LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant recipient Sarah Rosalena Uncovers the Contributions of Women in Astronomy Through the Lens of Indigenous Cosmology

Sarah Rosalena: In All Directions is the first of three films from Hyundai Artlab centered around the Art + Technology Lab at LACMA – one of the museum’s unique programs that was revitalized through a long-term partnership between Hyundai Motor and LACMA beginning in 2015. This series showcases bold experimentation and cross-disciplinary innovation fostered by the Lab through the eyes of three artists. 

This first film delves into how Rosalena’s groundbreaking projects, Exit Points and Standard Candle, were enhanced by research opportunities provided through the LACMA Art + Technology Lab. Collaborating with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory allowed Rosalena to investigate the historical contributions of women "computers" in astronomy, examining their crucial roles in early measurements of celestial bodies. 

This experience enabled her to reproduce their labor, further exploring the intersection of technology, gender, and the influence of data and Indigenous lands in shaping our understanding of the cosmos. By bridging these realms, she invites viewers to reconsider how we perceive space and our place within it.

Watch the full film on Hyundai Artlab

Lost Narratives Are Excavated As A Form of Restitution in The Struggle of Memory @ PalaisPopulaire in Berlin

As Milan Kundera writes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The artists in this exhibition are concerned with remembering, reconstructing, reimagining, and restoring. Part 1 of The Struggle of Memory focuses on how memories are embodied, presenting artworks that probe in different ways how the body absorbs, processes, stores, and recalls experiences. Part 2 explores how memories are inscribed, bringing together artworks that draw our attention to the traces of history in the natural and built environment while proposing alternative, sometimes subversive strategies of looking at the past. The show, curated by Kerryn Greenberg, features work by Wangechi Mutu, Kara Walker, Samuel Fosso, Anawana Haloba, Mohamed Camara, Berni Searle, Lebohang Kganye, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Mikhael Subotzky.

Part 1 is on view through September 18th; part 2 is on view October 6th through March 11th at PalaisPopulaire, Unter den Linden 5, 10117 Berlin.

Desert Painters of Australia Part II @ Gagosian Beverly Hills

Gagosian presents a sequel to the critically acclaimed Desert Painters of Australia, again drawing from the distinguished collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield. This is the first time that the work of Indigenous Australian artists are being shown in Los Angeles since Icons of the Desert at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2009.

Evolving out of ancestral rituals of mark making practiced for many thousands of years, such as tree carving, body painting, and sand drawing, painting on canvas is a fairly recent phenomenon for remotely based Indigenous Australians, linked to the forced displacement in the late 1960s of communities such as the Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, and Arrernte peoples to the Papunya settlement in the Northern Territory. This social upheaval inadvertently created a resilient hub of artistic production: out of communal work on canvas, wall, and ground emerged the movement now referred to as Western Desert painting.

Desert Painters of Australia Part II is on view through September 6 at Gagosian 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210. photographs courtesy of Gagosian