made a construction of simple wooden slats that changes the shape of the large square room by covering its entire area at a height of 2.4 m – the standard ceiling height in Norway. Henriksen has mounted the uncut slats in their varying standard lengths together so that they form a narrow, jagged opening in the centre, through which the skylight of the existing room remains visible. For her object, Swiss artist Karin Hueber (*1977) has carefully studied the ground plans of the Kunsthalle. These reappear on a smaller scale and in a tilted form in her sculptural object. Precariously positioned, the iron bars outline immaterial volumes in the space; the object is stabilised by a wall made of found wooden panels that have been varnished with glossy paint. Shaped like an impossible spatial solution, the elegant sculpture is attractive and at the same time awkward, prompting the viewer to think about the function and perception of familiar spatial structures. Scottish artist Karla Black (*1972) works with raw materials such as powdered plaster and petroleum jelly, which she combines with materials that have clear female connotations, for example face powder, lipstick or skin cream. These materials not only reveal their cultural use and psychological significance, in Black’s fragile, process-oriented works they also confront a history of sculpture and painting dominated by the ‘great’ male artist and his epic battles with the material. At the Kunsthalle she is showing two new pieces: a floor piece made of plaster in powdered form and a fragile, suspended work made of transparent, gossamer-like cellophane. Basel artist Kilian Rüthemann (*1979) explores the sculptural quality of everyday raw materials. Here he presents an approximately 4 m-long iron bar that seems to extend weightlessly into the space, along with a work made of asphaltic felt that folds like waves over the floor. Both works reveal Rüthemann’s interest in overcoming gravity and the relation between coincidence and artistic intervention. German artist Dagmar Heppner (*1977), who lives in Basel, has created a spatial arrangement involving various media for the first elongated gallery space in the Kunsthalle. Besides drawings and photographs, it contains a curved wall made of perforated wooden panels that extends from an existing wall. The wall distorts the usual perspective of the space and plays with varying degrees of visibility between closeness and distance, front and back view, spatial opening and restriction. English artist Ian Kiaer (*1971) works with fragile materials such as cardboard, paper, cellophane and polystyrene. His multi-part installations of objects, drawings and watercolours are connected with complex narratives relating to the history of utopian architecture, literature and philosophy. Kiaer’s work for this exhibition focuses among other things on the initial period of the Kunsthalle building and on the changing agendas concerning the presentation of art since modernism. Basel artist Martin Heldstab (*1971) deals with everyday objects such as wooden pallets or light bulbs, which he reworks by means of subtle shifts from their original functions. Here he presents among other works an installation of roof battens into which light bulbs have been inserted in a particular sequence. On the wall they create a rhythmic variation and at the same time evoke an abstract landscape. American artist Robert Breer (*1926) is represented in the exhibition by his group of works entitled Floats. Since the 1950s, he has used the media of painting, animated film and sculpture to explore the experience of abstract forms in real time and space. The Floats – often abstract objects made of simple polystyrene – move subversively and freely around the space with the aid of unseen motors, disturbing the formerly secure territory of the exhibition space. Despite the modest gestures with which the artists modify the space, they confidently inscribe themselves in the spatial context of the Kunsthalle and activate the viewer’s imagination by confronting him or her with new and surprising situations.

The Erro Collection until 19.08 Reykjavik Art Museum

2007-05-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

In this exhibition the focus is on art, music and literature in Erró´s paintings.

FABIEN VERSCHAERE After Remix until 19.08 Baltic (UK)

2007-05-17T18:21:00.000-07:00

Verschaere’s first UK exhibition creates a world that exists somewhere between fairytales, dreams and nightmares. He uses wall painting, watercolours, drawing, video animation and sound to create a theatre of characters that can be humorous, menacing and sometimes disturbing.

PAIN until 05.08 The Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

2007-05-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

The exhibition PAIN explores the manifold depictions and expressions of pain: in an early modern painting of the Crucifixion, the medical preparation of a gouty hand, a video installation of mourners, the flickering electrical impulses of a nerve cell, a cry. It examines pain’s ability to create community, as well as the attempts to observe, analyze, seek or escape it. It shows that pain can be many things at once: subjective and objective, creative and destructive. The two venues, the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin and the Berliner Medizinhistorische Museum der Charité, are both program and challenge. The museums stand for realms of images and things that could not be more disparate. “Pain” is predestined to thematize these expectations themselves, for neither art no science can claim to have the last word here. The exhibition PAIN draws from all conceivable sources. Combining and confronting artistic works and medical, folk-art, religious and everyday objects, it traces the boundaries between art, medicine and cultural history. The focus is on Western culture. Following a strategy of reduction, the exhibition is not afraid to make leaps in time. It is conceived as a zone of experimentation for new visual and thematic impulses and puts up for negotiation the viewing habits traditionally associated with both museums – a challenge for curators and visitors alike. In 15 chapters, the exhibition sets out in search of pain, of its expression, form and meaning. The chapters of the exhibition, each headed with a Greek or Latin term such as crux, exstasis or pharmakon, fall into four main sections: “Views of Pain” and “The Ecstasy of Pain” are presented in the Hamburger Bahnhof, while “The Time of Pain” and “The Expression of Pain” are shown in the Medizinhistorisches Museum. A Way of Sorrows or Stations of the Cross along Invalidenstraße and the canal to Humboldthafen connect the two museums, which are only 400 meters apart. Visitors are free to choose which museum to begin their tour with. Whether and how pain can be adequately expressed, a question of equal importance for art, science and everyday life, is thematized in “The Expression of Pain”. Focusing on writing and the voice, it presents patient’s correspondence from five centuries and artistic explorations of the human cry that extend all the way to opera. Selected examples plumb the question of the range and restrictedness of expressions of pain in art, everyday life and medicine. The museum’s permanent collection is integrated as well and manipulated through interventions such as an installation by Aernout Mik. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with blocks of illustrations corresponding to the structure of the exhibition. The 22 essays go into greater depth on aspects of pain that can only be touched on in the exhibition context: philosophical, art-historical, medical, theological, literary, political and media-related. Aside from those mentioned, works by the following artists and others will be shown: Birgit Brenner, Albrecht Dürer, A K Dolven, Julio González, Mathilde ter Heijne, Gary Hill, William Kentridge, Bruce Nauman, Aya Ben Ron, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Mladen Stilinovic, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mark Wallinger. An exhibition by the Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin and the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité in cooperation with the Praxis für Ausstellungen und Theorie. Curators: Eugen Blume, Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart - Berlin; Thomas Schnalke, Medizinhistorisches Museum; Annemarie Hürlimann and Daniel Tyradellis, Praxis für Ausstellungen und Theorie

between two deaths & between two deaths: the festival until 19.08 ZKM, Karlsruhe

2007-04-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

From May 12 to August 19, 2007 ZKM | Karlsruhe will present an exhitibion curated by Ellen Blumenstein and Felix Ensslin. It will show a critical artistic reflection on the political, social, and cultural trend toward melancholic retrospection. The effects can be felt everywhere: in the expressions of conservative nostalgia, as well as in the social moods of stagnation, depression and anxiety. Boundless pessismism on the one side, state-ordered or self-help optimism on the other seem to be the general call.

In this situation contemporary art is thus read often as an enigmatic answer to a life that is always already traumatic or -with relief- there is talk of the "return of the romantic" understood as sentimentality and avoidance of politics. The positions gathered in "zwischen zwei toden / between two deaths" counter this interpretation by showing the current "melancholic" state of subjectivity as a figure that can be fragmented, crossed and passed through.

"zwischen zwei toden / between two deaths" shows positions that do not get stuck in the situation of the "exhausted self" (Ehrenberg) or with the "new maladies of the soul" (Kristeva). Each work interrogates the starting point of anxiety and stagnation, thus not denying the diagnosis. But beyond this, the artists reach with and through their work the zone "zwischen zwei toden / between two deaths" from where to critique the present and ask the question: What comes after? If people today find themselves in this zone, then art assembled here shows that in this "land of zombies" there lies an "emancipatory potential" (?i?ek).

Participating artists: Rita Ackermann, Ulf Aminde, Sue de Beer, Walead Beshty, Martin Dammann, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Brock Enright, Barnaby Furnas, Luis Gispert & Jeffrey Reed, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Nicolás Guagnini, Elín Hansdóttir, Jutta Koether, Terence Koh, Erik van Lieshout, Ján Mančuška, Marlene McCarty, John Miller, Chloe Piene, Adam Putnam, Stephen G. Rhodes, Kirstine Roepstorff, Aïda Ruilova, Florian Slotawa, Javier Téllez, Mark Titchner, Ryan Trecartin, Jennifer West, Charlie White

Wind from the East until 27.05 Kiasma, Helsinki

2007-04-27T15:37:00.000-07:00

For Kiasma’s Wind from the East exhibition, we have chosen contemporary artists who weave old and new, East and West, myths and reality and change and permanence into a rich web in which opposites interact. The exhibition does not propose an overview. Instead, it offers a considered and focused selection of impressive works of art by artists who deal with topical and relevant issues. Rapid changes and expanding economies are forcing Asians to adjust to new social and economic realities. But is our own understanding and knowledge of these distant places really any more pro- found than that garnered on holidays or the ephemeral stories of the mass media? The exhibition Wind from the East focuses on three Asian countries where change has been parti- cularly rapid: Indonesia, China and Thailand. Although they have different cultures, political cli- mates and religions, they all have strongly expanding economies and struggle with environmental and social problems, including human rights issues. Huge populations and mass migration to large cities pose challenges to environments and economies alike. New biennials, Contemporary Art museums and art centres emerge everywhere, also in Asian area, and the artists with the best international contacts and networking skills are most likely to succeed or win recognition in the art world. Native cultures and Western influences often clash. The collision between strong, vibrant traditions and rapid change may indeed seem like a threat, though it may just as well be an opportunity. The artists in the exhibition are Heri Dono, Eko Nugroho, Melati Suryodarmo and Entang Wiharso from Indonesia, Chen Zhen, Hu Yang and Yang Zhenzhong from China and Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook from Thailand. Their works use the methods of Contemporary Art to deal with political issues, individuals at the mercy of the market economy, the parallelism of the spiritual and the material in the world, and the encounter between cultures.

The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China until 10.06 Tate Liverpool

2007-03-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China reflects the varied and complex nature of contemporary art in China, and presents a comprehensive overview of some of the most interesting and important art to be made since 2000. Working in close collaboration with the Beijing-based writer and curator Karen Smith, and the Shanghai-based artist, critic and curator Xu Zhen, Simon Groom, Head of Exhibitions at Tate Liverpool, has spent several years researching the artists and works for the exhibition. The exhibition features work by eighteen artists, in a variety media, and includes several large-scale installations, and several new commissions.

Mischa Kuball. ReMix/Broca II (Letters/Numbers) until 13.05 ZKM, Karlsruhe (D)

2007-03-28T08:46:00.000-07:00

The multimedia installation ReMix/Broca II (Letters/Numbers) will open the international exhibition tour of the work of Mischa Kuball (*1959), a light and media artist from Düsseldorf, Germany, at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art. Kuball has worked conceptually with light for more than twenty years, and in a unique way has linked light, which is otherwise largely considered an aesthetic medium, with social and political statements. Within his complex and multifarious work, the pieces that confront human communication form a specific concentration. "I am interested in language as a function of a code—that is, in the sense of coding and de-coding," says Kuball. Presented for the first time is the new, extensive multimedia installation ReMix/Broca II (Letters/Numbers), which is a further development of his earlier work, broca'sche areal. With both of these works, Kuball refers to the eponymous brain region, which forms language capability, and thereby the basic conditions for human communication. Taking six different rotating projectors as a point of departure, in ReMix/Broca II (Letters/Numbers), letters and numbers are cast on the walls of a room. This leads to the chance overlapping of a multitude of connections of meaning from various semantic areas, which generates the need to construct meaning. In addition, sculptural elements in the room reflect the light of the projectors; these sculptural elements are the artist's digitized brain waves transferred to three dimensions. In this way, grasping, expressing, and representing thoughts are all connected on different levels as the preliminary stage of communication. "When language and light come together, the basic elements of knowledge are present" (Kuball).

ReMix/Broca II (Letters/Numbers) is a collaborative project by the Ruhr-Universität/Neuropsychologie, Bochum, the HfG Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, and ZKM.

Curators Andreas Beitin, Gregor Jansen

Anton Henning until 06.05 S.M.A.K, Gent

2007-03-25T10:45:00.000-07:00

Anton Henning (Berlin, 1964) works in many fields. Although he is best known as a painter, sculpture and installation art are also significant elements in his oeuvre. By always trying to combine every art form in one all-embracing whole, his work seems like a contemporary version of the gesamtkunstwerk, where all the various disciplines come together and enter into dialogue with one another. The exhibition is a mixture of old and new work. In addition, Henning designed a number of pieces specially for the rooms at the S.M.A.K. The largest piece he has ever made, Oktogon – a huge installation that merges painting, sculpture and interior design – will also be displayed.

BREAKING STEP / U RASKORAKU 24.03- 10.06. Museum of Contemporary Art - Belgrade

2007-03-18T16:08:00.000-07:00

Breaking Step / U raskoraku brings together new work by fifteen major figures of the British art scene. The exhibition is the culmination of a four-year collaboration between the British Council and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade. Breaking Step / U raskoraku is neither a survey nor an attempt to construct a historical narrative, but rather a critical consideration of some of the most pronounced tendencies in contemporary British art. In recent years, one such tendency has been an effort to break away from ideas and interests prevalent in the early to mid 90s, with which contemporary British art is still widely identified. In relation to the art system and its institutional structures, artists today seem to occupy an uncertain position, participating in the process of distribution and promotion, yet constantly problematising and renegotiating their own role within it. The artists in the exhibition demonstrate an involvement with a broader range of interests and a personal and dynamic engagement with a wider social reality, as well as with new collaborative and participatory models and alternative artistic interventions. An important aspect of Breaking Step / U raskoraku is the inclusion of a series of new projects commissioned in response to the specific local situation in Belgrade. While they work within traditional representational modes, in a general sense, the artists in Breaking Step / U raskoraku consistently seek to undermine the ideological function of these modes. To this end, they employ a number of strategies – displacement, re–enactment, decontextualisation, repetition or an amalgamation of disparate references and media – inherited from Conceptual Art, but often used in an uncharacteristic manner. It is this close connection with the politics, ethics and aesthetics of Conceptualism that forms one of the strong thematic threads running through the exhibition. Another unifying factor is the selected artists’ use of humour in their work. Whether pointed and unswerving or subtle and understated, it is of a kind far removed from the postmodern irony of the 90s. It is a humour with sympathy, evincing a capacity simultaneously to show affection for something and to think critically about it; a form of playful teasing by those close to, and concerned for, the target of their wit. Most importantly, what connects all the practices in Breaking Step / U raskoraku is their systematic defiance of our expectations, evading attempts at an easy classification. In other words, works selected for this exhibition share the sense of being at odds with whichever framework we might apply to interpret them: they are site–specific while questioning the idea of site–specificity, marketable but not market–driven, compassionate but not sentimental, and intimate yet far from comforting.

THE DISAPPEARED (LOS DESAPARECIDOS) until 17.06. El Museo Del Barrio, NY

2007-02-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

El Museo del Barrio, New York’s premier Latino and Latin American cultural institution, will present The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) from February 23 – June 17, 2007. This traveling exhibition, organized by the North Dakota Museum of Art and curated by Laurel Reuter, brings together visual artists’ responses to the tens of thousands of persons who were kidnapped, tortured, killed and “vanished” in Latin America by repressive right-wing military dictatorships during the late-1950s to the 1980s. The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) gathers 14 contemporary living artists from seven countries in Central and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay and Venezuela), all of whose work contends with the horrors and violence stemming from the totalitarian regimes in each of their nations during the mid- to late-20th century. Some of the artists worked in the resistance; some had parents or siblings who were disappeared; others were forced into exile. The youngest were born into the aftermath of those dictatorships. And still others have lived in countries maimed by endless civil war. These artists whose work is represented in the exhibition are Marcelo Brodsky, Luis Camnitzer, Arturo Duclos, Juan Manuel Echavarría, Antonio Frasconi, Nicolás Guagnini, Nelson Leirner, Sara Maneiro, Cildo Meireles, Oscar Muñoz, Ivan Navarro, Luis González Palma, Ana Tiscornia and Fernando Traverso. Also included is a collaborative installation Identity/Identidad by a collective of 13 Argentinean artists. The range of visual languages -- drawings, prints, photographs, installations and mixed media -- incorporated in The Disappeared (Los Desaparecidos) frequently employs similar forms to evoke the presence of the missing person or persons. Bodies, faces, personal possessions and names, often methodically compiled and arranged, appear both boldly and subtly throughout the work in the exhibition. “Through their intense visual and emotional impact, these works communicate the unspeakable and reveal the artist’s assumed role of social responsibility towards ending the silence surrounding these extreme cases of human rights violations,” says Julián Zugazagoitia, Director of El Museo del Barrio. “In this context of public awareness and education through art, El Museo, as the only venue in the Eastern United States for this internationally traveling exhibition, aims to assemble as broad an audience as possible to confront and preserve the memory of these recent historical tragedies.”

Notorious slum becomes open-air gallery, The Guardian

2007-02-16T04:53:00.000-08:00

Rio favela transformed by artists and residents
Painted shacks compete with gun and drug culture
The cloakroom is a pokey, bullet-riddled bar. The security consists of motorbike-riding teenagers with assault rifles strung across their chests. But if you make it past the police checkpoints and the concrete barricades, the good news is that entry is free. And so far there has not been an art critic in sight.The heavy artillery on show might suggest otherwise but this is Rio de Janeiro's newest, most unusual and certainly most dangerous, modern art gallery. It is located at the heart of the Vila Cruzeiro shantytown.The open air gallery, where crumbling shacks have become giant canvasses, is the brainchild of Jeroen Koolhaas, a Dutch illustrator who works for New Yorker magazine, and Dre Urhahn, an art director from Amsterdam."Normally, outsiders would only come here to buy cocaine," said Mr Urhahn, who admits to having found empty cartridges on the scaffolding used for the painting. "The museum is about giving them another reason to visit the community." Vila Cruzeiro is definitely an odd location for a museum. The favela became notorious in 2002 when a Brazilian journalist was dismembered and incinerated by local traffickers. These days, teenage gangsters surround the art gallery with military-issue grenades strung from their shorts. Gun battles between police and members of the Red Command drug faction are a regular occurrence. Recently, more than 200 military policemen, backed up by three helicopters, launched an assault on the favela, killing at least six "suspects" and wounding several civilians. Roberto Carlos Teixeira, a local social worker, estimates that there are at least 120,000 young people in the Complexo da Penha, a labyrinth of shantytowns that includes Vila Cruzeiro."I'd be surprised if 50 of these kids had ever visited an art gallery," he said.The launch of Vila Cruzeiro's own outdoor gallery has brought about some optimism. Working so far mainly to the designs of the two Dutchmen, the residents have been painting huge murals on the exteriors of their homes. "Everyone in the favela approves of it 101%," said Alex Rigueira, 32, the owner of one concrete shack transformed into a vast sky-blue mural by the Favela Painting Project. He pointed to a series of yellow puddles inside the house where his dogs had urinated. "Look, even the dogs have stopped pissing on the wall outside."Helena Maria Jesus Alves, a 63-year-old evangelical, whose house has also become a giant portrait, said: "Last week we couldn't even leave our house because of the shooting. But I think this will make people value the place much more."Not everyone is so hopeful. "It's really cool," said one 17-year-old drug trafficker hovering on a nearby street corner with a 45mm Glock revolver tucked into the back of his shorts and a missing right hand due to an accident with a home-made grenade. "But I'm never going to be a painter - it's too late for me to leave this life."Mr Urhahn said that with the help of budding artists from the favela the "organic museum" would be extended to other shantytowns in Rio. Artists from around the world would be invited to contribute. "By making huge paintings in the favelas we hope to inspire the kids ... to pursue a career in a creative field," said Mr Koolhaas. "Our final goal is to paint a whole hillside favela depicting one single image.

Gilbert&George Major Exhibition until 7.05. Tate Modern, London

2007-02-13T16:23:00.000-08:00

Gilbert & George place themselves at the centre of their art, and almost all of the images they use are gathered in the half-mile or so surrounding their home in London’s East End. Yet their pictures capture a universal human experience, encompassing an astonishing range of emotions and themes, from rural idylls to gritty images of a decaying London; from fantastical brightly-coloured panoramas to raw examinations of humanity stripped bare; from sex advertisements to religious fundamentalism.

From the beginning, they wanted to communicate beyond the narrow confines of the art world, adopting the slogan 'Art for All'. As a result they have joined the very small handful of artists to become household names, and their impeccably-dressed figures are instantly recognisable to the general public. Bringing together a selection of pictures that spans their entire 40-year career, it is fitting that Gilbert & George: Major Exhibition is the largest retrospective of any artist to be held at Tate Modern.

George was born in Devon in 1942. Gilbert was born in Italy in 1943, in a small village in the Dolomites. They met as students on the sculpture course at St Martins School of Art, London, where they exhibited together and soon began to create art together. They adopted the identity of 'living sculptures' in both their art and their daily lives, becoming not only creators, but also the art itself.

Janet Cardiff - George Bures Miller The Killing Machine and other Stories until 01.05. MACBA, Barcelona

2007-02-04T08:03:00.000-08:00

Since the early nineties Janet Cardiff (Brussels, Ontario, Canada, 1957) and George Bures Miller (Vegreville, Canada, 1960) have been working together on works in which they use sound and voice as raw material and main subject. Through techniques of edition and reproduction of binaural sound and the use of earphones and loudspeaker systems these works can be characterised as authentic sound sculptures. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's installations become temporary units of experience, fictitious narrations, and audio effects that challenge the visitor's sensory experience by dissociating audio and visual sensations. The sculptural space is therefore transformed into a phantasmagorical or hallucinatory one where apparently contradictory cultural traditions coincide at a specific place and time. The spectator is looking at works that are difficult to classify, since they propose a collage that brings together forms of high culture such as opera, art films or literature with popular culture, B-movies, rock'n'roll or radio broadcasts. This MACBA exhibition unites ten installations that weave together independent but complimentary experiences. Each piece imposes its own time and rhythm, and they bring together the live theatrical experience with that of film, bringing us a new genre of narration. This very high reading visuality brings Cardiff and Miller's work close to literature by generating a script which can be read or interpreted according to the eye or ear of each reader-spectator. This produces stories that live side by side in time and transport the visitor to superimposed fictions: of the museum and of the works. Among the Solo Exhibitions of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller in recent years are: the Lousiana Museum and the Art Gallery of Hamilton in 2006; the Hirshhorn Museum (Washington) and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, in 2005; the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in 2004; the Whitechapel Art Gallery de Londres and the Museum of Modern Art of Oslo, in 2003; The National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the L.Augustine Gallery of New York and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin) in 2002; the Canadian Pavillion in the 49 Biennale Venice, the Ps.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal and the Castello di Rivoli (Torino) in 2001. The Forty-Part Motet at the Capella-MACBA Of the ten installations comprising the exhibition, The Forty-Part Motet, 2001 (A reworking of Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis, 1573) , is the most noteworthy as it offers an exceptional experience in audio perception. This piece lets the audience experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers in that every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices and reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well it poses the question how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.

First Generation: Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986 until 02.04 Reina Sofia, Madrid (ES)

2007-01-28T09:53:00.000-08:00

First Generation: Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986 was born with the intention of presenting to the public, in a contextualized manner, the historic core of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía's video collection, which has been built up in recent years with the goal of laying solid foundations upon which the collection could grow. Curated by Berta Sichel, director of the Museum's Audiovisual Department, the exhibition aims to reconstruct, via the acquired works and with the support of a small yet significant group of works on loan to cover existing gaps, a history of video which has been neglected for a long time. The exhibition has been organized around the different approaches and ideas of the artists who worked with video during the first 25 years of this medium. These include the inspiration of Fluxus, the critique of commercial television, the relationship between the medium and the viewer, feminism, performance and the legacy of minimalism and conceptual art.

First Generation does not aspire to be a thematic exhibition, nor does it try to follow a strict chronological order. Rather, it is a global vision of how and why a technology of recording, broadcasting and reproducing sound and images, which emerged in 1950 —and technically different than cinema— became an artistic medium; a “study” of the influence technology and mass culture had on the social and artistic changes of an era, at a time when cultural acceleration and the cross-pollination of ideas was beginning. In this sense, 1968 marks a before and after in this history: for that was the year in which a portable, relatively affordable television set appeared on the market, opening this medium up to a vast new group of people.

The original exhibition design by Angel Borrego challenges the traditional concept of “black boxes“ when showing media-based works. The show starts out with a work in the spirit of Fluxus: the documentary Fluxus Replayed (1991) by Takahiko iimura, which reproduces some of the key performances of Yoko Ono, Dick Higgins, George Brecht and Allison Knowles, among others. Behind this video, a unique document from 1979 is projected, created and re-edited by Joan Logue, who describes it as a “portrait” of a day in the life of Paik.

The first room of the exhibition features a group of pioneer works: 6 TV Dé-coll/age (1963) by Vostell, six works from the series Exposition of Music-Electronic Television (1963-65) and TV Rodin – The Thinker (1976-78) by Paik, plus The Bathroom Sink (1964), an installation by Robert Whitman which, shot in 16 mm, is a good example of the decisive years in which the moving image was being introduced in the art world. Upon exiting this room, we find Manhattan is an Island (1974), the work of Ira Schneider, one of the first artists who explored the possibilities of multimedia installation. This particular piece examines how the fact that Manhattan is an island conditions the physical reality and experience of New York City. It is followed by Face/Ings (formerly known as Back to Back), from 1974, made by Takahiko iimura with a closed-circuit video camera. In this work —just like in others in which he uses the closed-circuit video he had invented–, the artist explores the notion of feedback.

The next group includes all those works related to television as a physical and immaterial body: information, manipulation, time and light. This is the case of TV Interruptions, by the pioneer in English video, David Hall. Made for Scottish television and aired in August and September 1971, the interruptions appeared in the middle of a typical program without prior warning. This work is regarded as the first example of the intervention of British artists on television and the formative moment of British video art. Today it is shown as an installation, TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces): The Installation, which can be seen in this exhibition. Another piece is The Live! Show, a compilation of the weekly "anti-television" program presented and produced by Jaime Davidovich for cable television and broadcast by Manhattan Cable from 1975 to 1984.

The critical attitude towards television and the media industry and the manipulation of televised information as a strategy to challenge our perception are also represented by three Spanish artists: Antoni Muntadas, with Between the Lines (1979), Joan Rabascall and Benet Rossell with Bio Dop (1974) and Eugènia Balcells with TV Weave (1985), which subjects television images to processes of abstraction and manipulation to expose culturally-coded ideas. Muntadas' piece reveals how the process of editing information for television manipulates the news, as well as what a tiny difference there is between news programming and advertisements. PM Magazine (1982), by Dara Birnbaum, borrows the name of a famous, very popular television show. Taking music and images from real broadcasts and transmitting them on five monitors, the artist seems to suggest that the viewer is willing to watch anything that appears on television, no matter how banal. The O. J. Simpson Project, by Roger Welch, takes its title from the name of the American football player. The installation situates the viewer between images of Simpson — the star — and the spectacular image of a huge crowd of anonymous fans during one of his games.

First Generation also shows works by an international group of women who made significant contributions to the development of video as an artistic language. The importance of this female presence in the so-called "alternative" media and artistic forms (performance, artists' books, video, etc.) is undeniable. During this period of artistic exploration and political explosion, a large number of extremely coherent and inspired works were produced, acting as a link between modernity and post-modernity. Artists such as Hannah Wilke, Mary Lucier, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann, Joan Jonas, Ulrike Rosenbach and VALIE EXPORT are represented in the show; most of them exposed their body and their nude self as a way of claiming control of their own bodies. Another woman who contributed to the aesthetic transgression of the Seventies was the Vice President of Fluxus, Shigeko Kubota, who applied the Fluxus concept of performance and event to video. Duchampiana. Nude Descending a Staircase (1976) is inspired by the famous, transgressive painting by Marcel Duchamp to provoke, in turn, another transgression. This broad selection of works shows how women found their own voice against discriminatory policies, inside and out of the art world, and makes clear the very different use they gave to video with respect to their male counterparts.

Next to the work of these women, there are pieces by internationally-recognized artists with very diverse influences: painting, film and minimalism. Peter Campus, Gary Hill, David Lamelas, Thierry Kuntzel, Bill Viola, Juan Downey, Rafael França, Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman address themes ranging from perception to performance.

"All About Laughter: Humor in Contemporary Art" 27.01-06.05 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

2007-01-18T15:10:00.000-08:00

We all tend to submit to the whims of the world that surrounds us, and in particular to the so-called “powers that be.” Yet we also share an utter fascination with the invisible powers of nature and science, with the unfathomable nature of our sensations and emotions, and with the notion of creating something that is new. One of the roles of contemporary art is to bring these attractive yet inexplicable phenomena to our attention, enabling us to experience or visualize them directly. Sometimes art might point out new ways of looking at our world, or new approaches for ascertaining otherwise elusive truths. If contemporary art is sometimes disquieting, it is because it shows us things that we usually can not see - things hidden beneath the surface, things outside the bounds of convention or acceptability.
When considered this way, art plays a similar role to that of the jokes, parody, satire, irony and absurdity that make us laugh. Laughter defuses tension, and humor challenges the "straight" view of things by undermining the "common sense" or conservative tendencies of the “powers that be.” Humor is highly personal and subjective, often pushing up against the limits of our private “comfort zones.” This exhibition explores the laughter that plays a supporting role in art, throwing light on the messages conveyed through humor in each of the exhibits. Here a completely new world awaits the visitor - the world revealed when laughter is enlisted to loosen the constraints on our sensibility and make us more receptive to new experiences.

Comprising four parts, and including works that make us laugh in addition to works that make us think about laughing, "All About Laughter: Humor in Contemporary Art" brings together over 200 videos, photographs, installations and other works by 50 creators of contemporary art from around the world.

Ezra Johnson until 06.05 UCLA Hammer Museum, L.A.

2007-01-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

Ezra Johnson's new animated low-tech digital film, What Visions Burn (2006), uses lushly colored paintings and collaged figures to tell the story of a pair of art thieves in New York City. Each animation is a laborious process, as Johnson paints and repaints the surface of his canvases to create each frame of film, which uses visual elements and sound effects to narrate the scenario. Johnson's amusing depictions of the art world's many characters and his poetic representations of the city tell a story both romantic and unexpected.

Doug Aitken sleepwalkers 17.01- 12.02 MoMA, NY.

2007-01-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

The Museum of Modern Art and Creative Time, the New York–based public art organization, have jointly commissioned Doug Aitken to create the artist's first large-scale public artwork in the United States. The project is also the first to bring art to MoMA's exterior walls. Continuous sequences of film scenes will be projected onto eight facades, including those on West Fifty-third and Fifty-fourth streets and those overlooking The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden. Inspired by the densely built environment of New York's midtown, the artist will create a cinematic art experience that directly integrates with the architectural fabric of the city while simultaneously enhancing and challenging viewers' perceptions of public space. The project, filmed in New York City, will be shown daily from 5:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m., and is intended to be visible from many public vantage points adjacent to the Museum.

Unmasked Sidney Nolan and Ned Kelly 1950 - 1990, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (AUS)

2007-01-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

Sidney Nolan’s original Ned Kelly series, painted at Heide during 1946–47, has been widely acclaimed and extensively researched. Much less attention however, has been given to the artist’s numerous later representations of the legendary Australian bushranger. This exhibition explores, for the first time, Nolan’s ongoing artistic engagement with the Kelly myth after he left Australia permanently in 1953, a fascination that lasted for the next three decades.

For Nolan, Ned Kelly was an intensely compelling figure: he was of working class Irish–Australian stock like the artist himself; a natural leader with an instinctive command of language; and an archetypal tragic hero. As Nolan’s career developed, he became
inextricably associated with Kelly and the iconic black square mask he had invented to represent the outlaw.

This exhibition reveals the ways in which Nolan's Kelly, behind the black mask, was a complex figure whose significance reaches well beyond the shores of his native homeland.

Palazuelo, Pablo until 18.02.07 MACBA, Barcelona

2006-12-26T16:49:00.000-08:00

Pablo Palazuelo (1915) is one of the key figures of Spanish art of the second half of the 20th century, though unfortunately he has still not won the international recognition his work deserves. There are a number of reasons for that neglect. First, the still precarious situation of contemporary Spanish historiography. Second, an excessively linear notion of abstraction, which begins with Cézanne and Picasso, continues with constructivism and finally reaches minimalism. That orthodox conception of modern art has meant that other kinds of practices and aesthetics, which had to do with the symbolic, have been partly ignored. Palazuelo is one of the people affected in this way. The exhibition at MACBA, conceived as a retrospective, will be placing the emphasis on the more neglected aspects of his work.

Although he began his studies in architecture, from 1939 Palazuelo decided to devote himself entirely to painting. His work evolved towards abstraction, or non-figuration, as he himself considers that it should be called, and after 1946 he moved into a geometrical abstraction. In 1948 he obtained a grant from the French Institute in Madrid to study in France, which brought him into close contact with the French avantgarde, the new abstract works shown at Galerie Denise René (where he exhibited in a collective the same year), and he also met Eduardo Chillida, with whom he has kept up a close friendship.

Palazuelo conceives art as “a road to find a way out of human problems”. He makes continuous references to the history of painting, and the influence on his work of the notion of line in the work of Klee, which was a complete revelation to him, is particularly remarkable. He has also stated his interest in Russian constructivists like Gabo and Pevsner, though he rejects their scientific conception of geometry.

The drawings and gouaches are the seed of the canvases, “structures which, through a process of manipulation bring about metamorphic generations which form families”, in a biological way. The sculptures are the development of his two-dimensional forms in three dimensions.

Geometry is a central aspect of his work, because it is the measure of matter, the possibility of exploring it, understanding the process as an interaction between imagination and thought. He considers that all the forms we see are geometrical, “geometry is at the origin of life, which is the most inventive and endless thing we know. To have a vision of the structures that are contained in other structures, to see the new forms in potential, to see the possibilities of generating forms, to experience the passage of forms into others through metamorphosis, to see what grows like a plant. The geometrical forms I work with also develop through a very long metamorphic process or movement, and for that reason we can say that those forms are open and remain open and predisposed to transformation.”

Hence his interest in the skill and imagination with which graphic geometrical structures are handled in Arab art, or the correspondence between his work and musical composition, which can already be seen in the first drawings he did at the beginning of his time in Paris and which suggest musical notations to him when they are done, or the later series of drawings and gouaches done in 1978 in which those notations are now conscious. His is a work process based on a geometrical metamorphosis, radical, extreme, complex and, in his own words, in a slow tempo.

Colour, an element he introduces into his two-dimensional works, is not to be found in his sculptures: he does not need colour added to the sculpture, since the variety of metal materials provides him with the colour spaces he requires. In the painting, he imagines the colours before introducing them, saturating them, like symbols “of the deep dynamisms between psychic and material energy.”

In his work there is a major concern with the analysis of the structure, with the revelation of new needs, and the positive psychic sensations they produce in him. He does not seek to represent, but to collaborate in the act of the appearance. To his way of thinking, “that involves, on the part of the person looking at the work, a reading that can and must go beyond simple interpretation or formalist translation.” The imagination is a means of activating the hidden reality, which he also considers a real world, and an organ of knowledge.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres until 09.01.07 Hamburger Bahnhof , Berlin

2006-12-17T14:39:00.000-08:00

The RealismusStudio of the New Society of Fine Arts (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst) will be presenting a comprehensive retrospective at the Hamburger Bahnhof. The exhibition concentrates on the artist’s semi-temporary and reproducible works as well as on a selection from his photographic oeuvre.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres was one of the most important American artists of the 1990s. His work is characterized by a keen understanding of the social, cultural and political situation and an ability to translate such complex circumstances and events into the simplest of forms. The formal openness of the content of his objects and photographs contrasts with his political statements and private experiences. He leaves it up to viewers to interpret them as they will, aware that these interpretations will be dependent on their cultural and socio-political contexts.

Aesthetically polished and socially provocative, Felix Gonzalez-Torres used minimalist strategies and added personal, social and political meaning. Through his work in the 1990s, he made an important contribution to the critical reception of minimalism and concept art as politically motivated art forms within the “system”. His aim was on the one hand to work within the traditional context of art-making practices, on the other hand to infiltrate the system. This may be seen for instance in the billboard projects shown at public sites, in which he makes use of subversively aesthetic marketing strategies and thus open up for discussion questions of what is "private" and what is "public".

As a gay artist of Cuban origin, another theme of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ work was societal emancipation, including sexual emancipation; the gender discussion; equal integration of ethnic groups and of feminist theory and practice in the general art discourse. The blotting out of history, the efficiency of the political system, the omnipresence of ideology and the AIDS crisis all culminate in Gonzalez-Torres’s artistic work and activity.

This retrospective coincides with the 10th anniversary of the death of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The artist’s work has been shown in five RealismusStudio exhibitions since 1988 (two of them solo exhibitions). The curator of the show, Frank Wagner, has followed his artistic development almost from the beginning. In this exhibition the works byGonzalez-Torres will not be just refabricated, but reinstalled.

Netherlands v. Germany until 21.01.07 GEM, The Hague, (NL)

2006-12-10T15:15:00.000-08:00

Schilderkunst Nederland – Deutschland Malerei examines the current revival in neo-romantic, neo-realist painting. It does so by pairing off three Dutch artists with three German ones: Matthias Weischer (D) with Aaron van Erp (NL), David Schnell (D) with Tjebbe Beekman (NL), and Martin Eder (D) with Rezi van Lankveld (NL). The aim is to expose the similarities and differences between their work, in terms both of content and style.

Recent years have seen a boom in neo-romantic and neo-realist painting. This has been reflected in the escalation of prices at international auction to levels unprecedented in the contemporary art market. The revival in no way involves the kind of retour à l’ordre that occurred in the 1920s and ’30s. Today’s neo-romantic and neo- realist painters experiment as easily with modernist elements like form, brushstroke and colour as with the academic rules, often in one and the same painting. Moreover, since the advent of post-modernism, it has once again become possible to laugh and cry in art without becoming toe-curlingly sentimental or slushily romantic. For this exhibition, guest curator Jhim Lamoree and GEM director Wim van Krimpen, have chosen artists whose work resounds with the fever of time. They share a romantic view of life which leads them to express not so much an ideal as the uncertainty of existence. The three representatives of new German painting - Martin Eder, David Schnell and Matthias Weischer - were all born in West Germany, but deliberately chose to train at art schools in the former GDR, where emphasis is still placed on the craft aspects of art. Their work is deliberately exhibited in combination with that of Dutch contemporaries.
The work of Aaron van Erp and Matthias Weischer is hermetic and oppressive. Both focus on the psychological confusion caused by external pressures. In the case of Weischer, the claustrophobia of the narrow living spaces he depicts is almost physically palpable; in Van Erp’s paintings, the melancholy and hope still present in Weischer’s work descend into mania. Tjebbe Beekman and David Schnell produce landscapes reflecting the condition of our society. Beekman, who lives and works in Berlin, allows social tensions to infiltrate his compositions, while Schnell addresses the myth of nature. Both make occasional explicit use of scientific perspective, drawing the viewer almost literally into the scene.
Rezi van Lankveld en Martin Eder work with the subconscious mind: obsessions, frustrations and nightmares of every kind. Whereas Van Lankveld seems to conjure her pictures out of thin air, Eder browses through art history and the mass media to produce his semi-surreal images.

At the East-West Crossroads -The Art of Wucius Wong, Hong Kong Museum of Art

2006-12-03T06:50:00.000-08:00

A world-renowned artist, Wucius Wong has been very active in the Hong Kong art scene. He has made significant contributions to art, art criticism and art education over the past fifty years. By incorporating Chinese landscape elements and design concepts, his works unveil a new horizon in ink painting.

This is a major retrospective exhibition to commemorate the accomplishment of Wucius Wong. It features over seventy representative works displayed in five chronological sections. With each section covering a decade of his works, the exhibition will showcase the stylistic evolution and the superb achievement of Wucius Wong from the 1950s to date.

Ákos Birkás 24 November – 4 February 2007 LUMU, Budapest, Hungary

2006-11-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

Ákos Birkás is known first and foremost by the public, up to the present day, for his “Heads” series, his abstract ovals painted as a programme from the mid-eighties up till the late nineties, comprising nearly two hundred pieces in all. Not only the entirety of the painter’s oeuvre, but even a large portion of the “Heads” series is practically unknown in Hungary. This is not surprising, however, since from 1985 Birkás worked abroad with increasing frequency and for longer periods. He last had a large-scale solo exhibition in 1994 in Budapest; this was followed by a presentation in Vienna in 1997, in which he summarised the developments in his painting until that point. His new pictures have been on view in the decade since in German, Viennese and Parisian galleries. Thus, the local art scene has received Birkás’s new pictures produced around the new millennium with not a small measure of surprise (moreover, incomprehension): these are easily painted, large-scale, realistic portraits, which might appear to be diametrically opposed to his earlier paintings, known at home. By now, however, Birkás has taken a further departure from his abstract ovals, going as far as socio-political, narrative scenes, featuring several characters – on view for the first time at the Ludwig Museum Budapest. That which might seem to be an unexpected turning point in the eyes of some, is actually the fruit of Birkás’s coherent artistic programme; it is an oeuvre that incessantly questions the nature, role and aims of painting (and the painter), and thus, does not remain static, but is in a constant state of flux, in motion. Birkás’s pictures are the proceeds of a self-analysis of art and the artist (but not merely documentary), reflecting upon painting, and within this, first and foremost the intellectual relationship to portrait-painting, and this relationship, this self-reflection embraces in a single arc Birkás’s various periods, and his artworks that might appear at first sight to be inconsistent or radically innovative, or even provocative. This retrospective exhibition does not simply align the selected pieces of his oeuvre one alongside the other, but we intend to indicate this span, as well: to the conceptual and theoretical foundations of Birkás’s painting, and to the determining questions of the development of his life-work, in these works produced from 1975 up till 2006, of diverse genre, technique and ambition.

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005,Brooklyn Museum (NY)

2006-11-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990–2005, an exhibition of more than 200 photographs, debuts at the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view from October 20, 2006 through January 21, 2007, prior to an international tour. The exhibition, sponsored by American Express, is being organized by the Brooklyn Museum. Among the other venues it will travel to are the San Diego Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery, the de Young Museum, Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and London's National Portrait Gallery, with additional venues to be announced.

The material in the exhibition, and in the accompanying book of the same title, which will be published by Random House, encompasses work Leibovitz made on assignment as a professional photographer as well as personal photographs of her family and close friends. "I don't have two lives," Leibovitz says. "This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it." The material documents the birth of her three daughters and many events involving her large and robust family, including the death of her father.

Portraits of public figures include the pregnant Demi Moore, Nelson Mandela in Soweto, George W. Bush with members of his Cabinet at the White House, William S. Burroughs in Kansas, and Agnes Martin in Taos. The assignment work also includes searing reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and a series of landscapes taken in the American West and in the Jordanian desert.

One of the most celebrated photographers of our time, Annie Leibovitz has been making witty, powerful images documenting American popular culture since the early 1970s, when her work began appearing in Rolling Stone. She became the magazine's chief photographer in 1973, and ten years later began working for Vanity Fair, and then Vogue, creating a legendary body of work. In addition to her magazine work, Leibovitz has created influential advertising campaigns for American Express, Gap, Givenchy, The Sopranos, and the Milk Board. A retrospective of her work from the years 1970 to 1990 was presented at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Leibovitz is the recipient of many honors, including the rank of Commandeur in the French government's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Barnard College Medal of Distinction. She was named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress in 2000 and one of the thirty-five Innovators of Our Time by Smithsonian magazine in 2005.

Art Link until 7.1.07 Göteborg Konsthall (S)

2006-11-11T14:49:00.000-08:00

This autumn the Göteborg Konsthall will be presenting a group exhibition of works by artists, all sharing the intention of involving and engaging us and having us examine more closely the society we live in, our own selves and our daily lives. The exhibition is entitled Art Link and consists of six works by seven artists who all in their various ways hope to stimulate people to participate actively in their projects. The works thus belong to the category known as ‘participatory art’, art with a social ambition focusing on processes and human relationships and situations rather than on the art object as such. In projects of this kind the artists often have as their starting point some specific social, cultural or political context which they aim to discuss, research or present alternatives to. In recent years there has been a surge of this type of artistic projects. Art Link exhibits a small selection of the various approaches and methods used.

Apart from the fact that these artists share certain common features, their choices of content and working method differ. Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta Kalleinen have devised ‘workshops of complaint’ as part of their Complaints Choir. Assisted by other participants and a composer they have converted these expressions of complaint into songs, which they have then gone on to perform in choral form in the cities where the four art projects have been held. In her work Funk Lessons from 1983, Adrian Piper invited visitors to the exhibition to listen and dance to funk music, the intention being to stir reflections on the stereotypical image we have of African-Americans. Superflex presents the project Guaraná Power, an energy drink that the art group have produced in collaboration with a peasant guarana cooperative from Maués in Brazil. The Power and Illumination Projec is Annika Lundgren’s alternative to energy production, in the form of fitness centres’ spinning bicycles as energy source. In The West London Social Resource Project Stephen Willats has worked with residents of four London areas, with emphasis laid on their relationships to their immediate environment and behavioural patterns.
Esther Shalev-Gerz presents First Generation, about first generation immigrants to Sweden and their responses to confrontation with the new land. After a month this artwork will be removed from the exhibition to be replaced by a parallel exhibition opening on 18 November with an entirely new work, The place of art, by the same artist. The Place of Art is a video installation in two parts. Based on contributions from 38 artists living in the suburb Bergsjön, the project deals with questions of the relation between art and place. The work is shown in two places, Rymdtorget´s shopping center in Bergsjön and Göteborgs Konsthall, linking contrasting spatial constructions and cultural domains. TheArt Link exhibition marks the start of a programme with the same title in which the Göteborg Konsthall aims to develop a number of projects over the next two years. The Art Link programme will focus on communication, co-operation and the creation of networks. The programme’s basic aim is to promote and create links between contemporary art and the environments in which art operates, links between different art projects, between the practitioners and consumers of art and between people in general.

Andreas Slominski until 28.01.07 MMK, Frankfurt am Main (D)

2006-11-09T17:09:00.000-08:00

Born in 1959 and now living in Hamburg and Werder/Havel, Andreas Slominski has made an exceptionally interesting and extraordinary contribution to contemporary international art. Following important solo exhibitions in the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2005, Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2003 and Deutsche Guggenheim inBerlin in 1999, the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt/Main, is staging the largest museum exhibition of his works to date. The MMK is showcasing a selection of works from the last 20 years, primarily new spatial installations, and the choice bears witness to the enormously radical nature of Slominski’s oeuvre, which with its covert sense of humor holds up a correcting mirror to contemporary culture. How much paint is needed to paint a lighthouse or a battle tank? Will fortune find me, or do I have to go out and find it? How can one startle the people who linger in parks at night? Why is an oven needed to burn forked branches, and what has a football got to do with a child’s skull? The things that Slominski concerns himself with could generally be described as field research – an aesthetic and fundamental investigation of casual perceptions. Slominski discovers creative potential even in the smallest objects and devices. He seeks out the abstruse and within the absurd finds unexpected insights, frequently with great cunning and artifice. And the works often have a double meaning, or, to quote Nancy Spector »we enter a world in which everything is upside down, in which all our expectations produce the opposite effect, in which comedy quickly becomes tragedy and vice versa, in which there are traps lurking on every corner, ready at all times to take in, torment or indeed delight the observer.«

In line with the MMK’s agenda, the exhibition extends over all three floors of the museum
building and is closely linked to the rest of the collection. The MMK has been following Slominski’s artistic output ever since it opened in 1991 and has thus far been able to acquire more than 40 exemplary works for its collection – from the painstakingly ironed, folded and carefully stacked dusters, dishcloths and tea-towels, or bicycles laden with the entire worldly goods of homeless people, to a Christmas decoration for spring, summer and fall. A number of works produced specifically for the exhibition address the cultural history of the City of Frankfurt and the surrounding region. One room is dedicated exclusively to the new group of bright and garish »polystyrene pictures«. They are a statement on what everybody wants to talk about nowadays: painting.

Desiree Dolron: Exaltation - Gaze - Xteriors until 20.12., Institut Neerlandais, Paris

2006-11-07T12:32:00.000-08:00

Desiree Dolron’s (born in 1963) exhibition is showing, for the first time in France, three series of photographs, Exaltation - Gaze – Xteriors, which reflect the very personal nature of the artist’s work, which is both documentary in style and the work of a visual artist.

In Exaltation (1991-1999), Desiree Dolron focuses on the expression of the religious experience during trance ceremonies in festivals in India and Thailand. In her following series entitled Gaze (1996-1998), she comes back to this phenomenon in a profane context. She creates underwater portraits of people cut off from their sensory perceptions. Finally, the series Xteriors (2001- 2006), very pictorial, reveals a different world, strongly influenced by the early Flemish paintings.

In her life and work, Desiree Dolron is fascinated by the dividing line between appearance, perception and reality.

A (French/English) catalogue of the three series will be created especially for the ‘Mois de la Photo’ event by the graphic designer Xavier Barral, Director of the publishing house Éditions Xavier Barral, Paris.

UNCERTAIN STATES OF AMERICA CONQUEST ICELAND until 21.1.07 Reykjavik Art Museum

2006-11-05T07:36:00.000-08:00

UNCERTAIN STATES OF AMERICA - American Art in the Third Millennium is a unique presentation of young and emerging American artists, curated by Daniel Birnbaum, Gunnar B. Kvaran and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The exhibition was first shown at Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, fall 2005 and then traveled to Bard College in New York and Serpentine Gallery in London. After Reykjavík it will carry on to Herning in Denmark, Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing.

The exhibition consists of more than 120 works by over 40 young artists, and presents a wide spectrum of expressions, from video and film to installations and paintings. Although the exhibition is comprised of rich and varied material, certain common features are apparent. The curators note that they have been confronted with a narrative art, and an ability to tell new and disparate stories. They have encountered artists who are cognizant of their historical context, and who, on many different levels, express a clear social and political consciousness. Meanwhile, all the works break new creative ground, and have a strong aesthetic awareness.

Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) until 8.1.07 Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

2006-10-31T15:25:00.000-08:00

Bill Viola, one of the worlds leading video artists, traveled to Japan in 1980 on a one-year arts fellowship to study and experience first hand its cultural traditions and religions. He extended his stay by six months to work at Sonys Atsugi Research Center where he gained access to the most advanced video technology of the time. The influence of both experiences transformed his work.
This exhibition, organized by the Mori Art Museum and The Asahi Shimbun, showcases work from Violas productive career, beginning with Hatu-Yume (FirstDream) (1981), the 56 minute video he made while staying in Japan, to The Raf, (2004), one of his recent room-size installations. It is his first survey exhibition in Asia, and takes his first dream in Japan as a starting point for viewing his subsequent work.

Brice Marden 29.10.06- 15.01.07 MoMA NY

2006-10-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

This retrospective of the artist Brice Marden is an unprecedented gathering of his work, with more than fifty paintings and an equal number of drawings, organized chronologically, drawn from all phases of the artist's career. Two new large-scale paintings exhibited for the first time are included. The gradual, deliberate evolution of the artist's work becomes evident, as well as the constant exploration of light, color, and surface at every turn. The work of the first twenty years, characterized by luminous monochrome panels, which first won the artist acclaim, is now seen in balance with the celebrated work of the past twenty years. In the mid-1980s Marden shifted to calligraphic gestures embedded in shimmering grounds before moving to heightened color in the past decade. An installation of drawings is installed in the Paul J. Sachs Drawings Galleries on the third floor. A major publication accompanies the exhibition. Visit the MoMA site.

6th International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Shanghai until 5.11. MUKHA, Antwerp (B)

2006-10-27T09:21:00.000-07:00

The 6th Shanghai Biennial, entitled Hyper Design, opens on 5 September 2006. Flanders will be represented there too by two internationally known artists: Luc Deleu and Hans Op de Beeck.

In 1985 a friendship agreement was concluded between the cities of Shanghai and Antwerp. Since then, exchanges in various fields have already taken place. During an official mission in November 2004, a delegation of the Antwerp municipal administration concluded a protocol with the city of Shanghai to set up, among other things, concrete cooperation projects on a cultural level in the course of the coming years.

This protocol explicitly mentions the participation of Antwerp in the Biennial of Contemporary Art, organised by the Shanghai Art Museum.

Every two years, the Biennial for Contemporary Art in Shanghai lavishly presents an international package of artists; their work reflects current developments in contemporary art. The emphasis is mainly on artistic production in the Asiatic region, which is also becoming increasingly important from a global perspective. In the meantime, the Shanghai Biennial has build up a good reputation as an international platform for contemporary art where artists, curators, authors, art critics and art lovers from all over the world meet.

The 6th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Shanghai runs from 5 September to 5 November 2006 and the theme is Hyper Design. Mister Zhang Qing, artistic director of this Biennial, invited Antwerp to submit concrete proposals for participation in the Artistic Selection Committee, which has an international composition.

After consultation with Bart De Baere, director of the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, two internationally renowned Flemish artists were nominated, viz. Luc Deleu and Hans Op De Beeck. Both have strong links with Antwerp.

Finally, the Shanghai Artistic Selection Committee approved the candidature of the two artists with the following works of art. New Version of VIP City, Luc Deleu's vision of a possible division of the world into habitable plots of land (6 m by 6 m), and T-Mart by Hans Op De Beeck, an enormous scale model of a supermarket with a video projection on top.

Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth SFMOMA until 21.01.2007

2006-10-24T15:27:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) presents Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth from October 20, 2006, to January 21, 2007. The first North American survey of this influential contemporary German artist’s oeuvre in 20 years, this traveling exhibition brings together more than 50 major works, many of which have never before been seen in the United States. Organized by Michael Auping, chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth

Not intended as a retrospective, the exhibition is a thematic survey that focuses on the artist’s ongoing meditation on metaphysical issues and various notions of transcendence and the spiritual—in particular the relationship between heaven and earth—using symbolism and the mythology of ancient religion as a foundation for investigating the broader subjects of human character, collective memory, and mankind’s universal desire to
completes its international tour in San Francisco in a presentation overseen by SFMOMA Curator of Painting and Sculpture Janet Bishop.

understand existence.

Arranged roughly chronologically, the exhibition will showcase a selection of Kiefer’s diverse output from 1969 to 2005, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, mixed-media photographic projects, and artist’s books. Given the monumental scale and fragility of Kiefer’s works, the contents of the presentation have varied at each tour venue. SFMOMA’s presentation will include extraordinary works by Kiefer from the Museum’s own collection, such as the monumental painting Isis and Osiris (1985–87), as well as other critically important pieces from a renowned private collection in San Francisco that did not travel to previous tour venues.

“Since the 1980s, contemporary German art has been a particular area of focus within the SFMOMA collection, though this is the first public presentation of Kiefer’s work ever to be mounted in San Francisco,” states Bishop. “As such, this exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see the artist’s work in both much greater depth and in the context of the issues that are most central to his practice.”

Widely hailed for his remarkable sense of materiality, Kiefer uses a variety of media to create works ranging from delicate watercolors to enormous multipart paintings to monumental sculptural installations composed of lead and steel. Drawing on the physical characteristics of his media to underscore intellectual concerns, Kiefer embraces a complex array of subjects—medieval alchemy, occult philosophy, astronomy, pagan ritual, religious mysticism—in order to address the dialogue between history and spirituality.

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), alongside contemporaries Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, was one of the first contemporary German artists to achieve international recognition in the early 1980s with his neo-expressionist paintings. Among his peers, however, Joseph Beuys—the most influential figure in the postwar European art world and Kiefer’s mentor at the Dusseldorf Academy—had the greatest and most direct impact on Kiefer’s work.

Using an intricate system of symbols and imagery drawn from myth, legend, and poetry, Kiefer has earned wide acclaim for his ruminations on German history—particularly on the moral weight carried by Germany after World War II—conveyed largely in mammoth-scale paintings layered with his signature materials: tar, straw, iron, lead, glass, pottery, burned wood, and other organic plant matter. Since his major mid-career retrospective in 1987, which traveled nationally, Kiefer’s work has rarely been seen in the United States, however.

From the very beginning of Kiefer’s career, he has explored deep-rooted, principal questions about the history of spirituality and its connection to scientific and political realms. Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth begins with the artist’s earliest surviving work, The Heavens (1969), a small collage book containing pictures of clouds and sky cut from magazines and affixed to white pages labeled with text. The artist’s use of fragmentary, rather than whole, images evokes the notion that heaven cannot be distilled into a single image or place but is better symbolized by fleeting impressions, a theme consistent in much of his art.

This work is followed by a series of early paintings in which Kiefer introduces many symbols and reoccurring motifs—trees, fire, winter, nightfall, the artist’s palette, barren countryside, charred landscape—that would go on to define his visual vocabulary. In one of these early paintings, an oil on canvas titled Man in the Forest (1971), Kiefer depicts himself standing in a small clearing of forest, wearing his nightclothes and surrounded by towering trees. Holding a burning branch, the figure appears at once threatening and fearful. In this dreamscape, the forest is not only an obvious symbol for German nationalism, Romanticism, and legends of the Black Forest, it also refers to pagan traditions of earth worship and ancient myths of heroic struggle between mankind and nature, as well as to the kabalistic Tree of Life and the Old Testament’s Garden of Eden. Tree trunks that extend beyond the picture plane suggest their reach far into the sky, perhaps alluding to a bridge between terrestrial and celestial realms.

The exhibition continues with several works from Kiefer’s Attic series of the early 1970s, in which the exposed wood floor and ceiling of his art studio at the time—the attic of a former German schoolhouse—function as a forestlike architectural stage for his re-imaginings of metaphysical and historical lore. Quaternity (1973), a 15-foot-wide drawing rendered in oil and charcoal on burlap, refers to a theological debate within the early Christian church about the role of evil. In this canvas, three flames, labeled “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Ghost,” are joined by connecting lines to a serpent labeled “Satan,” forming a closed diagram that seems to erupt from an allover background of meticulously rendered wood grain. Mapping the interdependency between God and the devil, the work highlights a favorite theme of Kiefer’s: paradox—the fires of the Holy Trinity that illuminate and redeem can also burn and destroy. Like Man in Forest, this work typifies the artist’s use of his own image—here represented by the serpent—as well as his incorporation of handwriting.

Among the different media Kiefer has worked with over the years, artist’s books have been a consistent and central part of his practice. “The book—the idea of a book or the image of a book—is a symbol of learning, of transmitting knowledge,” he has said. “I make my own books to find my own way through the old stories.” To create one of his early book projects, a seven-volume series called Cauterization of the Rural District of Buchen (1975), Kiefer burned a selection of his paintings, cut the scorched canvas into pages, and interspersed them with photographs representing staged explosions in landscapes around Buchen, the district where he was then living. The term cauterization—the medical procedure by which tissue is burned to facilitate healing—alludes to the restorative properties of fire, invoking the metaphorical rehabilitation of a wounded landscape and, by extension, the renewal of German national mythology. The burnt, carbonized pages of the book suggest both the material of destruction and the basic constituent of all life forms on earth, again illustrating Kiefer’s longstanding interest in alchemy, dualism, and paradoxical states.

Many of Kiefer’s books take the form of freestanding sculptures, monumental symbols of his quest for spiritual knowledge through art and image. Book with Wings(1992–94), a massive tome made of lead, lies open on a high lectern and has majestic wings sprouting from each side as if poised for flight. Secret Life of Plants (2001), a more than 6-foot-high book made of lead, stands upright on its spine, its pages fanned open. The work’s title refers to a book published in 1973 that investigates the proposed consciousness of plants and the idea that they may hold answers to the mysteries of life—a concept pioneered by the 16th-century mystic philosopher Robert Fludd, who proposed that each plant on earth has a corresponding star in the universe. Containing an intricate numerical mapping of the stars based on NASA information, Kiefer’s book continues an age-old rumination on the unfathomable correspondence between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic.

Kiefer’s current Barjac studio complex in the south of France comprises a network of above- and underground installations created for the artist’s ongoing investigation of the ancient kabbalistic system of thought known as merkaba. A reoccurring motif in his work, the term alludes to a chariot that journeys through the Hechaloth, the seven heavenly palaces that eventually lead to the throne of God. The Barjac installation involves a series of concrete rooms stacked hundreds of feet into the air as well as subterranean spaces containing various books and sculptures. Recent works such as the large-scale mixed-media canvas Sefer Hechaloth (2002) and Die Himmelspaläste (2004) feature seven shelves or metal cages that act as containers for symbolic objects. A number of gouaches from 2003 also are based on photographs of both found and formed objects that are part of the artist’s immense studio installation project.

The exhibition also includes a number of works created since 1990, many of which have not been seen in the United States. This last decade and a half of Kiefer’s output reveals a new chapter in the artist’s development: Fields of lilting sunflowers, immense desert landscapes, colossal pyramids, and panoramas of stars are now a part of Kiefer’s cosmological vocabulary.

Between the lines Kim Donaldson, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne

2006-10-19T18:45:00.000-07:00

Books radiate imagination. Studied and worn, they carry the imprints of time, gathering associations and furnishing our intimate lives. The book-lined walls of the Heide I library contain a wealth of ideas and associations that inspired Kim Donaldson’s most recent exhibition project, Between the lines. Adopting the roles of researcher, editor, artist and historian, the exhibition is the result of Donaldson’s three-year enquiry into the contents of the library, and the lives and histories inscribed on the pages of its volumes.

The present Heide I library is an accumulation of books that belonged to John and Sunday Reed (who occupied the house from 1934–1967, returning in 1980–1981), and to their family and friends who have lived there periodically, or who have later gifted books to the Museum. In Between the lines, Donaldson offers a distilled view of this collection, choosing details from a selection of books to re-create as paintings. During her visits to the library, Donaldson’s methods of research combined careful perusal with opportune findings; selecting books not only for their notable authors or subjects but also for the affinities she felt with the colours and textures of certain covers, or the handwritten notes she discovered inside. The painted covers, illustrations and inscriptions give form to her experience, providing an index of the books she has accessed and evidence of those who have turned the pages before her; revealing personal interests, scholarly exchanges, and dedications of love and friendship.

In the layout of the exhibition, Donaldson makes playful reference to Heide I as a former home and its current incarnation as a museum. Paintings are placed throughout the rooms of the house, their demarcation and groupings based on her systems of categorisation. The informative ‘How to…’ and ‘The complete guide to…’ books form certain groupings, while other works are given a ‘practical’ placing within the house: Chez Reed Menu (2006) rests on the mantelpiece in the former dining room, and Algerian Apperitive [aperitif] (2006) is placed in the library, evoking memories of the Reeds’ pre-dinner gatherings. Portraits of John and Sunday and their cats, selected from Heide’s Collection, hang in the bedroom and canvases are stacked against the walls of the house, mimicking the Reeds’ unusual methods of art storage. Alongside Donaldson’s recollections of times past, Between the lines is also a commentary on her explorative journey and recent presence in the house. A painted floor plan, a re-creation of the cover of the current Heide I Guide Book, and a painting created especially for reproduction on the cover of the exhibition catalogue are interleaved with paintings of the books and ephemera she uncovered on the site. The history of Heide is enfolded with the present in Donaldson’s work. She reminds us of the meanings books have and the use we make of them, not only in reading, but in the inspiring presence they timelessly provide.

Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture until 07.01.07 Bronx Museum NY

2006-10-13T04:55:00.000-07:00

Tropicália is the first comprehensive exhibition to explore one of the most significant chapters in modern cultural history, a period beginning in the late 1960s when daring experiments in Brazilian art, music, film, architecture and theater converged—and ignited. Although suppressed by an increasingly oppressive military dictatorship, the moment produced a counterculture that has influenced successive generations of artists, even up to the present day.

The exhibition revisits this seminal time in Brazil through more than 250 objects. Highlighting major historical works from the 1967 New Brazilian ObjectivityTropicália features artists Lygia Clark, Antônio Dias, Nelson Leirner, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, among others. Searching for their own identity, these artists were inspired by one of the founders of Brazilian modernism, Oswald de Andrade, and his concept of “cultural cannibalism.” They sought to liberate their art from traditional European forms and cultural hierarchies and a narrow cultural elite. As a result, they often embraced an aesthetic of informality, interactivity, and cultural hybridity. exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro,

The title of the exhibition is drawn from an installation created by the influential artist Hélio Oiticica in 1967, as well as from the 1968 pop record, featuring Gilberto Gil, Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso, and others, which became one of the most celebrated albums in Brazilian music.

The impact of this period in current Brazilian culture and contemporary art internationally is revealed through the inclusion of a younger generation of artists and musicians including Matthew Antezzo, assume vivid astro focus, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Arto Lindsay, Marepe, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Karin Schneider, many of whom have created new works for the exhibition.

'Test site' Carsten Höller until 09.04.07, Tate, London

2006-10-10T04:26:00.000-07:00

For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend.

To date Höller has installed six smaller slides in other galleries and museums, but the cavernous space of the Turbine Hall offers a unique setting in which to extend his vision. Yet, as the title implies, he sees it as a prototype for an even larger enterprise, in which slides could be introduced across London, or indeed, in any city. How might a daily dose of sliding affect the way we perceive the world? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?

Höller has undertaken many projects that invite visitor interaction, such as Flying Machine (1996) that hoists the user through the air, Upside-Down GogglesFrisbee House (2000) - a room full of Frisbees.

Photography, Video, Mixed Media III until 08.01.07 DaimlerChrysler Contemporary , Berlin

2006-10-08T03:03:00.000-07:00

In the early 1990s, the DaimlerChrysler Collection, initially focused on painting, began expanding by acquiring works from the realm of new media: photography, video, object art, light boxes and installations.

This exhibition with new acquisitions for the collection - in Berlin the third of its kind already since 2001 - shows how this approach has been continued. Sylvie Fleury is represented with six new films which were produced for the Mercedes-Benz Brand Center in Paris in 2005.

Young Indian artist Shilpa Gupta presents an interactive video installation, an interactive video installation which merges the ideological codices of fashion and military formation.

Guy Tillim, the 2004 winner of the DaimlerChrysler Award South Africa, displays impressive shots from a new series of photographs which he took in Petros Village, Malawi/SA.

In addition, the exhibition comprises videos by Bernie Searle, Bernhard Kahrmann and Heimo Zobernig, photos and pictorial objects by the Indian artists Pamela Singh and Justin Ponmany as well as a group of sculptures by Ina Weber.

Participating Artists

Sylvie Fleury (*1961 Genf/CH),
Shilpa Gupta (*1976 Mumbai/Indien),
Bernhard Kahrmann (*1973 Geislingen/Ger),
Justin Ponmany (*1974 Kerala/India),
Berni Searle (*1964 Capetown/SA),
(Pamela Singh (*1961 Rajasthan/Indien),
Guy Tillim (*1962 Johannesburg/SA),
Ina Weber (*1964 Dietz/Ger),
Heimo Zobernig (*1958 Mauthen/A)

"Projection" until 26.11. Kunstmuseum Luzern (CH)

2006-10-07T03:47:00.000-07:00

The exhibition "Projection" investigates an exciting art topic that has emerged since the 1960s: taking precinematic projection art such as the magic lantern and scientific and educational slide shows as its point of departure, an independent, experimental, and conceptual medium has developed. By means of projections and slide projections, photographs and videos the exhibition provides a bold historical survey through to the present day. Basic parameters such as space, light, mechanics, media and projectors are examined. In addition the exhibition explores the significance of projection as a metaphor for imagination.

With works by Paul Chan (USA, *1973), VALIE EXPORT (A, *1940), Peter
Fischli (CH, *1952)/ David Weiss (CH, *1946 ), Ryan Gander (GB, *1976),
Liam Gillick (GB, *1964), Dan Graham (USA, *1942 ), Imi Knoebel (D,
*1940), Cornelia Parker (GB, *1956), Beat Streuli (CH, *1957).

MoCA Envisagel -- Entry Gate:Chinese Aesthetics of Heterogeneity, Shanghai

2006-10-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

In this age of wide-ranging information exchange and of universal access to knowledge, people have succeeded in multiplying and democratizing the channels of information dissemination. As peoples' material conditions have improved, their increasingly sophisticated artistic mood is reflected not only in their sense of the beauty of forms but also in their demands for spiritual beauty, which increase daily. The literati of ancient China have become both the refined intellectuals of today who work in a variety of fields and those industrialists who maintain a spirit of intellectualism. Traditional Chinese literati art was not merely a visual art form used as a means of communication among the literati, but also held a resonance with their commonly-held practice of living on an aesthetic plane. Ancient literati applied their spiritual aesthetic values to their food、 clothing、 habitation、 and conduct in daily life. Through music, chess, calligraphy, painting, and other forms of quotidian aesthetic expression, they inspired and learned from each other. Thus, Chinese literati art is not merely a formal art in and of itself. Instead, it is an embodiment of one's connoisseurship of life. It is a form of communication through a spiritual language，as well as a shared search for lofty aesthetic values.

Visit the site MoCA Shanghai

Five Billion Years Palais de Tokyo, Paris

2006-10-03T02:18:00.000-07:00

Five billion years ago, the universe began an accelerated expansion. Astronomers hypothesize that a force called "dark energy" dominated the gravity of matter and caused the universe to stop slowing down and to begin a never-ending growth spurt. With this dramatic shift, the universe launched into a state of perpetual movement. Always in flux, reality loses its ability to appear as a series of fixed reference points or as a web of consistent and reliable connections. Instead, the elusive nature of speed and time penetrates our awareness of the world and compromises the comfort of stability. In a similar way, art eludes fixed positions or places and instead glides over the visible and reveals the many layers that serve in its construction. Art can make reality denser, and can make it accelerate.

FIVE BILLION YEARS is the first chapter of a year-long program at the Palais de Tokyo. It begins a reflection not on the exhibition as a singular event – a fixed point that is isolated in time and space – but on the very notion of a program, an experience with a temporal cursor that is constantly in motion, in permanent fluctuation. As the beginning and first segment of a new program that will feature exhibitions and events over the next 12 months, FIVE BILLION YEARS builds on the Palais de Tokyo’s commitment to artists working today by embodying the uncontainable and elastic nature of contemporary art.

The rapidly expanding artistic field that is FIVE BILLION YEARS spreads throughout the Palais de Tokyo’s exhibition spaces. Incorporating both solo and group shows, FIVE BILLION YEARS also includes a multitude of events, including an international competition of chainsaw sculpture, a lecture by an astrophysicist and a music therapist, and a ballet for mini-motorcycles.

FASTER! BIGGER! BETTER! ZKM, Karlsruhe (D)

2006-09-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

FASTER! BIGGER! BETTER!the survey of approximately 220 signet works, is thus both a special exhibition of our museum itself and a reflection of the art history of the last 50 years. While on the ground floor of atrium 1 a dialogue of themes and content is unfolded among the signet works that fascinatingly displays the various collections, in atrium 2 the themes of movement and dynamics propose relations to the parallel exhibition “die totalstadt. beijing case”. On the upper floor of the museum, the signet works of eight collections will be presented under the aspect of membership in their collections. Varied rooms will display paintings, photography and sculptures under museological aspects, whereby the open structure of the museum will promote communication beyond these areas and the atriums. Together with the works from the 21st century, this re-presentation of the masterpieces of probably the most interesting decades of the last century forms an aesthetic, thought-provoking and not least entertaining lobby for the exhibition of the history of recent art and its collections. ZKM site.

SPANK THE MONKEY 27.09-07.01.07 Baltic, Gateshead (UK)

2006-09-24T13:25:00.000-07:00

This exhibition will be the first serious international examination of urban and suburban art bridging the gap between the street and the traditional art space. With strong links to graphic design, graffiti, manga comics, skate boarding and surfing this group show includes artists based in urban centres across the world. Work will also be seen outside BALTIC with large-scale public interventions in both Gateshead and Newcastle.

Spank the Monkey presents twenty-two artists from urban centres across the world.
Including: Chiho Aoshima, Banksy, Dzine, Dr. Lakra, FAILE, Freaks Gallery, Shepard Fairey, Groovisions, Invader, Kozyndan, Barry Mcgee, Ryan Mcginness, Takashi Murakami, Miss Van, Neasden Control Centre, Os Gemeos, David Shrigley, Natasha Struchkova, Swoon, Aya Takano, Ed Templeton,Yasumasa Yonehara.

MUSAC INAUGURATES FIVE NEW EXHIBITIONS WITH PAINTING AS A COMMON DENOMINATOR ON SEPTEMBER 23RD

2006-09-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, MUSAC (Spain), inaugurates five new exhibitions starting September 23rd which intend to make a particular itinerary by some of the reinterpretations and paths taken by painting in the last few years. A group of canvases by the African artist, Julie Mehretu, as well as by the Austrian-Israelí pair, Muntean/Rosenblum, aside from videos, photographs and sculptures; while national representation is under the charge of Daniel Verbis, who will show his installation misojosentusojosderramándose and Felicidad Moreno, who will exhibit digital impressions in huge format and plays of light and laser under the title hipnÓptico. The virtual shop and the installation of the group Funky Projects for the showcase project will be extended until January 2007 and the young artist Philipp Fröhlich will gather his particular “votive offerings” at the Laboratorio 987.

5,000,000,000 YEARS until 31.12. Palais de Tokyo, Paris

2006-09-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

5,000,000,000 YEARS is an exhibition that places itself within the FIVE BILLION YEARS chapter by way of a mutation. Synonymous yet clearly dissimilar, the exhibition and the program-chapter that contains it create an endless feedback loop, each one mutating as it transfers back into the other. Like mutants, artists operate in parallel spheres, and like a mutant, art survives by being furtive and by compromising our ability to establish clear interpretive sign-posts. Visually, nothing (or almost nothing) allows one to distinguish a mutant from a human being, and nothing (or almost nothing) allows one to distinguish a work of art from an ordinary object. The difference lies elsewhere. But as soon as a mutant is identified as such, he returns—we see it happen—to his original status of being an extraterrestrial. As soon as a work of art is identified as such, it loses its status as an object only to be transfigured and returned to the world of art. This chronic schizophrenia is a defining characteristic of art-making today. What counts is not the colonization of new worlds but an accumulation of the identical. Art doesn’t invade or abandon one territory at the expense or in favor of another, but it constantly slides in and out of territories and across different spheres and personalities. Today, ontology seems less relevant than the mechanics of contamination. In a universe that is expanding at an irreversibly accelerated rate, the borders that define a work of art can only be blurry. More crucial are the ways in which the work moves back and forth between spheres of knowledge and practice, effectively becoming an uncontainable mutant. The exhibition 5,000,000,000 YEARS explores this elasticity of the work of art, its temporality and impact. Like mutants, some pieces featured in 5,000,000,000 YEARS have already been seen in other venues, notably at SI, New York, as part of the exhibitions FIVE BILLION YEARS (2004), OK / OKAY (2005) and SPACE BOOMERANG (2006). These works fit into a schizophrenia that emphasizes their ability to change according to context and their potential for generating multiple meanings: can a work of art that is displayed in two different venues remain identical? What is the principle guiding its mutation? What is the principle behind its autonomy? CHRISTIAN ANDERSSON / ARTISTS UNKNOWN / MICHEL BLAZY / MIKE BOUCHET / LORIS CECCHINI / PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT / MARCEL DUCHAMP / CEAL FLOYER / URS FISCHER / MARK HANDFORTH / JOACHIM KOESTER / VINCENT LAMOUROUX / LANG-BAUMANN / TONY MATELLI / JONATHAN MONK / FRANЗOIS MORELLET / GIANNI MOTTI / CHARLES RAY (the list is being expanded)

Now, Here, Over there 16.09-6.11 FRAC LORRAINE, METZ (FR)

2006-09-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

« The fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil »(1) happens over and over every day somewhere or other, sending back its now distant echoes through the sanitized filter of the media image. Utopias gone astray, political and/or religious forms of authoritarianism, repression and violence on minds and bodies melt into the magma of current affairs. As an alternative to prevalent information, artists are raising the question of their role, the scope of their engagement. As actual players rather than witnesses, they ensure a form of transmission that goes beyond textual and literal demands.

Lida Abdul (Afghanistan) and Tania Bruguera (Cuba) respectively engage in a reflection on their country’s situation, and tackle performative art head on, bringing their body into play and putting a political slant on what they have to say. Between the experience of exile and regular returns home, they address the question of one’s roots, one’s cultural identity, displacement, and take on a role of player-cum-transmitter that extends well beyond the context of their own country. Performances or installations, whatever the preferred device, Lida Abdul and Tania Bruguera break with the distancing of images ; we are destabilized, disturbed, and flip for a while into a cathartic, albeit pretty artificial experience.

Here for the first time in a joint exhibition, they stress the importance, now more than ever, of questioning images, casting doubt on and subverting the dominant and official rhetoric.

Emily Jacir and Renaud-Auguste Dormeuil, each in their own way, carry on this incitement to vigilance, this questioning of the notion of commitment. Disregarding frontiers and periods, their reflection on the refugee figure evokes control and constraints brought to bear on people and bodies, separation and uprooting.

1 – Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, quoted by Giorgio Agamben, Ce qui reste d’Auschwitz, Rivages poche / Petite Bibliothèque, Paris, 2003.

Access : admission free. Open Wednesday to Sunday from 12-19.00 and Thursdays from 13-20.00.

Partners: Giorgio Persano Gallery, Torino ; MMK Frankfurt am Main ; Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London ; Cac Brétigny – Centre d’art contemporain.

LIVE PERFORMANCES
Friday 15 Sept 06 from 20.00

Tania Bruguera / Lida Abdul

« Performance is the art of space, presence and time » (Esther Ferrer, artist). This ephemeral art which plays around with notions of endurance, pushing back physical and psychological limits, is something which the Frac has been seeking in recent years to feature in its collection to complement the fixed, finished work that is the art object.

For both Tania Bruguera and Lida Abdul, performance art is a crucial mode of expression whereby the body becomes the medium and the witness, the vector of history, of a demand or criticism. 15 September will be a red-letter day, a unique landmark moment when the two artists will be staging a live performance.

Also until 5 November:
This approach to performance art will be extended throughout the duration of the exhibition with a documentation area devoted to Lida Abdul and Tania Bruguera performances on film.
49 Nord 6 Est –
Fonds régional d'art contemporain de Lorraine
http://collection.fraclorraine.org

Cai Guo-Qiang: Head On until 15.10. Guggeheim, Berlin

2006-08-26T19:35:00.000-07:00

Throughout his career the Chinese-born, New York-based artist Cai Guo-Qiang has drawn on a wide variety of symbols, narratives, traditions, and materials such as feng shui, Chinese medicine, and gunpowder. For the Deutsche Guggenheim’s Cai Guo-Qiang: Head On, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Germany, he develops a concept that reflects the diversity of his oeuvre and establishes a unique link to the city of Berlin. Head On is a gigantic installation in which 99 stuffed wolves rush headlong toward the gallery’s eastern wall. Although the leader crashes into the wall, the pack still races after him. In a special performance prior to the show’s opening, Guo-Qiang will create a related nine-by-four-meter drawing using various sorts of gunpowder. This image, titled Vortex, shows thousands of wolves rushing across the paper, creating a swirling organic form that exudes energy, strength, and fierce resolution. These two pieces are supplemented by the video Illusion II, which documents a spectacular firework performance to be produced prior to the opening. Cai Guo-Qiang: Head On is part of an ongoing series of exhibitions drawn from the corporate collection of Deutsche Bank. In 2008, Deutsche Bank will be the main sponsor of the Cai Guo-Qiang retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Yael Bartana until 03.09. KUNSTVEREIN IN HAMBURG

2006-08-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

Israeli artist Yael Bartana's films are observant and personal, and combine a detached documentary style with a barely perceptible subjective atmosphere. Bartana, who lives in Tel Aviv and Amsterdam, looks at the familiar with a gaze sharpened by distance; she is an involved outsider who shows the people of her homeland during typical celebrations and rituals. "Ceremonies organized by the state and military celebrations define this tradition and shape national identity," she has said. "I am interested in the dynamic of a state that dictates a certain viewpoint and of the individuals that accept this viewpoint." The video Trembling Time, 2001, for example, was filmed in Tel Aviv on the day that commemorates those who died in the Israeli wars; a moment of silence unexpectedly interrupts the flow of cars along a highway. In When Adar Enters, 2003, we see children and adults wearing fancy dress in the Orthodox districts of Jerusalem during the traditional Purim festivities. Low Relief II, 2004, depicts a joint demonstration of Israeli and Palestinian youth, accompanied by soldiers. It is the film's apparent casualness that captures the underlying aggression. Bartana shows individual identity subsumed by ritual action, and in doing so makes the viewer aware of how social power structures exercise a control as omnipresent as a shadow. Jens Asthoff

New Acquisitions 2006 until 03.09 MCA Sydney

2006-08-13T14:08:00.000-07:00

Collecting is a vital part of the MCA’s support for Australian artists, as crucial as exhibiting in terms of promoting the importance of Australian art for future generations. The MCA is the only museum in Australia dedicated to collecting and exhibiting contemporary art. It holds a significant collection of over 5,000 Australian and international art brought together since the late 1960s. This collection forms one of the core functions of the Museum’s activities, playing a major role in the MCA’s innovative exhibitions, touring projects, education and outreach programs, and high-quality publications. Following on from the acclaimed 2005 exhibition MCA Collection: New Acquisitions in Context, this exhibition will showcase the MCA’s recent acquisitions.

The Age of Metamorphosis: European Art from the Pecci Collection MOCA Shanghai

2006-08-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

The Age of Metamorphosis: European Art Highlights from the Centro Pecci Collection
From July 22nd to August 29th of 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai will collaborate with the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (Italy) in hosting the highly anticipated exhibition "The Age of Metamorphosis: European Art Highlights from the Pecci Collection". Curated by the Permanent Collection Department of the Centro Pecci, the exhibition reflects the contemporary artistic expression not only of Italy, but of all Europe since the 1980s.

The history of the Permanent Collection of the Centro Pecci runs parallel to the program of the temporary exhibitions that have taken place during the 17 years since its foundation. The selection breathed the character of an age, an incarnation of European art in recent twenty years.

The theme behind the exhibition project is focused on the significant testimony of contemporary art in Europe. The works chosen come from the various movements in contemporary European art held by the artists from Italy, Russia, Austria, France, England, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands. The exhibition project probes their relationships and various expressions, giving a vision of European art since the 1980s.

The artworks chosen for "The Age of Metamorphosis" manifest themselves through the following themes: reflections on the body in the area of identity and otherness, the idea of multiplicity, the problem of representation in art, the relationship between materiality and spirituality, the narrative form in art and myth as poetic element. Some of these themes are tied to the discussions that arose around the values of Modernism, negating the idea of linear progress, and they constitute a point of arrival after the long voyage begun at the time of the historical Avant Garde at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

By hosting this exhibition, MoCA Shanghai intends to bring the European contemporary art to the Chinese audience. The exhibition will also serve as a great opportunity to promote the contemporary art scene within the country.

Cosmic Wonder until 05.11 Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,San Francisco (USA)

2006-08-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

The infinite, the transcendental, the unseen—these are the artistic quests of Cosmic Wonder, an exhibition of metaphysical art that gives colorful expression to the mystical yearnings of a new generation. Guest curator Betty Nguyen identified key young artists who explore trance, “alternative” realities and the psyche, who tap into altered states of consciousness through exaggerated color, mind-altering patterns, morphing forms, and visions of the infinite. Their work is inspired by nature, by the cosmos, by the vastness of the Western landscape, and yet is rooted in an urban sensibility. Cosmic Wonder presents a range of young artists—including Jim Drain and Ara Peterson, alongside their avante-garde, 60s and 70s predecessors such as James Turrell. Call it New Tribalism with edge, or the 1960s refracted through a 21st century consciousness, Cosmic Wonder revels in the wondrous.Artist list:Doug Aitken Jose Alvarez Reed Anderson Hanna Fushihara Aron and David Aron Hisham Bharoocha Mark Borthwick Anna Sew Hoy Sam Gordon Yayoi Kusama Terence Koh Yukinori Maeda Richard Misrach Takeshi Murata Paperrad Mike Pare Erik Parker Ara Peterson and Jim Drain Arik Roper James Turrell Banks Violette Debora Warner

On Mobility until 27.08 De Appel, Amsterdam (NL)

2006-07-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

MIKLÓS ERHARDT - YONA FRIEDMAN - PATRICIJA JURKŠAITYTĖ - LEOPOLD KESSLER - ANDREW MIKSYS - TOMAS SARACENO - TOMO SAVIC-GECAN - SEAN SNYDER - ÅSA SONJASDOTTER - JAVIER TÉLLEZ - PATRICK TUTTOFUOCO - JUDI WERTHEIN - XU ZHEN
This summer De Appel in Amsterdam shows the last stop of On Mobility, a series of exhibitions realized with the cooperation of European contemporary art institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, initiated by Saskia Bos, former director of De Appel. On Mobility is an ever-changing collection of works by artists that are concerned about recent developments in society. In their work migration and mobility, assimilation and translation, are key issues. They examine and analyse these issues in unconventional and imaginative ways, as demonstrated by two examples chosen from the projects shown in the venue at the Nieuwe Spiegelstraat in Amsterdam. The act of crossing the border from Mexico into the US is known as ‘brinco’, jump in Spanish. Judi Werthein’s ‘crossing trainers’ prepare illegal migrants for this journey. The shoes include useful items such as a compass and a torch, as most of the migrants cross at night. Inside are painkillers, as many suffer aches and injuries during the journey, pockets for money and the insole features a map of the most popular border crossing points for illegal immigrants between Tijuana and San Diego. Embroidered on the heel is an image of Santo Toribo Romo, the official saint of the Mexican migrants, and on the front of the toe in the direction of their dreams is the American eagle. To comment on the contradictions between fashion, manufacture competition, migration and labour flow, Werthein’s sneakers have been sold as unique art objects at the American side of the border. And at the Mexican side they were freely distributed amongst would-be illegal immigrants. The project caused a great deal of controversy in the United States. Werthein was invited for many news and talk shows, but she also received a lot of hate mail. Documentation of press coverage and webforums is included in the exhibition. In De Appel Judi Werthein also realises a Brincoshop. On August 26, the auctioneer of Christie’s Amsterdam will bring the sneakers under the hammer (location De Appel). The profits will go to Casa del Migrante
and Casa Madre Asunta, two shelters for migrants in Tijuana. Inspired by a study trip to India, where the farmers collect, improve and breed the seeds of local rices, cereals and beans, Åsa Sonjasdotter wanted to transfer her experience into the regional conditions in Scandinavia, starting out with farming one of the most common local staple foods; the potato. She planted some traditional varieties, but soon she found out that these old potatoes have a complex story to tell.
In the ongoing project A Potato Perspective, Sonjasdotter explores different aspects of potato, from the cultural historical aspects of potato consumption, to those problems that arise from the regulation of agricultural production and trading, including the fact that when farming old traditional varieties, one can easily break the law, even unwittingly. At De Appel’s roof garden, Sonjasdotter grows a series of traditional potatoes. On August 26 there will be a harvesting event and the public can taste the potato varieties that grew in De Appel.

"Travesías (Crossings) (MAC) Santiago, Chile

2006-07-22T12:45:00.000-07:00

Travesías (Crossings): Chile - Asia Pacific is an innovative bilateral visual arts exchange project fostered by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Santiago, based on Article 10 of UNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (adopted by the 31st session of its General Conference, held in Paris on 02 November 2001). The latter stipulates the importance of reinforcing the creative and diffusion capabilities of culture at world level, considering the current imbalance in the flow and exchange of cultural goods at international level, and with the purpose of allowing all countries, "particularly the developing ones and those in transition to development, to establish viable and competitive cultural industries at both domestic and international levels".

Travesías (Crossings): Chile - Asia Pacific comprises the curatorship, management and production of a series of bilateral visual arts exhibitions between Chile and APEC member cultures, to be carried out in a period initially established as five years (2005 - 2010), which would be entrusted to the MAC.

This implies that the works of art sent to Chile from abroad would be showcased at the MAC in Santiago, while those sent abroad from Chile would be exhibited by the network of Centers and Museums of Contemporary Art of each participating APEC Economy.

Serge Spitzer and Ai Weiwei until 27.08 MMK, Frankfurt

2006-07-19T14:05:00.000-07:00

Our image of China is shaped by a mixture of fascination and skepticism – an experimental combination of authority, Taoism and Modernity.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (born 1957, lives and works in Beijing) stands for a generation embroiled in upheaval. Likewise, the works of US artist Serge Spitzer (born 1951, lives and works in New York) focus not only on the discovery and investigation of »models of reality« but on the use of everyday materials. On the occasion of the »Humanism in China« exhibition, both artists have for the first time joined forces to create an expansive installation entitled »Ghost Valley coming down the Mountain« (2005 – 2006). Visit the site.

Trial Balloons / Globos Sonda until 10.09 MUSAC, León (ES)

2006-07-18T10:20:00.000-07:00

Trial Balloons is an exhibition meant to explore the diverse and complex artistic trends currently engaging and concerning a selection of international art practitioners who have been working since the dawn of the current century. This group show, which comprises the work of 48 artists and other creators –including designers, architects, musicians and performers- will occupy all of MUSAC’s halls and exhibition spaces. In the words of Agustín Pérez Rubio, Chief Curator of MUSAC and one of the three curators of this new exhibition, “Through this project, in addition to rejoicing after its first year since its inauguration and celebrating the good results obtained, which are even much better than originally expected, MUSAC aims to make a little more headway without losing sight of its original purpose, its idea of collection; in short, to embrace the museographic plan upon which it is sustained. Thus, embodying quite a venture, Trial Balloons tries to reflect in two directions: on the one hand focusing on the re-generation of the artistic event wherein the museum is the foremost protagonist, and on the other hand, probing our obsessions with everything that is emerging and innovative, the fleetingness and speed characteristic of contemporary society, and more specifically with regard to contemporary art. It is very important that MUSAC, as an institution, endeavours to meet this sort of challenge, being true to the present, and demonstrating itself as a new museum model for the twenty-first century. The project therefore goes a step further by making a self-reflection about the institution as creator of energies and communities within a sector such as art.” The proposal stems from the very definition of trial balloons, non-manned balloons that automatically measure temperatures and winds and provide other environmental data at different altitudes, and from the social and political use of the term, which means to tentatively put forth an idea or anticipated plan to test public reaction. Considering what is inherent in the term and its shifting into other applications, and within the context of some important trends and practices developed over the course of the last five years in the contemporary art world, the curators strive to elaborate, according to Pérez Rubio, “a metaphor that forges paths, experiences sensations, individualises collectives, and once again considers those other realities lost after the years of documentary and verite art. The very atmosphere of the project is that which joins these balloons, taking into account that perhaps the obsession with the new and the conspicuousness of a still unknown present already weighing us down are very much alike, which should rise and grasp these or other ideas, concepts and personalities emerging from the broad scenery of contemporary art”.

It's Not a Photo until 26.08 The Chelsea Art Museum, NY

2006-07-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

It's not a photo is an exhibition of abstract photography and electronic media. If this sounds like a contradiction, the confusion is intentional. Photography has long passed its status a document of "truth" - the very basic "the camera does not lie." Photography "lies" most of the time; given the ubiquity of photo shop that even the most amateur photographer can use to the conventions within art practice of creating sets that are then photographed as "real" or the "real" shot to look as if it were fake, artifice and manipulation reign.

The group of artists selected for It's not a photo have abandoned representation to focus on the media itself. Like abstract painting, it has become increasingly self- referential, using the freedom of its apparent lack of subject to investigate the tools of its own making - light, paper, chemicals, digital process, j-pegs and the like.

The resulting work is often mysterious, evocative and replete with a sense of haunting beauty.

Artists selected for the exhibition include:
Dimitrios Antonitsis
Jeremy Blake
Marco Breuer
Willa Davis
Bjørn Melhus
David Samuel Stern
Wolfgang Tillmanns
James Welling

Painting As a Way of Living until 27.08. Istanbul Modern Art Museum

2006-07-08T12:04:00.000-07:00

The video programmes at Istanbul Modern aim to present some of the most significantlocal and international productions created in this medium. Through a varied selection, the Istanbul Modern video programmes reveal how certain contemporary artists use new technologies to analyse or represent the aesthetic, emotional and social concerns of the times they are living in. The 4th Video Program at Istanbul Modern will run parallel to the monographic exhibition of works by two major Turkish abstract painters, Fahrelnissa Zeid and Nejad Devrim. Under the title “Painting as a Way of Living” the video works by Lida Abdul, Adrian Paci, Sarkis and Tony Tasset propose fascinating reflections on the practice of painting and reveal how the marvels of the sublime go hand in hand with the simplicity, the difficulties and the tragedies of everyday life. The works by these artists offer new insights into the understanding of how painting as a discipline continues to exist and expand beyond the classical limits of the framed canvas, into new territories, thanks to the use of contemporary media.