Category Archives: Events & Exhibitions

Walid Raad

Unreliable Informants: A Walid Raad Primer [Hyperallergic]

A survey exhibition dedicated the work of Walid Raad, at the Museum of Modern Art, Oct 12, 2015-Jan 16 2016

Walid Raad was born in Lebanon in 1967, eight years before that country was rent by civil war. In a precursor to the ongoing bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the conflict dragged on for fifteen years, claiming more than 100,000 lives and creating a million refugees.

… Raad has taken up the tradition of artist-as-trickster — a role carried into modern art though the Dadaist antics of Marcel Duchamp’s transgender alter-ego, Rrose Sélavy — while reaching even farther back to the artist-as-historian-cum-fabulist. Some works trip you up and others leave you out in the cold. [ read more ]

 

Trevor Paglen

 Can an Artist Take on the Government (and Win)? A Q&A With Trevor Paglen
  Artspace

The artist and “Citizenfour” collaborator’s new show at Chelsea’s Metro Pictures is both an homage to Edward Snowden and an example of what he calls “institutional improvement.”

Trevor Paglen has tracked secret spy satellites, photographed so-called “black sites” like Area 51, cataloged hundreds of classified codes for military operations and their associated (and often bizarre) patches, and blasted images into space for the benefit of future civilizations or a visiting alien species. … Paglen approaches art with a steadfastly interdisciplinary and collaborative mindset, combining his academic training with an eye for aesthetics and a healthy dose of post-9/11 paranoia. [read interview]

Web Interventions on Whitney Museuem’s website

 

“good morning good night” by JODI 2011-2015

The Whitney museum’s website gets “hacked” every day at sunrise and sunset – Quartz

Introduced with the re-launch of whitney.org in 2009, Sunrise/Sunset is a series of Internet art projects commissioned by the Whitney specifically for whitney.org to mark sunset and sunrise in New York City every day. Unfolding over a timeframe of ten to thirty seconds, each project accompanies a transition of the website’s background color from white (day) to black (night) and vice versa.
Curated by Christiane Paul, the Whitney’s adjunct curator of new media

Stephanie Rothenberg’s “Outlook: Untitled” 2010-11

Nao Bustamante’s Soldaderas, Real and Imagined

New Project from one of my favorite artists Nao Bustamente – women, history, identity, revolution, subversion, re-enactement, and archival research!

Nao Bustamante’s “Soldadera” is a “speculative reenactment” of women’s participation in The Mexican Revolution. ­­
>> Article from KCET
>> Article in LA Times

Source: Nao Bustamante’s Soldaderas, Real and Imagined | Los Angeles | Artbound | KCET

‘Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office’

‘Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office’ Recreates a Dark Time in a Laboratory’s Past  NYTimes.com.

“Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office,” a new exhibit at NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, transports visitors to 1924, the height of the eugenics movement in the United States. Inside a dimly lit room, the sounds of an old typewriter click and clack, a teakettle whistles and papers shuffle. The office’s original file cabinets loom over reproduced desks and period knickknacks. Creaky cabinets slide open, and visitors are encouraged to thumb through copies of pseudoscientific papers.

“There’s a haunted quality, that’s the nature of the files,” said John Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian at N.Y.U. and co-curator of the exhibit.  “We hoped we could evoke a visceral feeling of what it was like to be in a detention center, where people were presumed to be ineligible unless proven otherwise.”

When the Eugenics Record Office opened its doors in 1910, the founding scientists were considered progressives, intent on applying classic genetics to breeding better citizens. Funding poured in from the Rockefeller family and the Carnegie Institution. Charles Davenport, a prolific Harvard biologist, and his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, led the charge. [read more]

Garry Winogrand

The first major Garry Winogrand retrospective since 1988 is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until Sept. 21

Born in the Bronx, Winogrand did much of his best-known work in Manhattan during the 1950s and 1960s, and in both the content and dynamic style he became one of the principal voices of the eruptive postwar decades. Known primarily as a street photographer, Winogrand, who is often associated with famed contemporaries Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander, photographed with dazzling energy and incessant appetite, exposing some 26,000 rolls of film in his short lifetime. He photographed business moguls, everyday women on the street, famous actors and athletes, hippies, politicians, soldiers, animals in zoos, rodeos, car culture, airports, and antiwar demonstrators and the construction workers who beat them bloody in view of the unmoved police. Daily life in America—rich with new possibilities and yet equally anxiety-ridden and threatening to spin out of control—seemed to unfold for him in a continuous stream.

READINGS

Mike Kelley @ PS1

MoMA PS1: Exhibitions: Mike Kelley
A show not be missed (until Feb 2, 2014).  I was very inspired by this show. Mike Kelley was an incredibly prolific artist that was not afraid to take risks—he did not hold back and followed his ideas and passions.

Mike Kelley @ PS1

From the PS1 website:
Born in Detroit, Kelley lived and worked in Los Angeles from the mid-1970s until his tragic death last year at the age of 57. Over his thirty-five year career, he worked in every conceivable medium—drawings on paper, sculpture, performances, music, video, photography, and painting. Speaking of his early work and artistic concerns at large, Kelley had said, “My entrance into the art world was through the counter-culture, where it was common practice to lift material from mass culture and ‘pervert’ it to reverse or alter its meaning… Mass culture is scrutinized to discover what is hidden, repressed, within it.” Through his art, Kelley explored themes as diverse as American class relations, sexuality, repressed memory, systems of religion and transcendence, and post-punk politics. He brought to these subjects both incisive critique and abundant, self-deprecating humor.

Kelley’s work did not develop along a purely linear trajectory. Instead, he returned time and again to certain underlying themes—the shapes lurking underneath the carpet, as it were—including repressed memories, disjunctions between selfhood and social structures as well as fault lines between the sacred and the profane. The work Kelley produced throughout his life was marked by his extraordinary powers of critical reflection, relentless self-examination, and a creative—and surprising—repurposing of ideas and materials.

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Reviews and More Info:
Official Mike Kelley Website
Mike Kelley at Art 21 (video interview and more)

Review by Holland Cotter in the New TImes
Review by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker
Review by Ben Davis in Blouin ArtInfo

MoMA | Installing Cindy Sherman’s Mural

Cindy Sherman @ MOMA

Cindy Sherman Show is great. Here is an interesting blog post from the curator:

One of the most exciting features of the Cindy Sherman exhibition is Sherman’s photographic mural, which is making its North American premiere at MoMA. Before MoMA visitors enter the sixth-floor galleries, they will encounter her monumental mural. Like wallpaper, the mural adheres directly to the surface of the wall, and wraps around several walls and corners to transform space and create an immersive fictive environment. The artist designed this configuration of the mural specifically for MoMA’s grand sixth-floor space. The soaring ceiling height allowed her to scale the figures to a colossal size—they stand 18 feet tall—the largest she has ever made them. The effect is utterly jaw-dropping. read more >  MoMA | Installing Cindy Sherman’s New Photographic Mural at MoMA.

The Artist is Present

Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present @ MOMA 2010

Re-performing Marina

  • On the morning of Saturday March 27, 2010, the MoMA opened with Marina Abramovic seated facing a table and an empty chair, on schedule, ready to receive visitors as part of her ongoing marathon performance “The Artist is Present.” But this past Saturday was different, as the first visitor in line was a young woman who showed up dressed in a long dark blue dress and a black braid swept over one shoulder. As Abramovic’s doppleganger, she sat across from her and assumed a mirror pose. And there she sat, to the bafflement of the museum staff and visitors, all day. read more
  • The Artist is Present (online game)