From our friends at Beautiful/Decay, today we bring you a look at the chemically manipulated photographs of Rohn Meijer, whose work combines happy accidents with a trash-to-treasure approach to art making. Author Jené Gutierrez notes: ”Meijer claims that 90 percent of each batch he creates is trashed, but apparently he has a large arsenal of film that he doesn’t mind tossing, as they were most likely going to end up[…..]

Senan Lee and Pansy Aung make up the duo Salt’n’Pepper Squid, and they specialize in making innovative and often humorous advertising campaigns that range from magazine spreads to promotional videos. Their recent evolution from individual creative producers to collaborators—in June of this year—has inspired new ways of thinking that reach beyond the campaigns the duo are accustomed to making. In September, they came up with[…..]

Chris Burden is one of the legendary giants of performance art. In his seminal body pieces from the early 1970s, he orchestrated a series of daredevil brutalities and tests of the body’s resilience. Burden has had a more prolonged career, however, as a large-scale installation artist who masterminds feats of engineering that seem divorced from the body: scaled-down replicas of major bridges, a giant scale[…..]

Premised on the obliquely hypothetical question “What if the world changed?”, the Singapore Biennale 2013 (SB2013) is presented as a deconstructed entity centered on allusive keywords—or “tags” in internetspeak—such as “histories,” “intervention,” and “materiality” in order to highlight the transmutative and the transformative qualities of the art produced in the region. With a collaborative team of 27 curators instead of an artistic director helming the show,[…..]

Australian artist Andrew Nicholls dredges the queasy aesthetics of sentiment for its submerged ideological content. In an ongoing thread of his practice, he locates the ideals and practices of British imperialism in the kitsch, seemingly innocuous world of 19th- and 20th-century ceramics, disrupting this historical narrative with traces of the otherness otherwise repressed in the imperial worldview. He subsumes his viewers in an unsteady undertow[…..]

#politics #statehood #borders #biennials #nationalism The Venice Biennale is fundamentally shaped by its founders’ belief in statehood. Each nation-state secures its site, much like an embassy, and asserts its self-image through the choice of curators and artists. Four pavilions at the 2013 Biennale demonstrate how the notion of the nation-state is constructed and deconstructed in the face of contemporary global pressures. For Bangladesh, the pavilion[…..]

After the Smithsonian’s G. Wayne Clough decided to remove David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, Wojnarowicz became a household name and a cultural touchstone, to the point where Vanity Fair can now glibly claim, “Right-wing America will be begging for David Wojnarowicz…” and expect its readers to get the joke. In September, Clough[…..]