The book analyses how the remnants of utopias and ideologies of the 20th century continue to influence and interact with contemporary culture, capitalism and the environment
Category Archive: art
Interest for shamanism is expanding faster than for any other spiritual practices in the Western world. The art world is taking notes…
The works exhibited suggest a new era of planetary and geological consciousness where we are asked to read, feel and listen to rocks in new ways
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NPCs are digital Sisyphus machines that have no perspective of breaking out of their activity loops. In the moments when the algorithm shows inconsistencies, the NPCs break out of the logic of total normality, and appear touchingly human
An analysis of the different contexts in which artists, museums and curators face restrictions today, investigating political censorship in China, Cuba and the Middle East; the suppression of LGBTQ+ artists in ‘illiberal democracies’; the algorithms policing art online; Western museums and ‘cancel culture’; and the narratives around ‘problematic’ monuments
The artworks explore the many challenges of our contemporary condition and reflect on a reality punctured from all sides. Not to commiserate on the state of the world but to stimulate discussions about how we can build a new reality
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In the Black Fantastic celebrates the ways that Black artists draw inspiration from African-originated myths, beliefs and knowledge systems, confounding the Western dichotomy between the real and unreal, the scientific and the supernatural
What would happen if the development, running and all the activities associated with a major art center were guided by an energy budget and not just by a financial one? If, in accordance with the Paris Agreement, that cultural space were to cut its energy use by 50%?
The artists selected in the show investigate a world made of processes, not objects. A world where matter fluctuates, shifts, mutates
The Device_art festival questions, subverts and adds poetry and humour to the many devices, systems, mechanics and machines that share our life
Maxime Berthou’s cloud-seeding performance meant that he basically attempted to “steal” clouds heading to the US and make them rain over Canada. This artistic gesture hinted at the possibility of geopolitical disputes arising between neighbour countries over the ownership of water contained in clouds
The DAOWO Global Initiative asked groups of artists, curators and thinkers from Berlin, Hong Kong, Johannesburg and Minsk to design new prototypes to address key questions about the potential of blockchain to replace outmoded models, decentralise power structures and rewire the arts
A brutally honest display of social exclusion in suburbs, prisons and refugee camps, colonialist heritage, censorship, public spending scandals and fight against the mafia
Torvund’s eerie short films draw on traditions, nature, pagan folklore, Christian symbols and science fiction
Thomas Hämén used coprolite from a dinosaur that lived about 140 million years ago to sculpt a device for anal stimulation, in an attempt to make us connect with geological or “deep time”
A festival dedicated to art by young talents, independent research, experimentation and unconventional curatorial gestures
The exhibition draws on radical feminist and techno-feminist theories from the 1970s until now that criticised and revised the nexus tying new technologies and technoscience to patriarchal ideas
Comics is a flexible medium to imagine new types of bodies and sexualities. It offers offer a safe space to test the limits of representation and build new fantasies that escape normative representations
MOMENTUM10 intends to go back to emotions in order to move beyond the rational and embrace a more nuanced, more complex reality
The artists invited by curator Katerina Gregos investigate change. In particular, how change, because of its relentless speed and much proclaimed inevitability, seems to escape robust critical scrutiny
A series of artworks in a disused biology faculty in Riga make the Anthropocene disturbingly palpable
A global overview of how contemporary artists incorporate text and the written word into work that speaks to some of the most pressing issues of the 21st century
Artists investigating how creativity can be deployed to establish empathy and communication between incarcerated people and the public outside the prison
Reilly addresses the urgent need in the contemporary art world for curatorial strategies that provide alternatives to exclusionary models of collecting and display. In so doing, she provides an invaluable source of information for current thinkers and, in a world dominated by visual culture, a vital source of inspiration for today’s ever-expanding new generation of curators
I was expecting the curator’s ideas of transience, instability and uncertainties to be translated into powerful works that directly engage with some of today’s most pressing and depressing concerns. I got very little of that. I got plenty of clouds (including a couple of atomic ones), foam, puddles, waves and fountains though.
Fortunately, the biennale also features a surprisingly high number of sound works, extraordinary visual and emotional experiences and, here and there, a couple of more politically-minded artworks
Pazugoo, a gooey, collectively modifiable uranium glow-stick waving Pazuzu, the Sumero-Asyrrian demon of contagion, epidemic and dust, is proposed as a marker for the presence of nuclear waste products
Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša explore the “collateral effects” and damages of name change
In 2007, three artists officially changed their names and adopted the one of Janez Janša, a very powerful, right-wing and generally unpleasant political figure embroiled in accusations of corruption and authoritarianism.
The administrative procedure not only turned their lives into a perpetual performance but it also altered their private, civil and artistic lives in ways they had not always foreseen
Alone or with the help of local communities, these artists have cleaned up polluted areas, planted wheat field, provided pollinators with colourful and appetizing flowery landscapes, built hanging and floating gardens, initiated edible and medicinal urban farms, developed schemes for sharing excess food and bred more resilient chicken breeds
Sholette lays out clear examples of art’s deep involvement in capitalism: the dizzying prices achieved by artists who pander to the financial elite, the proliferation of museums that contribute to global competition between cities in order to attract capital, and the strange relationship between art and rampant gentrification that restructures the urban landscape
Intuitively, we already know that the key to more unified societies lies in a mix of resistance, remembrance, borrowing from other cultures, dreams and empathy. Many of the artists in the show illustrate what happens when these abstract notions are turned into real life stories
Because it’s almost 40 degrees this week in Turin and i’m in a murderous mood, i’m going to split my review of the show into two parts. Today, you get the depressing bits and as soon as temperatures have cooled off a little, i’ll be back with the works that speak of solidarity, hope and compassion. It’s not all bad though because 1. i loved that show so much i visited it twice and 2. i’m going to open the quick gallery tour with one of my favourite artists
Informed by several years of research in the Australian outback desert, It Was Like Experiencing a Fold in Time, She Said bridges the gap between, on the one hand, the landscapes, mythologies and life of outback and aboriginal communities and on the other hand, the brutal origins of our technological ‘progress’
Alienation represents a potential to expand the horizons of our current lives, to think and act progressively and usher in change. Thus M9 wants to welcome the alien, also the alien in us, without preconceptions of familiar and foreign. It wants to welcome the alien as a challenge to the present as well as a promise of better, extraordinary futures
Momentum 9, The Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, opened a few days ago in Moss, Norway. Its focus is Alienation, a pertinent theme for a time characterized by deep social and economic inequalities, new forms of rabid colonialism, atmospheric turmoil, transhumanism, closing borders and relentless questioning of democracy
In this age of Brexit and shortsighted nationalism, of austerity and politicians pinning for the crucifixion of abortion, same-sex marriage and freedom of movement, an exhibition that breathes hedonism and transgression is not just amusing, it is also necessary because it compels us to reflect on the fights we fought, won and lost again. On the values and rights we should never take for granted
Socle Du Monde, the biennale that opened a few weeks ago in Herning (Denmark), celebrates artists who have “accepted the challenge of turning the world upside down”
Socle du Monde, the oldest Danish biennale is one of the most aesthetically pleasing art events i’ve attended over the past few years. But because the event is inspired by the masterpiece of a renowned exponent of conceptual art, it is also a biennale that conveys ideas, provocations and moments for reflection. I’ll get back next week with a post discussing these ideas and provocations but right now, here are some visual impressions of the biennale
Widener’s super computing mind leads him to use his own algorithms to elaborate numerical puzzles and games that only intelligent and independently-thinking machines of the Singularity age will be able to fully enjoy and understand
The newly commissioned works investigate repetition through works as diverse as an improvised performance based on the sounds of war, the exploration of the traces left by an UFO seen over the village of Bir-Nabala, a patchwork blanket that is knitted and then unravelled in echo of the Palestinian-Syrian refugees who have to rebuild their life with each displacement, the reviving of an archival photo of a 1970s Palestinian female fighter through various moments in the history of post-Nakba Palestinian art, etc.
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Bat Opera, 2013 Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Bat Opera, 2005 Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, who used to […]