ART NEWS:Feb.01
“Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995” shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. Exploring the connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed dramatically with the entry of large-scale, cinematic installation into the gallery space, the exhibition presents a tightly focused survey of monitor-based sculpture made since the mid-1970s. The exhibition focuses on the period after very early experimentation in video and before video art’s full institutional arrival, coinciding with the wide availability of video projection equipment, in the gallery and museum alongside painting and sculpture. Proposing to examine what aesthetic claims these works might make in their own right, the exhibition aims to resituate monitor sculpture more fully into the narrative between early video and projection as well as assert its relevance for the development of sculpture over the course of the 1980s in general. Info: Curator: Henriette Huldisch MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, Duration: 8/2-15/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-18:00, Thu 12:00-20:00, https://listart.mit.edu
The exhibition “There and Back Again-Contemporary Art from the Baltic Region” brings together 26 artists from the eastern Baltic Sea region: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Russia. This collection exhibition of Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma explores the themes of identity, belonging and memory through the metaphor of travel. The theme of physical and mental journeys is approached by several artists, like Flo Kasearu, Karel Koplimets or Jaan Toomik. Another reoccurring subject of the exhibition is identity. It is built out of individuals’ narratives about themselves and others. Particularly in present-day discourse, identity is no longer seen as homogeneous or permanent, but fragmented and changeable, not to mention conflicting. Identity is linked to the question of what we value; what do we dedicate ourselves to or turn to in times of need? These questions are reflected in the works of Artor Jesus Inkerö, Daria Melnikova and Jaanus Samma. Besides identity, belonging is another central concept, dealt for instance in the works of Roma Auškalnyte, Katrīna Neiburga or Jenni Yppärilä. Info: Curators: Kati Kivinen and Saara Hacklin, Kiasma / The Finnish National Gallery, Mannerheiminaukio 2, Helsinki, Duration: 9/2-24/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue & Sun 10:00-17:00, Wed-Fri 10:00-20:30, Sat 10:00-18:00, http://kiasma.fi
For his solo exhibition Dominique Blais seeks to exhaust these sensorial and technically complex reflections which he has been developing for a decade. He invites to rediscover the artworks, produced between 2014 and nowadays, as well as to take a look at his new productions, which, although inspired by the same poetical obsessions, open up towards new horizons and experiment with unexpected mediums. This two-fold thought, which consists of a glimpse behind turning into a look ahead, creates a mise en abyme and embeds the exhibition in a cycle of exhibitions insisting on its encyclopaedic character (in the etymological sense of the term as in Ancient Greek, enkuklios means “circle” or “circular movement”). Thus, the circumference of a reflection, developed through years, is being sealed. The very image of a circle, joining the idea of a temporal cycle or of an obsessional loop, becomes crucial here: after going through several levels, those of a spiral which gradually expands on the turns, aiming to achieve its palindromic form, the artistic research is about to come full circle. Info: Xippas Gallery, 108, rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 10/2-7/4/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, Sat 10:00-19:00, http://www.xippas.com
“Songs for Sabotage” the 4th New Museum Triennial, questions how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society. The exhibition brings together works across mediums by twenty-six artists, artist groups, and collectives from nineteen countries, the majority of whom are exhibiting in the United States for the first time. The artists explore interventions into cities, infrastructures, and the networks of everyday life, proposing objects that might create common experience. The exhibition takes as a given that these structures are linked to the entrenched powers of colonialism and institutionalized racism that magnify inequity. Through their distinct approaches, the artists in “Songs for Sabotage” offer models for dismantling and replacing the political and economic networks that envelop today’s global youth. Invoking the heightened role of identity in today’s culture, they take on the technological, economic, and material structures that stand in the way of collectivity. Info: Curators: Gary Carrion-Murayari and Alex Gartenfeld, Assistant Curator: Francesca Altamura, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 13/2-27/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
The exhibition “Man Ray” explores “the universal Man Ray”, the visionary artist who painted, drew, designed, made films and objects, wrote, and worked enthusiastically in typography, book and magazine design. 150 masterworks lent from Collections across the world, including paintings, photographs, objects, works on paper, collages, assemblages and experimental film will trace the career of Man Ray, his enigmatic and complex personality, and his work and legacy which paved the way for contemporary art, laying the groundwork for what we see as “art” today. Critically addressing the issues that appear throughout his œuvre, such as the closeness and distance between male and female physicality and creativity, the exhibition will also focus on Man Ray as a prototype of the artistic networker and catalyst, a “friend to everyone who was anyone” who associated with the most glamorous circles of society. Info: Curator: Lisa Ortner-Kreil, Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien, Freyung 8, Vienna, Duration: 14/2-24/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-sun 10:00-19:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.kunstforumwien.at
The solo exhibition “The Words of Others: León Ferrari and Rhetoric in Times of War” of the Argentinian artist León Ferrari focuses on his influential practice from the 1960s to the 1980s. With a particular emphasis on his literary collages, works that incorporate text excerpts from different sources that are reassembled to create an altogether new message, the exhibition features the first full live reading of his seminal 1967 publication “Palabras ajenas” that was composed as an extensive dialogue among various characters, including President Lyndon B. Johnson, Adolf Hitler, Pope Paul VI, and God. By means of a cut-and-paste exercise, the work associates the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the horrors of Nazism, and the representations of redemption and punishment in religion through quotations selected from history books, literature, the Bible, newspapers, and magazines. Ferrari’s literary collages were a central element of his practice, yet most remain unpublished or have experienced minimal circulation as limited editions or sketchbooks. This exhibition revisits many of these works, exploring uncharted territory and offering a new perspective on Ferrari’s work while exploring the aesthetic forms of political intervention that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s. This profoundly contemporary project examines the obscenity of war, the ways the media represents conflict, and the role of political and religious discourse in the expansion of Western culture. Info: Curators: Ruth Estévez Miguel A. López and Agustín Díez Fischer, Pérez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, Duration: 16/2-12/8/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, http://pamm.org
With works by Francisco José de Goya, Sergei Eisenstein and Robert Longo, the exhibition “PROOF” offers insights into the particular positions from which artists reflect on the social, cultural, and political complexities of their times.From the 18th to the 21st centuries across three continents, these three artists experienced the turbulence of a turn of the century as well as the seismic effects of revolution, civil rights movements, and war. In the 18th & 19th centuries, Goya chose the medium of printmaking for his socially critical series of works and haunting images of war. Beginning in the 1920s, Eisenstein dealt with Russian history in classic films such as “The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) and “Ivan the Terrible” (1945). Robert Longo explores burning contemporary issues such as terrorism, refugee movements, modern warfare, and symbols of power in his drawings ranging up to 7.5 meters in size. Over 50 aquatint etchings from all four series by Goya, along with 43 works by Sergei Eisenstein from the Russian State Archive of Literature and 28 of Longo’s large-scale drawings from the past seven years from international collections. Info: Curator: Kate Fowle, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hall For Contemporary Art, Deichtorstraße 1-2, Hamburg, Duration: 17/2-28/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.deichtorhallen.de
Russian Cosmism was founded by Nikolai Federov, an eccentric Moscow librarian and teacher. The ultimate goal of technology, he posited, must be to overcome mortality and, eventually, to resurrect the dead. Combining ideas from the Western Enlightenment, Eastern philosophy, Orthodox Christianity and Marxism, this utopian philosophy infiltrated a wide range of disciplines until it was driven underground by Stalinism in the late 1920s. Cosmism inspired artists and architects associated with the Suprematist and Constructivist movements. “Immortality for All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism” explores Cosmism’s influence on the 20th Century and its relevance to the present day. It scans Siberian, Kazakh and far-northern White Sea landscapes for Cosmism’s influences in the remains of Soviet-era art, architecture and engineering, and reimagines a Moscow museum as a cosmist mausoleum. In part one “This Is Cosmos” (2014) Anton Vidokle searches for the foundations of Cosmist. Part two “The Communist Revolution Was Caused by the Sun” (2015) explores the solar cosmology of biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky (1897-1964), who linked the sun’s radiation to human psychology, sociology and politics. And part three, “Immortality and Resurrection for All!” (2017) filmed in a variety of Moscow galleries, libraries and zoological institutions, reimagines the museum as a site of resurrection and communion with the dead. Music by John Cale accompanies Vidokle’s haunted imagery, suggesting the yearnings for connection, social equality, physical and material transformation and immortality at the heart of Cosmist thought. Info: Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, 4173 Elgin Street, Houston, Duration: 17/2-24/3, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:00, http://blafferartmuseum.org
The participating artist of the exhibition “E-merging Nature” have agreed to inflect their own language in poetically coherent works, in many cases created expressly. As the title suggests, the exhibition addresses 21st-century Nature, explored as a surviving model, a stimulating yet melancholy icon, or else an image mediated by the digital culture. Through the works on exhibit Nature will either be emerging or implied, mediated or transformed, pure or contaminated by the visual languages: always a reference and parameter of a perhaps still possible relation between Man and the individual, the cosmos and the collectivity. The exhibition with its various formal outcomes, unfolds in a coherent and involving trajectory, making “emerge” and “mixing” languages of artists who work either with natural and organic materials or digital technology, always striving to suggest other worlds of contamination and con-fusion between natural, cultural, social, and technological ambits. Info: Curators: Ilaria Bignotti and Federica Patti, Marignana Arte, Dorsoduro, 141, Rio Terà dei Catecumeni, Venice, Duration: 18/2-5/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 14:00-18:30, Thu-Sat 11:00-13:30 & 14:00-18:30, www.marignanaarte.it
The exhibition “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943” explores the world of art and culture in Italy in the interwar years. Based on documentary and photographic evidence of the time, it reconstructs the spatial, temporal, social and political contexts in which the works of art were created and exhibited, and the way in which they were interpreted and received by the public of the time. On presentation are on presentation more than 500 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, posters, pieces of furniture, and architectural plans and models created by over 100 authors. In the exhibition these objects are displayed with period images, original publications, letters, magazines, press clippings, and private photographs in order to raise the issue of the decontextualization within any standard exhibition presentations, in which a work of art traditionally becomes a neutral, isolated object. Info: Curator: Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Duration 18/2-25/6/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Thu 10:00-19:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.fondazioneprada.org