In Long Ago and Not True Anyway at Waterside Contemporary, curator Pierre d’Alancaisez explores a kind of history that exists beyond the dry material of archives, records, and established national narratives. Instead, in this small London gallery nearly hidden around a corner among Islington’s high-density residential buildings, this exhibition’s artists and artworks blur the borders between uncertain subjective experience and the history it inhabits. Taking[…..]

Today in From the DS Archives we bring you an interview with Polish artist Lukasz Jastrubczak. Jastrubczak and his collaborator Małgorzata Mazur are currently exhibiting work in The Day Is Too Short at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum in Wrocław, Poland, through October 21, 2013. Jastrubczak also has work in Spojrzenia, the Deutsche Bank Foundation Award at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, through November 17, 2013. The interview was conducted by[…..]

In a time when appropriation has become seamlessly integrated into contemporary art practice, it’s not easy to provide a precise definition for such an increasingly amorphous concept. Jan Verwoert offers a robust description, calling appropriation “an intense sense of an interruption of temporal continuity, a black out of historical time that mortifies culture and turns its tropes into inanimate figures, into a objectified, commodified visual[…..]

Today we bring you a video of artist Tim Lee in conversation with Joseph del Pesco, director of Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. Lee, who is based in Vancouver, discusses his thoughts and processes as he re-creates a Warhol photograph from 1980: “It’s always…how can I articulate my artistic identity through others…what are some of the dissonances and what are some of the continuities?”  

An unattended bag of garbage amid a pristine installation is quite a thing to behold. At first instinct, one can barely believe the carelessness. Perhaps, in the haste of opening night, preparatory staff neglected it—or, in the case of Lifelike at the Blanton Museum of Art, one should reprimand oneself for failure to look closely enough. Titled Hefty 2-Ply (1979–81), the garbage bag is a flawlessly[…..]

As part of our ongoing partnership with Artillery, today we bring you author Seth Hawkins‘s report on the Laguna Art Museum’s exhibition ex·pose: Beatriz da Costa, a posthumous retrospective of the artist’s work. Only thirty-eight years old at the time of her death last year, da Costa was an artist who, in Hawkins’s words, was “brave enough, strong enough and inspired enough to allow us[…..]

Walking into the large, darkened space of Yang Fudong’s The Fifth Night (Rehearsal) (2010) at the Berkeley Art Museum’s Yang Fudong: Estranged Paradise, Works 1993–2013, the viewer is greeted by seven large black-and-white projections on three walls. In each projection, characters perform simple actions: two men carry suitcases down the street; a woman in a floral dress wanders pensively, her silk scarf fluttering. Superimposed on[…..]