Jota Mombaça Uses Berlin's Decompositional History to Slow Time for Mourning @ CCA Berlin

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP, Jota Momaça’s exhibition at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, was conceived, at first, through extensive conversations around the curious topography of Berlin, said to be entirely built atop drained wetlands. From swamp to city, a teleology of progress, a survival scheme, emerges. Looking at the devastating flash floods of 2021 that affected parts of Belgium, Germany and surrounding countries, Mombaça then conjures up reversal—what of cities that again turn into swamps, a form of dissolution fascists went in terror of (‘Drenare la palude!’, once howled a determined Benito Mussolini) throughout the twentieth century? From Berlin’s locality, we shift our gaze towards a planetary predicament: that of atmospheric phenomena continuously threatening terminal collapse across disparate geographies. until the last morning (2023), a newly commissioned video work, was shot among the mangroves and marshlands of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon. Covering about 700,000 hectares, these mangroves and marshlands depend on a constant influx of fresh water from rainfall and from the Guajará Bay rivers and streams. To that end, the camera pans to the sky, observing cloud formations, their movements and maneuvers. The ecosystem’s survival depends on this unpredictable choreography—to observe the weather is thus to forecast whether or not a line of continuity can be drawn into the future. 

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP is on view through December 2nd at CCA Berlin, Kurfürstenstraße 145, 10785 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.

Augustas Serapinas Excavates Nostalgia from Discarded Houses in Roof from Rūdninkai @ Klosterruine Berlin

 

Augustas Serapinas 
Roof from Rūdninkai (2023)
Installation view Klosterruine Berlin
Photo: Juan Saez

 

For his exhibition Roof from Rūdninkai, Augustas Serapinas produces a new expansive sculpture that takes its point of departure in a deserted house in rural Lithuania. The artist continues exploring his interest in questions of how space is constituted, how it reflects lived realities, and what memories are inscribed in it. Serapinas often finds the material for his sculptural interventions through online classified ads, where entire houses are given away on the condition that all materials be removed from the owners’ property. From these discarded materials he reconstructs sometimes recognizable objects such as a roof or a wall, sometimes more abstract artworks that open into a dialogue with the history of minimal art. In contrast to the use of anonymous industrial materials, Serapinas’s wooden elements and shingles bear clear markers of history, place, and use.

Roof from Rūdninkai is on view through September 17th at Klosterruine Berlin, Klosterstraße 73a, 10179 Berlin.

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.

Martyna Szczęsna Addresses the Challenge of Creating Art in An Ever-Gentrifying Urban Landscape @ Open Source Gallery in New York

In Martyna Szczęsna’s Spectre at Open Source Gallery, the artist has manipulated over 500 feet of nylon construction netting into an oversized ruched curtain, winding it through the KoKo NYC lot space. A playful embodiment of drama, opera and the challenges of securing hospitable space for art and creative expression in the ever-gentrifying urban landscape of this city. The blazing orange work will be on view all summer.

Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working with photography and sculpture. She is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed her MFA studies at UCLA. Szczesna lives and works in Brooklyn. Select exhibitions include: ARRAY at Penumbra Foundation, If Rittenhouse– at Callicoon Fine Arts, Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, BsAs, and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Szczesna’s work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations, and The Watermill Center.

Spectre is on view through August 31st at Open Source KoKo NYC Lot at 440 19th Street, Brooklyn NY 11215.

Tolia Astakhishvili's "The First Finger (Chapter II)" @ Haus Am Waldsee

photography by Frank Sperling


Tolia Astakhishvili (*1974 in Tbilisi, Georgia) transforms the Haus am Waldsee with an expansive installation that constitutes her solo exhibition The First Finger (chapter II).

Her works follow the structures and narratives of existing buildings, conjuring up real and imaginary stories through temporary installations and alterations. In her exhibition The First Finger (chapter II), Astakhishvili examines the physical composition of Haus am Waldsee by exploring its architectural layers and peripheral areas. Through architectural interventions, she condenses the spaces of the former home into an arresting and fragile environment in which the domestic sphere is reimagined. Architecture doubles here as both a protective shell and as something that appears to be exceedingly precarious.

In addition to structural interventions, drawings, paintings, text, and videos, the exhibition includes new collaborative works with Zurab Astakhishvili, Dylan Peirce, and James Richards, as well as contributions by Antonin Artaud, Alvin Baltrop, Kirsty Bell, Nat Marcus, Vera Palme, Andreas Rousounelis, Judith Scott, Ser Serpas, and Giorgi Zhorzholiani.

The First Finger is realised in two chapters: chapter I at Bonner Kunstverein, curated by Fatima Hellberg (March 25–July 30, 2023), and chapter II at Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, curated by Beatrice Hilke (June 23–September 24, 2023).

House & Garden Is A World Of Domestic Bliss @ Stroll Garden In Los Angeles

Conceived as a singular installation, House & Garden welcomes viewers into a home of domestic items rendered in clay by Analuisa Corrigan and a garden of working ceramic fountains by Lily Clark, complimented by live plant vignettes created by Alice Lam of A.L. BASA. In recontextualizing the familiar, the artists invite a moment of pause to reengage our senses and reconsider our relationship to often overlooked elements of the everyday, both domestic and elemental. Corrigan creates organic, figurative forms that unite material exploration and personal expression. Corrigan’s pieces are deceptively labor intensive, taking up to a month to make. After sketching and prototyping, each is carefully built up through a coil technique, then dried and sanded to achieve the desired silhouette. The resulting work feels simultaneously robust and delicate.

Whereas Corrigan works intuitively, Clark’s process embraces precision, reflecting her interest in engineering. After drafting a design, she rolls slabs of clay and cuts using a template, then carefully joins the seams. The surface is left unglazed to contrast with the water’s luster. For her large-scale fountains, Clark incorporates stones that she spent six months sourcing from the Whitewater quarry just outside of Palm Springs, fine tuning the design to achieve her desired water flow and sound. Clark’s fountains are arranged within an “indoor garden” by Alice Lam, whose Los Angeles-based creative studio A.L. BASA specializes in sculptural floral installations. Lam’s site-specific design references Buddhist Zen gardens created around works by Isamu Noguchi, as well as plants that are representative of California’s biodiversity. Immersive and temporal, House & Garden contemplates notions of interior and exterior — both somatic and psychological, experienced and subjective.

House & Garden is on view through June 11 @ Stroll Garden 7380 Beverly Boulevard.

 
 

Transmundane Economies: Queerness, Spirituality & Heritage Overlap in the Work of Theodoulos Polyviou →

 
 

Theodoulos Polyviou is an artist whose practice explores the multilayered spaces where queerness, spirituality, and cultural heritage overlap across physical and digital worlds. Often utilizing virtual reality (VR) technology, Theo’s work also features architectural and sculptural elements, text, and sound, resulting in installations that are at once intellectually deep and sensuous to experience. He has participated in numerous exhibitions and residencies throughout Europe, and has a forthcoming project in Lecce, Italy, later this year. I met Theo on the occasion of his recent exhibition Transmundane Economies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, where he has pursued a long-term artist residency. As an art critic, I’m usually hesitant and skeptical regarding the experience of art in virtual reality. But I found how Theo uses VR in Transmundane Economies to construct a “ritual space” that conjoins queerness, religion, and Cypriot cultural heritage to be profound and compelling. So I’ve met with him again to find out more. Read more.

Bedtime Stories In A Mental Asylum: Get In Bed With Tobias Spichtig →


interview by Janna Shaw
photographs courtesy the artist

When was the last time you stood up on a mattress, off-kiltered, aware of your balance, or lack thereof?  When was the last time you jumped on a bed with friends? When was the last time you jumped on a bed with strangers?  When was the last time you played childhood games? Cuddled in a group clad in coats and cloaks? Watched a couple kissing horizontally? Were read a bedtime story late into the evening, with snow falling gently outside?  

The KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin is hosting Die Matratzen, a week-long exhibit by Tobias Spichtig, with a nightly changing cast of poets and text-based artists reading their works aloud to an audience perched upon mattresses and sheets, sourced from friends and various collaborators of the artist.

Over the course of Spichtig’s installation, the mattresses are lived in and take on new forms, shifting from their original placement, absorbing the shapes and sounds of their dwellers and run-uponers. In one corner of a mattress, a tiny faded blood stain. Next to it, a rip from a Balenciaga heel, courtesy of that evening’s impromptu game of Tag. The sheets themselves have a collective abstract quality to them, marred with scuffs, prints, and static marks of movement. On view from above, the blocks of foam and springs morph into a perfectly assembled jigsaw puzzle, spanning the full space in its entirety, corner to corner. From here, one can clearly see that the work does not consist of objects in a room, it is the presence and experience of the guests that are on top of them that complete the work. It is an interactive performance.

Janna Shaw spoke with Tobias Spichtig on his opening night of Die Matratzen after a kickoff reading with Karl Holmqvist. Read more.

Rakeem Cunningham Presents Hero @ Ochi Projects In Los Angeles

 
 

In his first solo exhibition with Ochi Projects, Rakeem Cunningham plays and poses alone in his studio, exploring a multitude of selves informed and surrounded by a multiverse of niche subcultures. Each portrait is a declaration of subjectivity and existence—proof of self-validation and an ongoing healing journey that expands upon an outdated definition of hero.

Triggered by the designation of essential workers as heroes while being treated as disposable this past year, Cunningham paused to reflect upon his relationship to this loaded word. As a queer youth of color, he idolized heroes that didn’t look like him. Lazy metaphors—green or purple villains dressed in evil black—reinforced false dichotomies and ultimately white supremacy.

Hero is on view through June 26 through August 7 @ Ochi Projects 3301 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90019

Samson Young's Closer Reading @ ORDET In Milan

Formal construction and imperfect forms, time and consciousness are just a few territories that Samson Young (b. 1979, lives and works in Hong Kong) explores in his first solo exhibition in Italy. Renowned for a practice that weaves multicultural paradigms and cross-media experiences, the artist takes a group of works that he created during a residency at the Ryosoku-In at the Kennin-ji temple [1] the oldest zen temple in Kyoto—as a point of departure for Closer Reading. During those weeks, Young carried on his ongoing research on what form and its rethinking are.

At ORDET, Young deploys video, drawings, sound works and installations to generate an articulated, absorbing environment. Each work is connected and at the same time reveals its uniqueness in the hope of unveiling some fundamental beliefs about the way things work. There are different truths that await exploration. The video installation Sonata (2020, revised 2021) is a sequence of actions and images with a sense of a general direction and a recurring motif, in a choreography of events happening in time and space. A few objects complete the installation: a group of light clay pieces bear on their surface indented impressions of architectural features of the temple and a book of Zen scriptures with a circle drawn on it.

Closer Reading is on view through April 17 @ ORDET Via Adige 17, 20135 Milan

Digital Mourning: A Solo Exhibition By Neïl Beloufa @ Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan

The French-Algerian artist, Neïl Beloufa, is one of the leading voices of the past decade and a keen observer of our times, offering vivid representations of the world through films, videos, installations, and sculptures. 

Avoiding direct judgments and forceful declarations, Beloufa successfully conveys a reality that, in its subtlety, is often awkward to behold, focusing on highly topical issues such as power relationships, the technological control, the perils of data collection, as well as on a possible collapse in the management of a pandemic. 

Digital Mourning is on view through July 18 @ Pirelli HangarBicocca Via Chiese 2 20126 Milan

Simphiwe Ndzube Presents Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon @ Nicodim Gallery In Los Angeles

My skin is tightening
soon I shall shed it
like a monitor lizard
like remembered comfort
at the new moon rising
I will eat the last signs of my weakness
remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
for changes
I shall be forever.
— excerpted from Audre Lorde, “Solstice,” 1978

With Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon, Simphiwe Ndzube continues to develop and expand his cosmology, reimagining Black bodies as mythical and fantastic beings capable of inhabiting multiple dimensions. His figures fly, flail, fall, and dance their way from sculpture, to sound, to canvas through multiple environments, highlighting the fluidity and permeability of identity itself. Like the snake, his characters can be cold-blooded and stealthy; like the chameleon, they are capable of change.

Whereas the bodies in Ndzube’s earlier works are often faceless or headless, this series includes detailed portraits of a number of the individual characters and further develops their unique personalities. In prior exhibitions, Ndzube’s figures reckoned with drought and desolate environments, but the landscapes in Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon have grown fertile and sensual along with the humanoids that populate them. Where once the earth was dry and barren, it has now been sown and is ready for harvest. Within the paintings, pink flowers rise to the sky and spread their fleshy petal-tongues to the sunlight, begging to be kissed. Around them, a sculptural cornfield grows throughout the exhibition. A seven-foot dandy traipses throughout the proceedings, peacocking his vibrant couture to anyone who will pay attention. A Bacon-esque figure in a Garden of Earthly Delights, perhaps he is trying to draw the eyes of the couple making love in the sunlight on a canvas nearby.

Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon is on view through March 20 @ Nicodim Gallery 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, #160. photographs by Lani Trock.

I Contain Multitudes Group Show @ Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery In New York

I Contain Multitudes is a group show featuring the works of Jules Gimbrone, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, and Jennifer Sirey. The microbiome — all the bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses that cohabitate our genetic biomass, actually outweigh us by volume, some estimate that there are over 10 times as many microbial cells than human cells in and on each one of us. The microbiome is invisible to the eye but visible to our sense of smell, taste and touch, and visible in human culture as well. From the foods that we eat and the ways we digest, to the ways we process and interpret information and construct identity, and to whom we are attracted, the microbiome is influencing us and participating in our relations to the world. This show seeks to explore ways that several artists have pointed to, cooperated, or worked in tandem with microbial life in the making and context of works of art and culture. The title originally comes from “Song of Myself, 51” by Walt Whitman, and more recently used by science writer Ed Yong to title his book about the microbiome.

This exhibition will include a special series of KLAUSGALLERY.cloud editions focusing on the various practices of each artist. New editions of the online component will launch throughout the month.

I Contain Multitudes is on view through February 20 @ Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery 54 Ludlow Street, New York

Romancing A Wound: Read Our Interview With Multidisciplinary Artist Estefania Puerta →

estefania.jpg

“I am not thinking of the womb as an organ attached to a cis female but rather the womb as a place we all have within us, a place of making selves, of nurture, of “the animal within the animal,” and very much about a holding place and how that slippery sense of “holding” can become a place of containment, detainment, of being trapped. The wound aspect of it is that piece around finding a healing place within the wound and not an escape or sutured repression from it.” Click here to read the full interview. Estefania Puerta’s Womb Wound is on view October 11 - Novermber 15 at Situations in New York.

Read Our Review Of Cristine Brache's Solo Exhibition @ Fierman Gallery by Adam Lehrer →

Artist Cristine Brache has developed an interest in surrealism. For her recent exhibition, Commit Me, Commit to Me (Cázame, Cásame) at New York’s Fierman Gallery, the artist has created a sculptural installation rife with references to some of the surrealist movement’s most important female practitioners. In particular, the anthropomorphic forms and hybridity between body and object of the figurative sculpture that functions as the installation’s centerpiece, Woman Getting Reupholstered, recalls those soft sculptures of Dorothea Tanning such as Nue Couchée, 1969. Click here to read more.

Andrew Kreps Gallery NY Presents Think of Our Future By Andrea Bowers

As our global freedoms decline, Andrea Bowers is trying to move from grief to hope by focusing on youth activists beginning with the new video, My Name Means Future. Centered on Tokata Iron Eyes, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who has been involved with the movement to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline since its inception, the video continues Bowers’s commitment to documenting important activists of her time. Bowers asked the young activist to show her some of her most sacred places in South Dakota. With a small group of friends - all artists and activists, they traveled together for 4 days in September recording video interviews and landscape drone shots of the youth activist discussing the landscapes, their histories, as well as the personal and political issues that arose from being in these sacred sites. In the Lakota language, “Tokata” means “Future”.

In response to her journey with Iron Eyes and the climate emergency we are currently experiencing, Bowers has created a new series of neon works based on the designs of tree branches that incorporate quotes from eco-feminists. These monumental and sculptural pieces are made entirely of reused and recycled materials, inspired by Judi Bari and the Earth First call to action, “Resist Reuse Restore”.

Think of Our Future will be on view throughout February 15, 2020 at Andrew Kreps Gallery 22 Cortlandt Alley, New York, NY. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Apexart Presents Souls Grown Diaspora in New York City

Souls Grown Diaspora is an exhibition that explores a generation of leading contemporary visionary African-American artists from the wider United States, and situates their work into an art-historical lineage shaped by the Great Migration. The exhibition traces the migration: the movement spanning 1916 to 1970 in which six million African-Americans left the rural South for urban centers such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Oakland. Souls Grown Diaspora follows a new wave of artists, mostly self-taught, whose works address a range of revelatory social and political subjects.

The show’s title takes its inspiration from Atlanta’s Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which has worked for decades to change the canon of art history to include a group of pioneering African-American artists from the South—among them Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley, Mary T. Smith, Hawkins Bolden, and the women’s collective known as the Gee’s Bend Quilters (Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph)— as essential to the understanding of developments in the history of American art. The name “Souls Grown Deep” originates from the last line of Langston Hughes’ 1921 poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”: “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” A collection of research material will be included in vitrines and a series of performances and talks will accompany the exhibition during its run.

Souls Grown Diaspora is on view throughout March 7, 2020 at apexart 291 Church Street, NYC. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Arcadia Missa Presents Hamishi Farah, And Lomex (New York) Presents Danica Barboza & Justin Caguiat @ Condo London 2020

Hamishi Farah is an artist, writer, and musician living in Australia while retired from Australian art. Drawing upon afropessimist theory their painting practice skims through possibilities for non-human representation tiptoeing around the white disembodiment of a colonial libido.

Caguiat produces large oil based paintings often on unstretched canvas that shift stylistically between abstraction and figuration. Done in almost a pointillist style, the works appear as landscapes or murals out of a different era; anachronistic images with a register always in flux. Drawing stylistically from sources as varied as symbolist and post-impressionist painting, Viennese history painting, and certain stylistic movements in Japanese painting, they present otherworldy vistas perhaps at home in science fiction or in the realm of fantasy.

Danica Barboza produces suites of sculptures that populate a mythological universe entirely of her own devising; suites of works throughout which the same figures recur in various states of physical development that experiment with notions of celebrity and icon. Her works elaborate a mythic autobiography rooted in a romance between her and a mare figure named in her work as “Draco Adollphus B”; a figure often presented in various states of construction and de-construction, iomages of whom she has produced since as early as 2000 as part of a long term robotics project that informs much of her larger sculptural practice. She has produced a concurrent gothic novel ‘spondere’ which is available in various stages of construction on the occasion of her solo exhibitions.

The works of Hamishi Farah, Danica Barboza, and Justin Caguiat will be on view through February 8, 2020 at Arcadia Missa 14 – 16 Brewer Street, First Floor, Soho, London. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Siera Hyte's Breath Commuter @ Fresh Bread in Chicago

Fresh Bread is a kitchen-based exhibition series in Rogers Park, Chicago, run by artist Morgan Mandalay and writer Kim-Anh Schreiber. Each show meditates on metaphors of digestion and features an accompanying cookbook, a document of process and practice.

Breath Commuter is on view throughout March 8th at Fresh Bread. Email freshbreadgallery@gmail.com for address. photographs courtesy of the gallery