Irony and Intimacy Intersect in Lovers in the Backseat @ FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph in Berlin

“‘Lovers in the Backseat’ refers to romantic and intimate relationships. Everything we do happens because we can't help it: Breathing, living, loving and creating art, these are our common elementary needs." (A.N. & R.S.)

The connection between the works of Robert Schittko and Anna Nero lies in the exploration of identity, playfulness and irony, as well as a slight sexiness that resonates in both artistic practices. They take the exhibition visitor on the "back seat", behind their shoulders, on the motorway, country road or overtaking lane - always on the way, but where are they actually going...? Both Nero and Schittko harbor an aversion to self-referential art. Instead, they explore the self in their studios and transform their lives into a vivid artistic practice. Each in their own way: Schittko's sculptural and photographic art focuses on the development of their own identity. Nero provokes with her abstract-representational paintings and ceramics.

Lovers in the Backseat is on view through January 6th at FeldbuschWiesnerRudolph, Jägerstraße 5, 10117 Berlin.

Read Our Interview of Puppies Puppies on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ The New Museum →

Puppies Puppies stands against a pu

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, known by the pseudonym Puppies Puppies, is revolutionizing trans and Indigenous visibility through her critically-acclaimed conceptual works of sculpture and performance art. Despite a very genuine and personal embodiment within the work, an air of mystery once shrouded her identity as she initially insisted on a level of anonymity rarely exhibited by artists, particularly of her generation. In late 2017, however, this shifted with the very first reference to the artist’s gender transition taking place in her Green (Ghosts) installation at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles. Kuriki-Olivo and her then-boyfriend lived in the gallery during the hours it was closed, leaving only traces of their existence during the hours it was open. Here, she taped two estrogen pills to the wall, pointing toward her gender-affirming course of hormone therapy—a subtle gesture that gently opened the door of visibility. Employing the mundane, everyday objects that surround her life is a hallmark of Puppies Puppies’ practice and readymades are one of her favorite ways to reference the art historical canon. An initial easter egg of visibility has since swung the door open to a state of consensual voyeurism in Nothing New, her current solo exhibition at the New Museum where the artist is occupying the Lobby Gallery with nearly constant access to her comings and goings via video surveillance, live stream access, and glass walls overlooking a recreation of her bedroom. Puppies Puppies also points to elements of her multi-ethnic indigeneity—Taíno on her father’s side and Japanese on her mother’s—with the inclusion of objects and spiritual practices that connect her disparate lineages in a form of what the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Crockett, refers to as a memoryscape. Crockett got cozy in bed for her interview of Puppies Puppies on the eve of the exhibition’s inauguration to discuss their creative collaboration. Read more.

Subjects Rebel Against the Confines of the Camera in Unbound: Performance As Rupture @ JS Foundation in Berlin

The group exhibition Unbound: Performance as Rupture examines how different generations of artists have called upon the body in relation to the camera to refuse oppressive ideologies, disrupt historical narratives, and unsettle concepts of identity.

The exhibition traces various intersections of performance and video art from the late 1960s to today, focusing on how they create specific forms of rupture, fracture, and pause. In contrast to Peggy Phelan’s definition of performance as a live art characterized by its immediate disappearance, Unbound centers the use of the camera and its apparatus to record and direct the performance itself. By willfully conflating the presence of performance and the virtuality of the image, the artists question a fundamental paradox—or representational gap—between the performing subject, whose complex identity can never be depicted fully, and the camera as a violent tool that tries to capture, contain, and classify them. Many of these works expose and negate the colonial gaze perpetuated by the camera, while simultaneously utilizing time-based technologies, in order to create otherwise impossible connections across spaces and temporalities. In addition to performance documentation and performance-for-the-camera, the exhibited artworks offer investigations into contemporary image economies that draw attention to how bodies move through or evade physical and digital spaces.

Unbound: Performance as Rupture is on view through July 28th, 2024, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, D-10117 Berlin.

Thania Petersen Constructs A Cohesive Identity From Her Malay & South African Roots in ZAMUNDA FOREVER @ Nicodim Gallery

Thania Petersen, Cake, 2023. Image courtesy of Nicodim Gallery.

ZAMUNDA FOREVER is Thania Petersen’s first solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition divides Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles into three bodies of intricately embroidered narrative textiles, covering her family’s history, their present-day life as seen from the outside, then finally portrayals of their familial dynamic in more personal settings. Juxtaposed against one another, the three series are an honest depiction of how the journey that brought the artist’s people to South Africa resulted in a separation of selves that exist symbiotically to construct a new cohesive and contemporary identity.

Zamunda is the fictional African nation from which Eddie Murphy’s character hails in the 1988 film Coming to America. In these large-scale works, the artist reckons with the hyper-commercialization of her native continent, and the semi-truthfulness of the signifiers both Westerners and Africans use to market themselves to one another. ZAMUNDA FOREVER, like Petersen herself, embodies the plural histories, spiritualities, sonorities, and cultures of the Afrasiatic Sea. Also everpresent: the universal and readily identifiable signs of a family and community that lives, laughs, and loves with one another.

ZAMUNDA FOREVER is on view through September 9 @ Nicodim Gallery, 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160, Los Angeles, CA 90021

"Are You a Friend of Dorothy?" @ Hashimoto Contemporary

Justin Yoon, At Midnight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary.

Justin Yoon, At Midnight, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Hashimoto Contemporary.

Hashimoto Contemporary presents Are You A Friend of Dorothy? a group exhibition featuring new works by Santiago Galeas, Jean-Paul Mallozzi, Juan Arango Palacios, Carlos Rodriguez, and Justin Yoon. Each artist explores their identity and sexuality in emotive, figurative painting to create depictions of joy, belonging, and queer intimacy.

Rooted in personal narratives and lore, all five artists have created their own visual languages to imagine queer utopias filled with safety, community, tenderness and serenity. As the Cowardly Lion said while making his way through the Land of Oz, “Any friend of Dorothy must be our friend, as well.”

Are You a Friend of Dorothy? is on view through July 8 at Hashimoto Contemporary, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd. Suite B - Los Angeles, CA

 
 

Cindy Sherman Presents Tapestries @ Sprueth Magers In Los Angeles

 
 

In her latest series on view, Cindy Sherman explores her first non-photographic medium in a career spanning over 40 years: tapestry. Featuring a dozen examples of her new and recent tapestries, the exhibition marks the début of these works as a coherent body of work. In line with Sherman’s long-term photographic investigation into the construction of identity and the nature of representation, the images are based on pictures posted on the artist’s personal Instagram account, which she creates using widely available filters and face-altering apps. Impossible to print in large scale due to the low-resolution nature of the original Instagram images, they are transposed into woven textiles, which in turn resonate with the pixelation of the source material: Pixels, here, translate to the warp and weft of thread.

Tapestries is on view through May 1 @ Sprueth Magers 5900 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson's It Can Be Said of Them @ Roberts Projects In Los Angeles

Jeffrey Gibson’s solo exhibition, It Can Be Said of Them, features new work exploring themes of identity–as it relates to diversity and inclusivity–to uplift the unique experiences, struggles and personal victories shaping the current fight for LGBTQIA visibility. It Can Be Said of Them takes its title from a print produced by Sister Corita Kent in 1969. Kent’s print was part of her “Heroes and Sheroes” series, undertaken after she formally left the church as a serving nun, and depicts images of Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy. The men are surrounded by a quote by author E.B. White that reads, “It can be said of him, as of few men in like position, that he did not fear the weather and did not turn his sails, but instead, challenged the wind itself to improve its direction and to cause it to blow more softly and more kindly over the world and its people.”[1] A strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, Kent viewed these four figures, among many others, as modern day martyrs, especially during a time of aggressive political and social unrest.

It is in these works and others on view, that Gibson expands on how gender, as identity, is a liminal space; one that occupies and explores the in-between, the threshold, the reconfigured and the temporal. As a transitory space or state, it is characterized by ambiguity, hybridity and fluidity, with the great potential for subversion and radical transformation. Writing about anti-structure, cultural anthropologist Victor Turner argues that this liminal state is “a conceptual space where the ordinary world falls away, and the hierarchies of everyday life are no longer applicable.”[2] It is in this sublimation of surrender where joy can be found; where one re-articulates a new identity beyond the restricted spheres tied to tradition, geography, or social construct, and lives openly after abandoning the constraints of the everyday. Gibson’s most recent work is a reaffirmation of this profound and total freedom.

It Can Be Said of Them is on view through February 27 @ Roberts Projects 5801 Washington Boulevard Culver City. photographs courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California

Multidisciplinary Artist Chris Emile Presents AMEND @ MAK Center In Los Angeles

An exhibition and series of four performances by multi-disciplinary artist Chris Emile, AMEND explores Black male identity through movement, cinema, sculpture and sound. Emile employs archival & contemporary found footage with artifactual set design to re-render the modern architectural marvel that is the Schindler House into a sacred, private place: a home amenable for Black dealing and healing. An intergenerational cast of three dancers acting as one man, move the audience through the house and through time working their way through the question: who, if not me, decides what a Black man is? This performance series took place on September 26 at the Schindler House of the MAK Center in Los Angeles. continues from its original dates in March 2020, which were postponed due to the coronavirus. photographs by Lani Trock

"AN ALL COLORED CAST" By Hank Willis Thomas @ Kayne Griffin Corcoran In Los Angeles

An All Colored Cast is an exploration of color theory, popular culture, the development of Pop Art, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and the Hollywood film industry. In this new body of work, Thomas examines the portrayals of gender, race, and identity through the lens of film, performance, and color motion pictures.

Using color theory and screen color calibration charts as an aesthetic starting point, Thomas re-examines the language surrounding “color correction” and “white balance” in order to demonstrate the charged language of color, particularly around the time of desegregation and the proliferation of Technicolor in America.

An all Colored Cast is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at Kayne Griffin Corcoran 1201 S La Brea Ave. Los Angeles, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet The Sun Again @ The Broad

Originated by The Broad, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again is the largest exhibition to date of internationally acclaimed artist Shirin Neshat’s approximately 30-year career. Taking its title from a poem by Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, the exhibition (which presents approximately 230 photographs and eight video works) offers a rare glimpse into the evolution of Neshat’s artistic journey as she explores topics of exile, displacement, and identity with beauty, dynamic formal invention, and poetic grace.

Beginning with her early photograph series, Women of Allah, the exhibition also features iconic video works such as Rapture, Turbulent, and Passage, monumental photography installations including The Book of Kings and The Home of My Eyes, and Land of Dreams, a new, ambitious work encompassing a body of photographs and two immersive videos that will make its global debut in the exhibition. I Will Greet the Sun Again is on view through February 16, 2020 at The Broad Installation Images by Joshua White, courtesy of The Broad

Melike Kara, My Beloved Wild Valley @ Arcadia Missa in London

Artist Melike Kara’s first solo exhibition in London, “My Beloved Wild Valley,” is now on view at Arcadia Missa. For this exhibition, Kara’s figures are encircled with signifiers of place; perhaps locating their identities as connected to the heritage of the artist herself, as well as outside of being read simplistically through the body. These figures are read through their landscapes and histories. Markers of site and culture, such as sunflowers and the setting sun, speak of history as identity, a more complex matrix from which to map a sense of self, one made from ghosts. The presence and characters of Kara’s figures are created through the interaction they have with one another on the canvas and the placing of them within contexts, signifiers, or even areas of negative space.

“My Beloved Wild Valley” is on view through July 31 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor
Soho, London. photographs by Ollie Hammick. courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

Lignes de vies – une exposition de légendes @ MAC VAL in Vitry-sur-Seine

Conceiving one’s life as a creative force is the vector shared by the 80 international artists featuring in the new temporary exhibition at MAC VAL. Titled “Lignes de vies – une exposition de légendes” (Lifelines – an Exhibition of Legends), this new highlight in the life of the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne brings together work by several different generations of artists, representing every kind of practice, from photography to video via painting, installation, performance and writing. It continues a programme that, ever since the museum first opened in 2005, has worked to question modalities and instances in the construction of identity – or rather, identities. All the works shown in the extensive exhibition space deconstruct, analyse, critique or interrogate the phenomena and processes that shape and legitimise identity/identities. There are no narcissistic or self-centred gestures here; rather, the artists reconstruct and propose – more than new identities: chosen identities.

Lignes de vies – une exposition de légendes is on view through August 25 at MAC VAL Place de la Libération CS10022 94407 Vitry-sur-Seine, FR. photographs courtesy of MAC VAL

The Skirball Cultural Center Presents Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite in Los Angeles

Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite is on view now at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. The exhibition features over forty photographs of black women and men reclaiming their African roots with natural hair and clothes. This is the first-ever major exhibition dedicated to this key figure of the second Harlem Renaissance. In collaboration with the African Jazz-Art Society and Studios (AJASS) and Grandassa Models, Brathwaite organized fashion shows featuring clothing designed by the models themselves, took stunning portraits of jazz musicians, and captured the black arts community in a series of behind-the-scenes photographs. Brathwaite’s work challenged mainstream beauty standards while celebrating black beauty, instilling a sense of pride throughout the community. On view through September 1 at the Skirball Cultural Center 2701 N Sepulveda Blvd, Los Angeles. photos courtesy of the Skirball Cultural Center

Sarah Lucas Presents 'Au Naturel' @ Hammer Museum In Los Angeles

Over the past 30 years, Sarah Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as furniture, cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire. Au Naturel is on view through September 1 at the Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the Hammer

Mark Verabioff's Poolside Drive-by @ Team (bungalow) In Venice Beach

Long before the current administration’s ascendancy, the wheels had been turning in favor of hostile mechanisms of control. The blatant aggression and fascist broism of the present, however, have thrown into stark relief how identity and the gaze of another can be weaponized and internalized. Mark Verabioff’s practice is borne of the conjoined dynamics of identity and imaging and proposes self-definition as a position of resistance that can challenge cultural and political power structures. Existing at the intersection of autobiography and community, Poolside Drive-by is the mapping of an internal topography that tells us much about the artist’s choices and frames of reference, but also describes the kind of world in which he finds himself. Vulnerable, humorous, both reverent and irreverant, the work is grounded in Verabioff’s appropriative processing of cultural products and pushes against strictures of authorship, authority, and objectification. The show’s title, Poolside Drive-by, juxtaposes positions of blithe passivity and ruthless retaliation; when they go low, kick ‘em while they’re down.

Pooside Drive-by is on view through February 10 @ Team (bungalow) 306 Windward Avenue Venice, CA 90291. Image courtesy of the artist and team (bungalow). Photo: Jeff McLane.

New Museum Presents "Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel" The First American Survey Of The Artist's Oeuvre

Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, she has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into disorienting, confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire.

Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists. This presentation, which takes place across the three main floors of the New Museum, brings together more than 150 works in photography, sculpture, and installation to reveal the breadth and ingenuity of her practice. The exhibition addresses the ways in which Lucas’s works engage with crucial debates about gender and power, along with the legacy of Surrealism—from her clever transformations of everyday objects to her exploration of sexual ambiguity and the tension between the familiar and the absurd.

“Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel” features some of Lucas’s most important projects, including early sculptures from the 1990s that substitute domestic furniture for body parts and enlarged spreads from tabloid newspapers from the same period, which reflect objectified representations of the female body. Alongside the photographic self-portraits that Lucas has produced throughout her career, the exhibition features biomorphic sculptures including her stuffed-stocking Bunnies (1997–ongoing) and NUDS (2009–ongoing), the Penetralia series (2008–ongoing), and selections from her installations at the Freud Museum in London (2000) and the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). These works, which complicate inscribed codes of sexual and social normativity, have never before been shown together in the US. Lucas has also created new sculptural works for the exhibition, including This Jaguar’s Going to Heaven (2018), a severed 2003 Jaguar X-Type—the car’s back half burned and its front half collaged with cigarettes—and VOX POP DORIS (2018), a pair of eleven-foot-tall thigh-high platform boots cast in concrete.

Au Naturel is on view through January 20, 2019 at the New Museum 235 Bowery New York, 10002. photographs by Adam Lehrer

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