At long last, the grand arcanum of Massa Confusa is complete. Printed in extenso, in a profusion of permutations, Gusmão’s systematic project is not a coffee table book but rather meant for the meditative and convivial space of the tearoom. The present tome publicises the results of true experiments accomplished in the laboratory of the artist.

With Julien Creuzet accompanied by Phoebe Collings-James, Christina Kimeze, Manuel Mathieu, Bruno Peinado & Chloé Quenum
Curated by Céline Kopp et Cindy Sissokho

Sifang Art Museum presents a solo exhibition by He Xiangyu, opening November 8, 2023 at the museum's satellite space located inside the Avenue Apartments on Tongren Road, Shanghai.

In his precarious yet exuberant sculptural environments, the Paris-based artist, filmmaker, and poet Julien Creuzet often delves into centuries-long histories of trade and displacement. His multimedia installations skillfully combine the debris of domestic and industrial life (plastic containers, electric cables, cellphones) with that of the natural world (soil, seashell, wood sticks) — and often, these sculptural ecosystems invoke his childhood home of Martinique, the French Caribbean island at the crossroads of African, European, and Native American civilizations.

Fondazione Giuliani is very pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Rome of renowned Canadian artist, Liz Magor. For over four decades Magor’s practice has primarily concentrated on sculpture, exploring our persistent and complicated relationship with things. Working with common, everyday objects that often go unnoticed, she uses various sculptural techniques to transform them into new forms, somewhere between still life and the uncanny. Things such as blankets, weathered clothing and discarded toys are found in relationships that generate a sense of meaning and care beyond their original use or need.

The Slovak conceptual artist Ján Mančuška died twelve years ago at the age of only 39. He had a special connection to Austria: Artist residencies took him to the Neue Galerie Graz and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Vienna), important works were created here in Vienna and can be found in the Kontakt Collection as well as in the collection of TBA21.
 

Performance has been the central orientation of my life since the mid-sixties when I, by virtue of a divorce, stepped out of conventional life into this art reality. From that new stance, my entire milieu became my art and all the things I do and make as well. —Barbara T. Smith

“Ordinary Things Will Be Signs For Us: Photographs by Corita” is the title of the new catalogue about artist Corita Kent, formerly Sister Mary Corita, edited by Julie Ault, Jason Fulford and Jordan Weitzman with a text by Olivian Cha, designed and produced by Jason Fulford.

Liz Magor is one of Canada’s most influential artists. Her practice focuses on the possibilities of sculpture as a narrative form. Attentive to the physicality of an object, she casts and organizes found material so that intense narratives of dependency and desire can emerge. At once sarcastic and sympathetic, Magor’s sculptures spark questions about our belief and emotional investment in the material world.

Julien Creuzet (Le Blanc-Mesnil, França, 1986. Lives in Montreuil, Seine-Saint-Denis, France) develops a multi-disciplinary practice that intertwines poetic, sensory and social forms through combinations of sculpture, installation, video, sound, and textual intervention. 

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in Ireland by renowned Canadian artist Liz Magor. For over four decades Magor’s practice has primarily centred on sculpture, exploring our persistent and complicated relationship with things. Using various sculptural techniques Magor transforms ordinary objects into new forms which are located somewhere between still life and the uncanny. Things such as blankets, food containers, clothing and toys are found in unexpected relationships that generate a sense of care and meaning beyond their original use or function.

The first survey exhibition of Erika Verzutti (b. 1971, São Paulo) in the United States, New Moons provides an expansive view of the Brazilian artist’s bold and influential practice. It presents over 60 wall works and sculptures made over the past fifteen years, encompassing materials that are both permanent and expendable, such as bronze, clay, aluminum, Styrofoam, papier machê, wax, and porcelain. The artist integrates a multitude of references from art and architectural history alongside references to plant, human, and animal life as well as everyday and spiritual objects. The result is both singular new forms and chains of associations. Sometimes, her sculptures replicate through multiple versions, or what have been called “families.”

Julien Creuzet is included in “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things”, the 2023 Liverpool Biennial, on view through September 17, curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa.

“Orpheus was musing upon braised words, under the light rain of a blazing fog, snakes are deaf and dumb anyway, oblivion buried in the depths of insomnia” (2022)
 

Bertina Lopes curated by Claudio Crescentini and Paola Ugolini

On 6 June 2023, the Museo delle Civiltà also presents the  first exhibition  that reconstructs the  living and working space, both private and public , of the artist and activist  Bertina Lopes  (Lourenço Marques, current Maputo, 1924-Rome, 2012). On the occasion of the exhibition, Lopes' Roman home and studio, in Via XX Settembre 98, will  for the first time be the subject of a partial reconstruction , made possible by extensive photographic documentation created by the photographer  Giorgio Benni  and commissioned by the Museo delle Civiltà. Along with a selection of  paintings  and  drawings,  books and photographic images are also on display  and  work tools.

Fredrik Værslev’s Garden Paintings first appeared in 2011

The works, which consist of wooden planks mounted on steel supports, at first look deceptively like found objects, like standard industrial pallets. Upon closer study they are obviously handcrafted, not manufactured. 

Art – a public matter? Ever since their opening to the general public in the 1780s, the Belvedere Gardens have been used extensively as places for recreation and communality. The occasion of the 300th anniversary of the completion of the Upper Belvedere is a good opportunity to emphasize that they are clearly also places of art.

The exhibition Mind the Gap presents a dialogue between the two artists, Darren Bader and Li Ming, who are situated in geographically distant locations - New York and Hangzhou, respectively. This is Darren Bader’s first institutional exhibition in China. The exhibition features a collection of approximately 70 works by Darren Bader and Li Ming, spanning over a decade.

Hadi Falapishi’s (b. 1987, Tehran; based in New York) new, site-specific work Almost There on the facade of 95 Horatio Street will present an allegory of migration which engages with the Museum’s location along the Hudson River as well as the geography and history of Manhattan more broadly. A dog, cat, and mouse in a boat—with a human oddly positioned below—approach an island paradise. Where did they leave, and why? Where are they going, and how will they be received? This 17-by-29-foot vinyl print is an enlarged version of one of Falapishi’s distinctive photograms—a unique, cameraless photograph produced by burning an image into photosensitive paper with a flashlight. Almost There is Falapishi’s first solo museum presentation in New York. This billboard will strikingly bring the original photogram, made in complete isolation and darkness, out into the public and under the sun and sky. 

This work is part of a series of public art installations organized by the Whitney in partnership with TF Cornerstone and High Line Art. This project is organized by Lauren Young, Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The Douglas Hyde is delighted to present the first institutional exhibition in Ireland by artist Uri Aran.

Aran has a decidedly unfixed relationship to media, combining aspects of sculpture, video, painting, drawing, and installation, challenging the traditional formal constraints of each. His work explores the humour, poetics and manipulations of everyday objects and popularly held beliefs. Aran tries to call attention to the nuances within a world of givens. His visual language ranges from text and elaborately developed films to the assembly of familiar everyday objects, which he processes, combines and therefore unites to create ensembles that hover over the boundary of the familiar and the unexpected. Seen together Aran’s work can be intimate and disconcerting at the same time resulting in encounters that are simultaneously playful and deeply sombre.

Henry Moore Institute is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by American artist Michael E. Smith (born 1977, Detroit), made for the Institute’s main galleries.

Until they are installed in the exhibition, Smith’s sculptures exist as composite parts or what the artist calls ‘material sketches’. It is only when Smith arrives in the gallery, typically working out of hours, that new and complete works will come into existence. Critical juxtapositions are made between different materials, objects and the structures and functions of the gallery’s architecture.

An artist's life in storage; an artist's practice of holding or discarding works of their own and others, teaches us about who they are as artists and what and who they value as influences. In the case of Barbara T. Smith, one sees both her support of friends whose works she admired and appreciated, and the dedication to safeguarding her own works, as a means to tell their story and create her legacy. In some cases she has stored these works for over 50 years.

Organised in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, the exhibition will subsequently tour to The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art, Dublin (14 July-24 September 2023) and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (26 October 2023 – January 2024).

‘The Rise and The Fall,’ by Liz Magor presents a focused selection of works from the last five years that explore our relationship with the material world. Working with ubiquitous, manufactured objects that often go unnoticed, she transforms them using inventive sculptural techniques that locate them on a spectrum between still life and the uncanny.  Things such as blankets, containers, clothing and toys are found in relationships that generate a sense of care and meaning beyond their original use or function.

Since the 1960s, Barbara T. Smith (b. 1931 in Pasadena) has been at the forefront of artistic movements in California. Her work explores concepts that strike at the core of human nature, including sexuality, physical and spiritual sustenance, technology, and death. This autobiographical exhibition with an accompanying publication explores the artist's first 50 years, which were marked by dramatic upheavals in her personal life as well as the development of her most pioneering works, including her Xerox art and radical early performances.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz is an understated pioneer, who has steadfastly sailed against the prevailing artistic winds since the start of his career in London in the 1970s. Folding together past and present, Chaimowicz’s exhibition at WIELS brings together three work groups, all examining intimacy, domesticity, and the desire to create one own’s context.

This is the Future, by the film and new media artist Hito Steyerl, explores a vibrant, imagined garden through an immersive environment of video projection, sculpture, and architectural intervention. Steyerl is one of the foremost artists offering critical reflections on the complexities of the digital world, global capitalism, and the implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for society, which is explored in this exhibition. 

Julien Creuzet is a French-Caribbean artist whose work combines experimental filmmaking, music, sculpture, performance, and poetry. Mixing language, dance, and literature, his output is extensively influenced by the history of decolonization. The title of the exhibition is an extract from a poem Creuzet himself wrote, reflecting on the relationship between peripheries and centers, questioning the idea of time and geographical location as fundamental concepts in understanding cultural production. Reacting against dominant Western narratives, Creuzet looks for inspiration in the legacy of Afro-Caribbean and Creole philosophical thought and literary production.

El trabajo de Erika Verzutti (Sao Paulo, 1971) despliega un vocabulario de formas toscas y sensuales llenas de ingenio y desenfado. Su práctica ha transitado un camino de asociaciones que exploran afinidades inesperadas entre lo doméstico, lo orgánico, lo exótico, lo espiritual y lo monstruoso desde una evidente pulsión venusiana. 

On January 21 2023, Galeria Zé dos Bois will open waters of night, Pádraig Timoney’s first solo exhibition in Portugal.

Presenting about thirty works, which occupy the two floors of the gallery, including mirrors materialized by himself and canvases, Timoney brings to Lisbon a new nuance of his research on the construction of the image.

LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS is pleased to present an exhibition with Brussels based artist, Erika Verzutti. Consisting of works executed in both painted bronze and stoneware, the exhibition offers one perspective of the Brazilian-born sculptor’s “Brussels Years” studio practice. Familiar forms reappear in hybrid, suggesting an inwards turn and a refined yet characteristically playful approach towards the medium of sculpture and the particular context in which it is exhibited.

The MAMC+ gave carte blanche to Marc Camille Chaimowicz for his first exhibition in France of such an importance.

Starting from the Museum – its building, the industrial history of its area and its collections where art and design both found their place – the artist has conceived a conversation between more than eighty pieces he realized from the 1960s onwards and thirty works or so from the Museum’s collection. Chaimowicz unfolds those mixed artefacts within discreet dramas, between environments and interior designs, as sequences of a tailored screenplay: Zig Zag, Rachel et Graham, L’entrepôt, Peintures 1, Peintures 2, Du Textile, ...Many Ribbons.

TANK Shanghai is pleased to present the Bendt Eyckermans’ exhibition as an expression of support and appreciation for this talented young artist. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in China.

As a Belgian artist who has gained worldwide attention recently, Eyckermans uses his painting practice as a transit point to connect not only to the Flemish artistic tradition that runs deeply in his blood, but also to his personal experiences and fantasies with the spectator. Inspired by this, the exhibition at TANK Shanghai will focus on the essence of daily life, conveying the artist's bright, calm and witty qualities to the spectator.

Indipendenza is proud to present waters of night, a solo exhibition by the artist Pádraig Timoney curated by Gérard Faggionato.

With about thirty works including mirrors and canvases, Timoney brings to Indipendenza a new nuance of his investigation into the construction of image. From room to room we slowly enter a shadowy and foggy atmosphere, almost Dantean, as if we were gliding through the tenebrous waters of the Acheron and scrutinizing the forms bathed in mist. From the interaction between each individual work, a system of multiple reflections is created in which both the observer and the space float in a dance of appearances and disappearances: sometimes real, when we look into the mirrors, other times merely suggested, when on the contrary our gaze rests on what Timoney calls «broken mirrors»: charcoal canvases in which he has recreated the illusory effect of a mirror that, being incapable of reflection, is broken.
 

One of the most original and recognised voices in contemporary painting, Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev navigates between different pictorial traditions. In his practice, he focuses on the process of painting, demonstrating the possibilities and relevance of the medium today.

For its Fall-Winter 2022 season, the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) will present Bruno Munari: The Child Within, scheduled for October 6, 2022 – January 14, 2023. The show will focus on Munari’s children’s books and will demonstrate how his experimental and commercially produced publications expressed his wide-ranging ideas about the possibilities art offered to communicate visually.

What is a garden, a habitat, a sphere, a ‘cave’? What spirits live there and how do they show themselves? Directly engaging with the Kunsthaus Graz, the outstanding international artist and essayist documentary filmmaker Hito Steyerl creates a many-layered, intertwined digital and analogue installation in the dark dome of Space01.
 
Hito Steyerl’s immersive installation at Kunsthaus Graz presents the interactive retelling of the work Cave, produced for the MMCA Seoul in 2022.

Fondazione ICA Milano presents, from Friday, September 16 to Saturday, October 15, 2022, the exhibition Die Bücher by German artist Annette Kelm (Stuttgart, 1975), curated by Alberto Salvadori and Chiara Nuzzi.

Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Milan are proud to present Moving in Space without Asking Permission, an Andrea Bowers exhibition curated by Bruna Roccasalva. Andrea Bowers’s first solo show in an Italian institution, Moving in Space without Asking Permission offers an immersive experience within the work of the artist and her commitment to the struggle for gender equality and women’s emancipation.

Corita Kent was an artist, an educator, and an activist for social justice and the anti-war movement. A member of the religious order Mary of the Immaculate Heart, Corita used her faith, her distinct design sensibility, and aesthetic influences from packaging to pop art to create her unique prints that inspire attention to and action against the critical issues of her time. The selection of boldly colored text-based serigraphs are on loan from U.S. Province of the Society of St. Sulpice. We Care is presented along with the Special Collections & Archives’ exhibition of the same title, which documents the Goucher community’s participation in activism and protests throughout the college’s history.

Julien Creuzet is a French artist whose work combines experimental filmmaking, music, sculpture, performance, and poetry. Mixing language, dance, and literature, his output is extensively influenced by the history of decolonization. The title of the exhibition is an extract from a poem Creuzet himself wrote, reflecting on the relationship between peripheries and centers, questioning the idea of time and geographical location as fundamental concepts in understanding cultural production. 

The artist Danh Vo revisits the Nivaagaard Collection in the summer of 2022 – this time to create an exhibition featuring the visionary and iconic pop artist Sister Corita. 

The Someday is now exhibition. Danh Vo presents Sister Corita follows up on the previous years’ collaborations with Danh Vo, who presents significant favorite artists from his own collection at the museum. At the exhibition, you can experience Corita’s most important works from the 1960s, which is her most innovative and productive period. There will be displayed works owned by Vo and works borrowed from other private collectors at the Nivaagaard Collection where Sister Corita’s works will be put in display in a dialogue with the museum’s own works.

For more than 30 years, the Los Angeles–based artist Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) has made art that activates. She combines artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a more just world. Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, and women’s rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them.

El MACA presenta en Alicante la exposición sobre Bruno Munari. La muestra, que podrá verse hasta el 25 de septiembre, ha sido realizada en cooperación con la Fundación Juan March y cuenta con la colaboración del Consorci de Museus.

How does one start to talk about an artist whose work contests the very concept of the beginning? For the painter, writer, and psychoanalyst Bracha L. Ettinger the notion of origin—a singular, temporally, and geographically bounded event—needs to be interrogated. Every subject’s « origin » consists of an accumulation of the material, political, and emotional parts of a life lived in time: trauma, memory, language, breast milk, water, soil, oxytocin, ashes, bodily arousal, and other transgenerational transmissions.

Hito Steyerl-A Sea of Data at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Asia, sharing 23 of her most representative works from her early video works in the 1990s, which took the form of film essays with a documentary quality such as Germany and Identity (1994) and The Empty Centre (1998), to her most recent video works reflecting on digital technology (including the internet, virtual reality, robot engineering, and artificial intelligence) within its relationship to human beings and society. In particular, this exhibition will mark the first presentation of Animal Spirits (2022), a new work commissioned by MMCA.

"Allegories," Walter Benjamin famously tells us, "are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.” And, in the work of Hadi Fallahpisheh, allegory emerges in the tension between darkness and fable, where the sweet and apparent innocence of its subject quickly shifts from benign to perverse.

House of Nations is a short film by artist He Xiangyu, shot in Berlin in the past couple of years. The film’s protagonist, a Chinese exchange student, is seen biking through the city, gathering with fellow students, and bathing in lakes alone amid the first pandemic-related global lockdown. His seemingly trivial and uneventful daily life is intermittently disrupted by close-ups of a heavy carpet, a flickering bonfire, hands rubbing together, and ambiguous interactions in the snow. At once intimate and voyeuristic, these scenes are carefully woven into a cinematic whole from which a narrative of alienation becomes more and more palpable.

The work of Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, 1967) addresses the relationships between art, power and inherited narratives around historical facts and characters. Her work connects different fields and research methods, and is often based on an investigation of institutional accounts. Macuga proposes unconventional associative readings of social and political events.

The Whitney Biennial has surveyed the landscape of American art, reflecting and shaping the cultural conversation, since 1932. The eightieth edition of the landmark exhibition is co-curated by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Titled Quiet as It’s Kept, the 2022 Biennial features an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of sixty-three artists and collectives whose dynamic works reflect the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of the American experience today.The Whitney Biennial has surveyed the landscape of American art, reflecting and shaping the cultural conversation, since 1932. The eightieth edition of the landmark exhibition is co-curated by David Breslin, DeMartini Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, and Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Titled Quiet as It’s Kept, the 2022 Biennial features an intergenerational and interdisciplinary group of sixty-three artists and collectives whose dynamic works reflect the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of the American experience today.

For the first time, the Kunsthalle zu Kiel was presenting the complete series of The Books by the award-winning artist Annette Kelm (*1975). In about 100 works, the Berlin-based artist explores books that fell victim to defamation campaigns, persecution and bans imposed by the National Socialist regime between 1933 and 1945.

The work of Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, 1967) addresses the relationships between art, power and inherited narratives around historical facts and characters. Her work connects different fields and research methods, and is often based on an investigation of institutional accounts. Macuga proposes unconventional associative readings of social and political events.

What is it like to grow up in a place that does not officially exist on the map?

KM21 is proud to present the first major solo exhibition in the Netherlands by artist Moshekwa Langa (b. 1975, South Africa). Langa makes drawings, collages, photographs, paintings, videos and installations. His personal history is a common thread in all his work. He grew up in South Africa in the age of apartheid – the system of racial separation that existed from 1948 to 1990 – and his poetic work focuses on themes like displacement, alienation and identity. This is reflected in artworks inspired by maps or street plans, sometimes organic and abstract, and sometimes interwoven with language. The elusiveness of language and meaning plays an important part.

Primera retrospectiva dedicada en España a Bruno Munari (Milán, 1907-1998) y muestra más completa hasta la fecha fuera de Italia sobre este artista multidisciplinar, especialmente conocido por ser una de las figuras más importantes del diseño y de la comunicación visual del siglo XX.

From 29 January 2022, the Stedelijk Museum presents the major solo exhibition Hito Steyerl. I Will Survive. As an artist, cultural critic, filmmaker, writer and professor, Hito Steyerl is one of the most important and valued representatives of the contemporary art world. She operates at the intersection of film and visual arts, ranging from documentary cinema to inventive multimedia installations. Her committed installations are visually overwhelming, always well thought out and recognizable in an unexpected way.  

Oliver Lee Jackson is known for creating complex and layered images in which figurative elements—or what he calls “paint people”—emerge from abstract fields of vibrant color. Jackson’s practice is informed by a deep understanding of global art history—from early modern European painting to African art. Yet his works do not aim to elevate a single message, narrative, or meaning. Rather, the works serve as an open invitation to slow and close looking, encouraging viewers to stake emotional claim on the paintings and not wait for instructions on what to see.

Greater New York, MoMA PS1’s signature survey of artists living and working in the New York City area, returns for its fifth edition. Delayed one year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this iteration offers an intimate portrayal of New York City, forging connections between often under-examined histories of art-making in the city.

Featuring the work of 47 artists and collectives, Greater New York opens up geographic and historical boundaries by expanding familiar narratives around artists and art movements in New York. Bridging strategies of the documentary and the archive on the one hand, and surrealism and fabulation on the other, the exhibition considers the ways that artists record experiences of belonging and estrangement. Drawing connections across the interdisciplinary practices of international and intergenerational artists, Greater New York examines the many ways that affinities are formed in relation to place and through time.

The exhibition foregrounds the resilience of artists and artist communities in the city, while marking ways these artists have both profoundly shaped New York, and borne witness to its many transformations. As New York emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition offers an opportunity to mourn, celebrate, and reconnect with artist communities. This iteration of Greater New York honors not only the persistence of artists, many of whom have worked unrecognized over decades, but their ability to help us make sense of the many ruptures—social, political, and ecological—that have shaped New York City in this critical and transformative moment.

Artists: Yuji Agematsu (b. 1956); Nadia Ayari (b. 1981); BlackMass Publishing (est. 2018); Diane Burns (b. 1957, d. 2006); Kristi Cavataro (b. 1992); Curtis Cuffie (b. 1955, d. 2002); Hadi Fallahpisheh (b. 1987); Rotimi Fani-Kayode (b. 1955, d. 1989); Raque Ford (b. 1986); Luis Frangella (b. 1944, d. 1990); Dolores Furtado (b. 1977); Julio Galán (b. 1958, d. 2006); Doreen Garner (b. 1986); Emilie Louise Gossiaux (b. 1989); Robin Graubard (b. 1951); Milford Graves (b. 1941, d. 2021); Bettina Grossman (b. 1927); Avijit Halder (b. 1988); Bill Hayden (b. 1984); Steffani Jemison (b. 1981); G. Peter Jemison (b. 1945); E’wao Kagoshima (b. 1945); Marie Karlberg (b. 1985); Matthew Langan-Peck (b. 1988); Las Nietas de Nonó (est. 2011); Athena LaTocha (b. 1969); Carolyn Lazard (b. 1987); Sean-Kierre Lyons (b. 1991); Hiram Maristany (b. 1945); Servane Mary (b. 1972); Rosemary Mayer (b. 1943, d. 2014); Alan Michelson (b. 1953); Ahmed Morsi (b. 1930); Nicolas Moufarrege (b. 1947, d. 1985); Marilyn Nance (b. 1953); Tammy Nguyen (b. 1984); Shelley Niro (b. 1954); Kayode Ojo (b. 1990); Paulina Peavy (b. 1901, d. 1999); Freya Powell (b. 1983); Raha Raissnia (b. 1968); Andy Robert (b.1984); Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990); Shanzhai Lyric (est. 2015); Regina Vater (b. 1943); Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa (b. 1980); and Lachell Workman (b. 1989).

SJMA presents the landmark installation Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), a joint acquisition between the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and SJMA. The critically acclaimed, immersive video debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale. It is inspired by a quote from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985), describing machines as “made of pure sunlight.” In the video, Steyerl explains: “Our machines are made of pure sunlight. Electromagnetic frequencies. Light pumping through fiberglass cables. The sun is our factory.” The premise of machines made of pure sunlight is not a romantic one for the Berlin-based artist. Steyerl has long attuned herself to the power of image and their reproduction, particularly documentary images, to manipulate our worldview.

Factory of the Sun tells a surreal story of workers whose forced dance moves in a motion capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. The story is based on an actual YouTube phenomenon (her studio assistant’s brother whose viral homemade dance videos were used as a model for Japanese anime characters) and a news story about an experiment at CERN nuclear research facility that claimed to have measured a particle traveling faster than the speed of light. On screen, Steyerl interweaves fact and fiction; a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, real documentation of recent international student uprisings combines with video game characters, fake news, and dancing, gold lamé-costumed avatars. In this imaginative reality spun from Haraway’s theory, the motion capture studio’s glowing grid of blue LED lights extends beyond the screen into the gallery, like a Star Trekkian “holodeck” able to materialize a different world in three dimensions. Modern warfare, corporate culture, and anti-capitalist resistance movements are played out by disembodied characters—avatars, bots, or proxies for the human viewers who watch the video from the vantage of reclined beach chairs.

This is the first museum retrospective surveying over two decades of Bowers's practice. Highlights of the exhibition include Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (2013) and My Name Means Future (2020). These two works, both focused on issues related to environmental justice, highlight the range of mediums employed by the artist. The former is a large-scale sculpture based on her involvement with tree-sitting activists protesting the destruction of old-growth trees in California; the latter is a video that features Tokata Iron Eyes, a young Indigenous rights activist whose ancestral lands have been threatened by the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

Andrea Bowers is co-organized by Michael Darling, former James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the MCA, and Connie Butler, Chief Curator at The Hammer Museum. It is presented in the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art on the museum's fourth floor.

Dries Van Noten is honored to announce his invitation to Darren Bader to exhibit Group Show at The Little House, 451 N. La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles.  Available to the public September 23rd until October 30th.

In Group Show, the artist will install works from a diverse range of disciplines and mediums.  Works include: new sculptures from the CS series, where Bader creates assemblages from objects previously owned by famous people; stanza sculpture, an ambitious, and humorous, multi-part work combining 3D animation, fake Ikea instructions, NFTs, and junk mail; and 6 Sides of Scott Mendes, a QR-driven “portal” to surreal and hilarious AR sculptures.  Group Show will also be the Stateside premiere of Bader's latest comic book. 

Camille Blatrix creates environments filled with sculptures and inlaid objects whose origins of fabrication often remain ambivalent: his artworks emerge as hybrid beings/machines that aim to synthesise abstract ideas and intimate romances, artisanal techniques and a fascination for high-tech design, a dreamlike imagination and hermetic materiality. He creates incoherent objects, with indeterminate functions that nevertheless give rise to an impression of déjà-vu.

Moshekwa Langa's works can be read like the pages of a diary, like annotations relating to events in his life. In a more or less direct way, they evoke recollected impressions of a place, the memory of an image seen in a magazine or a moment associated with the melody of a song. The key to their reading may be directly inscribed in them, as, for example, when the names of historical figures, acquaintances or friends are crossed in the form of lists, but this mental geography sometimes remains entirely abstract, with the only clue being a title, always linked to a fleeting moment in the artist's life. Moshekwa Langa's impressionism finds its closest equivalent in the work of James Joyce, whose method he has adopted and who, in the text as well as in the paintings, intertwines in the same flow everyday sensations and historical events. 

Urban Video Project’s program year opens with world-renowned artist Hito Steyerl’s Strike (2010). Hito Steyerl’s work explores late capitalism’s social, cultural, and financial imaginaries. Strike will be on view at UVP’s outdoor projection site on the north facade of the Everson Museum of Art at 401 Harrison Street, Thursday through Saturday, from dusk until 11pm.

This outdoor installation by Klaus Weber animates the brutalist architecture of the Hayward Gallery, creating a sense of passage for both passers-by and visitors. The work also embodies Weber’s hopes for what an art gallery can offer: the chance to ‘widen our viewpoint, sharpen our senses and make new connections in our brains’. Peacock, one of the two bronze sculptures, is a hybrid human whose hips emit an exuberant jet of water, suggesting a magnificent white bird fanning its plumage. At intervals, the cascade of water deluges the sculpture, extinguishing its plumes and marking a tension between what the artist calls ‘gravity and levity’. Thinking Fountain, the second bronze figure, assumes a pose of contemplation. A fountain of water surges upwards from its neck to suggest the shape of a head, before falling down its bronze body. Flowing water is an ancient metaphor for human consciousness, still evident in contemporary language when we speak of streams of consciousness or floods of emotion.

In his films, for which he only uses a 16mm camera, Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965, Mansfield, OH, lives in Charlottseville VA) directs the lens at Black people without enforcing any kind of specific representation. The film scholar and companion of the artist, Greg de Cuir Jr., describes his work as driven by the concern to record everyday “Black experience.” The exhibition in Graz focuses on a depiction of Black American realities, and on the work of the filmmaker himself, looking at the materiality of analog film and its capacity to reproduce reality from a certain characteristic perspective. Recover, the first major solo exhibition of Everson in German-speaking Europe, combines poetic images from various Black American lives with observations of universal phenomena such as the horizon and the cosmos. This juxtaposition leads to storylines that inspire us to reflect on the different meanings of perspective. Everson makes no specific proposals as to how to interpret his works, and yet the exhibition again and again raises one and the same question: “What is our perspective through which we see the world?” A question that cannot be answered in just one sentence, and a question that is crucial.

Michael E. Smith's solo exhibition at Pinakothek de Moderne in Munich is on view from September 2 until October 24. 

Inside 6 exhibition levels of Torre, project “Atlas”, emerged from a dialogue between Miuccia Prada and Germano Celant, is unveiled. It hosts works from the Prada Collection displayed in a sequence of environments incorporating solos and confrontations, created through assonances or contrasts, between artists such as Carla Accardi and Jeff Koons, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer and Pino Pascali, William N. Copley and Damien Hirst, John Baldessari and Carsten Höller.
From Thursday 17 June the fourth floor of Torre reopens to the public with a new display featuring works by artists Goshka Macuga and Betye Saar.

Goshka Macuga (Warsaw, Poland, 1967) brings into focus the relationships between art, power, and history in her practice. Her works comprise large installations that mix her own pieces with material found in archives and collections to explore new interpretations of inherited narratives of historical events and characters. Macuga engages with continuous recycling of images and accounts, a method inspired by art historian Aby Warburg who juxtaposed thematically or aesthetically related images from different historical periods to create a visual continuum. Macuga blends together the items in her installations and builds narratives focused on a single event or on revealing relationships and connections between a priori unrelated historical characters. Her works suggests new interpretations of the political and social events.

IN FLUX is the first presentation of the artist"s work in Spanish territory. Curated by Neus Miró, the show aims to showcase some of her more renowned installations: Plus Ultra (2009), Untitled (2011), and The Nature of the Beast (2010). Each of them explores and reinterpret inherited narratives regarding historical events and characters. 

This is the first solo exhibition held in a Brazilian museum dedicated to the work of Erika Verzutti (São Paulo, 1971). Verzutti’s work is essential to an understanding of sculpture as it is practiced today, in Brazil and internationally. Her thought-provoking forms explore new possibilities for the medium, to the origin and materiality of sculpture, as well as its formal intelligence.

“Terçolho” is the most complete exhibition to date by João Maria Gusmão (Lisbon, 1979) and Pedro Paiva (Lisbon, 1977), covering their work in film, photography, sculpture and installation over almost two decades.

Frank Benson hijacks statuary memorials for the outcast and displaced, in Castaway (2018) allowing the pirate to become the subject of monumentalization. In identifying his subjects and transforming them into bronze casts, Benson navigates the formal syntax of the monument and the statue. The pirate, as a cultural siren for the industrious scavenger, provides a clear cognate to the sculptor working with found objects. Indeed, the pirate in Benson’s imaginary has found a bottle of detergent encrusted with barnacles that can become a multi-purpose tool. At the same time, however, Benson’s marauder lends the authority of the monument to the marginalized—those castaway by society. Working against the traditional verticality of the statue, Benson charges the viewer to lower their body to meet the pirate’s crouching squat.

On June 2nd 2021, Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously to approve recommendations made by the Cultural Heritage Commission (CHC) and the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee to designate 5518 Franklin Avenue— Corita Kent’s Studio—as a Historic-Cultural Monument (HCM).

Pádrig Timoney has a one-person exhibition titled "Mean While" (June 3 - July 10, 2021) at Farbvision in Berlin.

Goshka Macuga’s sculpture takes influence from the status check of space missions (go/no go testing referring to a pass/fail test principle) before a rocket launch can proceed. It feels as though we are at the end of an era post-covid, but also at the beginning of a new one; a possible take-off fuelled by uncertainty.

American myths and German reality, different generations, different worlds - with Richard Prince (* 1949) and Peter Piller (* 1968), two highly idiosyncratic artistic works meet in the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, which illustrate life and thinking in and with images demonstrate by way of example.

The new work pays homage to Chantal Akerman, Belgian pioneer cineaste and visual artist; Andrée Blouin, pan-African political activist and member of the first democratically elected government of post-independence Congo; Patricia De Martelaere, philosopher, professor and author; Marie Popelin, the first woman doctor in Law in Belgium and key-figure in the international women’s movement; and Mathilde Schroyens, the first woman mayor of Antwerp and reformer of the city’s education system. Macuga contoured the profiles of these women and cast the outlines in rubber. The negative portraits that result from this process refer to the overwhelming absence of female figures in the collective memory and the public imaginary, and to the often invisible nature of intellectual and artistic labour and innovation.

This exhibition is the first solo presentation in a UK museum by the Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti (b.1971, São Paulo). It gathers together more than 40 works from the last 15 years, alongside a body of new work and a major site-specific commission.

Through works that bring together objects, movement, or the living body, The Paradox of Stillness explores the intersections between performance and visual art. The exhibition features some 100 artworks by successive generations of artists who test the boundaries between stillness and motion, mortality and time.

Goshka Macuga’s exhibition, The Death of Marxism, presents series of artworks that are an effect of diverse forms of creative practice – artistic research, appropriations, and collages. It focuses on the theme of the kaleidoscopic complexity of historical and personal narratives of the past.

Modern Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Sanya Kantarovsky and Camille Blatrix at the gallery’s Bury Street space. This marks the first collaboration between the two artists. 

MACRO presents Bootlicker Suite, an augmented reality (AR) exhibition for mobile devices from American sculptor Darren Bader. The exhibition is part of the Museum for Preventive Imagination’s SUPPLEMENT section. The public will be able to activate all 11 AR sculptures via poster-hosted QR codes displayed at a variety of sites throughout the participating cities.

The 2021 Max Wasserman Forum: Another World brings together artists, educators, and writers at the forefront of discourses on art in the digital realm to share their deep understandings and perspectives on digital media’s potential for more radical, imaginative, and limitless forms of cyber expressions. Live Stream Closing Address with Hito Steyerl: Decolonize the Digital Sphere and Transition it Towards the Commons.

Through documenting contemporary activists focused on women’s rights, migrant justice, workers’ rights and climate justice, Andrea Bowers is committed to an intersectional feminism that dismantles gender privilege and builds community that collectively cares for one another. Her multivalent art practice documents and honors the activists whose everyday actions forge meaningful change. The Visiting Artists Lecture Series is organized by Art Studio faculty and master of fine arts candidates. It invites some of the most compelling practitioners and thinkers working today to UC Davis— including nationally and internationally recognized artists, critics and curators—for public lectures, readings and critiques with students and faculty across disciplines. Organized by the Department of Art and Art History. Co-sponsored by the UC Davis, College of Letters and Science and the Manetti Shrem Museum.

 

Barakat Contemporary presents Garden of Delete, the first exhibition of the British sculptor Michael Dean (b. 1977, UK) in Korea.

Roe Ethridge's photograph Apple and Black Glove (2020) is featured on the cover of Aperture issue 242. 

An exhibition organized by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. At the center of the presentation is a new multimedia installation developed especially for the exhibition, with which Steyerl critically explores the potentials of digitality, simulation, and artificial intelligence with regard to artistic creativity, modes of museum presentation, social upheavals, and pandemic conditions. The new work will be shown together with a comprehensive selection of earlier works by Steyerl. 

kaufmann repetto is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of artist Corita Kent (b. 1918, Fort Dodge, d. 1986, Boston). Developed in collaboration with the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles, to the everyday miracle presents a retrospective view of Kent's work, bringing together over 40 prints and watercolors as well as a selection of archival materials spanning from the early 1950s until her death in 1986.

The maquette of the Macuga’s proposed work will be exhibited at The National Gallery, London in May 2021 with two selected proposals announced this summer from the Six shortlisted artists. The works will be unveiled in Trafalgar Square in 2022 and 2024 respectively. 

The other five shortlisted artists include: Samson Kambalu, Nicole Eisenman, Ibrahim Mahama, Teresa Margolles and Paloma Varga Weisz.

Following the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, communists, Jews and members of the Resistance sought refuge at a local chateau run by the American journalist Varian Fry. In the middle of the war, Villa Air-Bel had been the temporary home of some of the 20th century’s most prominent artists and thinkers, including Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge, Anna Seghers, Max Ernst, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp, among many others. For a short time, it was a safe haven where political dissidents, united in uncertainty, suspended in time, engaged in playful artistic experiments to cope with their bleak realities, while they awaited the arrival of documents that would let them escape to the Americas. Today, little remains of this wartime sanctuary, no monuments, no reminders.

While the transmutation of language is particularly important to Dean’s practice, his works are not intended to be read as words, but rather to be identified as an element of language in their own form and imagined as a word or idea. He attributes a physical form to a personally developed language, based on a series of typographic alphabets, which he designs himself.

MOCA’s online platform for experimental film and video art returns this October with SCREEN: Kevin Jerome Everson. Throughout the month, moca.org/screen will host four short films, one each week, by artist and filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson: IFO (2017), Traveling Shoes (2019), Vanilla Cake with Strawberry Filling (2014), and Music from the Edge of the Allegheny Plateau (2019). 

The artist, filmmaker, and author Hito Steyerl (b. 1966) is currently one of the most important positions when it comes to reflecting on the social roles of art and museums, experimenting with media forms of presentation, and critically examining the use of artificial intelligence. K21 provides an overview of Steyerl’s work with the comprehensive exhibition “I Will Survive”, developed in cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Best known for sculptures made from both found and cast objects, Liz Magor is interested in the cyclical culture of production and consumption, how we assign value to things, the utilitarian and non-utilitarian functions of objects, and our emotional and psychological attachments to them. Her work addresses the latent qualities of ordinary things that influence our acquisition, use, and disposal of them and how, sometimes, the power that these objects hold can even supersede our human relationships.

Character Study, Darren Bader's presentation at ACRUSH, picks up many of the threads that define Bader’s work: an expansion and confusion of the object nature of art, an appetite for the capacity of technology, and the way all of this is situated in our viewing world. 

In her photographs, Annette Kelm (b. 1975) explores a variety of styles and genres—still life, object, architecture, and landscape photography—while deliberately flouting their conventions. 

In a large solo exhibition entitled grief and hope, Museum Abteiberg presents the multi-media oeuvre of American artist Andrea Bowers, a crucial body of work that focuses on environmentalism, ecofeminism and climate justice.

Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to participate in Tribeca Gallery Night on Friday, September 25 from 4 - 8 pm, with extended viewing hours of Kim Dingle's exhibition, Restaurant Mandalas.

The art of Marc Camille Chaimowicz is rich in nuances. It oscillates in the specific, but at the same time appears abstract and, indeed, other-worldly. Emotional, yet cool. Intimate, yet foreign. His art is cheerful and melancholic. Tasteful, at times almost artificial, but simple.

Even the boundaries between public and private space present themselves as soft shades. But his art is not autobiographic or authentic. The way we furnish our living environments, the way spaces are decorated remains, to some extent, a construction and metaphor. Just as the things we wear on our bodies, our personal furnishings can provide stability. At the same time, however, they are invariably stage and costume in the script of life.

Chaimowicz does not limit himself to the realms of the private: reference to public life is made on a continuous basis. Actions and objects pass into public space or open up to many as serial products.

His exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern includes works from the 1970s to the present. It focuses on rarely shown works and bodies of works which have never been presented together before. Thus, a large selection of letters Chaimowicz has written since the 1970s in widely differing life situations. Their poetic nature reflects another characteristic of Chaimowicz’ work: the power of omission to bring suggestive spaces of imagination and the incomplete into effect.

Another arrangement focuses on the private residence of the architect Roger Diener and his wife, the writer Maryam Diener. Chaimowicz has furnished their place near Basel with floors, lamps, tiles and façade paintings, turning it into a total work of art.

Variations is an exhibition devoted to the lesser-known art of Light Set projections, a stage design technique established in 1900 in the tradition of shadow theatres and magic lantern shows and developed on the Opéra de Monte-Carlo stage up until the 1930s.

In this rediscovery of the Light Set projections that contributed to the Opéra de Monte-Carlo’s fame in the early decades of the 20th century, Célia Bernasconi wished to combine a historical perspective with the contemporary vision of the artist João Maria Gusmão, who has imagined and reinterpreted different projection techniques.

For this exhibition, an untitled work by Darren Bader (b. 1978) stands alone in the gallery. Fresh fruits and vegetables—“nature’s impeccable sculpture,” according to Bader—are presented as formal objects on pedestals. Before over-ripening, the produce is removed from the pedestals by museum staff. It is then chopped, sliced, shaved, and diced into a salad, which is served to visitors. The artwork is then refreshed with a new selection of fruits and vegetables.  

The artist Annette Kelm always develops works in which money, consumption or economy play a role. In the exhibition in the Money Museum of the Deutsche Bundesbank, she concentrates on these topics and presents, among other things, new photographs that were taken in the Bundesbank's premises. 

He Xiangyu’s video work Terminal 3 is included in the group show Cosmopolis #2 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show focuses on contemporary ideas of societies and the issue of cultural translation.

Hito Steyerl is an artist, theorist and acute observer of our contemporary world. This survey exhibition, the largest of its kind in Canada, brings together a significant number of her works from the last 15 years. Steyerl is a storyteller. Using her signature essayistic documentary style – poetic narration supported by a unique blend of pop cultural images, documentary footage and computer-animated sequences – she presents a vision of our world that is at once humorous and frightening. Her playful explorations of technology and power structures result in darkly ironic cultural critiques that feel particularly relevant today. She blends the personal with the political, the satirical with the serious, while addressing a range of topics from economic collapse to globalization. Steyerl draws us into her world, asking us to reflect on our own roles in shaping the not-so-distant future.

Objects Recognized in Flashes is the title of a group exhibition focusing on the seductive surfaces of photographs, products, and bodies. The exhibition has been created in close cooperation with the artists Michele Abeles, Annette Kelm, Josephine Pryde, and Eileen Quinlan. In the light of our largely media-determined society it asks how we approach and relate to analogue and digital images. How are relations between material and immateriality, body, screen and photographic surface are constituted? In our current consumer culture, products and questions of commodity aesthetics are becoming more and more significant. This is not without consequences for our use of photographic images. Ubiquitous advertising, marketing, and product presentation create imaginary visual standards that have now become a firm fixture of our self-representations in photos on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

How do artists mediate between the need for intimate experience and the ambition to engage with the enormity of the world? Surrounds presents 11 watershed installations by living artists from the past two decades, conceived out of different circumstances but united in the scale of their ambition. Each explores physical scale as well: many are large and imposing, at times even literally surrounding the viewer. Others group smaller works into sequences that stretch across space. Some suggest the passing of long stretches of time, and some focus our attention on the stuff of everyday life. All mark decisive shifts in the careers of their makers and are on view at MoMA for the first time.

Surrounds includes work by Allora & Calzadilla, Sadie Benning, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Sou Fujimoto, Sheila Hicks, Arthur Jafa, Mark Manders, Rivane Neuenschwander, Dayanita Singh, Hito Steyerl, and Sarah Sze.

Exhibition M, Goshka Macuga's large-scale Jacquard tapestry, will hang in the atrium of the Cullman Education and Research Building and has been specifically produced for this space. The work re-stages a well-known photograph of Andre Malraux taken in 1954 by Maurice Jarnoux for the magazine Paris Match, featuring Macuga surrounded by images that are intrinsically linked to MoMA’s history and collection.

Political commitment and artistic work can not be separated for the US-American Andrea Bowers (born 1965 in Ohio, lives in Los Angeles). For over two decades, she has stood for an artistic position that combines thoughtful aesthetic practice with a political attitude from a feminist perspective. Civil resistance and its translation into an artistic language find in their work a skillful balance, uniting socially relevant content with conceptual and formal approaches. Their engagement with different forms of nonviolent protest is motivated by a historical awareness and archival curiosity about the history of political activism and feminism, as well as their visual language.

Michael E. Smith is included in a group exhibition at Estancia Femsa that will take place at Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City. Entitled Emissaries for Things Abandoned by Gods, the exhibition is curated by Elena Filipovic. Estancia Femsa is a cultural and artistic platform hosted by Casa Luis Barragán with the support of Colección FEMSA. With the artistic direction of Eugenia Braniff, the initiative introduces a series of exhibitions, interventions, performance, academic activities, and editorial content that dialogue with the historical context offered by the house, as well as the heritage of Luis Barragán, one of the most relevant architects of the 20th Century. The curatorial program introduces international artists whose work invites the spectator to ponder about the possibilities of the modern and contemporary art disciplines within a particular context.

“Les Barrières de l’antique (The Barriers of Antiquity)” is the first solo exhibition in the season “Matters of Concern | Matières à panser”. Artist Camille Blatrix immerses us in the world of artisanship, and fiction. The title is an ironic expression used by latterday artisans (albeit unverifiable, and possibly invented) that refers to the a priori insurmountable barrier of perfection set by the works of Antiquity. Implying as it does an examination of the nature and values of art and artisanship, the concept resonates powerfully with the core beliefs of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, as a committed supporter of creative people and a partner in the promotion and transmission of creative expertise. With this in mind, La Verrière’s curator Guillaume Désanges has invited Camille Blatrix – together with his father, a painter turned boat builder – to devise a project shaped by the imprint of their highly stimulating, twofold sensibility. 

Bruno Munari has a solo exhibition at the Museu da Casa Brasileira in São Paulo, curated by Alberto Salvadori. The exhibition is open from September 4 to November 10. 

Fredrik Værslev has a solo exhibition at Städtische Galerie Delmenhorst. Titled Fenstermalerei, the show is open August 31 to October 20.

Fredrik Værslev has a solo exhibition at the Kunstnerforbundet in Oslo, Norway from August 15 to September 15. 

Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and cultural critic who roots her investigative practice in the proliferation of digital images and their large-scale implications. Her practice takes a strong political stand, while being unafraid to challenge the power of the art market, the politics of images, and the state of human consciousness in the age of technologically advanced capitalism. Taking the form of essays, lectures, installations, video, and photography, her work is combined with dogged outspokenness and academics to critically influence agendas internationally. This creator reveals her most recent installation in the U.S. to date, commissioned by the Armory and curated by Park Avenue Armory’s visual arts curator Tom Eccles. Steyerl utilizes both the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and historic interiors of the building in mounting both pre-existing works as well as new projects commissioned by the Armory in her ongoing illumination of the world’s power structures, inequalities, obscurities, and delights. When viewed collectively, this material allows the viewer to zoom in on and out from some of the most complex and pressing issues of our time.

Erika Verzutti’s unique hybrid objects playfully fuse the real and the fantastical. Grounded in the everyday and deriving from ordinary objects, such as fruit, Verzutti’s ambiguous sculptures take on anthropomorphic qualities through her exploration of materials and embrace of chance and tactility. The artist has described her work as “a sculpture of a painting,” and Verzutti’s most successful pieces result from her figuring out what works along the way in her studio. For the AAM’s Crown Commons, Verzutti will create a large-scale bronze Venus—an extension of her recent smaller sculptures incorporating organic forms that depict the goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus, the Kestner Gesellschaft is presenting a solo exhibition by the Polish-British artist Goshka Macuga (*1967 in Warsaw, lives and works in London). In her work, Macuga questions historiography, especially key ideas of modernism such as a belief in progress, authorship, and utopia. In detective-like research, she finds breaks, pitfalls, and ambiguities in a supposedly linear narrative. This exhibition focuses on the Bauhaus, the influential school of art, architecture, and design, and its connection to the Kestner Gesellschaft. From 24 May to 4 August 2019, installations, sculptures, textiles, and collages by Goshka Macuga will be on view throughout the building. The artist is creating new works specifically for the exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft in collaboration with the London lighting designer Michael Anastassiades.

American artist Christian Holstad has been invited by curator Milovan Farronato to create a site-specific installation inspired by the theme of marine protection from plastic waste pollution. Presented by FTP Industrial at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (9–11 May 2019) situated on the water of the Grand Canal, and from 12 May–12 June 2019 in the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice courtyard. 'A past neighbour had a sign on their door which read "Consider yourself a guest". I walked past it each day for years and it became an unintended mantra,' says Holstad. 'Our dependence on plastics is not sustainable. Its effects are swelling into continents in our waters. Consider yourself a guest (Cornucopia) is a reflection of our impact on the planet and our consumptive roles within the growing plastic mass.'

Andrew Kreps Gallery congratulates our artists on their participation in the 58th Venice Biennale, Darren Bader, Michael E. Smith, and Hito Steyerl as part of May You Live In Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff.

He Xiangyu is among four artists presenting work at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia's China Pavilion. Titled ‘Re-‘, the pavilion is curated by Wu Hongliang.

Kevin Jerome Everson, arguably one of the most prolific, and important experimental filmmakers currently working, is an artist who thinks through the particular problems of cinema by making it. His tireless output exemplifies American painter and film critic Manny Farber’s description of “termite art” as having “no sign that the artist has any other object in mind other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement.” Everson’s films, light and deeply affective, are never not alive: each new film surprises. His themes, though clearly identifiable, are never forced; they emerge organically through the course of his work. Everson’s oeuvre is one of the most significant records of contemporary African American life. Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA is proud to present this program of recent work by Everson, with the artist in attendance. 

For more than four decades, Liz Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects. Drawing on materials familiar from daily life, she carefully pairs elements of tenderness and exposure, often playing soft against hard, weak against strong, hand-made against mass-produced. Each artwork conjures broad social histories and is driven by intimate, contingent dynamics of power, desire, and vulnerability. Manipulating found objects much in the way an author gathers fragments of stories, the Canadian artist brings them together into a newly commissioned body of work that she describes as “a collection of tiny intense narratives.” Here, she uses Mylar to create clear plastic support forms recalling commercial packaging for a number of sculptural “agents”—stuffed toys that she alters in various ways. In another installation, thirty pairs of secondhand shoes line a low structure, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments. Magor uses sculptural techniques like casting, containing, cutting, and reattaching to create these hybrids, which she arranges into sprawling vignettes.

Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) debuts a new body of work by American painter Ruth Root (b. Chicago, 1967) in the 81st installment of its Forum series dedicated to contemporary art. With a jolt of pattern and shape, Root’s eccentric paintings dazzle and perplex with their play of geometry, color, and found images. These new works are composed of two parts involving a shaped panel painted with acrylic and spray paint suspended from a flexible sewn form covered with the artist’s own fabric designs. Incorporating found imagery from news media, art history, online search engines, and objects from CMOA’s own collection, Root creates eye-popping patterns. Physically and visually unruly, these large-scale works push the boundaries of the medium and embrace the complexities of the visible world. In addition to the exhibition, Root designed an interactive scavenger hunt based on her visits through the museum’s collection called “Looking and Drawing with Ruth Root.” Follow the artist’s playful prompts and discover the collection through her eyes. 

Steyerl’s new project for the Serpentine Galleries considers power and inequality in society, mapping unequal wealth distribution in the communities surrounding the Serpentine which has been recorded as one of the most socially uneven areas in Europe. Visitors to the exhibition will see an augmented reality app designed to expand our social vision of some local communities to reveal what Steyerl calls Actual Reality, a series of guided neighborhood ‘power walks’, and a new video installation created using artificial intelligence trained to predict the future. Beginning with the premise that ‘’’power’’ is the necessary condition for any digital technology’, Steyerl considers the multiple meanings of the word, including electrical currents, the ecological powers of plants or natural elements, and the complex networks of authority that shape our environments. 

Michael Dean’s immersive sculptural installations begin with his own writing, which he translates into physical form, from letter-like human-scale figures to self-published books deployed as sculptural elements within his installations. His materials are readily available, and include concrete and steel reinforcement bars. For Lismore, Michael has created a new body of work developing on from recent work which examines how our experience of text exists in the realm of the street. Commonplace signs such as hazard and police tape have been replaced by Dean’s own typographies and nonsensical poetic fragments, emptying them of their original meaning. The transformation of written words into a language of concrete objects is characteristic of Dean’s work. Typically beginning with his own writing, he abstracts and deforms these texts into new typographies, subsequently materialized in solid, physical forms. 

Images Festival showcases artistic excellence in contemporary moving image culture through screening programs, gallery exhibitions, live performances, and discursive events. Since 1988, the Images Festival has presented media works that open critical dialogues and provides alternative ways of thinking and seeing, expanding the understanding of moving image art through our programming and education-based initiatives.

As part of a public commission, Frank Benson's sculpture Castaway is currently on view at the University of Bristol.

Annette Kelm is nominated for Kubus. Sparkda Art Prize. The prize was established jointly by the Sparda-Bank Baden-Württemberg and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, will be awarded for the fourth time in 2019. The prize honors an outstanding achievement in the visual arts. It is directed toward artists who were born in Baden-Württemberg or have a close connection to the state through their artistic work. The nominees, Sinje Dillenkofer, Peter Granser, Annette Kelm, and Armin Linke, will each present their work at the museum, in separate spaces. 

Prada presents What Was I?, a new exhibition project conceived by Goshka Macuga, with the support of Fondazione Prada. On view from 23 March to 2 June 2019, it will take place in the premises of Prada Rong Zhai, a 1918 historical residence in Shanghai restored by Prada and reopened in October 2017. What Was I? is a kaleidoscopic journey in the post-Anthropocene epoch, after the collapse of humankind due to the effects of technological overdevelopment. The protagonist of this unexpected voyage is an android created by Macuga and produced in Japan by A Lab for the exhibition presented in 2016 at the Milan venue of Fondazione Prada. 

Kevin Jerome Everson will be honored in this 41st edition of Cinéma du réel. 7 feature films, 2 short-film programs and an installation will be presented to illustrate the work of this prolific artist who combines scripted and documentary elements to examine certain conditions -- physical, natural, socio-economic­ in the daily lives of African-Americans. His films offer a rich image book of people and communities often marginalized in the mainstream history of the United States and almost absent from cinema screens.

Hito Steyerl's artistic discourse orbits socio-political processes in theory and practice: post-colonial criticism, abuse of power, violence and the influences of globalization on the financial, labor and goods markets are visualized in various media. The artist responds to the influence of the digital and the global that increasingly dominates everyday life by assembling and disassembling images, texts, performances, multimedia installations and essayistic documentaries. Together with other installations, Hell Yeah We Fuck Die, 2017 developed for the Skulptur Projekte in Münster, will make the natural, political and material dimension of images and audio-video sequences perceptible in the exhibition at Pariser Platz. Between steel barriers and walls reminiscent of crisis areas, films of humanoid robots address current questions about the role of computer technologies in war.

For this exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, his first large-scale show in Paris, Camille Blatrix was invited to occupy the top level of the glass exhibition tower, designed by Rem Koolhaas. This transparent space overlooking the surrounding rooftops has something of a penthouse feel, where power and opulence have reached their limit, and must be replaced by other conquests, a possible redemption, or a spiritual, mystical quest.  At the centre of this peculiar interior, an ambiguous sculpture — suggesting a succession of high-tech kitchen islands — presents the fundamental elements of life (water, fire, air, etc.) like as many stages in some unknown rite of passage.  The space is also dominated by an imposing marquetry panel; a decorative, almost baroque element which hints at a possible presence. As a counterpoint, an influx of light disrupts this static fetishization of objects at regular intervals.

“Mutations/Creations”, the annual creation and innovation laboratory at the Centre Pompidou, questions the links between the arts, science, engineering and innovation. In an original layout that fills up the whole space, a body of work is deployed, full of animal and vegetal associations, asserting the right to be undisciplined, going against the grain of a neo-modernist and conceptual trend. The first major European exhibition of the Brazilian artist Erika Verzutti, born in 1971 and based in São Paulo. Going against the tide of a neo-modernist and conceptual trend, Erika Verzutti has spent almost twenty years proclaiming indiscipline through a body of work tinted with a Venusian sensuality and a wild sense of humour, teeming with animals, fruit and plants.

Frank Benson is one of the most fascinating sculptors of his generation of American contemporary artists.  Astrup Fearnley Museet has followed his spectacular development and through the years included a large number of his work in the Astrup Fearnley Collection. The exhibition will for the first time show all of these works together and give a good insight to his artistic production.

Liz Magor’s sculpture quietly dramatizes the relationships that develop between objects. Often playing soft against hard, she pairs care with exposure. Adhering to exacting processes of casting, fabrication, and hand-made techniques, Magor raises questions around gender roles, memory, addiction, and the changing value of the objects that come in and out of our lives.  Featuring a newly commissioned body of work, this exhibition will be the Canadian artist’s first East Coast institutional solo exhibition.  A publication—the artist’s first US catalog in 15 years—will record this new work alongside newly commissioned texts by the exhibition’s curators and writers Sheila Heiti and Mitch Speed.

On June 20, 2017, the BBC evening news opener broke down. For four minutes, a breaking-news animation alternated random still pictures with tracking shots of a presenter who sat stoically in silence. The elements of the familiar sequence were jumbled, messed up and nonsensical.

The scene was the result of a technical glitch — a system crash. But it also served as an image of automation run amok, of decades of breaking news finally resulting in broken news.

The message still resonates: In this new age of artificial stupidity, technological disruption has turned destructive. Its greatest victim is reality itself....

The exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien turns the spotlight on works in which architecture, design, or constellations of seemingly mundane objects are revealed to be visual manifestations of complex genealogies. The Versuchsanstalt für Wasserbau und Schiffsbau in Berlin, an iconic building that houses facilities for experiments in fluid mechanics and ship engineering, appears in Kelm’s photograph as an abstract architectonic volume of color. In the series Friendly Tournament, the shooting targets pitted with holes and small craters where they were struck by arrows recall Lucio Fontana’s perforated canvases and offer an analysis of the interrelation between figure and ground, between three-dimensional reality and its representation, that is both intellectually astute and laconic. Yet here, too, something inscrutable remains.

Castello di Rivoli launches a symposium on Artificial Intelligence with the participation of theorists, privacy and data management experts, consultants in the field of architecture and security development systems, chosen with artist Hito Steyerl. Titled The City of Broken Windows, Hito Steyerl’s new sound and video-based multimedia installation presented in the Manica Lunga at Castello di Rivoli, drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio, stems from her research into Artificial Intelligence industry practices and surveillance technologies. Through this work, Steyerl explores how AI affects our urban environment and how alternative practices may emerge through pictorial acts in the public space.​

Featuring new work spanning sculpture, installation, performance, audio work and text by six artists chosen specially for the opening of Collective, Affinity and Allusion will be presented across all of Collective’s exhibition spaces, grounds and buildings. The artists brought together all create art which fundamentally asks us to question how we view the world around us, an approach that is central to Collective’s vision for a new kind of city observatory on Calton Hill. 

Walker Moving Image Commissions returns this fall. Artists Kevin Jerome Everson and Deborah Stratman have each been commissioned to create new videos responding to the inspiration, inquiry, and influence of key artists in the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection. Everson connects to gospel music and iconic rock-and-roll singer Little Richard in William Klein’s documentary The Little Richard Story (1980) through the African American communities of Mansfield, Ohio, while Stratman incorporates the sound, text, and teachings of Maya Deren in a montage responding to artist Barbara Hammer’s unused film footage. Drawing together an array of footage, photographs, and texts from archival and contemporary sources, the two new works reach into the past to explore contemporary life, art, and creative expression. The new commissions will be available to view online through January 8, 2019 and in gallery as part of the exhibition, Platforms: Collection and Commissions, opening November 15, 2018.

Hito Steyerl focuses on the role of media, technology and the circulation of images in the era of digital nativism. The artist creates installations in which film production is associated with the construction of architectural environments.  For her exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, she premieres The City of Broken Windows (2018), stemming from research into the practices of Artificial Intelligence industries, surveillance technologies and the contradictory roles Museums often play today. The City of Broken Windows revolves around neural sound recordings that, like an atonal and discordant symphony, document the process of teaching artificial intelligence how to recognize the sound of breaking windows, a practice that symbolizes social disruption. Steyerl explores how AI affects our urban environment and how alternative practices may emerge through pictorial acts in the public space. Chris Toepfer, protagonist of the new work, will board up Castello di Rivoli with trompe l’oeil window paintings. Steyerl’s new project offers an intriguing perspective on how the digital contemporary imagination shapes our emotions and experience of reality.

The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture was established in 2016 as a £30,000 biennial award recognizing a British or UK-based artist of any age, at any stage in their career who has made a significant contribution to the development of contemporary sculpture.

An exploration of the technological and surreal imaginary of the artists of today, from computer-generated dreams to creative algorithms and avatars that question the meaning of existence.

More than just an exhibition, but a workshop for study and debate on themes and issues associated with our relationship with technology and the incredible scenarios opened by its evolution: Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence is an immersive, multimedia and multisensory display.

Presenting work by 32 artists and artist collectives, the exhibition invites visitors to explore what it means to be “international” at this moment in time, and to experience museum joy. The pleasure of being with art and other people inspired the composition of this International—a series of encounters with contemporary art inside the world of Carnegie Museum of Art.

Fondazione Giuliani is pleased to present Tan Lines, a solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Fredrik Værslev. Værslev’s practice is a reflection on the act of painting as the result of a creative process dominated by the tension between careful planning and randomness. Interested in upending definitions, convictions and the limits of the pictorial medium, the genesis of his paintings is largely the result of a perpetual encounter/clash between control and chance. After having conceived an artwork with absolute rigour, Værslev often alters it through the intervention of fortuitous circumstances (exposing it to the weather, leaving it in nature or public places), or asking friends to freely modify and complete it, pushing the idea of appropriation to an extreme. In Værslev’s paintings, abstraction and figuration coexist, traditional materials alternate with the industrial, painting and graphic design merge, as well as the planned gestures of the artist with the accidental ones of fate.

Lua Cão is an experimental exercise derived from the intersection of works by Alexandre Estrela and João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, originally presented at an old sawmill by Galeria Zé dos Bois. The exhibition curated by Natxo Checa consists of twenty moving-image pieces: videos by Alexandre Estela and 16mm films by João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva. Presented in this former industrial area, these works were not only shown on screens or similar media but also formed a constellation of pieces that were activated at different moments during the visit. Thanks to this configuration, Lua Cão is presented as a performative film production rooted in a mechanical vision, which rejects conventional perspective in favour of an immersive, panoptic experience.

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences. Featuring works drawn from the Whitney’s collection, Programmed looks back at predecessors of computational art and shows how the ideas addressed in those earlier works have evolved in contemporary artistic practices.

Astrup Fearnley Museet is proud to present a solo exhibition by the Norwegian contemporary artist Fredrik Værslev.

The present exhibition shows 10 series from the last 10 years of Værslev’s artistic production. Værslev himself has determined how the paintings should be displayed, which make  the exhibition an artwork in itself. The individual works become elements of a larger installation, whose structure avoids all obvious, orthodox solutions. Without introducing new walls or coming into conflict with the existing architecture, Værslev has hung the works in parallel formations that reflect the shape of the museum building, but in an unconventional way.

On the occasion of the opening of Swiss Institute’s new home at 38 St. Marks Place, SI has commissioned and borrowed a series of semi-permanent works and installations exhibited in non-gallery spaces of the building. In the reception area, reading room, stairways, hallways, roof, elevator and other interstitial spaces, artists have contributed to the daily life of the building with artworks in the form of plants, scents, curtains, murals, clothing, seating, a visitor survey and more.

If I had to elect one artist to elegize the end of if not America, then the industrialized world, it would be Michael E. Smith. Working with found and appropriated materials, which have been known to include everything from animal parts to textiles to car parts to human bone, not to mention everything in-between, Smith creates supremely laconic and darkly comic sculptures that seem to come to us from a future that we would either prefer not to or cannot imagine. Whether or not we, as a species, actually figure in that future is unclear (indeed, whether or not we would even want to figure in it is something else entirely). But something seems to have happened there (where? looming on the horizon) in which the objects, tools and technologies we once used to negotiate it no longer seem to possess the uses for which they were intended. Something has happened. Is happening. Will have happened. Already. Behold these stark and gnarled elegies.

For his project Somewhere Safer, Camille Blatrix modifies Kunstverein Braunschweig’s Remise, reorganizing the spatial situation with architectural interventions. As a harbinger of the show, the entrance area, that is usually perceived en passant, is transformed into a nostalgic waiting room.  Sculptures, paintings and a “soundtrack” produced on-site are condensed into a tense, at times menacing atmosphere of waiting. Each element testifies to the fear and anticipation of an imminent event, whereby the expectation and accumulated exertion that also arise from the manipulated air circulation affect the human body.  Candlelight and ears of corn recur as symbols of live/decease and carry a sense of fruitfulness, sexual lust, and dedication. Shielded by handcrafted wooden pieces, only parts of the Remise are accessible, while other rooms remain hidden in the gleaming light. This way, Somewhere Safer presents itself as an ambivalent oasis—a private retreat that suggests protection from an outside world and a feeling of anxiety and inner strife at once.  

The Polish-British artist Goshka Macuga (born 1967) works in the field of installations, using media as varied as photo collage, sculpture, large-format tapestry, video and performance. She is known for her diverse approach that extends to the curatorial and the narrative. Using extensive artistic research, she develops storylines for her works and exhibitions in which she combines fiction and history. Her “materials” are pivotal moments in human history, as well as works by other artists, which she stages in playful displays.Macuga is interested in the myriad connections within cultural history, especially that of the international avant-gardes of the twentieth century. 

Inherent Structure showcases a multigenerational group of 16 exceptional artists who challenge abstract painting’s historical associations with chance, gesture, and aesthetic purity. The works presented here instead reveal the deliberate structures embedded in abstraction, illustrating how contemporary practices emerge not just from formal conventions exclusive to painting, but also from the artists’ particular material, psychological, and sociopolitical concerns.

The exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Basel | Present presents works by Martha Rosler (Brooklyn, NY) and Hito Steyerl (Berlin).She puts both early and current works into a dialogue conceived jointly with the artists. Rosler and Steyerl are exhibiting together for the first time - both are also the first comprehensive show in Switzerland. In addition to numerous video works, photos, photomontages, banners and objects, on two floors of the building you will see expansive multimedia installations that confront visitors with spectacularly staged high-tech imagery.

The works of both artists address the interfaces between politics and the mass media. Both in their artistic as well as theoretical production, Rosler and Steyerl reflect the connection between our perception of social reality and the audiovisual media that are essential for their mediation.

Hayley Tompkins works with painting, photography and found objects to make installations that highlight the process of looking and experiencing space. Through her practice she seeks to understand objects in the world through an examination of the mimetic quality of paint and painting. For Tompkins the act of painting is a process of thinking and exploring, rather than as a means to simply produce paintings. Her work attempts to find new ways to challenge and explore painting’s transformational possibilities, in order to construct a balance between the pictorial and the physical. The exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein is a new commission and is Tompkin’s first major solo exhibition in Germany.

Images Festival showcases artistic excellence in contemporary moving image culture through screening programs, gallery exhibitions, live performances, and discursive events. Since 1988, Images has presented media works that open critical dialogues and provides alternative ways of thinking and seeing, expanding the understanding of moving image art through our programming and education-based initiatives.

The 31st edition of Images Festival presents 13 gallery exhibitions, 78 on-screen works, and five live performances taking place throughout the Greater Toronto Area.

Everything is going to be fine sets out to examine the emotional charge of technology. In a divergent set of artworks spanning across mobile phone, sculpture, digital video and performance, each artist engages a technological object detached from pure utility, leaning towards a feeling-driven interaction with its user. At times caring, comical, or hostile, the depicted machines take on human-like personalities by serving as containers or channels for a variety of emotions: what artist Camille Blatrix has called “emotional objects.

When I was offered the opportunity to create a show for  Downstairs Projects I decided to approach the exhibition and the interview printed in the accompanying zine as a personal investigation into my own relationship with photography. While my work is primarily based in sculpture, photography has been vital to my development as an artist and I thought it would be useful to explore my connection to the medium. After reviewing my archive of photographs and answering the questions posed to me in the interview, I came to the realization that my core interest in photography lies simply in a basic need to frame and document my own sculpture. I had tried several different photographic strategies throughout my career, but I ultimately found them unfulfilling - it was not enough for me to photograph the existing world or directly appropriate a pre-existing image - I needed to have a hand in the creation and staging of the subject in front of the camera as well. 

Democ­racy appears to be in crisis, the era of post-democ­racy has already dawned. The symp­toms are mani­fold: populist leaders, fake news, auto­cratic back­lash, total­i­tarian propa­ganda, and neolib­er­alism. For some time, however, society has also been expe­ri­encing the path of the art’s return to the polit­ical—a re-politi­ciza­tion is palpable. Images of demon­stra­tions in the media have shaped public percep­tion in recent years: waving flags, posters, or banners on streets and squares, at the Women’s March, in anti-Brexit campaigns, or in Occupy actions. There have been renewed waves of protest relating to very diverse contexts, coun­tries, and polit­ical systems. This has affected artists as well. They create works that they regard as instru­ments of critique and explic­itly moti­vated by poli­tics.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz (b. post-war Paris) established himself in the 1970s London art scene as an artist who merged performance and installation art in a manner as playful as it was critical and sensual. This large-scale survey is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. It will present Chaimowicz’s cross-disciplinary work in sculpture, painting, video, collage, installation, and design made over his nearly 50 year career, including commissions newly created for the occasion.

"Germany is not an island" - this quote is not consciously assigned to anybody, but was and is used by different personalities in different contexts. It is clear, however, that the exhibition is intended to describe the multicultural location 'Germany', a place where everyone is welcome. And a place where all the arts can develop interdisciplinary. Art often seeks the confrontation with traditional perspectives and ideas and thus opens up spaces that also call for greater tolerance, openness and reflection. It needs no social consensus, no vote, but is first and foremost free. Politically, however, she is still, and socially-promoting power also resides in her, especially when she invokes her freedom and her obstinacy.

NEW YORK, January 29, 2018—Paintings, sculptures, video, film, and works on paper by 35 contemporary artists will be exhibited in the galleries of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on historic Audubon Terrace (Broadway between 155 and 156 Streets) from Thursday, March 8 through Sunday, April 8, 2018. Exhibiting artists were chosen from over 100 nominees submitted by the members of the Academy, America’s most prestigious honorary society of architects, artists, writers, and composers. The recipients of the Academy’s 2018 Art and Purchase Awards will be selected from this exhibition.

Michael E. Smith (*1977) works with discarded things, resonant with the accumulated traces of their existence, and transformed through the simplest of gestures into captivating, uncannily sentient sculptures. For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, the Detroit-born artist creates new works that expand his peculiar archaeology of humanity in the 21st century.

I've always been fascinated by hold-ups, burglaries and the like. This fascination probably comes from the fact that I find them rather romantic, but it might also be connected to the fact that I was born in a southern suburb of Paris where Diego Ferrera, a local contemporary criminal hero, grew up. What excites me in all this is the allure of desire, the thirst for action, the thrill of escape, and finally, the way the villain thumbs his nose at society. I imagine my old friend Camille shares the same interest in these kinds of robber-hero stories; the theme certainly forms the focus of his exhibition at Taylor Macklin, which presents a situation that might have been contextualised beforehand by poetically taking the exhibition space hostage. If you look around you, everything leads you to that conclusion. 

Fictive kinships mimic familial relationships but are ultimately defined on their own terms. Fictive Kin presents works by three contemporary artists who all construct photographic tableaux, and are united by their cultivation of modes of seeing that question conventions behind the photographic representation of three-dimensional objects. Sarah Conaway, Annette Kelm, and Kim Schoen harness the visual language of commercial art and advertising. At its most effective, advertising renders the photograph a signifier that we subconsciously identify as assuming an authoritative voice. It serves a clear purpose and delivers an inscrutable message. In the work of these artists, similar strategies are used to subversive, absurd, and philosophical ends. They communicate the arbitrariness of inherited conventions, solicit humor, and render anew the vernacular visual environment that so engulfs us that we may be unaware of it.

Michael E. Smith (b. 1977) transforms found objects into hauntingly sparse sculptures that reveal only the most rudimentary traces of their former function. Composed of natural and synthetic detritus, the sculptures are distilled to abstract, often loosely corporeal forms that highlight the tension between our affinity for excess and penchant for wastefulness. Smith's installations are immersive experiences, rather than straightforward presentations of sculptural objects. Careful consideration of the architectural and ambient features of the exhibition space is integral to his process, as too are the social aesthetics and politics of Smith's hometown of Detroit, which specifically come to bear on this exhibition, the first major museum show by the artist in his native state of Michigan.

Originally presented by Galeria Zé dos Bois in Azores and Lisbon, Lua Cão is the result of more than a decade and a half of conversation between Checa, Estrela, and Gusmão and Paiva. The title refers to a rare optical phenomenon where the moon’s light is refracted to appear in a halo with a pair of adjacent ‘moon dogs’. Moons, eyeballs, multiple exposures, tunnels, light rays, and atmospheric and optical illusions proliferate throughout the exhibition to emphasize the role the mechanics of vision plays in both artistic practices, and to demonstrate their shared interest in the moving image that consistently connects abstractions to illusions, the everyday to the impossible. 

Art as radar acts as “an early alarm system,” as it were, enabling us to discover social and psychic targets in lots of time to prepare to cope with them.*1. These were the words of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, writing in Understanding Media with sharp insight in the 1960s and predicting the social revolution that new technology would bring. Half a century has now passed since McLuhan published his important work, and the Internet has permeated our society and new technological innovations like artificial intelligence are rapidly advancing. “Any technology tends to create a new human environment.”

The complex relationship between image and reality has long been one of the most important topics in art.
In this exhibition, the National Museum shows works from the last four decades by close to forty prominent artists. Using a variety of approaches, they all address the surfeit of images we see all around us.
The visual deluge that supposedly represents our lives, our times, our world. News clips, holiday snaps, flickers from the depths of the internet. A fragmented intermediate world, half illusion, half reality. Excerpts and selections. And in the midst of it all: glimpses of truth. Images with the power to change the world.

The large-scale abstract paintings of Fredrik Værslev confront established conventions, definitions and limitations within the medium of painting. Using both traditional and industrial materials and techniques he creates compositions that draw influence from diverse sources including Abstract and Minimialist painting and graphic design. His exhibition at Bonner Kunstverein will present a series of new works that are co-commissioned with Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen and Fondazione Giuliani, Rome.

This exhibition is organized around the premise that objects of contemporary art possess narrative histories and inner lives that the conventions of display can only, at best, approximate. Through the work of over thirty international artists, Stories of Almost Everyone seeks to address the means by which a broad range of contemporary artworks and artifacts traffic in meaning and mythology in equal measure. The challenge that textual mediation poses to the inherent muteness of objects provides a framework for thinking through the potential for ideas facilitated by art to expand into other realms of thought. The varying artistic approaches brought together for this exhibition are as equally emboldened by a faith in objects to communicate their inherent value, as they are skeptical of the conditions of museological mediation and art’s promise to convey meaning.