Jota Mombaça Uses Berlin's Decompositional History to Slow Time for Mourning @ CCA Berlin

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP, Jota Momaça’s exhibition at CCA Berlin – Center for Contemporary Arts, was conceived, at first, through extensive conversations around the curious topography of Berlin, said to be entirely built atop drained wetlands. From swamp to city, a teleology of progress, a survival scheme, emerges. Looking at the devastating flash floods of 2021 that affected parts of Belgium, Germany and surrounding countries, Mombaça then conjures up reversal—what of cities that again turn into swamps, a form of dissolution fascists went in terror of (‘Drenare la palude!’, once howled a determined Benito Mussolini) throughout the twentieth century? From Berlin’s locality, we shift our gaze towards a planetary predicament: that of atmospheric phenomena continuously threatening terminal collapse across disparate geographies. until the last morning (2023), a newly commissioned video work, was shot among the mangroves and marshlands of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon. Covering about 700,000 hectares, these mangroves and marshlands depend on a constant influx of fresh water from rainfall and from the Guajará Bay rivers and streams. To that end, the camera pans to the sky, observing cloud formations, their movements and maneuvers. The ecosystem’s survival depends on this unpredictable choreography—to observe the weather is thus to forecast whether or not a line of continuity can be drawn into the future. 

A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP is on view through December 2nd at CCA Berlin, Kurfürstenstraße 145, 10785 Berlin.

"Magic of The North" Retrospective Delves into Munch's Lights and Shadows @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

Edvard Munch challenged his contemporaries with the radical modernity of his paintings, especially in Berlin, where the Norwegian symbolist exerted a big influence around the turn of the century. The exhibition Magic of the North is a partnership with the MUNCH in Oslo. It tells the story of Edvard Munch and Berlin, illustrated by paintings, prints, and photographs.

The German capital was in the grip of a fervor for all things Nordic. Even the conservative Association of Berlin Artists invited the young artist, as yet unknown, to put on a solo exhibition in 1892. Viewers were shocked by the bright colors and perceived the paintings as sketchy. The show was forced to close shortly after opening. Munch’s works polarized people. The artist delighted in this public attention. He moved to the Spree, living and working in the city again and again between 1892 and 1908. The “Munch Affair”, as the press sardonically labeled the scandal, is seen as the beginning of Modernism in Berlin.

 
 

Magic of the North is on view through January 22nd at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin.

Nasan Tur Interrogates the Uses of Power through Lifelessness in Hunted @ Berlinische Galerie in Berlin

Nasan Tur deals with the political and social conditions of our time. His works are experimental arrangements that make ideologies, social norms and behavior patterns visible and expand them to include possibilities for individual action. To do this, he examines statements, gestures and images that he finds in the media and public space and condenses them into miniatures of current social crises and discourses. The focus is on the question of how predetermined role models influence us and when we are ready to cross boundaries and actively change social patterns in the face of oppression, powerlessness and manipulation.

New works were created for Hunted, his current exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, which deal with questions of the exercise of power and its legitimacy. Why do people kill? What violence lies within us, and how and under what circumstances is it activated? By arranging the works in space, Tur creates images that express an ambivalent attitude toward death and life. They range from confronting one's own inner demons to questioning hunters and the act of killing to the careful staging of lifeless animals in space.

Hunted is on view through April 1st at Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture Alte Jakobstraße 124–128, 10969 Berlin.

Rachel Gregor Presents Summer as an Inescapable Purgatory for Teenage Girlhood in Still Summer @ Hashimoto Contemporary

Still Summer by Rachel Gregor, Stickleback and the female nude

Rachel Gregor, Stickleback, 2023. Images courtesy of Hashimoto Contemporary.

The rules of adolescent girlhood are convoluted and often unspoken, something painter Rachel Gregor seeks to highlight in her first solo exhibition with Hashimoto Contemporary, Still Summer. The Kansas City-based painter portrays the summer before ninth grade (remembered through overexposed point-and-shoot film photos) as the tense passage into true young adulthood: newfound independence is at odds with a lack of agency, infantilization discredits budding knowledge about the world. Based on versions of herself, the characters in these new paintings are wolves in sheep’s clothing, rebelling to escape their physical and psychological barriers, or at least survive the small hell of Arcadian juvenility.

Still Summer is on view through December 2 @ Hashimoto Contemporary, 2754 S La Cienega Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90034

 
 

Ken Gun Min Fuses a Cosmopolitan Personal History with Lush, Floral Landscapes in Sweet Discipline from Koreatown @ Shulamit Nazarian

Ken Gun Min presents Sweet Discipline from Koreatown at Shulamit Nazarian in Los Angeles

Images courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian

Shulamit Nazarian presents Sweet Discipline from Koreatown, an exhibition of new works by Ken Gun Min. In the artist’s newest paintings, lush, floral landscapes and sensitively rendered, imaginative portraits are adorned with beads and embroidery. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Min has led a global existence, moving from Zurich and Berlin to San Francisco before eventually settling in Los Angeles's Koreatown. This cosmopolitan personal history informs the social and political narratives of Min's work, which explores emotion, otherness, and an intimate connection to place.

The paintings in this exhibition exemplify Min's intersectional engagement with the nuances of queer experience as an Asian man and his deeply personal approach to often unexplored social spaces and histories. Yet even as he mines his own feelings and experiences, Min pulls a wide range of references and associations into the work to consider the ways that power, race, and sexuality play into both local and global geopolitics. Certain works reference the history of conflict between Asia and Europe, the dynamic history of relations between different minority groups in urban conflicts, and the intersection of sexual and racial prejudice. By exploring stories that span contemporary reality and earlier historical moments, the paintings expand outward from Min's personal journey through Los Angeles to address the sublime encounter of splendor and darkness in the human experience.

Sweet Discipline from Koreatown is on view through December 20 @ Shulamit Nazarian, 616 N. La Brea Avenue Los Angeles CA

Daniel Arnold: New York Life Is Sustained by Forward Motion @ New York Life Gallery

Attuned to moments in the city that many fail to notice, Daniel Arnold: New York Life documents the personalities who rush, stumble, and idle through every sidewalk, subway, bodega, park, beach, and ferry throughout the five boroughs. From his vantage point—a camera perched on scaffolding in the rain or nestled to his torso amidst a crowd—he creates a time capsule of the city that is simultaneously unsentimental and imbued with sublime oddity. 

Arnold’s photographs feature a broad cast of characters improbably brought together on the street. People who appear archetypal or stereotypical at first glance are revealed for their idiosyncrasies—exposing the uncanny nature of unassuming subjects. Through his candid lens, metropolitan scenes steeped in cliché are distilled back into the raw, bizarre, humorous, and miraculous.

In Arnold’s universe, there is no right moment, wrong moment, or perfect shot; there is only the impulse to load a new roll and take the next picture. His work is sustained by this forward motion. While each image is an index of a particular place and time, the breadth and scope of Arnold’s photographs form a composite image of city life today. In New York, Arnold has found an infinite muse


Daniel Arnold: New York Life is on view through December 22nd @ New York Life Gallery  167-169 Canal Street, Floor 5, New York,

Balenciaga Music, Curated by Artistic Director Demna, Provides A Unique Sartorial and Auditory Experience

On November 20th, 2023, Balenciaga announced the next phase of Balenciaga Music, curated by artistic director Demna. The initiative aims to provide a comprehensive music experience through innovative formats. The project features Archive, an English group with a 28-year history in electronic, trip-hop, post- and progressive rock. Archive created an exclusive 8.5-minute track, "Patterns," and a 7-hour playlist for Balenciaga.

The unique aspect of "Patterns" is its exclusive availability through an NFC chip embedded in limited-edition Balenciaga Music | Archive merchandise. Buyers can unlock an original listening event by scanning the chip with a smartphone. The interactive garments, including T-shirts and hoodies displaying Archive's discography, will be sold in selected Balenciaga stores worldwide and online.

This collaboration represents a first for both Archive and Balenciaga, as Archive has never worked with a fashion brand, and Balenciaga has never premiered music through a product. Alongside the exclusive track, Archive curated a 7-hour playlist available on a new Balenciaga Music hub on balenciaga.com, linking to various streaming services.

Darius Keeler, a founding member of Archive, emphasized the alignment of values between Balenciaga and Archive, emphasizing individuality and innovation. The project expands Balenciaga Music by introducing entirely new music tailored to Balenciaga's audience, coupled with a technically advanced merch series for accessing the music.

A--Company Presents Antigone @ The Baryshnikov Arts Center


text by Abe Chabon
photography by Jenna Westra

For the debut of their Collection 9.5, A--Company, founded by designer Sara Lopez, partnered with the iconic jeweler LL, LLC and the groundbreaking director Daphné Dumons for a restaging of Anne Carson’s Antigone. The use of a play, and an ancient Greek tragedy at that, as the medium for a fashion show was unfamiliar to me, but for Lopez it felt right. Lopez told me that the combination of artistic mediums with fashion, jewelry, acting, set design, and directing was, “the culmination of many of my interests.” Lopez has long drawn inspiration for her collections from what she is reading, and for her, Antigone was the obvious choice. “I’ve been collecting translations of Antigone for years” she wrote me, “It’s a story that's embedded in our collective unconscious about individuals entangled in tragic dilemmas as conflicting moral codes clash. It reveals a humanity acutely aware of its destiny while grappling with a sense of powerlessness in the face of it. As one of the most performed plays, it’s a story that’s worthy of telling again and again.”  When she decided on Antigone, Lopez assembled a reference board of texts, as inspiration for both the clothes and the performance that would show them. In interpreting the ancient text she drew from writers and theorists such as “Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Sarah Ahmed. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz says, “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” It’s this potentiality that I’m interested in. Working with Anne Carson’s translation of Antigone in a Brechtian manner offered a way to think about how we can move towards this horizon that he speaks about in the here and now.” 

The show, performance, exhibition, may be best described as a “half-way dressed rehearsal.” The actors/models take centerstage on a raw set—black walls, a hanging suit represents the body of Polynices, a painted family tree—wearing hem-less suits, sleeveless coats, and dresses made of shirts. The clothing folds in on itself, layers both in and out and sleeves drape from backs and shoulders. The collection does not feel unfinished so much as unrestricted. With each article of clothing there is an implied process that does not begin and end with the clothes being made and bought, but continues on through how they are worn and how they move on the wearer's body. This uncensored process is mirrored in the performance itself. Models flub and retry their lines, read directly from script pages that they throw to the floor when finished. The director, Daphné Dumons, frequently took the stage herself, to instruct her actors and ask for suggestions. At one point a scene was retried three times before Dumons decided that it would be best to just move on.  Neither the set nor the performances ended at the foot of the audience chairs. The crowd was lit as fully as the actors who spoke and made direct appeals to us.

The intimacy Lopez sought to establish began before the official start of the show itself. As I filed in with the rest of the spectators, I felt encouraged to interact not only with other members of the audience but with the model/actors who were already on stage as we arrived, warming up with vocal exercises, getting their clothes and makeup adjusted. There was no backstage, nothing was hidden. Like the seams and stitches of the clothes, all was borne out for the audience to see and take in. 

Lopez told me that she wanted the performance and the clothing to be, “revealing, uncovering, and moving towards something.” An organic fluidity unusual in two media so often grounded in ideas of perfect lines or the perfect performance. “Many of the details of the collection arose from thinking about the psyches of the characters,” Lopez continued, “which of course, we all hold, so rather than being character-specific, the collection was designed as a whole that could be interchanged if needed.” Because of these values A–Company’s collaboration with LL, LLC felt natural. Lopez had admired the work both in terms of their approach to jewelry itself and to the process and understanding of art. Lopez said that they, “share a similar research-based approach to design with an idealism for form and a love of process.” Because of this, the two companies were able to collaborate both physically and intellectually, “While moving back and forth between ideas and shapes, we looked at the collection and considered the performance before creating the final edit. At times we considered the jewelry to be like a talisman for the characters, and ones a future wearer could also hold.”

For Lopez and A--Company, fashion design is not just about the production and selling of clothing, it is a process, a relationship between artist and inspiration, audience and ideology. And as Antigone will continue to be retold and restructured, Lopez will continue to create and re-create, think and rethink. 

Read Our Interview Of Artist & Curator Mieke Marple On Bridging the Digital & Traditional Worlds of Art →

Alida Sun, Southern Gothic Love Letters to My NSA Agent, 2023, courtesy of the artist, bitforms gallery, and PR for Artists. Image by Joshua White

NFT Tuesday LA co-founder and former Night Gallery co-owner, Mieke Marple is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer determined to navigate what she calls the “insurmountable chasm” between the physical and digital art worlds. 

In her passionate mission to reconcile both the analog and the digital, Mieke has recently curated an impressive exhibition titled Interreality, showcasing 35 artists from the pioneering digital space mixed in with traditional established artists. Produced by Steve Sacks, founder of bitforms gallery and Aubrie Wienholt, founder of PR for Artists, Interreality is simply a tour de force. 

A kindred spirit and peer curator, I was thrilled to interview Mieke to speak about the exhibition as we tackled notions of provenance, embodied experiences, collecting art and feminism. Read more.

Curt LeMieux "Heroes" @ White Box LA

 
 

WhiteBox.LA, renowned photographer Joshua White’s curatorial project, presents its second exhibition, Curt LeMieux: HEROES at The Desmond Tower from November 18 through November 30, 2023. A group of minimal, puerile paintings of classic LP albums, including the iconic album cover art from artists ranging from Dusty Springfield to Frank Sinatra, Patti Smith, The Rolling Stones, and Black Sabbath.

The works speak of LeMieux’s adolescent obsession with Rock & Roll imagery and his own teenage sexuality as he came of age on the outskirts of the rust belt on the late 70’s “Growing up working class on the outskirts the rustbelt, I had no access whatsoever to fine art. I had no idea that art existed. Nor did I relate much to regional expressions of culture. Large Green Bay Packer themed snow men littered every other yard. I first saw the cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Outta Hell while in a waiting room at Saint Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, Minnesota. I remember the experience with vivid detail. As a bored and impetuous child, this artwork excited me to my core. It was pop of color in an overwhelmingly drab setting. It was life and it was death stuffed together in one horrible little scene. It was dramatic and forceful. The paintings in Heroes paintings pay homage to the role music played in my development as a visual artist. I do not want to capture an exact likeness of a given album cover or a given artist. The forms are deliberately exaggerated. The characters are somewhat gawky and jovial; reflecting the ostentatious and campy attributes of the source material,” says LeMieux.

The exhibition incorporates live music, with a performance by Randy Randall of No Age Mark at the opening event on November 18 and a closing event featuring musician Ian Svenonius in conversation with LeMieux.

Allison Katz Creates a Cosmos of Disparate Images in Westward Ho! @ Hauser & Wirth

 

Allison Katz, Truth, 2023.

 

In ‘Westward Ho!’ Allison Katz creates a cosmos by overlapping disparate images and narratives from visual culture, her own past, and the coincidences that gather around her. The title firmly locates us, with tongue-in-cheek undertones, inside Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, California. It was Katz’s specific request to exhibit here, in a desire to engage with its associated cultural mythologies: ‘Hollywood is a big picture and I should like to know what it means to walk the walk, or drive the drive, of the Pacific coast, with its last–resort, up to the edge, atomized light...if this is the birthplace of the silver screen, then it’s a chance to test out painting’s irrefutable material and impure surface, its porous consciousness...’ The title blends historical and literary allusions, tracing back originally to the calls made by Elizabethan ferryman as they navigated the River Thames in search of passengers. As Katz writes: ‘I’m using Westward Ho! as a call out, a whoop of exuberance, a question hollered across time and tradition to see who and what answers, as if to test the idea that painting is a conversation.’

 

Allison Katz, Sheepish, 2023.

 

Throughout the exhibition Katz deploys a constantly evolving set of techniques and source materials. Echoes, rhymes and serendipities erupt; meaning is reordered and unexpected genealogies converge. ‘West’ is the neighborhood in which the gallery is located, the direction Katz’s apartment faces in London, a catch-all term for a geopolitical system in the midst of being challenged, and an alias for the pastoral patch of English countryside where she worked in residence (the West Country). While preparing for the exhibition she also visited the ruins of Pompeii (in the context of the institutional program Pompeii Commitment), where the discovery of wall paintings buried under ash continues to play a central role in the origin story of Western figuration.

Allison Katz, Sleeping and Weeping in the Fourth Style, 2023.

Westward Ho! is on view through January 5 @ Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood, 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood CA 90069

Michelle Yeoh Named As New Balenciaga Brand Ambassador

 
 

Launching November 9th, 2023, Balenciaga’s Spring 24 campaign of photographs expands upon the collection’s digital presentation, showing scenes from a chic Parisian apartment.

Newly named Balenciaga ambassador Michelle Yeoh stars in the campaign, alongside brand ambassador PP Krit Amnuaydechkorn and friends of the House Malgosia Bela, Arthur Del Beato, Eva Herzigova, Soo Joo Park, and Khadim Sock. They wear looks from Spring 24 with the season's iconic bags: Le Cagole Sling, 24/7, Monaco, Crush, and Crush Sling.

Michelle Yeoh, whose career spans four decades, is credited with perfecting many genres of roles, from action heroine to dramatic lead. Since her start as an actress in the 1980s, Michelle has become ever more celebrated and influential in multiple domains. In 2023, she made several barrier-breaking achievements, including winning a Golden Globe, a SAG Award, and an Oscar—making her the first Asian to win the Academy Award for Best Actress and the first to win in the leading acting category.

 
 

Read Our Interview of Katharina Kaminski and Hanne Gaby Odiele on Queerness and Fertility →

The iconography of fertility holds a timeless power over us. Our paleolithic Venuses defined this obsession, encapsulating fertility as a powerful force of creation, rooted in the divine feminine while remaining paradoxically universal. Intersex artist Katharina Kaminski expands upon this understanding in her new show, Womb, which embraces our individual potentials for transformation and innovation while interrogating our gendered ideas about fertility. As we find ourselves in the throes of a gender revolution, Kaminski reckons with the intersection of gender and creation in her abstractions of the womb: soft vessels fill the Sainte Anne Gallery, distilling the Venus to its core sense of creation and transformation. In recognition of National Intersex Awareness Day, Katharina comes together with intersex model and activist Hanne Gaby Odiele to discuss creating while Queer, finding community, and claiming ownership of the self in the wake of bodily alienation. Read more.

Vincent Ferrané Inverts the Intimate Solitude of the Bed in Embedded @ La Cité Gallery in Paris

 
 

In the series Embedded, presented by photographer Vincent Ferrané realized in collaboration with performer Pauline Lavogez, the confined space of a bed transforms into the profoundly minimalist stage of a performative expression, an "embodied experience." The project is a mosaic of images that relies on a unique space-time of experimentation, intertwining photographic and choreographic ideas much like on an editing table.

Derived from ordinary situations inherent to this intimate and universalizing playground haunted by our fantasies, fears, or passions, the created images offer enigmatic representations in seclusion: ethereal presences, bodies, and suspended faces seize hold of this original setting and transform it into a microcosm, a topography. A mattress-crater hollowed by a fist, clothes resembling geological folds, an improvised refuge beneath the sheets, and ghostly silhouettes come together to give shape to a bed-landscape.

Drawing its name from the words "bed" and "embedded," which in our media-driven age convey the idea of incorporation and embodiment, the series Embedded explores, within the perfect rectangle of the bed, the place of the body, both social and metaphorical. Between pose and pause, the series Embedded draws from the attributes of live performance to script a mosaic of black and white still images, framing the gaze on fragments of bodies, faded, trapped in the penumbra.

Vincent Ferrané
Embedded (2023)
Photograph
Courtesy of the artist

Embedded is on view November 9th through November 16th at La Cité Gallery, 71 rue Réaumur 75002, Paris.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island Charts Coco Fusco's Radical Path of Social Reckoning @ KW Institute in Berlin

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is the first major retrospective of Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco (b. 1960, US). For more than three decades, she has been a key voice in discourses on racial representation, feminism, postcolonial theory, and institutional critique. The exhibition seeks to trace the profound influence that Fusco’s work has had on contemporary art discourses in the Americas and Europe. To do so, it features a broad selection of the artist’s videos, photography, texts, installations, and live performances from the 1990s to the present day.

With her multidisciplinary practice, Fusco explores the ways that intercultural dynamics affect the construction of the self and ideas about cultural otherness. Her work is informed by multicultural and postcolonial discourses as well as feminist and psychoanalytic theories. Her investigation of intercultural dynamics has led her to develop art projects about ethnographic displays, animal psychology, sex tourism in the Caribbean, labor conditions in free trade zones, suppressed colonial records of Indigenous struggles, and the military interrogation techniques used in the war on terror. Her more recent work focuses on the relationship between poetry and revolutionary politics in Cuba.
The exhibition is loosely structured along these various interconnected themes. As such, Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island shows the breadth of Fusco’s artistic practice that is highly relevant considering current political and cultural debates in Germany and beyond.

Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island is on view through January 24th, 2024, at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin at Auguststraße 69, 10117 Berlin, Germany

Celebration of Autre #17 FW23 The "Instinct" Issue at Desert 5 Spot with a Collaborator's Dinner at Ka'teen

photographs by Oliver Kupper

Narrated Entirely In Her Own Voice, Sarah Lucas' Happy Gas Exhibition @ Tate Modern In London Is A Must See

 

Sarah Lucas
Bunny, 1997
Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London

 

Since 1990, Sarah Lucas has been creating art that distorts everyday objects to reveal their expressive qualities. In her exhibition, she uses items like bananas, lightbulbs, concrete, fish, a car, tights, chairs, tabloid newspapers, and cigarettes to explore universal questions about human existence, including origins, sex, class, happiness, and mortality. While her work is deeply personal, it also addresses common themes and could relate to anyone. The exhibition goes beyond her association with the 1990s Young British Art scene and offers a comprehensive look at her art over nearly 35 years, featuring self-portraits and her evolution as an artist.

 
 

Lucas challenges artistic conventions through her choice of subjects and materials, often manipulating them with care despite their casual appearance. Her work evokes a mood of grit, shock, and play, frequently touching on themes of sex, smoking, and food, punctuated by both dark and pleasurable elements. Lucas's subversion of social realism exposes the laughable and demeaning aspects of class and gender stereotypes. Her art combines explicit metaphors, unusual body forms, and oversized food to create a magical quality, resulting in a defiant, joyful, and vibrant atmosphere.

Happy Gas By Sarah Lucas is on view through January 14th, at Tate Modern, Bankside, London

Marina Abramović Hosts Her First Solo Show @ Royal Academy Of Arts In London

Marina Abramović
The Current, 2017
Video; 1 hour 35 mins
Courtesy of the Marina Abramović Archives

Originally trained as a painter at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Marina Abramović turned to performance in the early 1970s and established the hallmarks of her practice: every day actions ritualised through repetition and endurance. She is a pioneer in using the live body in her work and has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental tolerance. Abramović has continued to navigate a space between the personal and the social, the conceptual and the existential, the physical and the spiritual. From 1975–88, Abramović collaborated with her then partner, the German artist Ulay, exploring male and female dualities. Returning to solo performances in 1989, the artist further tested boundaries with the creation of performative objects, performances to camera and audience participation.

The exhibition opens with Public Participation, featuring two works in which Abramović famously engaged directly with her audience: from the radical physical interaction of Rhythm 0, 1974 to the quiet stillness of The Artist is Present, 2010. Held 36 years apart, the two works encapsulate the development of her practice. Following on, The Communist Body foregrounds Abramović’s origins in the former Yugoslavia and how Communist ideals, experienced socially as well as personally, have informed her practice. Works featured here include Rhythm 5, 1974 (London, Lisson Gallery) and The Hero, 2001. The artist has spoken of the Balkan mind as ‘baroque’, in reference to what she describes as dramatic extremes of expression and emotion. Also included is Balkan Baroque, 1997, a work related to the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Marina Abramović will be on view until January 1st at Royal Academy Of Arts, Burlington House, London

Balenciaga's Short Documentary Detailing Its Heritage And Birthplace

On October 19, 2023, Balenciaga launched an in-depth look at the heritage of 10 - 12 Avenue George V, the House’s Paris birthplace. A short documentary details the history behind and continuing legacy of the iconic addresses with a 3D-scanned tour of their renovated interiors. These conjoined spaces were the only place Cristóbal Balenciaga created and showed his Paris collections, and where he lived and worked until the Couture House’s closure in 1968.

A renovation project was initiated to restore these rooms with respect to that era of austerity and elegance, as well as to accommodate a turning point in the history of the House by implementing modern technology and unprecedented access to the Balenciaga Couture experience. A newly installed official plaque on the outside of the building commemorates the House’s expansion and return to its original Paris headquarters. 

The documentary shows Balenciaga Couture’s grand staircase, its sales office, the “cathedral-like” salons where models walked in silence, the preparation cabins, and the couturier’s office, all integral parts in the creation of collections then and now. “What is a legacy?” asks the narrator. “It’s a vision, of course, and it’s also a place.” 

Read Our Interview of Puppies Puppies on the Occasion of Her Solo Exhibition @ The New Museum →

Puppies Puppies stands against a pu

Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, known by the pseudonym Puppies Puppies, is revolutionizing trans and Indigenous visibility through her critically-acclaimed conceptual works of sculpture and performance art. Despite a very genuine and personal embodiment within the work, an air of mystery once shrouded her identity as she initially insisted on a level of anonymity rarely exhibited by artists, particularly of her generation. In late 2017, however, this shifted with the very first reference to the artist’s gender transition taking place in her Green (Ghosts) installation at Overduin & Co. in Los Angeles. Kuriki-Olivo and her then-boyfriend lived in the gallery during the hours it was closed, leaving only traces of their existence during the hours it was open. Here, she taped two estrogen pills to the wall, pointing toward her gender-affirming course of hormone therapy—a subtle gesture that gently opened the door of visibility. Employing the mundane, everyday objects that surround her life is a hallmark of Puppies Puppies’ practice and readymades are one of her favorite ways to reference the art historical canon. An initial easter egg of visibility has since swung the door open to a state of consensual voyeurism in Nothing New, her current solo exhibition at the New Museum where the artist is occupying the Lobby Gallery with nearly constant access to her comings and goings via video surveillance, live stream access, and glass walls overlooking a recreation of her bedroom. Puppies Puppies also points to elements of her multi-ethnic indigeneity—Taíno on her father’s side and Japanese on her mother’s—with the inclusion of objects and spiritual practices that connect her disparate lineages in a form of what the exhibition’s curator, Vivian Crockett, refers to as a memoryscape. Crockett got cozy in bed for her interview of Puppies Puppies on the eve of the exhibition’s inauguration to discuss their creative collaboration. Read more.