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.

Singapore Design Week 2023 Spotlights Smart and Sustainable Design

From the festival hub at the National Design Centre to Design Districts at Bras Basah.Bugis, Marina Bay, and Orchard, and many other Design Community locations, Singapore Design Week 2023 will present an extraordinary showcase of Singapore’s distinctive brand of creativity. Singapore design embodies a universal attitude—the desire to always seek to make lives better using design. This year’s festival theme “Better by Design” reflects the commitment of DesignSingapore Council (Dsg) to champion design and creativity that helps meet complex challenges and shape a better future. The festival runs until October 1st. Click here for a full program.

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

Lucas Meyer-Leclère "Paris/Berlin" SS24 by Joseph Kadow & Hakan Solak

photography by Joseph Kadow
styling by Hakan Solak
hair by Veronika Stork at Inclover Agency
make up by Sam Hill at Inclover Agency
modeling by Aaron, Gregor, Mahmut & Wolf
all clothing by Lucas Meyer Leclere S/S24
thank you to the adminstration of Parochialkirche, Berlin

 

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

Diotima & Laura Facey Join Forces for Diotima's Spring/Summer 24 Collection

 
 

The recent collaboration between Laura Facey and the Diotima is an exquisite artistic partnership that draws inspiration from Facey's 2022 exhibition, "Laboratory of the Ticking Heart," at Ormsby Hall in Kingston, Jamaica. As such, Facey's captivating body of work for this collection had been conceived before the two artists had even crossed paths.

Diotima’s Founder and Creative Director Rachel Scott was profoundly moved by Facey's exhibition, which left a haunting imprint on her consciousness. It ignited a deep reflection on the historical and enduring legacy of slavery in the Caribbean. 

A chalk drawing titled "Seed" (2022), a creation by Facey in the weeks leading up to her exhibition, was transformed into a cotton print. Diotima preserved the integrity of the original piece while loosely draping it around the body.

Furthermore, Facey contributed miniature versions of her wood-carved hearts, which the designer artfully incorporated into the project. These intricate hearts adorned the body, gracing the neck, abdomen, and even hanging delicately from the ear.

In a mesmerizing fusion of art and performance, Facey adorned herself with the transformed pieces and posed in front of the camera. This collaboration culminated in the creation of an exquisite corpse, a testament to their shared vision and artistic synergy.

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.

The Missing Mountain Oozes and Shines With Choreography By Bobbi Jene Smith & Or Schraiber @ LA Dance Project

Photographs by Josh A. Rose for L.A. Dance Project, 2023

Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber’s The Missing Mountain hits you first with the scent of foggy mist and then with the crimson sea of wall-to-wall carpet. It’s a one-two punch that has you drunk in its ambience before you’ve even found a place to sit. Two of the dancers are seated at a dining table, another on a couch, one stands by a ladder stage right and another upstage next to a piano carrying a large bouquet of gladioli that fully obscure her face. Hers is the first step. It’s small and fast, bringing her one foot closer to the audience. It will be nearly a minute before she takes another, although the music is woolly and dissonant, making it difficult to track time. Her movements slowly accumulate at a pace that feels nebulous while she expands into the space. It’s a spellbinding opening solo that winds us into a hypnogogic state before it transitions into a romantic pas de deux with a sinewy texture of movement, which suggests that the gravitational pull and atmospheric pressure has shifted in the room. 

This is a surreal space occupied by six distinct, archetypal characters who populate our collective unconscious with the specters of an undocumented halcyon era. Daphne Fernberger is a lithesome vessel of femininity whose clarity of movement is as crisp and smooth as her rose-colored silk midi slip. Hope Spears repels off walls, defying gravity one moment and grounding herself consummately the next like an arachnid. Courtney Conovan has limbs as long and fine as her flaxen locks and she is in full control from core to extremity with every small, isolated articulation and every sweeping, full-body conveyance. Lorrin Brubaker is the most understated. He commands without drawing attention to anything in particular and yet he is magnetic in his cool subdue. Jeremy Coachman is a powerhouse chameleon. He is supple and romantic, fierce and formidable, and when you least expect it, he’ll throw in a light, coy wiggle of the ass. A spotlight hits the downstage right corner illuminating an antique standup microphone. Shu Kinouchi in a tuxedo with coattails and thick, red socks reads the weather report in English, punctuating it with mysterious cries in Japanese. He is the master of ceremonies. Equally indignant as he is mischievous, he takes risks that allude to an internal metronomic gyroscope, which prevents him from ever losing balance or time. 

The work is filled with easter eggs that materialize in the form of props, backdrops, and humorous gestures. The dancers employ multiple dialects of movement simultaneously and with perfect fluency, each of them equally alien. However, they all keep their traditional balletic prowess handy in an invisible pocket. Our coat-tailed emcee withdraws a red button from his actual pocket, presses it and the entire stage is bathed in red light. Our medley of atonal dissonance and variations on Bach is abruptly interrupted by Tom Waits’s “Lie to Me” and we are peaking with dinner plates for pupils. Do I still like Tom Waits? I do right now. Just when we think this scene couldn’t be more unpredictable, Kinouchi whips up a series of fouettés à la seconde, and for some reason, I’m not rolling my eyes at this trope of virtuosity. He finishes with a quadruple pirouette in coupé, or maybe more, it was enough to lose count, and I’m as thrown by this choreographic choice as I am by my embarrassing, undeniable swoon. 

The stage goes quiet and a spotlight shines centerstage. A man and woman face one another seated in chairs. He tells her what to do and she obeys. It’s sadomasochistic full stop. But no one is touching, no one is playing, and no one is coming. They are working. 

Each of these six dancers brings something unique to the stage and yet when they meet at the dinner table it is as though they all belong to one body. Their harmony suggests they have belonged to one another for quite some time now. Their movements ooze and shine like the friction burns they bear from dancing barefoot on the carpet below. In that moment, we understand that the surreality of this hour we’ve spent together, watching a piece that harkens a Lynchean dreamscape, Sartre’s No Exit, a scene from Pina Bausch’s Cafe Müller, another from Claire Denis’s Beau Travail, and a few others that we can’t yet place is actually none of those disparate references. It is an uncanny amalgam of similar feelings that are culled to the surface to tickle your scalp with an elusive facility that leaves you wondering why you felt compelled to scratch. And just when we start to feel like we know this space, this wondrous missing mountain, we are pulled back into a standard time signature and the ground below us once again applies its Earthly gravitational pull. It’s the metaphysics of last call. it’s the house lights killing your melatonin. It’s your Uber arriving in five minutes. 

 
 

The Missing Mountain is on view for 3 more nights September 28, 29 & 30 @ 8pm. Reserve your tickets here.

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.

KOZABURO Spring/Summer 2024 at NYFW

 
 

Mythical creatures serve as a universal source of aesthetic and spiritual inspiration, evident throughout the KOZABURO Spring Summer 2024 collection. This essence finds expression in garment construction, graphic patterns, and intricate embellishments. Curved lines evoke the undulating contours of sand dunes, while textures and fluidity capture the essence of dragons and serpents.

This collection transcends the constraints of historical clothing norms, embracing 3D-cut pants and styles that defy convention. The Chinese zodiac and the Uroboros symbol, representing rebirth and the future, permeate the collection, both structurally and in attitude.

Akasaka's reverence for ancient aesthetics extends to contemporary fabric choices. SS2024 incorporates a capsule collection produced in collaboration with cycora® by AmbercycleTM—a newly regenerated material derived from disassembled end-of-life clothing and textiles. This circular approach aligns seamlessly with the traditional Japanese weaving technique of Sakiori, a hallmark of KOZABURO, where used strips of fabric are woven into new textile creations.

The runway presentation features a soft serpent sculpture with scales crafted from upcycled denim, symbolizing the eternal cycle. Two drummers, uniting at the point of infinity, symbolize a universal language of communication, ceremony, and spirituality, recalling a past Tokyo show with Taiko drummers.

KOZABURO's Spring Summer 2024 collection is a harmonious mosaic of inspiration, reflecting a decade of creative community and cultural exploration in the United States, a testament to Akasaka's artistic journey.