Melike Kara “Lunch” Salon Kennedy in Frankfurt, Germany

Salon Kennedy presents Melike Kara “Lunch” – her first solo exhibition in Frankfurt. In her work, Melike Kara first and foremost allows the being to emerge without any evaluation. She questions the notion of duality between form and formlessness, incurrence and dissolution, focusing on the correspondence between groups and singular figures. Attitude, gesture and facial expression visualize social constellation, transmitting undefined content without ever being specific. Yet, by reflecting common, everyday social encounters, the figures seem utterly familiar. Emanating from the being, the artist allows the canvas to react upon all these emotions. The color however, is deliberately selected to provide a form and frame to the painting´s inner life. Melike Kara “Lunch” will be on view until July 31, 2015 at Salon Kennedy, Cultural Avenue HQ Frankfurt am Main 

PRIVACY Exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle

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Private—a word from the past, or so it would seem these days. A word of hardly any relevance in an era when everything—from one’s favorite recipe to one’s current relationship status—is posted on Facebook. Exhibitionism, self-disclosure, the delight in telling stories, showing off, and voyeurism are the social strategies in today’s world—a world that has long since undergone a structural transformation of the public sphere. In contemporary art, domestic scenes and personal secrets are mirrored in photographs, Polaroids, cell phone photos, objects, installations, and films. The familiar and intimate are put in the picture. Through a consideration of numerous contemporary approaches the Schirn investigates the dwindling private sphere and the “publicness of the intimate.” Aiming her camera through a rear courtyard window, Merry Alpern captures blurred scenes of hurried sexual encounters; in his romantic video piece Akram Zaatari explores an online chat between two men; and Fiona Tan combines private snapshots from different countries to create large tableaux. The exhibition undertakes memorable excursions to the fragile borders between the self and the other. Other artists include Dash Snow, Mark Morrisroe, Ai Weiwei and Marilyn Minter. Privacy will be on view from November 1, 2012, to February 3, 2013 at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Romberg, 60311 Frankfurt

Anja Czioska 8mm Film Retrospective

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On view this month at the MMK Museum in Frankfurt, the short Super 8 films of Anja Czioska in a retrospective of the filmmaker's twenty-year career. "I will show bathing and shower filmportraits of me and my friends, experimental film visions on single-frame, performances, happening, portraits, me and my camera, scenes of daily art like filmed during my travellings to Amsterdam, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Paris, London and home base diaries of a Frankfurt artist's life," says Czioska. On view January 25 at the MMK in Frankfurt Lecture Hall.

Douglas Gordon Retrospective

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Born in Glasgow in 1966, Douglas Gordon is today among the most important as well as the most influential artists of his generation. While he is famous for his films and large-scale video installations such as 24 Hours Psycho, his oeuvre also encompasses photographs, texts, sculptures and sound installations. In addition to Play Dead; Real Time, one of Gordon’s chief pieces, the MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst also has a number of other photo and video works by this artist in its holdings. Together they will provide the point of departure for the first major retrospective to be presented on Douglas Gordon in Europe since his show at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 2007. With his analyses of images drawn from the collective memory and everyday culture, Gordon exposes basic patterns of perception. Within this framework, his works often revolve around phenomena of duplication and reflection: the couple, the double, light and dark, guilt and justice, etc. His latest work is entitled k.364, which stands for “Köchelverzeichnis No. 364”, the Köchel catalogue number assigned to the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Vienna in 1779. After hearing this work of chamber music in Poznań (Poland), Gordon organized another performance of it with the well-known musicians Avri Levitan (viola), Roi Shiloah (violin) and the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio. The musicians’ journey from Berlin to Warsaw by way of Poznań and the performance of the symphony in Warsaw account for the major proportion of the film. The two musicians’ conversations on their way to Poland reveal that their pasts, and those of their parents, are complexly interwoven with German-Polish relations, and above all with the history of the Polish Jews during World War II. The new film k.364 will be supplemented with the pieces by Gordon in the MMK collection and a large number of other prominent works of the past years to form a comprehensive exhibition – the first to assemble the latest works and thus to provide a concentrated and impressive overview of this multifaceted artist’s oeuvre. On view from November 19 to March 25 at the Museum für Moderne Kunst.