ART NEWS:Oct.04
“Swimming in Rivers of Glue” is the title of Julieta Aranda’s first solo exhibition in Paris. The series of works that conform this exhibition are the result of the artist’s preoccupation with the topics of hostile architecture and defensive design, and how they manifest in the 21st century construction of civic space, as the architectural policing of social boundaries. In many Latin-American cities, you will find houses that are protected against trespassers, not with barbed wire, but by way of shards of glass embedded into the architecture of the building. Thinking about the for-profit educational turn, and profiteering of knowledge, the artist slices this architectural detail, and uses it to build the shelves of an inaccessible library, as a way to address the fencing-off of information and what could be seen as a concerted effort to withdraw education from the pool of common goods accessible to all. Info: Mor Charpentier, 61 Rue de Bretagne , Paris, Duration: 14/10-23/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-19:00, www.mor-charpentier.com
The exhibition “Sounds Like Her” proposes to challenge the patriarchal and Eurocentric frameworks that have informed the history of sound art and, to some extent, continue to dominate the scene today. Using sound as material or subject, the works selected (including new commissions) address sound in the broadest sense through voice, language, noise, textures, music, sonic structures and non-sonic materialisations of sound The exhibition builds the exhibition “Curators Series#8: All Of Us Have A Sense of Rhythm” at David Roberts Art Foundation, London (2015), which presented an original research into the influence of black rhythms in twentieth century sound art, and highlighted their overlooked legacy in the history of this practice. The result is a varied mixed media project bringing together archive material, audio, painting, prints, drawings, video, immersive installations and interactive practice.Participating Artists: Ain Bailey, Sonia Boyce MBE RA, Linda O’Keeffe, Elsa M’bala, Madeleine Mbida, Magda Stawarska-Beavan and Christine Sun Kim. Info: Curators: Christine Eyene and Melanie Kidd, New Art Exchange, 39–41 Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham, Duration: 14/10/17-3/2/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 9:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, Sun 10:00-16:00, www.nae.org.uk
The grpoup exhibition “Montag or the library-in-the-making” explores the links between literature and the visual arts, reflecting artists’ unflagging interest in the literary medium. It brings together some 30 works on the subject, either in the form of adaptations of famous texts via the visual arts (sculpture, videos, installation, design, etc.) in particular, or by directly reworking the textual matter, subjecting it to a host of transformations, new twists, recoups and other “affronts.” A final section is devoted more specifically to libraries, as well as to books, which are regularly the targets of censorship in repressive political regimes; in view of such violations book production has become stronger than ever among artists for whom literature remains an unrivalled field of experimentation and who are highly instrumental in its revival. The number of artistic works that reflect this tendency more or less directly has grown steadily over the last 30 years, and exhibitions linked to literature have continued to flourish. Info: Curator: Patrice Joly, Frac Franche-Comté, 19/10/17-14/1/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Fri 14:00-18:00, Sat-Sun 14:00-19:00, www.frac-franche-comte.fr
Fondazione Prada presents a research and information program on the Chicago art scene developed in the aftermath of World War II. The exhibition is structured around three thematic sections as a whole all devoted to two generations of artists formed in Chicago between the ’50s and the ’60s. “Leon Golub”, the first part of the project explores two complementary aspects of the artist’s production, displaying 22 acrylic paintings on canvas, realized between the late ’70s and the early ’80s, and more than 58 photographs painted on transparent paper in the ’90s. The section devoted to “H. C. Westermann” reunites more than 50 realized between the ’50s and the ’90s, along with a selection of 20 works on paper. The last section of the project “Famous Artists from Chicago. 1965-1975” has been conceived as an in-depth analysis of the artists active throughout the ’60s and ’70s, who were featured in shows that questioned traditional exhibition set-up and presentation conventions. Info: Curator: Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Duration: 20/10/17-15/1/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Thu 10:00-20:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-21:00, www.fondazioneprada.org
Remai Modern’s inaugural exhibition animates the entire museum with a spirit of active engagement, curiosity and disruption. Presenting a series of singular positions and coherent groupings of works, “Field Guide” introduces the museum’s program philosophy and direction. Works from the permanent collection are placed in dialogue with contemporary projects, commissioned pieces and immersive installations. Through an open framework, Field Guide invites consideration of a network of issues and questions impacting art and society today. The exhibition rethinks the idea of “modern” from multiple cultural, geographic, historic and contemporary perspectives. Legacies play an important role and act as a formative nucleus for the exhibition—both the legacy of modernism and that of our predecessor the Mendel Art Gallery, from which Remai Modern inherited a collection of nearly 8,000 works. Field Guide also signals the start of a new chapter, debuting many key acquisitions that speak to the aspirations and future growth of the collection. Info: Curators: Gregory Burkeand Sandra Guimarães, Remai Modern, 102 Spadina Crescent E, Saskatoon, Canada, Duration: 21/10/17-25/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri 10:00-22:00, Wed –Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://remaimodern.org
“Jean Prouvé: Architect for Better Days” is a major survey exhibition devoted to the innovative 20th entury French designer of furniture and architecture. Comprising 12 prefabricated buildings created between 1939 and 1969, this exhibition features the largest number of Prouvé’s demountable construction systems ever assembled in a single location, and aims to revisit the functional side of his architecture, a focus that is as timely and relevant as ever in light of today’s housing and migratory crisis.Prouvé’s social consciousness in design was forged at a young age, inherently tied to his conception and production of craft. He privileged collaboration, the integrity of material processes, and the ethical applications of industrial technologies across the five decades of his career. Early on, Prouvé’s experimental use of materials (specifically steel and, later, aluminum) led to collaborations with Robert Mallet-Stevens, and, with Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, and Charlotte Perriand, he became a founding member of UAM (1929). Info: LUMA Foundation, Parc des Ateliers, Arles, Duration: 21/10/17-15/4/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.luma-arles.org
Jakob Tuggener’s personal and highly expressive photographs of the boisterous parties in better social circles are legendary, and his book “Fabrik” of 1943 is regarded as a milestone in the history of the photobook. The exhibition “The Machine Age” focuses on his photographs and films from the world of work and industry. These not only reflect technical developments from the textile industry in Zurich’s Oberland to power plant construction in the Alps, but also testify to Tuggener’s life-long fascination with old types of machines: from looms to smelters and turbines to locomotives, steamships and racing cars. He loved their noise, their dynamic movement and their boundless power, and he presented them from an artistic viewpoint. At the same time he observed the men and women whose work kept the engine of progress running – and he did this not without hinting that at some point in time the machines could control people. Info: Fotostiftung Schweiz, Grüzenstrasse 45, Zürich, Duration: 21/10/17-28/1/18, Days & Hours: Thu & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.fotostiftung.ch
The Dallas Museum of Art presents “Truth: 24 frames per second”, the first major exhibition in the Museum’s history dedicated to artists’ film and video. Truth: 24 frames per second brings together 24 visionaries and over six decades of work. The exhibition takes its title and focus from French film director Jean-Luc Godard’s well-known statement, “cinema shows truth at the rate of 24 frames per second”. The artists included in the show draw our attention to marginalized or excluded societal positions, and challenge the powers that may be keeping them hidden or silenced. They are not suggesting that filmic representations are unequivocally true, but that they can frame reality and therefore effectively participate in a meaningful construction of it. The exhibition is designed around three filmic techniques—appropriation, documentary, and montage—that have been selected to confront the viewer with actual pieces of reality within a particular frame. These approaches have been chosen to create rich combinations, not as the neutral picturing of reality but as a way of coming to terms with it. Info: Curators: Gavin Delahunty with Anna Katherine Brodbeck, Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas, Duration: 22/10/17-28/1/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.dma.org
The Propeller Group anchors its ambitious projects in Vietnam’s history and its paradoxical present. Based in Vietnam and Los Angeles, the art collective extends its reach to address global phenomena, from street culture to international commerce to traditions shared across cultures. “The Propeller Group” is the first major survey exhibition dedicated to the collective. The exhibition brings together a number of multi-part projects from the past five years, comprising video, installation, and sculptural works that represent the scope of the group’s artistic practice. In conjunction with the exhibition The Propeller Group and internationally acclaimed muralist El Mac will also create a new public mural in the streets of San José. Among the highlights of the exhibition are: “The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music” (2014), a film that follows funerary traditions of the Mekong Delta. and “AK-47 vs M16” (2015–16), a multi-part mixed media work that includes a film, a video, works on paper, and accompanying objects. The San José Museum of Art’s presentation of the exhibition includes additional works not seen at previous venues, such as the 2016 sculpture “Antique Earth Satellite”. Info: San Jose Museum of Art, 110 South Market Street, San Jose, Duration: 27/10/17-25/3/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-17:00, https://sjmusart.org
Adrià Julià’s exhibition “Hot Iron Marginalia” departs from a family collection of photographs of Romanesque churches in Catalonia as a means of addressing the dissemination and traffic of cultural heritage and the spectacularization of conflict and landscape. The exhibit invites to decipher the marginal notes that facilitate the analysis of the overlaps and frictions between historical narratives and their mediatization, resulting from their transfer from one medium to another, the translation from one language to another, or relocation from one country into another. The artist establishes a methodology for rereading history against the grain through observing and identifying a series of details in events that seem to be unconnected: the buying and selling Romanesque artistic and architectural works by American museums and collections; the reverse attempt to establish American football in Catalonia in the 90s; the recurrence of the number 69; or the ascent and descent of staircases… such elements provide the view with certain clues to understand the political implications that emerge from artistic exchanges and cultural shifts, as well as their effects on the social landscape. Info: Tabakalera-International Centre for Contemporary Culture, Andre zigarrogileak plaza 1, Donostia / San Sebastián, Duration: 27/10/17-4/2/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 12:00-20:00, Fri 12:00-21:00, Sat 10:00-21:00, Sun 10:00-20:00, www.tabakalera.eu
Since 2004 Charles Avery has dedicated himself to the invention of an imaginary island, new corners of which he continues to chart through drawings, sculptures, texts, ephemera and (more rarely) 16mm animations and live incursions into our own world. “These Waters”, Avery’s first major solo exhibition in the US, takes liquid as its organising principle, from the seas that surround the Island and its spiralling archipelago of islets, to the draughts of liquor that lubricate philosophical debate in its numerous bars and pubs (poured, perhaps, from the bird-like neck of Untitled (Carafe) (2014). In a series of drawings, we see tourists from Triangland, an analogue of our own reality, bathing in the rock pools and sandy shallows that abut the Islands’ shores, their toes tickled by ‘ninth’ – sacred, eel-like creatures that might be understood as both the embodiment of the drawn line, and of the point where pure, mono-directional will converges with destiny. Info: GRIMM Gallery, 202 Bowery, New York, Duration 29/10-3/12/17, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com