Metahaven Film Installation: Chaos Theory @ Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Metahaven: Chaos Theory

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 

Through June 9, 2024

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

Metahaven

Chaos Theory, 2021

Single channel film, 25 min. (film still)

Courtesy the artists

© Metahaven

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Metahaven: Chaos Theory, the year's first exhibition of Film & Video exhibition series. This program, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024, is permanently devoted to artistic practices associated with the moving image.

Chaos Theory is a unique film installation by Metahaven, the renowned collective founded by Amsterdam-based artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007. Encompassing a variety of mediums including moving images, graphics, interfaces, textile works, and theory, Metahaven is regarded as a forerunner of interdisciplinary practice today.

In Chaos Theory, Metahaven addresses the range of shifting emotions of childhood, sisterhood and parenthood in the connected existence of the film's two protagonists. The enthralling 25-minute film takes revolves around different moments in the dialogue of a child ‘X’ (Valentina Di Mondo) and an adult named ‘Y/Z’ (Georgina Dávid), as they play, walk and live together in a multi-lingual reality. Filled with poetic resonances and ingenious wordplay, their exchanges are set in open spaces as well as more intimate settings—an elevator, a room—all of them equally allegorical and dream-like. A sense of continuity between wakefulness and reverie, pervades the entire film, where the lightness of play alternates with conversations on existential time and gravity. Thus, Chaos Theory operates as a nonlinear tale that challenges distinctions between voices and thoughts, places and fantasy zones.

Shot on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the film’s infrastructural landscape appears in contrast with its open-ended poetics. Multiple vantage points, or screens within the screen, coexist at times. Sections of the screen are outlined in red, as in a video conference call, when a new motif appears in the story. Chaos Theory is presented in a newly conceived spatial installation that includes a large woolen carpet, conceived as a seating area for the audience. Graphic vectors and colour squares mingle in a densely tufted texture that is reminiscent of common upholstery in public transportation. This object somehow materializes X’s words: “I see us in things that are not us; in the drawings of the seats on the bus.”

In the anteroom, Metahaven’s film resonates with a multiplicity of textile works that the artists understand as equivalent to film stills. Thus, the presentation of Chaos Theory is expanded with a selection of embroidered objects created in the past four years, some of which are being exhibited publicly for the first time. These series—Arrows (2020), Blossoms (2021), Bus Seats (2023), and Murmurations (2024)— include jumpsuit jackets, plastic bags, and small tapestries on bus seat fabric. Beside them are the triptych Living Together in Stories (2022) and the single jacquard Versions and Waves (2020). Juxtaposing oneiric landscapes, interfaces, bird flocks and geographics, the artists invite us to challenge our certainties and envision a future defined by empathy, fluid identity, and acknowledged dependence.

Metahaven. Biography

Amsterdam-based Vinca Kruk (b. 1980) and Daniel van der Velde (b. 1971) founded the Metahaven collective in 2007. Their work encompasses filmmaking, writing, and design, and has presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia Kyiv; e-flux, New York; Tick Tack, Antwerp; and State of Concept, Athens, among others; as well as participated in major group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; the Gwangju Biennale; the Sharjah Biennial; the Busan Biennale; Ghost:2561, Bangkok; and many others. Their work is featured in collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria, M HKA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others.

Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; affiliate researchers at Antikythera, Los Angeles; and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. 

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO

Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa

Avenida Abandoibarra, 2 - 48009 Bilbao

www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus

Artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen @ Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona - "Tuan Andrew Nguyen Our Ghosts Live in the Future" - Exhibition by the winner of the 2023 Joan Miró Prize (8th edition)

Tuan Andrew Nguyen 

Our Ghosts Live in the Future

Exhibition by the winner of the 

2023 Joan Miró Prize (8th edition)

Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona

10 May - 24 September 2024

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2023 Joan Miró Prize

Photo Pep Herrero © Fundació Joan Miró

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Specter of Ancestors Becoming, 2019

Still - 4-channel video installation: colour, 7.1 surround sound; 

28 minutes; dimensions variable

Courtesy the artist

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

A Sullen Moon Behind Lit Mountain Tops, 2023

Image credits: Dan Bradica

Courtesy the artist 

The Fundació Joan Miró presents the first solo exhibition in Spain by Vietnamese-American artist TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN (Saigon, 1976), winner of the eighth edition of the Joan Miró Prize. The show includes some of his most poignant recent video installations, as well as a selection of his sculptures made out of fragments of bombs and artillery shells from the Vietnam War.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen and his family emigrated to the United States as refugees after the end of the war and he uses his artistic practice to interweave his own personal story through the history of his country of birth. This exhibition explores the ways in which conflicts from the second half of the 20th century have impacted not only the people who lived through them but also their descendants.

The show gets under way with three sculptures inspired by the mobiles of American artist Alexander Calder, a close friend of Joan Miró who was also an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. In stark contrast to Calder’s pieces, however, Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s mobiles are made out of fragments of bombs and artillery shells from the lengthy and devastating Vietnam War. In this context, Nguyen’s sculptures are more explosions than formal exercises in art. Moreover, they are also sound pieces, tuned to emit certain frequencies with healing properties. Imbued with deep symbolic meaning, they resonate with the Buddhist idea of the transformative power of compassion.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

The Unburied Sounds of a Troubled Horizon, 2022

Still, Single-channel video, 4k anamorphic, 

5.1 surround sound, 60min.

Courtesy the artist

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Because No One Living Will Listen / 

Người Sống Chẳng Ai Nghe, 2023

Still Two-channel 4K video, stereo

Courtesy the artist 

The next three works are video installations linked to the material and personal consequences of the Vietnam War. The first gives a voice to an old unexploded bomb that is about to be detonated fifty years after being dropped. Indeed, throughout Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s audiovisual projects, ostensibly inanimate objects often find a way to tell their own stories as key players in the unfolding endeavour of processing collective trauma. The second installation is a feature film about a mother and daughter struggling to make a living from the scrapyard business they inherited from the father. The daughter salvages metal from the remnants of bombs—the Vietnamese landscape is still studded with unexploded ordnance—to craft uncanny hanging sculptures. One day she accidentally stumbles into the realisation that she must surely be the reincarnation of Alexander Calder. A young Buddhist monk, inspired by the figure of Thich Nhat Hanh, teaches her about the healing properties of sound, which she then applies in her work to help her mother overcome her posttraumatic stress disorder.

The exhibition concludes with one of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s projects linked to the stories of families of non-French soldiers sent by the French colonial administration to fight in Vietnam in what became known as the First Indochina War (1946–1954). In Because No One Living Will Listen, a Vietnamese woman writes a heartfelt letter to her father, a Moroccan soldier in the French army who died when she was a baby. She tells him about the path her life has taken and confesses how disoriented she feels at not fully belonging anywhere—a feeling shared by many other descendants of mixed couples who have to find ways of juggling hybrid cultural identities and integrating their ancestors’ legacy into their own lives.

Our Ghosts Live in the Future gives Spanish audiences the first opportunity to experience Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work in person and gain an appreciation of his artistic vision and committed interest in exploring social and historical issues thrown up by the destabilising effects of colonial legacies. In addition, repeated references in his pieces offer up rereadings of the work of American artist and antiwar activist Alexander Calder, a close friend of Joan Miró and Josep Lluís Sert whose presence is keenly felt in the Fundació Joan Miró Collection. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice resonates with the museum’s collection and with Joan Miró’s legacy as an artist with similarly strong ties to his native country.

The show not only offers a survey of Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s work but also provides a unique insight into his artistic vision and staunch commitment to social and historical concerns that run through the core of his artistic narrative. It includes a previously unseen piece fashioned out of reused war ordnance made at the artist’s studio in Ho Chi Minh City. Like the sculptures presented at the beginning of the show, this piece is inspired by one of Alexander Calder’s mobiles, in this case The Corcovado, a large-scale sculpture that forms part of the Fundació Joan Miró Collection. At both the start and end of the exhibition, Tuan Andrew Nguyen engages with key figures in Western modern art who helped shape the dominant artistic narrative of the 20th century.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen, 2023 Joan Miró Prize

Photo Pep Herrero © Fundació Joan Miró

TUAN ANDREW NGUYEN is an artist from Saigon, Vietnam who lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. His works explore the power of memory and its potential to act as a form of political resistance. His practice is fuelled by research and a commitment to communities that have faced traumas caused by colonialism, war and displacement. Through his continuous attempts to engage with vanishing or vanquished historical memory, Tuan Andrew Nguyen explores the erasures that the colonial project has brought to bear on certain parts of the world. He works between various mediums but devotes much of his attention towards producing moving-image works and sculpture.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen received a BFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1999 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He has been the recipient of several awards in both film and visual arts, including grants from Art Matters and VIA Art Fund. Radiant Remembrance, the artist’s first U.S. solo museum exhibition, was on view at the New Museum in New York from June 29 - September 17, 2023. His work has been featured in several international exhibitions, including the Aichi Triennial, Whitney Biennial in New York, Biennale de Dakar, Sharjah Biennial and the Berlin Biennale. His work is included in the permanent collections of institutions including Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Curated by Martina Millà, head of exhibitions at the Fundació Joan Miró

FUNDACIÓ JOAN MIRÓ | BARCELONA

Parc de Montjuïc, 08038 Barcelona 

www.fmirobcn.org 

Mary Lucier @ Cristin Tierney Gallery, NYC - "Leaving Earth" Video Installation Exhibition

Mary Lucier: Leaving Earth 

Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York 

January 19 – March 2, 2024 

MARY LUCIER

Still from Leaving Earth, 2023

© Mary Lucier. Courtesy Cristin Tierney Gallery

Cristin Tierney Gallery presents Leaving Earth, an exhibition of new video work by MARY LUCIER. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Leaving Earth is a multi-channel video and sound installation inspired by excerpts from the final journal of Mary Lucier’s late husband, the painter Robert Berlind. In this journal, Berlind fearlessly documented his thoughts on his impending death from a terminal illness. His writings reflect his appreciation of life with a remarkable lack of anxiety about the inevitable end—more curiosity than dread.

The imagery in Mary Lucier’s work consists of sequences of protean video and still images filmed in both her domestic and working environments. Most were shot after Robert Berlind’s passing, reflecting the world as she experienced it during his final days and after. Berlind’s terse epigraphs appear throughout as white text on a black background, serving as evocative companions to the flow of images in Leaving Earth.

pictures already formed

more remembrance than presence.

Mary Lucier describes this nine-channel installation as one where "words, pictures, and sound become interchangeable, not serving as descriptions but as a rumination on reality and a form of coping." Unlike much of Mary Lucier’s earlier work, it does not follow a synchronous and sequential internal structure, instead allowing for random juxtapositions, repetitive thoughts, and the possibility of chaos to occur, reflecting the potential disarray in the dying man's mind. The pictorial narrative in Leaving Earth is underscored by Robert Berlind's description of his mental state:

a succession of discontinuous moments occur

then disappear

without the elemental structure of sequence

And yet . . . I forget to fear death

MARY LUCIER (b. 1944, Bucyrus, OH) has been noted for her contributions to the form of multi-monitor, multi-channel video installation since the early 1970s. Her work prior to her introduction to video was largely concerned with manipulation of the black and white image through a graphic performative process. She also produced several live performances with the feminist video collective Red White Yellow and Black (along with Shigeko Kubota, Cecilia Sandoval and Charlotte Warren) at the original Kitchen in 1972 and '73. Archival materials from this collective were also exhibited in 2023. Her latest multi-channel video installation Leaving Earth will be exhibited at the Catskill Art Space in the summer of 2024.

Mary Lucier's video installations have been shown in major museums and galleries around the world. Many now reside in important collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; the Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the National Academy of Design, NY, among others. She has also produced a significant body of single-channel works which have been screened in museums and festivals world-wide.  From the austere black and white experiments of the 1970's to recent studies of Japanese Buddhist ceremonies and Dakota Sioux dances, these works acknowledge the influence of both Avant Garde and documentary practices in American art and cinema.

Mary Lucier has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, Anonymous Was a Woman, the Nancy Graves Foundation, USA Artists, the American Film Institute, the Jerome Foundation, the New York State council on the Arts, and the Japan-US Friendship Commission. Her teaching appointments have included the Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art and Art History at UC Davis; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; adjunct professor in the department of VES at Harvard University; and Visiting Professor in Video Art at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, among others. She lives and works in New York City and Cochecton, NY, where she has established a studio and archive for video art.

CRISTIN TIERNEY

219 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.cristintierney.com

Shirin Neshat: Land of Dreams @ Gladstone Gallery, NYC

Shirin Neshat: Land of Dreams 

Gladstone Gallery, New York

Through February 27, 2021

Gladstone Gallery presents an exhibition by SHIRIN NESHAT and the New York premiere of the artist’s latest body of work, Land of Dreams. Comprised of more than 100 photographs and a two-channel film installation, Land of Dreams marks a significant visual and conceptual shift for the artist, who has turned her lens to the landscape and people of the American West. For this exhibition, Shirin Neshat presents the entire collection of photographs from this series as well as both films, which is complemented by an online viewing room and virtual screenings throughout the show’s run. Combining Shirin Neshat’s singular artistic language with her intuitive approach to documenting the subjects she photographs, Land of Dreams presents multifaceted, surreal views into contemporary American culture during the Trump era.

Created in 2019 in New Mexico, Land of Dreams is a multidisciplinary project, both fictitious and documentary in nature, that captures the state’s diverse American population. The first film on the two-channel video installation follows a young Iranian art student named Simin, who travels around suburban and rural areas of New Mexico photographing local residents in their homes. As part of the protagonist’s assignment, Simin asks her subjects about their most recent dreams. As the people she encounters vividly detail their dreams, the viewer is transported into these imagined narratives alongside Simin, who wanders inside each participant’s subconscious mind. Shirin Neshat infuses the film with cinematic views of New Mexico’s sublime landscape alongside the everyday streets and neighborhoods where Simin travels. The second film reveals a sinister twist to the protagonist’s seemingly innocuous assignment: Simin is uncovered as an Iranian spy tasked with archiving the dreams and portraits she captures, which are recorded and analyzed in a bunker set within the mountains of New Mexico. Unlike the dozens of dream scientists who quietly work and diligently follow orders in the factory-like facility, Simin is noticeably perplexed by one of her subjects, leading her on a path to try and find their subliminal connection. Through her incisive ability to allude to the absurdities and similarities between the United States and Iran, Shirin Neshat astutely explores the complexities between the ephemeral nature of dreams and the dangerous impact of oppressive political ideologies and policies to reveal a shared humanity.

Alongside the film, the photographic installation Land of Dreams comprises 111 photographs of New Mexico residents who Neshat captured throughout filming. Similarly to Simin, Shirin Neshat asked her subjects about their dreams, which she recorded in Farsi on many of the portraits, along with the sitters’ names and dates and places of birth. The artist’s practice of applying calligraphy to portraits recurs throughout her oeuvre, and in many of these new photographs, Neshat additionally included technically intricate, ornate drawings that depict fantastical elements of the dreams. The artist notes, “We drove across the country to search for a landscape that at once looked like Iran and America’s Southwest. We settled on New Mexico not only for its spectacular nature but also for its demographically diverse communities of Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanic, and Anglos.” Through making these complex and interwoven works, Neshat formed a deep interpersonal connection with each person she met, resulting in a powerful and encompassing portrait of America.

SHIRIN NESHAT is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. In 2019, Shirin Neshat was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, “Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again” at The Broad, Los Angeles, which will travel to The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on February 19 and remain on view through May 16, 2021. She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Copenhagen; Musée de l'Eysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Shirin Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006), and the Praemium Imperiale Prize (2017). In 2009, Shirin Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.

Shirin Neshat is currently completing her third feature-length film, entitled Land of Dreams, marking the first time she has created a body of work that incorporates photography, video, and a feature film. Land of Dreams will be released in 2021 and features actors such as Matt Dillon, Sheila Vand, Isabella Rossellini, Christopher McDonald, and Anna Gunn.

GLADSTONE GALLERY

515 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.gladstonegallery.com

______________________

Sara Cwynar @ Milwaukee Art Museum - Image Model Muse

Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse
Milwaukee Art Museum
Through July 21, 2019

SARA CWYNAR

Tracy (Cezanne), 2017 

Dye sublimation print. 

Courtesy of the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. 

© Sara Cwynar

The Milwaukee Art Museum presents Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse, the contemporary artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, on view in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts at the Museum. The exhibition includes three recent video installations and large-scale photographs created by the Brooklyn-based Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, Canada). The works in the exhibition focuses on the artist’s interest in the creation of consumer desire for objects and how society conceptualizes beauty.

“Cwynar’s multi-disciplinary practice across photography, film, and performance echoes and responds to video and performance art of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the artist is both subject and object of the camera,” said Lisa Sutcliffe, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum, and co-curator of the exhibition. “Presenting her full range of work within the context of an encyclopedic collection provides opportunities to examine the historical evolution of standards of beauty and how design plays a role in its construction.”

The works on view reveal the artist’s study of the ways in which color, design and commercial goods can represent larger systems of power. By gathering and organizing objects according to color, vintage, material and content, Sara Cwynar traces how they circulate and are valued by society. In this exhibition, she highlights the evolution of objects from idealized to outdated, focusing on complex feelings of both attraction and repulsion.

SARA CWYNAR (Canadian, b. 1985) 

Tracy (Gold Circle), 2017

Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 30 x 38 in. 

Milwaukee Art Museum,

Purchase, with funds from the Ralph and Cora Oberndorfer Family Trust, M2017.18.

SARA CWYNAR

Tracy (Grid 1), 2017

Inkjet print mounted on Dibond, 30 x 38 in. 

Courtesy of the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. 

© Sara Cwynar

SARA CWYNAR

Tracy (Stepping Forward, Stepping Backward), 2017. 

Dye sublimation print on aluminum, 30 x 38 in. 

Courtesy of the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. 

© Sara Cwynar

“I’m trying to dismantle this often-idealized kitsch, or often very nostalgic Western context of photography, which tells us who we think we are, and often with great bias. I’m trying to think of all the different ways that that is a false history,” said Sara Cwynar. “I’m trying to be clear about my own ambivalence, and how you can see the way the strategies of design and advertising are working but still be seduced by them.”

The artist’s research-oriented films are meditations on the emotional impact of color, design, and popular imagery, and how desire is created. Museum visitors will have the opportunity to view three of Sara Cwynar’s most recent films—Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017), and Cover Girl (2018). Photographs from the artist’s ongoing Tracy series explore similar themes. Through the juxtaposition of commercial objects and Sara Cwynar’s friend Tracy, who acts as the primary model for the series, Sara Cwynar further shows how images can shape beliefs, values and standards of beauty.

SARA CWYNAR

Rose Gold, 2017 (still)

16 mm film on video with sound, 8 min. 

Courtesy of the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. 

© Sara Cwynar

SARA CWYNAR

Rose Gold, 2017 (still)

16 mm film on video with sound, 8 min. 

Courtesy of the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. 

© Sara Cwynar

SARA CWYNAR

Soft Film, 2016 (still)

16 mm film on video with sound, 6 min. 28 sec. 

Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. 

© Sara Cwynar

“The Milwaukee Art Museum has always found a balance between exhibiting contemporary and historic art,” said Margaret Andera, interim chief curator and curator of contemporary art, Milwaukee Art Museum. “The opportunity to explore the work of Sara Cwynar alongside the depictions of beauty by a 19th-century French Academic painter in the concurrent Bouguereau & America exhibition, allows visitors to deepen their understanding of beauty from differing points of view and across centuries.”

Image Model Muse joins a long list of Milwaukee Art Museum exhibitions that have showcased a living female artist, including Penelope Umbrico: Future Perfect (2016), Currents 35: Tara Donovan (2012), Taryn Simon: Photographs and Texts (2012), On Site: Chakaia Booker (2010), On Site: Andrea Zittel (2004) and Laura Owens (2003) as well as numerous exhibitions of Wisconsin-born Georgia O’Keeffe during her lifetime.

Sara Cwynar has won numerous awards as an emerging artist, including the 2016 Baloise Prize, which recognizes international artists on the rise.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and curated by Lisa Sutcliffe, Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Gabriel Ritter, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Supporting sponsors include Live Wire Productions. Exhibitions in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts are sponsored by the Herzfeld Foundation and Madeleine and David Lubar. Exhibitions throughout 2019 are made possible by the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Visionaries including John and Murph Burke, Sheldon and Marianne Lubar, Joel and Caran Quadracci, Sue and Bud Selig and Jeff Yabuki and the Yabuki Family Foundation.

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM
700 N. Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202
mam.org

Khaled Jarrar @ Ayyam Gallery Dubai

Khaled Jarrar
Castles Built from Sand will Fall
Ayyam Gallery Dubai
13 November 2016 – 7 January 2017

KHALED JARRAR

Journey 110, 2008

Video, 12.16 minutes

Ayyam Gallery Dubai (12, Alserkal Avenue) is pleased to present Castles Built from Sand will Fall, the solo exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Khaled Jarrar.

Over the last ten years, Khaled Jarrar has frequently addressed the subject of borders, particularly the elaborate system of checkpoints, fences, and walls that have split communities in his native Palestine. The title of the exhibition refers to the impermanent nature of politically imposed boundaries, which can always be redrawn or demolished.

Castles Built from Sand will Fall provides a condensed overview of Khaled Jarrar’s focus on this issue with a range of work in different media. Featuring installation, photography, video, sculpture, and art objects, the exhibition offers a look into the various strands of his creative practice. This curated selection also emphasises Khaled Jarrar’s use of diverse forms as artistic interventions that encourage viewers to rethink the intersections of life, politics, and visual culture.

The exhibition is organised as an immersive experience with new installations and objects alongside the artist’s older works such as Journey 110 (2008), a video that documents a hidden 110-metre passageway beneath the massive wall that snakes through the West Bank. Khaled Jarrar filmed Journey 110 while travelling with Palestinians who pass through a sewage-filled tunnel in order to reach the other half of Beit Hanina, a village divided in two by the Israeli-built barrier. In the darkened footage, the light of an opening on the other side guides people down the murky path. An elderly woman struggles to wade through the mud with the help of travel companions while a baby is passed to a waiting set of hands. Jarrar films the scene as though giving a first-person account rather than capturing it at a distance as a documentarian, providing an unconventional view of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

The artist’s re-creation of this sense of immediacy is reiterated in an installation that cuts through the gallery space in the form of a concrete wall. When seeking to view the exhibition in its entirety, gallery visitors must find a hole that the artist has carved out in order to access remaining works. Throughout the exhibition, objects, images, and videos show the tragic absurdity of the occupation, describing a surreal yet devastating reality.

On 14 November at 7.30 pm, Alserkal Avenue will screen Khaled Jarrar’s film, Infiltrators (2012), which portrays the struggle of Palestinians in the face of Israeli checkpoints.

KHALED JARRAR: BIOGRAPHY

With photographs, videos, installations, films, and performances that are focused on his native Palestine, multidisciplinary artist Khaled Jarrar explores the impact of modern-day power struggles on ordinary citizens while seeking to maximise the social potential of artistic interventions. Over the last decade, Jarrar has used the subject of Palestine, particularly the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, as a starting point for larger investigations of militarised societies, including the gendered spaces of violence and the links between economic and state powers that fuel and profit from war or political conflict.

Khaled Jarrar’s bold, and sometimes controversial, projects often include various media and have earned him international recognition, most recently as the recipient of the 2016 Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Award. In 2007, for example, he displayed photographs of the Howarra and Qalandiya checkpoint in plain sight of Israeli soldiers at the border. Other projects such as his Live and Work in Palestine passport stamps and his award-winning documentary film The Infiltrators (2012), subvert the dominant narrative of an equally fought, two-sided conflict by highlighting the limited mobility of ordinary Palestinians who struggle to have access to basic things such as healthcare, education, or travel documents.

In seeking to engage a wide audience through public performances and interventions, Jarrar has also presented his multilayered projects abroad. On the streets of Helsinki, Finland he built a temporary Hunger Wall in 2014, a barrier composed of loaves of bread that symbolises the thin line between prosperity and poverty, particularly under military occupation. With Dis-/ Obey, he invited dozens of volunteers to participate in a military march that ultimately placed them in opposition to Jarrar’s voiced orders and an installation of camouflage uniforms. Commissioned by Checkpoint Helsinki as part of the Helsinki Festival, Dis-/Obey investigates military power, disobedience, and individual responsibility in conflict zones.

Khaled Jarrar’s Upcycle the Wall series, which has been shown internationally at such venues as the Aga Khan Museum, is perhaps his most well-known project to date and draws attention to the occupation of Palestine with sculptures made of reconstituted concrete from the apartheid wall that illegally annexes and cuts through parts of the West Bank. These works were highlighted in a critically acclaimed exhibition at Ayyam Gallery London in 2013 that included the installation of a massive concrete partition and related photographs.

Recently, Khaled Jarrar was highlighted by a number of international publications such as The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, and Creative Time Reports for his artistic intervention at the U.S-Mexico border. There, he removed and reappropriated a piece of the partition in order to create a ladder that now stands as a symbolic means of crossing for Mexicans who are separated from their American relatives.

Born in Jenin in 1976, Khaled Jarrar lives and works in Ramallah, Palestine. Jarrar completed his education in Interior Design at the Palestine Polytechnic University in 1996, and graduated from the International Academy of Art Palestine with a Bachelor in Visual Arts degree in 2011. The following year, his documentary The Infiltrators (2012) won several accolades at the 9th Annual Dubai International Film Festival, and confirmed his importance in global cinema.

Khaled Jarrar’s solo exhibitions include Ayyam Gallery Dubai (12, Alserkal Avenue) (2016); Bartsch & Cie, Geneva (2015); Galerie Polaris, Paris (2014, 2012); Gallery One, Ramallah (2014); Ayyam Gallery London (2013); Galerie Guy Bartschi, Geneva (2013); and the NEWTOPIA: The State of Human Rights Contemporary Arts in Mechelen and Brussels (2012). The artist’s recent collective exhibitions were held at venues such as Hinterland Gallery, Vienna (2016); Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2016); Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2016); Palais De La Culture, Constantine (2015); Pirineos Sur Festival (2015); Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah (2015); New Museum, New York City (2014), Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, London (2014), University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2014), USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa (2013); The Madrid Palestine Film Festival (2013); 15th Jakarta Biennale (2013); and 7th Berlin Biennale (2012).

AYYAM GALLERY DUBAI
www.ayyamgallery.com

Laure Prouvost @ MMK, Frankfurt

Laure Prouvost – all behind, we’ll go deeper, deep down and she will say:
MMK - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
3 September 2016 — 6 November 2016

Laure Prouvost

Wantee, 2013

Video Installation

Courtesy of the artist

and MOT International, London & Brussels

Photo: Tim Bowditch

Laure Prouvost

Wantee, 2013

HD-Video Production still

© Laure Prouvost, Courtesy of the Artist 

and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels) 

and Carlier-Gebauer (Berlin)

Starting in September, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst will present the Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost (b. 1978) with her first comprehensive solo presentation in Germany. Under the title “all behind, we’ll go deeper, deep down and she will say:”, the artist will create an environment transforming the entire MMK 3 exhibition space into a large-scale installation. In this setting, she will unite several of her filmic works of the past years with sculptural and painterly elements to create an overall narrative. Hybrids oscillating between technical apparatuses and human figures will serve as the installation’s main architectural structure.

Laure Provoust 

It, Heat, Hit, 2010

Video Installation

Courtesy MOT International London & Brussels

and Taipei Fine Arts Museum

The point of departure for the presentation is a story invented by the artist about her fictitious grandparents. The grandfather, a satire on the heroic artist figure, has dug a tunnel within the framework of an art project, disappeared inside it and never turned up again. The actual protagonist, however, is the grandmother, who – with the aid of relics of their shared past – tells of her own fantasies, hopes and dreams.

Laure Prouvost creates a bizarre realm of the imagination that captivates the viewer on various sensory levels. The boundary between reality and fiction grows ever hazier. The artist’s concern is with penetration of unknown worlds, escape from everyday life, and the conscious loss of the self in the hope of ultimately finding one’s way back to it again.

The exhibition at the MMK 3 is the second and central chapter of a three-part survey of the work of Laure Prouvost. It began at the end of June with the installation “Dropped here and then, to live, leave it all behind”, staged in a labyrinthine structure at Le Consortium, Dijon. In Frankfurt the story will glide into a timeless world dominated by parallel narrative threads. At the end of October, at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, it will emerge again from darkness into light in a presentation entitled “and she will say: hi her, ailleurs to higher grounds”. Although the show’s three venues share a common theme, each also stands alone and offers its visitors a self-contained and independent exhibition experience.

Laure Prouvost

We Will Go Far

Installation view Rupert, Vilnius, Lithuania

© Laure Prouvost, Courtesy of the Artist

and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels)

and Carlier-Gebauer (Berlin)

The exhibition is being realized in collaboration with Le Consortium, Dijon and the Kunstmuseum Luzern and in close cooperation with the artist. It is being made possible by the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung. With support from the Institut Français.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual catalogue (DE/FR), the first publication ever to provide a complete survey of the artist’s œuvre to date.

MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
Website: mmk-frankfurt.de

Sophie Calle Exhibition at Louisiana Museum in Denmark

Contemporary Art Exhibition > Sophie Calle
Contemporary Art Exhibition > Denmark > Humlebaek > Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Sophie Calle

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark

23 June - 24 October 2010

 

With her photographs, texts and film installations Sophie Calle (b. 1953) creates what one could call reality-close fictions. The  Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark presents a number of the artist’s central works; works that play with our perception of reality, mix the private with the collective, often draw on journalism, anthropology or psychoanalysis and take their point of departure in literature, the diary or the photo-novel.

Sophie Calle, who is one of France’s most appreciated living artists, often uses herself as a narrative starting-point for the story in the work. This also applies to Take Care of Yourself (Prenez Soin de Vous), which was one of the high lights of the Venice Biennale in 2007, and which has just been presented in an English version. For this work Sophie Calle has invited a wide variety of women (from a ballet dancer to a lawyer) to use their various professional skills to give their interpretations of an e-mail where the artist’s lover ends their relationship. The results are poetic, touching and humorous statements which together form a monumental installation.

 

SOPHIE CALLE

23 June - 24 October 2010

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gl. Strandvej 13
3050 Humlebaek
Denmark

Philippe Parreno, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, NYC - One Thousand Pictures Falling From One Thousand Walls

Philippe Parreno: One Thousand Pictures Falling From One Thousand Walls 
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York
April 10 - May 5, 2001

Friedrich Petzel Gallery presents the first New York solo exhibition by Paris based artist Philippe Parreno. One Thousand Pictures Falling from One Thousand Walls, consists of two video installations, Credits 2000 and Anywhere Out of the World 1999 and a carpet inlay that draws the projection of sounds on the floor.

Credits suggests an urban landscape and the play areas of housing projects built during the 1970s in France. Credits begins with a dark screen from which the image of bare trees with brightly colored plastic bags fluttering from their empty branches slowly emerges. Apartment buildings appear in the distance. The scene is never viewed in daylight. Playing in the background of this artificial landscape is a piercing guitar riff by Angus Young. At the end, when the movie fades to the black, the gallery lights go on revealing a picture of a young boy named Gerard Philippe, photographed by Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin.

Credits is the results of a large collaboration of artists, technicians and a series of personalities who were influential during the 1970s, such as Angus Young, the lead guitarist of AC/DC; Alain Peyrfitte, the former French Minister of the Interior in the Charles de Gaulle cabinet, and MIKO an ice-cream maker. More specifically this film is an investigation into the history of a type of housing project called Les Grands Ensembles, from the late 50s-60s. Credits was exhibited previously at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

The second video installation is titled Anywhere Out of the World. Last year, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno bought the rights of Annlee, a Japanese Manga character. This collaborative project, titled No Ghost Just A Shell began with two episodes made respectively by the two artists. Anywhere Out of the World is Philippe Parreno's contribution, while Pierre Huyghe's contribution was exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York last fall. Throughout the four-minute video, Annlee talks frankly about her situation as a simple, empty commodity within the Japanese animation world. As a nameless figure, Annlee easily could have been disposed of and forgotten, but was "rescued" and given life.

FRIEDRICH PETZEL GALLERY
535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011
www.petzel.com

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson 
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 
April 11 - July 11, 1999

Brooklyn-based artist Lorna Simpson, who has used photography, text, and most recently, narrative film to raise complex social issues, is the subject of a Walker Art Center exhibition to be on view in Minneapolis April 11 July 11, 1999. Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson, curated by Walker Assistant Curator Siri Engberg, features the artist's most recent single- and multiple-projection film installations, including a work commissioned by the Walker, as well as photographic pieces related to the film projects. Photographs made by the artist during the shooting of the films will accompany each film installation, as will photographically based large-scale works printed on felt, a medium the artist has increasingly employed in her work. A gallery brochure with text will accompany the exhibition.

Lorna Simpson has been well known since the mid-1980s for her provocative photographs, paired with text, that address issues ranging from racial and sexual identity to notions of the body, to interpersonal communication and relationships. Trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, she received her M.A. from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied film and fine arts. She began her career as a documentary photographer but soon found herself, as she has said, "tired of the viewer's approach to looking at documentary images." Interested in the way a photograph is "read" she began to create conceptual compositions pairing minimalist black-and-white images with text. 

In Lorna Simpson's earliest works she used an African-American model, often wearing a simple white dress. Lorna Simpson removed all information that would allow the subject to be identified as a particular individual, thereby inviting the viewer's own experience as a means of interpreting the image and its text. In the mid-1990s Simpson began creating editions whose photographic imagery and texts were printed on panels of felt of the sort used on printing press beds. Often hung in groupings to create large-scale images or multi-image tableaux, the visual fragments combined to create an identity or narrative.

What began as an interest in the figure has given way in Simpson's more recent work to an interest in space and narrative, a shift coinciding with her recent explorations in the medium of film. In 1996, during a residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, she used the Wexner's Art and Technology Lab to create Interior/Exterior, Full/Empty, a seven-projection film piece screened simultaneously on three walls. Each projection presents differing narratives delivered by characters who move in and out of what may or may not be an interlinking story. The following year Simpson made Call Waiting , a short black-and-white single-projection work that centers around notions of communication and relationships, presenting characters whose lives are woven together through a series of telephone conversations and interrupted calls.

In 1997-1998, Lorna Simpson participated in the Walker's Artist-In-Residence program working with Twin Cities community members and actors to create the film Recollection . Commissioned by the Walker, and first screened as part of the Hugo Boss Prize: 1998 at the Guggenheim Soho in New York, Recollection focuses on the characters' use of fragmented narrative memories to reconstruct past events. The film is accompanied by a new 18-foot-long felt piece incorporating photographs taken on location in Minneapolis. 

Scenarios: Recent Work by Lorna Simpson is made possible by generous support from the Arthur and Alice Kramer Foundation. Lorna Simpson's 1997-98 Artist Residency was part of the Walker Art Center's "New Definitions/New Audiences" initiative, a museum-wide project to engage visitors in a reexamination of 20th century art, made possible by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The film Recollection was commissioned by the Walker Art Center through the Artist-in-Residence program, with additional support from the Penny McCall Foundation, New York.

WALKER ART MUSEUM
Vineland Place, Minneapolis, MN 55403
www.walkerart.org

Updated 23.06.2019