Entryways: Xenobia Bailey @ ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia - Univesity of Pennsylvania - A Site-Specific Installation

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 

Through August 9, 2026

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

In July 2025, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA), unveiled a striking new public artwork as part of ICA’s annual Entryways commission by visionary artist Xenobia Bailey. Spanning 400 square feet, the site-specific installation transforms ICA’s façade with a “Funktional” design and visionary illusion inspired by domestic crochet, natural cosmologies, masquerading culture, and local Philadelphia legend Sun Ra’s artistic philosophy. Entryways: Xenobia Bailey was developed in partnership with Maharam, North America’s leading creator of textiles for interiors, and is on view through August 9, 2026.

“Entryways: Xenobia Bailey continues our partnership with Maharam to transform ICA’s entrance into a space for experimentation,” said Hallie Ringle, ICA’s Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator and Interim Director. “ICA champions exploration and public engagement in meaningful ways, and local artist Xenobia Bailey’s site-specific work will do just that, inspiring visitors and redefining the way we remix, and they encounter, our space.”

For the Entryways commission, Xenobia Bailey began by crocheting decorative elements of vibrant yarn, before draping these crochet afghans over a ladder and photographing them. These images were digitally composed into the work’s centerpiece: a figure of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra, whose Philadelphia-based jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra embodied a holistic Black cosmology and philosophy. Bailey drew inspiration from masquerading traditions—used to channel ancestral spirits—and memories of homemakers such as her mother, who transformed household furniture pieces by draping colorful crochet textiles over them. Astrological symbols orbit the figure and reappear across the building’s surface. Later this year, Xenobia Bailey will also introduce a digital element to her process for the first time. An Augmented Reality (AR) feature extend the installation into an interactive realm and virtually suspend the masquerade designs, underscoring their multidimensionality and further evolving a “Funktional” Black aesthetics into the future. Deploying intuitive, organic improvisation, Xenobia Bailey translates the frequencies of Sun Ra’s music into a symphony of crochet stitches, colors, and forms that come to life through AR. Honoring Sun Ra’s ability to bring the frequency of a Black cosmic aesthetic into material culture and lifestyle and using textiles as animating masks that energize space, Bailey’s Entryways design reimagines ICA’s façade as that of Sun Ra’s spirit welcoming visitors and passersby.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

“In this expansive new commission, Xenobia Bailey draws on the legacies of Black utilitarian makers, including her own maternal lineage, from whom she inherited her ‘Funky’ textile aesthetics. She brings her medium of crochet, which she associates with domestic and sharecropping textile craft, into conversation with the architecture of ICA,” remarks Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator. “Bailey carries this spatial expansion into the all-encompassing experimental cosmos of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, who surveys Philadelphia from above. Bailey adds to this Funk-tional orbit a towering masquerader.”

Entryways is a continuation of Bailey’s ongoing, multi-part, research project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, a series she began in 1999 to build a distinctly African American aesthetic—one she experienced in her childhood, but had not seen represented in her academic industrial design education. Bailey’s body of crochet work, developed since 1984, stands as a testament to evolving textile material culture “funktioning” simultaneously as a source of sanctuary, comfort, historical preservation, and cultural identity. Born in Seattle and raised in rural and urban Washington, Bailey’s early life was shaped by Northwest forestry seasonal rhythms and land and stream-based living, guided by tools like the farmer’s almanac. Informed by this upbringing of being in sync with the natural environment, as well as thorough research on independent historical and contemporary radical elite Black communities, Bailey's work contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the material culture of funk, and emphasizes research, experimentation, development, and sustainable socio-economic models.

Artist Xenobia Bailey

Internationally recognized artist Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955, Seattle, WA) produces artworks and installations inspired by urban material culture and rural African-American homemakers. A student of ethnomusicology and industrial design, Bailey is well known for her crocheted sculptural headwear, wall hangings, and tents that articulate the utilitarian material crafts of the funk counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Using fiber and found items as her primary materials, Bailey produces a range of pieces that frequently riff on traditional home furnishings with inventive twists of color and texture.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey is commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) and developed in partnership with Maharam as an initiative of Maharam Digital Projects. The installation is curated by Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA)

July 12, 2025 –– August 9, 2026

Nick Cave: Mammoth @ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC - The museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist

Nick Cave: Mammoth

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

February 13, 2026 - Jananuary 3, 2027

Nick Cave, Artist in his studio

Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery 

Photograph by James Prinz

The Smithsonian American Art Museum will debut “Nick Cave: Mammoth,” a monumental new body of work by internationally acclaimed artist NICK CAVE. Commissioned by the museum, “Mammoth” marks Cave’s first solo exhibition in Washington, D.C. and represents the museum’s largest-ever commission by a single artist.  

“Mammoth” is Cave’s most personal project to date. Drawing on his childhood in Chariton County, Missouri—where his grandparents farmed and where the quilts, tools and clothing they made were a part of everyday life—Nick Cave roots this installation in family history, landscapes and craft traditions. He transforms these sources into a world animated by memory and the transformative possibilities of the imagination. Combining sculpture, video and found objects, the exhibition reflects on the artist’s own creative impulse and invites audiences to consider their relationship to the natural world and the everyday objects and histories that shape our lives.  

“‘Nick Cave: Mammoth’ builds on the museum’s commitment to present artists whose work speaks to the American experience and fosters connection,” said Jane Carpenter-Rock, acting Margaret and Terry Stent Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “It is an honor to support a new body of work by one of today’s leading artists, the museum’s most significant commission to date by a single artist and to present it in dialogue with the sweep of American art across our galleries.”

“‘Mammoth’ is a conversation across time, a meditation on how and why we make, and how we live with what we inherit,” said Sarah Newman. “Nick Cave gathers fragments of daily life—toys, tools, keepsakes, even the remains of ancient creatures—and transforms them into a shared space of memory and imagination. His work is a powerful reminder that objects are often more than things; they carry our histories, our knowledge, and the stories that carry us forward.”

Nick Cave remakes a suite of galleries on the museum’s third floor into a series of immersive environments. Against a 60-by-20-foot hand-beaded tapestry laid over a landscape of Chariton County, Missouri, towering lifeguard chairs rise—some crowned with massive skeletal mammoth heads, others draped in hides. In the center of the space, a glowing, 700-square-foot light table holds thousands of found objects—from vintage tools, juggling balls and pie plates to his grandmother’s thimble collection—arranged like paleontological specimens. Some remain recognizable; others have been transformed into masks, creatures and contraptions that feel alive with spirit and intention.

The mammoths come alive in “Roam,” a video projected across four walls of an adjoining gallery that follows the massive creatures as they wander through present-day Chicago. In another space, Cave presents bronze sculptures from his “Amalgams” series, which fuse casts from his own body with natural forms such as flowers, birds and trees. These works, surrounded by metal tole flowers and antique cast-iron doorstops—including those from his grandparents’ home—evoke both loss and renewal, the solace of nature and the imprint of inheritance.

The installation will be activated by a site-specific performance.

Artist Nick Cave

Nick Cave (born 1959, Fulton, Missouri; lives and works in Chicago) is an artist and educator working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. His work builds upon generations of Black artists and artisans, from quilters such as his own grandmothers to the assemblers of yard art in the American South, who imbued cast-off materials with new meaning. Nick Cave has harnessed this transformative impulse throughout his work—most famously in his series of “Soundsuits,” part sculpture and part garment, which conceal their wearers’ identities at the same time as they metamorphose into others.  

Nick Cave earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art at Kansas City Art Institute, a master’s degree from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and is currently director of the graduate program in fashion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is in many museum collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Arkansas). In 2022, he completed a multi-part commission from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City for a glass mosaic and video work “Each One, Every One, Equal All” that is on view in the Times Sq-42 St Station. Other recent projects and exhibitions include the major retrospective “Nick Cave: Forothermore” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2022); “The Let Go” at Park Avenue Armory (2018); and “Nick Cave: Until” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2016).  

Publication: A richly illustrated catalog, published in association with D. Giles Limited, will accompany the exhibition. The book offers an intimate look into Cave’s creative process, featuring found and personal objects that inspired him, annotated with his own handwritten notes and drawings. The publication includes essays by Newman, Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Cherise Smith, and a major new poem by J Drew Lanham.

“Nick Cave: Mammoth” is organized by Sarah Newman, the James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art, with support from Anne Hyland, curatorial associate.

SAAM - SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM 

8th and G Streets, NW, Washington, DC 20004

americanart.si.edu

Jeffrey Gibson @ The Met Facade, NYC - The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 12, 2025 – June 9, 2026

Portrait of Jeffrey Gibson: Eileen Travell

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of The Genesis Facade Commission:

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

The acclaimed interdisciplinary artist JEFFREY GIBSON has transformed the iconic niches of the Museum’s Fifth Avenue facade with a series of four large-scale sculptures that explore the metamorphic relationships between all living beings and the environment. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Jeffrey Gibson draws from his distinctive style fusing worldviews and imagery with abstraction, text, and color to create these new figurative works cast in bronze. On view through June 9, 2026, The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am marks Gibson’s first major exploration of this material at a monumental scale.

"Jeffrey Gibson is one of the most remarkable artists of his generation and a pioneering figure within the field of native and Indigenous art," said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. "These new works are based on his signature use of unconventional materials and reimagined forms, employing them to explore often-overlooked histories and the natural world. We’re thrilled to have his monumental sculptures installed on The Met’s iconic Fifth Avenue facade."

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, said, "Jeffrey Gibson is an artist brilliantly attuned to the varieties of life that our world holds—the human, the animal, the land itself. His art vibrates and bristles with that life, the histories that never leave us, and the futures that his vision makes possible."

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they carry messages between 

light and dark spaces biakak / dawodv / hawk,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they plan and prepare for 

the future fvni / sa lo li / squirrel,

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Titled The Animal That Therefore I Am, the installation transforms the Museum’s neoclassical facade into a dynamic stage for Gibson’s ambitious vision of figural presence and ecological kinship. Each 10-foot bronze sculpture takes the form of a regional animal: a hawk, a squirrel, a coyote, and a deer. Using cast elements such as wood, beads, and cloth to build texture, Jeffrey Gibson embraces a new process that expands his sculptural vocabulary. From these reproduced wood supports emerge referential animal forms, with each sculpture formally fusing the animate and the inanimate. Intricately bold, patinated abstract patterning evokes beadwork and textiles drawn from a range of Indigenous visual languages—motifs that are seamlessly integrated into the sculptures’ surfaces.

The works are inspired by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book The Animal That Therefore I Am, which examines the violence inherent in the human domination of animals—a theme Gibson connects to broader cycles of conflict. By selecting species native to the New York area, he reflects on how these creatures have been forced to adapt to human environments, inviting us to consider what they endure and what they might teach us. The Animal That Therefore I Am flanks the Museum entrance, the zoomorphic forms remaining in dialogue with the surrounding landscape, from the natural environment of the Hudson River Valley, where Jeffrey Gibson lives and works, to the urban ecology of Central Park encircling The Met.

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they are witty and transform themselves 

in order to guide us nashoba holba / wayaha / coyote, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

Jeffrey Gibson (American, born 1972)

Installation view of they teach us to be sensitive 

and to trust our instincts issi / awi / deer, 

for The Genesis Facade Commission: 

Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal Therefore I Am, 2025

Silicon bronze with patina finish

Courtesy the artist

Image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 

Photo by Eugenia Burnett Tinsley

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences.

Artist Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffry Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up in the United States, Germany, and Korea. His expansive body of work ranges from hard-edged abstract paintings to a rich practice of performance and filmmaking to significant work as artist convener and curator. Since the 2000s, Gibson’s work—which often incorporates Indigenous aesthetic and material traditions—has consistently revealed new modalities for abstraction, the use of text, and color, with the artist applying his formal mastery to concepts such as human connection and collective identity. Notably, Gibson’s work has introduced a broad range of recurring sources, material elements, and imagery while offering a critique of the reductive ways in which Indigenous culture has been historically flattened and misappropriated.

Recent solo exhibitions include Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me (The Broad, 2025); Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT (MASS MoCA, 2024); This Burning World: Jeffrey Gibson (ICA San Francisco, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric (SITE Santa Fe, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: They Come From Fire (Portland Art Museum, 2022); Jeffrey Gibson: INFINITE INDIGENOUS QUEER LOVE (deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2022); and Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer (Denver Art Museum, 2018). Jeffrey Gibson was selected to represent the United States at La Biennale di Venezia, the 60th International Art Exhibition, in 2024. Jeffrey Gibson also conceived of and co-edited the landmark volume An Indigenous Present (2023), which showcases diverse approaches to Indigenous concepts, forms, and media. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Portland Art Museum; Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Jeffrey Gibson has received many distinguished awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (2019), and is currently an artist in residence at Bard College, in Annandale, New York. He lives and works in Hudson, New York.

The Genesis Facade Commission: Jeffrey Gibson, The Animal That Therefore I Am is conceived by the artist in consultation with Jane Panetta, the Aaron I. Fleischman Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. The exhibition is presented by Genesis.

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue Facade

www.metmuseum.org

Jennie C. Jones @ The Met: New Installation for the 2025 Roof Garden Commission

The Roof Garden Commission: 

Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

April 15 - October 19, 2025

The Roof Garden Commission series was established in 2013 by The Met’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. The series of site-specific commissions on The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden has featured work by Imran Qureshi (2013), Dan Graham (2014), Pierre Huyghe (2015), Cornelia Parker (2016), Adrián Villar Rojas (2017), Huma Bhabha (2018), Alicja Kwade (2019), Héctor Zamora (2020), Alex Da Corte (2021), Lauren Halsey (2023), and Petrit Halilaj (2024).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has commissioned Jennie C. Jones (born 1968, Cincinnati, Ohio) to create a new installation for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden. On view from April 15 through October 19, 2025, The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble explores the sonic potential of stringed instruments as well as their formal possibilities.

“We are thrilled that Jennie C. Jones will bring her unique artistic vision to The Met’s iconic roof garden,” said Max Hollein, the Museum’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Elevated high above the sounds and rhythms of New York City, her innovative installation will seamlessly combine form, color, line, and acoustics, challenging visitors to engage with sculpture in new and unexpected ways.”

David Breslin, Leonard A. Lauder Curator in Charge, Modern and Contemporary Art, added, “Jennie C. Jones’s fidelity to abstraction invites her viewers to pay attention to the quieter pathways where profound meanings reside. By combining the sensorial experiences of visual art and sound, Jones is one of the most thoughtful and compelling voices in contemporary art today."

This project is the latest in The Met’s series of contemporary commissions in which the Museum invites artists to create new works of art, establishing a dialogue between the artist's practice, The Met collection, the physical Museum, and The Met's audiences. It stands as the final Roof Garden Commission before the space temporarily closes in preparation for the construction of the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing, The Met’s new home for its collection of modern and contemporary art. The series will resume following the anticipated 2030 reopening of the renovated wing, which will feature an expanded Cantor Roof Garden on the fourth floor.

JENNIE C. JONES

In her paintings, sculptures, works on paper, installations, and audio compositions, Jennie C. Jones uses sound to respond to the legacy of minimalism and to modernism itself. Drawing on her immersion in Black avant-garde music, she deploys sound and listening as important conceptual elements of her practice, from the acoustic fiberglass panels she affixes to canvas that absorb sound to the lines and bars she creates through her compositions that refer to elements of musical notation. Her work across media offers new possibilities for minimalist abstraction, challenging how—and by whom—it is produced.

Her solo exhibitions include Jennie C. Jones: Compilation, at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2015–16); Jennie C. Jones: RPM, at the Glass House (2018); Jennie C. Jones: Constant Structure, at the Arts Club Chicago (2020); and, most recently, Jennie C. Jones: Dynamics, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2022). Jones’s work is held by numerous public and private collections across the United States, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Cleveland Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. She lives and works in Hudson, New York.

The Roof Garden Commission: Jennie C. Jones, Ensemble is conceived by the artist in consultation with Lauren Rosati, Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art and Research Projects Manager in the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Met.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that includes an essay by Lauren Rosati as well as an interview between Jones and artist Glenn Ligon. 

METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK

www.metmuseum.org

Krista Kim @ Art Dubai 2024 - "Heart Space" New Julius Baer Commission

Krista Kim: Heart Space 

New Julius Baer Commission 

Art Dubai 2024 

28 February - 3 Mach 2024 

Art Dubai and Julius Baer, announces a newly commissioned digital installation by Canadian-Korean artist KRISTA KIM that will debut in the Julius Baer Lounge at Art Dubai. Held under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, Art Dubai 2024 will take place from 1 to 3 March (previews 28 and 29 February) at Madinat Jumeirah.

Heart Space م ا سح ةال ق لب is an immersive experience that will allow guests to connect with one another through the universal language of the human heartbeat. In real-time, each visitor’s unique heart rhythm will be visualised through hypnotic patterns and meditative shapes displayed across a dynamic LED canvas, shifting to reflect each new guest’s energy. The installation puts forward the concept of ‘oneness’ where participants come together to create a social fabric harnessing the power of art and technology.

This new commission is a continuation of Krista Kim’s ongoing exploration into digital consciousness and the creative potential of screens as digital instruments of wellbeing and longevity. She developed her signature language of shifting gradients using digital software since 2012, her works on glass and plexiglass aim to hypnotise viewers into a trance of tranquillity while her immersive video works provide meditative experiences of colour and light. In 2014, as a response to society's over-reliance on technology, Kim started the Techism Movement, a philosophy that recognise technological innovation as an artistic discipline, encouraging artists to promote digital humanism for our digital culture. In 2024 she will present her work Continuum at the World Economic Forum at Davos as one of the conference’s cultural leaders.

Art Dubai is committed to working with its partners to develop new commissioning models and innovative cultural programmes to present new commissions and premieres by internationally renowned artists. These partnerships place particular emphasis on education and technology, which are playing a critical role in shaping the future of the creative scene in Dubai. Julius Baer has been a lead partner of Art Dubai since 2015. A long-standing supporter of the arts across the world, the collaboration with Art Dubai is in-line with the bank’s long-term commitment to supporting the UAE’s emergence as both a business and cultural hub.

Krista Kim, artist said:

“I’m profoundly thankful to Julius Baer for enabling such an ambitious vision as ‘Heart Space’ – one amplifying AI technology’s power to reconnect where social media algorithms have fractured. As individuals participate, I hope each participant feels inspired in their singular beauty yet leaves appreciating a greater whole. My deepest wish is that from the micro – encoding each distinctive rhythm – to the macro tapestry those strands weave by exhibit’s close, visitors rediscover how alike our heartbeats sound when truly heard," shares Krista Kim of her debut with Julius Baer at Art Dubai.

Heart Space is part of Julius Baer’s NEXT universe, an initiative designed to explore investment thematics and encourage the interdisciplinary exploration of megatrends across the arts, science, and technology. NEXT supports collaboration with forward-thinking artists and institutions committed to new forms of cultural production at the vanguard of scientific research and technological development. It is the second major digital commission by Julius Baer to debut at Art Dubai, following an acclaimed collaboration with Refik Anadol in March 2023.

Related Post: Art Dubai 2024: The four Sections Highlights

ART DUBAI

www.artdubai.ae

Alicja Kwade @ Whitechapel Gallery, London

Alicja Kwade: Whitechapel Commission
Whitechapel Gallery, London
28 September 2016 – 25 June 2017

For Alicja Kwade’s (b. 1979) first project for a major UK gallery, unveiled on Wednesday 28 September, the Berlin-based artist creates a captivating installation of astronomical data and our position in the universe.

Bronze casts of giant vertebrae stand at either side of the gallery accompanying a projection depicting a slowly rotating, biomorphic form. The film is inspired by NASA data of extrasolar meteors, referencing the cataclysmic event believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. At the centre of the work and gallery, a large mobile of 24 electronic star maps is suspended from the gallery ceiling, slowly rotating in concentric circles, visualising astronomical data that demonstrates the earth’s position in the known galaxy.

Daniel F. Hermann, Eisler Curator and Head of Curatorial Studies said: “Since 2005, artist commissions have been a core part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s programme that provides a vital forum for the development of artists’ practice. Alicja Kwade’s work represents some of the most interesting developments in sculpture today – with meticulous attention to detail and a sincere appreciation for craftsmanship and quality of materials, her work emphasises the skill that is necessary to give artistic form to philosophical inquiry. We’re delighted to premier her work to the UK audience this autumn.”

Alicja Kwade said: “Material objects are events in time. I am interested in understanding how time operates and how we, in our own lifespan, are also part of these occurring events.”

Alicja Kwade’s sculptures often defy the conventional understanding of time and space: concrete columns melt in the sun, bicycles bend around themselves and everyday objects seem to take on a life of their own. From manipulating the mechanical workings of a clock, to creating liquid pools of mirrored glass, Kwade transforms common materials into extraordinary artworks that challenge our perceptions. Her diverse sculptures are inspired by the intangible ways we try to make sense of the modern world, from theories of astrophysics to stock market analysis.

Alicja Kwade’s new Commission is on display until 23 November in Gallery 2, a dedicated space for site-specific works of art until 25 June 2017.

WHITECHAPEL GALLERY
www.whitechapelgallery.org