ART NEWS:Apr.02

A newly commissioned painting of monumental scale “Empireland” grapples with Ireland’s history as a state. With images, icons, symbols and figures relating to Ireland’s religious, medicinal, corporeal and cultural histories, Mark O’Kelly’s ambitious history painting is interwoven with elements of conceptual and renaissance art history. Looming large over it all is an image of the Dunnes Stores (supermarket) strikers, who in 1983 refused to handle South African goods in solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement. Produced on the structure of a motorway gantry sign, the depicted engines of culture and democracy churn up a complex and layered image – an abstract roadmap of Ireland’s evolution born of rebellion. Info: Project Arts Centre, 39 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin, Duration: 31/3-28/5/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 11:00-20:00, http://projectartscentre.ie

Running parallel to the large retrospective of Günter Brus in the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the exhibition “Good Old West Berlin” is dedicated to his Berlin years in a partially new, partially familiar artistic setting. The core of the exhibition is the Berlin Scene of the 1970s, the artistic milieu in which Brus lived and worked, the collaborations, mutual dedications and collective events and exhibitions. In Berlin he founded the “Austrian government-in-exile” together with other artists and published their magazine, the Schastrommel. It was also in Berlin that the editions of Armin Hundertmark, whose boxes remain unsurpassed in terms of quality and demands, were created. Info: Neue Galerie Graz – Universalmuseum Joanneum, Joanneumsviertel, Graz, Duration: 8/4-10/7/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.museum-joanneum.at

With the exhibition “On the Wire”, for the first time in France, Jean-Hubert Martin has accepted the invitation of two galleries in Paris, to curate an exhibition intiating a fertile dialogue between Art Brut and contemporary art. Art Brut has entered a new era: formerly followed by enlightened amateurs as rare as they were exclusive, these works, having risen from alterity, are now frequently associated with more predictable artistic productions. But the stakes of including them in the field of licensed art go much further than the questions about how they are shown or the way they are contextualized. Indeed, the typical dialectic seems to have no hold over these works, which are devoid of any explicit reference to art history. Info: Curator Jean-Hubert, Christian Berst art brut,  3-5 passage des Gravilliers (entrance by 10, rue chapon), Paris, Duration: 9/4-22/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 14:00-19:00, http://www.christianberst.com/en/home.html and Galerie Jean Brolly, 16 rue de Montmorency, Paris Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.jeanbrolly.com

Jean-Michel Alberola is at once one of the best-known and most mysterious French artists of his generation. The exhibition “The Details of Adventure (Chapter II)” is devoted to his recent works on paper. Since the early 1980s, standing between Conceptualism, Abstraction and Figuration, artistic reflexion and political questioning, Jean-Michel Alberola’s strikingly unique work is never devoid of humour. The artist pieces employ both fragmentation and superimposition, marrying plastically the word to the language of forms. By associating fragments of bodies or geographies to ambiguous statements or injunctions (such as Is the exit inside? or Neither law nor grace), he composes series of philosophical rebuses which question how we see art’s role in society. Info: Galerie Daniel Templon, Impasse Beaubourg, 30 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 9/4-28/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.danieltemplon.com/new

Vincent Olinet lives and works in Brussels. He works in a variety of mediums from sculpture, photography and mixed media to large scale installations. Vincent Olinet experiments and makes his works as objects-toys in transit between the real and the imaginary. Fascinated by the making of the merveilleux, he carves into the real and confer it the excess of a dream. He chooses his subjects for their emotional power, their potential to speak universally, and shapes them to amplify their sculptural nature. His models become two-face figures, protagonist and stage, playing with both an attractive and repulsive perceptions, developing the confusion of truth and falsity, his new exhibition “MMXVI” is on presentation at: Galerie Laurent Godin, 5 rue du grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration: 9/4-7/5/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.laurentgodin.com

The exhibition “Magical Surfaces: The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography”, explores the uncanny as exemplified in the works of 7 artists from two generations, all of whose work includes in different forms the use of photography as a medium. The title of this exhibition derives from the thoughts of Vilém Flusser who, in his “Towards a Philosophy of Photography”, 1983, wrote of photographic images as “significant surfaces” and of “the magical nature of images”. We are always intrigued when an apparently straightforward image suddenly takes on an ambiguous, uncanny, quality as our mind grasps, as Ernst Jentsch wrote in 1906, its “intellectual uncertainty”. The mastery each of the exhibiting artists has over their own process of manipulating the photographic image invites us to marvel at the many ways the uncanny can occur in photographic works Info: Curator: Ziba Ardalan, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, 14 Wharf Road, London, Duration: 13/4-26/6/16, Days & Hours: Mo: by prior arrangement, Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-17:00, http://parasol-unit.org

The group exhibition “As Rights Go By” explores judicial, social and emotional shifts in the relationship between politics, economics and violence. The purported necessity for political policy to submit to market interests is leading to a shift in individual rights to the advantage of investors. Debt and trade agreements are being instrumentalized to establish and institutionalize inequality. The radicalization and globalization of markets is, in turn, leading to the entrenchment of inequalities between rich and poor countries in the battle for cheap raw materials and labour. Neo-colonial strategies are among the causes of migratory movements. The artworks explore the impact of globalization, financialization, and mass surveillance on civil and human rights, as well as the social and judicial inequality they entail. Info: Curator: Sabine Winkler, freiraum Q21 INTERNATIONAL/MuseumsQuartier Wien, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 15/4-15/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 13:00-16:00 & 16:30-20:00, www.q21.at

What do you do when you are disoriented, when the compass of your phone goes haywire? You reset it. The procedure depends on the situation and device, but you always have to stay calm and carefully follow instructions if you want the compass to capture signals again. The thematic exhibition “Reset Modernity!”, is offering you to do something similar, resetting a few of the instruments that allow you to register some of the confusing signals sent by the epoch. Except what we are trying to recalibrate is not as simple as a compass, but this most obscure principle of projection to map out the world, namely Modernity. Info: Curators: Bruno Latour, Martin Guinard-Terrin, Christophe Leclercq & Donato Ricci, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Lorenzstr. 19, Karlsruhe, Duration: 16/4-7/8/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://zkm.de

Guan Xiao’s exhibition “Flattened Metal” includes a video triptych and new installation comprising five large printed screens, in front of which are sculptures made up of various materials, including speakers that emit audio works. Working mainly in sculpture and video, artist Guan Xiao (b. 1983, lives and works in Beijing) explores how ways of seeing are now influenced by digital image and information circulation as an increasingly dominant source of knowledge exchange. In various works and installations she endeavours to expand the aesthetic and cognitive possibilities for how meanings and identities are assigned and understood, without seeking to compartmentalize or fix definitions. Info: Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London, Duration: 20/4-19/6/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.ica.org