Continuity

Exhibition view: Ann Veronica Janssens, entre le crépuscule et le ciel, Collection Lambert, Avignon, 2022.
© the artist / ADAGP, Paris 2022. Photo © Blaise Adilon

Welcome to the Letter from Berlin!

This month we take Ann Veronica Janssens’ two exhibitions in the south of France and her project at the Panthéon in Paris as point of departure to present exhibitions in France, Italy and at the Adriatic Coast, as summer traveling season has begun. We also include recently opened exhibitions in Berlin and hope you will join us next week for the opening of Summer ’22, a group exhibition with works by Sarah Buckner, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Cemile Sahin, Julia Scher, Sun Yitian and Tao Hui. Ugo Rondinone's major exhibition at the Schirn in Frankfurt concludes our review. A podcast recommendation, Liam Gillick on the Bonn exhibition Color as Program, and a selection of recent books round up this month’s Letter from Berlin.

We hope you have a wonderful summer! - Read here

Ugo Rondinone, the morning of the poem, 2014, aluminium foil on existing structure, 1000 x 515 x 515 cm
Photo © Stefan Altenburger / LUMA Foundation, Gstaad, Switzerland

Manifesta 14
With Ugo Rondinone
Various locations, Prishtina
July 22 – October 30, 2022
www.manifesta14.org

For Manifesta 14, Ugo Rondinone brings forth an object of “beauty and contemplation” in one of Prishtina‘s most frequented public gathering spaces – Adem Jashari Square – at a time when monuments the world over are being troubled for their entanglement with ideologies.

Read more

Booth views: artmonte-carlo 2022. Photos © Sebastiano Pellion di Persano

artmonte-carlo 2022
Booth 08
Grimaldi Forum
10, Avenue Princesse Grace
98000 Monaco
Through 16, 2022
Further information

With works by 
Angela Bulloch 
Etienne Chambaud
Simon Fujiwara
Liam Gillick
Ann Veronica Janssens
Isa Melsheimer
Philippe Parreno
Sojourner Truth Parsons
Ugo Rondinone

If you wish to receive a dossier, or should you have any questions about our presentation at Art Basel, please contact Julia Séguier seguier@estherschipper.com

At l'Esplanade, the outdoor sculpture Pentagon Totem: High Five by Angela Bulloch will be on view through the fair.

Summer ’22
With Sarah Buckner, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Cemile Sahin, Julia Scher, Sun Yitian and Tao Hui
July 21 – August 27, 2022
www.estherschipper.com

Opening Thursday July 21, 6–9pm
Special opening hours August 1–14, Wed–Fri 12–6pm


This summer Esther Schipper is pleased to present Summer '22, an exhibition of works from Sarah Buckner, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sojourner Truth Parsons, Cemile Sahin, Julia Scher, Sun Yitian and Tao Hui.

Read more

Tino Sehgal
Remai Modern
102 Spadina Crescent E
SK S7K 0L3 Saskatoon
July 16 – September 5, 2022
www.remaimodern.org


At the Remai Modern, Saskatoon Tino Sehgal presents a solo exhibition of three situations – Yet Untitled, This Situation (solo), and This Success/This Failure.

Read more

Roskilde Festival / Platform 
With Tino Sehgal
Roskilde Festival
Festivalpladsen, Darupvej 19
DK-4000 Roskilde
June 29 – July 2, 2022
www.roskilde-festival.dk


At Roskilde Festival 2022, Tino Sehgal presents This Variation, as well as an artist talk on Saturday July 2 at 2pm.

Read more

Ann Veronica Janssens, Pinky Sunset R, 2019 (detail), dichroic laminated glass consisting of ribbed glass, float glass and gelatin filters, 200 x 100 x 1.4 cm. © ADAGP, Paris 2022. Photo © Blaise Adilon

Ann Veronica Janssens
entre le crépuscule et le ciel
Collection Lambert
5 Rue Violette
84000, Avignon
July 2 – October 9, 2022
Opening: July 1, 6–8pm
Including a book launch and signing of Ann Veronica Janssens, Michel François from Zolo Press
www.collectionlambert.com


Ann Veronica Janssens' exhibition for Collection Lambert, entitled entre le crépuscule et le ciel, opens on the first floor of the collection's location - the Hôtel de Montfaucon on July 1. The exhibition responds to a selection of previously unseen artworks by Dan Flavin, on show in the ground floor gallery spaces.

Read more

Ugo Rondinone, life time, 2019, neon, acrylic glass, translucent foil, aluminium. Courtesy of the artist and Studio Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone
LIFE TIME
Schirn Kunsthalle
Römerberg
60311 Frankfurt am Main
June 24 – September 18, 2022
Opening: June 23, 7pm
www.schirn.de

Artist talk:
Ugo Rondi­none and curator Matthias Ulrich will be in conversation, followed by a book ­signing.
June 24, 7pm
Schirn Kunsthalle
Free, booking recommended

The Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt is dedi­cating a large survey exhi­bi­tion entitled LIFE TIME to Ugo Rondi­none with key paint­ings, sculp­tures, and video works from the artist.

Read more

Philippe Parreno, Quasi Objects: My Room is a Fish Bowl, AC/DC Snakes, Happy Ending, Il Tempo del Postino, Opalescent acrylic glass podium, Disklavier Piano (detail), 2014–2022. Pinault Collection.
Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Echo2: a Carte Blanche to Philippe Parreno with Arca, Nicolas Becker, and Tino Sehgal
Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
June 22 – September 26, 2022

as part of

Une Seconde d’éternité
With Ryan Gander, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, Tino Sehgal, among others.
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
June 22, 2022 – January 2, 2023
www.pinaultcollection.com

For this new season bringing together summer and winter, the need for the here and now, and the search for the infinite, elusive though it may be, Une seconde d’éternité (A Second of Eternity) takes visitors on a journey inspired by the question and experience of time, through a selection of artworks from the Pinault Collection.

Read more

Film still: Servus Papa, See You in Hell, 2022, directed by Christopher Roth. 
Still © Arden Film

Servus Papa, See You in Hell
Directed by Christopher Roth
Munich Film Festival
Various locations
Screening dates: June 26, June 27 & July 2, 2022
www.filmfest-muenchen.de


Christopher Roth's Servus Papa, See you in Hell will premiere at FILMFEST MÜNCHEN.

Read more

Ari Benjamin Meyers, K Club, 2019, performance, environment, neon sign, 2 12-inch LP vinyl records, dimensions variable, neon sign: 106 x 97 x 8 cm. Exhibition view: Ari Benjamin Meyers, K Club, Blitz Club, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, 2020. Photo © Lenbachhaus

Ari Benjamin Meyers
K Club
Art Basel | Unlimited Night
Hall 1.0
10 Messeplatz, Basel
Thursday June 16, 2022, 7–10pm
www.artbasel.com
Special tickets for the Unlimited Night can be purchased here. A ticket to Unlimited Night does not guarantee access to K Club.

A special performance of Ari Benjamin Meyers, K Club will be at the inaugural Art Basel Unlimited Night on Thursday June 16, 2022, 7–10pm.

Read more

Booth views: Art Basel, Basel, 2022. Photos © Andrea Rossetti

Art Basel 2022
Hall 2.1
Booth R1
Messe Basel
Messeplatz 10
4058, Basel
Through June 19, 2022
www.artbasel.com

We hope you will join us at Booth R1 at Art Basel through June 19 and hope you can attend Ari Benjamin Meyers' K Club at the inaugural edition of Unlimited Night from Art Basel on Thursday, June 16, 7–10pm at Hall 1.0, 10 Messeplatz, Basel.

Read more

Ryan Gander,  2000 year collaboration (The Prophet), 2018, animatronic mouse, audio. Photo © Gunnar Meier

Ryan Gander
The Markers of Our Time
Tokyo Opera City Gallery
3 Chome-20-2 Nishishinjuku
163-1403 Tokyo
July 16 – September 19, 2022
www.operacity.jp

For The Markers of Our Time at Tokyo Opera City Gallery, Ryan Gander has combined a variety of new and older works to turn an expansive gallery into a single work. Each of the individual works splays open one or more of the elements that have fascinated the artist from early in his career—time, values (or value), education and things that get overlooked. What is the true nature of things that are important to each and every one of us? Gander's world is one where we can think about the origins of things, with a touch of humour. Loosen up your mind and dive in. That way, you should start to see the signs of the age that we live in today—the markers of our time.

Read more

Scanned forest, real-time simulation, generative mutations and sounds, intelligent camera, environmental sensors, animals, plants, micro-organisms and materialized mutations: synthetic and biological material aggregate.
Pierre Huyghe, Variants, 2021 – ongoing, 3D Scanning, pointcloud visualisation and pointcloud engine by ScanLAB Projects. © the artist

Pierre Huyghe
Variants
Kistefos
Samsmoveien 41
Jevnaker
From June 12, 2022
www.kistefosmuseum.com


Pierre Huyghe, Variants, a new site-specific work will be unveiled at Kistefos from June 12, 2022.

Read more

Anri Sala, Time No Longer, 2021, three-channel UHD computer-generated imagery and three-channel sound, color. Photo Markus Tretter, © Anri Sala, Bildrecht Wien, 2021, Kunsthaus Bregenz

Anri Sala
Transfigured
GAMeC
Palazzo della Ragione
24129 Bergamo
June 10 – October 16, 2022
www.gamec.it


For the fifth year in a row, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo returns to the prestigious Palazzo della Ragione, the beating heart of the old town, with a new exhibition by Anri Sala, who has created a thoughtful dialogue with the iconic Sala delle Capriate based on his most recent film and sound installation: Time No Longer.

Read more

Ugo Rondinone, vocabulary of solitude, 2014, polystyrene foam, epoxy resin, fabric.
Exhibition view: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 2021. Photo © Jennifer French

Ugo Rondinone
vocabulary of solitude

Museo Tamayo
Paseo de la Reforma 51
Bosque de Chapultepec
Del. Miguel Hidalgo
11580 Mexico City
June 4 – September 4, 2022
www.museotamayo.org


Ugo Rondinone is recognised as one of the great voices of his generation, an artist who proposes trenchant reflections on nature and the human condition, while establishing a formal and organic vocabulary in which he fuses a variety of sculptural and pictorial traditions. His generous and expansive vision of nature has resulted in an extensive range of two- and three-dimensional objects, installations, videos, and performances. His hybrid forms, inspired by ancient and modern sources, exude pathos and humour and point to the most pressing issues of our time, where modernist achievements and archaic expression intersect.

Read more

Nathan Carter, Silky-Way Sylvan Slip-Throughs for Switchblade Shirley from Sapphronia, 2022 (in the artist’s Brooklyn, NY studio). Photo © Nathan Carter (Mars)

Nathan Carter
Silky-way Sylvan Slip-throughs Serrated Sub-space Side-winders
and Countess Von Venomous’ Private Pearl Position
June 10 – July 16, 2022
Opening Friday June 10, 6–9pm
www.estherschipper.com


Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Silky-way Sylvan Slip-throughs Serrated Sub-space Side-winders and Countess Von Venomous’ Private Pearl Position, a special presentation by Nathan Carter, who has had four solo exhibitions with the gallery.

Read more

Roman Ondak, Measuring the Universe, 2007, performance: felt-tip pen, museum guards, museum audience.
Performance views: MoMA, New York, 2009. Photos © MoMA

Roman Ondak
Measuring the Universe
Pinakothek der Moderne
Barer Straße 40
80333 Munich
June 3 – September 25, 2022
www.pinakothek-der-moderne.de


Beginning June 3, 2022, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich will enact Roman Ondak's Measuring the Universe. The performative work, last seen at the Pinakothek der Moderne in 2007, has since been re-enacted at major international institutions.

Read more

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, ⊮, 2022 (detail), Kriska aluminium curtain, aluminium rail, powder-coated steel frames, 3,95 x 15 m (each, 3 parts). 
Exhibition view: Under Construction, New Acquisitions for the Nationalgalerie’s Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2022. Photo © Manuel Miseur

 

The Hamburger Bahnhof holds an exhibition entitled Under Construction, presenting the latest additions to the Nationalgalerie collection, including works by Ceal Floyer and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.]

 

Read More

General Idea, P is for Poodle, 1983. © General Idea. Photo: General Idea Archives, Berlin, courtesy the artist

 

Starting June 3 and on view through November 20, 2022, the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) will present the most comprehensive retrospective exhibition of General Idea to date.

 

On Saturday 4, 2022 a day-long symposium exploring the work of General Idea will take place at the National Gallery of Canada Auditorium, and livestream on Zoom. Register for the livestream here

 

This exhibition will tour to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and another European venue in 2023.

 

Read more

Sojourner Truth Parsons. Portrait © Cub

 

Esther Schipper is delighted to announce representation of Sojourner Truth Parsons.

"I am looking at art through my heart. Maybe that's selfish, but I want to find something I didn't know was there."

—Sojourner Truth Parsons, 2016

 

Read more

Exhibition view: Julia Scher, Wonderland, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2018. Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

Julia Scher
Wonderland
Maison Populaire
9 bis Rue Dombasle
93100 Montreuil
May 25 – July 15, 2022
www.maisonpop.fr
Opening: Tuesday May 24, 6pm–9pm


Between 1996 and 1997, Julia Scher photographed seven children wearing pink uniforms: Lena, Grace, Andy, Andre, Brandon, Jodi and Zoë. Some of them held up batons or gas masks, others just stared defiantly at the camera. In the following months, Scher enlarged these images and integrated them into an installation which traveled and evolved in time: 1997, Chicago; 1998, New York; 2000, Bordeaux ; 2018–2019, Berlin. Over the years, the principle has remained the same: a child-sized control desk surrounded by distorting mirrors bathed in twilight-colored lights. The recorded voice of the artist warns the audience: “There are live cameras filming you [...] Attention. Your size may change”. This is Wonderland, an upside-down world where children watch over adults downsized in the reflections of mirrors.

Read more

Esther Schipper congratulates Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Ange Leccia, directors of the film Christophe... définitivement, included in the Official Selection of 75th Festival de Cannes, 2022.


Christophe... définitivement
Cinema de la Plage (open-air cinema)
Macé beach, Bd. de la Croisette
06400 Cannes
Wednesday, May 25, 2022, 9.30pm
Screening in the presence of Ange Leccia and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Followed by a musical evening organized by ARTE
www.festival-cannes.com

Read more

Gradient grey silk paintings by Matti Braun (130 x 100 cm each).
Sculptures by Angela Bulloch (MDF or synthetic marble sheet material, 150 x 40 x 40 cm; 150 x 50 x 30 cm).
Photos © Andrea Rossetti

馬蒂·布豪恩 (Matti Braun) 的灰色漸變絲綢繪畫 (每幅130 x 100 cm)
安吉拉·布洛克 (Angela Bulloch) 的雕塑作品（中密度纖維板或合成大理石板材, 150 x 40 x 40 cm; 150 x 50 x 30 cm). 攝影：©Andrea Rossetti

Art Basel Hong Kong 2022
Booth 1B14
Convention & Exhibition Centre
1 Harbour Road
Wan Chai
Hong Kong, China
May 25 – 29, 2022
www.artbasel.com

Private View: May 25 – 27
Vernissage: Friday, May 27, 2pm–8pm
Public Days: May 28 – 29


Esther Schipper is delighted to announce our participation in Art Basel Hong Kong 2022, with works by Matti Braun and Angela Bulloch.

Read more

Photos / 攝影 © Jörg von Bruchhausen; © Andrea Rossetti; © Studio Rondinone; © Marcus Schneider; © Thomas Demand & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

Taipei Dangdai 2022
Booth C05
Taipei World Trade Center No. 5
Section 5, Xinyi Rd
Xinyi District, Taipei City
May 19 – 22, 2022
www.taipeidangdai.com

Preview: May 19
Public Days: May 20 – 22


Esther Schipper is delighted to announce our participation in Taipei Dangdai 2022.

Read more

Video still: Angela Bulloch, Perpendicular Paradigm, 2022, two-channel video. 3D Technical Services by Bertrand Flanet. © the artist

 

Under the title Perpendicular Paradigm, Angela Bulloch's major solo exhibition of new and recent work opens at the Musée d’arts de Nantes on May 13, 2022. Reconstructing the constellations in the starry sky above the museum at the 2021 summer solstice, the artist has installed Firmamental Square, a monumental Night Sky work, in the museum's atrium. Geometric sculptures made of wood, metal or synthetic marble populate the exhibition spaces along with their shadow wall paintings. In addition, a new two–channel video animation presents a 3D version of the very exhibition on view, showing a slice of a meta-reality, an exhibition within the exhibition with two invented characters roaming the exhibition; one is apparently human and the other is a planetary system made up of elements of the artist's work.

 

Read more

Exhibition view: David Claerbout, Hemispheres, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2022
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Find here your Gallery Weekend Berlin guide, featuring concurrent exhibitions in Berlin and Germany, and a bespoke Google Map of exhibitions around the city.

Detail: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Metapanorama, 2022. © the artist / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Alienarium 5
Serpentine South Gallery
Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens
London W2 3XA
April 14 – September 4, 2022
www.serpentinegalleries.org


What if aliens were in love with us? What would change?

Alienarium 5 is a speculative environment that invites us to imagine possible encounters with extraterrestrials. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major institutional solo show in the UK since TH.258 at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2008, the exhibition is a culmination of her decades-long interest in science fiction and continued research into deep space and alien life. Conceived site-specifically for Serpentine, the exhibition will feature almost entirely new work that engages both the gallery’s internal and external space.

Read more

Exhibition views: Jac Leirner, Us Horizon, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2022. Photos © Andrea Rossetti

Jac Leirner
Us Horizon
Through April 14, 2022
www.estherschipper.com


Don't miss Jac Leirner’s first solo exhibition with the gallery – Us Horizon. The exhibition includes a new work from Leirner’s acclaimed series constructed from ensembles of plastic shopping bags, and a new installation made of found numbered markers.

Read more

Image © Museum of Fine Arts Leipzig, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: PUNCTUM / Alexander SchmidtTino Sehgal

Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig
Katharinenstraße 10
04109 Leipzig
April 7 – July 27, 2022
www.mdbk.de
Opening: Wednesday April 6, 6–9pm


A presentation by Tino Sehgal opens April 6, 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig. A changing program of several works, among them This Success/This Failure, will run from April 7 through July 24, 2022.

Left: Ann Veronica Janssens, Peacock Blue, 2017, size L 1 x 700/1000 watt halogen lamp, dichroic color filter, dimensions variable.
Right: Ann Veronica Janssens, Hot Pink Turquoise, 2006, size L 2 x 700/1000 watt halogen lamp, dichroic color filter, 1 tripod, dimensions variable.
Exhibition view: Ann Veronica Janssens, mars, IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes, 2017. Courtesy Institut d'Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhônes-Alpes. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Ann Veronica Janssens
5766 chemin des Trious 
Fondation CAB
5766 chemin des Trious
06570 Saint-Paul-de-Vence
April 7 – September 11, 2022
www.fondationcab.com
Opening: April 6, 6–9pm

Fondation CAB Saint-Paul-de-Vence presents a solo exhibition of Ann Veronica Janssens – 5766 chemin des Trious. The presentation at Fondation CAB Saint-Paul-de-Vence is part of a double exhibition project with the Collection Lambert, Avignon (July 2 – October 9, 2022), curated by Stéphane Ibars, artistic director of the Collection Lambert.

Read more

Simon Fujiwara
Hello Who?
Presented by CIRCA
Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Melbourne, New York, Seoul and Tokyo
April 1 – 30, 2022
Watch online at www.circa.art


In a new stop-motion animation by Simon Fujiwara, viewers are invited to follow Who the Bær - the cartoon protagonist - on their quest for identity and belonging. Curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal, Hello Who? will premiere April 1, 2022 on London’s Piccadilly Lights and broadcast everyday at 20:22 throughout the month across the CIRCA global network of screens in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Milan, Melbourne, New York and Seoul.

Read more

Photos © Andrea Rossetti, © Jörg von Bruchhausen

BAMA Busan 2022
Booth C-11
BEXCO
55, APEC-ro
Haeundae-gu, Busan
April 7 – 10, 2022
www.bamabusan.com

Preview: April 7
Public Days: April 8 – 10


Esther Schipper is pleased to participate in BAMA Busan 2022, taking place from April 7 – 10. We hope you will join us at the fair, Booth C-11.

Read more

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, OPERA (QM.15), 2016. Pinault Collection. © Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster/ADAGP, Paris, 2022. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
OPERA (QM.15)
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
April 6 – August 31, 2022
www.pinaultcollection.com


OPERA (QM.15), 2016, by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, takes up residence in Gallery 3 of the Bourse de Commerce, infusing it with the presence of Maria Callas.

Read more

Still: Liam Gillick & Gelitin, Stinking Dawn, 2022, film, duration: 92 min. © the artists

Liam Gillick & Gelitin
World Premiere: Stinking Dawn
CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival
March 25, March 30, and April 3, 2022
www.cphdox.dk
Tickets to each screening are available here.


Stinking Dawn - a movie by Liam Gillick and Gelitin, examines the limits of human tolerance in the face of oppression, political crisis and excessive self-delusion, where the boundaries between body and world dissolve in a delirious and darkly funny mirror image of civilization itself.

Read more

Photo © Conrad Erb

Rehearsing Philadelphia 
A Meta-Score by Ari Benjamin Meyers
March 25 – April 10, 2022
Various Locations
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
www.rehearsingphiladelphia.com
Opening Weekend: March 25 – 26, 2022


Created by Ari Benjamin Meyers and jointly produced and presented by the Curtis Institute of Music and Drexel University’s Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Rehearsing Philadelphia is a large-scale public project that explores how we can come together as a city through musical rehearsal. The traditional musical preparation process focuses on rehearsing as a way to attain perfection, which is then repeated in performance. This is not how we live modern life in a rapidly changing world of social upheaval. The future will be rehearsed, not perfected. Rehearsing Philadelphia re-examines the rehearsal processes which allow people to act together and be empowered to create new realities.

Read more

Jac Leirner, Us Horizon, 1985 – 2022 (detail). Photo: Edouard Fraipont

 

Jac Leirner
Us Horizon
March 12 – April 14, 2022
Opening Saturday March 12, 2–8 pm

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to present Us Horizon, Jac Leirner’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Us Horizon will include a new work from Leirner’s acclaimed series constructed from ensembles of plastic shopping bags, and a new installation made of found numbered markers. Her conceptually rigorous and formally beautiful works draw on a wide array of art historical and formal influences, as well as embracing the transgressive legacies of Dada, Constructivism, Pop and Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, and Punk, among others.

The New Yorker
Hito Steyerl’s Digital Visions
By Merve Erme
Read the full article here

'It would be wrong to claim that I first met the German artist Hito Steyerl on such-and-such day, insuch-and-such city, where the weather was bright or blustery, and that she arrived suitably dressed for this season or the next. It is more accurate to say that she simply appeared while I was waiting in the atrium of the Communist Party court, under a spectacular red banner from which the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin bore down on me. One minute I was alone, and the next she was there—all yellow and smooth, except for the thick black cubes of her hands and her large, impassive face. Four black cats trailed her, in place of her shadow. “I spawned a lot of them, so they have multiplied,” she murmured. Suddenly, a kitten wobbled out from between her legs. “I made a baby!” she cried. When I tried to balance a puffer fish on my own blocky hand to feed thekitten, I pressed the wrong button, and kicked it instead.

Kicking kittens is, I believe, usually discouraged, but in Minecraft, the sandbox video game in which players extract raw materials—water, wood, sugarcane, coal ore, gold, lapis lazuli—and use them to craft three-dimensional Legolands, the stakes of violence seem lower. The game is “a very good metaphor for how platforms really work,” Steyerl told me. Platforms seduce their users into performing the unpaid work of content creation—uploading the texts, photographs, videos, and music that are the raw material of the digital world—while mining their metadata to create newmarkets for corporate and military surveillance. “Many of the other platforms are quite devious,” she said. “We don’t really know whether your face is being used to train facial-recognition algorithms or something like that.” In the digital economy, free labor tenders a self-replenishing vein of gold for capital’s pickaxe.'

– Merve Erme for The New Yorker, February 2022

Booth view: Esther Schipper, ARCOmadrid 2022. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to participate in ARCOmadrid 2022, taking place through February 27. We hope you will join us at the fair, Booth 9B09.

 

Read more

Exhibition view: Simon Fujiwara, Once Upon a Who?, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2022. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Last chance to visit the Whoniverse! Simon Fujiwara's solo exhibition Once Upon a Who? takes a deep dive into the world of Who the Bær, the artist's original, jeans-clad cartoon figure with the giant lolling pink tongue and a voracious appetite for images.

In our exhibition film, see Simon talk about the origins of Who the Bær and how Who interacts with the world around them.

Discover more about individual works in the exhibition through a dedicated Online Viewing Room.

Watch the titular animation, Once Upon a Who?, 2021, screening online via www.dis.art.

Read the extensive press on the exhibition with Flash Art, Der Tagesspiegel, Berliner Zeitung and an interview with artnet.

The exhibition Once Upon a Who? and the accompanying Whotique, a presentation of Fujiwara’s merchandise collaboration with Highsnobiety at Esther Schipper Bookstore close on Saturday, February 26.

The Close, a new video work by David Claerbout has been added to the Concertgebouw Brugge collection. Intended as a short, emotional history of the camera, The Close reflects on what Claerbout calls ‘dark optics’: a profound if chaotic recalibration happening in our time, of the beliefs we share in regards to image, information and language. For the premiere of The Close, Arvo Pärt’s Da pacem Domine will be performed live by the Flemish Radio Choir.

Sunday February 20, 2022
11am – tickets
2pm – tickets
4pm – tickets

Thomas Demand, Markise / Canopy, 2020, C-Print / Diasec, 180 x 144 cm. © Thomas Demand & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

 

ARCOmadrid 2022
Booth 9B09
IFEMA MADRID
Recinto Ferial, Av. Partenón 5
28042 Madrid
February 23 – 27, 2022
www.ifema.es

Esther Schipper is pleased to participate in ARCOmadrid 2022, taking place from February 23 – 27. We hope you will join us at the fair, Booth 9B09.

With works by:
Rosa Barba
Matti Braun
Sarah Buckner
Angela Bulloch
Etienne Chambaud
Thomas Demand
Simon Fujiwara
Ann Veronica Janssens
Ugo Rondinone
Anri Sala
Karin Sander
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

---

 

40 (+1) Anniversary | Booth 17
With AA Bronson and General Idea

Esther Schipper is pleased to participate in this year’s special section ARCOmadrid's 40 (+1) Anniversary, from February 23 – 27. The unique project brings past and present together through the galleries and their essential relationship with artists and collectors that have always been present at ARCOmadrid throughout its history. The programme participants have been invited by María Inés Rodríguez, Francesco Stocchi and Sergio Rubira.

Esther Schipper presents two historical works: General Idea's El Dorado Series,1992, and AA Bronson‘s Untitled (For General Idea), 1997.

Julia Scher, Info screen at bus station somewhere near Planet Greyhound, 2022 (still). © the artist

 

Entitled Planet Greyhound, Julia Scher's solo exhibition of all new sculptural, video and installation works transforms the space of the Kunsthalle Gießen into a temporary bus station for humanoid and extraterrestrial life forms.

 

Read more

Exhibition view: Rosa Barba, From Source to Poem, CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, 2016–2017. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022. Photo: Arthur Pequin © Rosa Barba

 

Rosa Barba's solo presentation Exhibition Notes at Cukrarna is the first to be held in the basement gallery, marking the start of a series of projects exploring the dimensions and possible applications of sound, light, moving images, and music. 

With Exhibition Notes, Rosa Barba presents an installation that fills the gallery space, turning it into a coherent visual ensemble. It includes Blind Volumes (2016/2022), a work that uses steel frames as a support, a kind of stage on which films and kinetic sculptures are displayed.

Eight further artworks are choreographed around the gallery, transforming it into a place for experimentation. The gallery thus becomes a space where the constitutive elements of film, celluloid, projector and sound are presented: elements that often remain invisible, overlooked, and unexplored precisely because they are so obvious. By placing the various components of film in new experimental constellations, the artist liberates them from their original uses. “In my work”, says Barba, “I interrogate the industry of cinema with respect to various forms of staging, such as gesture, genre, information, and documentation, taking them out of their conventional contexts and reshaping and representing them anew. In this way, I experiment with and expand time-based forms into sculptural objects or speculations, that is, into spaces that are self-organized; it is an ever-changing, ever-evolving shifting process.”

Through her use of a steel construction which is both drawing and supporting space, the artist brings a dynamic interpretation of its constituent parts to the gallery space. In so doing, she invites the viewer to adopt different perspectives, focus on the artworks individually or as a whole. Both the basic physical elements and the metaphysical concepts thus become key vehicles for thinking about film as a process, a medium and, ultimately, a message.

The exhibition is curated by Alenka Gregorič.

Jac Leirner, Us Horizon, 1985–2022 (detail). Photo: Edouard Fraipont

Welcome to our first Letter from Berlin of 2022

We want to look ahead to the first half of this new year, introducing briefly our upcoming exhibitions in Berlin, art fair presentations and share with you a selection of exciting upcoming exhibitions by our artists.

Then join us for a visit to the Whoniverse: Simon Fujiwara's solo exhibition Once Upon a Who? takes a deep dive into the world of Who the Bær, the artist's original, jeans-clad cartoon figure with the giant lolling pink tongue and a voracious appetite for images! Discover their world in our video introduction and the dedicated OVR. Read Fujiwara's interview with artnet. And stay tuned for a live zoom tour with the artist on February 12!

We hope you enjoy our Letter from Berlin!

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Fassung des Briefes aus Berlin

Exhibition views: Hito Steyerl. I Will Survive, 2022, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2022. Photo © Peter Tijhuis

 

The major solo exhibition Hito Steyerl. I Will Survive opens at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on January 29, 2022. An artist, cultural critic, filmmaker, writer and professor, Hito Steyerl (1966) is one of the most significant and influential figures in contemporary art. She operates on the boundary between film and visual art, working in genres ranging from documentary cinema to innovative multimedia installations. Her rigorously researched and visually stunning installations illuminate some of the most pressing issues of our time. 

Hito Steyerl is a master storyteller, utilizing image, sound, essays, performance and architectural environments to shape her narratives. Her recent works develop an entire, completely immersive installation for each video. Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), which debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale, takes place in a sci-fi matrix dotted with beach chairs. The video Liquidity Inc. (2014) which addresses global migration and financial inequality, is viewed from a blue wave-like seating area. The exhibition poses untold narratives, connecting disparate threads that Steyerl masterfully unravels, shifting between reality and dream worlds that are unfortunately all too real.

Internationally, Steyerl is considered one of today’s most influential and politically engaged artists. She uses her position as an artist to expose patterns of control. As well as critiquing strains of capitalism, nationalism, ethnic profiling, digital control, power structures, media and politics in an era of globalization, she also addresses the status of art production, museums and biennials. Steyerl relentlessly asks: Who holds power? Who is abused by that power? Her work is jarring, always deeply affecting, and compels us to think about our own role in the stories she tells. 

I Will Survive offers an expansive overview of Hito Steyerl's oeuvre, from the early documentary works of the 1990s to architectural video installations of the past 10 years. The exhibition presents 20 loaned works and two installations that the Stedelijk acquired in 2014 in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum.

Pierre Huyghe, Cerro Indio Muerto, 2016, archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, 64 x 96 cm (unframed), 70,8 x 102,8 x 3 cm (framed), edition of 8. © the artist, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022

 

What is time and how can it be represented and measured artistically? And how can the future be thought? FUTURA. Measuring Time at Hamburger Kunsthalle invites 30 international artists, including Ceal Floyer and Pierre Huyghe, to address fundamental questions about temporality, sustainability and visions. The exhibition architecture transforms the entire first floor of the Galerie der Gegenwart, freeing it from modular walls and partitions. In this open design, artworks and artifacts are presented together in surprising dialogues that span across different historical periods and disciplines.

Hito Steyerl, This is the Future, 2019, video installation, environment.
Exhibition view, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED: BELANCIEGE, Giorgi Gago Gagoshidze, Hito Steyerl, and Miloš Trakilović, n.b.k., Berlin, 2019. Photo © n.b.k. / Jens Ziehe

 

Post Nature: Dear Nature, the inaugural exhibition of the Ulsan Art Museum, evokes a complex sense of history and cultural politics, rather than an ecology that mankind can change. The exhibition will not only raise the awareness of nature in danger but reset our ecological sensitivity beyond the previous dichotomous perspective of human and non-human, providing a multilayered opportunity to reset ecological sensibility, and think about “what it is to live in solidarity."

Ulsan Art Museum opens as the first major art museum in the eighth-largest city in South Korea. The museum will specialize in digital media art, encompassing the fast-evolving digital art genre.

---

 

개관특별전 <포스트 네이처: 친애하는 자연에게>는 인류가 바꾸어 놓을 수 있는 생태가 아닌 역사와 문화 정치가 얽힌 복잡한 감각을 떠올린다. 이를 통해 경각심을 일깨우기보다 인간과 인간이 아닌 것을 나누던 이분법적 사고에서 벗어나 생태적 감수성을 다시 설정하고 “함께 연대하며 살아가는 것이 무엇인지” 생각할 수 있는 다층적 계기를 제공한다.

울산 시립 미술관은 대한민국에서 8번째로 큰 도시에 처음 세워진 대형 미술관이다. 빠르게 발전하는 디지털 아트 장르에 부합하며 디지털 미디어아트 중심 미술관으로서의 정체성을 정립한다.

AA Bronson and General Idea, VideoVirus, 2021, London, Piccadilly Lights rendering. Rendering © CIRCA

 

Watch now: an exclusive documentary on AA Bronson, General Idea, and VideoVirus from CIRCA

Launching World AIDS Day, 1 Dec 2021, CIRCA presents VideoVirus, a powerful new film by AA Bronson and General Idea. Reimagining their historic Imagevirus for a global audience, the artwork comes to life in a hypnotic video animation that virally transmits their activist message across billboards in London, Milan, New York, Seoul & Tokyo. 

Throughout December, CIRCA is proud to partner with UNAIDS and Terrence Higgins Trust to mark 40 years since the disease was first recorded in 1981. A new work by AA Bronson, the sole surviving member of the General Idea art group, draws inspiration from the viral intentions of Imagevirus, which in the mid-1980s spread consciousness of the epidemic by reappropriating Robert Indiana's famous LOVE logo, virally transmitting the AIDS symbol through cities in the form of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, and exhibitions.

Exhibition View: Ugo Rondinone, nude in the landscape, Belvedere 21, Vienna, 2021. 
Photo © Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

 

Belvedere 21 has reopened - visitor information can be found here.

nude in the landscape at the Belvedere 21 is Ugo Rondinone’s first solo show in an Austrian museum. In the sunlit glass pavilion of the Belvedere 21, the artist brings together new groups of works from the classic genres of the nude and the landscape. 

Alongside landscapes, sculptures shaped from soil designed specifically for Vienna, the exhibition also presents hyperrealistically designed nudes—seemingly introverted nude figures made of clear wax and soil.

For over thirty years Ugo Rondinone has been crossing the boundaries between media and disciplines. His work is often based on everyday issues and subjects that take on a poetic dimension as a result of their isolation, amplification, or specific material treatment. His landscapes, suns, human figures, and still lifes probe the emotional and psychological depths of human experience in relation to nature.

 

Exhibition view: Ann Veronica Janssens, Green, Yellow and Pink, Winsing Art Place, Taipei, 2021. Photo © OS Studio / Rex Chu

 

"I am interested in what escapes me, not in order to arrest it, but on the contrary, in order to experiment with the 'ungraspable.'" — Ann Veronica Janssens

On December 18, Winsing Art Place will open a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Ann Veronica Janssens. This exhibition will feature some of the artist's renowned works in the colored mist, glass and gilded blinds series. 

 

「我對於會消失的東西很感興趣，但不是為了捕捉它，相反地，是為了試驗那些無法被抓住的東西。」—— 安．維羅尼卡．詹森斯

12 月 18 日，文心藝所舉辦的安．維羅尼卡．詹森斯 （Ann Veronica Janssens）個展將正式開幕。 本次展覽展出藝術家著名的色彩霧氣、玻璃以及敷金窗簾系列作品。

Booth view: Esther Schipper, SOLO SHOW 2021. Photo © Sang Tae Kim

 

Continuing through December 5, 2021, Esther Schipper is pleased to present a solo presentation of works by Florin Mitroi as part of SOLO SHOW, a program by COOP (Check Out Our Project) a flexible community formed in 2018 to experiment with new forms of art activities, initiated by Jung Jaeho (Gallery2), Yeo Joonsoo (Gallery Chosun), and Kim Inseon (Space Willing N Dealing). On view will be a selection of portraits painted with tempera, as well as ink drawings, and zinc cut-outs.

 

Read more (EN/KO)

Liu Ye, Book Painting No. 22 (Karl Blossfeldt, Wunder in der Natur, H. Schmidt & C. Günther, Leipzig, 1942, Page 49), 2019, acrylic on canvas, 32,5 x 24 cm (unframed), 34,5 x 25,5 x 4 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and New Century Art Foundation. Photo © the artist

 

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Liu Ye's solo exhibition, Pierre Menard at the New Century Art Foundation, Beijing. 

The exhibition brings together works from Liu Ye's Book Painting series related to the publications of Karl Blossfeldt from collections around the world and will introduce these paintings to audiences in China for the first time.

The title of the exhibition, Pierre Menard, refers to a fictional character in a short story by Luis Borges. Entitled Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, Borges’ 1939 story tells of a character, Menard, whose most ambitious and unparalleled work is Quixote, which coincides, in some cases verbatim, with specific chapters of Cervantes' famous book Don Quixote. Menard's intention is not to imitate or mechanically copy but to create an authentic "Quixote." Liu Ye read Borges' Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote after completing his series of book painting works related to Karl Blossfeldt, and recognized a similar ambition or delusion in this fictional character.

Film Still: Tao Hui, Pulsating Atom, 2019. Single channel HD video, color, sound, duration: 14:12 min, edition of 5. © the artist

 

Esther Schipper congratulates Tao Hui, nominated for the 2021 Jimei X Arles Discovery Award. Established by the Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, the prize recognizes outstanding photographic work from a Chinese artist.

All ten nominees will present their work during the Seventh Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, opening in Xiamen on November 26, 2021, and runs until January 3, 2022. The winner will be announced during the opening week and will receive an invitation to present a solo exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2022.

Tao Hui creates photographs and immersive video-installations that bend the boundaries of fiction and reality to address cultural and identity related issues. His works are visceral and provocative, yet enlightening and always imbued with a strong emotional power and a sense of displacement, inviting the viewers to confront themselves with their own cultural history, ways of living and social identities.

Booth view: Esther Schipper, ART COLOGNE, 2021. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

ART COLOGNE
Booth A5, Hall 11.2
Koelnmesse
Messeplatz 1
50679 Köln / Cologne
November 18–21, 2021
www.artcologne.com

Read more

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, A Dream Dreaming a Dream, 2020, video projection (real-time procedural computer-generated animation), infinite duration, 4-channel sound, black and white, edition of 4. 
Commissioned and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21). Exhibition view: LOOP Fair, Casa Milà, Barcelona, 2021. Photo © Roberto Ruiz

LOOP Fair 2021
with Daniel Steegmann Mangrané
La Pedrera – Casa Milà
Passeig de Gràcia, 92
08008 Barcelona
Through November 18, 2021
www.loop-barcelona.com

Esther Schipper is pleased to participate in LOOP Fair 2021 where we present Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's A Dream Dreaming a Dream, 2020, a real-time, infinitely changing animation, always similar but also always generated anew, of a dreaming panther roaming the forest.

Read more

Photo © Leon Kahane

International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam
With Hito Steyerl, Guest of Honor
Frederiksplein 52
1017 XN Amsterdam
November 17 – 28, 2021
www.idfa.nl

Special events: 
November 19, 2:30–4:35 pm – Hito Steyerl: The Empty Center + Master Talk – Tickets
November 20, 8:30–10 pm – IDFA Dialogue: Hito Steyerl and her Top 10 – Tickets

Hito Steyerl who is Guest of Honor of this year's International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam curated a Top 10 program. Key to apprehending her own seismic body of work, Steyerl’s selection presents a lineup of dissident filmmakers who, each in their own way, have radically shaped the art of political documentary cinema.

Read more

Matti Braun, Untitled, 2019, Seide, Textilfarbe, pulverbeschichtetes Aluminium / silk, dye, powder-coated aluminium, 130 x 100 cm. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Hamburgische Kulturstiftung Benefit Art Auction
With Matti Braun and Angela Bulloch
Hamburgische Kulturstiftung
Hohe Bleichen 18
20354 Hamburg
www.kulturstiftung-hh.de

Read more

Still: Simon Fujiwara, Once Upon a Who, 2021, installation with stop-motion animation, duration: 4:48 min. © the artist

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2021: A Goodbye Letter, A Love Call, A Wake-Up Song
With Simon Fujiwara
Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève
Rue des Vieux-Grenadiers 10
1205 Geneva
November 12, 2021 – January 30, 2022
Opening: November 11, 6 pm
Admission free: a vaccine certificate is required for entry
www.bim21.ch

Co-curated by the collaborative DIS and Andrea Bellini, Director of the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, the Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement 2021 (BIM'21) includes works by 14 artists and collectives, that all grapple with a shift in consciousness and a need to debunk narratives.

Read more

Ugo Rondinone, yellow green pink mountain, 2021, painted stone, stainless steel, pedestal, 160 x 35.6 x 30.5 cm. Photo © Studio Rondinone

 

UNQUESTIONING LOVE: An Auction to Benefit the New York City AIDS Memorial
With works by Ugo Rondinone
November 9 & 12, 2021
Christie's New York
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York
www.nycaidsmemorial.org


The New York City AIDS Memorial has partnered with Christie’s for Unquestioning Love, a selection of contemporary artworks across two auctions — the 21st Century Evening Sale on November 9, and the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on November 12 to which Ugo Rondinone has donated yellow green pink mountain, 2021.

This charitable auction is dedicated to creating a vital and strategic fund that will help to ensure the preservation of the New York City AIDS Memorial’s physical space in perpetuity and support and strengthen many future years of ambitious arts, cultural, and educational programs.

The proceeds of the sale, occurring as the New York City AIDS Memorial celebrates the 10th anniversary of its founding and the 5th anniversary of its public dedication, will help create a vital and strategic fund that will ensure the preservation of the Memorial’s physical space in perpetuity and support and strengthen many future years of ambitious arts, cultural, and educational programs.

Ugo Rondinone, siebteraprilzweitausendundsechzehn, 2016, acrylic on canvas, ø 80 cm (31 1/2 in).
Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Art Collaboration Kyoto
Joint presentation by Esther Schipper and Taro Nasu
Booth B01
Kyoto International Conference Center Event Hall
November 5–7, 2021
www.a-c-k.jp

For Art Collaboration Kyoto, November 4 – 7, 2021, Esther Schipper is pleased to announce a joint presentation together with Taro Nasu.

Read more

Angela Bulloch, Pentagon Totem: Perp, 2021 (detail). Photo: Daniel Young

Angela Bulloch 
Animal Vegetable Mineral
November 5 – December 18, 2021
Opening Friday November 5, 2 – 8 pm
www.estherschipper.com


Esther Schipper is pleased to present Angela Bulloch's Animal Vegetable Mineral, the artist’s 13th exhibition with the gallery. On view will be all new works, further developing the artist's iconic series and her sculptures assembled from modular geometric elements, as well as a monumental wall painting and a projected digital animation.

Read more

Photo: Marlene Gawrisch. © Rosa Barba

Rosa Barba
In conversation with Joachim Jäger
Neue Nationalgalerie
Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin
Wednesday, October 27, 2021, 7 pm – 9 pm
Language: German
Free, booking required

On the occasion of her exhibition In a Perpetual Now at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Rosa Barba talks with director Joachim Jäger about her artistic work and ongoing projects related to the 15 cinematic and sculptural works on display there until January 16, 2022. The conversation will be mostly conducted in German.

Read more

Photo © Michael Chiu

Esther Schipper congratulates Ari Benjamin Meyers, who was named Artist in Residence at the Beethoven Orchestra in Bonn.

Read more

Booth view: Esther Schipper, Frieze London, 2021. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Frieze London
Booth B04
13 Park Square W
Regent's Park, London NW1
Through October 17, 2021
www.frieze.com

Read more

FIAC
Booth B17
Grand Palais Éphémère
Place Joffre
75007 Paris
October 21 – 24, 2021
www.fiac.com

FIAC Viewing Room
October 21 – 25, 2021

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce our participation in FIAC 2021.

Read more

Martin Honert, VSG-Gruppe, 2015-2016, polyurethane, sand, wood, oil paint, 220 x 560 x 200 cm approx. overall, edition of 2. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

Martin Honert
Fliegendes Klassenzimmer
Oktogon, Art Gallery of the HfBK
Dresden University of Fine Arts, Dresden
October 15 – December 5, 2021
Tue – Sun 11 am – 6 pm
www.hfbk-dresden.de

Farewell exhibition of Martin Honert

Read more

Photo © Wolfgang Stahr

Finissage – Artist Talk with Anri Sala & André Vida
Kunsthaus Bregenz
October 10, 2021, 11 am
Free admission
Language: English
Further Information on the talk
www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Current COVID-19 guidelines at Kunsthaus Bregenz

On the occasion of the closing of Anri Sala's major solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz, the artist will be in conversation with André Vida, giving a personal insight into his work on the last day of the exhibition.

Read more

Thomas Demand, Pond, 2020, C-Print / Diasec, 200 x 399 cm, edition of 6. Image © the artist

 

Thomas Demand presents Mundo de Papel at Centro Botín, Santander. The exhibition is conceived as an installation combining photographs not previously shown and others selected by the artist and Udo Kittelmann, curator of the exhibition.

For Mundo de Papel, Demand has designed an entire simulated urban landscape, composed of eight pavilions surrounded by wallpaper installations. Each pavilion hangs from the ceiling and serves as a display for his photographs and video works dating from 1996 to the most recent from 2021.

Subjects include Whitney Houston’s last meal at the Beverly Hilton Hotel; the control room at Fukushima’s nuclear power plant; the recent Diamond Princess cruise ship stuck in quarantine; a pond with waterlilies like an impressionist painting; a red bow glowing in the sun or discarded plastic cups stuck on a mesh fence. Each scene is reconstructed with paper and cardboard using intricate folding and cutting techniques. After the model is built, he photographs them and discards the objects he created leaving only a visual narrative.

Accompanying the exhibition will be a unique pop-up book including an essay by Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa and with three-dimensional representations of the pavilions, produced by Thomas Demand and co-edited in collaboration with Fundación Botín and London-based publishers Mack Books. Demand will lead a special workshop in Santander during the exhibition.

Julia Scher, Hidden Camera (Architectural Vagina), 1991/2018, JVC camcorder, bracket, organic fronds, (optional: monitor output, archival video footage), dimensions variable, unique in a series of three variations. MAMCO Collection, Geneva. Photo © Julien Gremaud

 

The work of Julia Scher, which first appeared in the 1980s, is noteworthy for its systematic use of surveillance techniques, particularly CCTV. Scher’s technical background provided her with in-depth knowledge of a range of surveillance systems. She worked at a well-known security firm for a period of time before setting up her own company, Safe and Secure Productions. 

 

Further information

Rosa Barba, Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, 2021. United Nations Buffer Zone, Deryneia, Cyprus. Open-air cinema Sculpture. Photo: Marios Stylianou © Rosa Barba

 

Esther Schipper is is pleased to announce the inaugural ceremony of Rosa Barba’s Open-Air Cinema and premiere of her film Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, 2021.

Inside the Outset is a project that consists of two parts: a film and a long-term open-air cinema installation within the 180-kilometer UN-controlled "Green Line Buffer Zone" in Cyprus. This area divides the island between North and South, and forms the starting point of Rosa Barba’s artistic intervention.

The project started seven years ago when Barba was invited by Point Centre for Contemporary Art in Nicosia and by the curator Mirjam Varadinis to Cyprus and proposed a cinema sculpture for the Buffer Zone. The inaugural ceremony of the Open-Air Cinema will take place in the presence of His Excellency the Ambassador of Italy to Cyprus on September 10, 2021, with the projection of Barba's film Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage along with films selected by the project’s Advisory Board of artists from each side of the Green Line and beyond. Visitors from both sides of the island will be able to enter the Buffer Zone, which is usually closed to civilians.

In a recent article for The Brooklyn Rail, Rosa Barba discusses this project as well as her other current projects – Read it here

 

 

Rosa Barba, Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage (2021)
Open-Air Cinema and 16mm film transferred to digital and 8k film, sound, 31:15 min
Produced by Point Centre for Contemporary Art, funded by the Italian Council.
A collaboration with Famagusta Avenue Garage.
Image: Marios Stylianou © Rosa Barba

Photo © Michael Trier

 

Sarah Buckner was born in 1984 in Frankfurt, Germany. She studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Palermo and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Buckner lives and works in Cologne.

Sarah Buckner's image world is inspired by multiple sources: real-life encounters, books, films and imagination. She has developed an intuitive and fluid approach that transforms these impressions through her material practice. Her works distil narratives into images full of mystery, their atmospheric scenes resonating with emotional potency—the exact nature of which remains elusive, even to the artist, she says.

As Meret Held has written: “Between the concrete and the non-concrete, between the said and unsaid, she forms pictorial worlds that come very close to that of the dream. Like the dream, Sarah Buckner's paintings are determined by a mixture of (past) experienced, (present) acting and (forward-looking) premonition. We are taken from the real space into the dream world by certain, peculiarly present picture elements, but especially by the materiality of the paintings themselves, the oil paint, which carries the trace of painting in itself and with it the liveliness of the painter herself.”

In 2020, Sarah Buckner was awarded the Residence NRW+ grant, and at the conclusion of the residency period presented her work in the solo exhibition Head over Heels at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster in 2021.

In 2021, Buckner's work was included in Esther Schipper's group exhibition L'Invitation au voyage. Buckner’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the US. Among her participations in institutional exhibitions are: Salon des Amateurs, Tramps, London (2018), Lia Pasqualino Noto / Casa Studio, Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); 1001 Bild, Villa de Bank, Enschede (2018), Eggy and Seedy, Munchies, London (2017), Petto, L’Ascensore, Palermo (2015), Beyond the Stage, Canongate Venture Edinburgh (2013).

Click here for German text

Portrait, left © Trevor Paglen
Portrait, right © Joachim Gern

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce the participation of Tino Sehgal and Hito Steyerl in the festival steirischer herbst ’21 – The Way Out.

 

Read about each project here

Ann Veronica Janssens, Venetian Blind, 2007-2021, aluminum Venetian blinds, gold leaf, 400 x 190 x 2 cm
Exhibition view: Ann Veronica Janssens, gam gam gam, Galleria d'Arte Moderna – GAM, Milan, 2021. 
Photo © Ann Veronica Janssens

 

On the occasion of Milan Design Week, Italian luxury house Bulgari presents Metamorphosis, an immersive journey inside the iconic Serpenti jewelry collection in dialogue with the work of four renowned contemporary artists, including Ann Veronica Janssens. 

Playfully titled gam gam gam, Janssens‘ site-specific installation conceived for the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, uses natural light and a composition of new works characterized by a minimalist aesthetic in contrast with the maximalism and the sumptuous decor of the museum's architecture. The exhibition includes a golden Venetian blind which was specially produced for the windows of the room, and six of her iconic aquariums, where optical physical phenomena are used to expand the observers' perception.

A bilingual catalogue titled Serpenti. Il Potere delle Metamorfosi – The Power of Metamorphosis, published by Silvana Editoriale, is forthcoming.

 

Thomas Demand, Ballot, 2018, C-Print/Diasec, 180 x 280 cm
Image © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn/UPRAVIS, Moscow

 

Mirror Without Memory is the first solo exhibition of Thomas Demand in Russia. Borrowing images of events from the press other sources (or organizing technical shoots), Demand reproduces these scenes in life size from cardboard and paper—basically making sculptures—after which he photographs them and subsequently destroys the models.

Rosa Barba, Plastic Limits, For the Projections of Other Architectures, 2021, 35mm film, color, optical sound, duration: 14:40 min. Film still © Rosa Barba. © Rosa Barba / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021

 

Welcome to our Letter from Berlin!

This weekend Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie will reopen after being closed for nearly six years for renovation. Under the title Mies in Mind many Berlin galleries are celebrating with projects related to the architect Mies van der Rohe and his famous structure. Esther Schipper is presenting a special screening of Rosa Barba’s Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage.

 

We hope you enjoy our Letter from Berlin!

Rosa Barba, Plastic Limits, For the Projections of Other Architectures, 2021, 35mm film, color, optical sound, duration: 14:30 min. Film still © Rosa Barba

 

The Neue Nationalgalerie celebrates its reopening after six years of renovation with a solo exhibition by Rosa Barba, opening to the public from August 22, 2021.

Under the title In a Perpetual Now, Barba will present key works of her oeuvre from the years 2009–2021, as well as a new film created on the occasion of the exhibition. An expansive steel structure referring in its architectural structure to Mies van der Rohe's early project Brick Country House will host 15 of Barba's cinematic and sculptural works. Specially produced for the architecture of the Neue Nationalgalerie, this major solo exhibition follows the principle of cinematic montage, which plays a pivotal role in the artist’s work as well as her conceptual approach to cinema itself.

Who’s Online! is an online experience conceived in close collaboration with artist Simon Fujiwara as part of his major exhibition Who the Bær currently on view at Fondazione Prada, Milan through September 27, 2021.

In this unique digital experience, Fujiwara has conceived an interactive tour of the exhibition that brings viewers into the world of Who the Bær - an original cartoon character he created in 2020. Using a specially developed technique that presents the exhibition tour as a user driven stop-frame animation, audiences dive into the coming-of-age story of a cartoon bear in search for an authentic self in a world of images.

While the physical exhibition Who the Bær brings viewers into a giant labyrinthine cardboard structure in the shape of a bear, the interactive digital experience broadens the scope of the exhibition with detailed images, animations and artist interviews.

Whether you have already visited the exhibition or are experiencing it remotely for the first time, Who’s Online! is a digital experience that offers unprecedented perspectives into the original universe of Who the Baer.

Discover the “Who the Bær” digital experience on your mobile phone via who.fondazioneprada.org

Andrew Grassie, Car Door 1, 2020, tempera on paper on board, 14,8 x 18,8 cm (image), 31,1 x 35,2 x 3 cm (framed). Image © the artist

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce the opening of a seasonal pop-up exhibition in Taipei.

Visit us from August 19 through September 10 at PPP / PPAPER Space, in Zhongshan District, for a special exhibition of new and major works by twelve artists of the gallery. The exhibition will span various media, from installation, sculpture, video, to painting, photography, and works on paper.

With this project, the gallery aims at developing and anchoring the solid relationship it has built with Taiwan’s vibrant cultural art scene over the past decade.

"In the past decade we've built up a very solid relationship with collectors in Asia," says Muchi Shaw, Director, Asia and based in Taiwan. "We are always looking for different projects in the region from museum exhibitions to art fairs, and have strong connections with collectors in Taiwan," Shaw says.

With works by: Martin Boyce, Thomas Demand, Simon Fujiwara, Ryan Gander, General Idea, Andrew Grassie, Pierre Huyghe, Ann Veronica Janssens, Gabriel Kuri, Roman Ondak, Philippe Parreno, and Ugo Rondinone.

Should you have any questions about this special exhibition, please contact Muchi Shaw: shaw@estherschipper.com


施博爾・台北

PPP / PPAPER 空間
台北市中山區中山北路二段26巷2号

2021年8月19日—9月10日

施博爾藝廊欣喜地宣佈我們在台北舉辦的夏季 pop-up 展覽即將開幕。

8月19日至9月10日期間，我們將在位於台北市中山區的 PPP / PPAPER 空間舉辦一場特別策劃的展覽，屆時將呈現12位藝廊代理藝術家的重要作品以及新作。展覽作品將跨越多種媒介，從裝置、雕塑、影像，到繪畫、攝影和紙上作品。

施博爾藝廊旨在通過該展覽項目來拓展和鞏固我們在過去十年中與充滿活力的台灣文化藝術界所建立的緊密聯繫。

「我們在過去十年裡與亞洲不同地區的藏家建立了緊密的關係。」施博爾藝廊亞洲總監蕭牧齊說。「我們在亞洲地區一直以來不斷尋找各種展覽項目的可能性，從美術館展覽到藝博會，並且與台灣藏家有著密切聯繫。」

本次展覽參展藝術家包括：馬丁・博伊斯、托馬斯・德曼、藤原西芒、瑞安・甘德、普遍概念、安德魯・格拉西、皮耶・雨格、安・維羅尼卡・詹森斯、加布里埃爾・庫里、羅曼・昂達克、菲利普・帕雷諾 ，以及烏戈・羅迪納。

如需瞭解更多展覽詳情，請聯絡
蕭牧齊：shaw@estherschipper.com

Exhibition view: Etienne Chambaud, Inexistence, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2021. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to present an Online Viewing Room dedicated to Etienne Chambaud’s exhibition Inexistence, the artist’s first with the gallery. The works included in the exhibitions are a scent and a sound installation, a sculptural work generating a pattern of temperatures, three light installations, glass works, bronze sculptures and modified panel paintings.

Visit our OVR here

The Online Viewing Room features an exhibition film in which Chambaud takes you through the exhibition. 

Anri Sala, AS YOU GO, 2019, 13-channel HD video and 22-channel discrete sound installation, color, 39:24 min. Exhibition view: Anri Sala, AS YOU GO, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2019. Photo © Antonio Maniscalco

 

From July 17 through October 10, Kunsthaus Bregenz dedicates a major solo exhibition to Anri Sala.

Musical phenomena play a major role in Sala’s work, his transformative, time-based works develop from a dense network of relations between sound, image, and architecture. A recurring medium in Sala's exhibition is film. In contrast to conventional cinema, Sala does not employ a strict narrative or even actors, it is rather musical pieces that become the real protagonists in the works. The cinematic results from the musical and not, as is customary, vice versa, enabling visitors to immerse themselves in a both visual and acoustic experience of the space.

Recent and entirely new works will be on view in the exhibition at Kunsthaus Bregenz. A record player, floating freely in an abandoned space capsule, a subtle alternating between the architecture's contours being sharp or blurred, a garden snail slowly moving along a viola bow, a vintage wallpaper-printing roller whose metal pattern is translated into spectral sounds. All of these are elements and imagery that Anri Sala will be employing in engendering creative shifts and to probe existing interpretive relations.

Blenheim Park and Gardens. Landscaping by Capability Brown. Courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation

 

Esther Schipper is is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition by Tino Sehgal at Blenheim Park and Gardens, Oxfordshire. Organised by Blenheim Art Foundation, this will be the first exhibition at Blenheim designed specifically for the Park and Gardens.

Tino Sehgal is known for artworks composed exclusively using the human body, voice, and social interaction. His artistic practice focuses on the fleeting gestures and subtleties of social encounters, with participation and open exchange as the subjects of value, rather than material objects. For this project, Sehgal will present a complex, roaming choreography imagined for Blenheim, involving more than 30 participants.

Conceived as a series of scenes rather than works with fixed locations, the exhibition will move fluidly throughout the Park and Gardens like a game of encounters, responding to specific conditions such as the number of visitors, the location or the weather. Akin to a swarm or flock, the group of participants – the majority of whom are local residents cast specially for this project – will gather and disperse in a fluid and porous choreography, enacting moments of connection with visitors and their surroundings.

Video still: Simon Fujiwara, Who for President, 2021, sculptural video installation, duration: 1:33 min. Video © Simon Fujiwara

 

Esther Schipper and Dvir Gallery are pleased to present parallel Online Viewing Rooms on the occasion of Simon Fujiwara's solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam (on view through September 12, 2021).

Visit our OVR here.

For his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, Simon Fujiwara presents works from his most recent project Who the Bær. Developed during the lockdown in the spring of 2020, Fujiwara created a unique cartoon character in the form of a denim wearing bear with a golden heart and an uncontrollably long tongue, that seemingly has no gender, race, sexuality or even a clear design. Without an identity, Who exists only as an image, a status that allows them the freedom to roam a world of online images, appropriating characters, identities, aesthetics and guises in a greedy search for a "self".

Who the Bær is also at the centre of a major solo exhibition currently presented at Fondazione Prada in Milan, through September 27.

Who the Bær can also be followed via their official Instagram account, @whothebaer.

 

 

Detail: Etienne Chambaud, Uncreature, 2021. Photo © the artist

 

Welcome to the Letter from Berlin!

 

This month the Letter from Berlin begins with our exhibitions by Etienne Chambaud and Rosa Barba opening at the gallery. Please join us tomorrow, Saturday July 3, 2-8 pm. 

And of course, we hope you will visit our pop-up exhibition, En la casa de Marquès, in Palma de Mallorca beginning July 12, on view through July 31.

 

We hope you enjoy our Letter from Berlin!

Ari Benjamin Meyers, The Long Parade (Day 1, De Panne to Koksijde), 2021. Performed at Beaufort 21: 7th Beaufort Triennial, Flanders, 2021. Photo © Kristien Daem

 

For the seventh edition of the Beaufort Triennial, Beaufort 21, Ari Benjamin Meyers, in collaboration with the walking orchestra "Die Verdammte Spielerei", presents The Long Parade.

The Long Parade is a music-based durational performance that is inspired by the brutal history of the Belgian coast, memory and forgetting, and the children’s game "Telephone". Over the course of the summer, the Flemish fanfare band "Die Verdammte Spielerei" will be marching from the French-Belgian border in De Panne to the Belgian-Dutch border of Knokke, performing a new composition by Ari Benjamin Meyers over ten musical parades. For each performance, they are joined by a different local group of musicians that have made their own adaptations of the piece and, in a ritualized manner, will pass the music — and a specially commissioned flag — from one municipality to the next. This performance, in essence an evolving, moving rehearsal, continues over the coming months, undergoing further mutations until the work reaches its finale in Knokke-Heist in October.

With The Long Parade Meyers unites the identities and histories of the Belgian coastal municipalities in one new composition that gets adapted by all, celebrating collaboration and recognizing the individuality of each place, while at the same time highlighting the fog of memory as it pertains to the past – both recent and more distant.

Participation is free and open to the public.

Upcoming performance dates and locations:
July 4: Koksijde - Showkorps El Fuerte, Imperior De Percussion and Koninklijke Gemeentelijke Harmonie Koksijde
August 1: Nieuwpoort - Koninklijke Katholieke Harmonie Nieuwpoort
August 8: Middelkerke - Drawing Pins
August 15: Ostend - Melody Makers Ostend
August 29: Bredene - accordion group with Alain Billiouw
September 12: De Haan - Saxophone Quartet Beaufort
September 19: Blankenberge - Shanty Choir Blankenberge
September 25: Zeebrugge - Koninklijke Harmonie Vermaak na Arbeid Koolkerke
October 17: Knokke - Koninklijke Harmonie Sint-Cecilia Heist

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Camille Vivier, Gorgone 1 (apparition), 2021, snakes, hair and make-up by Melanie Gerbeaux. © Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Camille Vivier

 

For her exhibition VOLCANIC EXCURSION (A VISION) at the Vienna Secession, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has conceived an environment that addresses the specific site while also reflecting on the extraordinary time of a global pandemic. Invoking role models from the past and the present, friends and colleagues who share her ideas, Gonzalez-Foerster counters the fissures that have come to mar the social fabric with a tableau exuding strength and confidence, optimism and courage.

Her exhibitions are often site-specific productions in which she engages with distinctive features of the venue and its history, weaving in literary references. Objects feature in subsidiary roles, as props that let her establish a particular atmosphere, rather than as ends in themselves and definitive creative output. Evolving narratives await discovery by the beholder who takes the time to pick up on the clues hidden in the fragmentary set pieces, photographs, peculiar interior arrangements, and personal details. Transporting the visitors to fictional scenarios from the past and future, her environments are the scenes of distinctive experiences in which yearnings, utopian wishes, fears, and dreams come to life.

Photo © Adrian Deweerdt

 

With Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, and Tino Sehgal.

 

LUMA Arles, a 27-acre creative campus at the Parc des Ateliers in the city of Arles, opened to the public on June 26. Work by over 45 artists and designers is featured in the opening programme, with special new commissions for LUMA by major international artists.

At the heart of the site is Frank Gehry’s 15,000-square-metre tower, a twisting geometric structure finished with 11,000 stainless steel panels. The Tower houses exhibition galleries, project spaces and the LUMA’s research and archive facilities, alongside workshop and seminar rooms.

The Tower houses Philippe Parreno’s permanent commission Danny and Liam Gillick’s design for communal areas, entitled Laguna Gloria. In addition, on view in the Tower are a commissioned work by Tino Sehgal, This Element, and works from the collection, among them, Anri Sala’s 2018 film If and Only If, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s Virtual Reality Environment, Endodrome, presented at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The Library is on Fire, a new commissioned work by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Charles Arsène-Henry, will be inaugurated in September 2021. In the industrial Grande Halle in the Parc des Ateliers, Pierre Huyghe’s exhibition After UUmwelt will be on view through October 2021.

The campus is also home to seven former railway factories, four of which have been renovated by Selldorf Architects as exhibition and performance spaces. The surrounding gardens and public park are designed by landscape architect Bas Smets.

Ugo Rondinone, long last happy, 2020, neon, acrylic glass, translucent foil, aluminum, 313 x 768 x 15 cm. Image © Studio Rondinone

 

From June 26 to October 24, 2021 the second Kortrijk Triennial will take place. Titled Paradise Kortrijk 2021, it includes works by Ryan Gander and Ugo Rondinone.

Paradise Kortrijk 2021 invites contemporary artists to participate and reflect on modern questions. What are meaningful values today and how can we construct a better society? By installing artworks in the heart of the dynamic city, the significance of the artists’ vision becomes present in public. The participative element is crucial in the project: through an active experience, interaction is activated by the visitor. Through this experience, the visitor is offered the opportunity to modify their way of thinking, both about themselves and about our current society.

During Paradise Kortrijk 2021, two immense, brightly colored, rainbow-shaped neons by Ugo Rondinone will appear on the roof of the Budatoren and the Heilig Hart Woon- en Zorghotel. While cry me a river (1997) is the first rainbow neon ever produced by the artist, long last happy is a new commission conceived specifically for the occasion.

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, A Dream Dreaming a Dream, 2020, video projection (real-time procedural computer-generated animation), infinite duration, 4-channel sound, black and white, edition of 3. Commissioned and produced by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21). Exhibition view: How to Tread Lightly. st_age expanded, an exhibition, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain, 2020. Photo © Roberto Ruiz | TBA21

 

October Salon is a representative manifestation of accomplishments in the field of visual art in Serbia, found and funded by the City of Belgrade.

This year, the exhibition titled The Dreamers intends to question not only the misleading and ambiguous nature of the real but the space occupied by dreams—intended as the metaphorical embodiment of a space of freedom—which is able to challenge the certainty of the real world, of acquired knowledge and of our own beliefs.

The largest part of the exhibition of the 58th October Salon | Belgrade Biennale 2021 which includes works by 63 artists, among them Pierre Huyghe, Anri Sala and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, will be presented at the Belgrade City Museum, galleries of the Belgrade Cultural Centre, the Movie Theatre of the Belgrade Cultural Centre, the park of the Museum of Yugoslavia and a number of public spaces all over the city. It is planned for this year’s edition of the Salon to involve television and radio platforms as exhibition venues.

Etienne Chambaud, Nameless, 2019, coyote, squirrel and rabbit urine, various chemicals, copper powder, acrylic and acrylic varnish on LW. Photo © Jan Brockhaus / Friends of Rohkunstbau e.V.

Photo © Jan Brockhaus / Friends of Rohkunstbau e.V.

 

This year's edition of ROHKUNSTBAU 26 presents the works of 22 artists including Etienne Chambaud, David Claerbout, Philippe Parreno and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.

The exhibition title I am Nature – Of Vulnerability. Survival in the risk society defines a common thread running through the exhibited works. How are deep, existential insecurities after and during the Corona pandemic connected with the human understanding of nature, which is shaped by ideas of omnipotence? What are the consequences of this attitude?

Exhibition view: Ugo Rondinone, your age, my age, and the age of the rainbow, Belvedere Palace Garden, Vienna, 2021. Photo © Johannes Stoll / Belvedere, Vienna

 

In Ugo Rondinone's work, the rainbow features prominently as a recurring motif with multiple meanings. It is not only an impressive spectacle of nature but also a symbol of peace, equality, tolerance, and the connection between heaven and earth. 

Together with the Belvedere, Rondinone invited children aged 6 to 12 years to paint rainbow pictures. This hope-filled project was launched in the spring of 2021 by the Belvedere's art education team in collaboration with elementary schools throughout Austria.

The result is the participatory work your age and my age and the age of the rainbow, which consists of 1,085 rainbow panels. The 70-meter-long installation is on view through November 1, 2021 in the Belvedere Palace Garden between the Belvedere and Belvedere 21.

Simon Fujiwara, Who’s Childhood?, 2021, sculptural video installation (cardboard, electrical tape, Plexiglas, antique tripod, projector, projection screen), 164 x 73 x 73 cm (64 5/8 x 28 3/4 x 28 3/4 in) (projector on tripod). 
Image © Jörg von Bruchhausen

 

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce our participation in the inaugural edition of AMTSALON Berlin, with a solo presentation of works by Simon Fujiwara from the artist's most recent project Who the Bær. 

The presentation will include the sculptural video installation, Who’s Childhood, with an animation depicting a revisionist history of Who's childhood as well as a series of new collages and drawings centring around the early identity development of Who the Bær. Housed in the premises of the former district court of Charlottenburg, AMTSALON will open its doors to the public as a pop-up of twenty-four Berlin galleries from June 17 – 24 only.

Who the Bær can also be followed via their official Instagram account @whothebaer.

Roman Ondak, Perfect Society, 2018, exhibition view: Diversity United, Flughafen Tempelhof, Berlin, 2021. Photos: Silke Briel © Stiftung für Kunst and Kultur, Bonn⁠
⁠

Diversity United presents an artistic tour d'horizon of Europe currently. The trans-national exhibition shows paintings, sculptures, videos, new media, photographies, installations, drawings and object of art by about 90 artists from 34 countries, including Roman Ondak, Ugo Rondinone, and Anri Sala. They represent different generations, genders and regions and their work reflects the phenomenal diversity and vitality of Europe's contemporary art scene – from Portugal to Russia, from Norway to Turkey. 

The works on display shed light on themes such as freedom and democracy, migration and territory, political and personal identity, utopias and fears, which also revolve around the current pandemic. Diversity United reflects the complexity of the European idea and its social realities in a globalized world.
⁠

David Claerbout, Aircraft (FAL), 2015-2021, single channel video projection, black & white, stereo audio. Still © David Claerbout © c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2021

 

In disquieting video installations David Claerbout tries to come to grips with the passage of time. He lengthens time, allows the present and past to fuse, and sometimes even seems to bring time to a halt. His latest video, Aircraft (FAL), will have its world première at De Pont. The presentation will be accompanied by other video works, drawings and storyboards of his that the museum has been collecting since 2005.

Gabriel Kuri, Offering, 2021, mixed media in customised crate 125 x 170 x 50 cm, variable combinations, variable dimensions. Photo © Gabriel Kuri

 

Gabriel Kuri's Offering is a multi part sculpture commissioned by Saint-Martin Bookshop. This will stem from an array of sculptural props (some found, some purchased, some fabricated by the artist) snugly nestled in a crate lined with customized foam.

On the occasion of Kuri's exhibition at Saint-Martin Bookshop, curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete has written a short text entitled A Neighborhood of Things – Read it here.

Simon Fujiwara, Who Loves Who?, 2021, sculptural video installation, foam core, cardboard, monitor, video duration: 1:02 min, dimensions: 97,5 x 115 x 12,5 cm, hanging key and chain: variable, depicted: 90 cm high. 
Exhibition view: Simon Fujiwara, Who the Baer, Kunstinstituut Melly, Rotterdam, 2021. Photo © Simon Fujiwara

 

For his first solo exhibition in the Netherlands, Simon Fujiwara presents works from his most recent project Who the Bær. Developed during the lockdown in the spring of 2020, Fujiwara created a unique cartoon character in the form of a denim wearing bear with a golden heart and an uncontrollably long tongue, that seemingly has no gender, race, sexuality or even a clear design. Without an identity, Who exists only as an image, a status that allows them the freedom to roam a world of online images, appropriating characters, identities, aesthetics and guises in a greedy search for a ‘self’.

Who the Bær can also be followed via their official Instagram account, @whothebaer.

Exhibition view: L'Invitation au voyage, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2021. Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Welcome to the Letter from Berlin!

This Letter from Berlin begins with our current exhibition L'Invitation au voyage. The focus here will be on the notion of travel, which is one of the unifying themes of the exhibition.

 

As exhibitions are opening and re-opening, we present a number of projects - Read the Letter from Berlin here

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Fassung des Briefes aus Berlin

Hito Steyerl, SocialSim, 2020. Exhibition view: Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2021. Photo © Centre Pompidou, Bertrand Prévost, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021

 

The Centre Pompidou presents, in collaboration with K21 in Düsseldorf, I Will Survive: the first large-scale exhibition dedicated to the work of Hito Steyerl in France.

Spreading out over the entire space of the Galerie 2 of the Centre Pompidou, the survey exhibition brings together a group of major works, articulated around SocialSim (2020), a new production that imagines the future of the world in the era of social simulation technologies. The retrospective retraces a path that began in the 1990s in the field of documentary cinema and that has been developing, for the past ten years, particularly inventive multimedia installations, dedicated to joyfully transforming the immersive character of our visual culture into a space for reflection. Pointing out the failures and paradoxes of the image, Hito Steyerl experiments with new ways of talking about reality and critically addresses nationalism, capitalism and artificial intelligence.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.

Rodney Graham, Phonokinetoscope, 2001, 16mm looped film
Film still © Rodney Graham

 

For Rodney Graham’s first showcase in Russia, Garage will present one of his key works, Phonokinetoscope (2001), which highlights the Canadian artist and musician’s idiosyncratic understanding of the relationship between moving images, sound, and narrative building.

Phonokinetoscope is a complex symbiotic experiment where the traditional synchronization of sound with image and narrative is disrupted not only by the limitations imposed by the specially-built equipment but also by the random intervention of the audience. In the 16mm looped film we see a solitary Graham on a bicycle ride through Tiergarten in Berlin, evoking Albert Hofmann’s historic bike ride home from his laboratory in 1943 after making an interesting scientific discovery.

Loop after loop, the artist takes us on a ride of our own through the carefully choreographed constellation of sonic correlations, poetic congruences, and cinematic and literary associations.

David Claerbout, Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity, 2016, color animation, duration 50:00 min, edition of 7. Film still © David Claerbout

 

For our Spotlight this week we present David Claerbout's Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity, 2016.

 

Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity is a work by David Claerbout, based on the classic 1967 animated adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book. 

The 50-minute-long film follows the tradition of the frame-by-frame animation, and focuses almost exclusively on the animals: the panther, the bear, the snake, among others.

 

 

Over a period of 3 years, David Claerbout and a team of professional artists painstakingly redrew the frames of the original movie by hand, one by one, and then assembled them to create an entirely new, lifeless animation—a contradiction in terms—which stands in raw contrast to the lively and rhythmical original.

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Photo © Annik Wetter courtesy of MAMCO, Geneva

 

For our Spotlight this week we present General Idea's, S/HE, 1976.

 

On the occasion of Frieze New York 2021 (May 5–9) and our solo presentation with General Idea in collaboration with Mitchell-Innes & Nash we are pleased to present General Idea's S/HE as part of our Spotlight series.

 

Playing with gender, the two groups of five black-and-white photographs show two models, one male, one female, both professional fashion models from General Idea’s circle of friends. Each model illustrates five roles more usually assigned as male or female: Celebrity, Architect, Muse, Olympian, and Empress.

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Simon Fujiwara, Skölstrejk för Whö?, 2021. Mixed media sculpture, paper, plastic, wood, plush, metal, printer
Photo © Jörg von Bruchhausen

 

Fondazione Prada reopens from April 29

Visitor information can be found here.

 

For this new site-specific project conceived for the ground floor of the Podium in the Milan premises of Fondazione Prada, Simon Fujiwara introduces audiences to the fairytale world of Who the Bær, an original cartoon character created by the artist. Who the Bær is a cartoon bear without a clear character – “Who” as they are known, seems to have not yet developed a strong personality or instincts, they have no history, defined gender or even sexuality. Who the Bær only knows that they are an image, and they seek to define themselves in a world of other images.

 

Who the Bær’s adventures are presented at Fondazione Prada in a giant labyrinth made almost entirely from cardboard and recyclable materials and forming the shape of a giant bear. As visitors travel through the bear-like installation, they are introduced to the basic design and formation of the cartoon character of Who the Bær before embarking on a series of adventures that follow Who the Bær around their fairytale world. Told through drawings, collages, sculptures and animations, we witness Who the Bær in their perennial quest for an identity.

 

Inspired by the tradition of fairytales as well as modern animation movies, Fujiwara uses the mechanisms of fantasy to explore some of the joys and traumas we face as a society possessed with images and spectacle.

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

For our Spotlight this week we present Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's Summer Cloud, 2017.

 

The work is from Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's series of brightly colored aluminium curtains with differently shaped passageways made from Kriska aluminium chains. Widely used in Spain, Kriska curtains can function as flexible screens for entryways. They are light, often brightly colored and make a characteristic metallic sound when the chains touch.

The forms cut into the curtains relate to the artist's idea of "model forms", familiar but non-specific shapes that both trigger our imagination and leave us unable to identify them. The "continuation" of the aluminium chains below the openings appears counterintuitive, adding an element of surprise. Oscillating between appearing as diaphanous screen and semi-solid object, the curtains are both indications of a transition (meant to be traversed, marking the end of one space and the beginning of the next) as well as sculptural objects, existing in a hybrid state between corporeality and immateriality.

 

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Exhibition view: Martin Boyce, Recurring Dreams, FAHRBEREITSCHAFT, haubrok foundation, Berlin, 2021

 

In the “kantine” of FAHRBEREITSCHAFT the haubrok foundation show works by Scottish artist Martin Boyce. The lyrical objects and installations from the haubrok collection are largely based on the formal language of the brothers Jan and Joël Martel, who worked together with the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens in Paris on the intersection of Art Deco, Cubism, and Bauhaus. The concrete trees, to which Martin refers in various works, are particularly well known. The exhibition entitled Recurring Dreams consists exclusively of works from the haubrok collection.

Please note due to Covid-19 restrictions, a visit of the upcoming exhibitions at the hauberk foundation will probably only be possible from May on and by prior registration and the allocation of time slots. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact visit@haubrok.org.

David Claerbout, Wildfire (meditation on fire), 2019-2020, single channel video projection, 3D animation (stereo audio, color), duration: 24 min
© David Claerbout & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021

 

David Claerbout presents two major film installations: Wildfire (meditation on fire), 2019-2020 and Die reine Notwendigkeit/The Pure Necessity, 2016 as part of the exhibition The Nature of Art at the Busan Museum of Art, Busan, South Korea. 

This exhibition was conceived to convey the message of comfort and healing that art gives to us living in the Corona era, and to awaken the courage to face a new era. The Nature of Art consists of three sections: "Imagine from Today", "Contemplate from Emptiness", and "Empowered by Mother Nature".

Photo © Jörg von Bruchhausen

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Nathan Carter’s Rosa Rosaghetti in the Red Anemones Garden at Rougemont Castle., 2021,Syldavian Sallies née Succory at Snowdonia Llyn Gardens, Dolwyddelan., 2021, and 

Royal Convulvulus Clementine at The Alnwick Castle Poison Garden., 2021.

 

Nathan Carter’s exuberant paintings continue a theme of playfully mixing abstract and organic shapes to create fantastical botanical compositions, named for flowers and recalling their distinct shapes. Painted in acrylic enamel, the works focus on flowers in the process of blossoming. Thus, among the tightly intertwined forms reminiscent of leaves and vines, are also stamen and stigma, evoking the complex reproductive apparatus of plants. The intersexual botanical beings are curious proliferations, spiky prideful panorama, petals, stamen and ovule tentatively intertwining and coupling in a self-stimulating dance. Emphasizing the phantasmagorical element of these constructions, they can also include hearts or a row of rainbow spikes, or, as Carter calls them: “visible deadly warnings to all away supporters and dream killers."  

 

The titles of this series of works contain both scientific and common or fictional references to plants, paired with names or emotive qualifiers.

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Photo © Gunter Lepkowski

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Karin Sander's Patina Painting 187/12, In The Garden During Building Renovation, Berlin-Zehlendorf, 2018.⁠⠀

 

Patina Paintings (Gebrauchsbilder) are standard, mass-produced canvases in various formats that the artist has placed in specific locations for a certain time period, or given to collectors and institutions for their own use over a limited period of time.

 

As Harald Welzer noted in his text on Karin Sander's work “From the moment of its acquisition it is left to them whether they install such a work in their sports car or leave it in their basement or carry it about as a constant travel accessory (like a toiletries bag). In any case the canvas will be covered with some kind of a coat of dust, dirt, mould, notes or whatever else crosses the path of the wok and its owner. These works are also self-portraits of their owners, at least they show traces of a use that could only take place with this individual and his or her specific way of life. In the context of an exhibition they seem as auratic as any other painting; this can represent an affront to actual painters.”

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!
⁠⠀

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Andrew Grassie's Giraffe, 2020. 
⁠⠀
Giraffe is from a new body of work exploring images from the artist’s image archive, among them decades old snapshots associated with personal memories, tied to a specific place, a moment in time. Andrew Grassie chose motifs that had held his attention for reasons he could not always explain: photos from his image archive, sometimes many decades old and exuding a vague awkwardness, became sources for these works.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
The intimately scaled, precisely painted work is executed in tempera, a painting technique associated with pre-Renaissance panel paintings anteceding the development of oil paint.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Click the image to watch the full interview with Tino Sehgal and Svetlana Marich 

 

This Letter from Berlin is dedicated to our current Art Basel OVR: Pioneers presentation.

After a short essay on the history of the term pioneer, we introduce the works by General Idea, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Ann Veronica Janssens, Philippe Parreno, Anri Sala, and Hito Steyerl featured as part of our selection in Art Basel OVR: Pioneers, and present a conversation with Tino Sehgal and Svetlana Marich on the artist's practice.

As part of our series All Access, a video takes you into Sun Rise | Sun Set with Pierre Huyghe's aquarium work at Berlin's Schinkel Pavillon. David Claerbout's solo exhibition opened yesterday at the Garage Museum in Moscow. Karin Sander's sole presentation opens tonight at the Kunsthalle Tübingen. Find the links to attend the digital opening and exhibition tours with the artist below.

 

Read the entire Letter from Berlin here

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Fassung des Briefes aus Berlin

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Ann Veronica Janssens' Green, Yellow and Pink, 2017.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
“(…) sometimes you have to erase reality, erase what’s visible in order to see something else, to make the invisible visible.” – Ann Veronica Janssens⁠⠀
⁠⠀
This site-specific work was created on occasion of the artist’s 2017 solo exhibition at Esther Schipper, Ich rede zu Dir wie Kinder reden in der Nacht. Once visitors pass the threshold of the exhibition space, they find themselves immersed in an immaterial colored abstraction where any spatial or temporal landmark has disappeared.⁠⠀

 

Green, Yellow and Pink was most recently part of the artist's Connect, BTS project at DDP Design Exhibition Hall, Seoul in 2020.

 

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

David Claerbout, the “confetti” piece, 2015-2018, video still, double channel video projection, 3D animation, silent, color, 18’ 25”
Film still © David Claerbout & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021

 

Unseen Sound is the first solo exhibition of Belgian artist David Claerbout in Russia. His work is best defined as a hybrid, where media dissolve into one another using video, photography, film, and 3D to create images that question our perceptions and expectations.

The exhibition brings together four works that span a period of more than ten years, and show the artist’s increasing occupation with what he describes as “dark optics,” a term he uses to describe the contemporary state of the image. All of the works presented in Unseen Sound capture single moments stretched in time and space. This expansion reveals new layers of reality behind seemingly trivial images, and new characters emerge.

As the title of the exhibition—Unseen Sound—indicates, these works visualize sound as a central event that, nevertheless, remains beyond aural perception. Sections of a Happy Moment (2007) and The Algiers' Sections of a Happy Moment (2008) capture moments of a street ball game. The Quiet Shore (2011) is a series of beach scenes shot during a loud splash. Set at a grand reception, the “confetti” piece (2015–2018 ) shows the second when the fireworks of confetti rain down. For Claerbout, digital materiality will not remain as virtual reality but will attempt to penetrate as many aspects of life as possible, altering optical and material habits. Lens-based images are already part of the past, and will be replaced by dark optics.

 

More information

Photo © Rex Chu

 

All Access is a series of online visits to exhibitions which currently have restricted public access. As museums and galleries around the world are mostly closed, the series takes us into these spaces with the artists and curators as guides.

Here, curator Agnes Gryczkowska introduces a section of the exhibition Sun Rise | Sun Set at the Schinkel Pavillon Berlin.

Sun Rise | Sun Set brings together contemporary and 20th century artists to form a multi-layered response to the fast unfolding ecocatastrophe. The selected works permeate one another, creating small organisms and turning Schinkel Pavillon into a surreal landscape, highlighting the interconnectivity between humans, animals, plants, inanimate objects, technologies and non-beings.

The exhibition includes two works by Pierre Huyghe. The video tour below focuses on the room in which "Circadian Dilemma (Dia del Ojo)" is installed. The work is part of a series of aquarium works in which the artist creates cyclically-oriented underwater scenarios. The landscape of the water basin is modelled on a Mexican cave and is populated by six fish of the species Astyanax mexicanus, along with microscopic bacteria and algae.

 

Click here to watch the tour

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Isa Melsheimer's false ruins and lost innocence 1, 2020.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
The large-scale ceramic takes as point of departure the so-called Cuckoo Coffee House in Da Nang, Vietnam, an airy building from 2019 designed by a young Vietnamese architectural firm called Tropical Space. Inside the multiple nestled shapes overlooking an enclosed courtyard, a small forest of trees appears to thrive, their trunks richly glazed.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
The new sculpture is one of the artist’s largest and technically complex ceramics to date. Similar to her idiosyncratic use of concrete, Melsheimer who began to work with the material in 2013, has pushed the boundaries of this craft in scale and technique, making the medium completely her own.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Click the link below to see the full Spotlight!
⁠⠀

Photo © Lawrence Elisabeth⁠

 

Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston, presents a newly commissioned artwork for the by Anri Sala. This immersive new film and sound installation, titled Time No Longer, will occupy the Cistern for a period of nine months, transporting visitors into an other-worldly environment within this vast, subterranean reservoir.⁠⁠

Time No Longer will incorporate film projected onto a translucent, 22 by 150-foot (7 by 45-meter) screen with a soundtrack emanating throughout the space, its reverberations creating ripples on the surface of the water. Visitors will encounter the work in 360 degrees by making their way around the full perimeter of the 87,500-square-foot Cistern.⁠⁠

The film depicts a weathered turntable floating in a space station. It is tethered only by its electric cord, which allows it to keep playing a vinyl record. There appears to be no human presence to listen to it, and an uneasy quiescence around it suggests it may be spinning in the aftermath of a catastrophe – a custodian of that absent humanity.⁠

 

Read more

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Ugo Rondinone's zweiteraprilzweitausendundsiebzehn, 2017 and the quick, 2019.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Taking the universally recognized motif of a brick wall as point of departure, Ugo Rondinone's large scale zweiteraprilzweitausendundsiebzehn traverses the boundary between sculpture and painting.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
the quick is made of hewn bluestone. Five blocks have been stacked atop one another to form the basic shape of a human body—legs, waist, torso, and head. The stones, whose rough edges result of the quarry work, have not been modified. The marks left by weather, wind and corrosion contrast with the smooth surface of the poured concrete plinth.⁠

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Photo © Eberle & Eisfeld

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Angela Bulloch's Pentagon Totem: Tree, 2020⁠⠀

 

Pentagon Totem: Tree is the latest development in Angela Bulloch's ongoing series of sculptures. The work consists of five assembled geometrical figures known as regular dodecahedrons (each figure is made of 12 pentagons).⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Angela Bulloch's series of sculptures examines the connections formed by the convex geometrical shapes of their structure, together with their associations of colors and the gallery space. Made of painted Corian, the surface of the vertically assembled dodecahedrons creates an optical illusion of pushing and pulling planes. Conceived and designed within a digital imaging program, each superimposed module appears distinct while at the same time relating to the others.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

What would you like to know about Who The Bær?⁠
⁠
Tune in to attend the digital preview of the exhibition Who The Bær on Wednesday 3 March at 7 pm (CET) live on the @fondazioneprada Instagram account⁠
⁠
Simon Fujiwara will unveil his site-specific project and, in conversation with author Barbara Casavecchia will go through the key themes that inspired the fantastical character of Who The Bær.

Exhibition view: Liam Gillick, The Work Life Effect, Gwangju Museum of Art, 2021
Photo © Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea

 

Welcome to this month's Letter from Berlin which presents two major solo exhibitions, Liam Gillick's just-opened The Work Life Effect at the Gwangju Museum of Art in Korea, and Ryan Gander's Natural and Conventional Signs installed in his impromptu Kunsthalle-like space Solid Haus, part of his studio complex in Suffolk and currently only accessible virtually.

Our dedicated Online Viewing Rooms for Isa Melsheimer and Rosa Barba remain open and our new series Spotlight and All Access highlight works and exhibitions accessible virtually.

Under the title Sun Rise | Sun Set an ambition group exhibition with a multi-layered responses to the fast unfolding eco-catastrophe opens exclusively digitally today at Berlin's Schinkel Pavillon with a major work by Pierre Huyghe.

Rounding up our Letter is a selection of publications, among them a beautiful new catalogue for the 2017-2018 group exhibition Like a Moth to a Flame curated by Liam Gillick, Tom Eccles, and Mark Rappolt. Details can be found below.

 

Read the full Letter from Berlin here

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Fassung des Briefes aus Berlin

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Roman Ondak's Bad News, 2018.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Bad News consists of a round table with three papier-mâché spheres placed on its tabletop. As is characteristic of Roman Ondak’s practice, the table, formerly a revolving worktable showing signs of wear, is a found object that most likely originates from an artisan’s workshop in Bratislava, where the artist works and lives.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
The three spheres were made by Ondak using pages from three different widely-read newspapers, the American The New York Times, the Russian Izvestia and the Slovakian SME. The artist collected the newspaper issues for the work throughout December 2018. The diameters of the spheres was determined by the number of printed pages of each newspaper. While the surface of each sphere appears as a cacophony of article headlines and text quotes, the artist’s selection of the visible headlines was deliberately random. It is the observer who, subtly nudged by the work’s title, might assume “bad news” when in fact they may not be any.⁠⠀

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

The Work Life Effect is Liam Gillick’s first major solo museum exhibition in Asia. The exhibition continues the artist’s interest in questions of production, various modes of work and an endless search for a contemporary abstraction. The title directly refers to this – alluding to the complex tensions between work and life. The Work Life Effect proposes a zone where we sense the effects of the merging of work and life that has accelerated in the digital period and under the conditions of the Covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition does not directly illustrate such processes, rather it evokes a twilight mood of lights, forms and affects that bring forward how emotional and formal aspects of perception and experience are altered when we are subjected to new modes of mediated existence.

Animated lamps lure us into a liminal space where work and life have merged. The outside has been brought inside. Large neon mathematical formulas flood the museum with colored light and show ways to calculate human happiness. Two large “storefronts” are sited in the centre of the space. Each appears to have large glazed illuminated panels. In fact the windows are empty and lead us into a space of abstraction and a space where a piano sits while black snow softly falls.

An important aspect of the exhibition extends to the lobby of the museum and the book lounge. These spaces will be furnished with low tables and stools that provide spaces for informal gathering, study and research. A program of education, performance and video streaming will be produced in these spaces and in the exhibition itself.

An exhibition catalogue is forthcoming.

Martin Boyce, After Light, 2021, acrylic paint on perforated steel, aluminium, cellulose paint on cast bronze and bronze wire, 166,5 x 110 x 18 cm. Photo © Martin Boyce

 

We are pleased to announce our participation in the first iteration of FIAC Online Viewing Room where we will present major works by Rosa Barba, Martin Boyce, Angela Bulloch, Etienne Chambaud, General Idea, Ann Veronica Janssens, Isa Melsheimer, Roman Ondak, Philippe Parreno, and Ugo Rondinone.

 

More information

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present Ryan Gander's Y gêm (My neotonic contribution to Modernism), 2017.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Y gêm (My neotonic contribution to Modernism) takes as point of departure a 1918 abstract sculpture by the Belgian Modernist artist George Vantongerloo (b. 1886, Antwerp; d. 1965, Paris). Vantongerloo, who was greatly influenced by his encounter with the Dutch De Stijl movement, pursued his interest in geometrical relationships and algebraic formulas beginning in 1918. Another art historical reference are Pop artist Claes Oldenburg's "soft sculptures" from the early 1960s.⁠⠀
⁠⠀
Ryan Gander short-circuits this development by first treating the older master's hard-edged sculpture with a computer program that enlarges the work and rounds angular shapes, before covering it in a thick layer of orange artificial fur balls, transforming the sculpture into a soft, fuzzy and inflated-looking form.⁠⠀

Click here to see the full Spotlight!

Simon Fujiwara, Sculpture for Who the Bær, 2020
Photo © Jörg von Bruchhausen

 

For this new site-specific project conceived for the ground floor of the Podium in the Milan premises of Fondazione Prada, Simon Fujiwara introduces audiences to the fairytale world of Who the Bær, an original cartoon character that inhabits a fantasy universe created by the artist. Who the Bær is a cartoon bear without a clear character – “Who” as they are known, seems to have not yet developed a strong personality or instincts, they have no history, defined gender or even sexuality. Who the Bær only knows that they are an image, and they seek to define themselves in a world of other images.

The world of Who the Bær is a flat, online world of pictures, yet one full of endless possibilities. Who the Bær can transform or adapt into any image they encounter, taking on the attributes and identities of those depicted within the image – human, animal or even object. In this sense the fantastical world of Who the Bær is a world of freedom: Who can be whoever they wish to be, Who can transcend time and place, Who can be both subject and object. Yet Who the Bær may never be able to overcome their one true challenge – to become anything more than just an image.

Who the Bær’s fantasy adventures are presented at Fondazione Prada in a giant labyrinth made almost entirely from cardboard and recyclable materials and forming the shape of a giant bear. As visitors travel through the bear-like installation, they are introduced to the basic design and formation of the cartoon character of Who the Bær before embarking on a series of adventures that follow Who the Bær around their fairytale world. Told through drawings, collages, sculptures and animations, we witness Who the Bær in their perennial quest for an authentic self.

Inspired by the tradition of fairytales as well as modern animation movies, Fujiwara uses the mechanisms of fantasy to explore some of the joys and traumas we face as a society possessed with images and spectacle.

The exhibition is completed by a publication, which is part of Fondazione Prada’s Quaderni series. Conceived as an illustrated story book, it includes a conversation with the artist.

The adventures of Who the Bær can be experienced on Instagram following their official account @whothebaer.

 

Read more

Photo © Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

 

This week for our Spotlight we present a selection of major works by Rosa Barba who recently joined the gallery, as well as an introduction to her new film and site-specific project, Inside the Outset: Evoking a Space of Passage, filmed in Cyprus, including the UN-Buffer Zone.

This summer, Rosa Barba will present an architectural film installation as part of the long-awaited reopening of the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, after five years of closure for renovation work.

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight

Ryan Gander, The Silent Majority / The Vocal Minority, 2021, brown paper, plastic envelope, A4 printer paper, inkjet ink
Photo © Studio Ryan Gander

 

Natural and Conventional Signs is an exhibition in which Ryan Gander presents a selection of new works directly guided by his research at Princeton undertaken during his time as a Hodder Fellow (2019-2020) and made during a period of reflection while the world paused amid a global pandemic.

Gander invites an audience into his studio-cum-gallery, Solid Haus in rural Suffolk, a two-hour drive east of London, digitally for the first time. There he has assembled a show in which the works have duality in meaning and utility; subverting the signs, tropes, and markers seen in the everyday world to shine new light on how we position ourselves in relation to the values of time, money, opportunity, attention and privilege.

 

See inside the exhibition

Photo © Tom Mannion

 

Live Tour and Zoom Conversation with Ryan Gander and Princeton Program in Visual Arts faculty member David Reinfurt
February 9, 2021, 12 pm (EST), 6pm (CET)
Pre-registration is required

 

Register for the tour HERE

© Thomas Demand & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021

 

Spotlight is a weekly presentation focusing on an artwork or a group of works. This week in the spotlight is Thomas Demand's Princess. ⁠⁠
⁠⁠
The work depicts a detail of the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship that gained notoriety when in early February 2020 several passengers were diagnosed with the novel coronavirus and Japanese health officials imposed a mandatory 14-day quarantine on the vessel which was then anchored in Yokohama, Japan. Aboard the ship were a total of 2,666 passengers and 1045 crew members whose daily activities were reported in worldwide news.⁠⁠
⁠⁠
The image is part of a series produced in 2020 for the covers of the Italian architectural magazine DOMUS. The series depicts "architecture which got into trouble," as Demand puts it. These are designs which became symbolic architectural forms for current disputes without necessarily being built with any such intention.

 

Click here to see the full Spotlight

Cemile Sahin, car, road, mountain, 2020, digital video, site-specific installation with photographs, advertisement banners and airplane slides, dimensions variable, duration: 12:27 min
Film still © Cemile Sahin

 

Welcome to our first Letter from Berlin in 2021!

We begin with a short introduction to the work of Cemile Sahin whose representation the gallery has just announced.

As much of Europe remains on lockdown, we highlight exhibitions and the extensive materials which makes it possible to visit and to engage with these remotely.

Our overview includes Simon Fujiwara at the Blaffer Art Gallery, Ugo Rondinone at SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, AA Bronson and Simon Fujiwara at the Schwules Museum, and our exhibition with Isa Melsheimer.

A charming short video on Philippe Parreno's work Echo at the Museum Modern Art, a recent interview with Esther Schipper, and our book recommendations round up this January edition of the Letter from Berlin.

Read the entire Letter from Berlin here

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Version unseres Briefes aus Berlin

 

Photo © Paul Niedermayer

 

Cemile Sahin was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1990. She studied Fine Arts at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin. She lives and works in Berlin.⁠

 

Sahin's artistic practice operates between film, photography, sculpture and text. Points of departure include both images and stories, which she stages in multimedia video installations. Her work questions the instrumentalization of media and the significance of diverse perspectives for the writing of history. Working with a variety of media, she explores how history and its narration changes when it is constructed through diverse—or even contradictory—points of view.⁠ ⁠

 

Her debut novel TAXI was published in 2019, followed by her book Alle Hunde Sterben in 2020, both of which are important components of her artistic practice. In 2019 she was awarded the ars viva 2020 prize for Visual Arts. The same year she was a fellow of the JUNGE AKADEMIE at the Akademie der Künste Berlin.⁠ ⁠

 

Click here for German text

Photo © Kristian Schuller

 

For its December newsletter, titled "The Challenge: We are in this together", The New Institute asked Esther Schipper – among other thinkers and practitioners – to share her insights and analysis on the current global pandemic. For the occasion, Esther Schipper selected artworks by the gallery artists showing that the questions of viruses and pandemics have been among us for a long time.

 

Click here to read!

Rosa Barba, Somnium, 2011, 16 mm film transferred to digital video (color, sound), duration: 19:20 min
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020
Film still © Rosa Barba

To conclude this extraordinary year, we present a special film screening from Rosa Barba whose representation we just announced.

 

Take a tour alongside Isa Melsheimer and Jan Kage who met last weekend in the artist's exhibition at the gallery in Berlin for a lively conversation.

We present our first online exhibition with Hito Steyerl and introduce materials from K21's digital guide.

Projects by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Jean-Pascal Flavien have real-life iterations and a strong digital presence: Steegmann Mangrané's work is currently on view in Madrid, Flavien's will be accessible in Hannover in 2021.

And don’t miss the online artists’ conversation on occasion of Jeanne Tremsal’s exhibition with works by Angela Bulloch, Isa Melsheimer and Christopher Roth taking place on Saturday, December 18th.

 

Read the entire Letter from Berlin here

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Version unseres Briefes aus Berlin

Exhibition view: Isa Melsheimer, false ruins and lost innocence, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2020
Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Online Tour of Isa Melsheimer's false ruins and lost innocence
with Isa Melsheimer and Jan Kage
Saturday December 12, 2020, 12 noon
The tour will be held in German
Join the tour on Instagram Live

 

Join Isa Melsheimer and author, musician, and curator, Jan Kage as they take you on a tour of false ruins and lost innocence, Isa Melsheimer's current exhibition at the gallery.

Photo © Sara Masüger

 

Rosa Barba was born in 1972 in Agrigento, Italy. She currently lives and works in Berlin.

She studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and has completed her PhD at the Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts, Lund University in 2018.

She has been a visiting professor at MIT, ACT (Program in Art, Culture and Technology), in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Barba holds a professorship in Fine Arts at the University of the Arts, Bremen.

Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.

Hito Steyerl, SocialSim, 2020, single channel HD video and live computer simulation Dancing Mania, duration: 18:19 min (single channel), Dancing Mania duration variable

© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020
Film still © Hito Steyerl

 

What happens to the art at the museum at night? 
A weird-ass visual podcast

 

During the corona-related shutdown in November 2020, Hito Steyerl’s exhibition I Will Survive at K21 (September 26, 2020—January 10, 2021) transforms into a livestream format. The project 4 Nights at the Museum developed by the artist, filmmaker, and author Hito Steyerl, provides some background and conversations about the works in the exhibition.

 

In five episodes (each lasting ca. 45 minutes), selected works and themes in I Will Survive will be discussed in more detail. Participants in the works, such as the New York-based graphic designer Ayham Ghraowi or the Hamburg-based actress Heja Netirk, will talk about their perspectives. In addition, Steyerl will present alternative versions of exhibited works and previously unedited archival material. Short guided tours by the curators will accompany visitors into the exhibition spaces, which are abandoned at night. They will take a look at some of the works and prove that there is nothing going on inside the museum during the shutdown. 

 

The episodes will livestream on e-flux Video & Film starting Sunday, November 15. All episodes air at 8pm CET, 2pm EST.

 

More information here

Andrew Grassie, Windscreen, 2020, tempera on paper on board, 14,8 x 18,8 cm (image), 31,1 x 35,2 x 3 cm (framed)
Image © Andrew Grassie

 

 Welcome to the Letter from Berlin!

Our focus is Andrew Grassie’s exhibition Still Frame with an essay introducing the Online Viewing Room and an online tour the artist and Manuel Miseur, director at the gallery, conducted.
While Thomas Demand’s exhibition at M Leuven is currently closed, we want to draw your attention to the artist's conversation with the museum’s curator Valerie Verhack, Demand’s recent interview with German Public Radio, and the final cover for DOMUS as part of his collaboration with the magazine’s 2020 guest editor David Chipperfield.

Recent press includes a comprehensive article on AA Bronson’s A Public Apology to Siksika Nation and an interview with Gabriel Kuri on life in Brussels.

We hope you enjoy our Letter from Berlin!

Hito Steyerl, SocialSim, 2020⁠. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020⁠
Film still © Hito Steyerl⁠

 

Hito Steyerl's simulation Social Sim screening live from a locked down K21 to reflect the current political climate.⁠

 

Watch the live stream here!

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Online Tour of Still Frame with Andrew Grassie and Manuel Miseur, Director at Esther Schipper

Sunday November 1, 2020, 11:30 am
On Instagram live

 

Andrew Grassie’s paintings are based on photographs he has taken himself or that he, in some cases, has found. Often they have been elaborately staged, although this effort is veiled by the ostensibly unassuming matterof-factness the small, precisely painted works exude. The works are executed with tempera, a technique associated with pre-Renaissance panel paintings anteceding the development of oil paint. Tempera dries very rapidly and remains relatively sheer. To create cover and solid colors, many layers are needed.

 

Click here to watch!

Photo © Ola Rindal

 

Enjoy a discussion with artist Philippe Parreno, creator of the installation Echo, a "sensible and sentient automaton" that "lives" in MoMA's lobby and interacts with visitors, and hear about what he's working on and thinking about these days.

 

An online lecture/panel discussion with Philippe Parreno
Wednesday, October 14, 2020, 12 pm (EST)

MoMA

 

Join the discussion

Rodney Graham, Vacuuming the Gallery 1949, 2018, painted aluminium lightbox with transmounted chromogenic transparency. 
Courtesy Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar
Photo © Ken Adlard

 

In his exhibition, Artists and Models, Rodney Graham brings to the Serlachius Museums his disguise self-portraits for which he is best known. Graham’s exhibition at Serlachius Museum Gösta is his first in Finland.

In his works, Graham explores the layers of Western culture, both everyday life and collective memory. He draws on wide-ranging references to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the art and popular culture of different eras.

He is best known for his disguise self-portraits, monumental photographic works in which he smoothly assumes various fictional roles. His art is characterised not only by subtle nostalgia and melancholy, but also gentle humour, poetic irony and meticulous finishing of the works.

Purchase the supporting exhibition catalogue HERE

Exhibition view: Philippe Parreno, Manifestations, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2020
Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

This Letter from Berlin introduces new documentation for Philippe Parreno’s Manifestations and Ugo Rondinone’s nuns + monks. Both exhibitions remain on view through October 17. 

This weekend the Lenbachhaus presents Ari Benjamin Meyers' K Club at Blitz Club in Munich. Also in Munich, Gabriel Kuri's exhibition as part of Various Others remains on view at Walter Storms Galerie through October 31. Please find detailed information below. 

 

Read the entire Letter from Berlin here

 

Hier finden Sie die deutsche Version unseres Briefes aus Berlin

Tao Hui, Joint Images, 2016, single channel HD video (color, sound), duration: 14:27 min
Film still © Tao Hui

 

Film screening with Tao Hui

Bi’bak, Berlin
October 8, 2020, 8 pm

 

Tickets available here

Photo © Brigitte Lacombe

 

Starting 9 October M is presenting the new exhibition HOUSE OF CARD by Thomas Demand. In order to limit the spread of the coronavirus there will be no physical opening event. Instead, there will be a livestream on Facebook on Thursday evening 8 October.

 

8 pm – Première of the film M and Thomas Demand made on the exhibition (English, subtitles in Dutch and French)

8:15 pm – Conversation between curator Valerie Verhack and Thomas Demand (English) on the exhibition at M and the accompanying book.

 

Click HERE to attend the online event

Thomas Demand, Bluethroat, 2020, pigment print, 172 x 135 cm
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020
Photo © Thomas Demand

 

House of Card offers an overview of various approaches to construction in Thomas Demand’s oeuvre from the past fifteen years. His work related to models, scenography and even buildings are closely related to architecture. At the same time House of Card shows the connection between Demand’s projects and those of other influential artists, architects and designers like Martin Boyce, Arno Brandlhuber, Caruso St John en Rirkrit Tiravanija.

The title House of Card refers to the precariousness of Demand's practice as a builder. Whereas architecture generally equates with permanence, Demand prefers to explore the limits of the ephemeral, as is evidenced in his use of paper and cardboard.

 

More inforiaton can be found HERE

Matti Braun, Bunta Garbo, 2002, wooden screen and digital prints mounted on forex
Exhibition view: MONOCULTURE – A Recent History, M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, 2020
Photo © MHKA

 

The group exhibition MONOCULTURE – A Recent History begins from the principle that any understanding of ‘multiculture’, should necessitate an investigation of ‘monoculture’. The societal understanding of monoculture can be defined as the homogeneous expression of the culture of a single social or ethnic group. The project seeks to approach the notion of monoculture with an open mind. It will thus aim for an analysis of, rather than an antithesis to, monoculture, approaching it not only from historical, social, cultural and ideological perspectives, but also philosophical, linguistic and agricultural ones.

Through the works of more than 40 artists, including Matti Braun, the exhibition will provide a tentative mapping, allowing for a comparative analysis of different manifestations of monoculture, as well as their reflections in art and propaganda, seeking to draw some conclusions that might be relevant for society and culture at large.

The exhibition includes Matti Braun’s Pierre, 2009 and Pierre Pierre, 2010, several silk paintings, as well as Bunta Garbo, 2002, a project on the Belgian writer Andrea Juste.

Two publications accompany the exhibition: MONOCULTURE – A Recent History, exhibition catalogue published by M HKA, and The Aesthetics of Ambiguity – Understanding and Addressing Monoculture, co-edited by Pascal Gielen and Nav Haq, published by Valiz as part of the Antennae – Arts in Society series.

 

More information can be found HERE

 

Ann Veronica Janssens, Untitled (Blue Glitter), 2015 – ongoing
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020
Photo © Dirk Pauwels

 

Ann Veronica Janssens has created an extensive body of work over four decades spanning installations, projections, immersive environments and sculptures. At the core of her practice is an interest in light and its impact on our perception and experience.

This exhibition will be the first major presentation of Janssens’ work in London. Across three floors of the Fire Station, sculptures, projections, light works and installations continue Janssens’ exploration of perception and ephemerality.

Janssens’ Untitled (Blue Glitter), an expanse of reflective, blue glitter scattered across the floor of the gallery, will occupy the Main Space for the first half of the show, after which it will be replaced by Janssens’ reflective wheeled Bikes, 2001. Visitors are invited to cycle round the Main Gallery on one of five custom-made bicycles with mirrored wheels, which will reflect light on the surrounding gallery walls and floor as the wheels turn.

Hot Pink Turquoise is presented in collaboration with Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Fog Dog (Eye), 2019-2020 (detail), giclée print. Image © Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

 

With Dog Eye, on view from September 13 through November 22, the Kunsthalle Münster is presenting the first solo exhibition in a German institution of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané. His works—comprising installations, films, sound-based works, photographs, drawings, holograms and sculptures—are marked by a poetic approach of overlapping geometric and abstract forms with organic elements: branches, leaves, insects and recently also dogs serve as integral components of the artist's works. He combines and intertwines these to create an overall structure that subtly brings us to question our own position in the world, and thus also our attitude toward our environment. We are called upon to re-think the prevailing western perception based on binary thinking, in terms of subject and object, nature and culture.

 

More information can be found HERE

Photo © Piotr Porebski

 

On the occasion of Berlin Art Week 2020, The Art Newspaper spoke with AA Bronson about participating in one of the big shows opening during the week, at the legendary Berghain nightclub, and about his experience of living in the city. 

 

Click here to listen to the full podcast!

On Wednesday September 9, at 18.30, the Museo Madre will present the new publication by Liam Gillick: Standing On Top of a Building: Films 2008-2019 published in June 2020 by Edizioni Madre and arte’m.⁠
⁠
After an introduction by the president of the Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee, Laura Valente, Liam Gillick will be joined in conversation with the curators, Alberto Salvadori and Andrea Viliani.⁠
⁠
The publication is the first retrospective dedicated exclusively to Liam Gillick’s film production.⁠

 

RSVP HERE

Ari Benjamin Meyers, Solo, originally produced in 2009 by Soundfair at Loge, Berlin with Ruth Rosenfeld, soprano
Photo © Douglas Gordon

 

Solo by Ari Benjamin Meyers was first presented in Berlin in 2009 by Soundfair at Loge. In line with the basic concept of the work, only one person at a time was allowed to enter the space, to experience a live vocal performance of ca. seven minutes, delivered by a solo singer. In the first version of the performance the soloist and the solo audience were in one space, a small room which created, in fact provoked, an inevitably intimate connection between the two.

In Solo (Social Distance Version)—presented first at CHB-Collegium Hungaricum Berlin and later at Yellow Solo—the soloist and the solo audience are separated by a wall, and thus the show, experienced in complete solitude, is comprised not of hearing, but overhearing.

VENUE 1:
CHB – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin
Dorotheenstraße 12, 10117 Berlin
September 11, 12, both days 4 pm - 10 pm
Duration of the performance: 10 min
The performance takes place in continuous repetition from 4 pm till 10 pm on the 11th and 12th of September. A solo visitor is allowed to enter the space following a short break after each performance.
From 4 pm to 7 pm, the performance can only be visited at a pre-booked time slot. It is not necessary to register between 7 pm and 10 pm, entry is in the order of arrival.
Registration: contact@yellowsolo.de

VENUE 2:
Yellow Solo
Danziger Straße 162a, 10407 Berlin
September 19, 26, October 4, 11, on all four days 4 pm – 8 pm
Duration of the performance: 10 min
The performance can only be visited here at a pre-booked time slot.
Registration: contact@yellowsolo.de

David Claerbout, Wildfire (Meditation on Fire), 2020
© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2020. Courtesy Musea Brugge
Film still © David Claerbout

 

David Claerbout has distinguished himself in recent years with video works that are as spectacular as they are multi-layered. The artist's multimedia oeuvre – located, so to speak, between the media – aims at a fundamental reflection on visual genres. In his concentrated output, time becomes the decisive dimension of perception. The artist plays ingeniously with the forms of temporality in images, their possible elongations and condensations between moment and duration.

Claerbout's new film, Wildfire (Meditation on Fire), will premier at Kunst Museum Winterthur on September 11 and Musea Brugge on September 30, 2020.

 

Click here for more information

Photo © Andrea Rossetti

 

Artist Talk

Gabriel Kuri in conversation with Georgina Jackson⁠

Thursday 3 September 2020, 7.30 pm⁠ ⁠(CET)

 

Join Gabriel Kuri and The Douglas Hyde Gallery Director Georgina Jackson as they discuss Kuri's practice, in particular his current exhibition The Douglas Hyde Gallery "spending static to save gas".⁠ ⁠ The conversation will be live cast on The Douglas Hyde Gallery YouTube channel. 

 

More information can be found here

AA Bronson and Adrian Stimson looking at the Old Sun Residential School, now the Old Sun Community College, on the Siksika Reserve, 2018.
Photo © Mark Jan Krayenhoff van de Leur

 

(At Home) On Art And Healing: Online Artist Talk

With AA Bronson And Adrian Stimson
Hirshhorn Museum (online)

August 19 2020, 2–3 pm

 

Artists AA Bronson and Adrian Stimson join Hirshhorn assistant curator Betsy Johnson for a discussion on their work and recent collaboration to address the fundamental role that art can play in helping us to face unspeakable atrocities, rebuild relationships and trust, and find healthy ways to heal and move forward together. Through this conversation, the artists approach the unanswerable question—one posed by Bronson in his work A Public Apology to Siksika Nation—of how one can apologize for genocide, if at all.⁠
⁠
Register here! 

“When I was a kid, I drew and built my worlds. I would make maps and models of places. I would mix toys together and there was a lot of masking tape, pencils, matchboxes, thread, string, and Elmer’s glue—sticking legos to pine cones and things like that. As an adult, as a childish adult, I’m still doing that storytelling through drawing maps and world-building.”⁠
⁠
Nathan Carter shared his recipe for a refreshing, tangy salad of cucumbers, mangoes, pineapples, lime, and spicy Thai chilis for MoMA PS1's new instalment of Cooking with Artists with Chef Mina Stone⁠
⁠
Click the link for the full recipe!
⁠
⁠

Down to Earth will focus on the boundary between nature and culture and how it can become porous. An important element will be its audit of our own “operating system”: 20 degrees Celsius, 50 % humidity in the exhibition hall – how did that come about? How did our predecessors come to prescribe this standard of modernity for museums? How did they work in this building before air conditioning? How does our air conditioning work and where is it exactly? Which hotels are ecologically viable, which energy companies, how will our programme change if the people working with us have to come here by train?

 

More information can be found HERE

Grönlund-Nisunen, Pneumatic Landscape, 2004/2020, polyester fabric, chipboard, timber, fans, digital dimmer, computer, 24,4 x 11 x 3,5 m
Exhibition view: Grönlund-Nisunen, Flow With Matter, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, 2020
Photo © Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

 

On July 17, 2020 Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen's major solo presentation opened at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai and will continue through the end of November. Delayed by the recent closures, the exhibition occupies the entire museum's 2,500-square-meter exhibition space on two floors and features more than twenty works, mainly large-scale installations using kinetics, light and sound. The selection of works spans the artists' entire career, including new site-specific works created specifically for the museum space.

Published on occasion of the Roman Ondak's exhibition History Repeats Itself at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg in 2017 and is published Verlag der Buchhandlung König. It is a personal and metaphysical journey into the landscapes of history and youth of Roman Ondak.

 

Roman Ondak works with conceptual art, that is: art based on an idea. Like the father of conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp, Roman Ondak works with found objects. He revitalises the genre by placing the "object" in a broader context, which allows new stories to arise - with both personal, poetic and political power.

 

Available here⁠