Known for her politically charged works that explore themes like exile, mass-migration and displacement, British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum is experiencing renewed and timely interest today, particularly since her remarkable show at the Tate Modern in 2016.
Last month, a new sake bar opened at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts: a softly lit tunnel of booze that promises the kind of entrancing conversation one can never quite remember the next morning. A permanent installation designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 2019 (the form of the flower is unknown to the seed) is furnished...
One difference between a diagram and a tracing is their relationship to abstraction. To diagram is to anticipate the production of something new, and a diagram's information can be read selectively. To trace is to attempt to capture the totality of a formation as something absent. Haegue Yang's exhibition Tracing Movement is marked by a tension...
There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries...
Michael Krebber is known for understated objects and an overstated reputation. My goal in visiting his latest exhibition was not only to scrutinize the paintings but also to experience a new arc in what has been a long and stimulating narrative of cultivated persona.
Five large, freestanding LED panels fill the spaces of the Serpentine. Despite their technological nature, they look like temporary plaster walls and give the rooms a stripped appearance. Images scroll onscreen at high speed. In the darkened exhibition space, they have peculiar light and colors, cold and clear tones. Sounds can be heard, but like...
Three decades after Andy Warhol's death, he remains one of America's most provocative artists. His influence on popular culture is so pervasive that each emerging art movement after him has had to grapple with Warhol's focus on surface perfections and his singular celebrity. Despite their complicated feelings, many contemporary artists say they...
Strange Days: Memories of the Future is overwhelming: complex, at times annoying and confusing, repetitive, uplifting and baffling. Like life, really. Films and videos by 21 artists are spread over three floors of the Store X on London's Strand.
Last Friday, Fondazione Furla unveiled Tightrope Walking and Its Wordless Shadow, a new exhibition by Korean artist Haegue Yang at the La Triennale di Milano, one of the biggest design museums in Milan. Created in 2008 by Furla, the Milan-based accessories manufacturer, Fondazione Furla is meant to showcase the company's relation with the art...
ST. LOUIS — A floating cube of barbed wire. A circle of sand combed by steel teeth. A food mill with a shredder scaled to the size of a human body. In Mona Hatoum’s Terra Infirma, on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation through August 11, form colludes with a violent function; the domestic menaces, materiality imperils. From a glass bassinet...
There is something utterly majestic about block letters — even more so at a staggering height of 12 feet. Such is the case of the letters 'IM' in the painting "Invisible Man (after Ralph Ellison)" (2008) by Tim Rollins & K.O.S.
Four large columns, arranged in a square, occupy the main room at Galerie Bob van Orsouw—a potential obstacle that leaves Swiss artist Fabrice Gygi undeterred. In his last exhibition here, five years ago, he used the columns as supports for an 'arena' constructed ingeniously from orange plastic mats and tarps.
Who would have thought a story about an aqueduct could be so salacious? Riddled with corruption, intrigue and drama, the story of the first aqueduct in Los Angeles - completed in 1913 and led by William Mulholland - is well known, thanks to Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown. Now it has piqued the interest of architect/artist Oscar Tuazon, who...
Had her family not fled Lebanon during the country's civil war in the 1970s for the relative safety of London, Mona Hatoum might have become a designer of exquisite torture devices for the Mukhabarat, or secret police, based on the evidence of the 30 sculptures and installations on view in Terra Infirma, her exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts...
Anonymity and intimacy – these two characteristics work hand in hand in Wang Bing's Man With No Name (2010), which is a mere glimpse of the life of a hermit, given the director's otherwise very extensive and lengthy observations of people in their given environment. With a running time of around 90 minutes, one could almost describe it as a...
An eight-hour-and-15-minute documentary is not something you walk into lightly, especially when its subject is the imprisonment and slow-motion murder of human beings. But Wang Bing's Dead Souls is a powerfully sobering and clear-eyed investigation that justifies its length through the gravity and presence of its testimony. Wang, like Claude...
A piercing whistle punctuates the blaring of a trumpet. But in the columned central space of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the only visible instrument is a grand piano. For three days a week throughout the course of the exhibition, the instrument is played—and, one could say, worn—by a pianist who stands in a hole cut into its center....
Danh Vo had just started to gain recognition as a rising young artist when he decided, in 2010, to make a full-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty. He had been offered a one-man show at the Fridericianum, a huge exhibition space in Kassel, Germany. 'The curator said he had seen shows of mine, and that I could deal with big spaces without...
The Chinese film expert Shelly Kraicer tells a story about a recurring daydream: he wanders down a narrow Beijing hutong alleyway and finds himself at the 'Chinese Indie Director's Discount Emporium'. Here, you can pick from shelves of long-haired drifters, bleak rural landscapes, sweeping long takes – and a discount deal on shaky DV camera...
The US artist and activist Tim Rollins, known for launching the Art and Knowledge education workshop in the Bronx in 1982, has died aged 62. Pittsfield-born Rollins began his career as the assistant of the artist Joseph Kosuth, earning a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1980. His work with students—some of them with...
Not having a story to tell from the beginning or possibly starting from the middle is how Taoism describes time: continuity without a starting point. Stories abbreviate and expand in "intensiveness," a term Haegue Yang uses, in dialogue with Jimmie Durham, to describe a mode that, similarly to belief, can exist beyond linear narrative...
The US artist Oscar Tuazon connects the functional possibilities of sculpture to the politics of public art, exploring the confrontation between industry and ecology, the urban and the natural. Two events this year represented a clear synthesis of the various ideas Tuazon has developed in his work over the past decade.
Historians can never agree about the so-called "Age of Enlightenment". The narrow definition has it beginning with the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and ending with the French Revolution in 1789. The long version begins somewhere in the late 1600s and fizzles out in 1815 with Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo.
Seoul-born, Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang has been announced as the winner of the 2018 Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst (Society for Modern Art) at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. She is the second Asian artist to be bestowed the prize, following Huang Yong Ping in 2016. Since 1994, the award has been presented to...
