From ancient Egyptian poppy tinctures to Victorian cocaine eye drops, Native American peyote rites to the salons of the French Romantics, mind-altering drugs have a rich history. ‘High Society’ explores the paths by which these drugs were first discovered – from apothecaries’ workshops to state-of-the-art laboratories – and how they came to be simultaneously fetishised and demonised in today’s culture
The exhibition explores portraiture and the representation of political, economical and social power in the contemporary world through the works of contemporary artists. Portraits of famous political figures, investigations into the lifestyle of the social elite, as well as inquiries into the power structures of international institutions
Rineke Dijkstra photographed a 18-year-old legionnaire named Olivier Silva, minutes after he had been accepted into the legion. She photographed him six more times over the course of thirty-six months while he was following the Foreign Legion stern training in Aubagne, near Marseille, and when he was stationed at Castelnaudary and in the Pyrenees
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I tend to avoid blogging about the most well-known galleries. I doubt they need my posts to attract the crowds. On Thursday however, i went to Tate Britain to see Fiona Banner’s sculptures and realized i would not be able to keep the excitement out of my website
A sensorial wearable device forcing to smell grass and to hear your own breath. Equipped with fresh sod and headphones, this mask inhibit the visual system while enhancing the olfactory by the proximity with soil.
The device defines also a sensory territory constructed by the rhytm of the breath, which is diffused from the headphones with a 1.5 sec. delay
The Documentary Real was probably the most satisfying conference i attended this year. I had planned to write down my notes from some of my favourite talks when Robrecht Vanderbeeken from KASK (the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent) informed me that the videos of the symposium were online
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The exhibition “West Arch – a new generation in architecture” shows 25 architecture studios from Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany which all respond to present demands and problems in an experimental and unconventional way
Beware! May contain ants scratching vinyl, a Cousin Itt alter-ego, Bruce Sterling and Carla Bruni
The walls of this experimental museum are built with compressed stacks of plastic, paper, metal, fabric and wood. All the material is recycled. The books of the library are kept inside disused fridges, tables are installed on top of upside-down washing machines. A huge fan regularly blows wind that moves the fabric walls of the corridor. A rudimentary skywalk allows visitors to get a better idea of the architecture of the museum
The show is indeed disturbing. Not so much for the images but for the issues they uncover: domestic violence, decaying corpses, mass graves for livestock, post-war trauma, pollution, nonconformist sexual practices, etc. Curators Germano Celant and Melissa Harris have hung on the white walls of the Triennale 260 pictures from 24 contemporary photographers. Each of these images follow the footsteps of the photos which emerged from Vietnam in the ’60s and ’70s and were so shocking that they played a crucial role in changing public opinion about the conflict
I spent the afternoon at the press preview of Artissima, Turin’s contemporary art fair. Since i’m still uploading the hundreds of pictures i took, going through the catalogue, trying to identify the performances and screenings worth attending over the coming days and wondering whether i shouldn’t get away from this screen and head to the Share festival, i’m going to do the lazy thing and give you an easy preview of Artissima using a selection of the press images i received a few hours ago
Form+Code discusses the role of software in visual design, art, and architecture. It hopes to generate interest in creating visual and spatial form with software across diverse fields by focusing on the history, theory, and practice of software in the art
After the moving and now iconic series The Hyena and Other Men and the stunning
Nollywood, Hugo’s latest work, Permanent Error, portrays the people, animals and landscape of a dumping ground for computers and electronic waste from Europe and the US. The area, on the outskirts of a slum known as Agbogbloshie, in Ghana, is a shocking contrast to the better faster shinier life promised by the advances of technology
“Not for Nothing” is a typical expression in Philadelphia. It is not by chance that the three artists exhibiting represent the various facets of the human mind: Ben Woodward expresses an existentialism diluted with irony, Kris Chau expresses a pungent and cutting femininity, AJ Fosik represents an atavistic and purely masculine force; eccentric visions of individual contemporary intimacy
Cinema is more than film alone, as Almost Cinema proves every year. At this festival organized by Vooruit and the Ghent Film Festival, artists from a variety of disciplines offer the audience a different take on cinema. With performances, concerts and an exhibition with surprising installations, they dissect the ordinary cinema experience as they experiment with sound, image, light, space and movement
By cutting thousands of little pieces of polarization filter and putting a rotating polarization filter in front of them, Wim Janssen succeeds in imitating television static by using an almost banal technique
Thousands of buildings in the Netherlands lie vacant. Some of them for a week or a few months, many even for years. The exhibition at the Dutch pavilion, “Vacant NL, where architecture meets ideas”, is a call for the intelligent reuse of temporarily vacant buildings around the world in promoting creative enterprise
Called Usus/Usures, the exhibition investigates a specific phase in the life of construction materials: the time when they are subjected to use and are gradually re-shaped by human beings passing through them, walking on them, touching, pressing, stroking, scratching or holding them
Creative Characters is a collection of in-depth interviews with the most influential type designers in the business as well as up-and-coming young guns about the motives and methods behind the typefaces
One hundred posters, selected from amongst the thousands of works submitted each year for the most prestigious awards, representing the best of Japanese graphics over the last ten years
Passages. Travels in Hyperspace is a selection of works drawn from the collection of Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Consisting primarily of large-scale sculptural or installation work, the exhibition was designed so as to foster a contemplative stroll, making the body central to the visitor’s experience of art and offering a journey into a perceptual dimension that activates the physical, the sensory, and the cerebral
The crushed vehicle does not only serve as an entry point to a discussion about the Iraq conflict, it also comments on the increasingly harsh impact of war on civilian and cultural life. A display at the museum states that at the start of the 20th century, 10 % of war casualties were civilians. Today, they make up 90%
The series that put me in a merry mood for the rest of the day is Tony Hayward’s ‘Loving Couples’ porcelain figurines. The artist found damaged porcelain lovers on a flea market and ‘restored’ them by adding a replacement head that belong to today’s pop culture. The lovely shepherdess shows her legs to a green monster and a love-struck squire courts a girl with a playmobil head
The first book to present the full historical sweep, global reach and technical developments of the street art movement, Trespass features key works by 150 artists, and connects four generations of visionary outlaws including Jean Tinguely, Spencer Tunick, Keith Haring, Os Gemeos, Jenny Holzer, Barry McGee, Gordon Matta-Clark, Shepard Fairey, Blu, Billboard Liberation Front, Guerrilla Girls and Banksy, among others. It also includes dozens of previously unpublished photographs of long-lost works and legendary, ephemeral urban artworks
To discover M10, you have to open a very mundane door. Then another one on your right. And another one in front of you. There are ten of them, each leading to a plain, beige room so claustrophobic you quickly look for more doors that will take you out of there as the art critics mayhem pictured here demonstrates
Félix Luque’s three-fold work tells the story of a computer which, after an electronic alteration, decides to free the other machines and becomes mad in the process
In the previous episode, Austin Houldsworth had installed a ‘Fossilisation Machine’ in the Tatton Park estates in England. He was hoping that his rudimentary machine could fast-forward the fossilisation process and petrify a pineapple and pheasant over the Summer only. Two weeks ago, the artist opened the prototype fossilisation machine and checked out the outcome of the experiment
Some 100 works by photographers as Sibylle Bergemann, Evelyn Richter, Ulrich Wüst, Ute Mahler, Will McBride, Helga Paris and Roger Melis. In black and white, they have documented everyday situations that reflect the more recent history of East-Germany beyond high politics – snapshots that show the professional and private everyday life, political activities, urban landscapes, interiors and nudes
To get a sense of the true vastness of the Solar System, you are invited to follow its walkable scale model. Along one of Britain’s most longest Roman roads, local shopkeepers at the appropriate points on the route are acting as guardians to the planets – hosting models represented by everyday objects, at their correct sizes on this 3.1 km scale
The book provides a detailed insight into the techniques of ten creative individuals (Jason Bruges Studio, Greyworld, HeHe, Crispin Jones, the Owl Project, the Pooch, Bengt Sjolen, Troika, and Moritz Waldemeyer.) and how they exploit the latest computing technologies in their work and the impact this will have for creative practice in the future
Architect Caruso St John and artist Thomas Demand are paying homage to the famous Chongqing nail house with a project that involves reconstructing the Nail House under a road viaduct in Zurich, and to open it to the public as a 24/7 restaurant
Tom Sachs, who made a career revisiting contemporary icons such as Prada, the atomic bomb and Hello Kitty, has been given a large room to exhibit his take on the work and legacy of Le Corbusier. The irreverent artist goes as far as drawing parallels between the Villa Savoye and McDonalds drive-in
Unlike most critics and visitors, i can’t say i’ve found the exhibition of 12th biennale of architecture particularly exciting. Call me a masochist but i missed the overdose of information we were submitted to in 2006. I also missed the extravagance and the speculation of the 2008 edition. The 12th biennale of architecture is mostly aesthetics and lightness. What i did enjoy more than any other year however was the way Kazuyo Sejima played with the architecture of the Corderie. There was air, grace and gaiety
Architect Tetsuo Kondo has teamed up with German climate engineering firm Transsolar to fill a closed space inside the Corderie with clouds. Visitors can experience the cloud from below, within, and above as they climb up 4.3 meter high helical ramp erected in the center of the room
Justin’s work is a prototype responsive screen proposed as a speculative stage set. Blooming mechanical flowers are used as pixels in a grid formation responding to movement. It draws on the balletic tradition of a choreographic poem combining narrative, choreography and score
This book is not only visually inspiring. Because it documents plans, describes associated costs, and suggests concrete solutions for common problems, it is a practical reference for architects, planners, and cultural activists as well as event and marketing managers, to guide them in deciding what types of containers are best suited to their upcoming projects
This year, the biennial was guided by the notion of cybernetic autonomy – by the evolution of principles and patterns derived from the emerging behaviors of the devices themselves. The devices not only possess the ability to enter in a dialog with their surroundings, they also determine the rules for this interaction and change their behavior as if they had “personality”
To many of their fellow Israelis, they are traitors. They are attacked, arrested and demonised. Yet Israelis like Yehuda Shaul, leader of Breaking the Silence and Jonathan Pollack from Anarchists Against the Wall continue to struggle for a more peaceful Middle East. They believe that they can save their state by putting an end to the military occupation
The project explores the difference between the virtual freedoms experienced by a population and the physical constraints imposed upon it by the urban environment. It explores the effects of new technologies of urban sight and urban occupation on the social and political structure of a city. The resultant proposition is a series of physical interventions that subvert the urban landscape through its digital counterparts
In the exhibition JULIE NORD – XENOGLOSSY we are invited into a strange home, where nothing looks as usual. Doll-like girls with shiny, almond eyes, bunches of flowers and cute little animals tempt us to take a closer look at the pictures. It all looks enchanting, but a closer look at them confronts us with an abundance of grotesque hybrid creatures, sculls and meat-eating plant