ART NEWS:Jan.02

Samson Young presents “A dark theme keeps me here, I’ll make a broken music” his first institutional solo exhibition in Europe. Young is a sound artist and composer, in 2017 the artist will be featured in the Hong Kong pavilion at the Venice Biennale. From the perspective of a composer, Young conceives sound works, installations, performances, drawings, sound walks, and films. On presentation is a series of drawings entitled “Landschaft”. In these “sound drawings” the artist translates the noises of his environment and the ringing of the bells into musical notation. His works represent an unusual contribution within the complex relationship between music and visual art and open up new perspectives for the perception of sounds as well as pictures. Along with the series “Muted Situation” (2014), directions for listening to sound situations in a new way or perceiving the political qualities of sound itself, and a selection of works from the series “Sound Drawings” (2015–), the exhibition also features large-scale installations in which Young deals with conflicts and wars. Info: Curator: Jasmina Merz, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Grabbeplatz 4, Düsseldorf, Duration: 17/12/16-5/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.kunsthalle-duesseldorf.de

The exhibition “Stillness in Motion-Cloud Cities”, by Tomás Saraceno, includes an immersive site-specific cloudscape installation of suspended tension structures and floating sculptures, as well as explorations of the intricate constructions of spider webs. The exhibition is part of Saraceno’s larger, long-term project titled “Aerocene”, the artist’s vision for a future era in which humanity minimizes the impact on the planet’s fossil-fuel resources, and instead resides in collective airborne cities. In the exhibition, visitors are encouraged to wind their way through and below a geometrically complex array of cords and reflective panels, forming a cloud of 10,000 nodes suspended in the air by tension and connected to the gallery walls, floor and ceiling. This site-specific work is inspired by multiple phenomena and structures, including the social construction of spider webs, stellar and atmospheric clouds, bubble and foam geometry and social and neural communication networks. Info: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), 151 3rd Street, San Francisco, Duration: 17/12/16-21/5/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Fri-Sun 10:00-17:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.sfmoma.org

Jude Broughan in her solo exhibition “Athenree”, presents a tiny beach town with the same name, in the coastal Bay of Plenty, in the artist’s native New Zealand. It was named after the Northern Irish ‘townland’ that is home to the monolithic Athenree Portal Tomb. Revealing an interest in the process of traveling and the concomitant instability of ‘place,’ Broughan’s new works state their claim on the here and now while simultaneously questioning exactly where and when this might be. In assemblages, loose-hanging works, mixed-media panels, and photo collages, Broughan draws on the languages of painting and printmaking alongside those of photography and collage to play with space and form, line and color. Using colored vinyl, leather, denim, and polyester grounds, she alludes to her own physicality while pondering the nature of artistic production itself.  Info: Benrubi Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 6/1-25/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://benrubigallery.com

David B. (Pierre-François Beauchard) was one of the initiators of the French alternative editorial house L’Association, and is now well-known for the graphic novels he either wrote and drew himself and the ones he wrote for others. After he co-founded L’Association in 1990, he began using the pseudonym David B. and specialized in short black-and-white stories, detailing nightmarish dreams, collected in the album ‘Le Cheval Blême’ in 1992. As powerful as his dream imagery is in itself, it is amplified by his masterful use of black and white drawings. In his solo exhibition entitled “Mon Frère et le Roi du Monde”, includes a set of 72 drawings. This project follows the last two solo exhibitions of the artist at the art centre le Pavillon Blanc in Colomiers and at the Museum of l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix in les Sables d’Olonne, as well as the book published by l’Association. David B.’s new works are on presentation. Info: Gallery Anne Barrault, 51 rue des Archives, Paris, Duration 7/1-18/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.galerieannebarrault.com

“Salon, Salon: Fine Art Practices from 1972 to 1982 in Profile—A Beijing Perspective” is the third exhibition of “From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position: The Legacy of Socialist Realism in Chinese Contemporary Art”, a research initiated that examines the historical narratives and ideological construct of Chinese contemporary art in a timeframe of 67 years since 1949. The exhibition focuses on a 10-year period, from 1972 to 1982. This decade is both a critical transition in China’s political history, and a relatively cohesive artistic period. This exhibition inquires into the artistic practices of three generations of artists, mainly active in Beijing, within this ten-year period. This exhibition includes works as well as archival materials that outline the historical settings out of which their works and practice had emerged. It looks at the “internal exile” of artists and their practice under harsh political circumstances, from the late Cultural Revolution to the eve of the Reform and Open Door policy, considering how individual practitioners had explored, defined, oscillated or adjusted their personal standpoints confronted by the tension between art and politics. In particular, we will investigate the modernist experience inherited from the Republican Period of China, how it contradicted, collided, intertwined, reconciled with and strayed from the mainstream ideology within the structure of the PRC. Info: Curators: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, Inside-Out Art Museum, Xingshikou Rd, Haidian District, Sector-A, Inside-Out Artist Colony, Beijing, Duration: 8/1-7/5/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.ioam.org.cn

Anne-Marie Schneider presents drawings in “I am here”, her solo exhibition at the Michel Rein Gallery. The line is the primary formulation in the imaginary of Anne-Marie Schneider, in which autobiographical activity also has a strong presence. The line refers to gestural writing and gives shape to the enigmatic world of personages whose bodies are often taken apart and fitted back together in fragments, prolonged in domestic space and projected on to the landscape. Schneider’s fascination with everyday situations and banal objects reveals a certain degree of explicit violence in her lines; fable, satire, black humour and absurdity comprise highly personal work, whereby improvisation inhabits the same space as a precise and calculated form of expression. Info: Michel Rein Gallery, 51A Washington Street, Brussels, Duration: 12/1-25/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://michelrein.com

The NTU CCA Ideas Fest is an invitation to share and engage in cooperative projects and collective experiences that critically reflect on current challenges in urban development and future habitats. It is a platform to catalyse critical exchange of ideas and encourage thinking out of the box. “CITIES FOR PEOPLE”, a pilot edition of the annual NTU CCA Ideas Fest, expands artistic interventions and engages contemporary issues such as air, water, food, environment, and social interaction in connection to artistic and cultural fields, academic research, and design applications. Coinciding with Singapore Art Week 2017 and the Singapore Biennale 2016, “CITIES FOR PEOPLE” unfolds in a diversity of formats and kicks off with a “procession” by Indonesian artist duo indieguerillas during Art After Dark at Gillman Barracks. Info: NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, Gillman Barracks, 43 Malan Road, Singapore, Duration 13-22/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 12:00-19:00, Fri 12:00-21:00, http://ntu.ccasingapore.org

Sven ’t Jolle’s work can be read as an impassioned critique of capitalism. “The Age of Entitlement, or Affordable Tooth Extraction”, his solo exhibition at WIELS features new and existing works, including sculptures, installations and works on paper. They reveal how he fuses historical references with citations from everyday life to create eloquent constellations of images and ideas. The title for this exhibition is taken from a 2014 speech by the former Australian treasurer Joe Hockey. Decrying the welfare state as unsustainable, Hockey proclaimed: “The Age of Entitlement is over”, the artist uses the phrase to explore the question of entitlement more broadly. Who is entitled to what? Who decides upon this entitlement? The exhibition’s bathetic subtitle “Affordable Tooth Extraction”, evokes the growth of DIY dentistry as public healthcare is dismantled. With works referencing current immigration policies, the fall-out of the banking crisis and the politics of austerity, Sven ’t Jolle’s exhibition explores the values 
of contemporary society, addressing its inequalities with understated humor. Info: Curator: Zoë Gray, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre Brussels, Avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, Brussels, Duration 13/1-19/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, http://www.wiels.org

During the last ten years Klara Kristalova has established herself as one of Sweden’s most successful artists with exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. She now returns with “Slottet”, a site-specific installation made for the Galleri Magnus Karlsson, a structure that can be seen as a mixture of a tower, a mountain and a body, which collects a number of ceramic sculptures. It holds associations and reflections of both our society and the personal inner life. The installation is built in the main room of the gallery. The exhibition also present a wall with different works in various materials, such as: textiles, drawing, watercolor, relief and smaller jewelry-like objects in silver, which are all connected to “Slottet”. Info: Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Fredsgatan 12, Stockholm, Duration: 14/1-12/2/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 12:00-16:00, www.gallerimagnuskarlsson.com