Alfredo Jaar Indulges In Radical Pessimism with "The Temptation to Exist" @ Galerie Thomas Schulte

For over four decades, Alfredo Jaar has used photography, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex sociopolitical issues and the ethics and limits of representation.

The exhibition’s title makes a reference to a book by Emil Cioran, one of the artist’s favorite writers. A dark, subversive thinker, Cioran was the poet of pessimism. A philosopher who was always on the verge of suicide, he once said: “If I didn’t write, I could have become an assassin. Writing is a matter of life and death. Human existence, at its core, is endless anguish and despair, and writing can make things a bit more bearable. A book is a suicide postponed.” For Cioran, failure permeates everything. Great ideas can be stained by failure, and so can art and the human condition. “No longer wanting to be a man” he is dreaming of another form of failure he wrote. “The universe is one big failure, and not even poetry can succeed in correcting it.”

For Jaar, art is the impossible answer to an impossible question: how do we make art when the world is in such a state? In the gallery’s main space, an immersive experience is created with a large, red neon work, where the words of the stoic philosopher Seneca take center stage. Seneca strongly believed that if we have the essentials and a strong inner spirit, we can radically accept and endure any circumstances. Eschewing the presence of other objects, the room is entirely illuminated with a dense red light, building an atmosphere of poetic uncertainty, mirroring the unease of contemporary times. The philosopher’s emblematic phrase glimmers in the space, reacting to the tyranny of the white box space and filling it with an idea—a model for thinking about the world.

Jaar’s second part of the exhibition fills the second, smaller gallery space with more than 50 works from a diverse group of artists, including Bas Jan Ader, Rosa Barba, Angela de la Cruz, Valie Export, Yoko Ono, Zanele Muholi, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, and more. Here, the artist has tried to create what he calls “a space of resistance, a space of hope.”

The Temptation to Exist is on view through August 12th at Galerie Thomas Schulte, Charlottenstraße 24, 10117 Berlin.

Annka Kultys Gallery Presents Quid est veritas? Group Exhibition in London

Quid est veritas?, a multi-generational group exhibition exploring the concept of philosophical truth, is now on view at Annka Kultys Gallery.  Through works by AES+F, Morehshin Allahyari, Imre Bak, crocodilePOWER, Simon Denny, Eva and Franco Mattes, Joseph Kosuth, Olia Lialina, Signe Pierce, Timur Si-Qin, and Theo Triantafyllidis, curator Anton Svyatsky scrutinizes the cognitive mechanisms by which humans operate the label of truth. The concept of truth has been and remains a central subject of philosophy, and yet its definition has proved elusive for thousands of years. In a time of universal deceit, propaganda, political truth-bending, and outright condemnation of truth, it becomes imperative to examine our relationship with it. With the dawning of the information age came unprecedented access to knowledge, and with that access, doubt has engulfed humanity. It can be said that doubt is the herald of enquiry and thus the harbinger of truth. Without doubt, no progress towards truth can be made. Each work in Quid est veritas? is intended as a provocation to self-examination, as well as invite the spectator to doubt their belief system by inquiring into their own process of belief formation.

Quid est veritas? is on view through August 3 at Annka Kultys Gallery 472 Hackney Road, London. photographs courtesy of the artists and Annka Kultys Gallery

Hammer Projects Present: Max Hooper Schneider @ Hammer Museum In Los Angeles

Artists are often likened to inventors or scientists, and in the case of Max Hooper Schneider the comparison is more than metaphoric. Schneider’s background in landscape architecture and marine biology strongly informs his artwork. Research and scientific investigation are key to his process. He explores the relationships between philosophy and nature, the personal and the political, destruction and construction, and what he calls nonhuman and human agents. Blending his diverse areas of expertise, his idiosyncratic sculptures, installations, and drawings challenge conventional systems of classification, suggesting a worldview that strives to dislocate humans from their assumed position of centrality and superiority as knowers and actors in the world. Schneider created a new immersive installation for his Hammer Projects exhibition, his first solo museum show. The exhibition is on view through September 1 at the Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Adrian Piper's 'Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016' Opens @ Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 is the most comprehensive West Coast exhibition to date of the work of Adrian Piper (b. 1948, New York). It is also the first West Coast museum presentation of Piper’s works in more than a decade, and her first since receiving the Golden Lion Award for Best Artist at the 56th Venice Biennale of 2015 and Germany’s Käthe Kollwitz Prize in 2018. Organized by The Museum of Modern Art, this expansive retrospective features more than 270 works gathered from public and private collections from around the world, and encompasses a wide range of mediums that Piper has explored for over 50 years: drawing, photography, works on paper, video, multimedia installations, performance, painting, sculpture, and sound. 

Piper’s groundbreaking, transformative work has profoundly shaped the form and content of Conceptual art since the 1960s, exerting an incalculable influence on artists working today. Her investigations into the political, social, and spiritual potential of Conceptual art frequently address gender, race, and xenophobia through incisive humor and wit, and draw on her long-standing involvement with philosophy and yoga.

For this exhibition, the Hammer is partnering with the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) to present Piper’s work What It’s Like, What It Is #3, a large-scale mixed-media installation addressing racial stereotypes. Adrian Piper: Concepts and Intuitions, 1965-2016 in on view through January 6 at Hammer Museum 10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.