SPLAT: A Sensory Play Party & Performance By Bobbi Salvör Menuez @ Performance Space New York

“Sometimes performing, leaking always, together” reads the subheading of Bobbi Salvör Menuez’s SPLAT, a sensory play party at Performance Space New York, where the multidisciplinary artist also gave a private performance. Guests had their tongues painted by Early Shinada in quori theodor’s gnaw installation, brought towels for “slime hour” in the “splash zone,” were offered beverages and a place to communally shower in the bathroom before engaging in some dry, quiet play in the “soft zone,” and documented themselves while traveling through the “liminal zone.” All guests had stickers placed over their phone cameras, so the only documentation of the night came from within an interactive, live-feed macrophilic installation resembling a giant mouth titled I’m Big, You’re Small. All attendees were asked to take rapid Covid tests before attending and encouraged to engage in consensual cruising and play. A house manager could be found on site to support in all ways necessary and voyeurs were received with a warm welcome.

Michaela Stark Presents "The Panty Show" in Collaboration with Charlotte Rutherford @ Fondazione Sozzani In Milan

 
 

Michaela Stark’s The Panty Show, hosted by Carla and Sara Sozzani, is a hyper feminine and playful, three-part artistic expression that comprises an exhibition, performance, and presentation of her panty collection.

Michaela’s process and practice is confessional and comes from her perspective that she shares with her generation. The Panty Show combines several aspects of her body of work. The show narrates the path she has taken from her early years experimenting with draping on her own body alone in her Paris apartment to how she gained liberation through fashion.

The conceptualization of Panty began as a heavily emotional journey. When her personal work and experimentation with reshaping her body began to get her noticed, this often led to appropriation of her body and her intimacy when collaborating with other artists.  

Artists Hans Baumer and John Kacere are the backdrop for the exhibition and performance at The Panty Show. Two male artists who overtly took the female form and its autonomy projecting their own ideas unto it. Stark reverses these outdated attitudes by reclaiming her voice as a female artist and by being the protagonist in her work. 

The set for the performance recreates her atelier, a dusty pink chaotic tableau vivant of ribbons and dried flowers. The audience and viewers are invited to join and share her experience. In the set, Michaela dresses her model, Yasmin El Yassini, who acts as her human doll. She dresses Yasmin in her body morphing corsetry, transforming her body completely, and then stages her almost lifeless body for photographs. 

For her second collaboration with Charlotte Rutherford, Stark remarks on the photographer’s ability to see the fantasy in everyone who steps in front of her camera and capture their unique energy as well as to foster an environment where everyone can act with agency over their body’s representation.

The final act of The Panty show showcases a series of lingerie-esque garments. Stark created ten sculptured dolls made out of tulle, using couture corsetry techniques and crinoline to give structure.

Her notebooks documenting her process are also on display, giving insight to her practice.

The Panty Show is on view through February 25 @ Fondazione Sozzani Vis Tazzoli 3, Milan

 
 

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.

"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).  

Dudu Quintanilha's Prophetic Complaints Explores the Act of Being in Public @ PSM

Dudu Quintanilha’s exhibition, Prophetic Complaints, features mostly videos that debate the (im-)possibilities of living together, generating belonging, recognition and social responsibility through research on verbal complaints. At PSM, Quintanilha reformulates the exhibition, adapting it to the gallery's exhibition space through performative collaborations with members of the Blaumeier-Atelier from Bremen, a project that since 1986 has been developing art projects with neurodivergent people in diverse fields such as theater, music, painting, photography, and literature. In addition, he invited the group MEXA from São Paulo – of which Quintanilha is a founding member — to occupy the gallery's "Loggia" and set up their own exhibition, 69 Rooms H&V.

The need to acknowledge the humanhood of marginalized individuals is very prominent in Quintanilha’s work with MEXA. The transdisciplinary art group is composed of people from various minority social groups which in Brazil are under permanent threat. The group embraces mainly transgender, gay, and Black people, whose elaborate performances and theater plays highlight their marginalized social condition in Brazil as a means of opposing discrimination and systemic violence. In the exhibition 69 Rooms H&V, MEXA is showing text-based works produced since the group was created in 2015 after violent events occurred in shelters for vulnerable people in São Paulo.

Prophetic Complaints and 69 Rooms H&V are on view through September 2nd at PSM, Schöneberger Ufer 61, 10785 Berlin.

Pussy Riot Presents Putin's Ashes @ Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Los Angeles

photographs by Morgan Rindengan

On January 27, Pussy Riot brought its radical performance art to Jeffrey Deitch's Los Angeles gallery, inviting everyone to join their protest against the authoritarian leader of Russia who started the biggest war in Europe since World War II. This was the first presentation of Pussy Riot’s political performance art at a gallery in Los Angeles.

Putin's Ashes was initiated in August 2022 when Pussy Riot burned a 10 x 10 foot portrait of the Russian president, performed rituals, and cast spells aimed to chase Putin away. Twelve women participated in the performance. In order to join, women were required to experience acute hatred and resentment toward the Russian president. Most of the participants were either Ukrainian, Belarusian or Russian.

Pussy Riot's founding member Nadya Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes of the burnt portrait and incorporated them into her objects that were being presented alongside her short art film, Putin's Ashes, directed, edited, and scored by Tolokonnikova.

"While working with artifacts, bottling ashes and manufacturing the faux furry frames for the bottles, I used skills that I learned in the sweatshops of my penal colony. I was forced to sew police and army uniforms in a Russian jail. I turned what I learned in my labor camp against those who locked me up. Putin is a danger to the whole world and he has to be stopped immediately," says Tolokonnikova.

In 2012, Tolokonnikova was sentenced to two years imprisonment following an anti-Putin performance. She went through a hunger strike protesting savage prison conditions and ended up being sent far away to a Siberian penal colony, where she managed to maintain her artistic activity and with her prison punk band made toured around Siberian labor camps. Tolokonnikova published a book Read and riot: Pussy Riot's guide to activism in 2018.

Pussy Riot stands for gender fluidity, inclusivity, matriarchy, love, laughter, decentralization, anarchy and anti-authoritarianism.

 
 

Watch Abraham Cruzvillegas Recite Tres Sonetos By Concha Urquiza @ Regen Projects In Los Angeles

Over the past decade, Abraham Cruzvillegas has explored the myriad ways to represent his life experiences in physical form. His humorous but incisive takes on identity often employ animal avatars to draw out similarities between humans and other species, particularly primates.

At the opening reception for Cruzvillegas’s third solo presentation at Regen Projects, the artist gave a rhythmic reading of three poems by Mexican poet Concha Urquiza. Standing upon sculptural elements from the show that function as performance platform and gallery seating, Cruzvillegas introduced a new series of drawings and paintings produced on-site during the installation of the exhibition.

In this new series of drawings, the artist’s own photographic likeness serves as the basis for such investigations. Thin textiles printed with images of his face act as canvases that the artist embellishes with designs rendered in bold colors. Employing a similar formal language, the artist presents a group of large-scale calligraphic paintings. Composed flat on the gallery floor, he uses a mop or broom to apply paint, tools chosen as a gentle nod to the workers who employ them, in loose, expressive gestures that serve as records of their performative nature. They translate the rhythms and tones of the Urquiza’s poems with precision and grace.

Abraham Cruzvillegas: Tres Sonetos is on view through April 23 @ Regen Projects 6750 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles

Read Exile On Main Street: An Interview Of Ai Weiwei From Our F/W 2018 Issue

 
A man standing in front of t-shirts hanging, and he is holding a camera.
 

One week before this interview, Ai Weiwei’s studio in Beijing was bulldozed by Chinese authorities without any warning. Known for his brazen acts of dissent, Ai has not only challenged authoritarianism in China – the revolutionary polymath has also been extremely vocal about the worldwide refugee crisis. In a constant limbo state of exile, Ai has been living and working in Germany since getting his passport back in 2015. This fall, he will be taking over Los Angeles with three major exhibitions that he sees as one singular expression. At UTA Artist Space—which is housed in a 4,000-square-foot former diamond-tooling facility conceived and designed by Ai—the artist will be showing a series of sculptural works made from marble, including his iconic CCTV camera on a plinth, a Damoclean symbol of our post-capitalist era of state-sponsored surveillance. Central to the exhibition will be Humanity, a performative work and social media campaign that encourages visitors to the gallery to read a passage from Ai’s recent book on the refugee crisis—the footage will be compiled in a 30-minute video. On view until March 2019 at Marciano Art Foundation, Life Cycle will also explore the crisis of global displaced persons by drawing on the artist’s personal experiences and Chinese mythology. The show will include his famous work, Sunflower Seeds, which is comprised of over 49 tons of porcelain sunflower seeds carved and crafted by 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen, in China’s Jiangxi province. Finally, at Jeffrey Deitch’s new Hollywood Gallery, Ai will present his installation of over 6,000 salvaged wooden stools from the Ming and Qing dynasties, which were gathered from villages across Northern China, thus serving as quotidian ciphers of cultural erasure and human existence. Read more.

 

“Any government, not only the Chinese government, is afraid of true individuality. True individuality is at odds with collective thinking.”

 

Watch Faith Wilding's Performance Of "Waiting" From Her 1974 Film Womanhouse

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Faith Wilding’s vanguard art installation and performance space, Womanhouse, Anat Ebgi in partnership with LAND (Los Angleles Nomadic Division), is presenting an eponymous solo exhibition with the artist. Seen here is a performance of “Waiting” from the documentary film Womanhouse produced by Johanna Demetrakas (1974). Below is an excerpt from Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interview with Wilding in our forthcoming BODY issue.

“HANS ULRICH OBRIST: You did two very legendary works at Womanhouse. You did the “Waiting” performance—an almost Beckettian performance about waiting, but very different from Beckett. And then, you also did an installation called “Womb Room.” Can you tell me about these two works? What kind of reaction did they get? 

FAITH WILDING: Yeah, well we had a performance group that Judy Chicago led. Because that was our plan from the beginning—that we would do some performances as part of the house. I was at dinner with Arlene [Raven] and Judy one night, and suddenly I was like, I wanna do something about waiting—about what we've waited for, what I've waited for all my life. And so, we started making a list. I still have that list. Out of that, I crafted the “Waiting” monologue, which we worked on as a group; other people tried out how they would perform the piece. But you know, I have given permission to anybody who wants to perform it, and lots of people have performed it all over the world in all different kinds of ways, which I think is really cool…”

Womanhouse is on view through April 16 @ Anat Ebgi 4859 Fountain Avenue, Los Angeles

Tori Wrånes Presents Mussel Tears @ Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles

 
 

As a synesthete, a person with a condition of combining senses such as seeing color and form in sound and language, Tori Wrånes visualizes sound into a sculptural and physical dimension. This experience allows the artist to use sound to dictate the form of painting and sculpture and, in turn, she also visualizes objects through vocal projection. Mussel Tears premiers sculptures, paintings, sound, and performance together to evoke dream-like narratives, where the familiar becomes fantastical. The exhibition has developed from the artist’s ongoing observation of what she describes as “the quiet outcasts of society,” referring both to elements of nature and personal relationships. The works in the show visualize a sensory experience of the world.

Wrånes’ unique method of communication, using sound and form to convey primal emotions and truths, bypasses the structural hierarchies of language and rational thought. The result is a wide-ranging, experimental, and ritualistic practice that guides us outside of our known world. The works in Mussel Tears situates the self in relation to other beings, both human and non-human, and illustrates how our understanding of the world is constantly mediated by our own bodies. Throughout her practice, Wrånes sews together our senses, asking us to consider how we might privilege the overlooked in any form.

Tori Wrånes is on view now through March 12 @ Shulamit Nazarian 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles.

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.

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Window To The Clouds @ Salon Berlin, Museum Frieder Burda

Presented at Salon Berlin, the Berlin-based project and exhibition space of the internationally renowned Museum Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Window to The Clouds is Paris-based artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy’s first institutional solo presentation in Germany. Mirroring Salon Berlin’s engagement for diverse potentialities in contemporary artistic creation, Lutz-Kinoy embraces the full dimensionality of the exhibition space as he conceives an immersive and sensorial environment for visitors that sheds light on his deeply spatial approach to painting, rooted in the body and performance. Comprised of recent paintings, ceramics and a site-specific sculpture, the exhibition imagines a series of contemporary landscapes as painterly reflections that look at — and through — various architectures, historical paintings and current events. These environments act as stages for worlds of shared experience, human presence and touch. 

Window to The Clouds is on view through June 5 @ Salon Berlin Auguststr. 11–13, 10117 Berlin

 
 

Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life @ MoMA PS1 In New York

From the very outset of her career in the 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle (American and French, 1930‒2002) defied artistic conventions, creating works that were overtly feminist, performative, collaborative, and monumental. Her first major US exhibition, Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life features over 200 works that highlight Saint Phalle’s interdisciplinary approach and engagement with pressing social issues. Innovation was key to Saint Phalle’s process: from beginning to end, she envisioned new ways of inhabiting the world.

Saint Phalle also engaged with the politics of social space in her work. Addressing subjects that ranged from women’s rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, she was often at the vanguard in addressing pressing issues of her time. In particular, her work to destigmatize HIV/AIDS is highlighted through works related to her illustrated book AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (1986).

Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life is on view through September 6 @ MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue, Queens

 
 

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.

Celebrate Womxn's Day By Watching Carolee Schneeman's Meat Joy On The Anniversary Of Her Recent Passing

Writes Schneemann: Meat Joy is an erotic rite — excessive, indulgent, a celebration of flesh as material: raw fish, chicken, sausages, wet paint, transparent plastic, ropes, brushes, paper scrap. Its propulsion is towards the ecstatic — shifting and turning among tenderness, wildness, precision, abandon; qualities that could at any moment be sensual, comic, joyous, repellent. Physical equivalences are enacted as a psychic imagistic stream, in which the layered elements mesh and gain intensity by the energy complement of the audience. The original performances became notorious and introduced a vision of the "sacred erotic." This video was converted from original film footage of three 1964 performances of Meat Joy at its first staged performance at the Festival de la Libre Expression, Paris, Dennison Hall, London, and Judson Church, New York City. Via Electronic Arts Intermix
Filmed by Pierre Dominik Gaisseau. Editor: Bob Giorgio.

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

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“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.

"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

Jasmine Nyende: Crested Crane @ AA|LA Gallery In Los Angeles

Through conversation, meditation, and rediscovery of “lost pasts,” Jasmine Nyende uses art to explore and mediate her mother’s southern American roots and her father’s Ugandan genealogy. Incorporating paintings, fiber arts, performance, poetry, meditation, spoken word, and embroidered ready-to-wear clothes, Nyende manifests an alluring confluence of body, identity, and ancestry.

Crested Crane materializes through Nyende’s use of fibers and manifests a particular mending of personal identity that echoes throughout the body of work. For Nyende, art is a way to speak to ancestors while asserting her own individuality. Specifically, the crocheted and knitted works relate to the American history of Black female labor in the fiber arts. The web of soft textiles act as connective tissue, binding the vibrant images and colorways into a complex yet comprehensive family narrative that would otherwise be inaccessible. Crested Crane is on view through December 14 at AA|LA 7313 melrose avenue, Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Lizzi Bougatsos + Kim Gordon x Penny Slinger @ Blum & Poe In Los Angeles

Lizzi Bougatsos and Kim Gordon perform sonic improvisation to the projections of artist Penny Slinger's early experimental silent films from 1969. After returning from a Gang Gang Dance Japan tour last winter, Bougatsos found herself emerged in the films of Jane Arden, Niki de Saint Phalle, and Penny Slinger, part of an experimental feminist film series curated by Alison Gingeras and Nicoletta Beyer at the Anthology Film Archives. She began writing text while watching the Slinger films in the theater, and thereafter asked her friend Kim Gordon to perform a sonic reaction. The two artists improvised to the films teetering on the elemental, surreal, metaphysical, and distinctly feminine raw poetry of the sublime unconscious -- an almost Artaudian parallel for the unconscious leadings of the nature of improvisation in art and life, shared in the three practices of Bougatsos, Gordon, and Slinger. photographs by Julia Nicoletti

Patty Chang: The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 @ Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Organized by the Queens Museum, New York, The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 is Chang’s most ambitious work to date: an eight-year project that redefines the role of artist, image, object and performance in the construction of narratives through an exhibition that integrates video projection, photography, sculpture, publication, and performance as one expansive body of work. The exhibition allows viewers to navigate through Chang’s personal, associative, and narrative meditation on mourning, caregiving, geopolitics, and landscape. The exhibition has been structured to replicate the complex way in which stories develop through geography, history, cultural mythology, fiction, and personal experience. While Chang’s multi-year project was in part inspired by turn-of-the-century colonial explorer Sven Hedin’s book The Wandering Lake (1938)—which tells the story of a migrating body of water in the Chinese desert—the project also chronicles the loss of Chang’s father as well as her pregnancy and the birth of her son.

The Wandering Lake, 2009-2017 is on view through August 4 at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 1717 E 7th St, Los Angeles, CA 90021. photographs courtesy of Elon Schoenholz/ICA LA