Neïl Beloufa’s video works do not so much deconstruct filmic conventions, as they un-build them, tear apart and reassemble the cinematic apparatus into new continuities. His characters inhabit precarious stages, meant to obstruct or facilitate the movements of the camera, rather than accommodate stories of becoming. Tracking shots, dialogues, half-gestures, segmented or cloned scenographies fictionalize each other to a point of cinematic self-display. This logic of dismantling extends into the environments Beloufa constructs around his moving images – a montage of material translations and unstable equivalents, of palpable film-stills from a process in many ways similar to his handling of video technique and narrative.

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Brand New Gallery is proud to introduce the first solo exhibition in an Italian gallery of the British-born Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare MBE. In this multi-part exhibition of sculptures, photography, and film, Shonibare explores the concept of destiny as it relates to themes of desire, yearning, love, power, and sexual repression. Over the past decade, Yinka Shonibare MBE has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization.

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The exhibition embodies multiple threads of abstraction, from the systematization of artificial flavors within the pre-existing paradigm of industrial production to a non-mimetic idea of scent perception and molecular structure rooted in the material specificity of substances. Olfactory perception (which along with taste are considered “the chemical senses”) is the proper domain for the perception of material specificity as it is based in the molecular structure or the primary “chemical signature” of a material.

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SculptureCenter is pleased to announce the simultaneous presentations of new work by four artists, Rossella Biscotti, David Douard, Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, and Jumana Manna, each artist to have a solo project in an U.S. institution for the first time.

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Federica Schiavo Gallery is delighted to present Fuori tema (Off Topic), third Andrea Sala’s solo show at the gallery. The new body of works comes from the intersection of several apparently unrelated ideas and from an unexpected crossbreeding of common forms and materials that seem incompatible, introducing a new formally autonomous language to the sources of inspiration.

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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s second exhibition with Sadie Coles HQ focuses on two bodies of work, each the subject of a major new publication. A recent group of the artist’s Bat Opera paintings – produced last year during a residency in Tuscany, Italy – appears in conjunction with a new volume published by Sadie Coles HQ and Koenig Books, extensively documenting this long-running series. Also on view is an array of collages which Chetwynd was invited to create for a new edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, released this year by Four Corners Books. The exhibition reflects the various stages which led to the creation of each publication, with dummy runs of the two books viewable alongside the final versions.

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Copies are closely connected to their originals yet create a distorted image of whatever they duplicate. Copies replicate and preserve their originals but also make it possible to view them in a new perspective. Even the process of reproduction itself is removed from the original, in a certain sense making the copy an abstraction of its original and causing a shift in perception, shapes, or materials.

Peles Empire – a collaboration between artists Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff – is a multifaceted exploration of these mechanisms. The starting point for their work is Peles Castle, a summer residence built for King Carol I at the end of the 19th Century in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

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ZERO … is pleased to present “Imitatio Christie’s (partoftheprocess6)”. The exhibition is the sixth episode of a project that develops over time and that imagines to condense, through a chain of poetic events, the description of a vision. All this by leaving open to “chance” some variables that are a structural part in defining the final form (impossible to imagine a priori). The recording of the present (processuality, linked to the idea of vitality and dynamism) is the pivot around which moves the material development of the exhibition and tends to represent the image itself (even though, by definition, only for a fragment of time). Visitors will be offered a sensory experience in relation to the passage of time during the day and the changing of light conditions. The naturalness of the daytime and the artificiality of the night.

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Lunds konsthall is glad to present “Don’t Embarrass the Bureau”, a group exhibition organised by Brussels-based independent curator Matteo Lucchetti (Italy). The exhibition questions the workings of bureaucracy, in the time of so-called “leaked democracy”. The title is borrowed from a novel from 1972. Its author, Bernard F. Conners, had been a FBI special agent for eight years and claimed to have written the first book revealing all the Bureau’s secrets at all levels. The rule that all agents must internalise is: “Whatever happens, never ever embarrass the Bureau.” The secret services symbolise the highest degree of loyalty to an office, where the individual is expected to dissolve and vanish. Any act that embarrasses the Bureau—or any other institution or organisation conscious of its reputation—will disrupt its regular functioning.

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Raffaella Cortese is pleased to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Alejandro Cesarco.

Alejandro Cesarco works in dialogue with the histories of Conceptual Art and addresses, through different mediums and strategies, his interest in repetition, narrative and the practices of reading and translation. On view at the gallery will be a series of photographs, texts, and a recent video, that investigate chiefly two lines of thought: the idea of art as a form of art history and the preoccupation with style in relation to ageing. At the center of this peculiar intersection lays the acknowledgement that if art has to do with the “unknown” – which is different from a banal preoccupation with novelty — then, a recognizable (repeatable) matured voice or style contradicts this very notion of discovery or surprise.

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For his second exhibition at Bugada & Cargnel gallery, Nick Darmstaedter (born in 1988 in Los Angeles, lives and works in New York) takes a look at the ultra-contemporary aspect of electronic spamming through a new series of oil and silkscreen paintings. The exhibition explores the notions of readymade and reappropriation, a thread that weaves through much of the artist’s work, questioning the aesthetic aspect of the most mundane contemporary productions. The title of the exhibition, Fuddruckers, is borrowed from an American fast food chain that tends to compensate for the lack of quality by quantity, just like spams. This reference immediately sets the show in an ambiguous relationship to a form of culture that is both massive and personal, despised and popular, oriented towards efficiency more than aesthetics, while possessing a certain beauty.

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“What emptiness here / In my place. / All anxiety consumed. / Nothing remains of me / If not the source / Which it did not indicate.”

Karl Kraus

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This exhibition will present the first major survey of artist Hassan Khan’s work to be held in Egypt. While internationally celebrated, including a recent nomination for the Hugo Boss prize, and an early influence in Cairo’s independent art and music scene, the artist has never before presented such a large number of works in Egypt. Khan premiered his artwork in Cairo in 1995, and this show will feature a selection of his works from the mid 90s to the present day.

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In the front gallery the walls have been repainted with an appropriately titled, “bananadream 1″; common latex paint infused with a vetiver essential oil, implicating the paint to perform in a way beyond its standard capabilities. An conceal that simultaneously reveals, an interest in nearly all of the materials used in Cowan’s work.

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If the Whitney Biennial is a snapshot of American art at this moment, and if any intimate encounter with American art at this moment must be mediated (as all intimacies these days are), then Marcel Breuer’s museum building here at 945 Madison Avenue is a well-disposed mediation for capturing twenty-four scenes of America. In assembling the artistsand groups I tried to answer a question of Breuer’s from his notes on the building: “What should a museum look like, a museum in Manhattan?”

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How to define “American” in a survey of contemporary American art, especially one with as much history behind it as the Whitney Biennial, is a question that has often challenged, even vexed, curators. As an American who has spent much of the last thirteen years in the United Kingdom, I have been compelled by artists whose work is as hybrid as the significant global, environmental, and technological shifts reshaping the United States.

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Although it may be far-reaching to think that a Whitney Biennial could be organized as a curriculum for other artists, aiming at pedagogy seemed a worthy ambition. Not because I am an artist and a teacher, nor because I sought to create a democratic survey, but because I didn’t want the frame that the viewer will look through to be a purely subjective take on contemporary American art.

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