ART NEWS:June 03
Although largely ignored in its day, the short-lived magazine Provoke (1968-69) was one of the most important photographic publications of the 20th Century. In existence for just three issues, it crystallized the best in Japanese photography from the ‘60s. The major exhibition “Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, Photography in Japan 1960–1975”, is the first to explore the full context and influence of the magazine as a collective project. It situates Provoke between the political movements of the ‘60s and the flourishing of photography in relation to Japanese performance art during the early ‘70s. In a lively installation that features works by” Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikō Hosoe, Kazuo Kitai, Daidō Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Shōmei Tōmatsu and many more, the exhibition explores the magazine’s work of provocation, reflecting both the spirit of protest and the performative aspects of Japanese camera work. Info: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Grüzenstrasse 44 + 45, Winterthur, Zurich, Duration: 28/5-28/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue & Thu-sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.fotomuseum.ch
Claude Closky started exploring the minimal operations of thought and perceptions 25 year ago, using drawing, creating and appropriating images, objects, sentences words, actions and creating videos. Developin paradoxes, playing the idiot or both at the same time, he is able to show the instability of ordinary operations which we do not usually deem problematic. In the exhibition “Vampires and ghosts”, the artists mainly presents collages, drawings and videos that do not quite look like videos. In Galerie Laurent Godin, the artist flips the switch, the only permanent source of light comes from the videos that they are looped. The artist set the conditios, but dos not master the order in which visitor discover the works nor does he always decide what, exactly, happens in them. Info: Galerie Laurent Godin, 5 rue du grenier Saint-Lazare, Paris, Duration: 28/5-23/7/16, Days & Hours: Sat 11:00-19:00, www.laurentgodin.com
Rockbund Art Museum presents its latest group exhibition, “Tell Me a Story: Locality and Narrative”. The exhibition presents 11 stories from different parts of Asia, all rooted in local historical and cultural backgrounds. Told from the unique perspectives of the artists as well as their deeply personal connections with the various locales, a new and unfamiliar outlook of Asia is revealed. From the borders of northern Thailand to Malaysia, from Japan and Korea to Taiwan and Hong Kong—these are places that we know of as sites of tourism and consumption without really understanding much about their current socio-historical conditions. Indeed, even in Shanghai, a city where we live our everyday lives—behind the glamour of skyscrapers lie parallel worlds of stories and meaning on the waters. Info: Curator: Amy Cheng and Hsieh Feng-Rong, Rockbund Art Museum, No.20 Huqiu Road, Shanghai, Duration: 28/5-14/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.rockbundartmuseum.org
The Shedhalle project “The Whole World in Zurich. Direct Intervention into Swiss Migration Politics“ (concept and realization in collaboration with the artist Martin Krenn), yielded to artistically explore concrete proposals for Urban Citizenship in Zurich. The project created a transformative space for thinking, negotiating and acting collaboratively, beyond practical constraints of political “realism”. It created a pre-enactment of a social utopia. For in a global age, the whole world is reflected in one city. The exhibition “#urbancitizenship. City and Democracy” gives visual insights into above-mentioned processes: the idea of urban citizenship, its beginnings throughout the world, its arrival in Switzerland, and its future: a city for us all. Info: Curator: Katharina Morawek, Shedhalle Zürich, Rote Fabrik, Seestrasse 395, Zurich, Duration: 2/6-25/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 13:00-18:00, Thu 13:00-21:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-18:00, www.shedhalle.ch
The exhibition “media block_richard kriesche” presents an overview of Richard Kriesche’s work from 1964 to today. He repeatedly focused on the social meaning of art and broadened the conventional concept of art by expanding into the areas of technology, the economy and science. Numbers play a special role in Richard Kriesche’s work. He works with numerical codes, precise measurements, size ratios and numerical proportions. Even in his abstract pictures from the ‘60s. He he demonstrates a systematic approach to art, working with geometric shapes or with the primary colours of yellow, red and blue. These early works already indicate the close relationship between art and scientific research that becomes even more evident in his later works. The installations take place under clearly defined spatial and temporal conditions. With an analytical, investigative gaze, his art seeks to open up new approaches to the world. Info: Neue Galerie Graz – Universalmuseum Joanneum, Joanneumsviertel, Graz, Duration: 3/6-2/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.museum-joanneum.at
Charlotte Moth uses: photography and film, slide projections and sculptural arrangements. The source and point of reference of many of her works is “Travelogue”, a collection of photographs that she has been assembling since 1999, constantly adding more in the course of her research. The artist commented, “As a collection it reveals a personal circulation and movement through my visiting places”. The exhibition combines Moth’s diverse groups of works to create a presentation that engages with the architecture of the Kunstmuseum. The artist surveys and explores places: everyday, natural, architectural or institutional. And she creates mise-en-scènes so her works engage in “sculptural dialogues” with each other, dialogues that are not only pervaded by a sense of lightness and motion, but which also create truly magical atmospheres. Info: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Städtle 32, Vaduz, Duration 3/6-4/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, www.kunstmuseum.li
As part of its 50th anniversary celebrations and to mark Claude Viallat’s 10th solo exhibition at the gallery, Galerie Templon presents “Les années 1980”, a historical perspective of works by the artist. The ‘80s was the period when Claude Viallat’ achieved prominence. He moved on from his beginnings as a founder of the Avant-Garde movement “Supports/Surfaces” experimenting more with color and texture. He was selected to represent France at the 1988 Venice Biennale. An admirer of Venetian painting, of Matisse and Pollock, he started layering paint thickly onto banners, curtains, fragments of tents and parasols. Info: Gallery Daniel Templon, 30 rue Beaubourg, Paris, Duration: 4/6-23/7/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.danieltemplon.com/new
“Power.Play” is John Gerrard’s first exhibition in China. The exhibition features three major works: “Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada)” (2014) a painstakingly accurate, virtual portrait of a functioning solar farm, “Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma)” (2015) a digitally modeled composite of one of Google’s server centers in Oklahoma and “Exercise (Dunhuang)” (2014), a reconstruction based on satellite imagery of a system of roadways located mysteriously in the middle of the Gobi Desert, which then becomes the site for a lengthy elimination game played among avatars modeled on factory workers in Guangzhou. Together the works raise important questions not only about key issues of the present historical moment such as power and surveillance, but about the very nature of the work of art in the digital age. Info: Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), 798 Art District, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, Duration: 9/6-7/8/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-19:00, http://ucca.org.cn
Gülsün Karamustafa’s oeuvre stretches from the mid-‘70s to the present day and encompasses various media, including painting, installation, performance art, and video. Her work focuses on questions of migration, politically-induced nomadism, pop culture, feminism and gender, and often provides a critical analysis of the Western view of Middle-Eastern countries. Rendered in a variety of media, these subjects permeate all phases and forms of her artistic work and are of unmistakable relevance to current debates. The exhibition “Chronographia” illustrates how these themes have recurringly interlaced with each other over the decades, the approximately 110 works are deliberately displayed not according to chronology, but rather by theme, thus revealing the underlying and ongoing dialogue between them. Info: Curator: Melanie Roumiguière, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, Invalidenstrasse 50/51, Berlin, Duration: 10/6-23/10/16, Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Sat-sun 11:00-18:00, www.smb.museum
The 13th Fellbach Small Sculpture Triennial 2016, “FOOD-Ecologies of the Everyday” borrows its title from the still relevant project “FOOD” run by Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, Tina Girouard, Suzanne Harris and Rachel Lew in the early ‘70s. More than 40 international artists on the subject of food and the context of it’s production and consumption as paradigmatic, universal examples of social, political, ecological and economic interrelations. The Fellbach Triennial 2016 serves as a platform to explore how contemporary art deals with aspects of the economic and ecological cycles of food, addresses the social and political dimensions of food and eating, or enquires how we define ourselves through what we ingest and to what extent it reflects our self-image and body awarenesss. A number of historical positions, such as those of Gordon Matta-Clark, Félix González-Torres and Paul Thek, provide a framework. Artists like Andrea Büttner, Laure Prouvost and Subodh Gupta are represented by larger groups of works and play a key role within the exhibition. Info: Curator: Dr. Susanne Gaensheimer, Co-Curator: Anna Goetz, 13th Fellbach Small Sculpture Triennial 2016, Alte Kelter Fellbach, Untertürkheimer Strasse 33, Fellbach, Duration: 11/6-2/10/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri 14:00-19:00, Thu 14:00-21:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-19:00, http://www.triennale.de
Matt Keegan’s and Kay Rosen’s shared interests led to a physical mail exchange started in 2009 and ongoing. Through their correspondence, they have created an archive of images, drawings, collages, and notes that map their thoughts and ideas about current events, their daily lives, pop culture, humor and more. The exhibition “Eine Wanderausstellung” is the first to bring together a selection of their mailings alongside works by each of the artists. In addition to the mailings with Keegan, Rosen will include in the exhibition a three-part site-specific wall painting “Happy Ever After”, a new video, “Blue Monday” and a small painting, “She-Man”. Matt Keegan presents a laser-cut steel sculpture, wall painting, video, and collage that highlight his use of idiomatic phrases calling attention to the materiality of language and its open-ended possibilities. Info: Grazer Kunstverein, Palais Trauttmansdorff, Burggasse 4, Graz, Duration: 11/6-7/8/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.grazerkunstverein.org
Storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario García Torres deploys to uncover (hidden) histories, narratives, and strategies embedded in archives, sites, and places and thereby to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. “An Arrival Tale” uses a conceptual gesture that detaches the works by the artist in the TBA21 Collection from their original contexts and descriptions and offers them as a collection of stories and artistic experiments open for reinscription thereby addressing the contemporary conditions and urgencies of our societies. Like much of his work, the exhibition itself questions untimely certainties, both by looking back, complicating historical descriptions, and their relationship to the future and by looking forward and projecting new possibilities. Info: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Scherzergasse 1A, Vienna, Duration: 17/6-20/11/16, Days & Hours: Wed-Thu 12:00-17:00, Fri-Sun 12:00-19:00, www.tba21.org