EXPO CHICAGO 2022: Exhibitions to See
Exhibition view: Stan VanDerBeek, Panels for the Walls of the World: Phase I, DOCUMENT, Chicago (5 March–23 April 2022). Courtesy Stan VanDerBeek Archive and DOCUMENT.
EXPO CHICAGO returns for its 9th edition this spring (7–10 April 2022) featuring over 140 participants. For those in the city, Ocula Magazine introduces a selection of exhibitions to see.
Skin in the Game
400 North Peoria Street
7–24 April 2022
Adapted from its previous presentation at Miami Art Week 2021, the group exhibition Skin in the Game gathers works by 40 artists to explore touch, transmission, and skin as a porous border, a protective boundary that is equally a zone of reception.
Featuring site-specific works and new commissions by local and international artists, including dancer and artist Brendan Fernandes' performance with bondage sculptures and Moisés Salazar's Mexican altar piece, which turns the sacred structure into a site for queer bodies.
Meriem Bennani: Life on the CAPS
The Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis Avenue
26 February–17 April 2022
The final installation of Meriem Bennani's film trilogy follows the artist's research into the history of island societies, biotechnology, and vernacular music.
In the dystopian world of CAPS, teleportation replaces air transportation and portals are used to cross oceans and borders. A detention camp turned into a city for the illegally teleported serves as the starting point for Bennani's tale of revolution, liberation, and diasporic longing.
Equiano
DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 East 56th Place
5 April 2022
The immersive exhibition Equiano tells the story of Olaudah Equiano, who was the first person to write and publish their experience of slavery in 1989, through the joint film project Equiano.stories (2022) made in collaboration with Stelo Stories Studio.
Across Instagram stories, Equiano's childhood is told in the first person with a focus on his family and community in the Igboland village of Essaka, addressing the lesser-spoken personal and collective histories that do not begin with enslavement, but freedom.
Bob Thompson: This House Is Mine
Smart Museum of Art, 5550 South Greenwood Avenue
15 February–15 May 2022
Figurative painter Bob Thompson was known for visually complex works that reconfigured the compositions of traditional European paintings with brighter palettes and distorted forms, replacing historical characters with pop-culture icons rendered in vivid chromatic tones.
Thompson's first museum exhibition in 20 years traces his engagement with art history, first grappling with the place of Black portraiture within the Western canon, before adapting known compositions like Francisco de Goya's and forming a distinct visual language.
Throughout the exhibition of paintings and paper works gathered from over 50 institutions in the United States, iconic figures like jazz musician Nina Simone and writer Allen Ginsberg surface, attesting to the blend of time and influence that mark Thompson's legacy.
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter: Stars Are Born in Darkness
Kavi Gupta, 835 West Washington Boulevard
8 April–11 June 2022
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter's painting practice explores hypothetical worlds, as with the parallel universe in Stars Are Born in Darkness, which posits a reality in which white supremacy is no longer, while Blackness becomes a superpower.
Based on true events of Africans on slave ships who threw themselves overboard to avoid enslavement, paintings on show conceive of an alternative timeline whereby bodies do not drown but rather reincarnate into divine beings—a cosmic revival expressed across a blend of black mica, abalone shell, and glitter.
Arghavan Khosravi: The Witness
Kavi Gupta, 835 West Washington Boulevard
6 April–21 May 2022
Arghavan Khosravi's multidimensional dreamscape paintings recover the tradition of Persian miniature painting, commonly employed to illustrate folkloric texts, while departing from its customary practice by bursting from the walls and expanding into space.
Where Persian miniature painting depicts landscapes and figures on the same plane, mixed-media works like The Witness (2022), a multi-panel painting made to resemble a deconstructed dollhouse, transform traditional Persian patterns into a renewed visual language.
Zohra Opoku: I Have Arisen...
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, 437 North Paulina Street
8 April–14 May 2022
Since her cancer diagnosis two years ago, German-Ghanaian artist Zohra Opoku has been trying to understand how to hold together life's pieces.
I Have Arisen... includes the artist's latest body of work 'The Myths of Eternal Life', in which the body is transformed into an archive of memory, pieced together through the act of stitching.
Unfolding across four chapters, images prior and following radiation treatments are combined with photographs of trees moving along the seasons of life, contending with mortality and change.
Stan VanDerBeek: Panels for the Walls of the World: Phase I
DOCUMENT, 1709 West Chicago Avenue
5 March–23 April 2022
American collage artist and experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek conceived of a series of 'telephone murals' in 1967, assembled from hundreds of collages printed with the newly available Xerox Telecopier machine.
These mixed-media works combine news imagery with hand-drawn and painted interventions in public locations, including overt headlines outlining pressing issues now and then: war, poverty, political divides.
A selection of these murals from the Stan VanDerBeek Archive will be installed in the gallery and throughout the city—at the Hyde Park Art Center from 19 March to 22 May and at EXPO CHICAGO.
Robert Stiegler: Photographs
Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 West Superior Street
11 March–27 May 2022
Chicago-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Stiegler was known for documenting the city's streets, capturing moments in American lives and the lesser-seen facets of its architecture with a careful eye for light and composition.
Stiegler experimented with positive and negative exposure, often resulting in partially abstracted works, as with one untitled photograph from the 1960s, in which three men chatter on the side, while the dark outline of an office worker concealed by shadows is visible to the right.
Alexander Höller
Casterline|Goodman Gallery, 954 West Washington Boulevard
15 December 2021–15 April 2022
Alexander Höller's playful caricatures quite literally show the middle finger to the world across a range of neon characters rendered in a blend of oil, oil stick, and acrylic, as with the green crocodile in Crocodile, or the red demon in Devil (both 2021).
Often incorporating graffiti materials like spray paint, as in Frecher Schueler 01 (2021), or abstracting works to show scratched surfaces in the 'Wald' series (2021–2022), the artist takes on the role of the jester articulating disappointment through a lexicon of protest that recovers familiar archetypes.
Jake Troyli: Slow Clap
moniquemeloche, 451 North Paulina Street
26 February–9 April 2022
Jake Troyli's graphic portraitures are surprisingly appealing despite their stark contents and subject matters, which explore the construction of otherness and the commodification of Black and Brown bodies enlisted to performance and labour.
Accordingly, Slow Clap draws from the artist's time playing division-one basketball to investigate the spectacle of sport, showing nude avatars engaged in acts that equally evoke celebration and violation.
Contending with nuances within set hierarchical systems, which can benefit participants just as they can constrain, the striking oil on canvas The Crowd Surfer (2021) shows a brown body gripped by six pink hands, held at the throat and hoisted into the air.
Françoise Grossen
Volume Gallery, 1709 West Chicago Avenue Second Floor
5 March–23 April 2022
Known for suspended knotted-rope works made with braiding and plaiting techniques learnt in West Africa, Françoise Grossen has been looking for alternatives to fine materials and traditional textiles since the 1960s.
Grossen's turn away from monumental forms saw a training first in architecture and textiles in Europe, before finding inspiration in functional usage of ropes and knots in West African infrastructure, including ship mooring lines and suspension bridges.
A selection of these braided works are on view alongside large-scale sculptures, including the sinister Metamorphosis IV (1987–1990)—a near six-foot-tall insect exoskeleton made of manila rope coated in wax and woven in sections.
Martha Tuttle: An ear, a hand, a mouth, an offering, an angel
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 1711 West Chicago Avenue
25 February–16 April 2022
Inspired by the dozing female figure in The Dream of Saint Helena (1570) by Renaissance Italian painter Paolo Veronese, Martha Tuttle recovered its pastel pink palette and allusions to spontaneous revelation as the basis for a new series of paintings and sculptures.
Evoking buried messages within dreams, patchwork paintings combine soft materials like silk, wool, linen, and thread to form textured compositions that express elusive sentiments, as with one grey and pink grid from 2022, thinking about Simone Weil.
Bani Abidi: The Man Who Talked Until He Disappeared
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 East Chicago Avenue
4 September 2021–5 June 2022
Known for video critiques of authority and power, Bani Abidi's proficient storytelling has addressed issues of nationalism, militarism, and self determination for over two decades, with humour and a lightness of touch.
Developed in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation, a survey of Abidi's practice across photography, video, sound, and installation includes the dual-screen video installation Reserved (2016), where routines of reverence are made absurd through footage of a city's preparations in anticipation of a V.I.P.'s arrival, reflecting on the experience of waiting and empty decorum. —[O]
