Subjects Rebel Against the Confines of the Camera in Unbound: Performance As Rupture @ JS Foundation in Berlin

The group exhibition Unbound: Performance as Rupture examines how different generations of artists have called upon the body in relation to the camera to refuse oppressive ideologies, disrupt historical narratives, and unsettle concepts of identity.

The exhibition traces various intersections of performance and video art from the late 1960s to today, focusing on how they create specific forms of rupture, fracture, and pause. In contrast to Peggy Phelan’s definition of performance as a live art characterized by its immediate disappearance, Unbound centers the use of the camera and its apparatus to record and direct the performance itself. By willfully conflating the presence of performance and the virtuality of the image, the artists question a fundamental paradox—or representational gap—between the performing subject, whose complex identity can never be depicted fully, and the camera as a violent tool that tries to capture, contain, and classify them. Many of these works expose and negate the colonial gaze perpetuated by the camera, while simultaneously utilizing time-based technologies, in order to create otherwise impossible connections across spaces and temporalities. In addition to performance documentation and performance-for-the-camera, the exhibited artworks offer investigations into contemporary image economies that draw attention to how bodies move through or evade physical and digital spaces.

Unbound: Performance as Rupture is on view through July 28th, 2024, at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Leipziger Strasse 60, D-10117 Berlin.

Read An Interview of Nina Hartmann by Leo Cocar on The Occasion Of Her Exhibition at Silke Lindner →

 

portrait by Alexander Rotonodo

 

Nina Hartmann navigates a diverse array of artistic mediums, seamlessly weaving her connection to music into her creative endeavors. Her work serves as a bridge, melting the divide between mysticism and critical thought. Within her conceptual pursuits, one encounters a unique blend of archival imagery, elusive symbols, screen prints, and Xerox collages. It’s in these varied forms of media that the synergy between visual artistry and musical expression effortlessly unfold. Employing deliberate restraint, Hartmann eschews superfluous elaboration about her work. She entrusts the observer with discovering the magical quality which resides in the gap between the art and viewer. Hartmann treats the output of her mind as an algorithm; it becomes a framework for further artistic computation. Her work delves into the depths of the subconscious, revealing concepts characterized by their infinitude. Her perspective extends to the creatively unconventional, where she intriguingly regards conspiracy theories as societal relics worthy of study—an open-mindedness which enunciates her versatility as an artist. A fusion of the modern mythological emerges, as Hartmann recycles recurring themes that persist in our collective consciousness. Through her exploration of spiritual phenomena, she invites us to delve into the enigmatic, prompting us to seek understanding in realms beyond the real. Click here to read more.

crosslucid Manifests Human Stories through Artificial Intelligence in Dwellers Between the Waters @ ACUD Galerie in Berlin

‘Dwellers Between the Waters’ (2023) is conjured as a series of hybrid rituals that mediate the space between physical presence, trauma, memory, healing, and virtuality. Polyphonic in its artificially intelligent framework, Dwellers Between the Waters could be experienced as a happening that is chanted by various elemental entities such as waters, winds, earth, air, algorithm... as well as poetry, history, magic, human and more-than-human creatures. This happening of digital rituals questions the singularity of humanist perception of reality. Co-performing with artificial intelligence, it attempts to create alternative epistemologies and outlooks on (so-called) reality through rendering multi-focal narratives and embedding the psycho-magical practice in forms of living ‘sigils’.

Combing artificial intelligence with the practice of magic and alchemy, Dwellers Between the Waters seeks possible solutions in response to the traumas of the contemporary anthropos, and examines how artificial intelligence, in terms of artistic practice, remains integral to our contemporary condition, that is, the ever-evolving climate crisis and the sixth extinction of species coupled with wars, inflation, and capitalist exploitation. By evoking, cultivating, and connecting various forms of consciousness in the virtual realms, Dwellers Between the Waters invites the ‘dwellers’ who inhabit in and among ‘realities’ to share their stories and experiences, which then feed back to (so-called) reality as evolving strings materializing across both physical and virtual domains to bring novel perspectives for further changes.

Dwellers Between the Waters is on view through October 8th at ACUD Galerie, Veteranenstraße 21, 10119 Berlin.

Teresa Baker's "From Joy to Joy to Joy" Recontextualizes Traditional Materials With Modern Discourse

text by Tara Anne Dalbow

If art historian Simon Schama’s assertion is correct that “landscapes are culture before they’re nature” and “scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock,” then when Teresa Baker, a member of the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, surveys the Northern Plains she sees far more than meets the eye. The nine technicolor tapestries included in From Joy to Joy to Joy offer a glimpse beneath the visible surface of her ancestral homeland at a terrain imbued with ancient meanings, enriched by tradition and ritual, and animated by that which is sacred and ineffable. Poised between the past and present, recollection and reality, the physical and the spiritual, Baker’s chimerical landscapes inspire a poignant commentary on the ways history, social sensibilities, memory, and mythology mediate our experience of nature.

At first glance, the viewer might find the textiles’ base material, Astroturf, surprising. They’d be right to assume that someone raised nomadically across the national parks of the Midwest wouldn’t have had many encounters with the imitation grass. It wasn’t until Baker moved to Texas a few years ago that she discovered the vibrant, short-pile synthetic turf. Sturdy enough to support layers of paint, weavings, sticks, and stones yet malleable enough to be manipulated into unusual, organic shapes, the plastic mats freed her from the rigid constraints of traditional canvas. The mimetic texture, capable of conjuring wide-open plains and vast grassy fields, alleviated the burden of representation and encouraged abstract experimentation. 

Perhaps the fiber’s most compelling quality is the tension it enacts with the natural embellishments. The ultra-contemporary turf, indicative of an age beholden to plastic and artifice, tempers the traditional materials and recontextualizes them within a modern discourse. Yarn, willow, and buckskin, resources used for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples, are dispensed like paint to create mesmerizing gestures, patterns, and shapes across the shaggy surface. Despite being restricted to the materiality of yarn to generate variation in her lines and marks, Baker renders a convincingly painterly effect that’s both innovative and recognizable. Nods to certain expressionists, including Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler, can be found throughout the exhibition alongside techniques, patterns, and symbols culled from Mandan and Hidatsa customs and craftsmanship. 

While the compositions resist narrative, the haptic engagement with the surface texture, the coloration, and the use of organic shapes ground them in the realm of landscapes and topographical maps. One can identify a winding river in Spring Unforeseen, an island in the middle of a lake in No Walls, or a parched field in Yellow Prairie Grass. At times, the individual threads that bisect the picture plane appear as longitude and latitude lines; other times, they read like hiking trails or the boundaries of various plots of crops. Dappled strands of yarn arranged side by side mimic the fluidity of water, and layers of paint imitate shifting patterns of light and shade. Baker relies on the emotional freight of her color palette to modulate between the feeling of a landscape and the landscape itself. Indigo, as evocative of the ocean and the night sky as it is of melancholy and despair. 

Where the materials resist domination, the strings fray, the Astroturf emerges beneath the painted veneer, and the rawhide curls around the edges, the tapestries feel most alive, charged with an energy and agency of their own invention. Even affixed to the gallery walls, there’s a sense of perpetual unfurling as if the works are still engaged in the act of becoming. To see them this way is to see them as products of a dynamic relationship between artist and material, not a subjugation or domination of the former by the latter. The metaphorical jump from the material to the land itself is difficult to ignore, rendering them poignant examples of symbiotic stewardship. 

On the afternoon of my visit, a rogue red ant crawled assiduously across the brilliant green field in Unwritten. For just a moment, I experienced that exhilarating awareness of being unfathomably small but fundamentally connected to something unfathomably vast and irrefutably miraculous that I’d previously assumed only the grandeur of nature could provoke.

From Joy to Joy to Joy is on view through October 14 @ de boer 3311 E. Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles

Dickon Drury Mines Diverse Corners of Still-Life Painting in An Egg in Your Shoe @ Shulamit Nazarian

Installation view of An Egg in Your Shoe. Courtesy of Dickon Drury and Shulamit Nazarian.

Shulamit Nazarian is currently featuring An Egg in Your Shoe, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by UK-based painter Dickon Drury. The artist’s thematically rich, meticulously detailed paintings mine diverse corners of art history and the genre of still-life painting to delve into themes of self-sufficiency, preservation, and regeneration with tenderness and humor.

Drury's latest series of oil paintings on linen invites viewers to contemplate the complex relationship between material possessions and a sense of home amid an uncertain future. The still lives present collections of objects that work like visual puzzles, prodding the viewer to piece together clues about the mysterious inhabitants of these scenes. Drury's practice seeks the humor and idiosyncrasy embodied in our selection of material possessions, and his research has often looked to the supplies collected by apocalypse preppers. Boxes in the process of being packed or unpacked evoke a sense of urgency and an impending move, while rolls of bubble wrap allude to themes of protection and value for one's beloved objects. The compositions present their diverse groupings of objects democratically, without a hierarchical division between a whistle, a lighter, or a high-end ceramic vase. Without a human figure in sight, Drury's paintings offer an imaginative narrative played out in the background by the invisible, implicit inhabitants of his eccentric world.

 
 

An Egg in Your Shoe is on view through October 28 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90036

Paul McCarthy Continues to Define the Language of the Obscene in Them as Was Is @ Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin

Bringing together past and present, then and now, Them as Was Is, Paul McCarthy’s first solo exhibition with Galerie Max Hetzler, presents two fundamental aspects of McCarthy’s practice. On the ground floor, eighteen sculptures constitute an early endeavour by the artist to combine different periods of sculpture into one, allowing visitors to draw out the similarities that weave together his most iconic sculptural projects. On the gallery’s upper floor, a series of drawings and video works from the artist’s more recent ‘A&E’ (2019–) project show film and performance to be at the heart of McCarthy’s practice.

The gallery’s second floor presents drawings created by McCarthy during improvised performances between himself and German actress Lilith Stangenberg as part of their ongoing ‘A&E’ project. The project’s title refers to the layered alter egos which McCarthy and Stangenberg assume: Adolf Hitler & Eva Braun, Adam & Eve, Arts & Entertainment, America & Europe. Created during hours-long sessions in which the collaborators enter a state of delirium, the drawings possess a radical immediacy and undeniable physicality. Alongside unconscious scrawls, magazine clippings, and imagery of Hitler and Mickey Mouse, certain drawings incorporate the artist’s tools, providing witness to the gestures embedded in them.

 
 

Them as Was Is is on view through October 21st at Galerie Max Hetzler, Potsdamer Straße 77-87, Berlin.

Read Our Interview of Artist Darius Airo Ahead of Both His Exhibitions in Los Angeles →

Installation view of Casual Banter @ Face Guts. Courtesy of Darius Airo and Joshua White.

Heavily intertwined with the work of the Chicago Imagists, artist Darius Airo has derived a decent amount of his contemporary style from the group of representational artists. Imbued with the quintessential imagery and pop iconography of the Imagists, Airo’s work fuses these art historical trends with his own inclination for surrealist imagery and the grotesquerie. His romanticization of public space is influenced by these same artistic roots, but is guided by the poetry he writes. Airo interweaves the quotidian with the romantic through his poetic approach to painting and drawing, unintentionally highlighting the exceptional in the mundane. 

Airo has two shows happening concurrently in Los Angeles. His show Dense at Central Server Works is a collaboration between him and Jim Mooijekind. The respective artists’ work operates in tandem; the paintings are in conversation with one another, all generally characterized by the abstracted figure and its gaze. Casual Banter at Face Guts is a sort of retrospective of Airo’s drawings from the last ten years, curated by photographer Joshua White. The drawings are filled with kinetic figural forms seemingly capable of conversing amongst themselves. Read more.

Derrick Adams Flirts With the Idea of Sensuality in Come as You Are @ Gagosian in Los Angeles

 

Derrick Adams, Be the Table, 2023. © Derrick Adams Studio. Photo: Jeff McLane

 

In Derrick Adams’ debut exhibition with the Gagosian, the artist continues to develop pictorial vignettes centering the Black figure, this time in new works borne from the artist’s imagined invitation to the real or fictional personalities he paints.

The exhibition’s title offers encouragement to be present without the need to conceal one’s true self, dreams, and aspirations—a prompt to shed the pressures of adaptation and conformity. Adams counters hackneyed narratives by presenting figures in moments of carefree leisure, inspired by his belief in the constructive power of scenes that uplift and support Black culture. Adding elements of fantastical daydreams along with a few icons familiar from previous series, he dramatizes lived experience and self-actualization in compositions that balance vivid and muted tones, flat planes and multidimensional space.

Come as You Are is on view through October 28 @ Gagosian, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills

Pictures Girls Make Inverts Archaic Norms Through Portraiture @ Blum & Poe in Los Angeles

“Pictures Girls Make”: Portraitures, Installation view, 2023, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles © The artists; Courtesy of the artists and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo, Photo: Evan Walsh

Blum & Poe presents Pictures Girls Make: Portraitures, an exhibition bringing together over fifty artists from around the world, spanning the early nineteenth century until today. Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, this prodigious survey argues that this age-old mode of representation is an enduringly democratic, humanistic genre.

“Pictures girls make” is a quip attributed to Willem de Kooning who purportedly dismissed the inferior status of his wife Elaine’s portrait practice. Inverting the original dismissal into an affirmation, Pictures Girls Make is a rallying cry for this exhibition which examines how different forms of portraitures defy old aesthetic, social, and ideological norms.

Pictures Girls Make is on view through October 21 @ Blum & Poe, 2727 South La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90034

Park Nights Return @ Serpentine Galleries In London, Featuring Live Music, Performance, Dance, and Poetry

Serpentine was thrilled to announce it’s returned of Park Nights this August. Its experimental, interdisciplinary, live programme sited within the annual architectural commission, the 22nd Serpentine Pavilion designed by Lina Ghotmeh.

Bringing together multi-disciplinary artists, and featuring rave music, performance installations, poetry and dance, the exciting live programme invites audiences to engage, reflect, and connect. Park Nights runs from August to October, featuring The Living and the Dead Ensemble; Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; Bambii and Christelle Oyiri.

Catch it’s final evening on October 8th, where Christelle Oyiri/CRYSTALLMESS will present a live iteration of her upcoming record with invited collaborators and musical guests.

The events will run through early October at Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens, London.

This American Life is Freighted in Race, Gender, and Politics @ Morán Morán in Los Angeles

Martine Syms, I miss the kids, 2021. Image courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.

This American Life is an exhibition at Morán Morán about stories, how they are conjured, how they are communicated, and how they relate to lived experience. These accounts are freighted in race, in gender, and in sexuality. It is also about the relationship between contemporary art and its reframing of the imagery of American culture. While negotiating the skewed protocols of media, the loops and networks of distribution, this constellation of artworks insist upon the intimacy and proliferation of artistic experimentation.

Dena Yago, Bets Hedged, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.

The artists in This American Life intervene, dissecting narratives and reassembling them to offer a new perspective. In the process, fresh truths are revealed and a deeper insight into our shared American experience emerges.

The American Life is on view through October 28 @ Morán Morán, 641 N. Western Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90004

 

Ryan Trecartin, Please Knock Before Going Outside (Flood Season), 2023. Image courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.

 

Ai Weiwei Breeds High Culture With Lego to Rebirth Readymades @ neugerriemschneider in Berlin

know thyself, Ai Weiwei’s fifth solo exhibition with nerugerriemschneider, continues his extended engagement with imagery created from Lego bricks to reassess, de- and reconstruct or contextualize anew works from throughout art history and the contemporary media landscape. Using a traditionally playful, immediate, generationally and geographically ubiquitous medium to analytical, critical extents, Ai shapes a veritable survey of both the Western cultural canon and of his own artistic trajectory.

Throughout his body of work Ai has returned to Lego bricks time and again, laboriously harnessing pieces by the hundreds of thousands to interrogate the parameters of imagemaking and production, honing his use of the material and expanding its representational and theoretical capacities to shape facsimiles of well-known works of art and other popular media. Honoring Marcel Duchamp and his legacy of the readymade, Ai deploys the mass-produced objects for adaptations of preexisting motifs, translating and often modifying them within his own social and political contexts, the angular components mimicking the pixels that coalesce to become today’s digital, widely and infinitely distributed imagery.

 
 

know thyself is on view through March 30th, 2024, at neugerriemschneider, Christinenstrasse 18-19, 10119 Berlin.

Analia Saban Explores the Intersection of Humanity and Technology in Synthetic Self @ Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles

Analia Saban, Flow Chart: Drawing a Hand, 2023. All images courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers.

text by Mia Milosevic

Analia Saban’s Synthetic Self ventures into the human instinct to quantify virtually everything. The exhibition—a unique two-part feature with different showings at Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery—encompasses nearly all aspects of technology's intersection with human civilization…from the heating of the universe to pornography. The mechanization of the world is intricately realized in her work, where minneal entities of the everyday are applied to the AI-entrenched craze of the present. 

Upon entry to Sprüth Magers—the site of the first half of Saban’s exhibition–and my first encounter with her work, the contrast between black-and-white coloration seems unapproachable, sterile, even unnerving. The work is, at first glance, not captivating and evidently not meant to be—that’s not the point. As we explore the nuances of natural phenomena we are simultaneously led to blend in with it. We become embedded in the mechanics of life and come to find out that this is actually our perpetual resting state.

To the left of the entrance at Sprüth Magers are rows of tapestries, detailed and glistening with copper thread which consecutively form the same shape as the marble structure residing on the floor of each room in the exhibition—it’s a computer fan. Its intended purpose is explained by the name, but what it symbolically represents in Saban’s exhibition is the cooling of the planet and broader stratosphere. It serves to comment on what has actually become the center of our universe, and what has the power to fix it. This allegory to climate change is present throughout the entirety of the exhibition, using technology as an emblematic resource with which to further delve into the problematic nuances of society. The computer fan is also symbolic of what powers contemporary life. This specific sculpture is equal in power to the engine it depicts. 

 
 

Saban seeks to replicate the encyclopedic age, invoking an omnipotent approach to nature. But there’s a lot of irony in this—she’ll never be able to define all of the variables. What characterizes this omnipotence to nature is the compulsive human tendency to quantify and define it. Saban’s work poses a multitude of questions, but seeks to answer none–this is the beauty of her work. What does it mean when a serious academic takes a selfie with a mouse filter? Saban’s work is filled with these kinds of satirical dichotomies. Her self-portrait of internet log-ins is another example of the individual identity we have inevitability entrenched in the technological realm; there’s an extreme absence of privacy, and invasive expectation to share. 

Images of the quotidian are almost all wrapped in the grid overlay that is quintessential of photoshop. Upon closer inspection, these figurative panels are full of errors–extra body parts and augmented facial features. She even includes an AI-generated “deep fake” of her own face. We see the world through the lens it’s run by. Saban’s art informs everyday life in simple terms. Not one image is spared the obstruction of a technological interface—of AI’s recognizable touch. It’s interesting to see the interplay between human nature and the artificial; to see how human instinct folds into the context of the invented. Even though the human instinct Saban depicts is the urge to quantify, define, explain, understand, her work actually achieves the opposite.

Synthetic Self is reminiscent of an iPhone, with the exhibition at Sprüth Magers being the front of the phone, and the one at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery being the back. The front represents a more human aspect, pervaded mostly by our own instinctual habits. The back represents the consumption of energy; it’s the burnt out crevice of humanity and the promiscuities that are hidden in our private browser. 

Upon entry to the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, a series of computer circuits rendered in thick printer’s ink line the walls. Historical computer graphic cards are engraved with their countries of origin; this is where the natural and manmade come head-to-head. These variant computer parts highlight the global effort towards intelligent development. Embedded within each work is the irony of our reality in coexistence with worldwide industry—our rather insignificant role in the broader technological stratum becomes abundantly clear. 

The very last portion of the exhibition is pornographic—incorporating one of the most provocative uses of the innovation that rules the world. Images of black-and-white penises harbor a small squarespace, all of them slightly obstructed by different forms of measurement or anatomical labeling. The involvement of measurement is at its most satirical in this context, where the urge to quantify and define appears all the more trivial. The finale of the exhibition reverberates its most intriguing purpose, which is to unveil the inner-workings of the most up-to-date status of human instinct. 

Analia Saban, Cooling Rack (4 x 4), 2023.

Synthetic Self is on view through October 28 @ Sprüth Magers and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

Rose Wylie Captures Atemporal Resonances in CLOSE, not too close @ David Zwirner Los Angeles

Rose Wylie Spindle and Cover Girl, 2022 © Rose Wylie Photo by Jack Hems Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Rose Wylie’s CLOSE, not too close presents a group of canvases that evoke in the viewer a feeling of immediacy, each depicting Wylie’s observation of a particular moment that is atemporal yet also grounded in her everyday existence.

Wylie has become known for her uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. The artist has long been interested in exploring perspectival and compositional strategies other than—and along with—traditional Renaissance perspective, frequently making numerous iterations of a given motif as a means of advancing her formal investigation. Working in both single- and multi-panel formats, she regularly juxtaposes apparently disparate imagery, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into a unified composition. As curator Tanja Boon aptly notes, Wylie’s “paintings exemplify the artist’s ability to absorb powerful impressions from her immediate surroundings. They also illustrate her broad knowledge of cultural production, spanning popular and cliche styles as well as underexamined and non-Western visual traditions.”

CLOSE, not too close is on view through October 14 @ David Zwirner, 612 North Western Avenue, Los Angeles

EJ Hauser Reclaims the Natural and Technological Aesthetics of Language in 'Song of Summer' @ Haverkampf Leistenschneider in Berlin

 
 

Most of us are so used to reading that we forget that each letter is a shape and each word is a composition. The type we read every day–in emails and books, on packaging and signs–has a significant aesthetic dimension. U.S. artist EJ Hauser has adopted graphic and typographic strategies for their philosophical purposes and works, revealing a new view of what we no longer see in everyday life among all the texts. EJ Hauser’s quasi-abstract, fabric-like paintings are composed of layers of pixels, text fragments, and chimerical figures that refer to networks both in nature and the plant world, as well as to digital systems and interconnections in our human communication world. For them, letters form a sculptural framework, a compositional structure that sometimes dissolves into pure text images, sometimes leads to text in combination with images, or sometimes is buried under successive layers of paint. Some are very explicit, others require a closer look to find the spine and curves of different letters jumbled together to dissolve the boundary between word and image, mixed with chimerical figures and totemic symbols representing the interconnectedness of life on earth. EJ Hauser is interested in the Wood Wide Web, the complex subterranean web on the planet. Plant communication takes place via the mycelium, a network of microscopic fungi beneath the forest floor, through which information is exchanged. This is not unlike the way we are connected today through our cell phones, social media, and the “invisible” Internet.

Song of Summer is on view through October 14th at Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Mommsenstraße 67, 10629 Berlin.

Somerset House Studios presents Sonya Dyer’s first major London solo show: Three Parent Child

Somerset House Studios resident Sonya Dyer undertakes a new commission to be presented throughout the River Rooms from 29th September, marking the artist's first solo exhibition in London. 

The installation, Three Parent Child, will be the final stage of Dyer’s Andromeda trilogy, as part of her ongoing project Hailing Frequencies Open. HFO reimagines the history and radical potential of human space travel, exploring the intersections between scientific enquiry and science fiction. Sonya weaves influences including Star Trek, the legacy of HeLa cells, and mythology, to engage with ongoing conversations around monumentalism, memory and the role of speculation. Three Parent Child features two works: Action>Potential, and Lucy.

The title Three Parent Child takes its name from the recent scientific development of Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), a new technique that incorporates DNA from three people to create a child, which mirrors Dyer’s adherence to trilogies throughout her practice. Whilst in residence at the Studios, Sonya Dyer’s research has been supported as part of the King’s College London x Somerset House Studios Programme.


’Three Part Child’ will be on view through November 12th at Somerset House Studios, Somerset House, Strand, London

‘Genetic Automata’ By Larry Achiampong and David Blandy @ Wellcome Collection In London

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy
GOD MODE 2023

This June, Welcome Collection will present Genetic Automata, a major exhibition of collaborative video works by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, exploring race and identity in an age of avatars, videogames and ancestry DNA.

The exhibition will present a series of four films exploring scientific racism – the false belief that there are innate differences and abilities between races. It will reflect on where deeply ingrained ideas about race come from and the role that science has played in shaping these perceptions. The series highlights how scientific racism is reproduced in contemporary society, from education to healthcare, science, politics and more.

Genetic Automata at Wellcome Collection will allow visitors for the first time to view the four video installations together, unpacking the relationship between science and race injustice through the artists ’lens. It will premiere the latest work of the series _GOD_MODE_ (2023), a co-commission between Wellcome Collection, Black Cultural Archives (BCA), and Wellcome Connecting Science.

Each film employs a spoken word soundtrack and includes imagery drawn from contemporary video games, in particular those with dystopian sci-fi plots that feature the misuse of genetic material. The series begins with A Terrible Fiction (2019), which addresses the complex history of classification, categorization and segregation. It references the history of the theory of evolution and highlights the figure of John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved Black man living in Edinburgh who taught Charles Darwin taxidermy – but whose contribution to science remains largely unacknowledged.

‘Genetic Automata’ is on view through February 11th at Welcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London

Berlin Atonal Combines Ritual, Installation, and Performance in an Exploration of Ephemerality

 

Florentina Holzinger
Etúde for Church (2023)
Image credit: Mayra Wallraff

 

Berlin Atonal immerses audiences in constant states of change and fluctuating intensity, where seemingly static artworks defy any rigidity. In Florentina Holzinger’s Études, stunt effects meet the world of music to create scores for bodies as instruments. At Atonal, the artist presents Étude For Church, a performance in which a two-ton iron bell is asked to ‘call in the canonical hours, summon tempests and awake the sleeping soul’.

Bridget Polk
Reclaimed Damages (2023)
Image credit: Frankie Casillo

Bridget Polk will be present throughout the exhibition, reconfiguring Reclaimed Damages by assembling precarious sculptural forms over time, in dialogue with the audience and other works in the exhibition that manifest in ephemeral reflections on the past, present, and personal.

Mire Lee
Installation view
Image Credit: Frankie Casillo

Mire Lee has created a hanging fabric installation, where worn-out, torn, and ripped fabrics are dipped in viscous liquid clay. Over the course of its exhibition, the clay absorbed by the "skin" of the work will be slowly thinned down by water. It promises a misty viscerality as a space to question human fantasies of technologies that contradict the realities of subjects that decay and deform through time.

Cyprien Gaillard
Absorbent Figure (2023)
Image courtesy of artist

Cyprien Gaillard’s "Absorbent Figure" is based on an existing object found by the artist at the Kijk-Kubus-museum house in Rotterdam. While the meaning of the statue is widely debated, the design is similar to the ‘weeping Buddha,’ and one interpretation is that those who touch it will feel a mysterious alleviation of their sorrows. With its new industrial skin, the figure sits outside Kraftwerk amidst those gathering, taking part in the collective experiences of music and nightlife.

Atonal features visual art and concert nights intermittently through 9/17 at Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin.

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

 

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

 

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

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