ART NEWS:June 04

Berlin-based collective Slavs and Tatars’ first mid-career survey “Mouth to Mouth” brings together works addressing cultural translation, shared linguistic heritage, and mysticism in contemporary societies. The exhibition especially highlights the collective’s research into historical shifts in Turkic languages, often related to transformations of political and social systems. Among the works are “Love Letters”, a series of carpets from 2013-14, that  underlines the use of language in politics as a propaganda tool via the caricatures of futurist poet and Bolshevik supporter Vladimir Mayakovsky, also including references to the 1928 language revolution of the Republic of Turkey. “Lektor” (2014- ) invites the public to an uninterrupted sound sequence with excerpts from the 11th century ethical and political treatise Kutadgu Bilig (lit. the wisdom that brings happiness) in six languages: German, Arabic, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, and its original Uighur. Info: SALT Galata, Bankalar Caddesi 11, Karaköy, Istanbul, Duration: 22/6-27/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-20:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, http://saltonline.org

The works brought together for the exhibition “Paysage Anthropique” make plain the attention artists have been paying to contemporary environmental questions, although perhaps the featured pieces are more immediately concerned with taking stock of the impact human activity has had on the transformation of our surroundings. All of the works on display deal with landscapes, nature, and a connection with time, either as an objectivized, institutionalized, or aestheticized fact, or as a support for a range of futuristic speculations. While the art practices enjoy a strong connection with our natural surroundings, they emphasize less nature’s supposed power than the impact human activity has on environmental transformations. Humanity is but one element of an ecosystem that is constantly evolving, and the state of the Earth is a memory of the future. Info: Parc Saint Léger Centre d’art contemporain, Avenue Conti, Pougues-les-Eaux, Duration 23/6-27/8/17, Days & Hours: Wed-sun 14:00-18:00, www.parcsaintleger.fr

Inspired by Ernst Fischer’s 1959 publication titled “The Necessity of Art – A Marxist Approach”, the summer season of new commissions and artistic research at the Grazer Kunstverein entitled “The Necessity of Art” is guided by Fischer’s claim that art is not only necessary in order to recognise and change the world, but that art is also necessary by virtue of the magic inherent within it. For Fischer this magic is located precisely in our ability to visualise potential, and to use this power to shape and control our natural world. Throughout summer, the Grazer Kunstverein is dedicated to exploring ideas around the transformative potential of art as inspired by our relationship to nature, by presenting three very different projects that engage with the natural world in ways that are physical, performative, poetic and metaphorical. Info: Grazer Kunstverein, Burggasse 4, Palais Trauttmansdorff, Graz, Duration: 23/6-6/9/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.grazerkunstverein.org

The exhibition “Richard Serra: Drawings 2015–2017” is the first public presentation of the artist’s most recent drawings. The exhibition consists of more than 80 works, from smaller to large-scale drawings, including works from the series “Ramble drawings” (2015), “Composites” (2016), and “Rifts” (2011-17). For this exhibition, Richard Serra has exclusively executed the series “Rotterdam Horizontals “(2016-17) and “Rotterdam Verticals” (2016-17), that aree shown for the first time, as well as a number of private sketchbooks never exhibited before. Constantly searching for new expressive languages, Serra has created many series of drawings that, while independent of his sculptures, correspond to the founding elements of his sculptural language: time, process, and materiality. The exhibition attempts to reveal the breadth of Serra’s current practice. It also considers the depth of his work’s relationship to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Info: Curator: Francesco Stocchi, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museumpark 18-20, Rotterdam, Duration: 24/6-24/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.boijmans.nl

“Picture Industry” presents works by over 80 artists, ranging from historical documents to major installations. The exhibition complicates traditional accounts of photography, drawing from its role within science, the humanities and contemporary art. Encompassing a broad range of photographic practices from the late 19th century to the present, the exhibition reflects upon transformations in the production and distribution of photographic images as realized through its varied constructions of the corporeal, from its origin as scientific tool and a means of cultural investigation to its phenomenological effects on a viewer.The wide variety of materials that constitute the exhibition create numerous situations within which to consider not only the materiality of images and the technologies that form their reception, but also the conflicted social history that lies under their surfaces and is inextricable from their origins. Info: Curator: Walead Beshty, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Duration 24/6-15/12/17, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 11:00-16:00, www.bard.edu

“No to the Invasion: Breakdowns and Side Effects”, presents works drawn from the Barjeel Art Foundation, a collecting philanthropic institution based in the United Arab Emirates. Featuring works dating from 1990 to 2016, the exhibition recalls various histories intersecting a shared geo-political space: the Arabic-speaking world. To begin in 1990 is to recall a socio-political landscape characterized by shifting regimes of power following Pan-Arabism, the Cold War, the Kuwait War, and the end of the Lebanese Civil War. The exhibition proposes an expanded meaning of the term invasion, one that goes beyond connotations of trespassing and violation to reflect a refusal or reckoning with interferences by agitators–the defense industry, media, global capital, or regional magnates. The artists parse the many intersecting influences of power that act on bodies, land, and production. Their works articulate ways in which bodies are subjected to various conditions of representation, control, and disaster to tell us about the limits of representation, the production of histories, and the transformation of landscapes. Info: Curator: Fawz Kabra, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Duration 24/6-15/12/17, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 11:00-16:00, www.bard.edu

For nearly forty years Shaw has been creating an expansive body of work: paintings, drawings, installations, sculpture, video, and sound, elucidating America’s social and spiritual histories. For his current solo exhibition the artist continues to illustrate overarching themes of belief, doubt, and politics, addressing such prescient topics as failing economies and crumbling power structures. In a new series of paintings rendered on found theatrical backdrops, Shaw summons a mélange of superheroes, cultural figures, folkloric iconography, and apocalyptic forces of nature. A second body of work features black and white paintings in which Shaw utilizes the “cut-up method” used by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin to collage a picture of the near future. Here Shaw depicts worlds of chaos and control informed by a constant dialogue with art history and the spirit of Silver Age comics. Info: Blum & Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 24/6-19/8/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com

As a part of CONDO Complex New York, a gallery swap between New York galleries and national and international partners, Metro Pictures hosts Leo Xu’s two-part exhibition “A New Ballardian Vision”. The show brings together a selection of works that reflect recent social, technological and environmental developments through the lens of author J.G. Ballard’s writings. Xu conceived the exhibition as two distinct chapters; the first features Metro Pictures artists. “Chapter Two” includes works from seven Chinese artists represented by Leo Xu Projects. Among them is aaajiao, whose video installation draws on society’s obsession with social media and the culture of constant approval, conditions anticipated in Ballard’s writing. Info: Curator: Leo Xu, Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, New York, Duration 29/6-4/817, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.metropictures.com

The exhibition “In Case There’s a Reason: The Theatre of Mistakes” presents the work of artists’ group The Theatre of Mistakes (1974-81), who pioneered a structured performance art traversing architecture, choreography and poetry as well as visual art. They formed in London in the early ‘70s from a series of open workshops at which instructional and games-based exercises were the focus. These came to inform “The Street” (1975), a performance with the residents and environment of Ascham Street in Kentish Town. Live elements in this exhibition mark two key phases of The Theatre of Mistakes. Each afternoon in the galleries with open participation, Anthony Howell will re-visit exercises from the workshops. While each Friday and Saturday evening performances will take place of the highly structured “Going” (1977). Info: Curator:  Jason E. Bowman, Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London, Duration 30/6-/8/17, Days & Hours: Fri-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.ravenrow.org

Robert Mann Gallery’s summer exhibition, “I Scream, You Scream”, looks at both the visual and social culture of ice cream by juxtaposing contemporary color images of ice cream itself with historical images of people savoring every sweet morsel. The show explores how photographers can capture the playfulness of the human experience indulging in the pleasures of life that will melt in your mind, not your hand. The light-hearted chant “I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream,” first published in 1927, by Howard Johnson, Billy Moll, and Robert King, epitomizes the amusing scene captured by Garry Winogrand of a women throwing her head back in laughter as she gracefully holds on to her ice cream cone or a phallic advertisement that will cause even the most mature of us to giggle a little. Info: Robert Mann Gallery, 525 West 26th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, Duration: 6/7-18/8/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.robertmann.com