9 March 2012
Regents Studios, London

Dear Gallerist,

I hope this letter finds you well and that the works Marie has sent to you have arrived in good spirits. They left the studio we share on Tuesday to travel in a van for a couple of days before residing temporarily at your gallery. The objects can be considered as common objects or at least that is how they behaved in our studio, when they were ‘hanging out’ in the corner, sometimes silently, sometimes frantic. As I was observing them from behind my desk I saw the group growing, their positions altering, and their features developing. I saw them hinting at certain functions but then resisting to fulfil these aims. A couple of them received a glass front, two-dimensionally positioned as if they only wanted me to know them from the spot I was watching them. But then to make the trip to you they changed. Some got filled with non-art material, one was rolled up and another one placed in a box which was slightly too small.

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“Prima Materia” is a group exhibition featuring works in ceramic by nine contemporary artists including Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Cameron Jamie, Liz Larner, Andrew Lord, William O’Brien, Sterling Ruby, Rosemarie Trockel, Paloma Varga Weisz, and Andro Wekua. While these artists’ practices encompass a diverse range of media from drawing and installation to film and video, each incorporates clay in distinct ways that reveal not only the multitude of formal and conceptual possibilities of the medium, but also the broader, constructive processes through which forms emerge.

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International Project Space presents a solo exhibition by Jason Dungan (b. 1978, Houston, Texas, USA), his first in a public institution in the UK.

Pacific gathers together a number of works produced over the last year alongside two new works produced for the exhibition. Central to the show is an installation comprising a standard theatre lamp illuminating a suspended tree branch, which casts a shadow within a screen-like frame onto the opposite wall. This simple, almost tautological, projection set-up stages a moment of what Dungan refers to as ‘accidental cinema’ whereby any surface might momentarily become a projection screen by means of incidental light and shadow. Dungan’s installation acts as a constant within the dynamic of works in the exhibition, functioning as a structural device against which various image mediations are played out. It also articulates an interest in the shift between the space of the street and the studio or gallery and how the construction of a cinematic space distends the incidental moment into one of dramatic significance.

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Nick Oberthaler {…}

at Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna

until May 5, 2012

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Michael Dean’s (b. Newcastle 1977) sculptures are either the perfect size to be carried or quote their surrounding architecture where they are then to be found lurking, propped against gallery walls. Made from cast concrete, the surfaces are veined and ridged, offering invitations to be touched. Tactility is an essential sculptural quality for Dean – he wishes us to first ‘touch with the eyes, and then allow ourselves to touch with the hand’.

Government quotes from and transforms the Institute’s galleries. The concrete floor has been covered with a thick, wool, wall-to-wall carpet, becoming something to touch, with the new surface changing the visual and sonic experience of the spaces. Instead of standing, the Institute’s Information Assistants sit on the floor. The door handles at the entrance to the galleries have been recast as four forearm-sized sculptures, titled ‘Yes (working title)’ and ‘No (working title)’. These flat, grey, concrete bodies leave themselves no choice but to touched, their patina changing as the raw, unsealed surfaces pick up the traces of each person’s hand.

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Bringing together over 30 worksspread over 2,000 square metres, Urs Fischer’s monographic exhibition unfoldsthroughout the atrium and first floor of Palazzo Grassi. The works selected come from several international collections, including the artist’s own and, of course, that of the François Pinault Foundation. Together, they present the artist’s career from the late ‘90s to today, including new productions shown here for the first time as well as works created in collaboration with Georg Herold—one of Fischer’s former professors—and a sculptural project installed in the public space of the city, organized in collaboration with students from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts.

This exhibition presents an overview of the career and the philosophical foundations of an artist widely considered one of the most important contemporary sculptors. The unique quality of this artist’s work stems from the way in which he seizes ordinary objects (Fischer’s favourite working material) and transforms their meaning through the use of highly diverse techniques and materials, in an approach that often resembles that of collage.

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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.

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Kees Goudzwaard’s work is easily recognizable. This is a consequence of the production process of the work, as Kees Goudzwaard commences by creating a collage of cut out square and rectangular pieces of coloured paper, acetate and transparent foil, which he composes in more or less regular grids by fixing them with paper masking-tape. This process is slow and complex, and develops gradually as it implies numerous decisions and a lot of looking and waiting until the artist finds he has achieved the desired composition and atmosphere.

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Artistic and literary works are the starting point for the work of Ciprian Muresan (*1977, Dej, Romania), who appropriates them for a reflective project that intersects with the recent history of Romania and other Eastern European countries and, more generally, ponders the realities of the contemporary world.
For his first solo exhibition in Switzerland, Ciprian Muresan presents two new pieces: an installation, “Recycled Playground”, from which the exhibition takes its title and its tone, and a companion video creation. A selection of other significant works is also presented. Juggling humour and critique, the artist highlights the structures and processes of all forms of power.

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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).

Save the date – Reception and drinks
Friday 20 April, 6 – 11 PM

The opening will feature a video projection by Enrico Ferrari Ardicini
The event is kindly supported by Elena Assante Design Studio and Immobiliare Aquila

Raven Row presents the first exhibition of the collection of historic textiles assembled by Seth Siegelaub over the past thirty years for the Center for Social Research on Old Textiles (CSROT). The exhibition features over 200 items from a collection currently comprising around 650. It includes woven and printed textiles, embroideries and costume, ranging from fifth-century Coptic to Pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles, late medieval Asian and Islamic textiles, and Renaissance to eighteenth-century European silks and velvets. Barkcloth (tapa) and headdresses from the Pacific region (especially Papua New Guinea) and Africa are also on display.

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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”.

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Mousse #33 is out and about. Click see more for fresh contents.

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As the world submits more and more to the abstractions of capital, the interconnectivity of digital
networks, and the promises of the experience economy, the body responds by lying down.
—Alex Kitnick

“Because They Try to Bore Holes” is Pamela Rosenkranz’s first solo exhibition at Miguel Abreu Gallery. The show features new works that “take the form of paintings and sculptures, but do not themselves begin with these terms.”1 Framed works produced with repurposed materials, such as adhesive mount hand-applied to blank Ilford photo paper, or various soft drink liquids mixed with Ralph Lauren latex paint covering inkjet printed paper, are installed alongside sculptures made of hand-warped acrylic glass sheets and Ikea furniture parts boxed in their original cardboard packaging, itself painted in decorative shades of white. Throughout the exhibition, Rosenkranz confronts painting and sculpture’s traditional address to human-scale, alienating its convention through her material treatment of the objects at hand.

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The exhibition “Mengele’s Skull” is structured around a specially commissioned book of the same title co-authored by Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman. Artist and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has been commissioned to respond to the proposition laid out in this book. Next to major new works by Hito Steyerl, this exhibition presents documentary and source materials.

The publication Mengele’s Skull discusses the forensic identification of the remains of infamous Nazi-doctor Joseph Mengele after his exhumation in 1985. The forensic investigation and identification of Mengele’s remains marks a transition. From now on, the “era of the witness”, centered around human testimony and trauma, gradually gives way to an “era of forensics”, in which things – such as bones – act as the witnesses of past events. How do bones act as witnesses? What role do technologies such as 3D scans and biomedical data play in the making of forensic evidence? And what is the role and politics of images?

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Czech’s photography explores the visual possibilities of poetry, deepening the dialogue between the written word and visual art. “I have nothing to say. Only to show.” includes two series by the artist.

For A small bouquet by Frank O’Hara, Czech invited seven writers to interweave new texts with a picture poem by American poet Frank O’Hara. O’Hara’s calligram, simultaneously both poem and image, serves as the static visual structure around which each new text is arranged. Czech photographs each page, “retrieving” the disguised calligram by circling each of its words with oil pastel. Through this interplay of appearance and disappearance, Czech emphasizes the form of the calligram, as well as her own approach: one can never see the image and read the text at the same time.

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“the voulez vous chaud” at Galerie Perrotin features a series of fresh new Gelatin paintings.

Joyful, bold, avant-garde paintings.
Voulez vous frais fraise de Père Lachaise
Voulez vouz ça-va, ça vient
Voulez vous la merde c’est moi
Voulez vous manger à l’œil
Voulez vous oh la la
Voulez vous la mère du maire est mon frère
Voulez vous début du duvet
Voulez vous descendez à la cave
Voulez vous métro – boulot – dodo

Like in their installations and this list of titles, Gelatin is not afraid of switching styles. From realistic to monochrome, from gracious art to everything, from everything to minimal and back again.

The richness of their artistic language is humorous, provocative, challenging, charming, sometimes illuminating, but never boring.

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In Art Talk! Italia, Vice magazine storms the brains and studios of some of the most interesting artists of the Italian peninsula. For its second episode, Vice interviewed Rä di Martino, Turin-based Roman-born artist whose research concerns issues related to cinema and other connected fields.

In the video above, Rä speaks about her personal story and the development of her artistic practice, showing some of her most significant works and offering us a brief but personal glimpse of her city.