As a prelude to its repositioning, the Kunsthalle Wien organizes a ten-day festival dedicated to key issues of today’s society. WWTBD – What Would Thomas Bernhard Do takes up the tradition of Thomas Bernhard’s critical and recalcitrant thinking, transfers it into the present, and breaks it down into various disciplines in the sense of a concise analysis of the present.

Deliberately posed without a punctuation mark, the question What Would Thomas Bernhard Do does not raise expectations of a singular answer. It rather makes room for a wide range of statements, discussions, as well as the construction of both stable and fragile investigative and intellectual edifices.What Would Thomas Bernhard Do does not only work in a scientifically logic or poetical way, but also musically, visually, and, above all, in the togetherness and confusion of a marathon without a traced-out finishing line.

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Xing presents the second edition of Live Arts Week, held in Bologna, Italy, until 21 april 2013 at MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and other locations.

This event dedicated to live arts, unique in Italy, hosts a blend of new productions that revolve around the presence, performance and perceptual experience of sounds and visions.

The decision to launch it as a ‘week’ is an attempt to break away from the concept of a festival as a consumer point in the cultural life of a city. This is rather a case of a co-habitation of diversified forms – differing in size and intensity – concentrated into a limited time frame, proposing a vision of art as something complex but cohesive.

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Thick As A Brick presents a selection of more than 100 catalogues, books, art editions and zines published by Mousse and shown within three brick structures conceived by Kuehn Malvezzi and produced by the Danish company Petersen Tegl.

At the end of the last century, it was thought the new millennium would be represented in design and architecture by incorporeal values such as lightness, transparency, and evanescence, inspired by the fluidity of communication as well as the intangible nature of finance. The world seemed intent on becoming liquid. Instead, in the last few years everything has changed.

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Dear Friends,

We are happy to introduce you to Vdrome, an online platform that offers regular, high quality screenings of films and videos directed by visual artists and filmmakers, whose production lies in-between contemporary art and cinema. Each screening is presented during a limited period, as in a movie theatre.

Vdrome makes available a programme of exceptional artists’s films and videos that are selected due to their importance, quality and innovative strength, many of which are only shown in the context of film festivals, exhibitions or specific surveys, being therefore of very limited access.

Starting from today, Vdrome is online with Spectres by Sven Augustijnen.

Warmly,
Mousse

Add Fire is the title – beautiful and destructive – that Jimmie Durham has dedicated to the ninth edition of the 2013 Premio Furla. In thinking about fire, countless images and metaphors immediately come to mind. The associations with this basic element are so numerous and so easy that it becomes paradoxical and difficult to put into words: fire that purifies, fire that brings light, the phoenix rising from its own ashes, the burning fire of passion, the initial fire of the Big Bang, the glow of volcanic lava, the lighting of bombs, fires and torches, the flame of a candle…

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This solo exhibition by Matias Faldbakken reflects the artist´s on-going interest in transforming an existing language of forms related to a particular period in modernism. For this specific project, Faldbakken has sourced iconic sculptures created in Norway in the 20th century to carry out a condoned vandalism. Faldbakken essentially de-skills modernist sculpture’s aspirations toward the aerodynamically abstract and the utopically minimal by acrobating respected works of sophisticated ‘art’ into vessels for intoxication

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“My acts, my painting, my photographing, my considering, are part of, not separate from, this process of evolution and change. These photographs are not so much about this process as they are remnants from it. My participation was not so much one of intellectual consideration as one of visceral involvement.”

John Divola, 1980

Divolas practice is intertwined with marginal spaces in and around the suburbs and the desert, and the various abandoned and isolated dwellings of Los Angeles. The relationship between a structured, observational approach to image making and improvisational gesture is at the crux of Divola’s practice and can be traced from his earliest work of the 1970’s to the more recent bodies of work that are on view in this exhibition: Dogs Chasing My Car in the Desert (1996-1998) and Dark Star (2008). With a career spanning four decades, John Divola is distinctive for his commitment to photography. The notion that a photograph is anchored in a specificity of time, place and circumstance, and the artists’ complicity in relation to that is central to an understanding of Divola’s practice. In Divola’s photographs the instant is openly acknowledged as past, the photograph implicitly a fragment.

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The work proving things deals with the search for traces as a method. By creating various experimental setups in the form of image and objects Steffen Bunte addresses the topic of exploring structure and shapes. The work also draws on rearrangement and restructuring of already existing objects and materials. His own photographs are extended by a selection of scientific artwork and collected things. These found objects gain a reorganized contextualization by a specific composition in the exhibition space, which allows visitors a different approach to material and object in the new setting.

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After the partnership with documenta, Absolut Art Bureau, the art agency of the vodka brand, doubled up and headed to Miami Beach to sponsor the Art Basel Conversations. The strategy of the art branch of Absolut, one of the most active—and deep pocketed—initiatives around, has been to commission artists to build pavilions-cum-bar.

In Miami, a peculiarly ostentatious place where bigger is firmly better and where the average dimensions of the works on display, both in the Convention Center and in the mega collections, seems to greatly exceed any other anywhere, the structure conceived by Cuban collective Los Carpinteros, strategically located on the oceanfront, was refreshingly intimate and evocative.

It is safe to presume that people go art fairs to socialize, and are extremely keen to cheer on their business—which incidentally was vigorous this year: cheering endlessly from the early morning didn’t constitute a problem since all of Miami Beach is a big, mostly white lounge, operating 24/7, a place where is impossible to find a corner, including outdoors, where music is not airing and cocktails are not churned out of bars lined along pools, lined one after the next along the shore. (Stefano Cernuschi)

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Güiro: an art bar installation by Los Carpinteros

5–8 December 2012

Oceanfront, Miami Beach

RESÒ, the international residency programme that was founded in 2010 on the initiative of Fondazione Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT, is this year enriched by RESÒ Meet Up, likewise promoted and coordinated by nine institutions active in the field of contemporary art in Piedmont. The project arose from a reflection on the meaning of residency, in the sense of an opportunity to live in a place and at the same time to interpret it. Thus it originated with the intent of giving visibility and space to the research that, in Turin and in Piedmont, numerous young artists, Italian and others, have for years been conducting, in order to open a non-occasional dialogue between these artists and the institutions.

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Trisha Baga interviewed by Jenny Jaskey on the occasion of “Plymouth Rock 2″, Baga’s first US solo show.

Jenny Jaskey: Your work currently on view at the Whitney Museum, Plymouth Rock 2, presents a fractured narrative. It seems to suggest, to borrow Adorno’s aphorism, that “the whole is untrue”. I’m wondering if you could speak a bit more about your interest in the fragment and in returning to an icon of past without looking for an origin.

Trisha Baga: Now that you’ve got me thinking about the word origin (even though I’ve been listening to that song “Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch over and over again for the past four months), I think the origin you are referring to, I think to me, that is the present – the here, now experience. Which is such a dumb and impossibly slippery thing, but we are all subject to grasping at it, each from our singular bodies. What we experience is only a fragment of what we are aware of and vice-versa, and what I am interested in is the stuff that fills the gaps. Desire is a part of it, and I am realizing that the 3D video piece I just showed you (the long one with fireworks and karaoke starships) is about, well, this is what I wrote in my notebook earlier today: the desire to exceed the body, and how that led to sports, the industrial revolution, 3DTV, and Madonna.

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A constellation* is a set of discrete elements, placed (more or less) close together which form, when interconnected, another (more or less) identifiable figure. • “Constellation of Forms and Processes” reformulates this idea of interconnection, interrelation, and the creation of correlation between the three artists Manuel Burgener\, Lorna Macintyre⊙, and Freek Wambacq⊛.

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David Jablonowski’s exhibition, curated by Katja Schroeder, is organized by the Westfälische Kunstverein in the botanical gardens in Münster.

In his works, Jablonowski questions the potential of communication in contemporary visual culture. In the form of sculptures, videos and installations, he focuses on the theme of the development of language as a technically reproducible code and its aesthetic development with regard to the communication of knowledge and information. The artistic visual language of sculpture seems to be contrary to this topic. In his mainly sculptural installations, Jablonowski takes a surprising approach to volumes and shapes and their relationship to one another, shapes which form a contrast for example to two-the dimensional or virtual nature of the communication technologies such as print or Internet. In doing so, he confronts the transience of the smart technology of surfaces with materiality and sensual experiences such as feel, smell, temperature and light.

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Gestures in Time is part of the pilot edition of Qalandiya International – art and life in Palestine. Presenting 30 artists (including 21 new commissions) whose works explore the individual gesture as an act of aesthetic and social creation, Gestures in Time takes place in urban and rural locations across Palestine (Abwein, Hajja, Jamma’in, Dhahiriya, Jerusalem and Ramallah).

As the myriad of recent public mobilizations world-wide show us, our times are characterized by an overarching sense of disenchantment with high forms of government. Gestures in Time seeks to reconsider how the individual can conceive of having an aesthetic and socially creative life, within and beyond a specific geography. The exhibition sets out to explore the individual gesture on an intimate, social, political and aesthetic level, as a means to re-claim our relationship with society.

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The life of an artwork is often unpredictable. It can be exuberant or modest, changing according to moods, different lighting and modes of displays. For “Easy Living”, the artworks lay down their hats and set up home at Less Is More Projects. They settle in, deciding to sleep in the living room testing the limits of what we can endure in everyday life. Tenacious, decorative and voluminous, these pieces won’t stay discreet or apart. There are new relationships and negotiations to be made between the two occupants and their new “flat mates” in this half gallery, half collector’s apartment space.

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Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission by Ed Atkins in his largest solo exhibition to date, Us Dead Talk Love. For his exhibition at Chisenhale, Atkins has produced a new two-channel video work and surround-sound installation set against a backdrop of collaged panels. Us Dead Talk Love focuses on a dialogue between two cadavers that reflects upon immanence, representation and narcissism. Atkins describes the work as ‘a tragedy of love, intimacy, incoherence and eyelashes.’

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From Stavanger with Love

Becky Beasley, Nina Beier, Michael Dean, Giuseppe Gabellone, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Marie Lund with Åbäke, and Sara VanDerBeek

Gathering together a group of artists who work between distinctly sculptural and photographic practices, this exhibition focuses on the portrayal of sculpture and sculptural issues through photography. From Stavanger with Love departs from and plunges into a tangled nexus of concerns, legacies and lines of investigation. These include (in no particular order): a heightened awareness of the circulation of images; doubts and uncertainties regarding the phenomenological experience of the object vis-à-vis photographic and digital reproduction, which is nevertheless accompanied by an on-going belief in the necessity of unique, three-dimensional objects; an indirect and highly mediated experience of art history through reproduction; sculpture and objects as conceptual, linguistic and in some cases indexical documents; and lastly, the sense that confining objects and sculptures to two dimensions does not necessarily reduce or limit them, but renders them only more complex, and in some cases, opaque, and stranger than ever.

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