Cannupa Hanska Luger @ Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC - New Myth

Cannupa Hanska Luger: New Myth 

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York 

Through October 23, 2021 

Cannupa Hanska Luger

Future Ancestral Technologies ++ a generation of new myth ++, 2021 

Three-channel video installation

© Cannupa Hanska Luger, Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Cannupa Hanska Luger: New Myth, an exhibition of new, never-before-exhibited ceramic and mixed-media sculptures by Cannupa Hanska Luger, along with a new three-channel video from the artist’s ongoing Future Ancestral Technologies project. The exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery.

Working in ceramic, textiles, and mixed media, Cannupa Hanska Luger crafts monstrous figures and vividly colored weapons that fill the gallery like remnants from an epic battle. Giant snake heads, thick black muscle fibers spilling out of their severed necks, rear their fangs shaped like the nozzle on a gas pump. The head of a three-eyed monster, Greed, lies on its side, its acid yellow tongue lolling out uselessly. A twisted hand, chopped off at the wrist, has its title, Ruin, tattooed across its knuckles in blood-red pigment, golden bite marks visible beneath a layer of matted blue hair.

Monster archetypes cut across cultural boundaries, continents, and time periods. “Today,” Cannupa Hanska Luger says, “we are once again plagued by monsters.” In these works, Luger creates a new mythology, manifesting societal ills as corporeal monsters and illustrating their destruction – complete with bloodied weapons – to “recognize the agency we have to slay our present-day monsters.”

The exhibition also includes regalia for two heroic slayer figures and a three-channel video installment in Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Future Ancestral Technologies, an ongoing project to create an immersive world of Indigenous science fiction. Luger describes the project as a methodology, a practice, and a way of future dreaming that harnesses the power of science fiction to shape collective thinking and reimagine the future on a global scale. Through installation, video, and land-based work, the series develops an ongoing narrative in which Indigenous people develop sustainable, migration-based technology to live nomadically in hyper-attunement to land and water. Within the limitless time jumps of Future Ancestral Technologies, Cannupa Hanska Luger challenges our collective thinking to imagine a post-capitalist, post-colonial future where humans restore their bonds with the earth and each other, asking us to consider how we will dream of our collective future. 

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER

Born in 1979 on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, Cannupa Hanska Luger is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. In 2011, he received a BFA in Studio Ceramics from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Cannupa Hanska Luger has received numerous awards such as the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts Multicultural Fellowship Award, 2015; the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship Award, 2016; the Museum of Arts and Design Burke Prize, 2018; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2019; a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, 2020; and a United States Artists Fellowship Award for Craft, 2021. He has been the subject of more than 21 solo exhibitions and has participated in over 110 group exhibitions at venues such as Art Mûr (2014, Montreal), Princeton University Art Museum (2018, Princeton, NJ), Washington Project for the Arts (2017, Washington, D.C.), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2018, 2019, Bentonville, AR), Gardiner Museum (2019, Toronto), Orenda Gallery (2017, Paris), the Autry Museum (2017, Los Angeles), the Museum of Arts and Design (2018, 2019, New York), and the Denver Art Museum (2021), among others.

His works are featured in the collections of many museums, including: the North American Native Museum (Zürich, Switzerland); the Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM); the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (Norman, OK); the Luciano Benetton Collection: Imago Mundi (Treviso, Italy); the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT); and the Conley Gallery, California State University (Fresno, CA).

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Cannupa Hanska Luger.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Madeline Hollander @ Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC - Flatwing

Madeline Hollander: Flatwing

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through August 8, 2021

MADELINE HOLLANDER

Flatwing, 2019

Video, color, sound, 16:25 min. 

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; 

Purchase with funds from the Film and Video Committee 2020.97. 

© Madeline Hollander

Madeline Hollander: Flatwing is the first U.S. solo museum exhibition of multi-disciplinary artist MADELINE HOLLANDER. The exhibition features Flatwing (2019), the artist’s first video installation, which explores the emergence of silent flat-wing crickets on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. Flatwing, recently acquired for the Whitney’s collection, is accompanied by a display of diagrams, drawings, and research materials created by the artist in the process of making the film. The exhibition also debuts a new sound installation based on the correlation between temperature and the frequency at which crickets chirp.

Madeline Hollander’s multidisciplinary practice examines concepts of movement, pattern, gesture, environment, and climate change. The artist’s performance work Ouroboros Gs, featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, choreographed the installation of a portion of the Whitney’s flood mitigation system, exploring the adaptations of the Museum itself in the face of the climate crisis.

“We're delighted to welcome Madeline Hollander back to the Whitney so close on the heels of her breakout performance in the 2019 Biennial," said Scott Rothkopf, Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator. "The Whitney believes deeply in sustained and intimate dialogues with artists, and it's a real privilege to be able to present an entirely different facet of such a pioneering young artist's work. In her gorgeous and eerie video Flatwing, Hollander trains her choreographic interests on another species and places us in the ever-shifting space where hypothesis and belief merge.”

Flatwing records the artist’s nocturnal journey through Kauai’s rainforest, and her futile attempt to find and record the movements of the silent crickets. Running at just over 16 minutes and shot with an infrared camera, Madeline Hollander’s footage captures many creatures of the rainforest’s nightscape—including a frog, a chicken, and various insects—in pink, red, and purple infrared light; but no crickets are to be found. Madeline Hollander presents the crickets’ absence as both a signal of the insects’ inevitable extinction and a mirror of our own human struggle to adapt to conditions of accelerated change, a grave duality symptomatic of ongoing climate crises.

Chrissie Iles, the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, who organized the exhibition with Clémence White, senior curatorial assistant, said, “Working with Madeline to bring together this multifaceted exhibition has deepened our understanding of her working process. Flatwing represents years of research, producing an examination of the adaptive choreography of survival in a poetic environment of light, color, sound, and space. Investigating the tensions between art and science, this multi-sensory installation, immersing us in the hidden world of the rainforest, speaks to the ethical imperatives innate in Madeline’s practice.”

The video installation occupies the Museum’s fifth-floor Kaufman Gallery, and is prefaced by a “studio wall” displaying Madeline Hollander’s drawings, diagrams, and research materials. The adjacent Goergen Gallery showcases a sound installation created with Madeline Hollander’s field recordings of chirping, non-flat-winged crickets. The tempo of the cricket chirps within the audio files corresponds to live temperature data in New York City, building on the formula explained in the first text in Flatwing: "To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count the number of chirps in 14 seconds then add 40 to get the temperature." 

MADELINE HOLLANDER (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is an artist who works with performance, film, and installation to explore how human movement and body language negotiate their limits within everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and daily ritual. Her work presents continuously looping events that intervene within spatial, psychological, and temporal landscapes and engage with alternate modes of viewership, replication, and archive. Madeline Hollander earned a BA from Barnard College of Columbia University and an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She has had solo exhibitions at Bortolami, NY (2020), The Artist's Institute, NY (2018); Bosse & Baum, UK, and SIGNAL, Brooklyn, NY (2016). Her work has been featured in the Whitney Biennial (2019); the Aldrich Museum, CT (2020); Helsinki Contemporary, Finland (2019); Serpentine Galleries, UK (2018); the Centre Pompidou Metz, France (2019); and the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2017). Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at The Shed, NY, and ARCH Athens, Greece.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014

whitney.org

Lawrence Abu Hamdan @ Maureen Paley, London

Lawrence Abu Hamdan 

Maureen Paley, London 

Through 9 May 2021 

Maureen Paley presents the second solo exhibition at the gallery by LAWRENCE ABU HAMDAN. The exhibition includes a newly realised installation of the video work Once Removed (2019) which was first shown in Sharjah Biennial 14, UAE (2019) (commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation) and was also included in the Biennale of Sydney, Australia earlier this year. This is the first time it is shown in the UK. As well, the exhibition presents pieces from his most recent project, For the Otherwise Unaccounted (2020) that consists of a series of thermographic prints which investigate the idea of birthmarks corresponding to reincarnation. This exhibition presents the first iterations of a new body of work he is developing that investigates reincarnation, not as a scientific fact, but as a medium for justice.

Once Removed, 2019

HD video, colour, sound, 28 minutes

This dual-channel video installation is a portrait of Bassel Abi Chahine, a 31-year-old writer and historian who has managed to obtain the most comprehensive inventory of extremely rare objects, photographs and interviews of the People Liberation Army (PLA) and Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) militia from the Lebanese civil war. His obsessive analysis, collection and unprecedented research into this one militia was done in pursuit of material to reconstitute flashbacks and unexplainable memories from a previous life. Through his research, Abi Chahine realised that his own lucid memories of a war he had not lived were because he was the reincarnation of a soldier Yousef Fouad Al Jawhary, who died aged 16 on February 26, 1984, in the town of Aley. The scenography of the film attempts to establish the conditions to listen to a new category of witness, one that is yet to be accepted into the production of history.

For the Otherwise Unaccounted, 2020

17 A3 Thermographic prints

In 1997 the psychiatrist and professor at Virginia School of Medicine, Dr Ian Stevenson published his life work, “REINCARNATION AND BIOLOGY: The Etiology of Birthmarks”. The book was the result of fieldwork in Asia, Turkey, Lebanon, across Africa and Alaska, in which he interviewed and investigated claims of reincarnation with particular attention to the correspondence of birthmarks on the reincarnated subject to the circumstances of their death in their previous lives. Stevenson’s book is a strange and beautiful mix of narrative literature, forensic analysis, biological data, historiography, theology and conflicting scientific hypotheses. In focusing on the claim to reincarnation rather than the ethnography of a single people, Stevenson’s monologue chronicles a collectivity of people who exist at the threshold of the law and for whom injustices and violence have otherwise escaped the historical record due to colonial subjugation, corruption, rural lawlessness and legal amnesty. The raised ink renderings of these birthmarks highlight the ways in which testimony is stored in the body. This work isolates the birthmarks from their bodies, and in this way archives the only surviving remnants of historical erasure, such as forced religious conversions, destruction of language and property, colonial occupation and territorial annexation.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a committed interest in sound and its intersection with politics. This originates from his background as a touring musician and his earlier work in DIY music production. His more recent audio investigations have been used (along with informing his art) as evidence at the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal and as advocacy for organisations such as Amnesty International and Defence for Children International together with fellow researchers from Forensic Architecture.

He completed his PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017 and is currently a fellow at the Gray Centre for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago. In 2019, he formed a collective with fellow Turner Prize nominees Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani in order to be jointly granted this award. This is the first time such a gesture has occurred. His solo exhibition at Vienna Secession will open in December this year.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan has had solo exhibitions at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai, UAE, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St Louis, Missouri, USA and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, Witte De With, Rotterdam and Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin, 2019; Tate Tanks at Tate Modern, London, UK, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK and Hammer Museum (Vault Project), Los Angeles, USA, 2018, as well as daadgalerie, Berlin, Germany, 2018 following his participation in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in 2017. He has also had solo exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt, 2016; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland, 2015, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2014 and The Showroom, London and Casco, Utrecht, Netherlands in 2012. He has also exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale 'May You Live in Interesting Times' selected by Ralph Rugoff, the 11th Gwangju Biennale and the 13th and 14th Sharjah Biennial. This year, Abu Hamdan was awarded the 2022 Future Fields Commission in Time-Based Media, The Jean Vigo Award for Best Director, Punto de Vista 2020 and the German Federal Foreign Office Dialogue Award at the 33rd European Media Art Festival. His other awards include the 2019 Edvard Munch Art Award, the 2018 Baloise Art Prize, the 2017 Tiger short film award at the Rotterdam International Film festival and the 2016 Nam June Paik Award for new media. His works are part of collections at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE, and Tate, London, UK.

A solo publication [Inaudible] – A Politics of Listening in 4 Acts was co-published by Portikus, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen and Sternberg Press in 2016. Lawrence Abu Hamdan: The Voice Before the Law was published in 2019 on the occasion of his exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart – Berlin. This year, the Jameel Arts Centre produced the publication Artist’s Rooms: Lawrence Abu Hamdan to accompany his solo exhibition.

MAUREEN PALEY

60 Three Colts Lane, London E2 6GQ

www.maureenpaley.com

_________

Paul Pfeiffer @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC

Paul Pfeiffer
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York
Through November 12, 2016

Paula Cooper Gallery presents Paul Pfeiffer’s second one-person exhibition, which includes a selection of recent video work.

Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Paul Pfeiffer recasts the visual language of spectacle to uncover its psychological, cultural and racial underpinnings. For this exhibition, the gallery presents Paul Pfeiffer’s forty-eight minute multi-channel audio and video installation, Three Figures In A Room (2015-2016), which features televised footage of Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao’s highly publicized boxing match at the MGM Grand, Las Vegas, in May 2015. The original audio has been replaced by an eerily quiet Foley soundtrack, which isolates the physical exertion of the boxers and movement among the stadium audience—a rhythmic thud of footsteps; an acute smack of leather on flesh; a hissing snarl of exhausted breath. A second video channel shows the sound technicians as they distill and recreate the sound effects. Mirroring the boxers’ athleticism and focus, the Foley channel plays in sync with the fight channel, each placed against opposing walls in the main space of the gallery. Audio playback alternates from one channel to the other, sparring across the room and enveloping the viewer in the meticulous process of sound production.

Also on view are three new works from Paul Pfeiffer’s ongoing Caryatid series, begun in 2004. Screened on lustrous chrome television sets of varying sizes, the HD videos show slow-motion excerpts of boxing matches in which the attacking opponents have been digitally removed. Cast into a torpid yet tense solo performance, the remaining boxer invites close scrutiny. Obscure corporeal details are brought to the fore, highlighting the brutality of impact from an invisible assault, while the work’s presentation as sculptural object serves to prompt further meditative viewing.

Paul Pfeiffer was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), MIT’s List Visual Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005), MUSAC León, Spain (2008), the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2010). He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship and the Bucksbaum Award from the Whitney Museum. Pfeiffer was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany in 2011. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Paula Cooper Gallery
www.paulacoopergallery.com

Rineke Dijkstra @ Milwaukee Art Museum

Rineke Dijkstra 
Rehearsals
Milwaukee Art Museum
Through January 1, 2017

RINEKE DIJKSTRA

Marianna (The Fairy Doll), 2014

One-channel HD video installation, surround sound;19 min. 13 sec., looped.

Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

© Rineke Dijkstra

The Milwaukee Art Museum presents the recent video installations of internationally acclaimed artist RINEKE DIJKSTRA (Dutch, b. 1959) in Rehearsals, in the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts. Two video installations—Marianna (The Fairy Doll) and The Gymschool, St. Petersburg—will make their museum debut in this Milwaukee-originated exhibition organized by Lisa J. Sutcliffe, curator of photography and media arts.

Rineke Dijkstra filmed the two video installations featured in Rehearsals in Russia; the works examine the intensive rehearsals of young girls. Marianna (The Fairy Doll), a single-channel video never shown in the United States, presents a touching portrait of a ballerina as she practices for an audition in the prestigious Vaganova ballet academy. The Gymschool, St. Petersburg, a three channel video, highlights the flexibility and strict discipline of a group of young rhythmic gymnasts. Both videos, which Rineke Dijkstra produced for Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, in 2014, reveal complex layers of determination and fragility as the girls attempt to conceal their emotions and perfect their crafts.

Over the past 30 years, Rineke Dijkstra has produced a sensitive and eloquent body of photographic and video work. In her large-scale photographs and video installations, she is particularly interested in moments of transition, especially adolescence, a time when individuals build their own identities and begin to present themselves in the way they wish to be perceived. Known for her acclaimed photographs of bathers—adolescents Dijkstra met on beaches from Poland to South Carolina—her subjects range from teenagers to mothers who have just given birth, bull fighters fresh from the ring and military recruits. In contrast to her earlier videos of visitors and dancers in nightclubs, Dijkstra’s recent videos capture young girls who have dedicated their lives to practicing incredible athletic routines. She does not concentrate on the final, polished performance but, rather, focuses on what is in fact a more impressive feat: the repetition, resolve, determination and constant practice that it takes to become a truly gifted performer. As the girls attempt to conceal their personal emotions, Dijkstra finds beauty in the moments of imperfection when they reveal their humanity.

Accompanying the Rehearsals exhibition is The Lives of Other: Portraits from the Photography Collection. This presentation of works from the Museum’s photography collection explores the interest many photographers have had in understanding how people present themselves to the world. The exhibition is organized thematically and includes an important new acquisition, Rineke Dijkstra’s Almerisa (1994–ongoing), purchased through the Christine A. Symchych and James P. McNulty Acquisition Fund. The work is an 11-part series that follows the transition of a young Bosnian refugee as she adapts to life in the West and grows from a girl to a woman with her own child.

“This exhibition offers a rare opportunity to view Rineke Dijkstra’s video installations in the context of contemporary and historical portraiture,” said Lisa J. Sutcliffe, the Milwaukee Art Museum’s curator of photography and media arts. “Marianna (The Fairy Doll) and The Gymschool, St. Petersburg reveal Dijkstra’s continued interest in examining the nature of transformation by closely observing the act of rehearsal itself.”

Both exhibitions are sponsored by the Herzfeld Foundation and on view through January 1, 2017.

About RINEKE DIJKSTRA: Short biography

Dutch artist Rineke Dijkstra (b. 1959, Sittard, The Netherlands) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in many international exhibitions and biennials including the 1997 and 2001 Venice Biennale, the 2005 Sharjah Biennial, and the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennial. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam organized a large overview of her work, Rineke Dijkstra: Portraits, in 2005, which traveled to Jeu de Paume in Paris, La Caixa in Barcelona and Fotomuseum Winterthur. In the United States, a major retrospective of her work was organized in 2013 by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize in 1998. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

Milwaukee Art Museum
www.mam.org

Ragnar Kjartansson @ Barbican Centre, London

Ragnar Kjartansson
Barbican Centre, London
Through 4 September 2016

Opening 14 July 2016 at Barbican Art Gallery, this is the first ever UK survey of the work of the internationally acclaimed Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, charting his wide-ranging practice across film and performance, and his less well known work as a painter and draughtsman. Born into a family active in Iceland’s theatre scene, Kjartansson draws from a varied history of stage traditions, film, music and literature from Icelandic storytelling to opera music to contemporary pop culture. His performances, video installations, drawings and paintings explore the boundary between fact and fiction, as well as constructs of myth and identity. Donning various guises from a foot soldier, to a Hollywood crooner, to the incarnation of death, Kjartansson both celebrates and derides the romanticised figure of the artist as cultural hero.

Ragnar Kjartansson said: “I am extremely pleased to have my works in the legendary Barbican. The interdisciplinary buffet that the Barbican is fits my unfocused practice. Seriously I love the building the utopian feel and the programme that has kept me coming and coming as a tourist since my parents took me there in the 80´s.”

Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts said “It is a pleasure to welcome and present Ragnar’s work at the Barbican, an artist who, incredibly, has never had a sizeable show in London or a survey on this scale this side of the Atlantic. After two highly memorable presentations at the Venice Biennale, and a host of new commissions across Europe and the United States, Ragnar is an artist at the forefront of contemporary art and I’m thrilled this show will bring his eclectic practice to a wider audience.’

Music, repetition and endurance are key ingredients in Ragnar Kjartansson’s video and performance works and the exhibition centres around two major works combining these elements. Shown to much acclaim at the New Museum in New York, Ragnar Kjartansson’s autobiographical performance, Take me here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2014) is presented. Full of romance and humour, 10 male troubadours are spread throughout the lower gallery, singing and strumming their guitars against a projected soft focus love scene acted by Kjartansson’s parents. The actors met on set and family legend has it that Kjartansson was conceived at the time the film was shot in 1975 . In homage to the interweaving of the real and the fictional, Kjartansson invited Kjartan Sveinsson, former member of the Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós to transform the dialogue into a polyphonic score.

Ragnar Kjartansson’s celebrated video installation, The Visitors (2012) is also on show in the lower gallery, comprising of a series of nine life-size video tableaux of a musical performance staged at historic Rokeby Farm in Upstate New York where Ragnar Kjartansson has been a frequent visitor since 2007. Shot in one take, each musician was recorded in a separate room of the home or on the grounds of Rokeby, singing the same refrain ‘once again I fall into my feminine ways’ for just over an hour. The s ynchronisation of the screens in the exhibition space merges the individual interpretations into a cinematic and harmonic composition.

One of the earliest works on show, Me and My Mother , is an ongoing video collaboration with his mother dating from 2000, and features four video screens, filmed over five years apart where she repeatedly spits in his face over several minutes with intensity and vigour at once provocative, humorous and absurd. As well as exploring family relationships and the passage of time, the series also engages us with Kjartansson’s interest in the conflation of reality and fantasy as mother and son slip into their professional roles.

For the first time in the UK, Kjartansson’s series of 144 paintings, The End (2009), made over a 6-month period during the Venice Biennale, are on display. As his native country was in the midst of an unprecedented economic meltdown, Ragnar Kjartansson inhabited the role of a bohemian artist, painting the portrait of the same young model, day after day, drinking and smoking against the backdrop of the Grand Canal. While the project served to document the artist’s own experience, his obsessive repetition of the same subject and maniacal accumulation of paintings hinted at the nihilism of art in the face of the real world. Drawing and painting are an essential part of Kjartansson’s practice and the exhibition also includes a selection of his intimate Moleskin sketchbooks and watercolour paintings for his durational performances.

To coincide with the exhibition, Kjartansson has conceived a new work of a mirrored scene of movement and symmetry entitled Second Movement (2016) for the Barbican Lakeside every Saturday and Sunday. In a theatrical reality, two women in quintessential Edwardian costume row their boat on the Barbican Lakeside embracing in a never-ending kiss. With gentleness and tension and the feeling of Mozart’s famous composition Second Movement of Piano Concerto 21 echoing from the title, the performance is in stark contrast to the Brutalist surrounds of the centre.

Ragnar Kjartansson was born in Reykjavík, Iceland in 1976, where he lives and works. His recent solo exhibitions and performances include, Krieg (War), Volksbühne, Berlin (2016); Ragnar Kjartansson: Woman in E , Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016); Seul celui qui connaît le désir, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2015—16); Me, My Mother, My Father and I, New Museum, New York (2014); The Palace of the Summerland, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2014); The Explosive Sonics of Divinity, Volksbühne, Berlin (2014); The Visitors, Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York; Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2012 — 13); Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna (2013) and HangarBicocca , Milan (2013—14); It’s Not the End of the World, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2012—13); Song, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2011— 2012). Kjartansson performed A Lot of Sorrow, with The National at MoMA P.S.1, New York (2013). Kjartansson was the recipient of Performa’s 2011 Malcolm McLaren Award for his performance of Bliss , a twelve-hour live loop of the final aria of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and in 2009 he was the youngest artist to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale.

Barbican Art Gallery, London
www.barbican.org.uk

Phil Collins – Cornerhouse, Manchester

Phil Collins
Cornerhouse, Manchester
Through 20 November 2010

Just as it was mandatory in British schools to attend Bible lessons, in Soviet Russia, Yugoslavia or East Germany, Marxism was a central part of the curriculum. I’d often wondered about this. What had happened to the Marxist teachers now? Were they teaching business studies? -- PHIL COLLINS

Marxism Today is a film project by British artist Phil Collins. It takes as its starting point the Marxism classes that were a compulsory feature of East German schools prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, investigating what became of the teachers of this subject after Marxist ideology became increasingly discredited and after the teachers themselves became surplus to requirements. 

After extensive research, Collins located many former Marxist-Leninist teachers from across the former German Democratic Republic. From the ones that came forward, the artist selected three women – Andrea Ferber, Petra Mgoza-Zeckay and Marianne Klotz – to be the subject of a 35-minute film, called marxism today (prologue), which launched to considerable acclaim at the Berlin Biennale in June, and will have its UK premiere at Cornerhouse, in October 2010.

Combining interviews with these women in their homes or current workplace with archive footage from the heyday of the socialist state, Collins’ film considers the ramifications of the social and political transformations of the past two decades from a human perspective, and with a generous and engaging sense of empathy. We learn that one of the interviewees switched from introducing students to the principles of Marxist/Leninist philosophy to setting up a dating agency for intellectuals, while another refuses, on principle, to eat bananas or drink Coca-Cola to this day.

The second phase of the project shifts its attention from former East Germany to Manchester, where Marx’s confidant Friedrich Engels wrote his influential ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ in the late nineteenth century. While Marxism Today: Prologue is exhibited at Cornerhouse, as part of the AND Festival, Collins will be in the city for a series of workshops and events, and preparing for a second stage of filming. For this next chapter of the project, Film and Video Umbrella and Cornerhouse will bring three of the Marxist-Leninist teachers to Manchester to give an introduction to Marxism at a state school, a private school and a religious school.

Collins will follow the lives of students and teachers at these schools through the eyes of the visitors, recording the reaction of pupils and parents to the lessons of this apparently discounted political creed. In the context of the recent global financial crisis, what kind of conversation will emerge from this encounter, and how do issues of class, labour and economic value figure in the lives of young people now?

marxism today is funded by Cornerhouse (Manchester), the Berlin Biennial 6 and DAAD Berliner Kuenstlerprogramm, Film and Video Umbrella (London) and Abandon Normal Devices (AND).

PHIL COLLINS was born in Runcorn, UK in 1970 and currently lives and works in Berlin. The artist earned his B.A. at the University of Manchester and received his M.F.A. from the University of Ulster, School of Art & Design, Belfast. Recent solo exhibitions include the world won’t listen, Tramway, Glasgow (2009), Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2008), Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (2007), Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2007), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2006), Tate Britain, London (2006-7), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006). Recent group exhibitions include The Making of Art, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009), Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2009), Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. Part II: Realisms, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2008), Life On Mars, 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2008), Double Agent, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2008). Phil Collins was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize.

CORNERHOUSE, MANCHESTER

70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH

www.cornerhouse.org

2 October - 20 November 2010

Pipilotti Rist, Heroes Of Birth - Luhring Augustine, NYC

Pipilotti Rist,  Heroes Of Birth
Luhring Augustine, NYC
Through October 23, 2010

Heroes Of Birth at Luhring Augustine in NYC is an exhibition of new work by Pipilotti Rist. This is Rist’s third solo exhibition at this gallery and it features the debut of two video installations as well as a more intimately-scaled video sculpture. 

In the entry gallery All or Nothing (2010) is a triptych of LCD screens mounted on the wall; it is surrounded by an altar with daily offerings such as fresh flowers and water for visitors to pause and quench their thirst. This sculpture features imagery that walks the line between the corporal and the spiritual - body parts ripple in rhythmic motion, mesmerizing in their perpetual search for synchronicity. 

Layers Mama Layers (2010), in the gallery’s main space, extends and amplifies Rist’s iconic experiential style. The space is filled with cascading, diaphanous fabrics which descend from the ceiling and become translucent screens for multiple video projections. As viewers wind through this otherworldly space their bodies, along with the ghostly gray cloth become the undulating canvas for the projections. The room is filled with melodic sounds which, accompanied by the roving projections create a meditative rhythmic environment. Demonstrating an evolution in Rist’s practice, Layers Mama Layers integrates computer graphic elements into her characteristic filmed footage. 

The rear gallery is covered by two wallpaper patterns designed by the artist; suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room is Massachusetts Chandelier (2010), a luminous, tiered object. The translucent volumes of the underpants, which were collected from the artist and her friends and family, are filled with warm light from within and lit from the outside by two video projections.

PIPILOTTI RIST (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland) has exhibited extensively in major international institutions and has received numerous awards including, most recently, the prestigious Joan Miró Prize from the Fundació Caixa Girona in Spain. Current solo exhibitions are Friendly Game – Electronic Feelings, at Fundació Juan Miró, Barcelona and Schliessen Sie mir das Kleid, Danke! (Close My Dress, Thank You) at Museum Langmatt, Baden, Switzerland. Recent exhibitions include Elixir – The video organism of Pipilotti Rist, which travelled last year from Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands to KIASMA Museum for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland and Pour Your Body Out (7534 Cubic Meters) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her work can be seen in numerous publications and in the collections of museums and institutions worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent, Belgium; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. Rist currently lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. 

Pipilotti Rist, Heroes Of Birth
September 11 - October 23, 2010

Luhring Augustine
531 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

www.luhringaugustine.com

Jan Tichy Video Installation Spertus Chicago

 

JAN TICHY

SPERTUS GROUND LEVEL PROJECT

CHICAGO

March 10 – June 27, 2010

 

  © JAN TICHY, installation no. 6 (tubes), 2009,
Video installation with 200 paper objects, adhesive, sand bags, and sound.
Courtesy of the artist / Spertus

 

Ground Level Projects is a dynamic series of artist commissions for the glass-enclosed, street-level vestibule space of the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. The project engages four artists over a year-long period, aiming to foster creative encounters that investigate, challenge, and expand traditional perceptions of the Jewish experience.

The inaugural project was The ways in which things operate by Chicago-based artist Deb Sokolow. This was followed by a photographic series entitled Portraits of Young Jewish Women by New York-based artist Sheree Hovsepian and by video work by Chicago-based artist Jason Lazarus with its work, entitled The top of the tree gazed upon by Anne Frank while in hiding (Amsterdam 2008), October 28, 2009 – January 17, 2010.

The fourth work in the series—running through June 27, 2010—is by artist Jan Tichy. 

Jan Tichy’s dynamic installations address the multi-layered, often charged narratives of specific urban spaces and architectural contexts. Using light as his medium, his site-specific commission animates and transforms the ground floor. His minimalist approach ensures that his works remain open to interpretation, focusing attention on the impact of his materials to transform the viewer’s experience of reality.

ABOUT JAN TICHY

Born in Prague, Jan Tichy moved to Israel in 1993. After studying political science at Hebrew University, he attended Musrara School of Photography and New Media in Jerusalem and the Advanced Studies Program at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv. He completed his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Over the past three years Tichy’s work has been exhibited in Barcelona, Berlin, Chicago, Frankfurt, Haifa, Helsinki, Jerusalem, New York, Prague, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Washington DC. In 2008 his work was exhibited in the Israeli Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice and the artist had a solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He recently completed a project at Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology and exhibited his largest solo exhibition to date at Richard Gray Gallery.

 

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Related programming supported by Denis Weil in memory of Jacqueline Weil-Bloch. Additional support for the Jason Lazarus installation from the Bernard and Rochelle Zell Center for Holocaust Studies at Spertus. Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies is a partner in serving the community, supported by the JUF/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago.                

Ground Level Projects is open Sunday-Thursday from 10 am to 5 pm. It is free and open to the public. 

 

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies
610 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605-1901
www.spertus.edu

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