Miu Miu and Art Basel Paris present 'Tales & Tellers,' a project by Artist Goshka Macuga

Miu Miu collaborates with Art Basel Paris’ Public Program to present Tales & Tellers, an innovative project envisioned by artist Goshka Macuga and curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, with exhibition design by OMA. Presented at the historic Palais d’Iéna and running until October 20th, 2024, the project dig into women’s narratives and experiences, using a mix of film, video installations, and live performances. Actors reenact moments from Miu Miu’s past film collaborations and runway shows, blending these stories with real-life perspectives to craft an immersive narrative. The project underscores the Italian brand’s commitment to exploring femininity through the intersection of fashion, film, and art.

Building on Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales initiative, which since 2011 has provided female filmmakers a platform to express diverse ideas of womanhood, Tales & Tellers incorporates various media to highlight women’s stories. The performances, enhanced by video works, bring past collaborations to life as actors embody characters from earlier Miu Miu films, transforming the space into a living, multi-dimensional narrative. These reinterpretations offer the audience a fresh view of memories and experiences, breathing new life into familiar stories.

In addition to these performances, Tales & Tellers screens the complete collection of films from the Women’s Tales series, accompanied by panel discussions featuring directors and artists like Chloë Sevigny, Meriem Bennani, Laura Citarella, and others. These discussions not only explore the themes in their films but also delve into the creators' personal histories and artistic inspirations, offering insights into the storytelling process and celebrating women as the keepers of their own stories. The event fosters a dialogue about how these narratives shape and reflect the world.

Highlights Of Art Basel Miami Beach 2023

Alex Israel, photo by Zach Hilty BFA.com.

text by Jennifer Piejko

“For Proust, it was the madeleine cookie. For me, it was 1980s frozen yogurt,” artist Alex Israel introduced his project Snow Beach Frozen Treats, an installation offering sweets as well as turquoise- and magenta-tinted views over South Beach. The nostalgic ice cream shop project (the artist’s family once owned a frozen yogurt shop in L.A.) was set up inside 1111 Lincoln Road, the Tropical Modernist parking structure designed by Herzog & de Meuron—a fitting opening for Miami’s annual art week.

While this year’s calendar had been somewhat more subdued than in years past, the work that made it to the city this year also felt more sensitive to the times, offering more balms and room for introspection than viral spectacle. Inside Art Basel Miami Beach, the city’s main fair, visitors were greeted with large-scale installations such as Ja’Tovia Gary’s Quiet As It’s Kept, centered in a 26-minute film made in response to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye and featuring interviews with the author and Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie, author of Spiritual Traditions in the Novels of Toni Morrison, as well as clips that call on the characters and concepts within The Bluest Eye—Lil’ Kim, historical documentary film footage, Azealia Banks, and hot takes on social media mixed with Gary’s original animations. A list of counties in Florida where The Bluest Eye is currently banned is posted at the installation’s entrance. 

Tribeca gallery Freight+Volume gave over their booth to the work of Karen Finley, one of the legendary four artists who sued the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 after their fellowships were withdrawn after their work was considered indecent, pornographic, and obscene. Finley, as well as John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller, eventually won back their grants in the 1998 Supreme Court ruling, but the N.E.A., as well as U.S. public arts funding in general, reacted by retreating into even more conservative tendencies. Finley’s infamous Go Figure was on view for the 25th anniversary of the case, opening up a nude-model drawing class to fair visitors; some of the gallery’s artists were among the drawing participants in the artwork, drawing the body in protest of some of Florida’s recent rulings narrowing civil rights and a new generation of culture wars in the state. 

Cynthia Talmadge at 56 Henry

Painter Cynthia Talmadge made New York gallery 56 Henry’s booth a pastel-hued kaleidoscopic cube, with wall-sized pointillist paintings and a hand-dyed carpet, in Half Light, her re-creation of Color School painter Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Washington, D.C. studio, showing it simultaneously at three points in possibilities: first, the reality of her daily routine there, in 1963; second, the scene immediately following her 1964 murder, a still-unsolved case rumored to be an assassination by the C.I.A.;  and the third, what Talmadge imagines it would have looked like had the artist been working in 1969. Pinchot Meyer was enmeshed in D.C. high society as much as she was in leftist activist circles, and was seen as a threat to the former. Talmadge’s work of historical fiction underlines the fears that art, even in abstraction, can hold. 

At the Zurich and Paris-based Galerie Peter Kilmann’s booth, Los Angeles artists Raffi Kalenderian and Alberto Cuadros set up a prime destination for both having meaningful conversations as well as laughing them off: a bar, simply calling it Raffi and Al’s. Describing their collaborative work as a “Trojan horse for good times,” the mobile bar looked like a bespoke shipping crate on wheels, made from wooden stretcher bars, linen, and gold hardware and standard minibar drinks—champagne, wine, White Claws—on offer. Headshots of famed Raffi and Al’s patron, including Salma Hayek and L.A. gallerist Matthew Brown, as well as paintings by the artists and their friends and collaborators covered the bar’s surfaces and surrounding booth walls. 

After closing down the fair for the day, crowds swayed to something a little scruffier: a Lot 11 Skatepark, an open lot under a freeway. Sukeban was a one-night-only Japanese women’s wrestling tournament, hosted by Tokyo actor and writer Kunichi Nomura. Wrestlers dressed in anime-inspired costumes by Olympia Le-Tan, hats by Stephen Jones, and makeup by Isamaya Ffrench battled for a belt designed by Marc Newson. A sprawling, snaking night market took over the rest of the underpass. With every swing inside the ring, the crowds let out a roar that drowned out the endless traffic swirling around them. 

Artist John Baldessari With The Prototype of His BMW "Art Car" #19 To Be Unveiled Next Fall

John Baldessari is currently working on his rendition of the BMW "art car" with a prototype of the M6 GT3 model. Baldessari’s Art Car wilk be a ‘rolling advert’ for himself, featuring aspects from some of his most famous works – his use of colored dots. “For me, the car is certainly an icon of contemporary life. I have done sculpture before, but it’s the first time I have ever in a sense collaborated. I didn’t design the car – I collaborated with the designers of the car. I think the challenge comes in making something that cannot be understood from just one point of view, but only from a total point of view. I figured my use of colored dots is kind of an iconic series, so I had to include that. I’m actually advertising myself.” The final product will be unveiled on November 30, 2016 during Art Basel Miami and on the Daytona racetrack in January 2017. photograph by BMW

Watch The Premiere Of Yulia Zinshtein's Sardonic New Short Film "Girls Going Wild" Shot In Miami During Art Basel

Girls Going Wild is a short film directed by Yulia Zinshtein in Miami during Art Basel. For those of us that grew up on early reality TV - shows like The Real World and Road Rules, which were usually punctuated by late-night infomercials for Girls Gone Wild – this portrait of young adults looking for the ultimate party in Miami is at once familiar, but all too honest and a sad and strange reflection of our times. Zinshtein says, "Girls Going Wild is about searching for the best party. This video aims to show how awkward that search can be...and that the very process becomes the best party you could ever find." Click here to read our short interview with Yulia Zinshtein.

Here Are Autre's Highlights from Art Basel 2015 in Switzerland

Art Basel 2015 is officially open to the public today in Basel, Switzerland. Art Basel has been described as the ‘Olympics of the Art World’. Approximately 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa show the work of more than 4,000 artists, ranging from the great masters of Modern art to the latest generation of emerging stars. The show's individual sectors represent every artistic medium: paintings, sculpture, installations, videos, multiples, prints, photography, and performance. Here are our highlights from the 2015 Art Basel in Switzerland, which will be in full swing until June 21, 2015. photographs courtesy of Art Basel

[PHOTOS] Cafe Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen @ MOAFL

Bringing together the work of French artist Francis Picabia, American artist Julian Schnabel, and Danish artist Jens Ferdinand Willumsen for the first time in the United States, the exhibition Café Dolly: Picabia, Schnabel, Willumsen will be on view at NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale from October 12, 2014 - February 1, 2015. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper