ART NEWS:March 03

Dichotomy is at the center of Matthew Ronay new installation, “When Two Are In One”, commissioned as part of Pérez Art Museum Miami’s Project Gallery series. This body of 11 sculptures, arranged in a processional atop a low plinth in the center of the gallery, suggest reproduction and twinning as their subject. The varied objects in this installation employ strategies of symmetry, reflection, and doubling. The installation’s title evokes the hermaphroditic underpinning of the project and is manifest in the composition of single works and in sets of asymmetrically paired sculptures. The installation also offers an evolution of Ronay’s exploration of ritual objects and architecture, placing the form of the altar in direct conversation with modes of display associated with modernist sculpture. Info: Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, Duration: 10/3/16-15/1/17, Days & Hours: Mon Tue & Fri-sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, http://pamm.org

The new exhibition by Sara Barker presents two sequences of new work made specially for The Fruitmarket Gallery together with a small number of existing works. With its combination of new and existing work, the exhibition “CHANGE-THE-SETTING”, offers the opportunity to spend time learning the language of Barker’s art, enjoying how her objects change in relation both to you and to each other as you walk around and among them. The title is meant to function like a stage direction, invoking a situation in which one element can be changed to allow the others to recombine in a different way. Info: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, Duration: 12/3-5/6/16, Days & Hours: Mon–Sat 11:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, www.fruitmarket.co.uk

Closely linked to the “Earthrise” exhibition dedicated to the Italian artistic scene in the ‘70s, the PAV is continuing its investigations into the pioneers of the relationship between artistic practices and the natural environment, this time moving towards the East and tracing a constellation of complementary experiences generated under Socialism. “ecologEAST: Art and Nature Beyond the Wall” presents non-official, Avant-Garde artistic research working with the environment and spread throughout Central Europe.. The differences in context, primarily from an ideological point of view, make it difficult to make their approach comparable with that developed by western Earth workers and Land artists, over and well beyond the appearance of the strategies used. Info: Parco Arte Vivente (PAV), Via Giordano Bruno 31, Turin, Duration: 17/3-26/6/16, Days & Hours: Fri: 15:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-19:00, http://parcoartevivente.it

Peter Güllenstern and Jürgen Stollhans’s new exhibition “Africa Waterfront Party”, explores Cologne’s Mülheimer Hafen as a microcosm of urban transformation, using a combination of non-narrative fiction film and collage. In their work, the site is visited by the imaginary character Lucius Okeh, whose symbolic actions suggest that he might be the catalyst for new forms of urban colonization. The Mülheimer Hafen is a space already profoundly shaped by the coexistence of modernism and colonial representation: the famous Werkbund Exhibition. Likewise, the Pressa exhibition of 1928 featured a “special colonial exhibit” alongside El Lissitsky’s Soviet pavilion.It is this history of associations that Güllenstern and Stollhans explore in their DIY faux-documentary infographics. Info: Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne, Herwarthstraße 3, Cologne, duration: 18/3-24/6/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 14:00-19:00, Sat-sun 13:00-18:00, www.academycologne.org

In her project “The Rhetoric of Tides”, Ariane Michel takes an organic, evolving cinematic approach to investigating the role of the artist in the light of Nature’s differing scales and movements. The artist had curated a venture on the wild coast of Esquibien, in Finistère, Brittany, an invitation to 21 artists to create works on the shoreline. Her video installation at La Criée is a concentrate of the event and its multiple time frames. Those of the artists: their bodies, actions and respiration. Those of the works: fleeting performances, fragile creations soon swept away. But also the time frames of everything making up the setting in space-time contexts other than our own: granite, crabs, lichen, the swell of the sea, and so on – a host of custodians imbuing the place with their varied scales. Info: Curator: Sophie Kaplan, La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Place Honoré Commeurec, Rennes, Duration: 18/3-22/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.criee.org

The first exhibition to open simultaneously within in the framework of Kanon-Fragen 2016–2019 is “Past Disquiet. Narratives and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978”, is a documentary and archival exhibition centered on the research conducted on and around the story of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine, which opened in the spring of 1978 at the Beirut Arab University, Lebanon. Organized by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), it comprised approximately 200 artworks donated by artists from around 30 countries. The exhibition was intended as the seed collection for a museum in exile, taking the form of an itinerant exhibition that was meant to tour worldwide until it could be repatriated to Palestine. During the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, the building where the works were stored, together with the exhibition’s archival traces, was destroyed. Info: Curators: Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10, Berlin, Duration: 19/3-9/5/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 11:00-19:00, www.hkw.de

In the solo exhibition “Des surfaces peintes larges plates claires” of Jean-Pierre Bertrand we are entering a quasi liturgical space where red and gold mix with honey, and also glimpsing a field of experimentation made from someelements of measurement, from a collection of relationships to the body and to colour like matter and energy. A builder’s art with an idea of man and how he may be worked by the mind and the verb. We can also identify a type of Shamanism, rectified by a mondrian rigor. Info: Michel Rein Paris, 42 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 19/3-7/5/16, days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://michelrein.com

The fragile structure of Margaux Bricler’s first solo exhibition “un œuf, un caillou, un chat”, originated from a dedication signed in a book. On an almost blank page, a swift and mysterious hand left a triptych of names, functioning like metaphorical symbols open to interpretation: An egg, a pebble, a cat. Bricler, whose past artistic trajectory was close to conceptual Minimalism, takes root this time in the fields of poetic evocation and matter and brings together around 10 works, each belonging to a series begun in 2014, “la prose du monde”. The artist uses an aesthetic in which a contemporary, almost surreal romanticism blends with many allusions to the iconography of the Quattrocento and the codes of alchemy. Info: Michel Rein Paris, 42 rue de Turenne, Paris, Duration: 19/3-7/5/16, days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, http://michelrein.com

The grpoup exhibition “Afterwork” explores issues of class, race, labor, and migration in Hong Kong, its surrounding region, and beyond. It is part of Para Site’s ongoing Hong Kong’s Migrant Domestic Workers Project, a long-term initiative aimed at engaging the domestic worker community through collaboratively organised public programmes and commissioned artist research. As an exhibition is nevertheless an autonomous proposition, including the often ambivalent and polychromatic aspects of the social and cultural mosaic of Hong Kong, Philippines, Indonesia, as well as of other contexts. The exhibition includes the work of artists of different practices, contexts, and generations dealing with the issues, aesthetics, and histories of migrant labor. Info: Para Site, 677 King’s Road, 22/F, Wing Wah Industrial Building, Hong Kong, Duration: 19/3-29/5/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 12:00-19:00. www.para-site.org.hk

The large-scale exhibition, “Digging a Hole in China” features a range of works produced in China that bear a connection to land, the exhibition attempts to expose and analyze the discrepancies between this genre of work and “conventional” Land Art understood in the Western-centric art historical context. In the late ‘60s, thousands of intellectuals were sent to rural regions as part of the “Down to the Countryside” Movement. In China, the concept of Land Art was imported from the West in the mid-‘80s. While most of these works did not necessarily relate to their Western counterparts, and there were vast differences between the two context,their concurrence nevertheless reveals intriguing correlations. Info: OCAT Shenzhen, F2 Building, OCT LOFT, Enping Road, Nanshan, Shenzhen, Duration: 20/3-26/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:30, http://ocat.org.cn

“Élysée” proposes a literal as well as figurative reflection on the aesthetics of power. Melding multiple temporalities and geographical remits, Laurent Grasso creates a mode of diffraction and echo, leading to an exchange regards the different emanations of power. The exhibition unfolds around the artist’s new film, with an original soundtrack by Nicolas Godin, shot in the Salon Doré of the Élysée Palace, the personal office of the President of the French Republic. Building a discourse between the film and selected works throughout the gallery, Grasso addresses the continuity of power, chiefly how it exists above and beyond its incarnation by an individual. Info: Edouard Malingue Gallery, 33 Des Voeux, Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 21/3- 30/4/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-19:00, http://edouardmalingue.com