Non-Specific Objects Carves Niches for Difference from Universality @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

The title of Non-Specific Objects acts as a counterpoint to the ideas expressed in Donald Judd’s canonical 1964 essay Specific Objects. Seeing as Judd characterized specific objects as separate from either sculpture or painting, they were precisely themselves, emphasizing the very materiality of a specific object that lacked expressive or symbolic content, especially to embodied subjectivity. This universal space, which aimed to be all-encompassing, did not make room for gender, racial, and sexual difference. The artists in this exhibition work against the hegemonic universal, creating space for difference in their works by means of abstraction, referencing bodies both literally and metaphorically.

The selection of works collectively embodies the contemporary lived experience of those who occupy spaces outside the normative. While they often do not overtly mirror the human form, the works represent humanity through a lens of abstraction and resistance, inviting viewers to confront themselves and experience bodily otherness. From alienation and embarrassment to intimacy and desire, the artists offer both the possibility of self-reflection and shared moments of humor.

In focus is the abstracted body – be it the intimate nature, materiality, and particularities of the individual human body, the collective body that is built on shared historic experience, the extended and amplified body in an age of relentless augmentation, or the body that eschews realistic painterly modes of representation, opting for formally abstract or heavily stylized, sometimes nostalgic renditions of humanity. The diverse set of artistic practices does not adhere to strict principles of representation, but continually references the human, sometimes clearly and often obliquely. It highlights objects that refuse human form but relate to the human by embracing abstraction.

Non-Specific Objects is on view through February 24th at Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin.

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.

Justin Urbach Uses Silicon to Unveil the Symbiotic Relationship Between Man and Machine @ Max Goelitz in Berlin

Justin Urbach’s Fractal Breeze is a three-channel video installation that addresses transformation processes in the digital age as a fragmentary sci-fi narrative.

In Fractal Breeze, two characters move on the borders of virtuality and reality in a metafictional representation of our technological future. The starting point for the video work is silicon, which is used to manufacture microchips and upon which the artist reflects in its many stages of production. In the form of wafers, thin reflective information carriers, silicon enables crossing over into a hybrid world in which virtual spheres increasingly materialize and the characters experience a new physicality. Through the symbiotic connection of body and technology, a transhuman circuit is formed that refers to social developments and the multidimensional processes of raw material extraction and energy storage.

The artist creates a multimedia installation in which the wafers merge into real space as sculptural objects and information carriers. Still blank in the film, in the exhibition they are engraved with body-related data of the actors, collected through MRI scans, 3D scans and motion capture. Fractal Breeze was realized in collaboration with specialists and researchers from the semiconductor and film industries, as well as the medical field, in order to unite these diverse branches. The music produced especially for the project was created in collaboration with musician and sound artist Jonas Yamer.

Fractal Breeze is on view through July 29th at max goelitz gallery, rudi-dutschke str 2610969 Berlin

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

 
 

601Artspace in New York Presents "How shall we dress for the occasion?"

Acceleration is accelerating. We are faster, stronger, better. We are digital. We are artificial. We are intelligent. We don’t have enough space but we have enough experience. We are connected, we are loud, we are confident. We have all the info we need.  We have time. We manipulate time. We know the past, we know the future. We are the future, but somehow, we can’t even predict the weather. If the world has become wretched and damaged, if humanity is futile, “how shall we dress for the occasion?”

This exhibition, featuring artists Chulayarnnon Siriphol, Deniz Tortum, Kathryn Hamilton and Pınar Yoldaş, considers our obsession with future scenarios and how we try to make sense of  personal mortality, technological progress and environmental collapse, simultaneously. Are we experiencing the “end of the future” or the “end of  history”? How do we fight the accelerated passage of time? Why do we take measures to undo the effects of time? How does it feel to worry not only about our personal time but how much time the generations to come will have on earth? How do we think about the relationship between value and time, when there is an expiration date to humanity’s existence on earth? How shall we dress for the occasion? invites the audience to contemplate our multiple, contradictory experiences of time.

How shall we dress for the occasion is on view throughout March 22, 2020 at 601Artspace 88 Eldridge St. New York, NY. photographs courtesy of Etienne Frossard

The Pleasure Ground: Matt Savitsky Presents Two Video Installations @ Cloaca Projects In San Francisco

Matt Savitsky’s new installation, ​The Pleasure Ground​, contains two video installations Savitsky conceived this year while on a self-created residency in his hometown (Lancaster, Pennsylvania). ​Crop Circles​ and ​Turn Bridge​ (2019) construct viewpoints by way of a fixed configuration between a sculptural element to a single camera. In both video images a disconcerting interplay of figure and ground is produced by the movement of each sculptural device relative to the camera’s position, which turns each in a continuous 360 degree rotation. Before becoming video objects, the images prompt a deconstruction of their viewpoint into a relationship defined by the coexistence of subject, object, and support.

The Pleasure Ground is on view through October 26 @ Cloaca Projects 1460 Davidson Avenue San Francisco. photographs by Andreas Tagger

Mika Rottenberg Presents "Easy Pieces" @ The New Museum In New York

Employing absurdist satire to address the critical issues of our time, Rottenberg creates videos and installations that offer subversive allegories for contemporary life. Her works interweave documentary elements and fiction, and often feature protagonists who work in factory-like settings to manufacture goods ranging from cultured pearls (NoNoseKnows, 2015) to the millions of brightly colored plastic wholesale items sold in Chinese superstores (Cosmic Generator, 2017). The exhibition presents several of her recent video installations and kinetic sculptures, and premieres a new video installation, Spaghetti Blockchain (2019), that explores ancient and new ideas about materialism and considers how humans both comprise and manipulate matter. Together, the works in the exhibition trace central themes in Rottenberg’s oeuvre, including labor, technology, distance, energy, and the interconnectedness of the mechanical and the corporeal. Easy Pieces is on view through September 15 at the New Museum 235 Bowery, New York. photographs courtesy of the gallery