Indie Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has won the £40,000 Artes Mundi contemporary art prize.The judges said his film Invisibility was 'a powerful weapon in these turbulent times'.The 48-year-old gave a UK premiere to his dream-like work, projected over two screens and showing two figures rising from their beds in separate rooms.He was...
From across the gallery, the four framed prints of architectural ruins look like vintage black-and-white photographs. But a photograph is just the start for what you are seeing at Crown Point Press.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's house in northern Thailand is a luscious jungle paradise full of polished concrete and teak, palm trees and bamboo. Even the air smells zen. The house's three gatekeepers, Dracula, King Kong and Vampire, do little to disturb the peace. They are pugs – named because Weerasethakul loves horror movies – who have a...
COPENHAGEN — Outside Denmark's Louisiana Museum of Modern Art on a recent late-summer morning, a few sunstruck visitors were sprawling on the turf of the sculpture garden, between monumental outdoor works by Alexander Calder and Richard Serra.
With their lobbying efforts beginning in 2006, the San Francisco Arts Commission convinced the intergovernmental agency developing the center to commit $4.75 million to on-site public art. Ranging from designed floors to interactive fountains, this funding supported work by James Carpenter, Julie Chang, Jenny Holzer, and Ned Kahn. These works are...
It's a strange thing to meet a stranger whose dreams you've dreamed. That's what it feels like to find myself sitting across from Apichatpong Weerasethakul one afternoon in the thick-carpeted quiet of a Doha hotel. We are both at Qumra, a week-long industry event held annually in the Qatari capital, at which Apichatpong is one of 2018's attending...
In 2017, the National Rifle Association in the US broadcast a controversial video advertisement, 'The Clenched Fist of Truth', which warns of liberal America's threat to freedom. In it, a brief scene details Anish Kapoor's 2004 steel doughnut-like sculpture Cloud Gate at Chicago's Millennium Park. Now the artist has released an open letter in which...
Last year, the National Rifle Association released its now infamous 'The Clenched Fist of Truth' video in which a brief clip of Anish Kapoor's sculpture 'Cloud Gate' appeared as a stand-in for Chicago and the city's most famous recent resident, Barack Obama. As NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch chanted in a hypnotically angry voice, 'they use their...
METZ, France — French and Japanese flags flap in tandem at the Pompidou Center here, hailing the fall program at this sister venue of the Paris museum of contemporary art. Its exhibitions include one about Japanese architecture from 1945 to the present day, and the recently opened Japanorama, a survey of Japan's contemporary art since 1970,...
When a local art group lures an international superstar like Ai Weiwei to its birthday celebrations, that's impressive. New York's Public Art Fund (PAF) has done just that to celebrate 40 years of commissioning artists to make site-specific pieces for New Yorkers to enjoy. Returning to the city this month, Ai Weiwei says: 'I never expected this...
A paradox: In an age when privacy has dwindled, public space seems to be atrophying too. Your phone tracks your every move, your most intimate data are logged for eternity, and yet increasingly, the civic squares in which you snap your selfie—and which define urban life—are not precisely public after all. In New York, more than 500...
MASS MoCA, the vast, multibuilding museum of contemporary art here, is a weird and wonderful place. For one, the dominance of brick walls, wood floors, big windows and frequent columns of its repurposed 19th-century factory buildings is the apotheosis of SoHo, whose small-industry loft spaces were taken over by commercial art galleries in the...
The master plan for MASS MoCA in 1986 was a wildly ambitious dream: to simultaneously rehabilitate all 28 buildings of a shuttered 19th-century factory in this depressed Berkshire County town for the long-term display of monumental art installations.
As part of its 40th-anniversary celebration, the Public Art Fund has brought Anish Kapoor back to New York City. Eleven years ago, the artist's Sky Mirror became something of a tourist destination when the Public Art Fund installed it at Rockefeller Center. This time around, his work Descension, a continually spiraling whirlpool, has been sunk into...
The Creative Act: Performance, Process, Presence brings together over 18 artists from the 1960s until now. Held at the Manarat Al Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi, the second exhibition from the collection brings together more than 25 artworks ranging from installations to works on paper and paintings.
Spring has sprung—and with it a fresh crop of public and outdoor art projects across New York. This is a special year for such work as it is the 40th anniversary of the Public Art Fund, a non-profit body founded in 1977 by Doris C. Freedman—New York's first director of cultural affairs—with the aim of turning the city into an open...
'Art Brussels believes in galleries that support their artists throughout their evolution... We are definitely not interested in showing work in a supermarket-like style.' We speak with Anne Vierstraete, Managing Director of Art Brussels, as the fair nears its thirty-fifth edition.
Renowned Indian-born, British artist Anish Kapoor has expanded the definition of contemporary sculpture with immersive and enigmatic abstract pieces that engage both the phenomenological and unconscious aspects of human experience. Kapoor had a cosmopolitan upbringing that infused his work with a syncretic mix of Western and Eastern culture and...
The entrance hall to the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery at the British Museum is blood-red, and covered in Andy Warhol's psychedelic screenprints of Marilyn Monroe's face.It's a punchy start to the exhibition, The American Dream: Pop to the Present.
The American artist Jenny Holzer, known for challenging texts imposed on urban settings, has been chosen as the next contemporary artist to tackle one of the most privileged spaces in the UK, the baroque splendour of Blenheim Palace.
Creature, a thematic exhibition at The Broad, is one of those shows, like the recently opened Raymond Pettibon: A Pen of All Work at the New Museum in New York, whose meanings and context have been jolted, scrambled, and reloaded by the resistible rise of Donald J. Trump.As it so happens, Creature opened on November 5th, the Saturday before the...
More than two hundred artists, musicians, writers, and arts professionals from forty countries have pledged to take part in Hands Off Our Revolution, a global art project that will organize a series of exhibitions and other programming to confront the rise of right-wing populism around the world.
Concerns with time, space, history and landscape inform the practice of British artist Darren Almond (b. 1971). Exploring how these different dimensions intersect and how we inhabit them, his images capture an interest in subjective, liminal experiences that play on the foundations of our perception and knowledge. An exhibition, at Mudam...
Descension, a massive land-locked whirlpool conceived by art star sculptor Anish Kapoor, is headed to Brooklyn this spring. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, the abyssal installation will be installed at Dumbo's Brooklyn Bridge Park on May 3, its first appearance in North America.