art

Cura. 35, The Changing World

31 October 2020 in Magazines Comment

Cura. 35
The Changing World

Cura. 35 selection of artists and authors records within a multifaceted mosaic some of the most relevant, urgent and dystopian visions of today’s changing world.

How were we imagining the future? And now that the future has suddenly arrived in its most subtle and dystopic form, what shall we save from the past, and how can we live in the present? In which direction will our perception and experience of what surrounds us change? Is there still space for a direct, physical relationship between nature and humanity or are we gradually distancing ourselves from our environment, in the name of a new and ubiquitous artificiality?

Two Covers
The two covers by Josh Kline and Oliver Laric premiere their brand new video productions, and offer the reader the opportunity of delving into the two artist’s respective worlds. Catherine Taft’s analysis of Kline’s latest work Adaptation (2019-2020) confronts us with a not-too-distant future, “an everyday world where life persists in the wake of the traumatic shifts caused by global climate change.” Carson Chan’s text about Oliver Laric’s video Untitled (2020) reflects instead on the tension of form and object, surface and content, creating an incessant dialogue between nature and artifice, real data and the surreal.

Changing Worlds
Anthony Huberman hosts a textual/iconographic contribution for his ongoing column Rhythm by anthropologist Tarek Elhaik, who invites us to discover the cosmic reverie of the “deep waters” in Bachelard’s concept, where geography, autobiography, and history all contribute to his rhythm-analysis of the ever-changing landscape.

The natural landscape (lost, extinct, recreated, reimagined) is at the core of Ben Vickers’ conversation with artists Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, whose different practices are similarly engaged in themes such as extinction, technology, and synthetic biology. Artist Lawrence Lek discusses with Alex Quicho about his ‘worlding’ narratives, where artificial intelligence, emotion, and sense of place interact in ever new ways. Rachel Rose talks with Kari Rittenbach about her filmmaking practice, particularly her works Enclosure (2019) and Wil-o-Wisp (2018), where the past world unexpectedly reveals aspects of the one we live in. “We share a love of bringing the fantastic into reality and watching it unfold” states Marianna Simnett as she talks with Ed Fornieles about horror films, worldbuilding, and intimate personal experiences.

Penny Rafferty focuses on Katja Novitskova’s exploration of the dystopic relationship with natural phenomena, describing the artist’s works as “coherent ecosystems that jam hard at the intersection between technology, sentience and art.” Margot Norton analyzes Kate Cooper’s work, which is often focused on the digital membrane created by computer generated imagery, as she argues: “Cooper’s high-definition world invites us to pierce and transcend our omnipresent digital skin, and perhaps find freedom in the technologies often used to constrain us.”
Flora Katz’ essay An Aesthetic of the Possible introduces a selection of artworks by different artists (Isabelle Andriessen, Bianca Bondi, Dora Budor, Grégory Chatonsky, Ian Cheng, Rochelle Goldberg, Pierre Huyghe, Agata Ingarden, Laure Vigna) which are symbiotic, placed within a set of relations with the environment, less stable and unified, more precarious and therefore more able of recording the shifting variations of the present world.

Hot & Portraits
In these variety of expressive outputs and artistic languages, the reader can recognize a common interest in the mutating world and in the definition of unexplored ways of reimagining it, of rethinking the human position within new coordinates.

The Portraits series is dedicated to Jenna Sutela (text by Francesca Gavin), Doreen Garner (text by Pavel S. Pyś), Precious Okoyomon (text by Hannah Black), while the HOT! section presents the Institute of Queer Ecology (text by Shannon Lee), Emilija Škarnulytė (text by Patrick J. Reed), Hoël Duret (text by Loïc Le Gall).

Cura. Magazine

Mousse 71, Spring 2020

9 April 2020 in Magazines Comment

Mousse 71
Spring 2020

The Spiraled Heart of Abandoned Things:
Ann Greene Kelly by Andrew Berardini

“Weathering the sun and rain and chill, they linger, waiting for anyone at all to see in their bedraggled and jilted bodies some new purpose besides disintegration: the tire to become a planter, a tree swing, tread for new cheap shoes—or, in Kelly’s hands, art.” Andrew Berardini on Ann Greene Kelly’s sculptures.

On Psychotic Images and Other Visual Symptoms by Aurélien Le Genissel

Visual art encompasses countless levels of language, withholding unspoken fears, dreams, and ideologies. Aurélien Le Genissel scrutinizes the techniques that artists, in our image-saturated world, employ to represent psychological demons and the ways we deal with them.

Based on a True Story: Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters and New New Left Cinema by Emily Verla Bovino and Hera Chan

Todd Haynes’s Dark Waters (2019) prompts Hera Chan and Emily Verla Bovino to examine the reliance of U.S. cinema on the purported truth, and the way we experience such reenactments as banal naturalizations of history.

A World without Angles: Larry Bell by Marie de Brugerolle

From his first paintings to his angle-cut and unframed standing walls, Larry Bell has explored the interaction of light on surface, and the resulting effects of vision and perception. Marie de Brugerolle investigates his pioneering work and inventiveness, as well as his decades-long impact on other artists.

The Sleeping Beauty Concept Works by Sabrina Tarasoff

Inspecting the oeuvre of Eyvind Earle, lead stylist on Disney’s 1959 animated musical fantasy Sleeping Beauty, Sabrina Tarasoff draws a parallel between the main character’s dormant immobility and Earle’s manner of stilling perspective to say something about our fears and fallibilities—without all the unnecessary anguish of “real life.”

Beyond Latin America, The Perpetual Quest for Specificity: Gabriel Kuri by Chris Sharp

In conversation with Gabriel Kuri, Chris Sharp underscores the enthralling application of Minimalism in the artist’s practice and its particular Latin Americanness. Convinced that the more precise forms are, the more effortless they should appear, Kuri’s sculptural practice testifies to an insistence on procedure, eschewing the hand or facture.

Tidbits:

Matthew Angelo Harrison by Rahel Aima; Bri Williams by Harry Burke; Elif Saydam by Kristian Vistrup Madsen; Eva Gold by Chloe Stead; D’Ette Nogle by Attilia Fattori Franchini; Virginia Overton by Ian Wooldridge; Jibade-Khalil Huffman by Lumi Tan; Pati Hill by Maurin Dietrich; Theodora Allen by Stephanie Cristello; Gina Fischli by Isabella Zamboni; Olivia Erlanger by Laura Brown; Pierre Guyotat by Estelle Hoy; Christine Sun Kim by Sofia Lemos; Jenna Bliss by Alexandra Symons Sutcliffe; Anthea Hamilton by Laura Herman; Tao Hui by Alvin Li; Aki Sasamoto by Charles Aubin; Jes Fan by Billy Tang; Ko Sin Tung by Ingrid Pui Yee Chu; Anna Witt by Joshua Simon; Tears of a Foreman by Noah Barker; Rebecca Morris by Tenzing Barshee and Camila McHugh.

Mousse Magazine

Frieze Magazine Issue 207

11 November 2019 in Magazines Comment

Frieze Magazine
November / December 2019 – Issue 207

“The more the activist agitates within [familiar cultural defaults], the more the noose tightens.” – Keller Easterling

The November / December issue of frieze focuses on infrastructural shifts in the arts, the environment and in activism. What is the artistic landscape like outside established global capitals? How are artists representing our now-hotter, wetter world? How can museums recover after scandals, and what should activism achieve? Featuring Pope.L, Keller Easterling, Rem Koolhaas, Chris Kraus, Marlene McCarty, Saskia Sassen, Thirteen Black Cats (Vic Brooks, Lucy Raven and Evan Calder Williams) and more.

The View from Above
“13BC are interested in land exploitation, the legacies of past conflicts and the creative deconstruction of cinematic conventions.” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie profiles 13BC, a film collective engaged in changing how we see and map landscape. A still from their 2019 film, Straight Flush, set in the barracks of a decommissioned military facility in Utah, features on the cover of the issue.

Countryside
“I began to realize that, through an accumulation of discrete individual changes, the countryside was transforming more drastically than the city.” Architect Rem Koolhaas and AMO visualize the emergence of a “new sublime” in the world’s rural zones—a change “perhaps more exciting than anything we have seen since the birth of modernism in the early 20th century.”

Also featuring:
Chris Kraus convenes a roundtable on art-making on the Mexico-US border; urbanist Keller Easterling on activism in an age of polarization and information warfare; sociologist Saskia Sassen on cultural “invisibility” in an age of global displacement; Jessica Lynne on Pope.L, an artist whose often-provocative work—spanning public performance, teaching and traditional media—has never been more urgent; Jennifer Kabat visits Silo City in Buffalo, New York, where artist Marlene McCarty is planting a garden that draws on the area’s history at the crux of capitalism and modernism; and Max Andrews pens a case study on how right-wing politics can impact museums, looking to Spain’s trailblazing Institut Valencia d’Art Modern (IVAM).

Columns and Reviews:
Mike Pepi investigates the nefarious potential of privatized digital surveillance, focusing on the company Palantir, and its ties to the US’s Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE); Timotheus Vermeulen reveals links between true-crime TV and Brexit; Susanne von Falkenhausen recalls cultural frontiers on either side of the Iron Curtain 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall; Jonathan P. Watts finds contemporary relevance in Jeremy Millar’s 1994 ICA exhibition The Institute of Cultural Anxiety; Skye Arundhati Thomas pens a call to action for the art world surrounding the Kashmir crisis; and Nicholas Mirzoeff asks—what can mass migration teach us about museums?

Plus, 22 reviews from around the world, including Vincent Fecteau at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, and Wael Shawky at Lisson Gallery, New York.

Answering our questionnaire is legendary sci-fi author William Gibson, whose novel, Agency, is forthcoming with Berkley Books.

frieze.com

Cura Issue 32: The October Issue

3 October 2019 in Magazines Comment

Cura Issue 32: The October Issue

Covers: Wong Ping, Stewart Uoo. Courtesy the artists.

Our iconic The October Issue 2019 is fresh off the press and brings together an incredible array of conversations with cutting edge and pioneering artists, together with recurring and brand new sections, that set the rhythm of an upcoming year filled with new and thrilling explorations.

The issue is introduced by two neon light-infused covers by artists Wong Ping and Stewart Uoo respectively.

Wong Ping engages in an in-depth conversation with curator Yung Ma about the beginnings of his career and the main themes of his work, which explores the relationship between fantasy and desire, sex and humanity.

Stewart Uoo’s work is introduced by a text by Whitney Mallett, who addresses the artist’s variegated references, which are drawn from pop culture and sci-fi, as well as New York’s queer nightlife. Alongside his manikins and hanging textiles, Uoo provides us with an unpublished photographic series reminiscent of fashion editorials.

The issue then moves to the unmissable columns by our contributors: in his Icons section Vincent Honoré engages in a long conversation with Marilyn Minter about the artist’s pioneering practice, as well as her role as an activist in today’s turbulent political landscape; in his Curator’s Diaries Massimiliano Gioni offers us a personal glimpse into Pipilotti Rist’s liquid world, where nature and culture are interwoven to form a collective organism that is carnal yet ethereal, voracious yet ascetic; and Anthony Huberman initiates a four-part column on “the percussive” as an aesthetic and political concept, investigating rhythm not only in relation to music, but as a vast area of study, from biology to politics and aesthetics.

The acclaimed artist Mohamed Bourouissa presents a four-hand visual essay together with curator Martha Kirszenbaum. That’s Just the Way It Is is configured as a ping-pong of images and songs that highlights the relationship between the sonic landscapes and the photographic series representative of the artist’s practice.

A focus on Miriam Cahn’s work brings us back to 2017 with an unpublished conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, where the artist talks about the main topics behind her paintings and the urgencies of her practice.

The Spotlight section focuses on LA-based artist Jasper Spicero who, in a conversation with Courtney Malick, describes the processes behind his installations and the characters of his movies—pivotal elements that give continuity to his projects.

Ingrid Luquet-Gad introduces Jesse Darling’s practice by saying that their work is stripped of any speculative or allegorical varnish: “Their sculptures are staunch and opaque, escaping art’s usual representational regime in favor of the ambiguity of things—objects and bodies alike.”

Our current Portraits series is introduced by Tom Engels who explores Nora Turato’s multi-faceted practice, that engages both with performances and a so-called ‘print renaissance’ made of words and images. The work of Elle Pérez is unfolded by Natasha Marie Llorens, who highlights their intense and visceral images that speak of the possibility of representation of notions such as gender, sexuality, love, and desire, elements that are entangled in Pérez’s bold imaginary. Margot Norton introduces the portrayal sculptures of Tau Lewis, whose motifs are informed by mnemonic materials and the artist’s keenness to invoke erased histories by stitching, carving, and assembling the latter into synergetic figures. And Rindon Johnson looks at Phoebe Collings-James’s practice, claiming that, “time and language are pushed in and out of their ideal form into something more.” Here, the London-based artist’s work is revealed through a reading of her performances and sculptures.

The HOT! selection of artists presents Giulia Cenci with a text by Daria de Beauvais, Shen Xin with a text by Alise Upitis, and Marcus Jahmal with a text by Loïc Le Gall.

CURA. 32

Great Women Artists

9 September 2019 in Books Comment

Great Women Artists

Five centuries of fascinating female creativity presented in more than 400 compelling artworks and one comprehensive volume.

The most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published, Great Women Artists reflects an era where art made by women is more prominent than ever. In museums, galleries, and the art market, previously overlooked female artists, past and present, are now gaining recognition and value. Featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries and spanning 500 years of creativity, each artist is represented here by a key artwork and short text. This essential volume reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a greater diversity of voices.

“Real changes are upon us, and today one can reel off the names of a number of first-rate women artists. Nevertheless, women are just getting started.”—The New Yorker

Format: Hardback
Size: 290 x 250 mm (11 3/8 x 9 7/8 in)
Pages: 464 pp
Illustrations: 450 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714878775

Phaidon