Viewing articles from 2017/11

Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, London W2 2AR

Torbjørn Rødland: The Touch That Made You

Torbjørn Rødland, Bathroom Tiles, 2011-13

In Torbjørn Rødland’s photography activity is stalled. Chemistry is cauterised and left to breathe and rest, surfaces and nubile skins are luminous and lustful, viscosities slip and collaborate. Review by Alex Bennett

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Plymouth Arts Centre, Peninsula Arts, KARST, Plymouth College of Art, The Council House, Plymouth

We The People Are The Work

More Than A Pony Show, Matt Stokes.

A partnership between Plymouth’s major visual arts venues, 'We The People Are The Work' is comprised of five new commissions installed across the city. With each involving varying degrees of collaboration with the city’s inhabitants, at the core of the work is how each artist navigates the complexities of ‘social engagement’. Review by Rowan Lear

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Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, 5015 Bergen, Norway

Magali Reus: Hot Cottons

Hot Cottons, Installation view

Hot Cottons is Dutch artist Magali Reus’ first solo exhibition in Scandinavia, and her largest solo exhibition to date. The artist creates sculptural objects that are seemingly recognizable, often appropriating the symbolism of ordinary objects from our immediate surroundings. Throughout, there is a flourish of mechanisation relocated to the hand-touched. The result is objects that appear with an unclear, unsteady identity; between the commonplace and the hyper real.

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The Rotunda, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 1934 Poplar Ave, Memphis, TN 38104, USA

Lisa Hoke: Pie In The Sky

Pie In The Sky, installation view

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is proud to present New York-based sculptor Lisa Hoke as the third artist in the museum’s Rotunda Projects series. Her installation Pie in the Sky, designed especially for the Brooks’ rotunda, will be completed Wednesday, October 25. Museum visitors are invited to watch Hoke create this dazzlingly colourful and richly textural abstract installation—of plastic cups, cardboard boxes, paper flyers, drink cartons, and molded Styrofoam, all suspended from the rotunda’s dome

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Jack Shainman Gallery, 524 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

Hayv Kahraman: Re-weaving Migrant Inscriptions

Hayv Kahraman: Re-weaving Migrant Inscriptions installation view 2017

In Re-weaving Migrant Inscriptions at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, Hayv Kahraman’s material treatment of characters is important – pale, nude bodies and homogeneous features contextualize them in the annals of visual history, but while their faces look opaque, their bodies, suspended in the negative space of raw linen, feel ghostly, merely outlining the promise of a form. Review by Torey Akers

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Peles Empire, Karl-Marx-Straße 58, 12043 Berlin, Germany

Shannon Bool: Cathedral/Castle

Installation view

At Peles Empire, Berlin, Shannon Bool’s works address the power of visual representation and manages to challenge authority by means of re-appropriation and exposure to forms once more unfamiliar. Review by Joan Lee

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Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB

States of America

Lee Friedlander, Mt Rushmore, South Dakota, 1969, gelatin-silver print.

Nottingham Contemporary’s ‘States of America’ sweeps across the shifting social and political landscape of the USA between the 1960s and early 1990s, capturing the rise of popular culture and suburbia, declining city centres, the Civil Rights Movement, wealth disparity, urban life and the fading American Dream. Viewed through the lens of seventeen different photographers, we are offered a necessarily prismatic picture of American culture that is particularly compelling given current events. Review by Hannah Newell

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Austrian Cultural Forum, 28 Rutland Gate, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1PQ

Emotion + the Tech(no)body

Emotion + The Tech(no)body, Ulla Rauter

Hosted at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the exhibition brings together works which evoke and unveil emotions dealing with technology as a subject or a tool. The show challenges our cultural attachment to data and the relationship of our bodies to technology, offering points of view on artistic practices that on the one hand bring these notions together, and on the other convey the tension within them. Review by Fiorella Lanni

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Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 5RH

Zach Blas: Contra-Internet

Zach Blas, Jubilee 2033, film still, 2017. Commissioned by Gasworks; Art in General, New York; and MU, Eindhoven.

The prefix, ‘contra-’ designates the oppositional, the illicit. The title of Zach Blas’ show, ‘Contra-Internet’ then, affirms the internet as the hegemonic network, the principal arena of political control where social possibility is dictated, mediated and constrained. ‘Contra-Internet’ asks: how can we think beyond or outside the internet? What happens when the internet dies? Review by Alex Bennett

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Division Gallery, 45 Ernest Ave, Toronto, ON M6P 3M7

Nicolas Baier: Asterisms

Vanité (bureau astro)

Division Gallery is pleased to announce Asterisms, an exhibition of new works by acclaimed Quebec artist Nicolas Baier. His past work consisted of a self-reflexive examination of the camera’s possibilities, focusing on the medium’s transformation in the digital age. Baier’s experimentation compelled us to pay attention to the perspectival changes engendered by photography: how the technology alters both the Real and our direct reality.

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Bonner Kunstverein and Artothek, Hochstadenring 22 D-53119 Bonn Germany

The Policeman´s Beard is Half Constructed: Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Installation view, The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed: Art in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Bonner Kunstverein 2017

Titled after the first book written by a computer, The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed surveys art engaged with the age of artificial intelligence. The exhibition includes both historical and contemporary artworks made between 1961 and 2017. Comprising over 100 works by 36 artists from 14 countries, the exhibition is the largest to be held at the Kunstverein in 30 years.

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Index, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Kungsbrostrand 19 11226 Stockholm

Beth Laurin: Provisorium

As its title, Beth Laurin: Provisorium, suggests, this exhibition functions as a provisional retrospective, the contents of which have settled, but are not yet final. The word provisorium also has a more everyday meaning in Swedish as ‘makeshift’. This word falls short of the fine delicacy with which much of Laurin’s work is realized, but does perhaps account for the way that the work meshes together the everyday life and environments in which she lives and works. Review by David Price

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Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street Manchester, M15 4GB

AND A 123

Aand a 123 installation view

The title for Castlefield Gallery’s exhibition, AND A 123, suggests a pace and a child-like playfulness that is experienced throughout this cohesive group show. Review by Eli Regan

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White Cube Bermondsey, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street, London SE1 3TQ

Damián Ortega: Play Time

Damián Ortega, Play Time, White Cube Bermondsey, 27 September - 12 November 2017

For his exhibition ‘Play Time’ at White Cube, Ortega has created new large-scale installations, sculptures and two-dimensional works which address the themes of chance and accidents in the creative process. Review by Fiorella Lanni

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