Avery Wheless is a Los Angeles-based painter who was born and raised in Petaluma, California. With her mother, a ballet instructor, and her father, an animator for LucasFilms, it’s no wonder she became a painter and video artist with a penchant for the theatrical. Her video works often depict movement artists performing choreography, and her painted portraits often depict everyday people engaging in the unconscious performativity of everyday life. Her current solo exhibition Stage, Presence on view at a private residence in Beverly Hills with BozoMag includes portrayals of the artist and her friends occupying glamorous spaces, caught in moments that subtly reveal the effort that comes with looking at ease. These acts are not celebrated or bemoaned. They just are. One friend reaches into the cocktail dress of another to lift and expose the fullness of her breast in anticipation of reuniting with an ex. Other figures unwittingly become subjects as they applaud an unseen performer or spy pensively on others while sipping martinis. The pageantry of hyper femininity is as vulnerable as it is manicured when you look at it from the right angle and Avery Wheless has a way of depicting it all simultaneously like an emotional lenticular on canvas. Read more.
Read Our Interview of Paris-Based Artist Ladji Diaby →
April 11th marked the opening of Preservation, a group show curated by Paige Silveria and Paul Hameline at CØR Studio in Paris. The exhibition brings together a disparate group of artists (including Ladji Diaby, Alyssa Kazew, Mark Flood, Gogo Graham, Jordan Pallagès, Anthony Fornasari, Bill Taylor, Caos Mote, Ron Baker, Cecile Di Giovanni, Simon Dupety, Gaspar Willmann, Wolfgang Laubersheimer, and the late, great Gaetano Pesce) whose work ranges from photography, collage, video, design, sculpture, and more. These works explore the original purpose of our human intellect before it became aware of itself and started to ask the unknowable. They reflect on a time when the self wasn’t yet conscious and only concerned itself with preservation in the most existential sense of the word. On the occasion of the opening, Paige Silveria spoke with artist Ladji Diaby to learn more about his roots in Mali, his creative process, and his relationship to the art scene in Paris. Read more.
Gil Kuno's Early Internet Exploration Remains an Electric Testament to Online Creativity in Solo Exhibition @ panke.gallery in Berlin
Gil Kuno’s work is an intricate tapestry of sound art, installations, and video art. His current solo exhibition at Panke Gallery exhibits his earliest art creations – those created on the Internet in the 90s. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of the first of these creations, Unsound. "Unsound.com" (1994) was a pioneering media experiment that fused sight and sound, allowing users to interactively engage with artists' works in both visual and audio formats. Through crowd-sourcing, it facilitated artistic curation by audience votes – an innovation that even captured the admiration of Timothy Leary, who subsequently endorsed the site. In 1996, Gil Kuno introduced Wiggle, the world's first Internet band. This groundbreaking endeavour leveraged the Internet's connectivity to forge musical collaborations across geographical boundaries, culminating in a band composed of members from Japan, Australia, and the United States. They achieved a major label deal and released multiple albums, all while some band members remained faceless due to their geographically dispersed nature.
Unsound: The Shape of Sound is on view through December 20th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin.
"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).
A Memory: Tabaimo’s Nest at GL Strand in Denmark
Tabaimo, aitaisei-josei, 2015 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan Gallery GL STRAND Photo by David Stjernholm
text by Lara Schoorl
Walking into, Nest, Tabaimo’s first retrospective in the Nordic region, is like walking into someone’s subconscious mind, half asleep, half awake, half dream, half real; each film a vignette into an absurd fusing of desired or criticized aspects of society; each painting and installation a remnant of that. Spread across three floors of Copenhagen’s GL Strand––an eighteenth century aristocratic house designed by the Dutch-Danish architect Philip de Lange that has housed the almost hundred-year old art association for the past five decades––Tabaimo turns the interior of a home into the interior of a psyche; using the architecture of the exhibition space as well as the architecture in her works as a lattice that let the realms of inside and outside, private and public seep through and into each other.
“haunted house” (2003), one of five hand-drawn and then computerized stop motion animation videos in the exhibition, is the first work on view and a gateway from the outside to the inside, into which one will be pulled deeper and deeper as one dwells through the show. On a curved wall we follow a moving peephole or telescope-like lens across a cityscape filled with apartment buildings; only seeing as much as the round lens reveals, while the rest of the wall remains in the shadows, blocked from our vision and awaiting its turn to be gleaned over. Our eyes move across windows and inevitably the scenes behind it. We see people standing, walking, eating in their homes; we imagine their moods and relationships; and then imagination begins to blend with reality when the (made up) life stories behind these people are suddenly taking place in blown up proportions atop buildings. In this video work, Tabaimo uses an amalgam of childhood memories and adult daydreaming to peer into the lives of others. While we are still looking from an outside perspective, a longing for the inside is instilled.
Tabaimo, haunted house, 2003 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James
As one continues up a floor, we enter “public conVENience” (2003) and stand at the edge of a public bathroom. Installed across three wall-sized screens positioned in a U-shape and built on an inclining ramp, this public yet intimate space starts out as larger-than-life, but grows smaller towards the end of the slope. A concoction of perspectives both realistic and fantastical presents itself depending on where one chooses to stand. We are inside a shared space, a unique liminal space where public and private meet. Women walk into the screen and into the stalls, peeing, disposing of sanitary napkins, re-applying makeup. Then, here too, Tabaimo allows for fictional narratives to insert themselves into our shared reality. One of the bathroom visitors takes off her clothes, and dressed in a bathing suit, ties a rope to her waist before diving into one of the squat toilets; later on, a giant moth flies into the space, and a turtle is flushed in one of the bowls. For the majority of the video we stand separately, as one of the possible bathroom visitors, but occasionally a zoom-in occurs across three screens and we are staring at what could be our own feet squatting above a toilet. Slowly, we are roped into the narratives of the works.
Tabaimo, public conVENience, 2006 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan. GL STRAND Photo by David Stjernholm
The further we enter the exhibition, the more the space between us and the works blur; with each floor interior spaces protrude more outward. On the second floor, in the only room lit by natural light, as though to encourage growth, drawings of hybrid plant body parts are drawn directly upon the walls as well as on papers held in wooden frames. Technically perfect, to the likening of botanical and anatomical drawings for research and documentation purposes, the medium of drawing (here and in the videos) refers to Japanese woodblock printing and anime––the latter became a popular genre in the 1960s in Japan in which the border between real and imaginary lives also became porous––and form a formal undercurrent in Nest. The humanoid flowers lead us into the adjacent room in which an interpretation of Tabaimo’s studio is installed. Its presentation in an exhibition, in an art institution, in which touch is discouraged, emphasizes the installation is a rendering, a recollection (instead of a reality) of this place elsewhere, where it is used by the artist and so presumably holds an aliveness of materials and movement. Here, where the studio is in stasis, the viewer becomes a time traveler sharing the room with a frozen temporality. We are now fully inside one of the most intimate places of the artist, yet kept at a small distance by way of temporal and institutional boundaries. An anchor in our singular, physical, reality in the shape of systemic space or time, and its friction with alternative realities is a trope that recurs throughout the exhibition.
In the final gallery, after which no throughway or exit is available, only a way back through the previous rooms and tracing our steps down the other two floors, we land in “aittaisei josei” (2015), a video of a corner of a room without a ceiling. Or, a room for which the night sky poses as plafond, a full moon hanging directly above the meeting point of the cornering walls that disappear into a dark infinity. The scene spans one wall covering projection of said corner in which just a couch and a table are placed, with their sides closest to the edge of the image coming out of the screen and continuing into the space as real objects, cut out of furniture matching to the drawing in the video. The interior space in the video and the interior of the gallery space are literally connected as such and form a backdrop for the imaginary outside spilling in. A moth reappears on the screen, from behind the walls a tree grows high and into the room, and from its branches a head of hair appears, locks sweeping and reaching to the ground. In “aitaisei josei” all matter comes to life, moves, and turns not only spaces but meaning inside out.
Tabaimo, aitaisei-josei, 2015 Video installation ©Tabaimo. Courtesy of Gallery Koyanagi and James Cohan Gallery. GL STRAND Photo by David Stjernholm
Although the longest video is little over 6.5 minutes, it is easy to continue watching each of them for much longer; the addictive quality of the bizarre that creeps into the everyday but also the slightly quivering texture of the countless succeeding animated drawings that compose the videos have a hypnotizing effect. And, simultaneously, it is the medium of drawing that functions both as a barrier between reality and the work, and one that prevents us from fully falling into a shared imagination between the artist and viewer. Nest, in nature a complex and built structure that nurtures new life, entices us to open those drawers in our minds for which there may be no space in our day-to-day life, and provides a place where our fantasy, fears, desires and anxieties are acknowledged and given a response.
Meriem Bennani's Guided Tour of a Spill @ François Ghebaly In Los Angeles
Meriem Bennani’s Guided Tour of a Spill acts as an interlude between her groundbreaking Party on the CAPS (2018), her pseudo-documentary set in the Moroccan quarter of the CAPS, and a narrative sequel set to debut later this year at the Renaissance Society and Nottingham Contemporary. The exhibition consists of the titular multi-channel video projected and displayed on sculptural, kinetic screens alongside new drawings of scenes from the world of the CAPS. One screen, broadcasting what could be an A.I.-generated children’s video, is topped by helicoptering ropes that slap the gallery walls. Inspired by the compilation structure and synesthetic drive of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), Guided Tour of a Spill centers less on overt narrative and more on the visceral and sensorial pleasure of music, dance, athletics and humor. Throughout the exhibition, Bennani playfully blends humor and critique, weaving an expanded allegory for how media circulates through channels of digital and geopolitical power, both online and in the real spaces we inhabit.
Guided Tour of a Spill is on view by appointment through May 1 @ François Ghebaly 2245 E. Washington Blvd., Los Angeles
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
Marilyn Minter Presents "My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee" @ Simon Lee Gallery London
In Marilyn Minter’s video work, “My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee” (2018), women write the word ‘cunt’ into condensation on a glass pane. As the women articulate each letter, their features are gradually revealed as the steam hiding them dissipates. Minter reclaims one of the most widely acknowledged offensive words by providing the women in her video the chance to, quite literally, write it away from its degrading associations. The artist’s debut exhibition with Simon Lee Gallery and her first solo presentation in the UK in thirty years explores feminism and sexual politics through images that dismantle Western culture’s hierarchies of censorship and misogyny. “My Cuntry 'Tis of Thee” is on view through July 13 at Simon Lee Gallery 12 Berkeley St, Mayfair, London. photographs courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery London.
Petra Cortright Presents CAM WORLS @ UTA Artist Space In Los Angeles
CAM WORLS features fifty of the artist’s videos, made between 2007 and 2017, including eighteen never-before-exhibited artworks. Take a walk around the gallery to trace the evolution of Petra's online presence and take a seat on one of the many beanbags to view the works simultaneously from a distance, then make your way to the back gallery to view her 2015 piece, mind_candy_pfaffs, a collection of life-sized sexy girls in motion pulled from VirtuaGirl, one of the many technologies that the artist has employed in her work, its broader purpose is to give its users the impression that the sexy woman of their choice is trapped and living right within their own computer screens. CAM WORLS will be on view through April 7 at UTA Artist Space 670 S. Anderson Street Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Kupper and Lani Trock
Watch The Exclusive Premiere Of The Memphis Milano Inspired Music Video for the Soft Ethnic Track "Prints"
The video for Soft Ethnic's "Prints," which exclusively debuts on Autre, relies on a simple set and a variety of characters played by Liam Benzvi to visually represent the construction and variation found throughout the song. Influenced by Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis group, the set pieces were designed and colored to add a playful backdrop and lightness to the scene. This, along with the relative sparseness and consistency of the editing creates a strong visual language that lends itself well to Liam Benzvi's melodic musings. Music video co-directed by Alex Rapine and Jarod Taber. Set design by Marki Becker. Click here to read an interview with Liam Benzvi.
LAND Presents Brian Bress 'A Toyota's A Toyota' @ The Desmond In Los Angeles
LAND presents a site-specific exhibition of newly commissioned works by Los Angeles-based artist Brian Bress at The Desmond (formerly Desmond’s Department Store), an Art Deco landmark on Miracle Mile. The exhibition, A Toyota’s a Toyota, includes a large-scale video projection, entitled NOON NOON, and a six-channel HD monitor “window display” installation, entitled The Desmond Six. Both works feature painted panels – bucolic mountain landscapes in NOON NOON and a white and grey grid mimicking the architectural windows on the building’s façade above in The Desmond Six – which are cut through from behind to reveal candy-colored striped cartoonish figures, both bulbous and cylindrical, tightly positioned within the picture plane. NOON NOON mirrors itself on opposing walls, while the cutting of each of the letters of “NOON” are slowly revealed, again mimicking itself as each letter is cut. 'A Toyota's A Toyota' will be on view until January 6, 2016 at the Desmond, 5514 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA