ART NEWS:Nov.03
Jwan Yosef’s work, while minimal in execution, is loaded with political and autobiographical signifiers. Having emigrated with his family from Syria to Stockholm at a young age and being educated in western cultural society, Yosef draws from a variety of pop culture, personal and political influences from these disparate places. Jwan Yosef’s exhibition “A Gathering of Eagles” features new paintings and site specific installations. In a series of canvases, he focuses on glorified publicity stills of Hollywood pop icon Rock Hudson, whose transcendence from cinematic idol to queer icon changed the public’s perception of AIDs, humanizing the disease and also becoming a deeply important persona for Yosef. Two paintings in the exhibition feature portraits of his father Ahmad Yosef, a Kurdish Muslim who at the time crossed ethnic and religious lines to marry a Christian Armenian which triggered the families move to Sweden and profoundly impacted Yosef’s life. Each of these characters, distinctly different in their political and popular persona, represent separate memories and time frames for Yosef throughout his upbringing and who would later in life come to bring a deeper understanding of his heritage and search for identity. Info: Praz-Delavallade Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, Duration: 10/11/18-11/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.praz-delavallade.com
Light, color and space are the basic materials of Ann Veronica Janssens. With these elusive phenomena she creates sculptures that make the invisible visible. Architecture is, by nature, static; whereas light and color are changeable. This is what Janssens investigates, as she experiments and sets people and things in motion. Her work deals with sensory perception and requires the active involvement of the viewer. With her interventions Ann Veronica Janssens transforms the De Pont Museum’s white cube into vague spaces filled with colorful mist. A fascination with architecture made Janssens want to become an architect, so that she could experiment with space, with light. But because this failed to give her the satisfaction she sought, she began to seek her own language of forms, her own experience. This resulted in a space filled with colorful mist which causes the viewer to lose a sense of orientation. Janssens ‘sculpts’ with light, color and space. Such an approach makes Janssens an extraordinary artist who aims to create an experience. Info: De Pont Museum, Wilhelminapark 1, Tilburg, Duration: 10/11/18-31/3/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, https://depont.nl
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) announced Cannupa Hanska Luger as the winner of the inaugural Burke Prize for contemporary craft. Named for craft collectors Marian and Russell Burke, the prize constitutes an unrestricted award in the amount of USD 50,000, given annually to an artist age 45 or under working in glass, fiber, clay, metal, or wood. Luger is the first recipient of the Burke Prize, which recognizes the achievements of a young artist working in and advancing the media and disciplines that shaped the American studio craft movement for which the Museum was founded. A multidisciplinary artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent, Cannupa Hanska Luger was raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. Now based in Glorieta, New Mexico, he interweaves performance and political action to create monumental installations that communicate stories about 21st-century indigeneity. His work includes community-based projects focused on issues facing indigenous peoples in the US and Canada. Info: Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), 2 Columbus Circle, New York, https://madmuseum.org
Phoebe Dickinson unveils her new urban and pastoral works painted during her year of global travel in the exhibition “Journey Through Landscape”. This new body of work marks a shift in the artist’s oeuvre, as Dickinson is well known for her portraiture in the style of late 19th-century American masters. The exhibition present over 100 figurative plein air paintings ranging from earthly paradises to pastoral atmospheres. The artist began painting in plein air as a means of escaping the four walls of her studio, painting in a range of sizes and capturing the vibrant glow of her many surroundings. The show is presented in a salon style hang, beyond the archetypal white cube that has become so principal in the contemporary scene. The paintings depict cold Icelandic winter sceneries with a vantage point at the northern lights, the peaceful almost dreamy atmospheres in Malibu, California, to impressive medieval Florence. Although her paintings are classically informed, the oil paint and brief strokes give her paintings a nearly abstract impression. Info: Tessa Packard Showroom, 15A Ives Street, London, Duration: 12/11-14/12/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, www.tessapackard.com
Since 2007, Playground has been a meeting point for the performing and visual arts. Artists freely combine elements from installation, text, film, sculpture, architecture and choreography in their practice, bringing objects and bodies together in challenging live performances. For the12th consecutive year, the Live art festival Playground is offering a platform to artists who are not bound by one specific discipline but who work at the intersection of the performing and visual arts. The programme of this arts festival combines performance, installation, film, architecture, sculpture, and choreography in provocative performances that blend objects and bodies. Playground is also a mecca for experimentation. Many of the works that you will see here have never been exhibited or performed before.Playground follows various artists in the development of their experimental artistic practice, often across several editions of the festival. A number of artists will be coming back to the festival again this year. Info: Curators: Eva Wittocx and Steven Vandervelden, M – Museum Leuven, L. Vanderkelenstraat 28, Leuven, Duration: 15-18/11/18, Hours: Thu (15 Nov) 11:00-22:00, Fri-Tue (16-18 Nov) 11:00-18:00, www.playgroundfestival.be, www.stuk.be & www.mleuven.be
Alejandro Cesarco’s solo exhibition “Photographs in Different Sizes” charts different forms and technologies of preserving and organizing information. The ways in which information is collected, parsed, and archived, already, in itself, begins to tell a certain story. A family album, a book, a museum, an Instagram feed, a state archive. The exhibition questions how knowledge is produced through the different ways these collections of data can be read and narrativized. What is understood about the past relies on the existence of data about it. But these records, documents, memory traces and artifacts are always partial. Our systems of cataloguing attest to both an attempt at narrating the past and the impossibility of doing so truthfully, reliably, or objectively. Cesarco’s work is influenced by literature and literary theory, and by the fragile relationships that exist between imagery, language, and meaning. In projects such as “Index” (2008– ), a series of printed alphabetic lists of references assigned to nonexistent books, words are a central medium. Info: Parra & Romero Gallery, Claudio Coello 14, Madrid, Duration: 15/11/18- , Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:30-19:30, Sat 11:00-14:00, www.parra-romero.com
Contemporary society is shaped by flows of capital, networks of people and information that connect distant parts of the world and various levels of social productivity. Bergen Kunsthall presents “On Circulation” an extensive exhibition that deals with ‘circulation’ as a central notion in current socio-political and economic conditions, and presents the work of 19 international artists. The exhibition presents newly commissioned projects and engages them in dialogue with earlier artworks from the 1960s to the 1980s, thus making visible a continuity from a pre-digital age of mechanization to our current, late-capitalist and fully digitalized information society. The notion of circulation connects with aspects like the deregulation and expansion of the market, but also with the promise of emancipatory networks and self-organized distribution, such as counter-information and participatory platforms in magazines, radio, events and Internet formats. Many of the projects approach their subjects in an ambivalent way, involving themselves in the networks of power as a way of engaging with them critically and reflecting on the role of creativity and critique in the dynamics of contemporary society. Info: Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, Bergen, Duration 16/11/18-13/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-17:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, www.kunsthall.no
Katja Seib in her solo exhibition “dear diary” presents an interconnected group of new paintings throughout which lucid figuration blurs into dreamlike symbolism. Throughout her new paintings, Seib plays with light and color, using fluctuations in shadow and tone to convey spatial depth. Her figures are often shrouded in darkness or literally veiled, in an extension of the delicate layering (of paint and fabric) that gives rise to each picture. Installed upstairs are multiple smaller works, made on identically-sized square canvases, each produced within the space of a day. These are based primarily on photographs that Seib has taken of people she has encountered in Los Angeles. Painted more quickly and lightly than her larger canvases, she likens these works to drawings – each is an open-ended experiment. Yet the canvases also mirror and magnify the charged symbolism of her more ‘finished’ pieces, repeating their interplay of illusionistic content and surface patterning, and suggesting a cast of characters coming into being. Info: Sadie Coles HQ, 1 Davies Street, London, Duration: 16/1118-5/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.sadiecoles.com
Ângela Ferreira is interested in post-colonial issues and how architecture and built environments bear traces of history, politics and ideology. In “Pan African Unity Mural”, she presents sculptures and murals. The title of the exhibition refers to a mural which Ângela Ferreira created together with thirteen other artists in 1986-87 in Cape Town, South Africa, in protest against the apartheid regime. What is a home, and what does belonging mean for a person who is constantly on the move? Can a feeling of displacement be used as an asset? In her exhibition, Ferreira references South African singer Miriam Makeba and the US fugitive George Wright, interweaving their life stories with her own. Makeba was banished from her homeland for taking a stand against apartheid, and was also later forced to leave the USA together with her husband, who was involved in the Black Panthers. Wright, now a Portuguese citizen, was sentenced for murder in his home country, became politically active during his time in prison, and later fled to Algeria in an infamous plane hijacking incident. Info: Bildmuseet, Östra Strandgatan 30B, Umeå, Duration 16/11/18-14/4/19, days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.bildmuseet.umu.se
Black holes, dark matter, gravity, space, time and motion – these are phenomena that fascinate scientists and artists alike. The exhibition “Entangle / Physics and the Artistic Imagination” presents painting, installation, fashion design, sculpture, film, digital artwork and photography inspired by the science which reveals the fundamental forces that shape our world. The exhibition is accompanied by an audio cloud which allows you to listen to the words of physicists alongside those of some of the artists in the exhibition, which show their different as well as connected ways of seeing our universe. The participating artists include Julius von Bismarck, Julian Charrière, Sou Fujimoto, Iris van Herpen, Ryoji Ikeda, William Kentridge, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Goshka Macuga, Davide Quayola, Solveig Settemsdal, Sarah Sze, Keith Tyson, Jorinde Voigt and Carey Young. Info: Curator: Ariane Koek, Bildmuseet, Östra Strandgatan 30B, Umeå, Duration 16/11/18-14/4/19, days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, Fri 10:00-21:00, www.bildmuseet.umu.se