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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On occasion of his eighth personal exhibition at Art Concept, Jean Luc Blanc presents a new series of drawings and paintings. When talking about this artist, who has been shaking up the French art-scene for the last 20 years, it is difficult to get off the beaten tracks and avoid quoting his own sources of inspiration. We remember his 2009 “Opera Rock” exhibition at the CAPC-Bordeaux with pleasure, as an unusual retrospective in which he took the liberty of surrounding himself with his artist-friends. Generous, faithful, alternative, bizarre, this collector-at- heart definitely is a well-rounded individual, but do we really know him?

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At the beginning of the 1990s, Martin Kersels experimented with his body. As an active member of the group SHRIMPS (with Pam Casey, Gail Gonzalez, Steven Nagler, Ryan Hill and Weba Garretson), he performed a series of familiar and simple gestures: holding, throwing, falling, kissing, cadencing, rocking; performances that oscillated between radicality and the absurd, both transpiring through the photographs taken during the performance. Simultaneously, he developed a 3-dimensional work guided by movement. Inspired by objects and the body language of daily life, Martin Kersels builds not only staged spaces where body and machine interact, but also animated sculptures producing incongruous actions and sounds. The bizarre dimension of his work is only a facade, his plastic work is in fact underpinned by a conceptual and critical reflexion on our relations to the world and society. The constant discussion between bodies, space, and the object is an integral part of his practice.

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Stuart Shave/Modern Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Lara Schnitger. This is the third solo show of the Los Angeles-based Dutch-born artist with the gallery. Schnitger’s signature works – sculptures, paintings and banners made of fabric – are brought together in this exhibition with the artist’s recently launched line of clothing Sister of Arp.

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kaufmann repetto is delighted to announce Pae White’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Continuing in her exploration of diverse materials, techniques and media, …and then you know what? presents two site-specific installations along with a large scale sculptural work that reconfigure the gallery’s architecture, while playing with themes of tradition and history.

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Mamco presents a retrospective of work by the French artist Philippe Thomas (1951-1995), some of whose work is part of the museum collection. Displayed on all four floors of the building, it is divided into three sequences.

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The largest Polish presentation of Paulina Ołowska’s work to date, the exhibition shows both its thematic diversity and the various working methods employed by the artist. It features works of painting, sculpture, stage design, installation, neon light, assemblage, drawing, collage, textile, as well as a new installation, created specially for the exhibition: a fashion store with a collection by the brand Clemens en August. In her practice, Ołowska explores the issue of liaisons between the historical avant-garde and the present, creating a melange of arts: high-brow with applied and popular. She is preoccupied with contemporariness and topicality, which she confronts with utopian visions from the past, encouraging the viewer to reflect on forgotten aesthetics and ideologies.

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For some years Belgian artists Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys have been present on the wider stage of the international art scene. They have been producing a unique epic-absurd theatre consisting of video works, photography series and sculptural installations. In February 2014 they will present “Das Wunder des Lebens” (The Miracle of Life), their first large solo show in Austria. Its main element is a large-scale installation which the artists describe as following: “We think of the big exhibition space as a place of stillness. You can only hear the noise of the water plashing from the fountain and you can see 400 (silent) drawings. There are no colours in the exhibition. Only black and white”.

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Far and High is the inaugural group exhibition at FAHRENHEIT — an interrelated residency program and space dedicated to exhibitions, performances, film programs and talks, initiated by FLAX (France Los Angeles Exchange) and developed by director and curator Martha Kirszenbaum.

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