ART NEWS:Dec.03
A new, free, web-based publication on cultural practice is now available, “In Terms of Performance” is a keywords anthology designed to provoke discovery and generate shared literacies across disciplines. It features essays and interviews from more than 50 prominent artists, curators, presenters, and scholars who reflect on common yet contested terms in contemporary cultural practice. The publication is produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia and the Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley and co-edited by Shannon Jackson, director of the Arts Research Center and Paula Marincola, executive director of the Pew Center. As a free online resource, “In Terms of Performance” is non-linear and richly cross-listed, enabling an unstructured browsing experience in which terms, contributors, and artworks connect intricately in a true web of reference, while inviting new entries to be added in the future. It also allows users to create their own PDF publications, customized to their interests.
The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI in Breda are jointly acquiring 17 digital works by: Constant Dullaart, Rafaël Rozendaal, Floris Kaayk, Rosa Menkman, Geoffrey Lillemon, Jan Robert Leegte, JODI, Vuk Ćosić, Martine Neddam (under the pseudonym of Mouchette), Olia Lialina, Jon Rafman, Petra Cortright, Jonas Lund, UV Production House and Michael Mandiberg. This collaboration is spurred by MOTI’s change of course, it is due to reopen in the course of 2017 as the Stedelijk Museum Breda, where the legacy of the city of Breda will have a more prominent role. In a time where museums are increasingly expected to show artistic distinctiveness and to operate as a cultural enterprise, collaboration at the national level is an obvious step. With this joint acquisition, the two museums seek to enhance the visibility of digital art for the general public, and to give digital art a permanent place in the national art collection, Collectie Nederland.
The 43rd issue of Harvard Design Magazine issue: “Shelf Life” investigates and unpacks the contents, containers, and systems of storage that organize our world. The more stuff we accumulate, the more space we need to store it all. Storage is the aggregation and containment of the material and immaterial stuff of culture; but also the safeguarding or hoarding, of energy and tools for some imagined future purpose. How does all this stuff mask or overcompensate for economic and ecological bankruptcy? Is storage about greed or need? Storage, perhaps, is everything we can live without but insist on living with. “Shelf Life” explores what’s inside the box. Even as we attempt to reduce and recycle, the stuff that we dispose of also needs to be stored. Where do we put it? Our planet is now a saturated receptacle. This warehouse is full, and we’re all inside it.
The group exhibition “Time Will Tell – A selection of artists from the Ricard Foundation Prize” is based on the history of the Ricard Prize, which was inaugurated in 1999, and since has distinguished an emerging artist on the young French art scene each year, invites us to think beyond the very logic of what a prize does, which is to single out a personae at a given time. Instead, it asks to consider what can be common, continuous, reiterative in a situation that the award of the Prize creates in the life and work of an artist. This exhibition by: Boris Achour, Camille Blatrix, Katinka Bock, Isabelle Cornaro, Tatiana Trouvé, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Raphaël Zarka, who won the Prize since its inception, calls attention to how artists, undistracted by competition for fame and prizes, develop a practice in the long run, maintain deliberate, conscious control, keeping to the plan, the subject, the gait and the direction of the work. Info: Curators: Thomas Boutoux and Paola Santoscoy, Museo Experimental El Eco, Sullivan 43 Col. San Rafael, Mexico City, Duration: 9/12/16-2/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://eleco.unam.mx
With a joint exhibition C/O Berlin, the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, and the Museum Folkwang in Essen are celebrating their tri-city collaboration. Examined through the lens of Berlin’s Werkstatt für Photographie and Essen’s nascent photography scene, the exhibition takes a look at an important chapter in the history of German photography that has been partly obscured by the success story of the Düsseldorf School. In 1976, the Berlin-based photographer Michael Schmidt founded the “Werkstatt für Photographie” at the adult education center in Kreuzberg. Its course orientation with a focus on a substantive examination of contemporary photography was unique and quickly lead to a profound understanding of the medium as an independent art form. When the institution was closed in 1986, it fell into obscurity. Info: “The Rebellious Image”, Museum Folkwang, Museumsplatz 1, Essen, Duration 9/12/16-19/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.museum-folkwang.de, “Kreuzberg – Amerika”, C/O Berlin, Hardenbergstraße 22-24, Berlin, Duration: 10/12/16-12/2/17, Days & Hours: Daily 11:00-20:00, www.co-berlin.org & “And Suddenly this Expanse” Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kurt-Schwitters-Platz, Hanover, Duration 11/12/16-19/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue 10:00-20:00, Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.sprengel-museum.com
Sexism continues to pervade the art world, male artists still garner the highest prices for their work and are disproportionately represented in exhibitions. In a challenge to the boys’ club sensibility that has historically shaped abstract painting, the eight female painters featured in the exhibition, which is named after the feminist hardcore punk movement that began in the ‘90s, achieve mastery, innovation, and chutzpah in their brash and exciting paintings—without seeking external validation. With works by the pioneering painters Mary Heilmann, Charline von Heyl, Judy Ledgerwood, and Joyce Pensato, as well as a younger generation of artists, including Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Amy Feldman, “Riot Grrrls” is part of an ongoing exhibition series featuring iconic works from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Collection. Info: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E Chicago Avenue, Chicago, Duration: 15/12/16-18/6/17, Days & Hours: Tue 10:00-20:00, Wed-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://mcachicago.org
In his solo exhibition “Traces” Benji Boyadgian presents a body of work spanning over a few year. Boyadgian’s research-based works feature encounters with architectural relics, and with consequences of political and social situations pertaining to his background, in combination with imageries of his perception. These projects explore themes revolving around heritage, territory, architecture and landscape. Boyadgian mostly uses painting and drawing as the main tools to convey his subject matters. Nevertheless, Traces contains various medias, including photography, animatıon, and spatial installation. Cyprus, through its landscape and long history share some similarities with Palestine that has inspired Boyadgian to work in the island. The contexts are different, but a set of questions that interest him in general are shared. Info: Curator Basak Senova, Art Rooms, Ecevit Cad, Kyrenia, Duration: 16/12/16-16/1/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Mon 12:00-22:00, www.artroomsatthehouse.com
Babette Mangolte is an icon of international experimental cinema. From the beginning, her early interests focused on the documentation of the New York art, dance, and theatre scene of the ‘70s, and above all, on performance art. The adaptation of dance and choreography for the media of film and photography and the concomitant question regarding the changes this transfer has on an event based on the live experience, play a central role in her work. “I = EYE” not only presents an array of Mangolte’s film and photo works from the ‘70s, but also more recent projects, which explore the historicisation of performance art, and the differences between perceptions of contemporaneity past and present, as well as conceptualizations of time. All works are defined by a visual form that innovatively incorporates and reflects on a wide array of influences from silent and American experimental filmto feminist film theory. Info: Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1, Vienna, Duration: 18/12/16-12/2/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.kunsthallewien.at
The group exhibition “Afterworks” explores issues of class, race, labour, and migration in the South East Asian region and beyond, as well as their corresponding aesthetics and histories. The exhibition includes the work of artists of different practices, contexts, and generations. Several artists navigate directly the main thematic map of the exhibition; others chose a more personal approach, looking at the presence of domestic workers in households, the public sphere, and the artists’ lives, while another group of artists create abstract and poetic landscapes that bring a different and necessary vocabulary in an exhibition that tries to address such a wide and contradictory array of topics and perspectives, from personal desires and dreams, to historical processes. The stories of migrant workers in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and elsewhere are crucial narratives, together with the stories of struggle of what is considered the ‘local’ working class and of other groups that have seen themselves historically disadvantaged. Info: ILHAM, Level 3 and 5, Menara ILHAM, 8 Jalan Binjai, Kuala Lumpur, Duration: 18/12/16-16/4/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.ilhamgallery.com