An exhibition of two adjoining shows by Slavs and Tatars and Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan is on at Kiosk, Ghent till 22 January 2012, featuring works that deal with interpretations and associations surrounding historically significant events. Friendship of Nations: Polish-Shi’ite Showbiz by Slavs and Tatars presents a re-imagination of an Iranian Polish Solidarity. Even to an eye unfamiliar with Iranian and Polish[…..]
I must admit I am often plagued by skepticism walking into ‘best of’ exhibitions – the ones, like the recent Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011: In the Presence, that promise to clairvoyantly open up a window onto the future of contemporary art. Often, these group exhibitions seem plagued by too many artists, who are represented by a single work, thrust together in a curatorial jumble that[…..]
Comprising only a large installation at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir’s Crepusculum – Latin for “twilight” or “dusk” – is a mixed-media, polyphonic, physical exploration of metaphysical structures that govern the human psyche, and speculates that an enigmatic and irrational system of signs, meanings and forms counterbalances the deceptively ordered exteriors of our existence. Above all, it is an experiential and tactile show that prioritises[…..]
On the surface, Judy Fiskin’s tiny photographs of stucco apartment buildings (Stucco, 1973-6) and Southern California architecture (31 Views of San Bernadino, 1974) belong to a subset of works by artists obsessed with the typography of architecture, à la Bernd and Hilla Becher, or even Ed Ruscha. Each of these artists has produced dozens, if not hundreds, of images of buildings, usually in black-and-white. The[…..]
Grasping the nebulous zone of art and politics can be arduous at best. The curatorial project of Agitated Histories attempts to do just that by compartmentalizing the political narrative. The Re-enactment, The Archive, The Persona, and The Intervention give some scaffolding from which the viewer can approach the work. The artists in this exhibition engage with the political, the social, and the personal through formal[…..]
Startle Reaction, an exhibition of works by Torsten Lauschmann is on view at Dundee Contemporary Arts till 8 January 2012. Skipping Over Damaged Areas is a compilation of movie titles, sequenced to form a new narrative. It is screened in the first gallery with Misshapen Pearl, a film that assembles street scenes and television footage, with Lauschmann’s voiceover reflecting on the streetlamp as a manifestation[…..]
Monika Fryčová’s show Perpetuum Mobile at the Kling og Bang Gallery propositions that the relationship between the visible and invisible is constantly in motion and ephemeral. Locked behind the socialist borders in then-Czechoslovakia, stories of local culture were the only narratives that Fryčová heard. Like many artists who were restless for new physical activity and renewed visions after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Fryčová[…..]
