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From 2020 to 2023, the scientific and artistic collaboration DRIVING THE HUMAN develops and produces seven tangible prototypes responding to complex contemporary scenarios. The project is jointly led by four partner institutions – acatech – National Academy of Science and Engineering, Forecast, the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe – and relies on the expert knowledge and skills of their combined networks. Together, these partners will work to enrich the various developments and outcomes of the initiative.

From February 10 to April 9, 2021 DRIVING THE HUMAN through its open call, invites several participants – designers, artists and other multidisciplinary agents – to engage with these knowledge networks and multidisciplinary know-how, in order to develop future-proof concepts and test them as prototypes. The seven final prototypes can materialize in different ways: from walk-in room installations to designed objects, architectural mock-ups to interactive games, video works to performances, and many others.

Proposals may connect to larger themes such as the social impact of climate change, energy cycles and our current technological acceleration, the mirror between the biosphere and the technosphere, contemporary processes of exchanging values and objects, and/or the impact of collective decision-making. Driving the Human welcomes proposals that embrace notions of urgency and radical openness as much as curiosity, interconnectedness, and new modes of collectivity across scales. Similarly, we encourage proposals that ask fundamental questions about the predominant narratives we exchange about the world and our role in it.

The results of these explorations will be shared and communicated over the project’s three-year duration, and will deploy strategies for action in the form of physical experiences, with a strong individual and collective impact. Ultimately, they will create tools that enable new ways of envisioning and inhabiting the world.

February 10 – April 9, 2021

1, 2) DRIVING THE HUMAN visual identity developed by Studio Yuyiko
3) Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas, The Swamp Observatory, 2020
© ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Elias Siebert
4) Jenna Sutela, nimiia cétiï, 2018
5) Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas, The Swamp Observatory, 2020
© ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Courtesy: the artists. Photo: Elias Siebert

Cybernetics of the Poor group show at Kunstalle Wien examines the relationship between art and cybernetics and their intersections in the past and present. From the late 1940s on, the term cybernetics began to be used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in order to intervene in changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, and criminology, and early ecology, under digital capitalism cybernetics has become an economic factor (see: big data). In such a cybernetic totality art must respond to a new situation: as a cybernetics of the poor.

This exhibition presents works that use the powerlessness of art—its poverty—vis-à-vis the cybernetic machine to propose countermodels. In addition, the show gathers recent and historical works by artists who believed in cybernetics as a participatory, playful practice or were pioneers in delineating a counter-cybernetics. How much of the “counterforce” (Thomas Pynchon) exists within art when it is conceived as a cybernetics of the poor?

Cybernetics of the Poor was shown in its first iteration at Tabakalera in the spring and summer of 2020. The subtitle of that exhibition, Tutorials, Exercises and Scores, named three different genres curators Diedrich Diederichsen and Oier Etxeberria identified as using either anticybernetic or cybernetic artistic strategies. In addition to presenting a selection of examples of these genres, the show’s second installment in Vienna focuses on cybernetic instruments of social control and methods of circumventing it as well as the art market’s very own economic cybernetics.

Curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Oier Etxeberria

Artists: Robert Adrian X • Agency • Ana de Almeida, Alicja Rogalska & Vanja Smiljanić • Eleanor Antin • Cory Arcangel • Elena Asins • Paolo Cirio • Coleman Collins • Salvador Dalí & Philippe Halsman • Hanne Darboven • Jon Mikel Euba • Michael Hakimi • Douglas Huebler • Gema Intxausti • Mike Kelley • Ferdinand Kriwet • Agnieszka Kurant • Sharon Lockhart • Mario Navarro • Adrian Piper • Kameelah Janan Rasheed • Lili Reynaud-Dewar • Heinrich Riebesehl • Pedro G. Romero • Constanze Ruhm • Jörg Schlick • Camila Sposati • Axel Stockburger • Kathrin Stumreich • Isidoro Valcárcel Medina • Tanja Widmann • Oswald Wiener •…

“Cybernetics of the Poor”
18 december, 2020 – 28 marc, 2021
Kunsthalle Wien
Vienna, Austria

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

The Lithuanian Pavilion awarded with the Golden Lion for the latest edition of  the Venice Biennale in 2019, will be staged again next year in an abandoned Bauhaus swimming pool just outside Berlin.

An ecological work at its very core, Sun & Sea (Marina) takes place on an artificial beach composed through light, architecture and music. In the heat of the midday sun, vacationers sings their stories, unfold their thoughts. As these multiply, everyday micro-events slowly give rise to broader, more distributed anxieties on planetary-scale, anthropogenic climate change. The setting – a crowded beach in summer – paints an image of laziness and lightness. In this context, the message follows suit: contemporary crises unfold easily, softly – like a pop song on the very last day on Earth.

In Germany, Sun & Sea will be shown on May 1, 2021 in the adjoining pool of the E-WERK Luckenwalde, a former East German coal plant less than an hour from Berlin built in 1919 and that operated until 1989, reborn in 2019 as an art center that provides electricity in a sustainable way and promotes activities and exhibitions fueled by experimental art and green energy.

Casa-Museo Alberto Baeriswyl (CAB) is seeking for two Chilean artists and one swiss artist or researcher to participate in the residency “Consciousness” that will take place in South Patagonia next Chilean summer 2021.

The program aims to encourage territorial exploration and critical and creative thinking processes departed from this experience, as well as facilitate the creation of collaborative networks between researchers and creators in science, humanism and contemporary art fields.

CAB is the only refuge open to the public in these faraway lands in front of the Whiteside Channel of Magellan Strait and establishes itself not only as a site museum that recalls local history events, but also as a meeting platform for critical thinking researches about the austral territory.

This invitation is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in the context of its programme «COINCIDENCIA – Swiss & South American Cultural Exchanges» and the Ministry of Art, Culture and Patrimony of Chile through PAOCC 2020 Program.

Deadline: 15 November, 2020
www.cab-patagonia.cl

The Association for the international diffusion of French art ADIAF is an organization that groups art collectors firmly committed to creativity and the diffusion of art and creators. In 2000, they created the Marcel Duchamp Prize (Prix Marcel Duchamp) together with the Centre Pompidou to reward an artist who stands out for a strong international career and who is leading his field and a generation, and who is a resident of France.

A group exhibition takes place each year at Centre Pompidou with the nominees. For this edition, the artists are Alice Anderson (France / UK), Hicham Berrada (Morocco), Kapwani Kiwanga (Canada) and Enrique Ramírez (Chile) and opened on 7 October 2020. Starting 21 October 2020, the Centre Pompidou will present a selection of the winning works in a dedicated exhibition on level 4 of the Musée national d’art moderne.

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Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Over 20+ years, CTM has been highlighting new strains of pop and fringe cultures that venture through the weird, the challenging, the cathartic, the esoteric, the contagious, and the ecstatic – simultaneously exploring sonic histories, contexts, and political and technological entanglements.
Listening and dancing within the gaps between musics, communities, and scenes, CTM defies easy categorisation and tests the current possibilities and limits of sound and music. Programming supports a multitude of voices, backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives – CTM is for all forms of music as long as they dare to experiment, question, and demonstrate conviction.

The 22nd edition of CTM, themed Transformation, will take place both in person and online from 22 – 31 January, 2021.
The near future remains unpredictable – it still isn’t clear whether or not (and how) long-distance travel, coming together IRL, concerts, and live performances will be possible. For CTM 2021, smaller events, durational or process-based works, and other artistic formats leaning away from large, punctual gatherings will be intertwined with online format in a hybrid festival format, in hopes of enabling physical-sensual experience where feasible, while continuing translocal exchange.

OPEN CALLS FOR 22nd EDITION “TRANSFORMATION”

-CTM Radio Lab: Call for Hybrid Radio/Live Works

-Kontinum: Call for Generative Audio Works

-Research Networking Day: Call for Papers

-MusicMackers HackLab: Call for Participants

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For a long time the reactions of Earth to our human actions remained unnoticed, and have now finally – not least due to recent international climate protests – moved into public consciousness. The exhibition project  »CRITICAL ZONES« invites visitors to the ZKM | Center for Art and Media to engage with the critical situation of the Earth in a novel and diverse way and to explore new modes of coexistence between all forms of life.

In order to remedy the generally prevailing disorientation and dissension in society, politics and ecology with regard to the changing state of the planet, the exhibition project sets up an imaginary cartography, considering the Earth as a network of »Critical Zones«. The term »Critical Zone« is taken from the geosciences and describes the fragile layer of the Earth, its surface, which is only a few kilometres thin and on which life is created. In addition to emphasising the vulnerability of this thin layer, the term also sheds light on the numerous controversies that have triggered new political attitudes towards it. Created by a wide variety of life forms over time, living organisms interact in these »Critical Zones«, but also earth, rock, water and air. Those life forms had completely transformed the original geology of the Earth, before humanity transformed it yet again over the last centuries.

The Exhibition as an Observatory of the Critical Zones

As a research and exhibition project »CRITICAL ZONES« explores the urgency of bringing together skills, knowledge, disciplines and cultures to jointly create a cartography of the multitude of Earths. Over a period of five months, the exhibition simulates on a small scale the model of a new spatiality of the Earth and the diversity of relations between the life forms inhabiting it. The exhibition creates a landscape that makes the public understand the characteristics of the so-called »New Climatic Regime«, a term coined by Bruno Latour to describe the global situation  affecting all living things. Not being limited to ecological crises, the term also includes questions of politics and cultural history as well as ethical and epistemological changes of perspective. As an observatory of »Critical Zones«, the exhibition aims to steer a debate towards new Earthly Politics.

This special combination of thought experiment and exhibition was developed by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in their previous collaborations at ZKM. »Iconoclash« in 2002, »Making Things Public« in 2005, and »Reset Modernity!« in 2016 constitute the three former »thought exhibitions« (Gedankenausstellungen) that resulted from their intensive working relationship which now spans twenty years. »CRITICAL ZONES« is characterized by an extensive collaboration of artists, designers, scientists and activists. Art, with all its imaginative, speculative and aesthetic power, takes up the important challenge of developing new forms of representation and options for action in an overall situation that has not yet been clarified.

Many of the artists working on this project originate from non-Western countries, broadening the view of European ways of thinking, which we have learned to describe as global modernity.

Curatorial committee: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel with Martin Guinard-Terrin and Bettina Korintenberg

Curatorial advisory board: Alexandra Arènes (architect), Bruce Clarke (literary scholar), Jérôme Gaillardet (geochemist), Joseph Koerner (art historian), Daria Mille (curator) and the Critical Zones Study Group of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG)

Exhibition team: Barbara Kiolbassa (museum  communication), Jessica Menger (curatorial assistance)

»CRITICAL ZONES«
23.05 – 28.02.202
ZKM | Center for Media Art
Karlsruhe, Germany

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Next June 6, will be open again the exhibition “Event Horizon”  by the Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno at Cisternerne in Copenhagen, Denmark.

An “Event Horizon” refers to a region of spacetime that marks a point of no return – when the gravitational pull makes any escape from a subsuming black hole impossible. As humans find themselves on the precipice of a point of no return on this planet, we should urgently learn to become, just like spider/webs, more sensitive to that which is at first unreadable and inaudible. This is to tune into, to pay at-tent(s)ion to the reverberations of cosmic events, to the guiding signals of non humans, assembling as new tools for navigation. Which synaesthetic modes of perception do we need to re-sense the world we live with? Descending the stairs into Cisternerne, visitors watch as their shadow dissolves slowly into the surrounding darkness of engulfing echoes. As you wait for your eyes to adjust, your ears wake up, and movements slow down, encountering an invitation to enter an installation that opens up channels of communication and sociality that cross the borders between senses and species.

One of the most foundational elements of life is water. A proper distribution of water, including an abundance of clean, healthy water, is needed to grow crops, to sustain human and animal life, to maintain a diverse assemblage of organisms and species. A lack of it, however, is a defining factor of our current climatic era. The spread of water is at odds with the life it sustains, some areas experiencing life-threatening droughts while others are inundated with an onslaught of water in the form of unceasing floods and historically massive hurricanes. One prominent example of the latter is Venice; in addition to threatening local populations, the historic flooding in the city that has happened over the past year has called into question its continuing future as a hub of the global art community. The same is true for coastal Miami, home of the US branch of Art Basel, and New York City, both of which have experienced recent devastation from hurricanes. What does it mean for the future of art that we have tended to gather in such sea-threatened cities? And if the future necessarily entails drastically different levels of water, is there a way we can adapt?

In contemporary literature, there is a genre entitled “climate fiction,” or “cli-fi” for short, defined by its reckoning with the reality of climate change and oncoming climatic disaster. Though a distinct genre for now, cli-fi writer Ashley Shelby has stated that, “Soon, cli-fi will be classified simply as contemporary fiction.” In essence, the contemporary is inextricable from climate change; there is no discussion of the now without the spectre of global warming hanging over. We can either choose to acknowledge it or not, but we cannot deny it. The same may be said of the visual and performing arts; we must adapt our practices as well as our sites. The history of Cisternerne and the specificity of its relationship to water makes this uniquely possible.

Holding in its essence the potential of being underwater, Saraceno asks from being on air, atmosphere-bound and terrestrial beings, how could we dive in and adapt to other kinds of immersive and binding mediums which challenge our human spatial coordinates and ways of being – either down, underwater, or up, in outer space, into networks of vibrant dark matter, and outside the atmospheric critical zone where all known life evolves? For a glimpse into possible futures, we can look toward the underwater spider. A literal “amphibian”, Argyroneta aquatica has at least two different kinds of life, being able to live both on land or in water – she inspires us to become what Eben Kirksey would call “ontological amphibians” (Kirksey, 2016) being able to have two or more modes of existence, travelling across Umwelten or specific worlds and even, maybe, between universes. Is this how we must move into the future? Saraceno’s “Event Horizon”, at least, offers a space to try.

Tomás Saraceno : “Event Horizon”
Cisternerne
6th of June – 29th of November 2020
Copenhagen, Denmark

The Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez opened last February 21 at CentroCentro Cibeles in Madrid, Spain, the exhibition “There is nothing in the middle” within the ‘Absloute Begginers’ cycle curated by Rafael Barber Cortell.

“There is nothing in the middle” is a bipersonal show with Beatriz Olabarrieta, where Domínguez investigates the encounters and clashes between cultures that happen in the global world through a look at the different ways of understanding healing and care, bringing together the experimental research on ethnobotany, healing practices and the corporatization of well-being that the artist has been researching since some time ago.

Combining experimental research on ethnobotany, curative practices and the corporatisation of wellbeing, the Chilean artist work focuses on tracking relationships of work, affection, obligation and emancipation between living species in an increasingly corporate cosmos. Her main projects have been exhibited at the Gasworks (London); Momenta Biennale (Canada); Pizzuti Museum (Ohio); El futuro no es lo que va a pasar, sino lo que vamos a hacer (The future is not what is going to happen, but what we are going to do), ARCO, Solo Projects Focus Latinoamérica ARCO, and Twin Gallery (all in Madrid); Seoul Museum of Art SeMA (Seoul); Museo del Barrio, Bronx Museum, The Clemente (all in New York). She recently received the AMA Foundation Grant (2017), the Media Art Award from the Telefonica Foundation, and 3rd Prize in the Norberto Griffa Awards (both in 2014), among others. She holds a master’s degree in Studio Art from Hunter College, New York (2013) and a Certificate in Botanical and Natural Science Illustration from the New York Botanical Garden NYBG (2011). She is currently the director of the ethnobotanical platform Studio Vegetalista.

The New Museum presents the first institutional solo exhibition in the US by Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, Latvia).

Grantina -who represented Latvia at the 2019 Venice Biennale- creates large-scale sculptural assemblages that emulate the natural world, often resembling terrariums and vegetation. Her labored configurations employ synthetic materials and incorporate conflicting physical qualities: soft and hard, transparent and opaque, mobile and static, strong and weak.

The title of the exhibition, “What Eats Around Itself”, refers to the dynamic properties of lichen, a composite organism that results from the symbiosis between fungi and algae. Grantina draws inspiration from lichen’s many adaptive qualities, like coexistence and self-replication, to devise her material processes. For her New Museum presentation, the artist premieres a new site-specific sculptural installation that interweaves cast silicone with paint, latex, fabric, and felt. Suspended from wooden planks and clinging to the gallery walls and floor, this work mimics the growth of lichen, which typically develops into a crusty, leaflike, or branching formation. The work’s amorphous structure appears to undergo construction and decomposition at once, much as lichen reproduces and consumes its own biological matter.

Grantina’s sculptures also draw from the lyricism of poet Rainer Maria Rilke and his profound interest in the rose, which he viewed as an emblem of promise, possibility, and the power of art to give life deeper meaning. On his gravestone, Rilke’s self-composed epitaph reads, “Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire / to be no one’s sleep under so many / lids.” The central forms in Grantina’s installation resemble both rose petals and eyelids, evoking Rilke’s manifold interpretations of the flower as a conduit between vitality and sleep, life and death.

“WHAT IT EATS AROUND ITSELF” – DAIGA GRANTINA
JANUARY 21 – MAY 17, 2020
NEW MUSEUM
NEW YORK

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Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

The first ever retrospective exhibition in Europe of the work of Carlos Amorales was opened last November 23 at Stedelijk Museum in Netherlands during Amsterdam Art Weekend 2019. “Carlos Amorales – The Factory” showcases the work of one of Mexico’s most important contemporary artists from the 1990s to the present day –the most recent piece was made especially for the exhibition. Spanning 14 rooms of the museum, the exhibition includes spatial works, installations, paintings, drawings, videos, prints, textiles, animations, and sound works, which Amorales incorporates in his open, non-chronological, large-scale spatial installations. Visitors will be able to navigate their own route around Amorales’s world of fantastical images and stories that explore the field of tension between the individual and society.

Carlos Amorales began his career in Amsterdam in the 1990s, as a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie. It was during this period in the city that he changed his name to Carlos Amorales, a conceptual identity which he would ‘lend’ to other people as part of his enquiry into the function of art in everyday life. He lent the Amorales character (a masked figure inspired by Mexican lucha libre wrestlers) to artist friends, fighters, and strangers. They adopted his stage name and donned his mask to take part in wrestling matches and in performances in museums and other art institutions in Europe, US, and Mexico (venues include Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou).

Amorales left Amsterdam in 2004 to return to Mexico City, where he set up his own studio. Inspired by the media’s mass production and distribution of imagery – and with references to Warhol’s Factory and Disney’s early animation studio – Amorales and his team created a digital image bank titled Liquid Archive containing thousands of monochrome silhouettes in vector format. On request, this resource for the artist and his team is sometimes shared with third parties.

The Liquid Archive has formed the basis for the rich and multifaceted body of work that Amorales has built up over the last 15 years. The essentially open-source character of the images that Amorales creates (other people have ‘borrowed’ freely from them), means they can detach themselves from the world of autonomous art and stray into the realms fashion, music videos, tattoos, and record covers – through which they return to art in the form of work by other artists. Amorales’s Factory is a nod to pop culture and to our neoliberal world in which, the artist says, “the globalized assembly-line has gotten a bit out of hand.”

CARLOS AMORALES – THE FACTORY”
STEDELIJK MUSEUM
AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS
NOV 23, 2019 – MAY0  2017, 2020

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Until next October 5 is on view at Instituto Cervantes, Tokyo, Japan, the bi-personal show “Something is missing” curated by Taro Amano showing the works of the Chilean artist Gianfranco Foschino and the Japanese Tsubasa Kato.

The invention of photography is reported in 1839 but the first proper images and practical assessment date back to the 1890’s. 180 years passed since this new medium appeared in the world. We could also say reversely that it took about 180 years to appear in the world.

Since the time all these mediums were used to create visuals and images by hand, a shift occurred with the invention of the camera. The innumerable amounts of everyday images were now literally discovered by someone. Each of these images take a fixed form to invade the realm of our perception.

Our vision is regulated, supported by a great amount of images and, without even noticing humans’ consciousness is being invaded and this meaning becomes accepted by the unconscious mind.

In that fixed construction of images both Foschino and Tsubasa Kato attempt to break the space between the sight and the image so as to create a fissure, which is also the museums’ historical vow so long. In other words, the appreciation’s target is limited to the visible (things we can see) and the readable (things we can read). In that history of intercourses the art history is interwoven at a small though tight scale.

Behind the rigorous relation between images and sights that are embedded in people’s unconsciousness underlies an invisible realm that guides people and lets emerge hidden meanings.

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Taro Amano

In the frame of Kölner Galerien-Rundgang, Amalia Valdés (Santiago de Chile, 1981) introduces “Symbolic Match”, her second solo exhibition, at the Galerie Seippel, between June the 8^th and August the 31^st, 2019.

The exhibition consists on a number of modular pieces made of stainless steel that intertwine the idea of how we perceive light and our body on the surface. The spectator’s reflection is an active part of the works that play with the geometric contrast of icons and symbols.

What inspires “Symbolic Match”, according to Amalia Valdés, is “the interest in approaching a universal harmony through an intuitive combinatorial game, in which fragments of different narrations of our ancestors, which communicate mystical and transcendental messages through shapes and metaphors, are seen.”

“SYMBOLIC MATCH” – AMALIA VALDÉS
GALERIE SEIPPEL
ZEUGHAUSSTR. 26, 50667
COLOGNE, GERMANY
RUNNING THROUGH AUGUST 31, 2019

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Chilean artist Patricia Domínguez explores healing practices emerging from the points where many worlds meet, clash and overlap as a result of colonial encounters. Rooted in the artist’s ongoing investigation of ethnobotany in South America, her first UK solo exhibition invites the viewer to envision possible futures for humans and plants thriving in the cracks of modernity.

The exhibition presents a multi-screen video installation alongside a series of altars and totem figures. Combining ethnographic surrealism and science fiction, Domínguez’s work embraces a range of myths, symbols and rituals shaped by extractivism and global finance, from the syncretic worship of Our Lady of Cerro Rico, an infamous silver mine in Bolivia where eight million natives died, to the archaeological museum inside Scotiabank’s head office in Cusco, built on top of the ruins of an Incan palace.

Sculptures dotted around the show incorporate talismanic objects with business shirts and consumer electronics as a way to exorcize the effects of neoliberalism on the body, signaled by the presence of healing plants such as the Rose of Jericho, which is said to absorb harmful radiations from Wi-Fi networks; and Aloe Vera, used to relieve computer vision syndrome.

Domínguez’s recycling of materials and symbols is testament to her encounter with an enigmatic bird-like totem in the collections of the Salesian missionaries in Punta Arenas, Chile. Envisioned by native children under colonial rule, this artefact —recreated in the show— epitomizes cultural bricolage as a means to resist the erasure of indigenous worlds and livelihoods.

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s publication designed in collaboration with Futuro Studio. Conceived as an artwork, it includes an essay chronicling an ethnobotanical journey across indigenous lands in Bolivia, Chile and Peru. Approached with a sense of wonder, the text uncovers the histories buried beneath the surface of hydropower dams, petrol stations and other ‘temples of “extractivism”.

GREEN IRISES : PATRICIA DOMÍNGUEZ
GASWORKS LONDON
4 JULY – SEPTEMBER 8, 2019
UK

At Fundación Proa in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the exhibition “Minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptualism / 60-70” is being shown since this last weekend under the curatorship of Katharine J. Wright.

Minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptualism are concepts used in many artistic disciplines that invaded the spaces of architecture, visual arts, music, etc. Knowing their origins and appreciating their first works allows us to understand the reasons for the rebellion in the context of the time. The idea of the concept of the materiality of works, austerity, silence, contemplation, are some of the proposals that make up this aesthetic universe, and that features works by artists Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback and also, a special artwork by Dan Graham made especially for the show, which will be exhibited in August of this year.

An exhaustive curatorial proposal brings together the group of founding artists of the movements with their early works. The renowned – Dan Flavin with his pieces of fluorescent tubes, Sol LeWitt with his conceptual proposals in his wall drawings, objects and designs, Fred Sandback with his subtle pieces that delimit the space and Bruce Nauman with his Neon work and videos – all of them presented with their early pieces, they give an account of the intensity and influence of these movements in contemporary art.

The exhibition will present in August a Dan Graham installation in the public space, specially designed for Proa, becoming the first work of this artist in the country. A remarkable event that explores the possibilities of intervening and transforming space.

“Minimalism, postminimalism and conceptualism / 60 – 70” brings together works of historical value and the exhibition becomes a piece of study to know the movements of twentieth-century art, as is tradition in Proa. The works come from Glenstone Museum (Potomac, Maryland), David Zwirner (New York), Paula Cooper Gallery (New York), Cayón Gallery (Madrid / Minorca / Manila) and Electronic Arts Intermix (New York).

MINIMALISM, POST-MINIMALISM AND CONCEPTUALISM / 60′ – 70′
JULY – OCTOBER, 2019
FUNDACIÓN PROA
BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

The Venezuelan artist based in London Lucia Pizzani is currently with the solo show ‘Coraza’ at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London. This new body of work has been developed over the last two years and from her recently completed residency at the Marso Foundation in Mexico.

The title, ‘Coraza’ (translated – ‘armour’), references the ceremony to the Aztec god of rebirth, Xipe Totec. As part of the ritual to celebrate the start of the corn cropping season, Aztec priests would peel the skin from defeated warriors before donning their flayed skins. Pizzani became fascinated by the ancient ceremony, and this exhibition is her parallel exploration into regeneration, transformation and metamorphosis through ceramics, photography, installation, collage and video.

In a new series of photocollages shown throughout the exhibition, Pizzani layers her own photographs of indigenous snake sculptures on top of amate paper – a type of tree bark paper that has been manufactured in Mexico since pre-Hispanic times. By syncretizing medium, method and imagery, these photocollages allude to our own ‘Coraza’ – or as Pizzani calls it, ‘our second skin’.

Pizzani has produced a series of darker ceramic sculptures that are meticulous, organic forms that twist, fold and coil, as if shielding and protecting something within. Each sculpture references Xipe Totec as they are either imprinted by corn – the symbol of renovation and harvest – or resemble the texture of a shed snakeskin.

Focusing on this motif of the shed snakeskin, the four small photogram works are produced by taking the positive image of an amplified snakeskin, then through a process of toning, turning the image from black-and-white, to the earthy sepia image displayed. The larger two canvas photograms are silkscreen prints of this photography-without-camera process. By using a palette of earthy colors and dark tones, Pizzani heightens sense of the organic and original materials used.

By relating the permanent state of violence in Aztec culture to her own Venezuelan identity, and the acute crisis her home country is in, Pizzani describes: ‘This violence isn’t exclusive to Venezuela, although the situation is very personal and latent for me. We live in a time where multiple wars of many sizes and motives are happening in parallel.’

Lucia Pizzani: CORAZA
Cecilia Brunson Projects
May 4 – June 8, 2019
2G Royal Oak Yard
Bermondsey Street
London, United Kingdom

The French filmmaker born in Brussels, Belgium, passed away today Friday, March 29. Varda studied Art History at the École du Louvre before getting a job as official photographer at Théâtre National Populaire (NPT) in Paris, but she was always more attracted to film than to the photography.

Her films, documentaries and video-installations are characterized by an emphasis on the social and cultural framework, standing out as one of the pioneers of the feminist cinema with films like “L’une chante l’autre pas” (1977), with a fresh style transforming the feminist struggles into a dance of kitsch colors, “Sans toit ni loi” (1985), starring Sandrinne Bonnaire, giving life to a wanderer who survives subjected to chance. In the film actors and people of the place coexisted, being the germ of a whole stream of contemporary realistic cinema, led by the brothers Dardenne and Ken Loach, and “Visages Villages” (2017), made with the artist JR, where she again cross the documentary with the social experimentation of her cinema. The film was made possible thanks to crowdfunding and the support of her daughter who sought funding at MoMA, who bought a copy for her archive, and the Cartier Foundation. In 2017 she received an honorary Award Academy.

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

The female Chilean artists Cecilia Vicuña y Johanna Unzueta are currently with solo shows in the United States.

Cecilia Vicuña is until March 31, 2019, at Institute of Contemporary Art University of Pennsylvania – ICA Philadelphia with the show “About to Happen” , marking her first major solo exhibition,with a multidisciplinary presentation that offers unprecedented insight into the evolution of her practice through a range of landmark works, including sculpture, video, text, performance, and site-specific installations, drawn from the past four decades of her career. A poet, artist, filmmaker, and human rights activist, Vicuña operates fluidly between concept and craft, text and textile to draw attention to pressing social and political issues, transforming her pieces into topical vehicles of engagement with economic and environmental disparities and the reclamation of ancestral traditions.

The exhibition re-frames the dematerialization as more than a formal consequence of 1960s conceptualism but also as an artistic response to radical climate change.

RUNNING THROUGH MARCH 31, 2019

For her side, Johanna Unzueta is at Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University with the show “From my head to my toes, to my teeth to my nose”.

Unzueta’s works address notions of labor, productivity, and progress. Made using natural materials such as felt and wood, manipulated and combined with recycled objects from old factories, her labor-intensive, handmade constructions emulate industrial architecture, tools, and machinery. Thinking of tools as extensions of the body, Unzueta rereads the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. She calls our attention to common objects that serve practical purposes, but that we take for granted and rarely notice.

The hinges and the chain in the exhibition are made of 100 percent natural felt and arranged in configurations that invoke the body. A hinge “hugs” a corner of a wall; a chain made using Unzueta’s whole body as a pattern becomes a stand-in for the artist herself.

RUNNING TROUGH MAY 6, 2019

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Sorry, this entry is only available in European Spanish.

Most pictures fade away only moments after they see the light of day. Unnoticed, they sink into insignificance, like a joke we are apt to forget once we have heard its trivial punch line. Or like some people, who have left no traces except in the filing cards of an administrated life that somehow slipped through the cracks. Several recent series of drawings by Eugenio Dittborn, who has been one of the most influential voices in Latin America’s art scene since the 1980s, are dedicated to the brief and ephemeral appearance and disappearance of pictures, people—and jokes.

Dittborn gathers the debris along the highways of visual culture: photographs and illustrations from second-rate magazines, anonymous drawings, found scribbles. Under the draftsman’s hand, the gleaned motifs resurface in variations. Tracing lines on the paper, Dittborn builds a new presence and history for them. Black ink and white “liquid paper” reveal and conceal themselves on the surface of the composition, forever approaching a figural definition that is never assured and that will be transmuted in the next step.

It is a melancholy figure. Each picture starts out as a resumption of a theme that was never really interesting to anyone. Each motif derives from a source that has run dry, and now, bereft of its history, it evolves into a new and disjointed sequence of instants. The theme cuts to the heart of Dittborn’s oeuvre: under the Pinochet dictatorship, thousands of Chileans vanished without a trace. Earlier, colonial regimes had erased lives and their stories. Culture and identity—both have repeatedly been effaced, swallowed up by power and violence, marginalized.

Beginning in 1986, Eugenio Dittborn responded to this history by devising a distinctive genre, the so-called Airmail Paintings, which brought him international renown. He folded his pictures, which he could not show in Chile due to censorship, and mailed them to recipients abroad, who unfolded them and presented them in exhibitions all over the world. The works bore the marks of the constant uncertainty in a society in which dissimulating and witnessing, trying to forget and conjecturing, averring and disagreeing, dying and smiling to oneself defined the asynchronous rhythm of everyday life under a repressive regime.

The same rhythm informs Dittborn’s drawings. They are the return of something vague that looms on the edge of perception and now attains form. Until the next form overtakes the first. None of this is funny in and of itself. What is funny, however, is the way the motifs drift when the draftsman allows them the room they need to evolve as they will. And how a stroke of the pen and another stroke, tiptoeing around the question of visibility, can build up to an absurd struggle over perspectives and meanings. A struggle over deception, assertion, and ignorance, over faulty logic, and, yes, also over the spirit of anarchy.

Text: Alexander Koch / Translation: Gerrit Jackson
Photos: Ladislav Zajac