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.
Xing presents Live Arts Week, a new project born out the fusion of the experiences of the two Bologna festivals (2000>2011): Netmage – International Live Media Festival and F.I.S.Co. – Festival Internazionale sullo Spettacolo Contemporaneo.
The event takes place in Bologna, from april 24 to 29, 2012, and is developed throughout one week in six different locations and settings in the historical centre of the town. Live Arts Week intensifies a weave between disciplines and forms of expression, and cohabitation between artists and audiences from different backgrounds. Focused on live arts, it offers a program that reflects an idea of art as experience made of temporalities, postures and the imaginaries. The decision to launch the new event as ‘week-long’ is an attempt to break away from the concept of a festival as a consumer point in the cultural life of a city.
These days the Salone del Mobile is taking over the city of Milan, and for the occasion Mousse is happy to present an exhibition of brand new design by the Weimar collective MY BAUHAUS IS BETTER THAN YOURS.
The exhibition—where you can also check Mousse Publishing’s latest publication—is running through April 22 in a temporary showroom in Via de Amicis 51 (M2 Sant’Ambrogio).
The opening will feature a video projection by Enrico Ferrari Ardicini
The event is kindly supported by Elena Assante Design Studio and Immobiliare Aquila
Mousse will be offering a three-month internship position at its editorial offices in Milan.
University graduates or students in the last year of a degree course in the humanities, cultural heritage, communication studies, language, or art academy graduates and students, Journalism and Communication Master’s students will get the opportunity to enter into the day-to-day operations of an international magazine and add important experience to their résumé.
Candidates should have a keen interest in contemporary art, excellent writing skills, excellent English, courtesy, flexibility, and if possible, basic familiarity with Adobe InDesign. Applications, accompanied by a résumé/CV and optional published work or unpublished writing samples, can be sent to maria@moussemagazine.it with the subject line “Stage”.
On Thursday 29 March 2012 a new and significantly expanded Museum of Contemporary Art Australia was unveiled to the public. The redevelopment transformed the MCA, with spacious new galleries including an entire floor dedicated to the MCA Collection; the National Centre for Creative Learning with state-of-the-art technology; public spaces that embrace one of the world’s most famous locations, and a series of site-specific artists’ commissions.
“Ritual without Myth” is an exhibition that considers the potential of ritual as a catalyst for transformative experience. Curated by the graduating students of MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, the exhibition features the work of ten international artists, currently emerging to wide critical acclaim.
Featured artists – Danai Anesiadou, Asco, Erick Beltrán, Lygia Clark, Joachim Koester, Patrizio Di Massimo, Ioana Nemes, Ocaña, Amalia Pica and Yeguas del Apocalipsis
Presented by Friends of the High Line, High Line Art commissions and produces public art projects that take place on and around the High Line, a public park built on an historic freight rail line elevated above the streets on Manhattan’s West Side.
High Line Art invited Anne Collier to conceive a new commission for the 25-by-75 foot billboard next to the High Line at West 18th Street and 10th Avenue. This is the second work to be presented as part of HIGH LINE BILLBOARD. The new billboard follows the iconic and much celebrated presentation of John Baldessari’s The First $100,000 I Ever Made, a gigantic reproduction of a $100,000 bill that dominated the skyline in Chelsea during the month of December.
on January 21, 2012 we opened the last shows of the gallery with Spartacus Chetwynd, Hans-Jörg Mayer and a group show with works of Ida Ekblad, Matias Faldbakken, Berta Fischer, Karl Holmqvist und Vincent Tavenne.
The gallery closes in March.
REGISTER OF DOCUMENTS 1974-
Register of Documents (Vokno)
Where the Berlin Wall once marked the frontier between the two opposed political systems of Germany, Sony and Mercedes Benz have now constructed new headquarters, celebrating their victory in the Cold War. Materially speaking, these structures are light, soaring tensile monuments of steel and glass – the ideological antithesis of the heavy opaque wall the buildings replaced.
It is hard to attribute a stylistic unity to Hubert Duprat’s work. His intention isn’t to surprise or to create “out of the blue”; each one of his pieces is the result of a precise and tangible moment that pinpoints a significant experience, meant to allow him to temporarily break up with his previous schemes. He is at the crossings of two worlds: the world of free artistic expression, and the world of rationally organized artifacts. Neither goldsmith nor sculptor, not an entomologist, definitely not an archeologist, not even an artist, he uses his knowledge to reach beyond a purely artistic sphere. His interest doesn’t really lie in the transformation of something into something else that could be considered artwork, but rather in the creation of a metaphor between being and becoming, a ”know-how” and a possible “how-to-know”.
Galerie Eva Presenhuber presents new work by Paris-based American artist Oscar Tuazon in a show entitled Manual Labor. In recent years, Oscar Tuazon’s works, notably constructions in wood and concrete, have been shown in many exhibitions worldwide, including the 2011 Venice Biennial. His approach, working with and against the entropic qualities of natural materials, achieves fascinating results. In formal terms, Tuazon’s work displays loose links with the development of minimal and land art by artists such as Sol LeWitt or Michael Heizer. Tuazon’s hybrid sculptures, which are formed by and bear the traces of physical labor, are situated between architecture and performance.
“Third Time” is the first solo exhibition by the Brazilian artist Renata Lucas at an Italian institution.
In her works Lucas questions the space we inhabit, our perception of it and the relationships that are established within it, as she is aware that there are no objective answers to be found but merely possibilities to test. Her projects consist of interventions – invasive in some cases and subtle in others – in the architecture and spaces with which the artist interacts, and they are always the outcome of a long process of experimentation, ongoing mediation and failures. Each work is an attempt to suspend the rules, to measure the “limits” of possibilities, using those very limits as contents to be developed again and again in new directions.
Maureen Paley presents the first solo exhibition in London by the Cologne-based brothers Gert & Uwe Tobias (born 1973 in Brasov, Romania). Gert & Uwe Tobias’ exhibitions often incorporate wall paintings, large-scale woodcut prints, collages, type-writer drawings and ceramic sculptures. Their works embrace eccentric figuration, geometric abstraction, and the typographic. The brothers’ interest in folklore and regional mythologies provides a contextual framework for their practice that simultaneously draws on personal biography, cultural identity and popular culture.
Increasingly well-known since the mid-1980s, especially in New York, Verne Dawson’s painting focuses with positively anthropological zeal on the history of humankind’s evolution and impact in dialog with the world around it. The universal manner in which the artist views and examines the world is evident in his complex cycles of works. Recurring themes including astrology, numerology, religion and mythology become the key sources from which his pictorial narratives are fed. In this way, Dawson’s works offer a door to a world which has always existed, and which still exists, but which has been marginalized by the many-layered interconnections of modern civilisation.
Jonathas de Andrade, in a conversation with Stuart Comer, thinks about the condition of stiffness that inhibits his generation and explains how his work sets the goal – identified by Suely Rolnik – of grasping a new political-creative flux.
Chantal Akerman has addressed issues like otherness and confinement, starting with her own biography and that of her mother, a survivor of the Nazi camps. Elisabeth Lebovici met with the artist to talk about how her extraordinary filmography has been able to shed light on the Other as Subject.
The Arab Image Foundation is an expanding collection of photographs from the Arab region. Alessandro Rabottini talked with its co-founder, the artist Akram Zaatari, who explains why the images produced by everyday people are so important in his work.
