Michael Rakowitz @ Whitechapel Gallery, London

Michael Rakowitz
Whitechapel Gallery, London
4 June 2019 – 25 August 2019 

Enthralling environments tell gripping tales that haunt buildings and objects, revealing the utopian aspirations and the disasters of modern times, in this debut survey of internationally renowned Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz (b.1973).

Premiering Michael Rakowitz’s most important projects from two decades, eight multifaceted installations draw on architecture, cultural artefacts, cuisine and geopolitics from 750BC to today. Whitechapel Gallery’s headline exhibition for summer 2019 coincides with the display in London of the artist’s Lamassu sculpture for the Fourth Plinth, part of his epic and ongoing attempt to recreate every cultural artefact lost or destroyed during the Iraq war.

Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery and co-curator of the exhibition, says: “From the Assyrian winged bull he placed in Trafalgar Square to the stone books he had carved from the ruins of Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Buddhas, sculptor, detective and some time cook Michael Rakowitz turns the disasters of war into beacons of knowledge and hope.”

Rhythmically rising and falling, an inflatable tower block opens the exhibition. Dull Roar (2005) is based on the 1950s American Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. Built to give people ‘sun, space and greenery’, it descended into a racially segregated conflict zone and was later detonated, the rubble carted off for use as landfill for luxury homes. Opposite stands a model of Vladimir Tatlin’s unrealised utopian tower. White man got no dreaming (2008) was made in collaboration with an Aboriginal community in Sydney whose dwellings had been condemned, using materials from their crumbling homes. The project was part of a successful campaign for new housing and typifies the interaction with communities at the heart of Michael Rakowitz’s work.

Creativity from destruction characterises the emotionally charged installation What dust will rise? (2012). Working with artisans in Afghanistan, Michael Rakowitz carved stone books from the ruins of the Bamiyan Buddhas, two 6th century monumental statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 to global outcry. Each sculptural volume is informed by, and a monument to, books destroyed in World War II.

An ardent Beatles fan, Michael Rakowitz discovered their last concerts were to be in the Arab World. In The Breakup (2010 – ongoing) he presents Beatles band ephemera to superimpose the story of their break up over the Arab-Israeli conflict and the collapse of Pan-Arabism.

Floating across the floor and walls nearby is a flotilla of plaster casts and rubbings taken from the Art Nouveau facades of 1900s Istanbul. The flesh is yours, the bones are ours (2015) pays tribute to the artistry of Istanbul’s Armenian craftsmen who shaped the city’s facades but suffered persecution and exile.

Life-sized recreations of mural reliefs formerly located at the Northwest Palace of Nimrud and destroyed by ISIS in 2015 are included amongst other objects created over the course of a decade for ongoing project, The invisible enemy should not exist (2007 – ongoing). In the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq thousands of archaeological artefacts were stolen or destroyed. Michael Rakowitz remakes them from packaging such as date syrup cans, fusing pragmatism with poetry to illuminate lost histories.  This use of material references the way war and sanctions have decimated the date industry in Iraq, once a lucrative export second only to oil. To coincide with the exhibition A House With A Date Palm Will Never Starve, a cookbook of date syrup recipes contributed by international chefs including Yotam Ottolenghi, Anna Jones, Claudia Roden, Anissa Helou, Nawal Nasrallah, Phillip Juma and Alice Waters is published by Plinth and Art Books.

The exhibition culminates with The Visionaries. In 2006 the artist quizzed the citizens of post-Soviet Budapest about how they would fill the many derelict building sites that dot their city ‘like missing teeth’. Their visionary architecture is displayed as if floating in mid-air, ending the exhibition with a collectively envisioned future.

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli – Torin.

Curated by Iwona Blazwick and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, together with Habda Rashid at Whitechapel Gallery and Marianna Vecellio at Castello di Rivoli.

Michael Rakowitz

Edited by Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev and Marianna Vecellio. 

A co-publication between Whitechapel Gallery, Castello di Rivoli 

and Silvana Editoriale

Hardback, 224 pages, 280 x 240 mm, 160 colour illustrations

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication with a survey by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, an interview with Michael Rakowitz by Iwona Blazwick alongside essays by Habda Rashid, Nora Razian, Ella Shohat and Marianna Vecellio. The book includes a definitive exhibition history and anthology of key texts on the artist.

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX
whitechapelgallery.org

Mark Dion @ Whitechapel Gallery, London

Mark Dion
Whitechapel Gallery, London
14 February - 13 May 2018

The Whitechapel Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of American artist MARK DION, with large-scale installations made between the 1990s to the present, including a new commission created especially for London. Each installation draws attention to characters that observe, conserve or exploit the natural world.

Mark Dion (b. 1961) approaches art by shadowing scientific enquiry, engaging in fieldwork, expeditions and experiments. Performing the role of scientist, explorer, museum curator and archeologist, Dion examines how knowledge is gathered, interpreted, classified and presented. His research and collections come together as elaborate installations, which combine artefacts, material culture, photographs and documents. His work raises questions concerning the culture of nature and the environment – such as how nature can exist in urban space but also how it is managed and controlled.

Curated by Whitechapel Gallery Director, Iwona Blazwick, Mark Dion begins with a new commission by the artist, to be unveiled in February 2018. Alongside this is a series of Hunting Blinds (2008), inspired by structures used to disguise hunters in the wild. Each is characterised by the personality of an imagined inhabitant, from the glutton or the dandy rococo to the librarian. Viewers are invited to examine the belongings and attributes of their absent owners. The librarian’s hunting blind is well-equipped with shelves full of books, a small armchair and equipment hanging neatly on the walls; while the Dandy delights in the decorative potential of natural objects and curios. In an exploration of hunting as a traditional, but contentious, cultural practice, wall-mounted felt banners made in the style of medieval heraldic standards depicting animals, such as the fox, bear and stag, accompany the installation.

A naturalist’s study, decorated with wallpaper designed by the artist then leads the viewer indoors and into the 19th century.  The clues and symbols pictured in photographs, intricate drawings, prints and models may look historic, but they touch on environmental issues of our time.

The exhibition continues with the Bureau for the Centre of the Study for Surrealism and its Legacy, a recreation of a 1920s curator’s office filled with evocative objects, artefacts and specimens from ancient and modern culture. Inspired by Mark Dion’s interactions during a residency at Manchester Museum in 2002, the installation serves as a repository for neglected and unclassifiable objects ranging from photographs to intricate drawings, prints and models. According to the artist this work is designed to “provide a fitting setting for the contemplation and study of Surrealism.”

Tate Thames Dig (1998-2000) is presented in the final rooms as an iconic example of Mark Dion’s participatory practice. During the summer of 1998, two years before the launch of Tate Modern in 2000, teenagers, retirees, artists and historians mudlarked on the foreshores of Millbank and Bankside for artefacts at low tide. Led by Dion’s archaeological approach, they unearthed clay pipes, plastic toys, credit cards and animal bones that have been transformed into this poetic display. Documentary photographs of the beachcombers and tidal flow charts are also exhibited. By combining historic and contemporary finds, the work presents a slice of London’s material history over the centuries.

MARK DION: Biography

Mark Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, US and lives in New York with his wife and frequent collaborator Dana Sherwood. He studied at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Connecticut (1981-82), which awarded him a BFA in 1986 and an honorary doctorate in 2002. From 1983 to 1984 he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (1984-85). He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University, UK (2014) and has an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Ph.D.) from The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015). Dion has received numerous awards, including the ninth annual Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2001); The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2007) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucida Art Award (2008).  He has had major exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris (2016); Natural History Museum, London (2007); Miami Art Museum, Miami (2006); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004); Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2003) and Tate Gallery, London (1999). For over two decades Dion has worked in the public realm in a wide range of scales, from architecture projects to print interventions in newspapers. Some of his most recent large-scale public projects include David Fairchild’s Laboratory, a permanent installation commissioned for The Kampong, National Tropical Botanical Garden, Coconut Grove, FL (2016); Den, a permanent installation commissioned for the Norway National Tourist Route (2012) and Neukom Vivarium, a permanent outdoor installation and learning lab for the Olympic Sculpture Park commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum (2006); Dion has also produced large-scale permanent commissions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany and the Montevideo Biennale in Uruguay (both 2012). His work is held in the collections of Centre George Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; The New York Public Library, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate, London. Dion is co-director of Mildred’s Lane, an innovative visual art education and residency program in Beach Lake, Pennsylvania.

Curators

Exhibition curated by Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery with Candy Stobbs, Assistant Curator, Whitechapel Gallery.

Publication

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated publication including an interview between Iwona Blazwick, Director, Whitechapel Gallery and Mark Dion and contributions from Petra Lange-Berndt, Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Hamburg and Gilda Williams, art critic and lecturer at Goldsmiths College, University of London

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London E1 7QX
www.whitechapelgallery.org