What comes to your mind when you hear the term myth?
The fragrance greeting us each and every morning.*

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Communism and Islam are the two grand narratives of Central Asia, claim Slavs and Tatars, and they go further: “In fact, Communism and Islam are the two most important geopolitical factors of the 20th and 21st centuries.” With the exhibition Not Moscow Not Mecca in the Grafisches Kabinett and an outdoor installation at the Secession, the collective formed in 2006 writes the “autobiography” of a region that is little known in this country and that bears many names: from Central Asia to Greater Khorasan, from Turkestan to Ma Wara’ al-Nahr—Arabic for “the land beyond the river”.

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Three Days Of Struggle is a annual music festival, which takes place in Vittorio Veneto, north east of Italy.
The event, initiated by Codalunga in 2008, takes inspiration from Two Days Of Struggle, the hardcore festival organized by Green Records during the Nineties.

Three Days Of Struggle has made diversity its identity. Click see more for the line up of the fifth edition—kicking off tomorrow.

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at Coda Lunga, Vittorio Veneto

May 18-20, 2012

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San Francisco-born, New York-based artist Tauba Auerbach has described her work as an attempt to reveal “new spectral and dimensional richness…both within and beyond the limits of perception. ” Engaging a variety of media, ranging from painting and photography to book design and musical performance, Auerbach explores the limits of our structures and systems of logic (linguistic, mathematical, spatial) and the points at which they break down and open up onto new visual and poetic possibilities.

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1.    Structures are still being removed right now. New movement happening! Watch its destruction.

3.    The debris netting used comes from acts of repair and rebuilding in 2012. Practically, the material is used when constructing and reconstructing to keep loose objects and fragments from falling and endangering those below while providing pseudo windows for the workers. btw speaking of debris…
the largest concentration of marine debris is 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N.

11.    a hole = a depression.

10.  (To peel something away/off) remove or separate a thin covering or part from the outside or surface of something.

9.    And one can see through to the wall.

4.    Things need our support. We build Walls for that. We reinforce them. We mount shelving. We maintain the crumbles. We repair. We dream of, and are terrified of the destruction. What means are we supporting? What structures are we helping to build? What do we want to see ourselves without?

12.    be at peace. want not. have all. no good need. me happy. life ok. feel good. have happy thoughts. food good. sex good. me happy.

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Sissi’s solo exhibition “Aspiranti Aspiratori”, curated by Marcello Smarrelli, takes its name from a larger project that the artist created in collaboration with Elica and Ermanno Casoli Foundation over about a year. The idea for “Aspiranti Aspiratori” stems from the need of the company, world leader in the production of cooker hoods for household use, to generate new reflections on the theme of air purification.

In line with her aptitude for renaming and classifying reality, Sissi began by formulating a new concept, Organindustry, from which came a methodology capable of enabling communication between art and industry. The artist is housed inside the factory, familiarises herself with the environment until making it at one with her body and fills it with content. Then comes the start of an ongoing osmotic exchange between the company, transformed into the body of the artist, and the artist herself.

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The Modern Institute presents ’If you don’t like this book you don’t like me’, an exhibition of works by the artist Paul Thek and ‘Dresden’, Michael Wilkinson’s inaugural show of the new exhibition space at Aird’s Lane, Glasgow.

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Gavin Brown’s enterprise presents Sturtevant’s first exhibition in the US for 7 years.

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Matt Connors, Marc Hundley

at Herald St

until May 27, 2012

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MoMA PS1 presents the first survey of LaraFavaretto (b. 1973, Treviso, Italy), comprising works from the past fifteen years alongside new pieces made specifically for the show, including a new site-specific installation that extends through all of the galleries. The exhibition also features the first presentation of the extensive archive of images that the artist has collected as source material and inspiration. Organized by MoMA PS1 Curator Peter Eleey with Curatorial Assistant Matthew Evans, “Lara Favaretto: Just Knocked Out” is on view at MoMA PS1 until September 10, 2012 and is co-organized with Sharjah ArtFoundation, where it will be on view December 2012 – February 2013.

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In the latest history of art the obsession for void and chasm is a constant. Since Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni till the latter Anish Kapoor, absence and filling of void have always been main topics. It’s a necessity, for art and perhaps for humanity itself, to understand void and absence and shape it into an image, an encoding, a measure so this extension becomes less terrifying.  The notion of blind hole has a specific value in engineering. Indeed it means a duty excavation useful to succeed in the work more quickly, as in construction of  undeground lines. This method often implies that the ground around the empty space is going to collapse, so normally a fast grip chemical treatment gets the ground stuck and self-standing.

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On Stellar Rays presents Towards a Warm Math, an exhibition comprised of works that mingle strategies and forms borrowed from the hard-edged fields of science, mathematics, and technology with qualities and approaches that are more expressly humanistic—works, in other words, that attempt to muddy the pellucid water of stubborn facts and with unruly sediments of the personal, the biomorphic, and the spiritual. They are works that act as solvents, softening the normally rigid demarcation lines that divide the perpetually warring disciplinary camps of our thought, and dissolving the walls erected between the realms of the subjective and the objective.

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Helga Wretman’s first solo exhibition is a reflection of a world where providing services is a tradition: buying or selling yourself, your time or your talent. Services give customers a pleasurable experience: The exhibition is inspired by the urban context that surrounds the gallery.

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I’ve just come out of the shower. After drying off, I’m now deciding on a shirt. Three possibilities: white, red stripes, and light blue. The striped shirt is missing a button; ok with a sweater on top, but it’s warm today so that’s out. White looks better with my jacket, plus it’s been ironed. But it’s a little boring. The blue shirt was washed yesterday and is still a bit damp, also a little wrinkled. Right now, the morning sun is falling on the shirt’s collar as it dries on the radiator. This creates two tones: a blue reminiscent of the sky on a sunny day, and a yellow-tinted hue that verges on green. I decide it’s dry enough and put it on.

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Ed Atkins, Robert Benayoun, Juliette Blightman, Andrea Branzi, Jay Chung& Q Takeki Maeda, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Anneliese Hager, Danny McDonald, Susan Philipsz, Carol Rama, Man Ray, René-Jacques, Stephen G. Rhodes, Yorgos Sapountzis, Emile Savitry, Danh Vo

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Jenny Holzer searches for ways to make narrative a part of visual objects, employing an innovative range of materials and presentations to confront emotions and experiences, politics and conflict. While looking for subject matter for electronics and projections, the artist located a number of redacted, declassified government documents including policy memos, autopsy reports, and statements by American administration officials, soldiers, detainees, and others, generated during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These opaque documents became the foundation for Holzers silkscreened paintings in 2005; she began to create the fully hand-painted works on show in the gallery in 2010. Color, scale, and the mark of the hand are the only alterations that the artist makes; the graphic geometric shapes are the censor’s, and the surviving text is original. Holzer’s subtle alterations exacerbate how much one isn’t allowed to see.

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Two large rugs featuring images from junk email advertisements lay the ground for Andy Boot’s solo show at Croy Nielsen. Boot uses what can be considered waste products of the digital sphere, and in this case they are literally interwoven in our material world: Trombone and Submits (all works 2012) have been hand-tufted in Nepal and shipped to the gallery in Berlin, where they evasively adopt postmodernist forms. The abstract patterns originally formed the backgrounds of two specific junk-email images, of which Boot has subtracted their ‘foreground’ graphics. A paradox defines this relationship: the original png-files have been twisted, warped and downsized to ensure they will surpass email filters, while the rugs are ‘upvalued’ by their size, quality and context. Yet the image both as a poor png-file and in the form of a precious rug/piece of art, acts as a surface to serve its specific – digital, aesthetic as well as practical – purpose. In both ways it is conceived as a flattened background which at once alludes to an intriguing depth (let alone formally): Pixelated and reduced in its colour palette, the image compels through murky and dull shades in the digital realm, only to appeal by a similarly coarse yet sinuous aesthetic in the handcrafted rugs, carefully made strand after strand of dyed wool.

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Much of Gedi Sibony’s work appears to make a somewhat paradoxical connection between improvisation and refinement. Or, in fact, Sibony succeeds in making that connection seem precisely not paradoxical.

Normally using objects made of plywood and cardboard, Sibony’s work often evokes a deliberate ‘poorness’ (as in ‘Arte Povera’), if not barrenness. A restrained palette of colors, consisting of browns, greys, and beiges, and seemingly makeshift arrangements heighten this impression. For his second show at Galerie Neu, Sibony is still incorporating what is “at hand,” objects found at all moments in the activity of operating in life and with objects, from which he creates an orchestration intricate in color and detail.

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If you, herr Tooth, follow these instructions carefully i shall give you these two sausages to sell and soil and slice and save and whatever else you wish without restriction! so: (don’t be or get angry now) get a recipe from a butcher a recipe for sausages and follow this recipe (exactly), so that everything in the recipe that is not MEAT, in the dough or the mass (whatever that’s called) included – spices, water, gelatine, onions, garlic, etc. etc. etc. ; PUT IT ALL IN, and then in place of meat use the pages of the book!

Dieter Roth to Hanns Sohm, 1964

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