Read Our Interview Of Artist & Curator Mieke Marple On Bridging the Digital & Traditional Worlds of Art

Alida Sun, Southern Gothic Love Letters to My NSA Agent, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

NFT Tuesday LA co-founder and former Night Gallery co-owner, Mieke Marple is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer determined to navigate what she calls the “insurmountable chasm” between the physical and digital art worlds. 

In her passionate mission to reconcile both the analog and the digital, Mieke has recently curated an impressive exhibition titled Interreality, showcasing 35 artists from the pioneering digital space mixed in with traditional established artists. Produced by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR for Artists, Interreality is simply a tour de force. 

A kindred spirit and peer curator, I was thrilled to interview Mieke to speak about the exhibition as we tackled notions of provenance, embodied experiences, collecting art and feminism. Read more.

"Our Tears are Golden Glitter That Only Shines on Lost Souls": Fierce Queer Work from Turkey and its New Diasporas

Akış Ka, Harun Güler
IN LIMBO (2022)
Video still

by Cüneyt Çakırlar

The contemporary art scene in Turkey has accommodated a significant number of acclaimed queer and feminist artists who produce work exploring the politics of gender and sexuality in the country. The post-millennial expansion of art institutions and art collectors, as well as the development of the local art market’s international networks, have made the scene a vital territory of cultural capital, in which artists and their collaborating cultural practitioners, including academics and activists, channel their voices through art. While the neoliberal economy of art-as-capital and the extent to which it contributes to the precarization of cultural workers should be scrutinized, the academic, artistic, and cultural visibility of LGBTQ+ practices in Turkey raises critical possibilities to articulate questions of cross-cultural mobility and translation of sexual dissidence in arts. What I’m interested in here are the strategies of transposing queer aesthetics into a critical LGBTQ+ practice that does not merely insist on a local political context but also engages with – and unsettles – the geopolitics of the global contemporary art market and its “ethnographic turns.”

The post-millennial consolidation of LGBTQ+ activism, the increased public visibility of LGBTQ+ cultures, and the proliferation of political discourses on gender and sexuality in contemporary Turkey revealed what the political theorist Sinan Birdal considers “the fault-line between a liberal narrative based on universal human rights and democracy, and a conservative narrative based on particular values and identities” (2013). As the ruling class consistently and increasingly instrumentalizes “family values” and “general morals” in various legal frameworks that reinforce censorship, misogyny, transphobia, and homophobia, the marginalized communities that oppose the status quo mobilize various intersectional frameworks of resistance. Within these frameworks, LGBTQ+ activism appealed to forms of strategic political alliances, including the pro-Kurdish movement, the women’s movement, and anti-militarist resistance in the country. 

These intersectional platforms, which contest the state’s hegemonic discourse of militarism, nationalism, masculinity, and Islam, became dramatically visible in #OccupyGezi protests in 2013. The purges followed by the government’s post-Gezi framing of resistance-as-terrorism and the coup d’état attempt in 2016, resulted in a new wave of migration of skilled labor (mainly into Europe), in which academics, artists, curators, and other dissident practitioners have been the leading emigrating groups. This new diasporic presence of Turkey-affiliated cultural practitioners in European publics resulted in the formation of new academic, artistic, and curatorial collectives in various countries, notably Germany and the UK. Thus, to fully understand how LGBTQ+ cultural practices operate in Turkey (and expand internationally), one should pay attention to these new networks of solidarity and platforms of artistic practice that are informed by Turkish politics through the arts-academia-activism nexus in national and transnational settings. 

My previous work on the post-millennial LGBTQ+ art production in Turkey and its diasporas argued that these practitioners (e.g. Kutluğ Ataman, Taner Ceylan, Nilbar Güreş, Erinç Seymen, and Istanbul Queer Art Collective) have a particular politics of location that are informed by queerness, transnationalism, and intersectionality. Inspired by Irit Rogoff’s approach to “regional imaginings,” I argued that these artists “attempt both to activate and to actualize notions of location away from being ‘located’ by an authority of knowledge or a political authority:” rather than “trying to figure out what one’s identity might be as a given,” one should try “to produce a set of relationships in the world that might locate one” (Rogoff 2010).

The curatorial frameworks of the takeover events which have recently taken place in London, namely Screen Practices: LUBUNYA Dispatches at ICA London (2-4 June 2023) and Transpose BURN: Pit Party at Barbican Centre (15-17 June 2023), resonate considerably with my above-discussed account of queer cultural practices from Turkey and its diasporas. Their engagement with Turkey is informed by a transnational perspective that considers queer art as a practice of mobility, rather than a practice of identity that is authenticated only by the geopolitics of nation-states. These projects celebrate queer practitioners as active agents of cultural change rather than passive recipients of authoritarian oppression. 

ICA’s Screen Practices program included screenings of recent works I was already familiar with, such as the Turkey-born, Berlin-based researcher-pornographer Emre Busse’s Godasses Trilogy (2021-2), Gizem Aksu’s recent documentary 9/8fight41 (2022), Rüzgar Buşki’s #Resistayol (2016), and the performances by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu and Istanbul Queer Art Collective. However, the presence of Istanbul-based performance artists Kübra Uzun (aka Q-bra) and Akış Ka in London, and their discursive, affective, and artistic contribution to the three-day program at ICA turned the takeover into a special happening. Their performances reinvigorated the screening program as a live archive of fierce queer practice rather than a mere re-presentation/documentation of Turkey-based queer culture and institutionally branded queer art practices to London-based audiences. 

Istanbul-based singer, songwriter, performance artist, and DJ, Kübra Uzun is an LGBTQIA+ rights activist, working in Turkey and also on various international platforms. LUBUNYA Dispatches at ICA London featured Uzun’s video performance Jülyet’s Habanera, which was produced by [alt]platform and premiered on [alt]cut YouTube Channel in March 2022. Originally composed by Georges Bizet (Habanera: L’amour est un oiseau rebelle, Carmen), the lyrics of Jülyet’s Habanera are rewritten by Uzun herself in lubunca, Turkish queer slang. In the video, Uzun impersonates their four famous personas (Kübra, Madam Sipsi, Dikiz Jülyet, and Butch Berna), which firstly were seen at their Koli Kanonu [aka Fuckbuddy Canon]. Queering, in localizing, local and global canons of music, Uzun’s performances articulate discourses of queer/trans empowerment by subverting the stereotypes of (Turkish) masculinity and femininity. While these performances can also be considered drag acts, Uzun’s trans-feminist interventions gain additional critical layers through first-person storytelling, taking various forms of reclaiming queer lives and histories. Such reclamations are dramatically visible in the artistic collaborations Uzun were involved with, such as Cruising Gezi Park: An Oral History produced in collaboration with Simon(e) van Saarloos (presented at Refresh Amsterdam exhibition, Amsterdam Museum, 2020).  

Kübra Uzun
Jülyet’s Habanera (2022)
Video still

Reflecting on the murder of Jan Majdanski (2017) in a cruising spot of Oosterpark, Amsterdam, Simon(e) van Saarlos questions the Dutch police’s response to the incident with the use of extra lights in the park as a surveillance tool: “Whose ideas of safety and pleasure rule the city?” The artist’s engagement with the policing of sex and sex work (and the ways in which LGBTQI+ bodies experience, inhabit, and shape the public space) informs Cruising Gezi Park: An Oral History, a project of collaborative storytelling with Kübra Uzun. Uzun and van Saarloos take a nightly walk around Gezi Park in Istanbul, where Uzun shares her memories of cruising in the 90s and her experience of Gezi Park protests in 2013. Through the recording of the exchange between the two artists, Uzun’s story turns into a history of the transformation of not only Gezi Park but also themselves as trans activists. As van Saarlos also notes, “Most histories are not documented through text or legislation; they depend on intergenerational intimacies and informal storytelling.” 

Simon(e) van Saarloos and Kübra Uzun
Kübra in Gezipark, Istanbul. October 2020
Image from Cruising Gezi Park: An Oral History (2020)

 Uzun sees every occasion of queer performance and storytelling as a form of activism that opens spaces for resistance, solidarity, and empowerment. Hence, their performances bridge the gap between their personal life and the collective experience of the queer community in Turkey and its diasporas. Given the crushing effects of the pandemic on Istanbul’s queer spaces, the reach of such relationality gains particular importance in Uzun’s recordings, digital/multi-media projects, and live-streamed performances, such as A Trans History Sung (2020) and ALAN2020 (2020). Following the gradual fragmentation of the activist community in Istanbul as a result of the new – post-purge – routes of queer migration (to European destinations including Berlin and London), Uzun’s intimate engagement with the queer community and their blurring of sectoral/institutional boundaries between arts, culture, and activism, made their contribution to the ICA takeover in London (as a DJ, artist, and community interlocutor) particularly meaningful.   

Kübra Uzun
A Trans History Sung (2020) 
Video still

A Trans History Sung is a powerful example of Uzun’s practice, which can also be considered a precedent for the artist’s multi-media performances of queer platform-making during her residency in the UK (including gigs/events at Nottingham Contemporary, Dalston Superstore, and Engine Room Studios). To produce “a digital monument” before her move from Istanbul to Berlin, A Trans History Sung features Uzun’s one-hour-long interactive performance live-streamed via Instagram. Throughout Uzun’s singing and live conversations with friends, the performance embodies flow and fluidity in multiple affective registers, i.e. the artist’s gender transition, their decision to move to Berlin, their exposure to the flow of live content produced by the queer community in Turkey and beyond (during the performance), and their expression of nostalgia/melancholy and joy through singing. This dense affective texture in Uzun’s performance combining singing and queer storytelling considerably resonates with the practices of Justin Vivian Bond, David Hoyle, and Lady Rizo.   

In addition to Uzun’s work, LUBUNYA Dispatches’ screening program of video performances (curated by London-based artists-led Queer Art Projects) also included Harun Güler’s video In Limbo (2022) featuring gender-nonconforming performance artists Akış Ka, MustKika, Meli Bendeli, and Özgür Uzay. Güler’s video locates each artist in a mise-en-scène that is associated with Orientalism and its normatively gendered tropes. While each performance creates a friction between body and space, the video’s poetic essayism celebrates, in spectacularizing, gender-nonconforming bodies to transform this friction into a frisson of excitement. Akış Ka’s appearance in a hammam, a setting that is usually associated with homoeroticism and masculinity through tropes of Orientalism, is a powerful moment in the video. Rubbed and washed by two bath attendants (tellak), the artist’s body, painted in blue, is matched by their poetic voice-over: “The fairy of the night feeds on stardust. (…) They put dark matter mascara on… Sliding down from a comet back to the Earth… Leaking from their chest, drop by drop, stray meteor showers… Eyes sting, tears flow… Our tears are golden glitter that only shines on lost souls.” Güler uses water and glowing skin to articulate a queer erotic of flux: Akış’s shining other-worldly blue body is matched with Meli Bendeli’s jewelry, Özgür Uzay’s top surgery scar underwater, and MustKika’s belly-dancing costume. MustKika’s queer appropriation of belly dancing is also featured as part of the performances commissioned for Transpose Pit Party: BURN at Barbican. Combining belly dance with contemporary drag, the artist subverts gender-normative traditions of Middle Eastern performance arts as they re-interpret the historical figure of the zenne in contemporary settings. 

MustKika
Transpose Pit Party: BURN
Performance at Barbican Centre, London, UK
Photo by Holly Revel 

A number of artists featured in Lubunya Dispatches have also contributed to the recent edition of Transpose, which was founded by artistic director CN Lester in 2011 to “celebrate, promote, and platform the wide-ranging talents of the UK trans community.” Curated by performer and musician Dani Dinger, the 2013 edition dedicated its program to cross-cultural trans solidarity by featuring anarchist poet Kell w Farshéa, DJ Ifeoluwa, drag artist i-Gemini, Akış Ka, MustKika, and Kübra Uzun, in a performance event that took place at Barbican, London. As part of this program, Akış Ka produced a performance piece, INTERNALS, which shares their story of self-realization as a non-binary artist born in Turkey. Moving in and out of a web of textiles installed on stage, Akış’s naked body and voice articulate a performative crafting of the queer self through head-on collisions against societal norms of gender and sexuality. 

Akış Ka
INTERNALS (2023)
Performance for TRANSPOSE PIT PARTY: BURN, Barbican, London, UK
Photo by Holly Revell

Collision effectively describes Akış Ka’s practice, which operates across performance art, activism, and radical drag. An active member of the İstanbul LGBTI+ Pride Week committee (2016-2019), Akış performed in various Istanbul-based cultural events ranging from the public programs of contemporary art institutions (e.g. SALT Beyoğlu) to live performance venues (e.g. Babylon) and queer clubs (e.g. Şahika). Comparable to Kübra Uzun’s practice, Akış’s work crosses sectoral and institutional boundaries, the versatility of which was considerably visible in the performances they produced as part of their UK residency (June-August 2023) at the ICA, the Ugly Duck, Dalston Superstore, and the Engine Room Studios.   

 

Akış Ka
Shall I Give You a Secret? (2023)
Performance for the opening party of Screen Practices: Lubunya Dispatches, ICA, London, UK

 

 4 out of 13 music videos from Kırıta Kırıta (2021), a project by the Istanbul-based Dramaqueer Art Collective (curated by Serdar Soydan) were also showcased at the Barbican as part of the Transpose Pit Party’s digital program. Founded in 2015, the collective’s key mission is to produce alternative, queer legacies of gender expression and body politics in art and popular culture. Kırıta Kırıta brings together drag queens, who lip-sync and perform to kanto songs from the 1930s, revealing queer connections across different historical periods through dance and music. With its roots in Western music, kanto - as a genre of performance-as-artistic-entertainment in the late Ottoman period – employs humor, flirtation, and excess to navigate and queer the ideological ambivalences of modernization experienced during the transition from Ottoman Empire to the Republic. In their statement introducing these performances to Barbican’s audiences, Queer Art Projects notes that Kırıta Kırıta is a project that “traces the connections between generations of queer and minority performers, censorship, and resistance through popular entertainment in a turbulent culture that has been sashaying between the East and the West for centuries.” One of the videos in the project features the performance of “Kanamam / I Won't Be Deceived” by Cake Mosq - an Istanbul-based queer performer, an impressive example articulating kanto’s transhistorical affinities with drag performativity. Lip-syncing to Neriman Hanım's song in a BDSM setting against the backdrop of an iconic Istanbul cityscape, Cake Mosq’s 30s-style suit, high heels, and makeup transforms into a flapper dress during the performance while the performer dances around their slave on an electric chair adorned with a sparkling headpiece and veiled with bright blue tissue eyes. 

“There is no question but that we must fight the unspeakable violence we incur from the society in which we find ourselves,” says Douglas Crimp in his influential essay titled “Mourning and Militancy” (2002). “If we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society,” Crimp continues, “then we may also be able to recognize – along with our rage – our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.” Here, Crimp addresses the queer community recovering from the traumatic losses they experienced during the AIDS crisis. However, cultural practitioners like Kübra Uzun and Akış Ka, who perform a migratory aesthetic of queer existence and contribute fiercely to the resilience of their queer communities (in the face of crushing autocracies and/or increasingly oppressive transphobia), show us that “mourning and militancy” is a lifelong endeavor for queer people, politicizing – in owning – their joy and grief, and transcending pride and victimhood.   

Cüneyt Çakırlar is Associate Professor of Film and Visual Culture at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His current research practice focuses on gender and sexuality studies, global visual cultures, and transnational horror film. Çakirlar has taught on queer arts and film theory at University College London (UK), Boğazici University (Turkey), Koç University (Turkey), and Istanbul Bilgi University (Turkey). His articles appeared in various international peer-reviewed journals including Critical Arts, Cineaction, [in]Transition, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Paragraph, and Screen. He co-edited a volume about cultures of sexual dissidence in contemporary Turkey, namely Cinsellik Muamması: Türkiye’de Queer Kültür ve Muhalefet (2012), co-authored Mustang: Translating Willful Youth (2022), and co-translated Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993) into Turkish (Pinhan, 2014). Çakırlar has also worked with various arts institutions and curatorial collectives based in Turkey, Germany, USA, and UK. He currently leads a British Academy project on “Transnational Horror, Folklore, and Cultural Politics” (2021-2023).  

Read Our Interview of Teresa Baker on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ NADA Miami

A woman ( Teresa Baker)  in a studio with art in the back and a table at her side.

Raised nomadically along the Northern Plains of the United States, artist Teresa Baker spent her childhood shrouded in tribal storytelling. However, it wasn’t until recently that she realized how thoroughly steeped her visual work had become in all of these inherited allegories. Working with a wide range of materials, both organic and inorganic, she weaves the fiction and nonfiction of her heritage to create works that reflect the complex nature of American tradition. Referencing artists of the abstract expressionist, cubist, and postminimalist movements in harmony with the topographical territories and utilitarian objects employed by the Indigenous nations who inform her practice, Baker imbues her works with an autonomy that allows them to be singular and timeless. In anticipation of her solo exhibition with de boer, Los Angeles at NADA Miami, I spoke with the artist about her unusual path into artmaking, the influence of her wide-reaching travels abroad, and the delicate balance of becoming a mother while the demand for her work has skyrocketed. Read more.

Meriem Bennani's Guided Tour of a Spill @ François Ghebaly In Los Angeles

Meriem Bennani’s Guided Tour of a Spill acts as an interlude between her groundbreaking Party on the CAPS (2018), her pseudo-documentary set in the Moroccan quarter of the CAPS, and a narrative sequel set to debut later this year at the Renaissance Society and Nottingham Contemporary. The exhibition consists of the titular multi-channel video projected and displayed on sculptural, kinetic screens alongside new drawings of scenes from the world of the CAPS. One screen, broadcasting what could be an A.I.-generated children’s video, is topped by helicoptering ropes that slap the gallery walls. Inspired by the compilation structure and synesthetic drive of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Guided Tour of a Spill centers less on overt narrative and more on the visceral and sensorial pleasure of music, dance, athletics and humor. Throughout the exhibition, Bennani playfully blends humor and critique, weaving an expanded allegory for how media circulates through channels of digital and geopolitical power, both online and in the real spaces we inhabit.

Guided Tour of a Spill is on view by appointment through May 1 @ François Ghebaly 2245 E. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles

 
 

Traces On The Surfaces Of The World Group Show @ GAVLAK Los Angeles

Traces on the Surfaces of the World brings together six international artists whose works stage the anxious encounters between human bodies and inanimate objects that define a world reformed by an all-encompassing fear of contagion. In “Human Traces on the Surfaces of the World,” Judith Butler parallels the invisible passage of a virus from bodies to objects to other bodies, to the similarly invisible machinations of socio-political paradigms that dictate who must assume the risk of contact, and by extension which lives are expendable. Artists and theorists have for decades romanticized the notion of dissolving the distance between art objects and those who experience them: this exhibition probes the dimensions of a reality in which this longed-for contact has become especially fraught. Exhibiting artists include Cristine Brache, Henry Chapman, Alex Chitty, Gisela Colón, Amalie Jakobsen, and Dean Sameshima.

Traces on the Surfaces of the World is on view through April 24 @ Gavlak 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue, Suite 440 Los Angeles

 
 

Karon Davis: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished @ Jeffrey Deitch In New York

When Karon Davis has not seen a specific image of Black history in art history, she tries to create it herself. For her first solo exhibition in New York, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, the viewers are witness to one of the most unjust trials in American history. The work celebrates the defiance of Bobby Seale in the face of injustice. Bobby Seale, bound and gagged in a Chicago courtroom, is one of the most searing images in American history. There were no photographs of this shocking episode during the trial of the Chicago 8 in October 1969, only artists’ sketches. This has made the image even more resonant as we conflate the sketches and subsequent actors’ portrayals in our visual memory. The image of Bobby Seale, physically restrained but defiant, refusing to submit to the judge, has haunted Davis for many years. It became especially provocative during the past year’s incidents of police violence.

A powerful sculptural tableau of a bound and gagged Bobby Seale in front of Judge Julius Hoffman and the Chicago jury confronts visitors to the exhibition. Displayed in front of the courtroom are fifty sculpted bags of groceries, juxtaposing the Black Panthers’ free food program for the Black community in Oakland, California, with the repression of the judicial system.

Davis’s title for the exhibition is a reference to the government’s violent prosecution of the Black Panthers and its distortion of the public’s understanding of the Panthers’ contributions to their community.

Karon Davis: No Good Deed Goes Unpunished is on view through April 24 @ Jeffrey Deitch 18 Wooster Street, New York

Watch Niki de Saint Phalle Fire Away At Her Work With A Rifle

Niki de St Phalle débute sa carrière artistique, encouragée par le peintre Hugh Weiss. 'Les tirs', performances durant lesquelles des spectateurs sont invité...


Niki de Saint Phalle began her artistic career, encouraged by the painter Hugh Weiss. “Les Tirs“, meaning “the shots” were the performances that made her famous, during which spectators were invited to shoot with rifles at pockets of paint, thus splashing plaster assemblages. These works placed her firmly in the circle of 'new realists', playing the role of mediator between the French and American avant-garde.

Haim Steinbach: 1991 – 1993 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

For more than four decades, Haim Steinbach has explored the psychological, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of collecting and arranging found objects. In selecting items that range from the obscure to the ordinary, the private to the ethnographic, Steinbach emphasizes notions of circulation and human connection.

The exhibition highlights a concentrated three-year period in the artist’s career and draws upon memory, offering a recontextualization of his own historic practice and an occasion for reflection. Comprising a seminal large-scale “display” and objects from the same time period, the exhibition is populated by individuals who are both named and unnamed, touching upon family gatherings and traditions, intimacy, and the personifying power objects can hold.

Haim Steinbach: 1991-1993 is on view through February 27 @ Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 521 W 21st St, New York

King Dogs Never Grow Old: A Group Show Curated By Brooke Wise @ Diane Rosenstein Gallery in Los Angeles

Borrowed from André Breton and Philippe Soupault’s surrealist text Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), the show’s title alludes to exploring the nonsensical and the dreamlike unconscious. The work on view shares a common dialogue and aims to explore these surrealist notions in a contemporary manner.

Jillian Mayer and Haley Josephs use color and whimsy to address these surrealist concepts. Ginny Casey draws inspiration from classic Walt Disney cartoons and welcomes the spectator with distorted, absurd and disproportioned objects, which play with our restrictions of logic and time. Tom of Finland celebrates sexuality, fantasy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor. Scott Reeder and Matthew Sweesy both use comedy and rhetoric in their paintings. Chris Wolston’s Nalgona chairs are humanized by his addition of wicker body parts. Sam Crow’s tufted wall works skew our sense of reality and attempt to destroy our sense of stability in her usage of geometric shapes and dimension. Rose Nestler’s soft sculptures explore the body as the subconscious mind. Bri Williams uses found objects often with personal associations, to evoke a potent, psychic mood. Minimalist artist Robert Moreland reinvents his canvas into the space between painting and sculpture, while Haley Mellin’s small paintings reinvent mundane objects such as a Warholian banana floating in space. Through comedy, rhetoric, sarcasm and the uncanny, these works all share a common discourse about surrealism, the unexpected and the unconventional.

King Dogs Never Grow Old is on view through February 1st at Diane Rosenstein Gallery 831 N Highland Ave, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

The Sun Hung Low or A Question Loomed: A Solo Exhibition By Morgan Mandalay @ Everybody In Chicago

A snake made of bottle caps wraps around itself on the floor. Trees grow, overgrow, burn, and grow again. And some kind of mouse created a hole in our newly-built drywall (this may or may not be related to the snake).

It’s hard to tell if the sun is rising or setting. You might come to a conclusion based on the time of day, the temperature outside, your political views, or something else. Whatever the case, you’re looking at some paintings and not the sun itself. This is probably a good thing.

The Sun Hung Low or A Question Loomed is on view through September 1 @ Everybody 1722 N Western Avenue, Chicago. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Bad Sin Frutas: Read Our Interview of Painter Morgan Mandalay On The Occasion Of His Solo Exhibition @ Klowden Mann in Los Angeles

Are you staring directly into the mouth of the beast, or are you indeed sitting inside said mouth, observing the surreal landscape below? This is just one of the many visual homonyms that are ever-present in the works of Morgan Mandalay. For his first solo exhibition at Klowden Mann in Los Angeles, the Chicago-based artist has painted worlds that are rife with reference to human figuration, though only vaguely, in the form of phantom hands clutching at tree branches, or humanoid eyeballs peeking through leaves. Bad Sin Frutas tells a story of exile using the memetic power of the Garden of Eden as a template for processing the Mandalay family’s exile from Cuba, and it does so in a time of global refugee crises. Click here to read more.

Tim Hawkinson Presents New Works @ DENK Gallery In Los Angeles

New Works is a new series of sculptural works, and large-format drawings on paper, that continue to explore multidisciplinary artist: Tim Hawkinson's playful and morbid morphologies. The artist disassembles the familiar and stages dysfunctional propositions in which the self repeatedly appears as the only, albeit imperfect, measure of experience and inventive return to obsessive craft in service concept exists in an expanded and embodied field, dramatized by the inclusion of living variables like time, breath (sound), and movement. New Works is on view through March 30 at DENK Gallery 749 East Temple Street, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Highlights From Frieze London 2018 @ Regent's Park

Frieze London 2018 showcased the best of international contemporary art, with a discerning selection of around 160 galleries presenting their most forward-thinking artists and imaginative presentations. This year’s themed gallery section, Social Work featured women artists who challenged the status quo and explored the possibilities of political activism in their art making during the 1980s and ‘90s, from Nancy Spero in the US to Berni Searle in South Africa to Ipek Duben in Turkey and Helen Chadwick in the UK. Solo, group and curated presentations across the fair’s sections featured John Baldessari, Michaël Borremans, Zadie Xa, Lubaina Himid, Mary Kelly, Moshekwa Langa, Calvin Marcus, Jim Shaw, David Shrigley, Josh Sperling, Tatiana Trouvé, Hardeep Pandhal, Athena Papadopoulos, Faith Ringgold, Wong Ping and Cathy Wilkes, among many others. photographs by Flo Khol

Ochi Projects Presents 'Soft Pretzel' Group Show @ Vacation Gallery In New York

Soft Pretzel features works that investigate sculptural forms and perceived tactility. Evaluating our ability to anticipate sensory experiences as they are conveyed through visual cues, each work explores implied softness, rigidity, dimension, weight and movement. The exhibition includes works by Tanya Brodsky, Rives Granade, Nasim Hantehzadeh, Lilian Martinez, Daniel McKee, Erin Morrison, Claudia Parducci, Ben Sanders and James Seward. Soft Pretzel is on view through October 28 @ Vacation Gallery, 24A Orchard Street, New York, NY 10002. images courtesy of Ochi Projects

Frank Stella Presents Recent Work @ Sprüth Magers In Los Angeles

Few artists are as synonymous with the history of 20th and 21st-century American art as Frank Stella. His work across media, from painting to sculpture to printmaking, has continuously broken ground at each stage of his decades-long career, remaining influential and relevant to subsequent generations of contemporary artists. The selection of recent works presented at Sprüth Magers highlight the artist’s ongoing experimentation with spatial representation and includes the début of a new painting series. This is the first solo exhibition of Frank Stella’s painting and sculpture in Los Angeles since 1995. The exhibition is on view through October 26 at Sprüth Magers 5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90036.

Opening Of take care Group Show @ Gas In Los Angeles

How do radical ambitions of “self-care” persist or depart from capitalist society’s preoccupation with wellness and the industry surrounding it, particularly when filtered through technological advances? How can we imagine personal wellness that complicates or diverges from capitalist and consumerist tendencies? Taking its name from the common valediction, which is both an expression of familiarity and an instruction of caution, take care, is a group exhibition that considers the many tensions surrounding the possibilities of self-care. Participating artists: Hayley Barker, Darya Diamond, Ian James, Young Joon Kwak, C. Lavender, Sarah Manuwal, Saewon Oh, Amanda Vincelli, and SoftCells presents: Jules Gimbrone. Gas is a mobile, autonomous, experimental and networked platform for contemporary art. take care will be on view through July 20, and can be seen from 12pm-6pm on Saturdays in front of BBQLA 2315 Jesse Street, Los Angeles CA 90023. photographs by Lani Trock

LAXART Reopening Benefit And Art Auction In Los Angeles

This summer, LAXART will be welcoming the international art community to celebrate its newly revamped exhibition space, kicking off the celebration with a multi-week festival of events and a new site-specific mural by Barbara Kruger. Under the leadership of Director Hamza Walker, LAXART will share its newly expanded mission and reinvigorated programming. Founded in 2005, LAXART promotes developments in contemporary culture through exhibitions, publications and public programs, using contemporary art and performance as a means of understanding key issues of our time. For this launch, the exterior of the building has been visually adorned with a new site specific work by Barbara Kruger. Wrapping around the building’s façade, Untitled (It) speaks to the immediate central Hollywood environ with its pawn shops, peep shows, dollar stores, nail salons, marijuana dispensaries and currency exchanges—all nodes of identity, commerce and elements that define the unique urban topology of Los Angeles. The opening benefit included musical performances by Rob Mazurek and Ambrose Akinmusire, as well as a selection of works on auction by Liz Larner, Karl Holmqvist, Arthur Jafa, Glenn Ligon and Jonas Wood. Kruger’s Untitled (It) is on display from June 3 through Fall 2018. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Made In L.A. 2018 @ The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Made In L.A., the Hammer Museum's exceedingly comprehensive biennial just celebrated the opening of its fourth installment, and it's decidedly the best one yet. Curated by the Hammer's senior curator, Anne Ellegood and Erin Christovale, the newest member of the Hammer's curatorial team, the show features 33 artists from widely diverse backgrounds who employ immensely disparate media and span an age gap of 68 years. While the biennial doesn't proclaim any particular theme, almost all of the work presented is new and was made in response to the predicaments of the present. Much has happened since the last installment of 2016, and our collective experience has been marked by devastating fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and drought, government-mandated religious bigotry, deportations sans due process, countless recorded accounts of police brutality against black and brown citizens, countless school shootings, etc. Heavily steeped in political and social response as it may be, though, there's nothing didactic or sanctimonious about it. Instead the thread that connects all of these works together is one that explores the idea of citizenship in the present moment. In it we see stories of our past, how they led to the present, how they define who we are, and determine what is in store. A collective moment to "count using only your breath" as taisha paggett instructs us to do on a handwritten note taped to a microphone. She is one of several artists who will be performing and activating the space throughout the run of the show. Throughout the summer there will also be numerous lectures and walkthroughs with the curators, so there are plenty of reasons to take your time and come back a few times. Artists featured include: Carmen Argote, James Benning, Diedrick Brackens, Carolina Caycedo, Neha Choksi, Beatriz Cortez, Mercedes Dorame, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Aaron Fowler, Nikita Gale, Jane Gordon & Megan Whitmarsh, Lauren Halsey, EJ Hill, Naotaka Hiro, John Houck, Luchita Hurtado, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Candice Lin, Charles Long, Nancy Lupo, Daniel Joseph Martinez, MPA, Alison O'Daniel, Eamon Ore-Giron, taisha paggett, Christina Quarles, Michael Queenland, Patrick Staff, Linda Stark, Flora Wiegmann, Suné Woods, and Rosha Yaghmai. To learn more about lectures, performances and programming related to Made In L.A., visit the Hammer. The exhibition will be on view through September 2, 2018 at The Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Opening Of Metamorphosis, Lightly (Intimacy Of Form) Group Show @ OOF Books

In a quest to challenge our perceptions of materiality, objectivity, gender identity and medium, Alex Rojas has curated a group show that pushes the individual boundaries of self.  Featured artists include Nasim Hantehzadeh, Carolyn Janssen, Larissa Lockshin, Erica Mahinay, Sophia Narrett, and Sarah Ann Weber. These works highlight the perennial and intimate connection with chaos inherent in human existence. Speaking to a desire for reason, these works provide intimate outlets for exploration and clarity through identity and physicality. The exhibition is on through July 1, 2018 at OOF Books 912A Cypress Ave. Los Angeles, CA 90065. photographs by Lani Trock

The Opening of Sylvie Fleury's L.A. Bougainvillea @ Karma International

A potpourri of plush and furry textures, of bright and sparkling colors, and of lights and shapes are offered in this playful exhibition of sculptures, installation and and furry wall works in Sylvie Fleury's L.A. Bougainvillea. A seemingly haphazardly xeroxed "press release" à la '80s fanzine aesthetic provides a barebones biography of the artist, a stencil-ready black and white portrait that looks not unlike Patty Hearst in a pair of sleek aviators, and a handwritten list of ideas and materials possibly pulled directly from the artist's personal notebook. L.A. Bougainvillea is on view through May 5 at Karma International 4619 W Washington Blvd. Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper