In November 2021, Kyiv-based architecture firm Balbek Bureau was tasked with reimagining a decommissioned fuel tank at the Vernadsky Research Base, a Ukrainian station on Galindez Island in Antarctica, near the Kyiv Peninsula.

Commissioned by the National Antarctic Research Center with the support of the Silpo retail chain, the installation was conceived as an attraction for tourists and a ‘home away from home’ for polar researchers inhabiting the base. The brief required straightforward assembly, resistance to severe weather conditions, and had to safely coexist with the 3,500 penguins inhabiting the island. The installation is intended to be a permanent fixture in the landscape, so long as the penguins remain welcoming of the structure. 

Based on a composite image of a rural Ukrainian house, Balbek Bureau designed an installation in which a delicate metal frame resembling a pencil drawing wraps around the tank. On the exterior walls of the tank is a mini-exhibition, with boards displaying symbolic mementos encapsulated in epoxy resin, such as a fragment of a vyshyvanka (an embroidered shirt used in Ukrainian national costumes) and a sample of the Unesco-listed Kosiv painted ceramics.

But when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the project took on a new poignancy. The disassembled parts were delivered to the Vernadsky base in the spring of 2022, but construction was placed on hold while the war raged. In the spirit of resilience, architect and Balbek Bureau CEO Slava Balbek and Wonder Workshop head Dmytro Zinoviev (who was in charge of construction) travelled to Antarctica and complete the project. 

‘The art installation, designed a year before the invasion, took on a new meaning. For millions of people forced to flee their home towns and villages due to Russian aggression, returning home became their biggest dream,’ says Balbek. ‘Still, we believe that the war will end in our victory, and Ukrainians will create new memories from the safe haven of their home. And all the way in Antarctica, for researchers and tourists alike, our house will continue to stand strong, a true memento of Ukraine.’

balbek.com

In Berlin, Finnish artist duo Grönlund-Nisunen (Tommi Grönlund and Petteri Nisunen), and Japanese composer and visual artist Ryoji Ikeda are presenting a joint exhibition, each taking over half of Esther Schipper gallery.

Organised by Olivier Renaud-Clément, Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen's show is a meeting of technology-powered art minds and follows a longstanding personal and professional relationship between the artists. 

In the first joint presentation of their work, the show seeks to highlight the common elements and distinctions of their practices, which each deploy innovative sound and light to create environments that rouse a phenomenological and intense, bodily response from their audience. 

Viewers may recall Ikeda's epic intervention at London’s 180 The Strand in 2021, a sensory assault course of sound, light and data. One of the standout works from that show, point of no return, has made its way to Esther Schipper. As Ikeda accurately explained of the work at the time: ‘point of no return is a very simple, very intense piece. I paint a black circle on a wall and project light around it, and this intensifies its blackness. It feels like it's always firing, you get a bit scared. It becomes overwhelming.’

The exhibition is the fifth show at the gallery for Grönlund-Nisunen, whom Ikeda describes as 'one of the most important artists to me among my contemporaries'. The duo are known for taking elemental forces – gravity, magnetism, or radiation – and translating these into poetic motifs that envelop viewers in electromagnetic radiation and sound waves. 

A new work for the show, Scattered Horizon, seeks to disorientate viewers by toying with the ordinarily stable motif of the horizon line. ‘The new work Scattered Horizon is an experimentation in a dark exhibition space. Projected slowly-swaying horizontal lines correspond with low sine wave tones modulating with each other, offering a slightly disorienting and meditative multisensory experience,‘ say the duo. ‘We have known and appreciated Ryoji and his work for [a] long [time] and Tommi´s label has also released a record by him. We have exhibited with him on some occasions during the years and it is a great pleasure to be able to do it again.’

Alongside the works by Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen, a selection of new, recent, and historical works by Estonian sound and installation artist Kaarel Kurismaa will be on view in the gallery's bookstore area.

Ryoji Ikeda and Grönlund-Nisunen's exhibition will be on view at Esther Schipper, Berlin until 25 February 2023. estherschipper.com

2022 was the year of Cecilia Vicuña. In April, the Chilean artist was honoured with the 59th Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement and she was the subject of a major show at New York’s Guggenheim. In October, this series of triumphs culminated in Brain Forest Quipu, the Chilean artist's epic Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern. 

Brain Forest Quipu, which has just been named Best Art Installation in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023, is a majestic, two-sculpture installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall that blends fibre art and ancient South American communication systems to explore ecology, community and social justice.

In an interview last year, Vicuña explained how the ‘very visceral, fantastic response’ to her monumental installation, Quipu Womb (2017), which debuted at Documenta 14 and was recently acquired by Tate, was part of the reason she was selected for the coveted Turbine Hall commission. 

As Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern explained last year, ‘Vicuña has been an inspirational figure for half a century, championing concerns of ecology, community and social justice which grow ever more urgent today. Her radical textile sculptures combine pressing political messages with stunning visual form, creating a truly unforgettable experience for the viewer – one that resonates with and connects audiences all around the world. Recognition of Vicuña's powerful work is long overdue and I'm thrilled that she'll be bringing fibre art to the heart of Tate Modern for the first time.’

Given Vicuña's historical entanglement with London, where she lived in political exile in the 1970s, her Tate commission offers a sense of coming full circle. ‘I have a love for London, where everything was so difficult and beautiful at the same time. The Turbine Hall, in particular, feels like a park, like a public space, and people use it that way. I’m fascinated by that because that’s the origin of my art,’ she told us. ‘Whatever I do in the Turbine Hall will continue that spirit of complete fluidity of the public space. Even though it’s inside the museum, people take it differently, perhaps because it’s an industrial space, it belongs to everybody. Experiencing – not telling, but sensing, feeling – is the most powerful way of transmission.’

Cecilia Vicuña, Brain Forest Quipu, Hyundai Commission, until 16 April 2023, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk

The winners of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023 are revealed in the February 2023 issue, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Michael Heizer began work on City in 1972. In September 2022 – 50 years, $40m and manifold logistical hurdles later – the American artist’s mega-sculpture in the Nevada desert finally came to fruition. 

Much like its Area 51 neighbour, City is a project swathed in intrigue, mystery and myth. The land art installation – more than one mile long and sited in Nevada’s Garden Valley – is divided into a series of ‘complexes’ featuring immaculate, undulating mounds of locally-sourced compacted dirt, and angular concrete shards and volumes that jut towards the sky as though they’ve pierced through the Earth’s crust.

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1944, Heizer had excavation embedded in his consciousness from childhood. Aged 12, he took a year off school to join his father, a renowned field archaeologist, on a dig in Mexico. While his father analysed rock samples, the young artist made drawings of the sites, an exercise that would form the bedrock of an extraordinary career. 

Remote parcels of land would become Heizer’s raw material, the exploration of positive and negative space his signature. Through monumental landscape interventions, the artist has come to redefine what sculpture can be – beyond the confines of conventional art spaces – and quite literally moved the earth in the process.

He became one of the key proponents of the land art or ‘earthworks’ movement. But while Robert Smithson was piecing together Spiral Jetty, and Judy Chicago was ‘feminising’ the male-centric landscape with ephemeral Atmospheres, Heizer was giving birth to an idea that would sustain him for half a century. 

City is a life’s work; an unwavering commitment to a vision. ‘This was a largely DIY project by a self-taught artist at the scale of new town planning. It was a Sisyphean chore,’ wrote Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic of The New York Times – who had visited the evolving site of City since the 1990s – in an article last year. ‘The project was conceived in a fit of apocalyptic cynicism about the fallout in the valley, the Vietnam War, the future. But City at the same time was also, clearly, a love letter to this part of the world.’

Heizer, whose family have inhabited Nevada since the 1800s, began this love letter to the state in 1967, pre-City. In the Sierra Nevada mountains, he dug two large pits – one lined with plywood, another with sheet metal – and declared this a work of ‘ultra-modern art’. Heizer went further with Double Negative (1969), two 50ft-deep canyon-like crevices in Nevada’s Mormon Mesa, created by extracting 240,000 tonnes of sandstone and rhyolite. 

These projects remain extraordinary feats, in vision and execution, but City is unlike anything the world has seen, in scale, concept and form. It was conceived after the artist visited Yucatan and Chichén Itzá, and draws on the pre-Columbian ritual cities of Central and South America and Native American mound-building traditions. The final result (though Heizer deems the work unfinished) resembles a Mayan-meets-modernist ruin. 

From the sky, City could perhaps be mistaken for something functional; an inappropriately located dam, a deserted skate park, a complex agricultural system, or, as Kimmelman describes it, an ‘art-world Atlantis’. It is owned and managed by the Triple Aught Foundation, a Nevada-based non-profit institution. As per the artist’s wishes, few will reach it – six people per day to be precise, on a reservation-only basis on specific days for the first year of operation. Those fortunate enough to get tickets are collected from the closeby-ish town of Alamo and shuttled to the majestically-remote sculpture via dirt tracks through barren, sparsely-habited valleys.

Heizer’s once-in-a-generation masterwork doesn’t defy categorisation, but instead seems to encompass them all: endurance art (for artist and visitor), sculpture, architecture, assemblage, performance, drawing (on land and in space) and earthwork – but City could just as well be on the moon. 

tripleaughtfoundation.org, gagosian.com

The winners of the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2023 are revealed in the February 2023 issue, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Cerith Wyn Evans, and his work, are not easy to forget. I first encountered the former at Tate Britain in 2017, when he doused the Duveen Galleries in a carnival of white neon light. It burned traces on the mind and retina that lingered for hours to come. 

The second, and even more memorable experience, was in 2018 at the award ceremony for the prestigious Hepworth Prize for Sculpture. The experimental filmmaker turned global force of sculpture had won the prize with a levitating, site-specific work titled Composition for 37 Flutes (in two parts), in which two intersecting glass arcs held pipes that inhaled and exhaled music that wavered between harmony and dissonance, through a programmed algorithm. It produced an unnerving, biological timbre that evoked the rasp and rhythm of the human respiratory system. When Wyn Evans accepted the award, he said, ‘It [the prize] means nothing, but I’m a Buddhist you see.’

At Mostyn gallery in the picturesque seaside town of Llandudno, Wales, Wyn Evans is currently showing his largest exhibition in his home country, and the UK, to date. But does it feel like a homecoming? ‘It’s certainly not a coincidence,’ says the artist, who represented Wales at the country’s inaugural pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. ‘[But] since I'm not making work about nationalism and identity politics, it somehow carries less weight because it isn’t, for want of a better term, the “subject” of the work.’ 

Mostyn, which has a century-long history of championing local and globally renowned contemporary art, fuses Edwardian architecture with a RIBA award-winning concrete modern expansion by Ellis Williams Architects. Enigmatically titled ‘....)(‘, Wyn Evans’ show isn’t just at Mostyn, but for Mostyn. 

Wyn Evans’ show, curated by the gallery’s director, Alfredo Cramerotti, is borderless –infused with film, music, poetry, literature and Eastern philosophy, and how energy can flow freely through sculpture, video and found objects. The artist has turned Mostyn’s Edwardian galleries into a neon-charged fantasia, with works that dance through the spaces like illuminated drawings. Wyn Evans was keen to embrace the plentiful natural light in the 1901 building, and explore how light patterns will shift through the winter months. ‘I love nothing more than neon in direct sunlight. it’s absolutely heartbreakingly beautiful.’

StarStarStar/Steer (Transphoton) (2019) (Oriel 3) is a three-column LED structure suspended a few centimetres above the ground. Shifting from translucency to a piercing brightness, the piece draws on the codes of Doric architecture but seems to inhale and expire like something very much alive. ‘There’s this sort of tidal relation to the sea being here, but also a slow oscillating of filling and breathing and looking and being in the space.’ 

Another highlight is Pli S=E=L=O=N Pli, a 17-glass panel maze of four chambers that emits an eerie, improvised piano soundtrack of alternating time signatures composed and performed by Wyn Evans. Phase shifts (after David Tudor) (2020) sees vehicle windscreens and visor-shaped pieces of fractured glass engage in a game of reflections with surrounding works. They appear like ghosts of Calder’s mobiles, and an ode to the history of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, (1915-1923). The work shattered in transit after its first exhibition, an event Duchamp embraced as the work’s resolution. In another deviation from neon, Wyn Evans is also presenting Decor Relics, a series of smashed-up bits of temporary gallery walls salvaged from previous blue-chip exhibitions. Here, they are present as 'wall on wall', recontextualised and elevated from functional (then discarded) infrastructure to art in their own right. ‘They make a critique of the gallery as a model’, he says. ‘It’s cannibalism; the gallery kind of eating itself.’ 

The centrepiece of the show is Mostyn Drift. The neon installation was originally titled Aspen Drift and displayed in 2021 at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, but owing to lockdown restrictions in the US, this is the first time Wyn Evans has seen the piece assembled. It’s a 3D incarnation of Japanese Noh theatre, capturing time signatures, stutters, and the foot patterns of movement, but devoid of bodies. This is just one example of Wyn Evans' ability to disrupt, and rupture existing modes of communication, translating movement into notational codes, then a ghostly visual embodiment of the controlled randomness of the world around us. 

‘....)(‘, by Cerith Wyn Evans, is at Mostyn, Llandudno, North Wales until 5 February 2023. mostyn.org

In June 2023, Phaidon will publish the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Cerith Wyn Evans’ work, featuring new text by the artists, and contributions from Nancy Spector and Daniel Birnbaum. phaidon.com

Nothing beats the Christmas installations in London. In the run-up to the festive season, the city provides an illuminated offering for every mood and taste. And beyond the optical overload of garish Christmas lights, faux snow, and Santa’s grottos, there’s an art and design wonderland to be found. Explore our pick of the best festive art installations to bring you comfort, joy and creativity this holiday season.

CHRISTMAS INSTALLATIONS TO SEE IN LONDON

1. Christmas at Kew Gardens

2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the beloved Christmas at Kew winter light trail. Long a beacon of the winter months, the light festival will this year offer a new route, illuminating the biodiversity and world-renowned botanical treasures of Kew Gardens. As well as some returning favourites, this year sees five new installations turn Kew into a futuristic festive paradise. Among them is an immersive animation at Holly Walk by design studio Novak, and Illusion Hole by UxU Studio, which optical illusion that plays with the ripples on the lake.

kew.org

2. The Winter Light exhibition at Southbank Centre

This year’s edition of The Southbank Centre’s free, open-air exhibition ‘Winter Light’ will illuminate the art centre, its adjacent buildings and Riverside Walk with 11 low-energy LED light works from ten acclaimed contemporary artists. The installations utilise light, colour and mixed media to playfully explore topics critical to contemporary society. Featured artists include Emily Mulenga, Fred Tschida, Conrad Shawcross and Caiwei Tang. 

3. Kings Cross’ Granary Square winter installation 

For the 2022 Granary Square winter installation, Berlin experimental art and architecture practice Raumlabor has illuminated Kings Cross with a 33ft-high totemic structure titled elsewhere: a place to think about the world. As its name suggests, the installation offers visitors a space to reflect on the beauty and complexity of the world through kaleidoscopic lights and heat maps that demonstrate our changing planet. The work forms part of a series of winter installations and festive trees commissioned by King’s Cross, which include Liliane Lijn’s Temenos, 2021 (on view again this year), and architect Sam Jacobs’ The Electric Nemeton, 2020. 

4. Louis Vuitton collaborates with Lego for festive store installations

In collaboration with Lego (which celebrates its 90th birthday this year), Louis Vuitton has unveiled a new series of playful window installations for its global store windows and in-store holiday displays, including at the brand’s New Bond Street London flagship. Lego blocks form the material for enchanting Christmas art installations that celebrate creativity, colour and imagination. Developed by the Louis Vuitton Visual Image Studio and realised by Lego Certified Professionals, these compositions follow on from a creative exchange that began with the Louis 200 project, for which the Lego Group was among the visionaries, contributing a colossal birthday cake formed of 31,700 bricks.

5. Claridge’s Christmas Tree by Sandra Choi 

Iconic hotel Claridge’s has enlisted the vision of Jimmy Choo’s creative director Sandra Choi for its annual Christmas tree. Titled The Diamond, this sculptural creation comprises reflective mirrors and light that pulses and undulates through its form. The tree will be topped with a giant, shimmering bow – a nod to one of the key motifs in the brand’s winter collection. As Choi commented: ‘Claridge’s is a London jewel, it’s multifaceted, like the diamond that inspired our tree, like Jimmy Choo.’

6. St Pancras Christmas Tree in partnership with The Prince’s Trust

St Pancras International station has unveiled a striking Christmas tree in partnership with The Prince’s Trust. Standing 33ft tall, and comprising 80 hand-illustrated buildings, the design features iconic silhouettes of the London skyline, which the station has been part of since 1868. Including terrace houses, department stores, concert venues and more, the design concept draws on the 1955 film On the Twelfth Day, based on the receiving of all the gifts from the eponymous song. The installation also spotlights the work of The Prince’s Trust, which is offering support to young people at what is a critical time, during the cost of living crisis and the aftermath of the pandemic. 

7. The Connaught Christmas Tree by Suzie Murphy 

This year, The Connaught Christmas Tree has been designed by London-born artist and sculptor Suzy Murphy. The striking, playful and thought-provoking creation comprises a British-sourced Nordmann fir tree dappled with 34 neon dogs, for which she was inspired by Toby was a girl, a series of sketches inspired by her childhood pet. In neon on the tree’s base, Murphy deploys her creative and philosophical mantra, ‘solitude, truth, passion and peace’, to describe the various stages one must pass through in order to achieve ‘peace’. 

A canopy of light and sound, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Topology is composed of 3,000 lightbulbs suspended at different heights, powered by the continuous beat of human hearts. The installation, the latest in the Mexican-Canadian artist’s Pulse series, illuminates the Superblue space at Art Basel Miami Beach 2022 in a unique collaboration with BMW i.

Custom-made pulse sensors capture the individual heartbeats of visitors. Each then powers a spectacular light display and a sonic landscape that constantly evolves as people enter and leave the space. It’s an intimate and deeply personal experience that aims to foster human connection, highlighting both the fragility and the joy of living.

Lozano-Hemmer, whose participatory works have previously harnessed artificial intelligence and robotics, has also collaborated with BMW’s engineers and scientists to bring the installation to life within the first-ever fully-electric BMW i7 sedan. 

On view during Miami Art Week 2022, Pulse Topology is part of a series of biometric pieces that Lozano-Hemmer has been making since 2006. The original works featured up to 500 incandescent light bulbs arranged as chandeliers or room arrays. Since then the artist has been experimenting with LED filament technology, making it possible to light thousands of bulbs with very little power.  

‘I decided to create a full landscape with crests and valleys that the visitors would be invited to traverse,’ says Lozano-Hemmer.  ‘The topology is similar to the original inspiration for the piece: a scene in the film Macario (1960), where the protagonist enters the Cacahuamilpa Caves in Mexico and sees every person on the planet represented by a frail flickering candle.’

When he was growing up in Mexico City, Lozano-Hemmer’s parents operated a nightclub, an ongoing influence on his practice. ‘I always say that my work is incomplete. As an artist (or a nightclub owner) you can create the platform, the context, and the ambience, but your effort is only really successful when the public takes it over and self-represents. I think some people in Miami will see my work as a continuation of nightlife's flashy aesthetics of spectacle; I'm really fine with that. But I do hope that more people see it as a reflective work, one that makes tangible the intimate rhythms that keep us alive, underlining the fragility of it all, and at the same time, the feeling of being included, even if it is just in a temporary womb-like choir.’

Seeing visitors react to the installation has been both revelatory and uplifting. ‘Originally I thought the project would be quite mournful, like a memento mori that reminds you that your heartbeat will only complete a relatively small amount of cycles. But we are seeing many other reactions: some find it romantic to add their heartbeat next to their loved one, others meditate to slow down their pulse and calm the whole environment, and others feel unease as their arrhythmia becomes shared in light and sound. The project is open to interpretation and I am happy not to be able to predict public reactions.’

At the heart of it all, Lozano-Hemmer wants to create a sense of community and meaningful connection. ’The great American composer Frederic Rzewski said that people “coming together” was the most important objective of art,’ he says. ‘After social distancing and Zoom fatigue, it is critical to re-embody our social space.’

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Pulse Topology runs until 4 December 2022 bmw.co.uk;superblue.com

Textile artists have long used their medium as a vehicle for storytelling. Much like ceramic art, it has long trodden the foggy line between art and craft. It comes dressed in many forms: fibre art, tapestry, weaving, embroidery, knitting, and often spreads beyond the borders of art into fashion, design, science and technology. 

The last century has seen a renaissance in thread-based art. It was only during the Bauhaus years in the early 20th century that textiles began to enter the vocabulary of modern art, a move indebted to textile masters like Anni Albers, who turned her weaving loom into a vehicle for innovation. Albers saw the potential of textiles beyond a ‘women’s craft’ and has since influenced swathes of creatives including Sheila Hicks, who studied under both Anni and Josef Albers and myriad fashion designers. Other artists who took textiles to new heights in the 20th century include Sonia Delaunay, Judith Scott, and Louise Bourgeois.

In the 1970s, coinciding with the women's liberation movement, and the rise of feminist art, textiles underwent its own revolution. Fibre art was born: textiles was catapulted beyond the domestic space and unshackled from veiled art world snobbery. The medium took on a life beyond functional craft; it became textiles for textiles’ sake.

From immersive site-specific installations to work that reinterprets the codes of history, contemporary textile art is a conceptual and political tool, fuelled by postmodernist ideals and the experimental spirit of those who command it. 

Ibrahim Mahama

In his home country of Ghana, Ibrahim Mahama's contemporary art centre provides the social infrastructure for arts education; in his exhibitions internationally, he cultivates a collaborative focus. Recently, Mahama has unveiled possibly his greatest collaborative work - and certainly his largest scale public commission - in the UK yet. Purple Hibiscus, exhibited over the exterior of the Barbican, named after Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2003 novel, encompasses around 2000 square metres of billowing panels of pink and purple fabric, woven and sewn in collaboration with hundreds of craftspeople from Tamale in Ghana. On the panels, around 100 batakaris have been embroidered - robes traditionally worn by both ordinary people as well as northern Ghanaian royals - which Mahama has been collecting over the years, without at first knowing for what purpose. 

The project is a natural extension of his fascination with materials, building on previous work which saw him reflect on global exchange, communism and colonialism through jute bags. He became interested in their physical journey - originally created in India and Bangladesh, they became useful for the transmission of cocoa and became a commodity themselves, becoming stained and ripped and stitched back together. The transformation began a new life cycle triggered by human intervention. 

Writer: Hannah Silver

Rachel Scott

Rachel Scott’s approach to textile art is one of pure dedication. In her Pimlico studio, mornings are spent weaving and evenings are devoted to spinning wool for the next day. Since she started weaving in 1976, her wide-ranging practice has comprised everything from handwoven rugs and knitted patchwork-covered chairs to cushions, bags, scarves, dresses and even chess sets in her signature earthen palette and angular patterning. In a new show, 'weaving my world' at Make Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, Scott offers a snapshot of her prolific textile output, as well as early paintings dating from the 1960s. In addition to Scott‘s work, the exhibition will feature pieces by her husband, Frank Bowling and her daughters, Marcia and Iona Scott. As Scott says: ‘Making things by hand for me is the only way and has been since I was a child. What else would I do with my time?’

Richard McVetis

Repetition, ritual, rhythm and obsession, British textile artist Richard McVetis’ work has long been concerned with the subtle differences that arise in habitual, labour intensive making. His ‘Variations of a Stitched Cube’, shortlisted for the 2018 Loewe Craft Prize, examine the systems in which we measure time. These distinctive, often three-dimensional and cubic textile works seek to record human presence, time and decay through meticulous stitching, making a portrait of both the artist and the broader human condition. 

Sanford Biggers 

American artist Sanford Biggers draws connections between apparently disparate cultural practices and examines current socio-political events while unearthing the contexts that conceived them. Biggers’ works reference African American history, ongoing police brutality against Black Americans, and Buddhist spiritualism. The Harlem-based artist’s work spans film, performance, music and sculpture, and he has frequently turned to textile art to explore new narratives, with his quilt pieces often originating as antique heirlooms, which he acquires and alters. As the artist explained of the works: ‘My embellishment, erasure, defacement, and repair complicates the provenance and gender of these relics of Americana. They are remixed, chopped and screwed but their softness is ultimately their power.’ 

Faig Ahmed 

The work of Azerbaijani artist Faig Ahmed is interwoven with complex layers of historical, literary, mystical, and craft. He is best known for surreal, often psychedelic twists to traditional Islamic rugs. His carpets – like optical illusions in textile form – warp, melt, pixelate, unravel, and appear to spill from the wall and onto the floor like intricate pools of liquid. Despite the contemporary interventions, the artist’s textile art is created by skilled practitioners who follow traditional Azerbaijani weaving techniques. Ahmed, who represented Azerbaijan at the Venice Biennale in 2007, presented three new carpet works in his solo show, ‘Pir’ at Sapar Contemporary, New York. Each work is titled after poets and spiritual masters whose works had a lasting influence on the cultural history of Azerbaijan: Shams Tabrizi, Yahya al-Shirvani al-Bakuvi, and Nizami Ganjavi. 

Tanya Aguiñiga

Textile artist Tanya Aguiñiga, now based in Los Angeles, spent a childhood in Tijuana, Mexico. During this time, she travelled several hours each day across the border to attend school in San Diego, an experience that would go on to have a profound impact on her work. Her furniture, textiles, wearable pieces, sculptures, and site-specific installations involve a spectrum of natural materials, from beeswax to human hair and stitch together complex ideas of gender and nationality. Beyond her individual practice, Aguiñiga frequently collaborates with artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and collective community-based art projects. These ‘performance crafting’ happenings explore notions of divided, transnational identities, political and human rights issues at the US-Mexico border, and the power of art to weave communities together.

Sheila Hicks

Sheila Hicks’ name is almost synonymous with fibre art. Over more than half a century, she has removed the seams between art, architecture and design with bold, groundbreaking work, often dominating public spaces. The American artists’ extensive travels across several continents and studies of vernacular textile traditions informed an expansive, yet unmistakable practice that ranges from intricate wall hangings (or ‘minimes’) to cascades of vibrant fabric balls and maximal site-specific installations which envelop viewers and overwhelm senses. Hicks’ work draws on everything from Peruvian and Bolivian archaeological sites to pre-Columbian textiles. She was also deeply inspired by her former Yale tutor Josef Albers’ approach to colour and the pioneering structures in the work of his wife, Anni Albers. American design firm Knoll became one of Hicks’s first major commercial clients; together they created Inca, inspired by Andean patterns. In Hicks’ work, textile art is sculpture, painting, architecture and an independent discipline in its own right. 

Chiharu Shiota

Chiharu Shiota's elaborate entanglements are difficult to forget and easy to get lost in. Her labyrinthine installations are vast, surreal waves of blood-red, black or white threads, and appear almost as though humans could weave webs. Within these environments, the Japanese, Berlin-based artist often traps objects of personal significance such as clothes, keys, boats, suitcases, and even herself. Shiota’s work is deeply rooted in performance art; the artist studied under Marina and holds a deep affinity with late Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta. Her textile installations are both performative and painterly; as the artist told us, ‘The single line of thread is like a line in a painting. With the thread, I am drawing in the air, in an unlimited space. With the material, I can create new spaces. They might be deconstructed after the exhibition, but they will live in the memory of the visitors forever.’ 

Billie Zangewa

South African–Malawian artist Billie Zangewa is well known for creating moving stories of femininity, domesticity, motherhood and the exploitation of the Black female body rendered in delicate hand-stitched fragments of raw silk. Within these scenes, often figurative, urban and referencing themes of everyday life, Zangewa explores gender stereotypes and socio-political notions around the undervaluing of women’s labour. Through self-portraiture, the artist also critically confronts the male gaze, and conversely, explores what a female gaze on womanhood might look like. 

Gabriel Dawe 

Best known for his dazzling Plexus series, Mexican artist Gabriel Dawe is well versed in pushing textile art to its extremities. His vast installations explore the intersection of fashion, architecture and optical illusion. Dawe takes the core component of clothing, and augments it on an architectural scale, creating hypnotic work which seems to make the tangible appear intangible. The artist uses ordinary polyester embroidery threads to create extraordinary illusions which resemble something close to vivid, laser projections. Beneath his work's obvious aesthetic appeal, Dawe speaks to something deeper: the human need for shelter and protection, and the hyper-masculine ideals prevalent in Mexican culture. gabrieldawe.com

Anna Ray

Anna Ray has a knack for harnessing the emotive power of her materials. Through large-scale, handmade work and avid experimenting, she blurs the boundaries between the two- and three-dimensional with wall-based pieces that almost assume the quality of sculptural reliefs. Predominantly fibre-based, the artist’s work spans silk, cotton, velvet, wool and paper, often using humble, domestic materials such as a sewing machine, scissors, pliers and a needle. Earlier this year, Ray became the second recipient of the Brookfield Properties Crafts Council Collection Award at Collect 2021. The artist charmed the judges with her ability to exude joy, optimism and energy through her sculptural works. As part of the award, her striking pieces, Capture and Weave (made during and directly after the first UK Covid-19 lockdown) was exhibited at 99 Bishopsgate and Aldgate Tower in summer and autumn 2021.

Diedrick Brackens

Texas-born Diedrick Brackens’ rich tapestries interweave personal stories, American history and narratives of African American and queer identities. Fusing techniques and traditions from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making, he creates intricate, often vibrantly-coloured visions of history, folklore and contemporary American life. Created in hand-dyed cotton, his pieces are charged with a consciousness of the material’s complex and barbaric history. Since receiving the revered Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize in 2018 (an honour previously awarded to the likes of Simone Leigh, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon), the artist has become a pivotal figure in the contemporary fibre art renaissance.

As Europe’s museums and galleries trickled back to life post-lockdown, the last two years of Venice culture have been, comparatively, a deluge. As the Biennale of Architecture opened its doors for the first time in two years, the floating city’s wealth of cultural institutions followed suit with a dazzling 57th Venice Biennale earlier this year. 

A highlight throughout both came from the Pinault Collection’s Punta della Dogana, just across the Grand Canal from St Mark’s Square, which inaugurated a new show dedicated to American contemporary artist Bruce Nauman – his first major exhibition in Venice since winning the Biennale’s Golden Lion in 2009.

Titled ‘Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies’ (and now in its final week) the exhibition weaves its way across disparate eras of the prolific artist’s career, focusing largely on Nauman’s work with sound and performance.

‘It’s a show with nearly no objects,’ says Pinault Collection curator Caroline Bourgeois, who, alongside Carlos Basualdo, senior curator of contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is responsible for bringing the works to Venice. ‘It is just sound that takes you through. It is an experiment because Bruce has always done experiments.’

Though it is not strictly a retrospective, much like the artist’s major Tate Modern show in 2020, the exhibition, which runs until November 2022, circles several themes Nauman has consistently returned to in his practice: the body; sound as medium; and the studio as a creative space. Indeed, the breadth of work on show illustrates Nauman’s commitment to exploring the endless potential of a single idea. From his early video work – Bouncing in the Corner, No. 1 (1968), Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk) (1968) – to sound pieces like the stilted piano plonking of For Beginners (instructed piano) (2010), and Untitled performance from 1969, in which actors stand, lie or crouch motionless on the gallery floor.

As a guiding principle, all pieces brought to Punta della Dogana were chosen for their relationship to a single foundational work, Nauman’s 1968 video piece Walk with Contrapposto, in which he traverses a narrow corridor, hands clasped behind his head, jutting out his hips and posing with each step. The film is black and white, grainy and shot from above at an angle, distorting and obscuring his figure as he travels back and forth. (Contrapposto, or counterpoise, refers to the common statuary stance – think: the jaunty pose of Michelangelo’s David.) ‘I think the tension between who we think we are, how we represent ourselves and how we feel we are is really what the show is about,’ Basualdo says. 

In the 2010s, Nauman revisited Walk with Contrapposto, creating a new series based on the same repetitive movements, though, this time, aided by advances in technology. His Contrapposto Studies, I through VII (2015/2016), first shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2017 and now projected larger than life onto Punta della Dogana’s walls, show the artist walking in the same straight line. In the updated version, the feed is full colour and crisp, each image split into seven sections and repeated 14 separate times, an allusion to Da Vinci’s theories of proportion.

Later in the exhibition, the exercise is recreated in 3D; viewers are invited to sit on a bench wearing the requisite glasses as Nauman walks towards them, turns on his heel, and returns. One of the more interesting aspects of the exhibition is seeing first-hand the continuity of Nauman’s ideas as his own physical conditions change: swapping a primitive camcorder for a high-definition camera; how differently his body moves with age. ‘What you will find in the exhibition is an artist who, with extraordinarily grateful simplicity, offers you an opportunity to think about your own body in the space and yourself inside your body’, adds Basualdo.

For his latest piece, Nature Morte (2020), shown for the first time in Europe at Punta della Dogana, Nauman utilised 3D-mapping technology to create a digital model of his own workspace. Visitors can pinch and scroll on an iPad, zooming into half-finished works, posters and clutter strewn on the floor. It’s a fitting finale to the show, particularly following a year in which Nauman himself was not able to travel, allowing visitors to step into his New Mexico studio all the way from the banks of Venice’s Grand Canal.

INFORMATION

‘Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies’, until 27 November 2022, Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, palazzograssi.it

Since Tora Schultz returned to Denmark last year, she has been tremendously busy. Graduating from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm in 2021, the young Danish artist has had a flurry of exhibitions in Copenhagen at the artist-run space Bizarro and Palace Enterprise gallery. ‘Bitch on Wheels’ at O-Overgaden marks her first solo outing at a public institution and presents an opportunity to crystallise an artistic vocabulary that has been formulating for some time. 

Schultz’s sculptures draw upon the objects and structures of everyday life that quietly coerce us into shape. It’s only when these designs chafe against a body which lies outside the standardised norm that their bias is revealed. For Schultz, it was an angle grinder in a metal workshop, which she could not grip because it was intended for a larger hand: ‘I guess it’s these situations where our body meets something that is painful which make you physically realise.’

One of the key works at O-Overgaden is the prototype of a female crash test dummy, designed by Swedish engineers. It’s shocking to hear that historically cars have been tested with the male body as the presumed norm in mind, rendering safety features like seatbelts less effective for women. Aptly called ‘Eva’ or ‘Eve’ in English after the first woman, ‘her destiny is pretty tragic,’ Schultz reflects. ‘Her job is to crash into a wall.’

‘Eva’ is also the name of a chair by the Swedish designer, Bruno Mathsson. Schultz reimagines such designs, so familiar in Scandinavian homes and institutions, to question their subtle influence. She has referred to Magnus Olesen chairs in Danish schools, which make all students sit in the same way, and reframed a Magnus Olesen table and upside-down chair in the sculpture wry titled, Face down Ass up (2021). This notion of the framework of a chair or bondage of a seatbelt rendering the body motionless is critical. Schultz considers the tensions within the stilled body and the frozen narratives of objects.

For Schultz, the materials and making of her sculptures are essential. An index of materials gathered in the studio over the years has become like a diary. And while Schultz pays homage to the Surrealist instinct to make the ordinary uncanny, everything she deals with is real. Conversely, Schultz argues it is ‘the world that is surreal… how we structure the world is uneven in so many ways.’

Equally important is the collision between tragedy and impish comedy. ‘Bitch on Wheels’ is a play upon the ‘stereotype of women who talk too much and are hysterical,’ with Eva the tragicomic heroine literally on wheels, who will not be silenced. The Prada stilettos with pitchfork tips placed inside a dumbwaiter, ordinarily shuttling food from kitchen to restaurant (The Devil’s Contract, 2021), are the shoes she might use to stomp the tarmac.

‘For a long time, I thought this was going to be a really sober show,’ Schultz laughs. Pinocchio with his phallic nose, attached to a strap-on, has become a figure of particular absurdity. Schultz was initially drawn to the dark origins of Pinocchio before Disney recast him as an adorable little boy, and now she cannot escape him. ‘He is constantly confronting me!’ Schultz jokes. ‘Every time someone sees a Pinocchio poster now, they send me a picture.’

As Schultz’s career gains momentum, her language of objects continues to formulate. But for now, Schultz has set her sights on Eva. She hopes to forge a new hip for the crash-test dummy that will allow her to stand and liberate Eva from the fate of sitting, only to hurtle into a wall.

Tora Schultz: ‘Bitch on Wheels’ until 28 Jan 2023, O—Overgaden, Copenhagen. overgaden.org

Even in the final year of Christo’s life, he was working towards wrapping Paris' entire Arc de Triomphe in great swathes of shimmering, silvery-blue fabric. The ambitious work, titled L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped and 60 years in the making, became a reality in September 2021, also featuring in the Sotheby’s exhibition, a year after the artist died aged 84.  

A new limited-edition book, published by Taschen, narrates the behind-the-scenes story of this monumental project, which was conceived by Christo and his life partner Jeanne-Claude. The pair met in Paris in 1958 and were best known for site-specific work that consumed monumental landmarks and environmental sites in fabric. 

What Christo referred to as ‘gentle disturbances’ were radical alterations to landscapes and cityscapes. Gentle, perhaps, in their ephemerality, but not in their visual impact. As Christo once said, ‘Each of our projects is like a slice of our life, myself and Jeanne-Claude. And the journey is so exciting, it is an adventure in the real world.’

The new book, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Paris, is published in an edition of 2,000. Spanning 450 pages designed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s studio in close collaboration with Taschen, the book chronicles in stunning detail how L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped went from early fantasy to final, mindblowing installation, which was seen by 6 million viewers over 16 days on Place de l’Étoile (and was also the subject of a the Sotheby’s exhibition, ‘The Final Christo‘ during the same period). 

This substantial tome offers a permanent tribute to a fleeting installation that formed a spectacular finale to the duo’s epic career. 

For those eager to own their own piece of art history, a Limited Collector's Edition of 2,500 copies is also available, signed by project photographer Wolfgang Volz (who has worked with Christo and Jeanne-Claude as exclusive photographer of their works since 1971), each accompanied by a 24 x 24 cm swatch of the original silver fabric, alongside two different artist editions. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude. L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Paris, is now available, £350. taschen.com

There is a certain difficulty in applying words to a show by Anne Imhof, and whether words are of any use whatsoever. 

The awe induced by the German artist’s work is accompanied by niggling frustration –  a sense of almost grasping, but of always missing something. The answer is just out of sight, earshot, and comprehension - forever swimming in your peripheral vision no matter how hard you squint at it. 

‘Avatar II’, Imhof’s latest show at Sprüth Magers London, is navigated in a fight-or-flight mode of apprehension, which ranges from curiosity to paranoia. Are we safe here? Safe from harm, maybe, but certainly not safe from the surrealism of contemporary reality. 

Imhof spent her formative years in Frankfurt am Main, where she taught herself to draw and compose music while working as a nightclub bouncer. For the last decade, she has been probing the intensity of isolation, fetishising contemporary consumer culture and sampling the motifs of nebulous neoliberalism to divisive effect. 

She is a self-described painter but is best known for choreographed endurance performances, or tableaux vivants, such as Faust which secured the artist and the German Pavilion a Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. The controversial piece involved four live Dobermans and a cast of cool, streetwear-clad performers who chanted, gyrated, mutated, and engaged with props to an uncanny soundtrack, confronting power dynamics between performer and viewer, leaving the latter wondering what’s dictated and what’s improvised, and what on earth just happened. 

For ‘Avatar II’, Imhof has turned Sprüth Magers’ London gallery into a psychological thriller, with a plot that excavates the dark underbelly of contemporary culture. Continuing where the artist’s recent shows left off, ‘Avatar II’ is a lesson in reality and artifice, staged as fragments, or avatars, of the artist’s self. From locker rooms to gym equipment, sparely rendered drawings to scored aluminium paintings, Imhof’s show is a journey of physical and mental strain, to make you wince and wonder. 

On the face of it, Anne Imhof’s art and Sprüth Magers’ Georgian Mayfair townhouse make for strange bedfellows – a jarring fusion of the hyper-contemporary and sentimentally historical. As we learnt in the first iteration of ‘Sex’ (2019), which dominated the entirety of Tate Modern’s Tanks, and the acclaimed Palais de Tokyo carte blanche last year, Imhof’s work needs space to orchestrate itself, and viewers need space to digest it. Although she is the first artist to dominate all four floors of the Sprüth Mager’s London, her work bursts from the building’s seams like a feral captive. Yet somehow, it works. 

We are first confronted by a labyrinth of benches and breezeblock-filled lockers, the former offering an illusion of respite and comfort. On the wall is the Halloween-esque painting Jester (2022), which sets the tone for a rollercoaster of tricks and treats to come. We’re coerced through Imhof’s maze like the vanquished prisoners of Beckett’s abode, at once apprehensive, and cynical, yet resigned to the foreboding dystopia of it all. For the viewer, it’s self-conscious and alienating, and morish - are we the spectators or spectated? 

Imhof uses the building’s vaulted basement to amp up the hardcore. A new film, Avatar, stars Eliza Douglas, an artist, Balenciaga model and longtime Imhof collaborator who epitomises the androgynous Euro-cool of Imhof’s work. She’s standing, melancholy yet otherwise emotionally absent, in an austere, sterile vista accompanied by more lockers and a bench. It’s silent, the sort of silence you only experience during snowfall. Then she screams. A curdling, visceral scream that impales the senses. She slaps her cheek, then keeps slapping her cheek at 10-second intervals. Blood begins to seep from her pallid lips, and she spits the excess into the snow-fluffed ground. 

‘Avatar II’ epitomises Imhof’s ability to take viewers to the brink of understanding, only to rip the rug of expectation from under their feet. It’s rare that an art exhibition so readily confronts the dissociation, disorientation and isolation so often experienced in viewing art exhibitions – few artists are able to crawl so artfully under the skin with so little warning. 

If you can’t see any live performance in this show, think again, then look in the mirror. We are all Anne Imhof’s performers, whether we like it or not.

Anne Imhof: ‘Avatar II’, until 23 December 2022, Sprüth Magers London. 

spruethmagers.com

Ugo Rondinone is a man of ritual. The Swiss artist begins each day in complete solitude – at least five hours of it – before venturing into his studio in Harlem, New York, converted from an abandoned Romanesque church. ‘I’m very sensitive to noises and impressions, so I cannot really process them,’ he says. This strict, self-imposed isolation provides a space for his creative process to take place. ‘I don’t feel like an artist who has ideas. I just follow my own work – it dictates the next movement, it’s that energy that brings it forward.’ This perhaps explains the sheer breadth of Rondinone’s practice: most recognised for his fluorescent boulder totems, the artist has worked across multiple disciplines including photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, poetry, video and sound. 

‘His evolution, through several decades, shows the extent of his work, its density and depth. His ability to renew himself by working in various media makes him an artist both “complete”, but also often unexpected,’ say Juliette Singer and Erik Verhagen, joint curators of a new exhibition of the artist’s work at the Petit Palais in Paris, opening this week to coincide with the inaugural edition of Paris+ par Art Basel. (Singer oversees contemporary art projects at the Petit Palais, while Verhagen is a professor of contemporary art history at Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France.) ‘He has no comfort zone or signature style. However, there is consistency in his work – themes such as nature and the body, for example, which are perfectly combined in this exhibition.’

The centrepiece of the show is a new film, Burn to Shine, housed in a monumental coal-black yakisugi (charred wood) structure, encircled by a quartet of 19th-century paintings by Eugène Carrière from the Petit Palais collection. Inside, a hexagonal room gives way to six large screens depicting a coterie of dancers and drummers in the desert, thronging in a sequence combining ancestral trance from the Mahgreb with contemporary dance developed by Franco-Moroccan choreographer Fouad Boussouf.

The film installation takes its inspiration from a poem by Rondinone’s late husband, the artist John Giorno, You Got to Burn to Shine – which itself stems from a Buddhist proverb describing the coexistence of life and death. ‘John was a generous person, and his generosity of thinking influenced me,’ says Rondinone. ‘As a poet, he was a person who was always in touch with art – and I love poetry – so we were in constant dialogue about our [practices].’ 

The elemental theme continues with a series of nude figures of trapeze dancers – notably made from wax and earth mined from all seven continents – seated and at rest among the Petit Palais’ permanent sculpture collection. Further figures arc gracefully above the entrance rotunda, against a backdrop of mosaics and stained glass. The idea for these initially formed in 2016, when Rondinone made the first cast. It remained without further development until an encounter in Venice with the Renaissance paintings of Gentile Bellini and Pietro Perugino. ‘This was it. I had found the solution to the unresolved nude case of the trapeze dancer: I decided to paint the cast body as the sky with clouds,’ he says. Elsewhere, Rondinone has placed blue-grey filters over the windows of the Petit Palais in a more subtle intervention, while a trio of painted bronze totems greets visitors outside.

Rondinone is the latest contemporary artist to be invited to exhibit at the Petit Palais, whose collection comprises French art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a formidable prospect, and the artist has created a respectful and intriguing visual exchange with the gallery’s grand interiors. ‘The challenge of this exhibition was starting from an imposed situation. That is, the museum’s galleries have nothing to do with traditional white cubes – the entrance and sculpture hall are not “neutral” spaces,’ explain the curators. ‘Ugo was able to convert this constraint into an engine and find solutions allowing him to recreate his own universe, to own and transform it.’ 

‘Ugo Rondinone’, until 8 January 2023, Petit Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris 8e. ugorondinone.com; petitpalais.paris.fr

‘I have always been driven by the provocation: How would advanced technologies change our bodies, change our minds?’ British-born Australian artist Lucy McRae explains over a video call from her studio in Los Angeles. The multidisciplinary artist and ‘body architect’ has just opened her first exhibition in the city – and in America – at Honor Fraser gallery. ‘Future Sensitive’ will debut two short films, Futurekin and Delicate Spells of Mind, alongside costumes adapted from objects sourced from McRae’s home and transformed into assemblages; a third film, Institute of Isolation, which was released in 2016, ‘contemplates whether isolation may be a gateway to training human resilience’; while a series of sculptures, garments and photography are also featured. 

The exhibition ‘gestures towards a future where advanced genetic engineering will enable humans to be grown in laboratories outside of the womb,’ says McRae. It’s a complex proposition, at once uncanny and realistic, which the artist processes and communicates through world-building, both in her films and in the design of the exhibition. ‘I am always trying to build worlds physically or thematically. Instead of it being a process of “write a script, find the protagonist and build the world”, I start with an object, or a costume, or a machine, which becomes the protagonist, and build the world around it,’ says McRae. ‘I build these “what if?” scenarios and play them out, trying to understand: Do we want this? If reproducing human biology in a laboratory is possible, should we?’ 

Genetic engineering and CRISPR technology, which can be used to edit genes, have played an important role in McRae’s research for years; her practice is focused on themes of human intimacy, reproductive technology, wellness culture and human biology, as well as ‘dabbling in artificial intelligence and edible technology’. Honor Fraser had seen McRae’s work on CRISPR while working on a project with her at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture), where McRae was formulating ‘an artistic lens on complex science’. A few years later, with the opening of ‘Future Sensitive’, McRae’s work is entering a more public conversation on genetic engineering at a critical time. ‘There is no consensus, no committee around the ethics of CRISPR. This exhibition is a way to speak to that.’

Futurekin looks at new forms of intimacy and care, following a group of women with the common goal of curating a tribe of ‘futurekin’ outside of the body. What sets them apart is that their mission is not about achieving perfection, intelligence and beauty, it is about nurturing weakness, vulnerability, serendipity, and accidents. ‘I think we are being presented with this choice now, a crossroads where science is on a mission for biological perfection, but what are we going to lose?’

Delicate Spells of Mind is rooted in McRae’s long-standing interest in Buddhism, and a period of reflection during the early months of the pandemic, when she considered: ‘Is there a way – and this is obviously not the case – to circumnavigate pain, and to avoid suffering?’ She worked on the film with choreographer Jasmine Albuquerque, and it follows a protagonist who is dragging a machine, ‘which is her way of trying to avoid any kind of obstacle, among a group of seven dancers, who represent her thoughts and shadows’. Nearly three years into the pandemic, Institute of Isolation takes on a new significance. Although it tells the story of people preparing their bodies for life on Mars, the film’s focus on the physiological and mental repercussions of spending years in a confined space, in sensory deprivation, and increasingly reliant on technology, feels less like a far-flung potential and more hauntingly familiar.

McRae is intent on keeping her work open to interpretation, encouraging the audience to draw their own conclusions based on their experiences and desires, and in the case of ‘Future Sensitive’, becoming players in the work as it extends out from the screen into the rooms of the gallery. ‘I believe that if you can really move someone emotionally, or through their body, then that is a way to connect in a lasting way. I am sure you have your experiences of where you feel something, or you watch something, and you are so moved it shifts your trajectory. I think that is what is needed now.’

Although McRae’s work looks toward the future, it is rooted in the present, both thematically and in its materiality: ‘I think there is power in familiarity, even though many of us like to depart from what we know.’ Working with found materials, adapting clothing, using beanbag balls, recycled foam, and carpet underlay, McRae utilises lo-tech, imperfect techniques to bring a productive vulnerability to her work and demystify the often impenetrable spaces of future technology and science fiction. ‘My work can include Tupperware or grass, but the underlying message is far out, and absurd, and kind of existential,’ says McRae. ‘If we are talking about something as complex as cutting out DNA from an embryo, then if we can anchor that in something tactile, or physical, or familiar to us, I believe that we can connect with that concept in a more impactful and behavioural way.’ 

By critically engaging with, reflecting on, and producing narratives informed by the technology and ideas that may shape our future, Lucy McRae has carved out a unique point of view: ‘To many, it is science fiction, but to me, these are potential scenarios. I am realising that my work can be prophetic.’

INFORMATION

Lucy McRae, 'Future Sensitive', until 17 December 2022 honorfraser.com

On 28 October, McRae will hold a talk on The Architecture Of Fashion as part of the SCCI Fashion Hub Weekend at the Design Museum. designmuseum.org

A bodiless voice with a singsong Swiss lilt rings forth. After a few seconds of staring into the Zoom void, a wonderful burst of colour explodes onto the screen as Pipilotti Rist materialises in virtual form from her studio in Zurich. Much like her immersive video installations, the Swiss artist seems incapable of being confined to pixels: her ebullient character is magnified by the polka dot apron she is wearing. A colourful crochet blanket draped over the orange chair next to her completes the richly polychromatic picture. 

When we speak in late August 2022, Rist has just returned from a six-week sojourn in Hong Kong installing her major solo show, ‘Behind Your Eyelid’, at Tai Kwun, a former police station-turned-cultural destination in the city’s Central district. Her heady installations sprawl beyond the confines of the Herzog & de Meuron-designed galleries, blanketing the complex’s courtyards and appearing on unlikely surfaces, such as a barred window. ‘My work is about freeing the electronic image from its square and bringing it into the physical realm,’ says Rist. Curated by Tobias Berger, head of arts at Tai Kwun, the survey spans Rist’s three-decade-long practice, from earlier mono-channel videos such as Sip My Ocean (1996) and Ever Is Over All (1997) to site-specific installations. There’s an iteration of Pixel Forest: a hypnotic tangle of LED lights, each distinct like crystals (or ‘frozen labias’, as the artist cheekily notes in the catalogue). Elsewhere, Omvendt øjenlåg (Reverse Eyelid) (2022), originally created in collaboration with Danish textile brand Kvadrat, has been reimagined, while Big Skin is a sensorial environment combining real footage with 3D animation.

‘Pipilotti’s art lets us see things that we should but don’t, because we don’t look close enough,’ says Berger. There’s an Alice in Wonderland perspective to the show as the artist supersizes macro details – such as the intricate veins of a plant – on suspended screens, or projects a coin-sized video on the floor, compelling the audience to consider a new spatial language. Berger adds, ‘What you don’t necessarily realise when you see her work is just how precise she is, not just with every colour and pixel, but also with the equipment. She always pushes to get more out of the equipment than anybody ever thought possible. The word I hear a lot is: “dream”. But you do not dream about computer-generated images, you dream about reality. That is what is so beautiful about Pipilotti’s work: this surprise of the “real”.’

Born Elisabeth Charlotte Rist (Pipilotti is a portmanteau of Rist’s childhood nickname and Astrid Lindgren’s literary heroine Pippi Longstocking) in 1962, the artist is the second of five siblings (her younger sister, Tamara, is a seamstress who regularly creates textiles for Pipilotti’s installations). Her late father, the son of a baker, was a doctor; her mother, the daughter of a farmer, is a teacher. From the villages in the canton of St Gallen where she was raised, Rist found a portal to music and popular culture through mass media – Yoko Ono, in particular, resonated with her. ‘For many people, including myself, it was an entrance into a world that I would not have known,’ the artist says. ‘In the 20th century, our biographies were not defined by birth anymore. That was a big development, and it started with my parents’ generation.’

Rist’s journey to video art was serendipitous: she initially used Super 8 film to create stage effects and images to be projected during concerts for local musical acts such as Billion Bob and all-female group Les Reines Prochaines. ‘I wanted to be in service of the music,’ explains Rist. ‘In a way, I am still creating music stages – except instead of a band, there are visitors.’ Music continues to play a role in her practice today: ‘Though my tendency is to look more at the image, I pay heavy attention to sound so that it is not neglected,’ she says.

After graduating in 1986 from the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna, the 24-year-old Rist returned to Switzerland and enrolled at the School of Design in Basel, where she studied under Swiss artist René Pulfer. During her first year of video studies, the artist submitted I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) to the Solothurn Film Festival – the seven-minute video was eventually placed into a group exhibition at Basel’s Museum of Applied Arts. Rist has exhibited at the Venice Biennale and São Paulo Art Biennial, as well as institutions across the world including the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, LA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. ‘I like the fine art world because it’s a protected space where you can bring all the disciplines together,’ she says.

Manuela Wirth, co-founder of Hauser & Wirth, has represented Rist since 1997. She describes the artist as a ‘guiding light’ for the gallery: ‘Pipilotti has expanded my understanding of how art can engage, entrance and immerse everyone – regardless of age or art knowledge.’ Marc Payot, partner and president of Hauser & Wirth, concurs, ‘The miracle of Pipilotti Rist is that she uses the camera with the same impact that the greatest painters have achieved with a brush. Where the first generation of artists working in video – such as Bruce Nauman – did so in relation to the medium’s limitations, Pipilotti set video free. She recreated it and opened a whole new form of expression, an ingenious cosmos all her own. But at the same time, her work is brimming with so much generosity that it engages every kind of viewer.’

Rist’s practice has developed in tandem with technological advancements, and today incorporates large video projects, digital manipulations and ambitious installations. But in the mid-1980s, creating and editing video was a decidedly analogue process. ‘I always was an early adopter. My goal was to squeeze the most out of these machines. Every screen has a different character. That’s something as a video artist I have to deal with,’ says Rist, who has the rare ability to tease humanistic elements from digital art – her work never feels cold. ‘The souls of the ones who have invented these machines are always there. I remember going to Osaka to visit the Panasonic headquarters – it was almost a religious feeling to go where video projection was invented.’ In spite of her reverence for technology, the artist is careful not to let it completely dictate her artistic practice. ‘Today, we are spoiled and expect a higher resolution – that’s why our brain can’t fill in the missing gaps anymore,’ Rist says. ‘But of course, our feelings take up more space. That’s why a painting often can have more reality or more truth in it than a very sharp image, because it gives more space for our interpretation. Extreme sharpness limits the emotional impact you can transport.’

Rist’s boundary-busting works seem most at home outside of white cube spaces – the light installation Seelenlichter (Soul Lights) (2021), which transformed a Gstaad chalet into a technicolour lantern, and Het leven verspillen aan jou (2022), a video projection in the square surrounding Rotterdam’s Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, come to mind, as does Jordlys og pingpong med solen (Earthlight and Ping-Pong with the Sun) (2020), a permanent installation for the Danish School of Media and Journalism in Aarhus involving four projections, multicoloured curtains and a large disco ball. Such projects, the artist explains, come with their own set of challenges. ‘Creating work for public spaces requires compromises: from considering weather conditions to a certain limitation of expression.’ Still, ‘a moving image is more difficult to ignore.’ She cites the kaleidoscopic intervention she created in 2011 for the Jean Nouvel-designed Sofitel Vienna Stephansdom as an example where she had to make creative concessions to cater to the hotel’s clientele as well as passers-by. ‘Museums are an ideal space because people take their time,’ she says, before adding that a playground would be her dream canvas for an artistic intervention.

In 2021, the Kunsthaus Zürich inaugurated its David Chipperfield Architects-designed extension with a genre- and era-spanning array of art, including Rist’s Pixel Forest (2021). The installation is on loan from art collector Werner Merzbacher, a Holocaust survivor who fled to Switzerland after his parents were murdered in a concentration camp. ‘He wanted visitors coming to see his collection to go through something that celebrates the underestimated power of colours – he would always say that colour saved his life,’ Rist explains of Merzbacher who, along with his wife Gabriele, has built an extraordinary collection of modern art masterpieces unified by energetic brushwork and bold hues.

The healing power of art is a quiet thread in Rist’s practice and it’s little wonder that her dazzling visual displays resonate with viewers on a deeper emotional level, even subconsciously. ‘I received a letter from a psychiatrist saying she had sent one of her heavily depressed patients to visit Pixel Forest. The patient said that for the first time in months, she felt a spark of joy,’ recalls Rist. ‘When somebody has depression, it’s less important to know why the ship has sunk, but rather how the ship can come up again.’ 

Sometimes the connection to mental health is more overt. Earlier this year, the National Museum of Qatar unveiled Rist’s first installation in the Middle East, Your Brain to Me, My Brain to You, in collaboration with the Ministry of Public Health. Visitors are invited to navigate 12,000 resin-encased LED lights – each representing neurons firing and communicating with one another – that have been programmed to sync with a video installation featuring abstract footage of the Qatari landscape. ‘Every day, I am astonished at the resilience of the minds of others – how much we hurt and then go on, and also accept that everyone is hurt,’ says Rist, who practises autogenic training (a relaxation technique) to keep her own mind balanced. ‘I am convinced art can help mental wellbeing; just a moment where you can forget your problems relaxes your brain. Going to a museum is a ritual and can have a calming, comforting effect.’

It’s only fitting, then, that the artist has been invited to create a permanent work at the New North Zealand Hospital in Hillerød, Denmark. Due to be completed in 2024, the clover leaf-like design by Herzog & de Meuron has a garden at its centre, where Rist’s projected installation will take shape. ‘We are working closely with the gardener to either shine through [the plants] or use them as the backdrop,’ she explains, likening the forthcoming work (which will light up for around ten minutes at night) to a ‘bonfire’. 

No wonder I walked away from my time with Rist feeling energised and renewed – she’s a feel-good tonic in human form. By pulling us close into her chromatic orbit, Rist brings a big and brilliant picture into view.

Pipilotti’s world: explore the artist’s portfolio for Wallpaper*

In Pipilotti Rist’s world, all things are bright and beautiful. Bed down and admire aquatic life, lose yourself in a forest of LED lights, gaze upon illuminated clothing lines, and dance against a backdrop of vivid projections and architectural spaces. By opening our eyes to the weird and the wonderful, Rist brings us closer to nature – and to one another. 

All artworks below, courtesy of Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine

INFORMATION

A version of this article headlines the November 2022 Art Special Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Pipilotti Rist, ‘Behind Your Eyelid’ is on until 27 November at Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, taikwun.hk, hauserwirth.com

In 1466, when Filippo Strozzi was allowed to return to Florence following his banishment by the rival Medici family, he set out to build the city’s grandest palazzo as an act of status and power. 

Palazzo Strozzi sits like a lump of solid geology in the centre of Florence. With walls formed of oversized rusticated stone blocks, it has the feel of a fortress: thick, defensive, with a grid of double windows wrapping its four sides.

Since 2006 it’s been home to Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, which has staged exhibitions by leading contemporary artists with an occasional classical superstar thrown in; comfortably hosting Carsten Höller’s slides and Jeff Koons’ dazzling orbs, as well as Donatello’s sculptures. In his new show, ‘Nel Tuo Tempo’, Olafur Eliasson has become the latest to fill the Renaissance rooms, in his words ‘with nothing but ephemera – water, temperature, light’.

‘Usually, an exhibition is a survey or just new work, but this is both,’ the Icelandic-Danish artist tells Wallpaper*, and with curator Arturo Galansino, Eliasson and his studio have composed an exhibition of new site-specific works alongside a selection from three decades of creative experimentation with light, technology, and experience. That last component, experience, has remained central to Eliasson’s work, but here it’s emphasised – ‘I think an experience is not something that happens to us… but experiencing is something we do.’ 

The first three rooms feature new site-responsive works, ideas so rooted in the palazzo’s architecture that it is hard to imagine how they could ever be exhibited elsewhere. Eliasson focuses on the palazzo’s windows, which puncture those thick, defensive façades, to open conversation between internal spaces and the civic realm beyond. Spotlights with colour filters affixed to a neighbouring building shine across the street and through a palazzo window, casting a triplicate upon a screen inside and turning the transparent window into a repeating vapourwave sunset. Another installation projects through a window from inside to out, bouncing off a mirror beyond and back into the palazzo, reverberating the colours into a shimmer of yellow and blue. 

The largest of these window works is monochrome. Spotlighted from the palazzo’s courtyard, it duplicates a gridded window onto the gallery wall. In this ghostly repetition, Eliasson makes visible the glass’s impurities, dust, and centuries of patina – ‘When looking, we forget that the window is editing what is outside, the window is a lens … and lenses are part of the reality, we do not see an objective truth,’ he says. 

The central courtyard itself is a semi-public space for the city, open from the street for passersby to wander into. It’s here that visitors this autumn will encounter an Eliasson intervention, a vast, suspended elliptical form with a disrupting moiré pattern formed from its two layers. Walking into the courtyard and under it, the interference ripples, while within the rational geometry and symmetry of the courtyard the sculpture appears to shapeshift, becoming a circle and then stretching back to an ellipse.

Other rooms feature various Eliasson works which he selected to speak to the underlining themes of translucency, thresholds, and objectivity. Beauty (1993) comprises a wall of mist, the angled light refracting in the droplets to form a rainbow curtain that can be walked through. With a mirrored ceiling and semicircular arc dropping to the floor, How do we live together? (2019) erupts the space, disorientating the visitor who, looking up, sees themselves and a perfect sphere – a Renaissance rationality through deceit and illusion.

Windows reappear in a room featuring Triple window (1999), formed of three overlapping theatre spotlights projecting the form of a night-time window, here stretched and confusing the geometry. Facing it is Your timekeeping window (2022), in which the artist has embedded 24 glass spheres into a wall. We can see the palazzo window behind but it is inverted and deformed, each globe twisting the architecture in a subtly different way which dances as one walks past, an encounter which keeps shifting.

Another new work, Your view matter (2022), made in collaboration with Metapurse (a crypto fund founded by the pseudonymous collector Metakovan), is Eliasson’s first reach into virtual reality. With an ambient soundtrack created by the artist, the digital explorer can meander around various geometrical spaces, with more moiré and playful twists of colour and form. The most interesting moments are when crossing from one ‘room’ into another, and the two imagined aesthetics overlap and clash. In a future-looking way, lingering in that digital threshold seems to poetically riff on Eliasson’s studies of the glass windows, despite the two different architectures of palazzo and VR having five centuries between their constructions.

INFORMATION

Olafur Eliasson: 'Nel Tuo Tempo', until 22 January 2023, Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. palazzostrozzi.org

Approached from the south, Es Devlin’s new public artwork in the Tate Modern Garden appears as an architectural homage, a monumental scale model of the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, right across the Thames from Christopher Wren’s original. In Devlin’s piece – titled Come Home Again, and commissioned by Cartier, the dome has been sliced open to reveal its cross-section, brilliantly illuminated and adorned from tip to toe with cut-out sketches of moths, birds, beetles, wildflowers, fish and fungi. At its base are steps that lead up to choral risers, inviting passers-by to immerse themselves in Devlin’s pencil-drawn wildlife.

By day, Come Home Again is a place for contemplation and learning. Stepping into the dome allows the visitor to examine the drawings up close – there are 243 in total, representing the 243 priority species identified by the London Biodiversity Action Plan as declining in numbers in the capital and thus in need of conservation action. In lieu of the prayer books that one might expect in a place of worship, Devlin has placed QR codes that link to a guide to all the species. Just as important is the soundscape, created by Devlin’s habitual music collaborators Jade Pybus and Andy Theakstone, and interspersing recordings of various choirs singing the Latin names of the priority species with the animals’ actual sounds. Every few minutes, the glorious cacophony fades and Devlin’s voice emerges to introduce one of the species. She says its common and Latin names, and brings up a nugget of information that helps us remember the animal. We learn, for instance, that the swift (Apus apus) can fly the equivalent of eight trips to the moon and back in its lifetime.

‘I want to help people learn the names of these animals,’ explains Devlin as we speak in her south London studio two weeks ahead of Come Home Again’s unveiling.

‘Once you know their names, you make a place for them in your imagination – it’s like the memory palace. And you’ll always think of them differently.’

Even for an artist and designer who is used to being in the limelight (Devlin’s portfolio includes stage sets for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Kanye West and U2, as well as Olympic ceremonies in London and Rio), Come Home Again is a project of great prominence. Tate Modern is among London’s most visited attractions, and even more people pass by its riverfront each day – so the museum is very selective about what it allows to be placed in the garden. The site also has personal significance to Devlin, a native Londoner: ‘For me, Tate Modern is emblematic of a real shift in British culture: its opening coincided with a shift in our character as a country and city, with New Labour and the rise of the YBAs. Suddenly British culture was significant on the world stage, when it hadn’t been for many years.’

The view of St Paul’s from the Tate Modern Garden makes the cathedral a natural starting point for a site-specific commission, but it was a conversation a few years ago with Ben Evans, director of the London Design Festival, that spurred Devlin to join the dots between the two spaces. ‘He said, “Es, you should think about the connection between St Paul’s as a seat of ancient ecclesiastical power, and the Tate as a seat of historical industrial power [the museum building was once the Bankside Power Station], and now a seat of contemporary cultural power. Consider that convergence of energies and think about what you might do”,’ Devlin recalls, as we pore over sketches and renderings of Come Home Again.

Around the same time as her conversation with Evans, Devlin was discovering books on eco-philosophy – encouraged by the likes of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alice Rawsthorn, and facilitated by the Amazon algorithm. The latter led her to the two most important volumes influencing her worldview and practice today: David Abram’s Becoming Animal (‘he talks a lot about magic, and how we can shift our perceptions if we just interrupt our usual ways of seeing things’, she recaps.), and Joanna Macy’s World as Lover, World as Self. ‘Macy invites you to consider where your self ends, invites you to recognise that you feel selfish, you feel a sense of self-preservation,’ says Devlin. ‘But what if where you considered self to reside was more expansive than just in your own body and in your own mind?’

Much of Devlin’s recent work reflects on Abram and Macy: there’s Forest for Change, which planted 400 trees within the courtyard of London’s Somerset House to raise awareness for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and similarly Conference of the Trees, which populated the New York Times’ Climate Hub at COP26 in Glasgow with 197 trees and plants. Her widely photographed and Instagrammed mirror labyrinth, Forest of Us, likewise carries an environmental message; in her words ‘it calls people’s attention to the connection between themselves and the planet’. Come Home Again, with its evocation of animal species which Devlin calls ‘non-human Londoners’, continues in this vein. ‘Humans went through a period of separation from the biosphere in order to learn more about it, in order to specialise. But now we need to reconnect, and come home again to our mutual planet,’ says Devlin, adding that the words ‘dome’ and ‘home’ share etymological roots.

In her bid to better connect with the 243 priority species, Devlin decided to draw each of them in pencil on paper, using photographs as reference material. ‘That kind of observational drawing has not been part of my practice since I was doing my art A-level, but I wanted this sense of submitting to the observation of a life that’s not my own,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t trying to be expressive. So my drawing of the bumblebee isn’t my interpretation of the bumblebee, but an effort to learn the bumblebee’s ways.’

It was a four-month process that involved a few 18-hour days, and gave Devlin ample opportunity to listen to podcasts about London wildlife, and wildlife in general. The fruits of her labour are evident in the ease with which she can now identify each species and rattle off factoids: she points out, for instance, that the streaked bombardier beetle was thought to be extinct until 85 of them were counted in the borough of Tower Hamlets, and has since become a subject in the artwork of Sonia Boyce, who won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Within Come Home Again, Devlin’s 243 sketches have been enlarged, printed on a sustainably sourced birch ply, cut out, and displayed across the dome’s cross-section, with strips of LEDs stuck on the back for illumination (these will go back to inventory after the exhibition). The structure is made in recycled steel and stretched fabric, and she’s opted for an environmentally friendly matte paint finish, all to keep the installation’s carbon footprint to a minimum and thus align with its message. 

Elegant and impactful as it is in the daytime, it is at sunset that Come Home Again truly comes to life. Each evening until 1 October, a London-based choral group will come to the installation and sing their interpretation of choral evensong, which members of the public can enjoy free of charge and without prior booking. Devlin got the idea from her visit to St Paul’s, where she observed the daily ritual that marks the moment as the day turns to evening: ‘listening to evensong, I thought, where else would you get this experience? They’re going to sing whether you turn up or not, so it’s not a performance. It’s actually a call to prayer, a relic of a time of matins, nones and vespers. You feel like you’re part of an ancient mode of telling time. Whoever you are, you can walk in and be surrounded by this extraordinary body of music.’

The choral lineup is illustrious and reflective of London’s cultural makeup, ranging from the award-winning Tenebrae, to the London Bulgarian Choir and the South African Cultural Gospel Choir UK. They will be singing in English, Latin, Bulgarian and Xhosa – ‘I’m interested in the parallel concerns of diminishing biodiversity and diminishing linguistic diversity,’ Devlin says. ‘We’re homogenising, and our ethnosphere has also been impoverished in parallel to the biosphere. There’s an extraordinary document on endangered languages, and how you feel when you read it is also how you feel when you see the last polar bear on the last floating bit of ice. I wanted to make that connection too.’ 

She is particularly looking forward to the performance by The Choir with No Name, a chorus for homeless and marginalised people to experience the joy of singing together. ‘I defy anyone not to cry on that night. Because we’re talking about homes, and here we have people who don’t have homes, singing their hearts out. I think it’s going to be incredibly moving.’

Devlin likes to include a clear call-to-action with each installation. So just as Forest of Us in Miami encouraged visitors to make a donation to Instituto Terra, a non-profit organisation dedicated to recovering the Atlantic Forest, Come Home Again encourages audiences to contribute to and engage with the London Wildlife Trust, which protects, conserves and enhances the capital’s wildlife and wild spaces.

It’s a cause that equally resonates with Cartier, with whom Devlin has a longstanding relationship (She cites the 2019 exhibition ‘Trees’ at Fondation Cartier, which brought together artists, botanists and philosophers, as an inspiration for her recent practice). Says Cyrille Vigneron, CEO of Cartier, ‘with Come Home Again, Es Devlin has created a unique and thought-provoking work of art, a choral sculpture representing how inspiring, yet fragile the beauty of the world can be, calling to preserve earth’s natural biodiversity.’

Ultimately, Come Home Again offers a message of hope, suggesting that if we take swift and decisive action to remedy past wrongs, we can return to a happier state of equilibrium with the planet. As Devlin says in the installation’s soundscape, quoting Joanna Macy: ‘May we turn inwards and stumble upon our true roots in the intertwining biology of this exquisite planet. [...] Now it can dawn on us. We are our world knowing itself. We can relinquish our separateness, we can come home again.’

Come Home Again, until 1 October 2022 at the Tate Modern Garden, Bankside, London SE1, esdevlin.com, cartier.com, wildlondon.org.uk

In scale and scope, the ‘Light & Space’ exhibition at Copenhagen Contemporary is epic. ‘It will be BIG in every way!’, the international art centre declared before opening the doors on 2 December 2021. Sprawling across 5,000 sq m, with artworks from 27 artists, it is the biggest exhibition ever for the six-year-old institution, as well as the most comprehensive presentation of artists from the influential light and installation art movement (Light and Space) that emerged in and around Los Angeles in the 1960s. 

From James Turrell’s immersive, site-specific Aftershock, 2021, to Doug Wheeler’s LC 71 NY DZ 13 DW, 2013, an illuminated fibreglass dome measuring 20m in diameter, the exhibition is monumental and impressive. Yet the real power of ‘Light & Space’ comes from its intimacy. You experience the artworks physically and emotionally. Some are ephemeral and enveloping, like Helen Pashgian’s Untitled, 2021, a cast epoxy lens illuminated by an intensifying cycle of light. Others are disorientating if not confronting. In Eric Orr’s Zero Mass, 1972-73, an oval room lined with photographic paper forms a void so dark that it hypersensitises your body, as your eyes are out of commission.

‘There’s a precision in all of this work, which is extremely fascinating because it’s paired with tactility, the bodily experience. So even though some of the work can seem cold, it’s not, because it’s always raised in your body,’ says Marie Nipper, director of Copenhagen Contemporary. Or, as artist Lita Albuquerque says, ‘you become part of the work’.

On site to recreate Materia Prima, first presented in Venice Beach in 1979, Albuquerque says she cried as she spread the cadmium yellow pigment on its bed of salt. ‘There’s something vulnerable and beautiful about being completely immersed in colour.’ Now 75, Albuquerque emerged on the art scene in the 1970s in the midst of the movement sometimes called Californian Minimalism. Ever since, she has explored our relationship to the cosmos with a sense of wonder and optimism. She perceives the Light and Space movement as prophetic, rather than an artefact. ‘I’m realising more and more it’s a profound movement. For me, 2021 was a hinge year. The Light and Space movement feels the same, like it’s a hinge, and there’s something really powerful that is yet to unfold.’

Her spirit infuses the show, a salve for a pandemic-weary world, but also a forensic reappraisal of a movement often narrowly defined by its prominent male figures and works referred to as ‘finish fetish’ because of their highly polished surfaces. ‘We didn’t want to do the obvious Light and Space show that has been done before. We wanted to broaden the scope of artists with new females as well as males and to broaden the spectrum,’ says Nipper. ‘The Light and Space movement is infused with more than the surface-oriented works, there’s also what I call organic minimalism, oriented towards the landscape or towards painting in expanded fields.’

Context was critical. Nipper wanted to properly represent works from the time and to demonstrate their influence by placing them in a contemporary framework with European artists. It meant rediscovering artists and works that were barely documented and recreating them in situ. A very intentional process, she says. In 2019 she undertook a research trip across the US, visiting institutions and studios, meeting artists, even going to church with the Quaker James Turrell. ‘That was really the beginning of the research.’ Back in Copenhagen, Nipper and her exhibitions team, led by Jannie Haagemann, pored over scant primary sources, such as back issues of Artforum that covered ‘happenings’, often without images. It enabled them to get a more nuanced perspective of the broader group who were making this ‘really amazing stuff’, powerful at the time, but largely forgotten since. 

Elyn Zimmerman’s haunting Untitled, 1974, is one such work. Made of shadows cast by halogen lights on glass panels, the minimalist expression of material and immateriality is being shown for the first time since 1974. 

This commitment to staging such a representative show, probably the biggest ever in Europe, also meant Copenhagen Contemporary was able to secure precious seminal works from important collections. Dia Art Foundation lent Robert Irwin’s Untitled, 1965–67, a painted convex aluminium disc lit by four lights that distort the perception of the object and its overlapping shadows. Irwin’s early perceptual works inspired the name of the movement. In a catalogue essay in 1966, the founding editor of Artforum, Philip Leider, describes his art as an ‘experience of space and light’, coining the term later enshrined in an exhibition in 1971.

The historic works resonate even more when placed with contemporary pieces by the likes of Olafur Eliasson or Ann Veronica Janssens. There is a clear continuum. Anish Kapoor is renowned for his light-absorbing voids, but his blue pigmented Void, 1993, reads differently when considered alongside one that Albuquerque conceived a decade and a half before. 

When Fred Eversley, an electrical engineer who worked on Project Gemini (an early Nasa human spaceflight programme), began playing around with casting resin in the late 1960s, it was an exciting new material. Yet the 80-year-old artist’s two sculptures, Untitled (parabolic lens), 1971, in violet, amber and blue, and the deep black Untitled (parabolic lens), 1976, as opaque as the former is translucent, are as seductive as anything made in the medium today. Eversley attributes it to the power of the parabola, which he first made at age 15, using an old turntable and jello, after reading about it in a science magazine. ‘The parabola, which is my shape, is the only shape that concentrates all forms of energy to a single focal point.’ He calls his sculptures moving art without moving elements. It is an apt way to describe the entire exhibition.

INFORMATION

’Light & Space’, until 4 September 2022, Copenhagen Contemporary. copenhagencontemporary.org

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Rana Begum and fashion designer Roksanda Ilinčić’s first collaboration consisted of a web of coloured fishing nets spun across the Giles Gilbert Scott-designed Durbar Court, the stodgy heart of the UK government’s Foreign Office. Carving up the lofty inner sanctum, the luminescent nets shot across three storeys of columns and landed on the marble floor to form a prismatic set for Roksanda’s A/W 2022 collection. Begum, an artist fascinated with interplays between light, colour and space, seemingly met her creative kith and kin in Ilinčić, a designer revered for her colour-block, ballooning sculptural pieces. It’s been a long-standing admiration, ‘even before our collaboration’, says Ilinčić. ‘Very cheekily, I used one of her Folded Grid series as inspiration for my pre-fall 2019 collection. You could see this wonderful aura of pinkness floating around it.’ 

Embedded within both practices is the experience and appreciation of architectural principles. While Ilinčić was privy to the concrete socialist landscape of her hometown of Belgrade, Serbia, Begum admired the impressive Indo-Islamic buildings during her childhood in Sylhet, Bangladesh. And movement around, through, out of and into space brought the pair together again this year for a public commission for The Line, a sculpture trail in east London. No.1104 Catching Colour, a floating plume of sherbety colour, stretches out in the centre of City Island’s Botanic Square, encircled by high-rise flats. 

The work was launched with a performance by the English National Ballet, choreographed by Stina Quagebeur. Ilinčić dressed the dancers in close-fitting costumes, characteristically bold in their palette. ‘It was new to me,’ explains Begum. ‘The piece is like a conversation between Roksanda, Stina and me.’ Underneath Begum’s cumulus puff of pigment – deceptively spongey although formed from metal mesh – dancers moved through the air, as dashes of pigment flew with them. A light breeze and the work softly swayed.

The chameleonic sculpture, like the best of Begum’s work, shifts with its environment and its viewer’s position. Exposed to the elements, the layers of lattice absorb and deflect light; colours intensify and shadows pattern the ground beneath it, evoking light streaming through a jali. A similar sculpture is installed at west London’s Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery as part of Begum’s touring exhibition, ‘Dappled Light’. Suspended underneath an original 19th-century circular skylight, the cluster of metal scrunches ushers shards of light onto the glossy floor of the gallery. The manor house was designed by John Soane, a man who considered light his building material. ‘This connection with Soane and the way he plays with light, and brings it into the space, was really exciting,’ Begum enthuses, with the caveat that there were challenges. ‘The house is listed and you can’t touch the walls.’ Instead, Begum’s work spreads into the stairwell and onto the balcony. 

The show has travelled from Warwick’s recently refurbished Mead Gallery, and will continue on to The Box in Plymouth. Curated by Cliff Lauson, the new director of exhibitions at Somerset House, the show emphasises that, in her exploration of light, Begum can be fickle with her mediums. She leaps from steel nodules inspired by Istanbul’s rooftops, to totems made of vehicle reflectors first set upon during a residency in Bangkok, to chevron watercolours that evoke the work of painter Tess Jaray, an early mentor. 

Begum’s clarity of focus transcends the abundance of colour, materials and forms. Each work is numbered, suggesting an infinite continuum and relentlessness in her experimentation with light. There are steadfast motifs, such as her predilection for grids and sharp lines seen in the crisp Donald Judd-like bars of her wall-based works, and the colour-changing prints for her recent solo show with Cristea Roberts Gallery. With light as its founding principle, the work imbues rudimentary objects with majesty. Begum has turned singular forms into light-filtering composites; for instance, joining handwoven bamboo baskets to become cavernous hollow spaces that draw in light through their warps and wefts. For a project at Wanås Konst in Sweden last year, a pyramid of terracotta pipes, floating on water, funnelled sunlight through their apertures. 

Begum’s studio-home in north London speaks of the same ethos; the space is a vessel for light. The project, which its designer Peter Culley, of Spatial Affairs Bureau, calls a ‘retreat compound’, has transformed the former ‘asbestos-covered shed’ into a three-floor space, with adjoining flat, to accommodate her family, studio team, resident artists and a timeline heaving with exhibitions and commissions. The open-plan interior is crafted around skylights and windows that frame the trees of Abney Park Cemetery. The view of this local nature reserve is the basis of Begum’s first video work, No.1080 Forest (2021). Made during lockdown, it’s a slow study of the seasons passing through the dense canopy. 

‘I’ve always hated the idea of barriers and fencing,’ says Begum. So the studio’s entrance is opened up to the park, with a sculpture court and courtyard garden that brush up to the cemetery’s boundary wall and siphon off its tranquillity. For Begum, barriers are emblematic of social neurosis. ‘What is it that gates allow you to do? They push people out, but at the same time they make you feel secure.’ This is a paradox Begum will take up in an upcoming New York project with the Art Production Fund. And similar ideas around permissible flows of movement and security are acknowledged in her co-curation of the architectural section of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with architect Níall McLaughlin. The focal point is Khudi Bari, a flood shelter on bamboo stilts designed for Rohingya refugees by architect Marina Tabassum. The two women have previously worked together and no doubt will do again, for, as Begum explains: ‘As artists, you can isolate yourself quite a bit, and become quite stale in the way you look at things. It’s really interesting to hear a different perspective.’

INFORMATION
Rana Begum, ’Dappled Light’, until 11 September 2022, Pitzhanger Manor, London. pitzhanger.org.uk

It was a well-worn condition of 20th-century art: the creativity of women eclipsed by the fame of their husbands. But in New York, an exhibition at Pace Gallery is seeking to remedy one of these historical imbalances: Coosje van Bruggen’s vital yet historically unsung role alongside Claes Oldenburg in the Pop Art powerhouse that is Claes & Coosje. 

‘The exhibit as a whole is a beautiful, intelligent and compelling elucidation of artistic partnership in celebration of multiplicity over reductive views of authorship,’ the duo’s daughter, Maartje Oldenburg, tells Wallpaper*. 

The pair met in 1971, when Coosje was a young curator at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Claes was a subversive and prominent force in Pop Art. They married six years later and Coosje soon turned from interlocutor into fully fledged artist and collaborator in her own right. She brought a lot to the table: the intellectual rigour of a critic combined with the poetic sensibilities of a sculptor. The results were sometimes controversial, instantly recognisable public artworks that prove difficult to forget. 

Augmented, uncanny replicas of familar objects were Claes & Coosje's bread and butter. The Pace exhibition spans from their early collaborations in the 1980s to their final works in the late 2000s, including studies, original artefacts, soft sculptures and drawings relating to their most famed works. 

The beauty of Claes & Coosje’s work is that you never quite know what’s coming: perhaps it will be a blown-up shuttlecock, a deflated, sagging viola, a disorientingly large fork affixed to a pasta-covered meatball or perhaps even an ominous penknife splayed to resemble a boat. The latter sculpture relates to Il Corso del Coltello (The Course of the Knife), a colossal site-specific performance project for Venice, Italy, commissioned and conceived with the writer Germano Celant and architect Frank Gehry. Elsewhere, in a harmonious déjà vu, is a suite of gloriously warped musical instruments that Claes & Coosje created around the time of their last major solo show, ‘The Music Room’, presented at Pace Gallery, New York, in 2005. 

The show captures all the wit, whimsy and subversive spirit of Claes & Coosje’s remarkable collaboration, but it’s also intensely moving. With 31 Flowers, the mood changes from amused awe to reflection. Over the years, Claes presented his wife with small sculptural works as tokens of affection. Shortly before Coosje passed away in 2009, Claes created 31 intricate paper flowers for her as an anniversary gift, one for each year of their marriage.

Flowers spring up as a recurring theme in their work, and formed the basis of their final project together. Dropped Bouquet – an enormous painted aluminium sculpture created this year and on display for the first time – was initially conceived for a grassy, sloping hillside in the sculpture garden of Indianapolis Museum of Art, but the original commission was never realised. ‘It is personally meaningful to realise Dropped Bouquet today to bring Coosje into a present with growing awareness of and appreciation for the too often minimised contributions of women,’ Maartje says. 

The exhibition offers rare insight into the fantastical world of Claes & Coosje. A world where high and low art converge, imagination roams free, love doesn’t wane, and where, ultimately, it takes two. 

As Maartje concludes, ‘When my eyes first skipped across more than 40 images of large-scale projects, displayed chronologically on a single wall, I cried, because they represent my childhood but also my parents’ lived commitment to the immanence of art that, moving between personal and public spheres, can sustain a duet for all.’ 

This article was first published in spring 2021

INFORMATION

‘Claes & Coosje: A Duet’ ran at Pace New York in spring 2021, pacegallery.com

oldenburgvanbruggen.com

You might have seen the work of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña before. You might have been staggered by its scale, its command of materials, or its ability to envelop space and all who encounter it. But you might not know all that Vicuña’s work stands for, or all it took to get here. 

Vicuña has the sort of speaking voice that doesn’t demand attention. It’s quiet, dulcet and melodious. What she says, however, warrants undivided attention, an advantage she and her work have long been denied. 

For most of Vicuña’s prolific 50-year career as an artist, poet, filmmaker and activist, she has been ignored, censored, marginalised, and ridiculed. When we meet at her studio, in the Tribeca district of New York, she explains that this alienation has its roots in the West’s ‘mastery’ in denying all that matters to people, the Earth and the future. This, she notes, is not just a story about how the Global North has excluded the South, but how the South has excluded itself by only embracing a Northern mentality. ‘All knowledge that disagrees with the Western system is eliminated, sometimes brutally, like in the current extermination of Indigenous people around the world’, she explains as a thread of incense billows through the air between us. ‘The Western mind is not just Europe and the US, [it] also operates in the colonies, and I consider Chile, even today, a colonised country where everybody is subjected to a colonisation of the mind, spirit and soul. So how could my work be meaningful under those conditions?’ In light of her potent and steadfast opposition to this oppressive landscape, Vicuña ‘never expected or looked for appreciation [or] recognition.’

Now, in 2022, Vicuña is having what is known as a moment. In April, she was honoured with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 59th Venice Biennale (where she has an installation in the main exhibition, ‘The Milk of Dreams’); she’s the subject of a major survey show at the Guggenheim in New York, and later this year, she will dominate the nave-like cavern that is Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for the 2022 Hyundai Commission. 

Is she frustrated it all took so long? ‘Incredibly, no,’ she says. ‘This is true and not completely true, because what happened to me is the reason I was able to continue doing what I was doing; I found souls, people, that believed in what I did.’ 

Born in 1948 in Santiago de Chile, Vicuña spent her early years in the Maipo Valley, enveloped in a liberal rural environment where being clothed was actively discouraged (‘my mother believed that clothes were detrimental’, she says), and education and creativity were nurtured (her father even built her a garden studio for painting). ‘The whole family knew I was an artist [at] two years old,’ she laughs. But her childhood was not entirely

drenched in freedom. Her grandfather, a historian, was jailed four times for defending civil rights in Chile, and her family frequently took in refugees from the Jewish diaspora and the República Española following the Second World War.

In spite of what was to come, Vicuña’s early life held a promise of swift success. At 18, her poetry was published in Mexico’s El Corno Emplumado (according to Vicuña, ‘the best poetry magazine that existed at the time’). At 23, she received two solo exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago. Vicuña believes this was only possible because it was the 1960s, a decade when minds were opened and ‘creativity engulfed the entire planet’. Then, in 1973, a wave of military coups arrived in Latin America, which deposed the democratically-elected Chilean president Salvador Allende and ushered in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. This, as Vicuña puts it, brought ‘a closing of the mind, and the closing of all potentialities.’ 

As these events unfolded, Vicuña was in London, where she had enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Arts on a British Council scholarship and would remain in exile for three years (from 1975, she continued her self-exile in Bogotá, Colombia). ‘They asked me “which course do you want to follow?” I said, “I don’t want a course, I just want a studio”, so that’s what they did. I never had classmates’, she recalls. The studio was in Stepney Green, then a ‘brutal’ area defined by prostitution and deprivation.

In London, Vicuña was poor in material, but rich in ambition. She began searching for somewhere to show her work. She found the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and proposed an exhibition. ‘I didn’t know that young South American girls didn’t do that. I was so naïve,’ she says. But Vicuña’s proposal fell into the hands of the ‘enlightened’ ICA co-founder, Roland Penrose, who requested that she visit him at the museum. ‘He said to me, “you are a great artist, but my board is absolutely adamant that you should not have an exhibition here”,’ she recalls. ‘“They think that you are worthless. But be sure, you will encounter this throughout your life, but you have to know within yourself that that’s not true.’ In spite of his board’s reluctance, Penrose managed to secure a space for Vicuna’s first solo show in London. ‘Pain Things & Explanations’ (1973) took place in the hallway leading to the ICA toilets.

‘Many years later, through friends who were scholars and researchers, I told this story and they searched the archives of the ICA and this exhibition, along with many other exhibitions, were not in their archives. Not in their records, like it never happened,’ she recalls. 

In the late 1960s and 70s, Vicuña created a number of oil paintings, many of which were either lost or destroyed due to travel, the Chilean military coup, and a lack of care and respect for her painting practice. Vicuña estimates that, during her career, around 40 per cent of these works were thrown away. In 1986, she stopped painting entirely. She has only recently returned to the medium, reclaiming her history through reimagined versions of significant earlier works, driven by the lost paintings of her past. ‘Sometimes I wish they still existed, but I think an awareness of the precarious nature of our existence imbued everything that I did all along.’ 

Vicuña’s most recognisable works are installations called quipus. These monumental pieces rain from the ceilings of exhibition spaces in streams of raw, unspun wool and debris. They are an homage to, and contemporary reactivation of the ancient record-keeping quipus (made from long textile cords with a knot system) of the Incas and other ancient Andean cultures that bound communities but were banned by the Spanish during their colonisation of South America. Contemporary audiences may be surprised to learn that her first quipu consisted only of an empty cord – it was a ‘mind quipu’, perhaps an elegy to what was taken away, or an invitation to imagine what could have been. ‘All the quipus I have done come from the “mind quipu”,’ she explains.

Vicuña’s exhibition at the Guggenheim is the premiere of a new three-part work titled Quipu del exterminio / Extermination Quipu (2022). Suspended in the High Gallery, a double-height space at the beginning of the museum’s spiral ramp, it’s at once an installation, a poem, and a call to action against the extinction of the Earth’s species. ‘Can we acknowledge extermination?’ asks a poem hand-scrawled in red on the wall behind the installation, inspired by texts by American theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek. ‘The quipu is the speaker of blood. Each knot marking a loss… a wound… the extermination of life.’ 

‘More than a year ago, before knowing exactly how the quipu was going to be, she asked for some silent time for herself in the High Gallery. This allowed her to use the Guggenheim spiral as a connector, connecting her with Earth and sky, and incorporating energy and millennial wisdom into the work,’ recalls Pablo León de la Barra, who co-curated the show with Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães. ‘Then [on] the day of installation she asked all of the team to make a circle in the space and hold hands. Incorporating her shamanic persona, she began chanting sounds and connecting us to one another, to the space, the building, her work and the energy of the universe. In the same manner, she did a prayer the day the quipu installation was finished, and now called it a prayer against extinction and for the Earth.’

León de la Barra first became aware of Vicuña’s work ten years ago while researching for an exhibition for the David Roberts Foundation (now The Roberts Institute of Art), which focused on Latin American artists who had been in political exile in London during the late 1960s and early 70s. ‘Although [Vicuña] has been based in New York for 40 years, the New York art world ignored her until she showed in Documenta in 2017’, León de la Barra notes. ‘On the other hand, this allowed her to develop her incredible and diverse body of work in silence and without the pressures of the art market.’

Titled ‘Spin Spin Triangulene’, the Guggenheim show is a focused offering of multidisciplinary work from the 1960s to today. Themes such as memory, language, science, cybernetics, and Indigenous spirituality and knowledge are explored through paintings, works on paper, language-based Palabrarmas (or ‘word weapons’, political and metaphorical riddles and poems which present language as a living entity), textiles, a site-specific quipu, and a one-time performance on 31 August of a ‘living’ quipu, commissioned by the museum’s Latin American Circle.

Lining the walls of the Guggenheim’s spiral are Vicuña’s paintings, which subvert colonial symbols, formats and media. Autobiography meets the rise of global socialism, alongside works that directly confront Frank Lloyd Wright’s museum architecture.

These include the deeply personal Autobiografia, which traces Vicuña’s life from birth until the work’s creation in 1971, and paintings of figures including Chilean folk singer and social activist Violeta Parra and German philosopher Karl Marx, which evoke religious icons. Vicuña presents Marx in a utopian ‘garden of eternal delights’ filled with amorous homosexual bodies. This painting has its own story of survival during Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, when those who opposed the regime were openly persecuted. To prevent the work from being seized by authorities, Nemesio Antúnez, artist and then-director of Santiago’s Museum of Fine Arts, hid the painting in his home, painted over the name ‘Karl Marx’, and replaced it with ‘Charles Darwin’ (the evolutionary biologist had a similar white beard), an amendment since reversed.

Another notable work in ‘Spin Spin Triangulene’ is the new painting, Three Spirals. It contains three images and three narratives, each distinct, but inextricably linked. On the left is Chuquicamata, the world’s biggest open-air copper mine, located in the north of Chile and owned by the Guggenheim family from 1912-23. In the centre is a spiralled conch flute, used by Mayans in sacred rituals. Mayan architecture in turn was a frequent source of inspiration in Wright’s work; a likely source of inspiration for the Guggenheim’s spiral form was the staircase of El Caracol (the snail), an ancient observatory at the Chichen Itza in modern-day Mexico. On the right is the Guggenheim itself, which appears to bleed with a river of red paint.

Vicuña doesn’t oppose the usual narratives around Wright’s design inspiration (the Guggenheim website references the incorporation of ‘organic form’ into the museum’s architecture), but instead poses an open question: is there more to this story? ‘Even though I’m not an archaeologist or an art historian, and I cannot say for sure, I wanted people to sense that an artist such as Frank Lloyd Wright also takes his inspiration from Indigenous art.’

With this question, Vicuña is addressing the foundations of the Western art world, specifically the history of the Guggenheim family and the source of its fortune in extractivism. It is noteworthy that a museum now celebrating Vicuña’s life and work had derived its early capital from destroying what the artist fought for an entire career to preserve. She contends that most museums around the world are entangled in capitalist exploitation. ‘The entire world is dependent on the destruction of the world, so it’s something that has to change if there’s a chance of surviving.’ That’s why I bring it up, because every chance we have to bring awareness to the deadly effect of extractivism, is something that every citizen should be involved in’, says Vicuña. ‘We are trapped in this complicity and this “looking away”, pretending that this is not the case. Now we have received the final warning from the scientists that the planet is becoming uninhabitable for humans.’

As León de la Barra explains, Three Spirals is questioning the ‘dependency today of the art system, institutions and artists on extractivist funding which has an effect on our fragile environment and climate change… Cecilia’s message is clear: if we don’t change our destructive ways and our relationship with our environment, our days on this Earth are counted.’

Throughout Vicuña’s paintings and installations are common threads, and they’re often a shade of deep, visceral red. This is red as the absolute core of humanity: life, death, blood, spirituality, the cosmos; the power of the female body, and its oppression. In her paintings and installations, red is murder, wounding, and menstruation, sometimes all at once. ‘The negative view of blood and menstruation is pretty universal. The patriarchy has been instilled in the entire planet, and nobody escapes that. But human culture is far older than the patriarchy. It existed for perhaps millions of years before the idea that blood was shameful.’ 

‘Red is incredibly important. I knew what it meant, this relationship or fascination, but I don’t think it would be in my art,’ she says. ‘

It is for each viewer to decide whether this is the blood of hurt, the blood of murder, the blood of destroying the Earth, or the blood of complicity. When we’re faced with blood, whether it is of our own menstruation or the blood of a wounded person, we have all this ambivalence in our response: disgust, horror, compassion. Red mobilises strange, profound forces within us.’

Vicuña created her first red quipu in 2006, the year that Michelle Bachelet became the first female president of Chile, and the first popularly elected female head of state in South America. Vicuña was unable to vote – the electoral register had been burnt by the dictatorship. ‘I wanted to vote! So I decided I would go up to the glacier that feeds Santiago, and [create] a red quipu at the foot of the glacier for the specific purpose of praying for the awareness of the union of water and blood.’

Another example recently dangled from the rafters of Tate Modern, where, in October, Vicuña will take on the ambitious Turbine Hall commission. Vicuña believes that the ‘very visceral, fantastic response’ to her monumental installation, Quipu Womb (2017), which debuted at Documenta 14 and was recently acquired by Tate, was part of the reason she was selected for the Turbine Hall. 

Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern explains, ‘Vicuña has been an inspirational figure for half a century, championing concerns of ecology, community and social justice which grow ever more urgent today. Her radical textile sculptures combine pressing political messages with stunning visual form, creating a truly unforgettable experience for the viewer – one that resonates with and connects audiences all around the world. Recognition of Vicuña's powerful work is long overdue and I'm thrilled that she'll be bringing fibre art to the heart of Tate Modern for the first time this autumn.’

Given her historical entanglement with London, Vicuña’s forthcoming Tate commission will offer a sense of coming full circle. ‘I have a love for London, where everything was so difficult and beautiful at the same time. The Turbine Hall, in particular, feels like a park, like a public space, and people use it that way. I’m fascinated by that because that’s the origin of my art,’ she says. ‘Whatever I do in the Turbine Hall will continue that spirit of complete fluidity of the public space. Even though it’s inside the museum, people take it differently, perhaps because it’s an industrial space, it belongs to everybody. Experiencing – not telling, but sensing, feeling – is the most powerful way of transmission.’ 

Vicuña’s artworks are living entities, with a gravitational pull stronger than their earthly weight suggests. They are circular, ephemeral, and in a sense, unfinished, much like our existence and purpose on Earth. Their message, at their core, is that eco-activism, feminism, and the rights of Indigenous people are not responses to distinct plights, but part of the same tapestry. Her work is a eulogy to all that’s been lost, and a plea to avoid what might be if we continue on our path of inaction and destruction. 

Vicuña brings the Earth, its people, and its lost histories onto the stage to speak for themselves. Together, they proclaim that what weaves us together might just keep us alive, and the world spinning.

INFORMATION

‘Spin Spin Triangulene’ is showing until 5 September at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, guggenheim.org
Hyundai Commission, 13 October 2022-16 April 2023, Tate Modern, London, tate.org.uk

ceciliavicuna.com, lehmannmaupin.com

A version of this article appears in the August 2022 Design for a Better World issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today!

The Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan is fond of stories that others don’t want to hear. Stories about the war, for instance. In 1979, after the Vietnamese army overthrew the Khmer Rouge, her uncle went to Cambodia for three years as part of the Vietnamese occupation force. Drained by the genocide, the capital city of Phnom Penh was almost empty of humans, but full of black birds, he told her. In order to take a shower he had to use the water from the well, but whenever he did so, his hair would be covered by white dust. 

‘The Khmer Rouge used to throw the dead into the wells,’ the Cambodians told him. ‘The white dust is what remains of the bones.’

Phan’s cousins took little interest in these gruesome stories, but she became fascinated with them. Fuelled by the fact that the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was rarely mentioned in Vietnamese history books, she conducted long interviews with her uncle. This inspired her latest work, the video installation First Rain, Brise Soleil (2021– ongoing) in which three films are projected next to each other like a moving, modern-day triptych. Neither the images nor the story told in the subtitles features her uncle’s experience, however. Having explored a hidden side of Vietnamese history, Phan decided to create a new work of fiction: the story of a Vietnamese construction worker who goes to Cambodia in the 18th century and witnesses a great fire that destroys the country’s most magnificent theatre. 

‘I’m interested in fiction because I realised at some point that Vietnam itself is like a big fiction,’ she says. ‘You don’t know what´s truthful and what’s not.’

Speaking on Zoom from Cornwall, where she has installed her solo show at Tate St Ives (until 2 May 2022), Phan talks softly, giving off the air of thoughtful observation. At the same time, you can sense her artistic mission to make sense of her country’s past and future; a drive to pose big questions and to present them on a large scale. Phan aims to uncover hidden narratives, to bring them to light in a new way. This makes her work at once very coded and very open; multi-faceted, but also driven by an overarching curiosity that seeks to discover it all: history and religion, nature and civilisation, folklore and art.

Trained in her hometown of Ho Chi Minh City, as well as Singapore and Chicago, Phan, 34, is one of Vietnam’s few contemporary artists to show their work abroad. In 2016 – 17, she was mentored by New York-based artist Joan Jonas as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her Tate St Ives show is her first major solo presentation in the UK, featuring paintings, sculptures and video installations. There are watercolour images drawn on the pages of the book Rhodes of Viet Nam, by the missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, who had adapted the Vietnamese language into the Roman alphabet (Voyages de Rhodes, 2014 – 17). There are light sculptures in sunflower and bird shapes, recalling the traditional symbols of harmony, prosperity and longevity, but also the sunflower motif used for state propaganda (The Rise and The Flower, both 2016). There is another video installation devoted to the Mekong river and the imbalanced relationship between humans and the environment (Becoming Alluvium, 2019 – ongoing).

‘On first seeing Phan’s work I was struck by the way in which she works across media and methodologies, creating a distinctive artistic language that often layers or blends film and animation, image and text,’ says Anne Barlow, director of Tate St Ives. 

Phan, who was born the year after the economic liberalisation of socialist Vietnam in 1986, grew up in a country that has been changing rapidly. While Ho Chi Minh City has evolved into a sprawling metropolis with skyscrapers, shopping malls and plenty of cars, modernisation has also posed a threat to the environment. According to the World Bank, the per capita plastic consumption rate in Vietnam rose ten times between 1990 and 2019. Coastlines and rivers – including the mighty Mekong – are heavily polluted. ‘I feel that Vietnamese people are paying a very high price to modernise,’ Phan says. ‘Our children will have to shoulder the burden.’ 

Environmentalism is an issue that concerns the younger, better-educated generation more than the older one, she admits. Many Vietnamese still focus on providing for their family, especially those living in the countryside. ‘Most people are just too busy making a living,’ she says.

Now that the Tate St Ives exhibition is opening, Phan says she no longer thinks about her art being from or about Vietnam. She feels she has come full circle. Her last show opened at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels in February 2020. Before she flew back to Vietnam, her mother asked her to buy face masks because they were already sold out at home. The 20 months that followed felt frozen in time: Phan finished her work on First Rain, Brise Soleil during a strict lockdown and shortly after giving birth to her second child. Her seven-year-old daughter couldn’t go to school and spent her days being bored at home. Phan’s favourite Vietnamese art space, The Factory, had to close temporarily because the people who ran it moved on to other jobs or other countries. 

Now, finally, Phan can travel and show her work again. ‘It’s a good return after almost two years of silence,’ Phan says. ‘It feels like a recovery.’ 

INFORMATION

Thao Nguyen Phan’s exhibition at Tate St Ives will be on view until 2 May 2022. tate.org.uk

About the author

Khue Pham is an award-winning Vietnamese-German writer. A graduate from the LSE, she has contributed to the UK’s Guardian and NPR before becoming an editor at the renowned German weekly Die ZEIT. Her interests span pop culture and politics; she has interviewed Anna Wintour; and her investigative reporting has earned her a nomination for the prestigious Egon Erwin Kisch Prize. In 2012, she co-wrote a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. In 2021, she published her first novel Brothers and Ghosts, which is inspired by the story of her Vietnamese family.

Few collectives have marked art history of the 20th century like General Idea. Emerging out of 1960s Canadian counterculture movements, the conceptual trio – AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal – spent 25 years pranking the art world with their witty take on societal ills, from late-capitalist consumerism to popular media and the Aids crisis. (Partz and Zontal both died as a result of the virus in 1994.) Now, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa is celebrating the group’s history with the most comprehensive retrospective to date, featuring over 200 works that span painting, video, sculpture, installations and archival material. ‘There are many shifts and surprises from space to space,’ Bronson tells me over the phone. ‘Because of the size of the gallery, there was a possibility to do something pretty amazing.’

While remembered as a sophisticated art threesome, General Idea started out as a commune of sorts when, in 1969, half a dozen friends moved into a small storefront on Toronto’s bohemian Gerrard Street West. ‘Most of us were unemployed and looking for entertainment,’ Bronson remembers. ‘So, we started staging fake shops in our front window to keep ourselves busy and, somehow, that grew into a practice.’ Early projects were ephemeral in nature, involving mail art, experimental performances and other interventions. For their first group show in 1970, they submitted a work titled General Idea, which the gallery misunderstood as being the collective’s name. ‘So, we became General Idea!’ Bronson laughs. Within a few years – after establishing the iconic mock periodical FILE Megazine – the original membership dissolved, largely due to Toronto’s booming real-estate market. ‘We were unable to find another equivalent space where seven or eight people could both live and work,’ Bronson says. ‘It just all fragmented and we ended up with Jorge, Felix, and I.’

General Idea cultivated a queer aesthetic before there even was a language to talk about it. As early as 1970, the group began staging Dadaesque beauty contests as a satirical performance of art and popular culture. Throughout the rest of the decade, iterations of the Miss General Idea concept unravelled in the form of archaeological fragments from the ill-fated fictional ‘1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion’. Once done and dusted, the pageant fantasy was substituted by the equally camp motif of the poodle, which came to dominate the group’s work in the 1980s. Three loose canines first appeared in one explicit painting at MoMA PS1 in 1982 and soon found their way onto custom flags, escutcheon scarves, fluorescent canvases and photographic self-portraits. ‘It would have been the kiss of death to call yourself a gay artist,’ Bronson remembers of that era. The poodles, then, became a coded trope for their ménage à trois at a time when no critics were prepared to discuss sexuality. ‘They wrote about them as being a metaphor for collaboration,’ Bronson laughs. It wasn’t until the mid-to-late 1980s that an appropriate discursive framework emerged. ‘We felt like, all these years, we’d been making work as an excuse for somebody to invent Queer Theory,’ says the remaining poodle.

As the Aids crisis intensified in the late 1980s, the group – who had then relocated to New York – increasingly turned their attention to the pandemic. From that period, IMAGEVIRUS remains their best-known work: an appropriation of Robert Indiana’s famed 1960s ‘LOVE’ logo whose four letters General Idea swapped for ‘AIDS’. Much like the poodles, the Aids motif first appeared on a painting before spreading across multimedia formats – subway posters, public sculptures, an animated billboard on Time Square and advertising banners from San Francisco to Berlin – mimicking the mechanisms of viral transmission long before ‘going viral’ was a thing.

While the work is celebrated today, it wasn’t always the case. Turning ‘LOVE’ into ‘AIDS’ appeared as an obscene semiotic gesture that divided New York’s Aids community. The artistic branch of ACT UP (Aids Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury – known for its safer sex campaigns and guerrilla interventions – soon responded with its own appropriation of the work, this time spelling out ‘RIOT’. ‘There was kind of a cultural split between us,’ Bronson remembers. ‘First of all, there was a generational difference – we were in our early forties, and they were in their early twenties. Plus, we were from a different country, and we couldn't go to demonstrations because we were afraid of being deported – we were living in the States illegally.’

Since Partz and Zontal’s deaths, Bronson – who now lives in Berlin – has continued making art while overlooking the group’s estate. ‘I have to pick and choose so much as to what one can show,’ Bronson says of the countless retrospectives staged in recent years, including at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo Jumex in Mexico City and MALBA in Buenos Aires. But this thriving legacy wasn’t always a given. Like many other artists affected by the Aids crisis, the collective had to manoeuvre strategically to avoid the interference of unsupportive family members. ‘Essentially, we incorporated General Idea with the three of us as equal partners, then Jorge and Felix each left their shares of the company to me,’ Bronson explains. ‘That was before the possibility of marriage. That was the only way to truly protect it, otherwise, all sorts of claims could be made.’ After Ottawa, the current retrospective will travel to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and to another yet-to-be-announced venue in Europe. Long live Miss General Idea.

INFORMATION

General Idea is on view at the National Gallery of Canada until November 20, 2022. gallery.ca

Spanish sculptor Cristina Iglesias is having a Mayfair moment this summer, with a large-scale commission for the Royal Academy’s Annenberg Courtyard and her first solo exhibition with Gagosian, where she is presenting new and recent works. The first non-architect to be awarded the Royal Academy Architecture Prize in 2020, Iglesias has created site-specific installations and immersive environments that sit in dialogue with buildings by some of the world’s most renowned architects – among them, the Renzo Piano-designed Centro Botín in Santander and Norman Foster’s Bloomberg Headquarters in London. Her organic formations are crafted in pitch-perfect medleys of metals such as bronze and steel, stone, ceramic and concrete, often combined with running water.

Ahead of the unveiling of her site-specific installation for the Royal Academy and commission for New York’s Madison Square Park, we spoke to the Madrid-based artist about how the pandemic has shifted perceptions of public spaces, the parallels between art and architecture, and creating places of refuge in cities.

Wallpaper*: How has the pandemic changed your relationship with public spaces and the work you create for them?

Cristina Iglesias: The experience of the past two years has not changed but rather reinforced my belief in the need to create public places where people can meet with people they know or encounter strangers and have different experiences. Some public places where my works are installed have become more integral than ever to the daily social life of towns and cities, such as a plaza, a park or an island. Consequently, the ways in which the works influence people's interactions with one another are as important as the ways in which individuals react to the works.  

During the pandemic many people moved away from their physical working environments into remote conditions – sometimes permanently – so the areas where my public works are situated became less populated for a while, such as the Square Mile in the City of London, where the Bloomberg Headquarters commission is located. That my work was being seen by far fewer people during that time probably created a completely different resonance.

W*: What parallels do you see between the way artists and architects create?

CI: We all share the sense of proportion, we all think about space and some of us about time. Our practices are rooted in aesthetics combined with a consideration of human behaviour and response. But while architects have to think more about being functional in a physical way – for example, employing protocols and processes with regard to safety and practicality – artists can approach questions from any perspective and art can function psychologically and poetically.

W*: How do you approach creating work for public space and ensuring there is harmony between your installation and its surroundings?

CI: Well, that’s always the main challenge. There is where the sense of proportion has to work – at every level. The brief is all-important as that sets certain initial parameters. One must listen attentively to the given brief, looking carefully at how the space is currently used and imagining how that could be transformed by the presence of sculpture. Active dialogue with the site and the involved parties – local people, urban planners, architects, engineers – is crucial. 

As an artist, I am seeking to create a counterpoint between what exists and what I want to put there. I’m not trying to recreate nature.

W*: Tell us about your site-specific commission for the Royal Academy

CI: Wet Labyrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape) is a play with perception. It creates an experience for the viewer entering inside where the real (the structure and the outside world), the fiction (the cast walls), and the reflection (the mirrored panels) intertwine in an intense way. The sense of humidity inside the structure together with the sound of water falling on the ground adds other dimensions: even in the heart of a bustling city, these visual, sonic and textural qualities can provide the viewer with a sense of refuge and respite. And the idea of flowing water has been employed across centuries to create a sense of transcendence, embodying the feeling of being transported to a place beyond the actual. Around the wet labyrinth with its mineral (slate) external skin, the ‘spontaneous landscape’ adds a vibrant notion of nature.

Generally, my artistic language concerns the play between interior and exterior, concealing and revealing through visually porous structures, controlling sight-lines, and introducing uncanny or unfamiliar elements into a given environment to signal the presence of art. And given that many of my works can be installed both indoors and outdoors, I like the idea that viewers find their own way of interacting with them. 

Similarly, for the Gagosian Davies Street exhibition, designed to complement the Royal Academy commission, the space appealed to me because the very wide plate-glass window frontage in the middle of Mayfair offers street-level visibility for the work, creating a dynamic between interior and exterior and allowing public engagement at any time. Even when the gallery closes in the evening, it remains lit and so it is visually accessible to passers-by – like a film frame. 

W*: What did it mean to you to win the 2020 Royal Academy Architecture Prize?

CI: It was a beautiful surprise! It provoked in me a sense of complicity with architecture, which was always present, but it was essential for me to know that the architects felt the same.

W*: How do you bring the experience of intimacy and refuge to a public space, especially in a city?

CI: Wet Labyrinth was to have been presented two years ago, before the pandemic and the mandate of social distancing. I work with panels and screens to enclose space and render it interior and intimate. Now intimacy is an issue and so we had to give this serious consideration when designing the work. With Wet Labyrinth, I ask the viewer to spend time experiencing it as they pass through from one end to the other.

W*: What role do texture and materiality play in your practice? 

CI: I am very interested in all the nuances that happen in vision both close-up and from a distance – the details, the evolving patinas and organisms that time adds are essential. I am a sculptor so texture and materiality are key. I mould with wax and cast from life and from my imagination to create hybrid surfaces and forms. The look and feel of my work is very important, what the sculptures represent and how the environment around them reacts. For example, in the case of my underwater installation Garden in the Sea, in Baja, California, we spent years working intensively with marine scientists to ensure the materials and structure positively encourage coral growth and biodiversity.

W*: At the same time as your London moment, you have another major public artwork opening in New York

CI: I created Landscape and Memory working with the knowledge of the ancient Cedar Creek that coursed beneath what is now Madison Park. It is a project that talks about geology and landscape: water – via a hydraulic mechanism – runs through the cast bronze elements embedded as a parcours in specifically excavated areas and grasses grow higher along the line that traces the underground river. Hopefully, this scenography creates a connection and fluidity that makes visitors to the park consider the importance of the life and its history that exists under our feet and the cities we construct.

INFORMATION

‘Cristina Iglesias’, until 30 July, Gagosian Davies Street, gagosian.com

‘Wet Labyrinth (With Spontaneous Landscape)’, early June through summer, royalacademy.org.uk

‘Cristina Iglesias: Landscape and Memory’, until 4 December, Madison Square Park, madisonquarepark.org

On the day of our video call, Jakob Kudsk Steensen is in the midst of an expedition in the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve, a wetland area in the German state of Brandenburg. It is teeming with life and removed from civilisation (he’s had to drive to a nearby small town to get reception). He and his team are at the reserve for a few weeks to study the landscape, paddling around in canoes and wielding underwater cameras, microphones and hydrophones ‘to document all this life that lives between the soil and the forest’.

The work is methodological and meticulous – perhaps de rigueur for an environmental biologist, but highly unusual for an artist. Of course, many artists go to great lengths to acquire insight into their subject. But few have made extensive fieldwork such an integral part of their practice, and fewer still have done so in the service of digital art.

‘I like to dive as deep as I can in my craft,’ explains Kudsk Steensen. ‘To create digital textures the way I do for a rock, I need to take 200 photos just of that rock, look at them, analyse them, and modify them.’ This immersive approach to art-making began with A Cartography of Fantasia (2015), a video installation for which Kudsk Steensen spent two months driving around Murcia to document the afterlife of Spain’s deserted resorts, the legacy of reckless financial speculation. ‘When you move through an environment, you start perceiving movement, time and scale in new ways. And because you’re experiencing it in new ways, you also start imagining new kinds of emotions or landscapes or places in your head,’ he says. 

He describes his process as a reaction to the boom of ‘post-internet art’, the collage-driven works created at breakneck speed for an era of short attention spans and infinite scroll. ‘Around 2015, digital art was becoming this very fast, very commercial field. I just couldn’t connect to that.

This awakening led him to spend a year creating a virtual island for Primal Tourism (2016), modelled on Bora Bora, a popular tourist destination in French Polynesia. His version features abandoned, futuristic architecture amid a primordial landscape. He spared no effort in researching the project, collating satellite maps, tourist photographs, scientific illustrations and drawings from the logbook of Jacob Roggeveen, an 18th-century explorer. Kudsk Steensen rendered the leafy island in dazzling detail, and programmed camera movements so viewers could explore it from the perspective of humans, animals and drones. Beyond its escapist appeal, Primal Tourism tapped into wider conversations around climate change, and the fraught relationship between colonialism and tourism. It set the bar high for virtual reality art and continues to be shown today. Just this March, Serpentine Galleries organised a live multiplayer event on the island, hosted by Kudsk Steensen and three of his collaborators.

While the themes of Primal Tourism reflect more contemporary concerns, its building blocks – a love of nature and a fluency in gaming technology – can be traced back to Kudsk Steensen’s upbringing. As a child, he attended a Steiner kindergarten, which emphasised outdoor learning and play; his family had a fondness for natural landscapes and taught him about plant and mushroom species. When he was nine, they moved to Nørre Nissum, a rural town in western Jutland with a population of around 1,000. ‘At the same time, video games really exploded,’ recalls the artist. ‘My friends and I suddenly had access to these extremely expansive, open virtual landscapes within three-dimensional video games where you could really navigate space. And it just absolutely captured our imaginations and became a huge part of our lives.’

He can still describe in vivid detail his favourite virtual landscape from that time, a multiplayer map called Facing Worlds from the 1999 first-person shooter game Unreal Tournament. The map shows two islands on opposing ends of an asteroid, each with a pyramid-shaped tower reminiscent of a Meso-American temple, while the Earth looms in and out of view in the background like a majestic blue marble. ‘Now it looks like square blocks, but at the time it was considered hyper-real, and had this strange effect of connecting you to something new and virtual,’ he enthuses. Facing Worlds captivated the young Kudsk Steensen and inspired him to learn the tools that would allow him to modify these in-game worlds. So much so that he set his sights on becoming an animator, only to change course when, at his first animation test, he was asked to draw the same character 17 times. ‘But that raw sensation that I had as a kid encountering these things, and the energy it brought, has stayed with me. I still draw on that today.’ 

In art school (first Aarhus University, then Central Saint Martins and the University of Copenhagen), Kudsk Steensen would build virtual worlds, then create paintings of the landscapes within these worlds ‘to make it art’. It was a way to fulfil his passions while conceding to the popular misconception that painting had greater aesthetic merit. He moved away from painting as soon as he graduated and started to build his career around virtual worlds. ‘It’s funny how you have to exit the doctrine of a system you’re brought up in to innovate within it,’ he reflects.

Moving to New York six years ago, the artist found kindred spirits in the growing immersive media sector. One was artist and writer Rindon Johnson, who became the voice of Kudsk Steensen’s Aquaphobia (2017), in which viewers follow a water microbe through a Brooklyn park, while listening to a break-up story between man and the landscape. Another was composer Michael Riesman, music director of the Philip Glass Ensemble, who created algorithmic music for the video and VR piece Re-animated (2018), inspired by a recording of the mating call of a Hawaiian Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō bird that had been the last of its species. The most important partnership of all has been with sound artist Matt McCorkle, whom Kudsk Steensen met through New Inc, the New Museum’s creative incubator programme. Like Kudsk Steensen, McCorkle has a love of nature and fieldwork, often gathering sounds ‘in extreme isolation to capture our natural world at its purest essence’. The project in Brandenburg’s wetlands is their fourth together. 

‘Jakob came over to my studio one night, and I played some whale sounds I recorded for a then-upcoming show at the American Museum of Natural History, “Unseen Oceans”. We realised at that point our work gelled together like magic,’ McCorkle remembers. ‘We have a similar fondness for the minute details in nature, often exploring the tiny worlds that pass us by in our everyday lives. For example, a small mossy patch on a decaying log is an entire world in and of itself, if you look and listen close enough. Patience is key to the work we create together. We let nature guide our work and expose to us how she wants to be presented in a particular ecosystem.’

Shortly after meeting, Kudsk Steensen and McCorkle began to work on The Deep Listener (2019), an artwork commissioned by Serpentine Galleries in collaboration with Google Arts & Culture and architect David Adjaye. It involves an app that takes its users on a journey around Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, using augmented reality to present the sights and sounds of five elements of London’s ecosystem – London plane trees, bats, parakeets, azure blue damselflies and reedbeds – and to illuminate the ecological interplay between humans and non-humans. The title refers to the slow and embodied process of attentive listening that is necessary for learning and reflection. 

Kay Watson, Serpentine’s interim head of arts technologies, recalls: ‘Jakob’s was one of over 350 ambitious works submitted for the first Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission.

Kudsk Steensen’s next stomping ground was markedly different from London’s green spaces. Accepting a residency at the Luma Foundation in Arles, he decided to research the wetlands of the Camargue. ‘You have these basic life forces of salt, algae and water. Depending on how dry or wet it is, everything will feel and look completely different,’ he says. He documented this process over a year for a multiplayer VR piece titled Liminal Lands (2021), created with McCorkle and now on view as part of the group show ‘Prélude’ at La Mécanique Générale.

His residency in Arles coincided with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘I really started thinking about embracing hyperlocal sensitivity, and what it meant to suddenly travel the international art circuit a lot less, and really be present in the landscape,’ he says. ‘It shifted something inside of me, deeply and profoundly. Through this much more extreme engagement with nature, I found out that you have to spend enough time in a place to start seeing it, to realise that it looks and feels different than anything you can imagine.’ There was more work to be done on wetlands still. And so when the Berlin-based art foundation Light Art Space approached him for a new commission, he decided to stick to the topic, and go further.

Light Art Space offered him a major solo exhibition at the Halle am Berghain, one of the German capital’s most celebrated cultural destinations. It’s an extraordinary opportunity that is well aligned with Kudsk Steensen’s ability to reach a wide range of audiences (besides art lovers and gamers, he has a loyal following among the fans of K-pop sensation BTS, who invited him to present a virtual forest ecosystem, Catharsis (2020), as part of global public art project ‘Connect, BTS’). ‘I work with people from different fields. We don’t care about the conventional frameworks, as long as we have a meaningful engagement with people,’ he comments.

The exhibition also comes with a heavy burden of expectation. ‘It’s not the type of show where you just roll in as an art world figure with your artwork. You have to embrace what the building has been as a nightclub, and what it might become, without alienating its history and existing community, without appearing to gentrify yet another space in a city that used to have all this energy.’ 

To live up to its venue, the exhibition, titled Berl-Berl, would have to be epic, collaborative, democratic and one-of-a-kind. Kudsk Steensen’s solution was to create a virtual swamp that would take over all of Berghain, encouraging viewers to contemplate the forgotten complexity and beauty of wetlands. Joining forces with fellow artist Dane Sutherland, Kudsk Steensen began to research historical perspectives on wetlands and swamps. They learned that many major cities in the world are connected to wetlands. Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin, is one big wetland that emerged from a glacial valley 10,000 years ago, and Berlin’s name in fact derives from the old Slavic word ‘Berl’, which means swamp.

Kudsk Steensen explains that across Europe and North America, this changed in the 1800s, when wetlands came to be seen as undesirable. People began to remove and pave over them. Today, freshwater wetlands account for only one per cent of our planet’s ecosystems. As the artist laments, ‘they have become lost from the public imagination’, despite their exceptional biodiversity, ability to filter toxins, and the protection they offer against rising sea levels.

His next port of call was Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. Its director, Professor Johannes Vogel, has been on a mission to revolutionise the way data in natural history museums is used. ‘Natural history museums have to inspire and encourage people to see themselves as part of nature,’ says Vogel. ‘It is extremely exciting and inspiring to learn from artists how human emotions can be evoked and how we can engender dialogue. It is fantastic to see how Jakob has a different approach to a museum object than we as natural scientists have – how we can engage through textures, sounds or virtual access.’ 

The museum has a vast sound archive, including recordings of frog songs from the wetlands of Brandenburg since the 1960s. Going through these recordings, Kudsk Steensen was struck by how much they have changed. So it wasn’t just that enlightenment ideals banished wetlands from our midst, those that remained were increasingly damaged by human activity, too. He also met with the museum’s scientists. The soil in wetlands, they told him, can include organisms that died 2,000 years ago but have yet to dissolve. ‘So the energy is still in the soil. It’s kind of alive,’ says Kudsk Steensen. ‘Then when you look at past religions and folklore, they also talk about the soil as being alive.

With this in mind, he set out to explore the Spreewald Biosphere Reserve, bringing along McCorkle, producer Andrea Familiari, and field biologists from the museum, whom he values not only for scientific knowledge but also for their emotional connection to their subject. ‘I like to bring experts from different fields with me into the landscape. I give a sense of direction, in the theme of the work and the story, but they’re very much themselves, responding to the landscape and being part of the artwork’s creation.’ 

There are precise steps to complete in the wetlands, such as using macro photogrammetry to 3D-scan flora and soil in ultra-detail. But Kudsk Steensen has allowed for spontaneity, too. ‘Once we’ve spent weeks sailing in canoes, looking around, we can experience and see things we didn’t imagine. We procure new sensations, spaces, visuals and sounds, bounce that back on our original material, and then go to the studio to put all this together in a single, holistic experience.’

Back in Berlin, where Kudsk Steensen has been doing a residency at Callie’s, a non-profit experimental institution, he assembles his raw material into a virtual wetland that is at once hyper-realistic and surreal. Gentle waters lap against cragged boulders and gnarly trees cloaked in emerald green moss, pristine reeds stand tall in turbid pools, luminescent fungi emerge from fertile soil. It looks at once like a sophisticated video game and a Romantic landscape painting that has come to life (later, when asked to name his artistic heroes, Kudsk Steensen mentions both the iconic Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima and the 19th-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich).

McCorkle drew from the Museum of Natural History’s archival material and his own recordings to create orchestra-like compositions, which feature three species prominently: the common frog, the European fire-bellied toad and the cuckoo. Further birds, bats and an aquatic insect called the water boatman play supporting roles. ‘The main soundscape consists of many different compositions, each with their own emotional toll, lightness and influence,’ says McCorkle. 

Humans are notably absent from this virtual landscape, and indeed from Kudsk Steensen’s earlier works. ‘We have so much art already that focuses on the human. I want to direct the eyes at the world beyond our human domain, to bring a sense of mystery, imagination and fascination,’ says the artist. Still, in a departure from previous practice, Kudsk Steensen has invited the Venezuelan musician Arca, whose ‘morphing sensibilities’ he has long admired, to contribute to the project. At Kudsk Steensen's invitation, Arca improvises raw vocals that are then layered into McCorkle's soundscape, along with spoken examples of various names by which Berlin has been called over the centuries, further rooting the virtual experience in its physical location.

The seven metaphorical verses of Berl-Berl – the human world, fungi world, root world, trees, frozen world, skies and water – come together in real time rather than following a predetermined sequence. Nine LED screens broadcasting live video have been installed in the cavernous Halle am Berghain, once the machine hall of a district heating plant. ‘The landscape exists on a server, which tells us what time of the day it is, what things look and feel like. And it sends that signal to all the individual computers, who render their own local version of that environment with those shared variables, which shows on the screens. So you get this constellation of screens throughout the space, offering little windows into the landscape, and something shared among them,’ says Kudsk Steensen.

Creative technologist Lugh O’Neill developed the sound technology to transform McCorkle’s compositions into a generative soundscape, parsing the information from the server into the sound experience. ‘This information dictates when and which parts of my composition play, how long they play, how much they connect to Jakob’s visuals and the overall emotional timbre they emit,’ says McCorkle.

Ambitious in scale and astonishing in detail, the resulting artwork is a marvel of VR technology. Kudsk Steensen is already thinking about Berl-Berl’s life beyond Berghain: to extend the reach of the installation, he has created a web portal so viewers can tune in from anywhere in the world. He also points out that because the artwork is virtual, it can infinitely morph and change, adapting to future contexts in which it will be shown.

‘Berl-Berl contributes to the development of new aesthetics and formats, presenting a radical new visual language,’ says Bettina Kames, the director of Light Art Space. ‘The heart of the world Jakob is bringing to life lives on a gaming engine, taking this technology to a new extreme. Very few people have worked with this complex mix of technical elements and scale in the art world. But importantly, Berl-Berl is not about highlighting technology, but using it to offer a certain kind of experience to discuss wider issues. It will allow new perspectives on our environment and create a space for connecting to an endangered ecosystem.’

For Kudsk Steensen, the ultimate goal is to expand the possibilities of virtual reality technology and digital art. ‘I don’t think of myself explicitly as an activist artist, though I work with themes like extinction and the preservation of wetlands.

Kudsk Steensen concludes: ‘This is not a narrative we often hear, and I think that’s the strength of it. That’s what I’m here for: I want more poetry in technology.’

INFORMATION
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, 4 June–23 October 2022, ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Denmark, aros.dk

lightartspace.org

jakobsteensen.com

ADDRESS

Aros Allé 2
Aarhus 8000
Denmark

VIEW GOOGLE MAPS

‘When I was in elementary school, we always had to buy this bag,’ begins the Korean-born, Berlin-based graphic designer Na Kim when I ask about the concept behind her latest exhibition. She tells me about this simple, small bag that in the 1980s and ‘90s was sold at stationery shops across Korea, and contained a number of ambiguous objects that were often used as teaching materials at school. ‘I remember some images of individual objects,’ she continues, ‘but more strong are the memories attached to these objects.’

In ‘Bottomless Bag,’ Kim’s new solo exhibition at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, the designer’s distinctive visual vernacular forges a framework for considering images as networked components within a relational system of organisation as well as discrete, subjective sites of memory. This unorthodox presentation of Kim’s elemental sense of colour and geometry engages with her longstanding interest in recontextualising forms and patterns found in everyday objects and proposes alternative approaches to graphic design based on dynamic logics of spatial organisation.

Anchoring the exhibition is the most recent iteration of Kim’s installation series SET (2015-present), which reinterprets a range of two-dimensional design elements as physical objects. ‘In many cases of previous SET series it was built up as a wall painting’ she recalls, ‘but here I want to bring these shapes and colours into the space, and that could be a sort of playground for children.’

As a commissioned artist for the museum’s biannual Children’s Exhibition Series, Kim had carte blanche to create a multilayered platform where visitors of all ages can freely interpret and interact with her work. An expansive playground installation at the core of ‘Bottomless Bag’ reflects the constantly-evolving rules of engagement that guide Kim’s aesthetic decisions, enlarging shapes, blobs and squiggles derived from her visual archive to construct an immersive environment of colourful curtains, carpets, stairs and structures.

The origins of these images can be traced to Kim’s daily collage practice, in which she repurposes found objects and mass-produced materials – such as stickers, plastic bags and various papers – in a meditative process of discovery that yields a steady stream of inspiration. She calls these small works on paper Found Compositions (2009-present), explaining that ‘most of them are based on the idea of how to find the hidden rules inside a composition.’ Beyond addressing the impulse to communicate such rules and relationships, however, this methodology also invites the active reinterpretation of specific memories that she associates with each object. By imagining the gallery space itself as her own ‘object bag,’ Kim imbues her images with meaning as visual objects that evoke recollections of the past as well as tools for realising mindful designs that ontologically tether form and function.

INFORMATIONADDRESS

‘Bottomless Bag’, until 13 September, Buk Seoul Museum of Art. sema.seoul.go.kr; ynkim.com

Buk Seoul Museum of Art 
1238 Dongil-ro
Nowon-gu
Seoul

At 87 years old, Sheila Hicks is showing no signs of slowing down. The textile artist has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Dallas, Miami, Vienna, Milan, Paris and Riyadh since our paths last crossed – in 2018 at the preview of her show in Tel Aviv. Now at The Hepworth Wakefield, putting on the finishing touches to her first major UK survey ahead of the opening on 7 April, the exuberant and ever-disarming artist has wrested creative control of her own portrait shoot from a flustered but obliging photographer. 

This is the first time Hicks has been able to visit the David Chipperfield-designed museum in person, having worked on it remotely for the past couple of years (a scale model of the galleries, she explains, lived in her Paris studio throughout). ‘Off Grid’ traces Hicks’ prolific output, from the 1950s to new site-specific commissions, spanning intimate woven images to towering installations. ‘It was fascinating to watch her enter the space, mapping and reading it in ways that I hadn’t seen other artists do, looking at the light sources, thinking of the angles,’ explains the museum’s chief curator Andrew Bonacina. ‘Across the exhibition, you’ll see an artist who has really explored the endless possibilities of fibre and thread as a sculptural material.’

Hicks is famously adamant about looking forwards and even now, her sculptural works are adapted for the space. ‘So many of the historical works, those made in the 1960s and 70s, will never be installed the same way twice – they will always transform, they will always change,’ adds Bonacina. ‘And so much of our conversation has been how these works might respond to the spaces they are being presented in.’ The final space, for example, is dedicated to works made over the past decade including a multi-part installation created in response to the architecture of the Hepworth. Many of the ideas explored here nod to motifs established earlier in her career, such as wrapped linen cords (found in the previous Lianes works), or the stacking of textiles (a nod to her Banisteriopsis and Evolving Tapestry series). 

And it’s not just Hicks’ terrific textiles that prove a draw. The artist’s photography offers a view into a rarely-seen side of her creative practice – not least because the black-and-white images are in many ways the antithesis to her riotous textile works. Her interest in the medium formed early in her career during trips to South America between 1954 and 1961, which included extensive travels throughout Chile with Magnum photographer Sergio Lorrain. ‘The camera was a way in which to think about framing the world – they became another frame in the way the stretched canvas or the loom became within which she could capture her experiences,’ explains Bonacina. Hicks has said: ‘I was using the camera’s positionings for looking, not always to take photographs.’

The show continues in the Hepworth Wakefield Garden with a monumental new work – a five-metre-tall column of cascading ribbons. Gabriel Reaching for Heaven (2022) mirrors its immediate surroundings, including the landscaping by Tom Stuart-Smith, Chipperfield’s architecture, and the newly redeveloped Rutland Mills (itself a former textile factory) adjacent to the museum. In London, meanwhile, an outdoor installation at Coal Drops Yard commissioned by the King’s Cross Estate will open to the public from 26 May. Hicks’ work here will respond to the Victorian architecture, creating a gently moving garden in the sky and threading King’s Cross – the starting point for many to reach Wakefield – with the exhibition at the Hepworth.

INFORMATION

Sheila Hicks, ‘Off Grid’, until  25 September 2022, The Hepworth Wakefield. hepworthwakefield.org

Chiharu Shiota has amazed us again, perhaps more than ever, with a monumental installation in the eerie underworld of the Cisternerne, a subterranean art space in Copenhagen that was once a reservoir. 

‘I tried to create an illusion in this otherworldly environment; a labyrinth within a labyrinth,’ says the Berlin-based Japanese artist. At the invitation of curator Astrid la Cour, Shiota first visited the museum three years ago during Jeppe Hein's exhibition ‘In is the only way out’, and was inspired by space. ‘This place is absolutely unique in its architecture and presence of water. And it gives the invited artists total freedom to choose whichever material. Jeppe was using fire! I instantly had the idea to play with water; flowing and dynamic water that makes us feel the force of life.’

Titled Multiple Realities, Shiota’s installation is the latest iteration in the Cisternerne’s all-star series of annual site-specific commissions, which has previously featured Tomás Saraceno (W*254), Superflex, Hiroshi Sambuichi and Eva Koch. It spreads out over 1,000 sq m of underground space, where water drips down stone walls and alcoves and flows slowly across the floor.

Shiota is known for her delicate cobweb-like compositions made of entangled yarn. ‘Weaving a web is, for me, an alternative to drawing,’ she explains. ‘I used to draw and paint, yet struggled to find my own mode of expression. I realised that most themes have been already explored as two-dimensional static art. But when I started to draw in the air with a single yarn, knotting and developing spontaneously, I finally found my signature.’ Though she often combines the web with anonymously donated everyday objects such as keys, chairs and clothes, this time she has created something new.

The Cisternerne, which once supplied drinking water to all of Copenhagen, was transformed into a space for contemporary art in 2013. Through a small, angular glass pyramid entrance in the middle of Søndermarken Park, visitors are invited to descend the stairs towards the vast rectangular chambers. It’s there that they are wowed by the poetic landscape of Shiota’s white web, which is almost divinely luminous against the otherwise gloomily lit environment. On closer inspection, a long, lean silhouette of a white dress becomes visible, imprisoned behind the flood of white yarn. Welcome to Shiota’s universe. ‘The serene atmosphere here contrasts with the dynamic elements to follow,’ she explains.

Following the metal walkways, installed especially for this show, we encounter a ceiling-mounted red sculpture, rotating and making a buzzing sound. It is made of a few geometrically shaped metal tubes and covered with red yarn. The motion is reflected in an adjacent mirror, and also in the water beneath. Further down, a white dress, similar to the one behind the web, hangs from the ceiling and rotates, stirring the water below and causing a splash. Another dress, in blood-red, is likewise in motion, playing with the water.

The further we go, the more dresses and sculptures appear in a crescendoing sequence. The show features seven nylon dresses in all, each in red or white, and each almost 3m-long including the train. Though Shiota’s designs evoke simplified 19th-century costumes, she says she didn’t seek to reference a specific historical style. Rather, her goal was to create a shelter to envelop a body – ‘presence by absence’, as she calls it. ‘The dresses are all alone. Their wearers are missing,’ she says. ‘But a hint of their existence is in the air. The water, not stagnated but in movement, means vitality. Visitors can see them from every angle, and thus feel multiple realities.’

Alongside 'presence by absence', another of Shiota’s manifestos is the 'expression of silence'. An artist of few words, she expresses herself through her installations instead of speaking in public, an approach that calls to mind the Japanese notion of ‘beauty in silence’. In another Japanese cultural reference, the idea of celebration could be read in this exhibition, suggested through the colour combination of red and white. However, as the artist affirms: ‘My work is not necessarily anchored to my Japanese origin.’

More evidently, her artistic motivation is based on deep thoughts about human nature, ‘because it is universal and fundamentally questioning. Death is always present around us. Sometimes the departed ones manifest a stronger presence than [during] their lifetime,’ she says. ‘When I was kid, my parents took me regularly to their hometown in Kochi [on Shikoku island, in south-west Japan] and we visited the cemetery where my late grandmother is buried. She was not cremated, which is uncommon in Japan. There, we observed the ritual of removing overgrown weeds from the grave, but I was scared to wake her up from the land where she is resting.’

Shiota has opened up in past interviews about her serious illness in 2005, which profoundly influenced her work. Even with life and death on her mind, her installations are not violent or heavy, but poetic and dreamy.

‘For each show, my preparation is really intense. I have to focus, especially on web-weaving. After installing [the work] – the longest it has taken is two weeks – I feel like a shadow of myself, completely frazzled. I just need to sleep and rest.’ This time, over ten installation days, she and her team patiently wove the web, starting from the ceiling toward the endless void, using 160km of yarn in total. The rotating effect of her dresses and sculptures reflects two years of experiments in her workshop during the Covid-19 pandemic. ‘We did considerable [and] painstaking research on the right balance of the weight, speed and centrifugal force of the objects,’ she recalls. 

Now the emotion-laden show is ready. ‘This exhibition is a special experience,’ says Shiota. ‘You might be thrilled to feel lost, without knowing any longer where or when it is.’

INFORMATION
‘Multiple Realities’, 13 March - 30 November 2022 at Cisternerne, Copenhagen, frederiksbergmuseerne.dk; chiharu-shiota.com

This article will appear in the May 2022 issue of Wallpaper*(W*277), on newsstands and available to subscribers from 8 April 2022

Part toxins-free psychedelic trip, part mass mindfulness experiment, Dreamachine is an immersive installation promising consciousness-altering spectacle. 

Landing in London on 10 May 2022 at Woolwich Public Market, Dreamachine stands apart from other techtastic experiential art environments in the calibre of its collaborative creators, in its ‘citizen science’ element and educational outreach, and in the fact that it will definitely not be Instagrammable. Dreamachine’s hallucinatory spectacle only happens inside your head.

The project was inspired by the work of artist, writer and inventor Brion Gysin (a William Burroughs acolyte) and is the brainchild of participatory art specialist Jennifer Crook, who has worked with Olafur Eliasson, Christo, Danny Boyle and Jeremy Deller, amongst others.

The origin story runs that on a sunny day in 1958, Gysin was dozing in the back of a bus, being driven along a tree-lined stretch of French countryside. That flickering forest light seems to have set off (pre-psychedelia) transcendental explosions in Gysin’s brain, crashing waves of intense colours and shifting geometry.

Gysin returned home, discovered that what he had experienced was not supernatural or psychosis, but a recently categorised neurological response to flickering light of a certain frequency – known as ‘stroboscopically induced visual hallucinations’. He was determined to create a small-scale device that could recreate the effect, what he called the ‘first artwork to be experienced with your eyes closed’. He succeeded using a turntable, a lightbulb, and a carefully slotted cylinder. Gysin hoped his device would eventually replace the TV in every American home. Fat chance. 

Crook has long been fascinated with Gysin’s flickering device – she came across a book about his original ‘Dream Machine’, and a plan of how to assemble one, in a charity shop when she was a teenager – and the possibility of upsizing and augmenting it to create a mind-blowing communal experience.

She put together Collective Act to make that happen and immediately turned to Jon Hopkins, the DJ and composer behind the ambient techno epic Immunity, the Grammy-nominated Singularity and last year’s Music for Psychedelic Therapy, to create a soundscape for the new project. 

Indeed, Crook says Dreamachine was also partly inspired by the ‘deep collective trance’ she had witnessed at a 2014 Hopkins show at London’s Royal Festival Hall. A connoisseur of the meditative and mind-altering, Hopkins quickly signed on and says he has tried to ‘soundtrack the experience of people seeing inside their minds’ and create a ‘sonic architecture’ for the Dreamachine experience.

In terms of actual architecture, Crook assigned Assemble  – the Turner-prize winning architecture, design and art collective – to create a mobile structure for the new Dreamachine, what she describes as a ‘secular temple or modern campfire’. (Coincidentally, Assemble’s Anthony Engi Meacock did his master’s thesis on Gysin’s Dreamachine, so they were forearmed.)

Assemble founding member Jane Hall says the key to the design – which will seat visitors facing one another in the round – was creating a space where people would feel comfortable talking about and reliving their experiences. ‘When you experience the Dreamachine, you feel like you are going through something deeply personal but with other people. And what we found during the prototyping is that even strangers want to talk about a life-changing experience.’

Hall cites the work of Olafur Eliasson and Pipilotti Rist as influences on the design which, she says, ‘brings texture and colour and a sense of intimacy without prescribing what you are going to see, because the event is in your head’. Having spent time with their prototype Dreamachine, both Hopkins and Hall are aware of how discombobulating the experience can be and saw creating an experiential safe space as key to their mission. ‘It will be very strange for some people,’ says Hopkins, ‘so I wanted to create a form and structure to the experience, a kind of narrative arc but also to create a feeling of grounding and comfort, give people a sense that they can be free to explore their minds in a safe way.’

A key advisor on the Dreamachine project is star neuroscientist Anil Seth, whose 2021 book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness was ecstatically reviewed and recommended in all the right places. Seth suggests that the Dreamachine’s flickering light interacts with the brain’s natural rhythms to create its inner vision. ‘It’s almost as if the brain is looking at itself,’ he says. And, picking up on Gysin’s original ambition, Seth hopes the experiment will help pull people away from their screens, at least some of the time, and ask them to think about the nature of experience. ‘I think we're allowing people to recognise the power of their own minds and brains to generate their perceptual world.’

As the Dreamachine goes on its magical mystery tour, everyone will be invited to take part in what Collective Act has tagged the ‘Perception Census’, a mass survey of the nation’s mental inner workings. Seth argues that the census is a unique opportunity to survey what he calls ‘perceptual diversity’. ‘The way we experience the world is slightly different for each of us,’ he says, ‘but we know very little about this perceptual diversity. And the intuition among scientists and philosophers is that there's a lot of diversity that we don’t see because it’s papered over by the language that we use. I think that when we understand that we do see the world slightly differently, it will allow us to talk past each other less.’

Dreamachine, one of the projects commissioned as part of the Unboxed programme of events, is also being backed by a UK-wide schools’ programme developed by A New Direction, a not-for-profit dedicated to promoting creativity amongst young people that partnered with Steve McQueen on his massive year ‘Year 3’ project, which began in 2019.

The starry list of Dreamachine collaborators further includes cognitive neuroscientist David Schwartzman, philosopher Fiona Macpherson, technical director and previously associate director at Random International Dev Joshi, sound designer Christopher Shutt, and creative technology studio Holition.

INFORMATION

Dreamachine will launch in London (10 May-24 July 2022) before travelling to Cardiff (12 May-18 June), Belfast (25 July-4 September) and Edinburgh (13 August - 25 September). Admission is free. dreamachine.world. unboxed2022.uk

Alexandra Bircken often compares her work to skin. For her, it’s a membrane between internal and external; it’s what protects us, what makes us permeable and what functions as the canvas we dress and exhibit to the world. It seems logical, then, that the German artist began a career working with the second skin of humanity: fashion.

In the early 1990s, Bircken left Remscheid, her hometown near Cologne, for the UK, with her lifelong friends Wolfgang Tillmans and Lutz Huelle (she and Huelle will stage a joint show at Paris’ Fondation Pernod Ricard in November).

At Central Saint Martins, which counts Alexander McQueen, Stella McCartney and John Galliano as alumni, she studied fashion design. ‘I had been reading i-D and The Face, and [London] is where I wanted to be. The underground fashion and eccentricity didn’t exist – and still doesn’t exist – in Germany, so there was no choice,’ she explains via Zoom from her Berlin home. ‘I followed what I wanted to do, which was to play around with individuality.’

And nowhere was individuality as extreme and extravagant as it was in London in the 1980s and 1990s. In its hedonistic, polysexual and ephemeral underworld, fashion school craft collided with high-concept art; each night was an opportunity for an act of personal theatre. These were decades drenched in the brazen sexuality of Madonna, the fetish gear of Vivienne Westwood and the transgressive energy of Leigh Bowery – performer, artist, ringmaster for London’s underground club scene. The last made a huge impact on Bircken. ‘Every week you would sew something new for the weekend, for the club. It wasn’t meant to last; wearability wasn’t a big thing. This is what Saint Martins taught us: if you can’t find what you want, you make it yourself,’ says the artist, who would later lecture on the college’s MA Fashion Design course, and is now a professor of sculpture at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts. 

After graduating in 1995, Bircken co-founded the label 'Faridi', but a career in the fashion world didn’t quite scratch the itch. ‘When you work in the [fashion] market you have to meet the market. You have to make people look “beautiful”, which is why I didn’t like fashion and the system. Nobody wears anything ugly or extreme, everybody wants to look thin and sexy, the typical female stereotype, and I got really fed up.’

The solution was a gradual shift to art, one that retained sartorial sensibilities and skills, but saw the body as a ‘moving sculpture’. It involved a deep exploration of materialism, man versus machine, and man as machine. 

Bircken’s show, ‘A-Z’, which opened in 2021 at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst, and will move to southern France’s CRAC (Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie) in March 2022, is her largest to date. The thematic show begins in 2003 with explorations into literal and symbolic ‘knotting’: from experimental early textile works and sculptures in leather, to her own placenta, preserved in Kaiserling solution. ‘A-Z’ culminates in a subtle, but significant site-specific intervention, one that reconfigures the skeleton of the Brandhorst building: wooden grilles on heating vents have been replaced by bones (cow ribs and chicken legs). ‘I had this feeling that wherever you go in the world, you walk on other people’s bones. It’s the overlaying of history,’ she says. 

Another significant and frequent subject in Bircken’s work is the motorcycle and its related gear as an ultra-protective skin. She still rides, but not as much as she did. Her fascination lies in how these machines – unlike cars and bicycles – complement the shape of the body in an intimate, almost carnal union. ‘The whole body is involved. It’s very dangerous; you have to become one with it in order to survive', she says. ‘But a lot of people don’t see the gracefulness of motorcycles’. 

In her work, burly motorbikes are rendered defunct. They are severed to reveal their bowel-like innards, turned upside-down, or infantilised as a rocking horse; their conventionally masculine heft exposed as a myth. The motorcycle is one of many examples of Bircken’s deft manipulation of readymade objects, whether machine-made, manmade, or animal-made – all underpinned by a deep affinity for the human condition, in all its unruly variety.  

Bircken’s work doesn't directly comment on the state of the world. It is not necessarily of this world. But it does highlight the fragility of flesh against the threats of an increasingly unstable, mechanised culture, asking: can bodies still hold themselves?

Bircken describes her other current show, ‘Fair Game’ in Berlin, as a comment on the pandemic’s effect on club culture, and a ‘free interpretation’ of Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones (1971). In the Irish writer’s short story, 200 naked bodies – one per square metre – are contained in a cylinder called the ‘abode’. The lighting and temperature fluctuate drastically, resulting in blindness, skin problems and a climate hostile to sex. The floor and walls are made of rubber, deadening all sound. There are ladders and niches in the walls – some ‘lost ones’ climb ladders to nowhere, others, vanquished, remain on the floor. Beckett’s tale is a version of hell; Bircken’s nightmare doesn't look far off – but in ‘Fair Game’, there’s more at play. 

The work is installed in the Kesselhaus (boiler room) of Kindl, previously a brewery, later a nightclub, and now a stage for contemporary arts. The space is cubic and vast: a cathedral of exposed brickwork with a glass roof. Were it not for Bircken’s bodies strewn across the floor, this might be a space of sanctity. But there is nothing sacred here. Rubber figures dangle from rafters, some hang by their necks, others scale the walls. They climb ladders made of cow ribs, stoop on niches, or lie lifeless on the floor. They are limp, faceless, deflated and void. But devoid of what? Bones, blood, stuffing, air? 

Bircken first introduced these gimp-suited bodies, made from black latex-dipped calico, in ‘Eskalation’ at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2014 (where she contended with David Chipperfield’s famously irregular angles) and again in the curated group show ‘May You Live In Interesting Times’ at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. 

Her scene is the aftermath of something violent. Perhaps it began in fetishistic pleasure and took a sour turn, or was a social experiment that turned into a massacre. But it could just as well be a factory, a production line of clothes: unworn, inanimate and cold.

There are notable modifications for Bircken’s Kindl show. She has embroidered body parts onto the suits: spines, hearts, eyes, ovaries, long blond pubic hair, genitals. ‘It’s a link back to the reality of the human body, and what’s under the skin,’ she says. There are real ostrich eggs placed where wombs might have been; they rupture with oily rags similar to those used to clean motorcycles; possibly a symbol of birth, or, as Bircken notes, a reference to a molotov cocktail. 

This time, the suits come with genitals. During our call, she picks up a pen and paper, draws a phallus and holds it up to the camera. ‘You pull it out and you have a penis, or you stick it in and you have a vagina’. This toying with genitalial forms felt like a logical development for Bircken, but she is keen to keep things non-descriptive: ‘There are no testicles, no labia, it’s very simple,’ she explains. 

There is one exception in this sea of tar-coloured flesh: The Tourist, a figure who presides over the battleground. She is clad in American football-esque shoulder pads, bold, block-coloured attire with a motorcycle exhaust for a head and epoxy resin clogs on her feet, giving an illusion of levitation. But is she a perpetrator or saviour? Has she slaughtered them all, or arrived too late to help? 

Elsewhere, coloured glass incubators resembling alien eggs contain a variety of stuffed objects. In the centre of the space, another black rubber body is draped over beer barrels, which are interspersed with loudspeakers. They emit a soundtrack composed by Bircken’s partner, the musician Thomas Brinkmann. ‘It’s clubby, but then it’s also breathing or a heartbeat. It’s a relentless boom boom boom,’ she says. This sound – pulsating around objects which may have once had a pulse – references the building’s history, and cuts through the deathly silence of this pitiful scene. 

Is this a fair game, as the artwork title suggests? Is it a game at all? Is it game as prey, or, in a culture of ever-intensifying anger and accusation, people as fair game for criticism? However you read it, Bircken has created an ambiguous, impenetrable scene. All we have is speculation. 

Bircken’s work has the intricacies of a vascular system – a tapestry woven with all that makes us complexly and beautifully human: our tangled, changeable and unattainable desires. We are deeply corporeal, but ultimately machines. In celebrating craft, and obliterating material hierarchies she weaves disciplines together like threads on a loom. In an overwhelming world, Bircken gets under the skin. 

INFORMATION

Alexandra Bircken, ‘Fair Game’ is on until 15 May 2022 at Kindl, Berlin. kindl-berlin.com

heraldst.com

A version of this article is featured in the March 2022 issue of Wallpaper*, on newsstands now and available to subscribers

According to legend, 11 February is the date on which Emperor Jimmu founded Japan in 660BC. National Foundation Day (Kenkokukinen-no-Hi) is an annual public holiday celebrating the achievements of Japan’s forebears who contributed to the dynamic blend of rich tradition and contemporary innovation Japan is known for today. 

To mark the occasion, we revisit recent Wallpaper* features on some of Japan’s leading contemporary artists, and art moments, those pushing the boundaries of their respective media, and taking the international art landscape by storm. 

Kazuhito Kawai’s deliberately deformed kaleidoscopic creations

For the March 2022 issue (on newsstands now and available to subscribers), writer Minako Norimatsu spoke to rising star ceramic artist Kazuhito Kawai about his deliberately deformed kaleidoscopic creations. The Kasama-based artist, whose otherworldly works draw on everything from plastic surgery to J-pop and 1990s culture, fashion and film, has just opened a new show of work at Steve Turner Gallery, LA ‘The feeling of not fitting in always urges me to create,’ he says. ‘I was not destined for making regular pottery, and my hands opted to deform vessels into something non-functional.’ 

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Chiharu Shiota on interweaving the past lives of found objects

Back in June 2020, we invited Japanese multimedia artist Chiharu Shiota to take part in our At Home With profile series. Wallpaper* editor TF Chan wrote of the artist’s work: ‘Chiharu Shiota’s installations, often involving everyday objects entangled in a sea of blood-red, black or white yarn, leave a searing impression in the minds of viewers; not only for their exceptional beauty but also because of the poignant way in which they represent personal narratives and articulate complex feelings of longing and loss.’ Shiota is now preparing a full-scale art takeover of Copenhagen’s iconic subterranean Cisternene – watch this space!

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Izumi Kato’s haunting humanoids

The work of Izumi Kato falls somewhere between a sci-fi future and ancient history. Last year, the artist took over two floors of Perrotin New York’s Lower East Side space. Ahead of the show, we were offered a behind-the-scenes look inside the artist’s Tokyo studio, where his haunting humanoids and Sphinx-like paintings and sculptures were coming to life. As the artist told Wallpaper’s US editor, Pei-Ru Keh, ‘I am aware that the human form I paint is not a specific person, but instead, I am using a person’s shape to paint. It could be you, and it could be me. I don’t know who it is. Using such an anonymous person, I am not focusing on the individual, but on the being itself.’

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The Ube Biennale: a template of public sculpture in Japan

In 2020, journalist Tom Seymour travelled to the once little-known city of Ube to explore how this industrial powerhouse transformed into Japan’s sculptural hub. This evolution was largely due to one, key and longstanding event: the Ube Biennale, founded in 1961 and one of the world’s first contemporary sculpture festivals. Seymour notes, ‘The sculpture islands of Naoshima, Teshima and Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea are now world-famous tourist destinations, instantly recognisable from omnipresence on Instagram. Also more famed is the Hakone Open Air Museum, which opened in 1969 close to Mount Fuji, the Noguchi-designed Moerenuma Park in Hokkaido, the northernmost island of the country, and the Kirishima Open-Air Museum in Kagoshima, on the southern-most island of Kyushu. Ube was the inspiration for each.’ The 29th edition of the Ube Biennale will take place in 2022. 

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Ryoji Ikeda’s multisensory assault course

Emerging from the industrial brutalist labyrinth that is London’s 180 The Strand, it’s customary to feel like your senses have been through the wash a few times. But after artist Ryoji Ikeda’s solo show in 2021, your eyes could hear, and your nose could see. Ikeda didn’t politely request our attention, he got inside our heads and played our eardrums like snares. This did not feel like an exhibition, it felt like a sensory assault course that one did not view, one survived. Presented by The Vinyl Factory and Fact magazine in collaboration with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, this was Ikeda’s largest show in Europe to date. Five years in the pipeline, it featured six global premieres and five works shown in the UK for the first time.

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‘I decided to forget about Madagascar, in order to represent it better’, says the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa of the majestic and melancholic installation he created for the 2019 Venice Biennale.’ Titled I Have Forgotten the Night, the work was Madagascar’s first pavilion at the international event and reconstructed the intoxicating ambience of the country’s capital, Antananarivo, at night, engulfing the viewer in cascading layers of delicate, torn black paper and sounds evoking places and events related to Madagascar’s past and present.  

There are, at present, no art schools in Antananarivo; museums, institutions or commercial galleries dedicated to contemporary art have – until now – been non-existent. Andrianomearisoa recognised the potential of building on the momentum created by Madagascar’s presence in Venice. Partnering with Hasnaine Yavarhoussen, founder of Fonds Yavarhoussen, the principal sponsor of the pavilion, he decided to open a multifunctional, not-for-profit arts centre, Hakanto Contemporary. Just six months after the biennale, Hakanto opened in an industrial area in east Antananarivo, to promote local art and culture, both within the country and abroad, with exhibitions, an educational programme, funding for artists to travel abroad and off-site collaborations and events.

It might be Andrianomearisoa’s most ambitious and challenging work yet. While the current exhibition of 26 Malagasy artists showcases the sheer breadth and scope of work being made in, around and about Antananarivo, the public response to their endeavours has been mixed; large-scale documentary photographs portraying the city’s disenfranchised, by Viviane Rakotoarivony as part of an off-site Hakanto project, were torn down two days after they were installed in the streets.

A towering metal and concrete sculpture by Andrianomearisoa, meanwhile, provoked controversy when it was erected last year outside the City Hall. In a city with a diverse population and poverty, where more than 62,000 people have been affected by floods and landslides in the current cyclone season, few believe culture should be a spending priority.

Naina Andriantsitohaina, who was elected mayor of Antananarivo in January 2020, has nonetheless made culture a key objective – another of his major projects has been the renovation of the historic Ambohijatovo Park in the centre of the city. Andriantsitohaina concedes that the sculpture ‘came at a political cost – but it is an opportunity to reclaim the city, to take charge of our history and our image’.

This is something Andrianomearisoa strongly upholds; his passion for his city, which spreads up and down three mountainous ridges, with lush glimpses of tropical foliage and rice fields between a mixture of crumbling colonial buildings and new architecture, is ever-present in his work. It constantly questions what it means to be Malagasy, to belong to an island and simultaneously be part of the world. 

The sculpture at the City Hall shares many of the trademark characteristics of an Andrianomearisoa work: it is both profoundly poetic and accessible, rigidly structured and resolutely open, meticulously detailed while still addressing the bigger picture. The towering geometric frame contains Malagasy words that proclaim ‘from here we convey the dreams of the world’ – Andrianomearisoa put the same words, but in French, in neon on the façade of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The phrase pays homage to the poet Fernando Pessoa – poetry, lyrics and literature are often sources of inspiration for Andrianomearisoa – but is given a new shape for Antananarivo; the work encourages the island to reimagine itself at the centre. 

Framing contemporary Malagasy identity – giving it visual and intellectual form – has been Andrianomearisoa’s consistent concern since his first creations in the 1990s, when he started out staging avant-garde fashion shows and provocative street performances across Antananarivo, some involving fire and nudity. Andrianomearisoa always sought out multiple expressions of being Malagasy: around that time, he led a design project to create a catalogue of local materials and crafts. 

A fluid mix of materials, techniques and languages in Andrianomearisoa’s emotive, textile-based monochromatic works draws on this rich cosmopolitan Malagasy heritage; from shimmering sculptural installations (such as the giant flowers currently installed as part of the ‘Ubuntu’ exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo) to the sensual and sumptuous small-scale works, such as the rippled pleats of the popular radzimir silk handbag he created for Dior Lady Art in 2020. 

In 1999, the artist left Madagascar for Paris, to study architecture under Odile Decq at the prestigious École Spéciale d’Architecture. ‘She opened my eyes as an architect but also to other domains – I can be an architect but also an artist, I can be a visual artist but also interested in food, I can be from Madagascar but also be looking at the world,’ says Andrianomearisoa, who now has two studios in France. ‘I need these two geographies.’ His third studio is a stunning three-floor 18th-century house on Faravohitra Hill, Antananarivo, whose original wooden floors and beams he carefully restored.

At Hakanto Contemporary, the present exhibition ‘Ny Fitiavanay/Our Love/Notre Amour’ picks up on the idea of looking simultaneously at Madagascar and out at the world, bringing together the rich imaginary of visual artists, painters, photographers, designers, musicians, performers, intellectuals and academics who have each quietly contributed to the cultural scene in Antananarivo over the last half-century.

Among the works is an elegant, hallucinatory diptych in muted tones by the master painter Jean Andrianaivo Ravelona, the grandson of a healer, who trained in meditation for creativity in Antananarivo in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he developed a style of painting he calls ‘Ay Fanahy’, that is intended to be used for meditation – done correctly, the effects can cure the viewer of physical or emotional problems, Ravelona tells me.

There is a haunting, soul-searching sound piece by singer Môta Soa, riffing on the symbol of the heart that proliferates throughout the exhibition; and evocative photographs by Joan Paoly, an emerging artist who uses long exposure to paint with light. Shooting exclusively from the windows of his family homes in Antananarivo and on the coast, he is fascinated with the metaphorical prospects of being inside, looking out. 

There are also ruminative video works combining new and archival footage of the city by Rina Ralay-Ranaivo, who co-curated the Venice Pavilion, and a series of photographs of the early 2000s uprising in the capital by Philippe Gaubert, a French-born photographer who has lived and worked in Antananarivo since the 1990s and has tirelessly photographed Malagasy rituals, ceremonies and collective experiences.

While Andrianomearisoa insists he is not a curator, the exhibition is a powerful thesis on love, place and independence, that avoids the clichés of national or regional explorations; it is pulsing with curiosity and contradiction – and cloaked with mystery, escaping a single, fixed meaning – much like Madagascar itself.

As Simon Njami writes in Andrianomearisoa’s monograph: ‘Madagascar does not exist as such as a tangible, physical place… Finally, Madagascar does not become a space open to all, but rather an intimate, unutterable place of memory.’

INFORMATION

‘Ny Fitiavanay/Our Love/Notre Amour’, until 16 March 2022, Hakanto Contemporary. hakantocontemporary.org

The hallowed, industrialist halls of Berlin’s Kraftwerk have seen a great deal over the years, but, until now, they have never experienced the work of acclaimed Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, and it turns out they’re quite the match. 

Formally the Berlin-Mitte thermal power station, Kraftwerk was built around the same time as the Berlin Wall in 1961 and served as the then-East Berlin power station until 1997. In 2006, after lying abandoned for years, it was resurrected as techno club Tresor. 

The American artist is currently saturating this vast arena with Light and Space (Kraftwerk Berlin), his largest installation in Europe to date, on view until 30 January 2022. The project was commissioned by Berlin-based LAS (Light Art Space), a non-profit art foundation working at the intersection of art, new technology and science. Though nascent, the foundation is rapidly securing a reputation for technology and science-rich projects staged within iconic spaces, most recently with Berl-Berl, Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s VR ode to wetland ecosystems at Berlin’s Halle am Berghain. Elsewhere in the city, Irwin is staging a solo show at Sprüth Magers (on view until 26 March 2022) featuring ethereal lighting artworks and monolithic sculptures.

Shortly after LAS was founded, co-director Bettina Kames travelled to the US to meet Irwin who was invited to conceive a new commission in Berlin. ‘Without an exhibition or a single project in [LAS’s] portfolio, Irwin accepted the invitation and took the plunge!’ explains Amira Gad, head of programmes at LAS and curator of Irwin's show. 

Irwin is a central figure of the radical Light and Space movement which emerged in 1960s California. This futuristic wave of art, characterised by light experiments, science-infused optical manipulations and the reimagining of environments, sought to challenge human perceptions, and utilise the new array of materials and technologies that emerged in the mid-20th century. 

Irwin’s seminal contribution involves site-conditioned artworks that use the effects of light to expand, warp and saturate the senses. As the artist said in 1986: ‘My ambition is, in a sense, to make you see a little bit more tomorrow than you saw today.’ The movement – past and present – is currently being explored in-depth at Copenhagen Contemporary, featuring work by Anish Kapoor, Ann Veronica Janssens, Bruce Nauman, Helen Pashgian, James Turrell, Judy Chicago, Larry Bell, Olafur Eliasson and Robert Irwin. 

Irwin began his Light and Space series in 2007, characterised by fluorescent light tubes arranged in rhythmic yet cryptic patterns. This new iteration at Kraftwerk involves several firsts: it’s Irwin’s largest to date, staged on a monumental freestanding wall measuring 16m x 16m. The work uses blue fluorescent lights in combination with the artist’s traditional white, and, in another diversion from convention, Irwin’s piece for Kraftwerk is double-sided, allowing the space to be saturated in light from all angles. ‘The design of the concept had to be fit for a building that is iconic, of that scale,’ Gad continues. ‘It had to be an installation that would feel monumental but also feel embedded within the architecture. In a way, it's about giving “power” back to the former power station.’

INFORMATION

’Robert Irwin: Light and Space (Kraftwerk Berlin)’, until 30 January 2022. lightartspace.org

Irwin’s solo show at Sprüth Magers Berlin runs until 26 March 2022. spruethmagers.com

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There’s a painter at work in the street-facing ground-level gallery at Pace New York, visible to passers-by on West 25th Street. He stands in front of a sizable white canvas, pristine save for a single, sweeping black stroke that evokes a tyre mark, applied with a spatula that he still holds in one hand. His back is turned to us, and we are left to guess at his facial expression, but his assertive bearing and insouciant attire – a pair of jeans, sans shirt so his muscular back and shoulders are on view – suggest supreme confidence.

The Painter, Fig 1, as he is called, is one of twelve pieces (ten of them new) that Elmgreen & Dragset have included in their solo exhibition, ‘The Nervous System’. While the Scandinavian artist duo’s previous works have depicted a boy astride a rocking horse for London’s Fourth Plinth, and forlorn teenager seated on a fire escape, this is a man in his prime, a postcard picture of heroism inspired by old photos of Wilhelm de Kooning in his East Hampton studio. But their current show is not a paean to abstract expressionism: any impression of nostalgia is quickly disrupted by a smaller artwork in the same space, a pair of wellington boots (in patinated bronze) ridden with holes. ‘They’re a symbol of our pathetic efforts to protect ourselves from climate change, and how we can’t turn the tides if we’re not changing our behaviour completely,’ explain the artists.

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, 2021 by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

We encounter more disquieting images as we step into the main gallery. A boy gazes out of a lightbox display that masquerades as a window. Earlier in the year, the artists created a similarly configured piece called Offline, a poignant reflection on pandemic living, in which the boy presses his hands against the perspex and appears to yearn for ‘something that can’t be found inside or a reality other than the one we find online’. The new work takes on more sinister tones, with ethereal blue skies replaced by a gathering storm. Here, the boy’s arms are raised, and his right hand clutches a gun. Its form is deliberately ambiguous, so one can read it as either a toy or a lethal weapon. Still, it’s hard not to see Boy with Gun and not immediately think of the onslaught of gun violence that makes the United States an outlier of the developed world. 

Boy With Gun, 2021, by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

‘School shootings are for the most part a white male problem. If you look at the statistics, it’s white boys who are responsible for these shootings, which has to do with a feeling of entitlement,’ they say. They find it disturbing that boys are often expected to play with toy guns, rather than being taught to respect other people’s lives: ‘The mindset that results in violence begins to form really early in life. It’s why you should put in all the effort and resources you can to nurture the next generation in a different way.’

The artists’ commentary on the crisis of masculinity continues throughout the space, which also features three familiar characters: Bogdan, Kev and Flo from Short Story, an installation that was first shown at Berlin’s König Galerie. This time, Bogdan, a wheelchair-bound elderly man drifting off in slumber, is placed atop a black woollen rug designed by the artists. A Day Short of a Year, as it is titled, is covered with 364 white tally marks, perhaps pointing to Bogdan’s imminent demise or the end of an era. Kev and Flo are two boys on opposite ends of a tennis court, the younger Kev has evidently lost the match and lies exhausted on the floor, while the elder Flo clutches a trophy but appears despondent. Unlike in Berlin, where viewers could roam the tennis court freely, the court at ‘The Nervous System’ can only be viewed behind glass, forcing us into the same perspective as Boy with Gun and grounding our experience of the artwork in the current pandemic. 

We are reminded of the fact that we’re indoors, perhaps against our will. The effect is enhanced by furniture pieces within the show – some (such as a distinctively masculine ‘Ox’ chair and a long leather sofa, both by Hans J Wegner) carefully sourced to evoke the midcentury, others created by Elmgreen & Dragset. A second rug in the exhibition, evocatively titled Lost Memories, has seven circular holes that, despite their geometric precision, feel like bullet holes. An original travertine fireplace has elegant proportions, inspired by the artists’ visit to a public library in São Paulo by Lina Bo Bardi. But it comes, disorientingly, with a TV antenna and is etched with the words ‘The oracles are gone and lost are the gods.’ (Adjacent is The Kiss, a new sculpture of two intersecting jerrycans).

The Ox and the Snake, by Elmgreen & Dragset, featuring a lacquered bronze python coiled on an 'Ox' chair by Hans J Wegner. Photography: Elmar Vestner

The artists have created a table lamp as well, featuring a porcelain base of two gently intersecting spheres, which taper into two necks supporting light bulbs and a lemniscate-shaped white cotton lampshade. They were inspired by a Qing dynasty vase that they encountered at Taipei’s Palace Museum years ago: ‘despite its age, it reminded us of Félix González-Torres’ Perfect Lovers’, they recall. Unusually for an artwork, it is available in four colourways (each an edition of three): mint green, dove blue, millennial pink and eggshell white. They point out that the colours in fact reference edible pigments that are used to coat HIV medicines such as Truvada and Isentress – behind their visual appeal lies a painful history that we must not forget.

Coupled Lamp (Mint Green), by Elmgreen & Dragset. Photography: Elmar Vestner

This is a melancholic exhibition, a cautionary message in a city that, at least until the arrival of the Omicron variant, has been dizzy with optimism. As Elmgreen & Dragset explain, ‘the artist’s role is to go against short-term memory. This is one of the few tasks we have.’ In a world that seems swept away by promises of a brighter future post-pandemic, they wish to remind us that there are longstanding problems to be dealt with: among them the climate emergency, gun violence and toxic masculinity. We’d be wise to tackle them head-on, lest we find ourselves left with a pair of perforated wellies when the waters rise.

INFORMATION

‘The Nervous System’ runs until 18 December, Pace New York, 540 West 25th Street, pacegallery.com

The light artist Chris Levine created his first lambent spectacle at Houghton Hall almost a decade ago. The Marquess of Cholmondeley, whose family have called Houghton home (actually second home) since the end of the 18th century, had commissioned Levine to create a laser installation for a private party. Levine remembers John Galliano, Boy George, Vivienne Westwood and Jazzy B – a prime clutch of 1980s icons – gathering in the grounds at 4am to watch the purple rain summoned by his laser beams. The artist is now back at Houghton Hall with an even more ambitious and more publicly accessible display. 

Born in Canada but based in Britain, Levine studied graphic design at Chelsea School of Art and computer graphics at Central Saint Martins before embracing light-managing media, including photography, lasers and holography, to create art of a spiritual, even meditative bent. He is perhaps best known for 2004’s Lightness of Being, a lenticular portrait of Queen Elizabeth II as a kind of spectral force, eyes closed and aglow, one of a series of portraits of the Queen and other luminaries, including Kate Moss, Grace Jones and, most recently, the Dalai Lama, all rendered similarly luminous.

He is also a prolific and in-demand collaborator, working with Massive Attack, Hussein Chalayan and Jon Hopkins, amongst others, and has created installations and performances at MoMA, the Royal Opera House and the Eden Project. 

Lord Cholmondeley, meanwhile, has established the ancestral Palladian pile, built in the Norfolk countryside by Sir Robert Walpole in the 18th century, as a major cultural draw with permanent public art by James Turrell, Rachel Whiteread, Anya Gallaccio and Richard Long set in the grounds, and a legacy of exhibitions, installations and interventions by artists including Turrell, Damien Hirst and Anish Kapoor. 

Levine's exhibition ‘528 Hz Love Frequency’, his largest to date and sponsored by Sotheby’s, is Houghton Hall's first winter show and brings together a series of new holographic artworks, prints and immersive site-specific laser and LED installations.

The new show, though, is as much about sound as it is light. ‘528hz is the middle note of an ancient musical scale known as solfeggio,’ Levine explains. ‘The numbers of the sound vibrations on this scale are based on sacred geometry and the notes are said to correlate with the energy nodes, chakras, in the body. There is harmony and natural order to the tones. The middle note relates to the heart chakra and 528hz is sometimes referred to as the love signal.’

The centrepiece of the show is Molecule of Light, a monumental sphere, 6m across, sat on a giant tripod and set on the hall’s front lawn. At 25m, the sculpture stands as tall as the house itself and weighs in at six tonnes. 

The sphere, a complex of steel tube circles coated with nine layers of UV-reactive paint and lacquer, emits 3D ‘ambisonic’ sound, notes from the solfeggio scale. By day, the sculpture, a vibrant red, seems to contain some kind of vibrating, natural energy. At night, it forms the heart of a carefully choreographed and precisely aligned laser display. ‘From the outset, I sought to align the work with the physical context – the architecture, the natural environment and the astronomical orientation,’ says Levine. ‘There is a laser locked on to the north star and the laser scanners are set to the rotation of the earth. The work is considered in relation to ley lines and is aligned to nature, the cosmos and the architecture as an atomic field.’

‘I wanted to use light and geometry to create a space where consciousness and the physical realm overlap, harnessing the power of light not just as a medium, but also as a means with which to create a powerful collective experience.’

Running until 23 December 2021, Levine’s show – designed to make the most of the crisp, cold light and the early nights – is a non-denominational and more contemplative and restorative kind of winter festival.

‘I’ve always sought to create art that draws the viewer to stillness and into a meditative state. The more the work can be accessed through the heart and not needing to be mentally processed, the better it allows for a deeper sensory experience,’ he says. ‘The time spent connecting with the work is refuge from the noise and frenetic pace of modern life; it can be calming and revitalising. And ultimately, it feels good.’

INFORMATION
Chris Levine at Houghton Hall: ’528 Hz Love Frequency’, until 23 December 2021. houghtonhall.com

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Northern Ireland’s Array Collective has been crowned winner of the Turner Prize 2021 in a ceremony held at Coventry Cathedral. 

In 2019, the Turner Prize made headlines after all four nominees were awarded the top prize, at their collective request. This year’s format was also unprecedented; for the first time in the award's history, the shortlist was a full house of artist collectives. 

Their common thread is art for social change, but each collective is dispersed in theme, and diverse in approach. Array was chosen from a shortlist of five collectives, which also included Black Obsidian Sound System, Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works. As the winner, Array Collective will be awarded £25,000, while £10,000 will be given to each shortlisted collective. 

Each nominee was selected for their close and consistent work with communities across the UK. The collaborative practices selected also reflect the solidarity demonstrated in response to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. 

An exhibition of the collectives’ work is currently being held at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry (until 12 January 2022), forming part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. 

Belfast-based Array Collective is known for work that tackles issues around language, gender and reproductive rights, as well the politics and identity of Northern Ireland, often conveyed through collaborative performances, protests, exhibitions and events. 

For its Turner Prize show, Array Collective created The Druthaib's Ball a fantasy síbín (‘a pub without permission’). The work has been realised twice. In Belfast, it was a wake for the centenary of Ireland’s partition, in the Black Box (grassroots venue). Quasi-mythological druids were in attendance, along with a community of costumed artists and activists. 

Array Collective’s Herbert exhibition hosts a film created from the Belfast event, and a TV showing Northern Ireland Screen’s Digital Film Archive. A large canopy styled from banners provides a floating roof. Visitors can approach the síbín through a circle of flag poles that references ancient Irish ceremonial sites, and is illuminated by a dusk-to-dawn light.

The collective has staged a contradictory world that simultaneously inhabits trauma, black humour and angst. It is a place to look beyond sectarian divides that have overwhelmed Northern Ireland’s collective memory for the last century. In a more subtle intervention, Array has also made its mark in the Herbert’s collections, inserting an etching of The Druthaib's Ball into Gallery 2 of the museum.

Array Collective comprises Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell, Jane Butler, Emma Campbell, Alessia Cargnelli, Mitch Conlon, Clodagh Lavelle, Grace McMurray, Stephen Millar, Laura O'Connor, and Thomas Wells.

The Turner Prize 2021 jury consisted of Aaron Cezar, director, Delfina Foundation; Kim McAleese, programme director, Grand Union; Russell Tovey, actor; and Zoé Whitley, director, Chisenhale Gallery.

INFORMATION

The Turner Prize 2021 exhibition will be on show at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry until 12 January 2022. tate.org.uk

Since it emerged, the Covid-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than five million people globally. The loss is extraordinary, and the agony has been exacerbated by restrictions on collective mourning with family and friends denied physical participation in funerary rites and rituals for their loved ones. In 2020, Mexican-Canadian media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer responded with a virtual memorial whereby bereaved family and friends could create individual homages.

A Crack in the Hourglass was first commissioned by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City and has been taking place virtually since November 2020. The project was staged as an ephemeral ‘anti-monument’; a space for catharsis and an impassioned lament that depends entirely on the participation of others.

Through ephemeral portraits made from hourglass sand, the installation and its online platform provide communities with space to collectively mourn and honour those lost to Covid-19 in New York City – which has seen some of the highest numbers of pandemic-related deaths in the United States – and worldwide.

The Brooklyn Museum is now presenting the first physical version of the work. Participants are invited to submit photographs of their loved ones who have died from Covid-19 through the project’s online platform, accompanied by a personal dedication, and watch in person or via live stream as a robotic arm deposits grains of sand onto a black surface to recreate the image. Once each portrait is formed, it is digitally archived and gradually erased by gravity. The same sand is then recycled into the next portrait forming an infinite number of memorials. 

‘This project is designed for mourning our losses at a time when we have been socially distant and denied proximity to those affected. The piece also represents continuity, as the same sand is used to make an endless number of unique portraits,’ says Lozano-Hemmer, who is known for provocative indoor and outdoor art installations on the intersection of technology, architecture, performance, and public art. ‘I am very eager to see how the project is received in New York City, an epicentre of the pandemic, and am thankful to the Brooklyn Museum for bringing it to the United States.’

INFORMATION 

Raphael Lozano-Hemmer, A Crack in the Hourglass, An Ongoing Covid-19 Memorial, until 26 June 2022, the Brooklyn Museum, brooklynmuseum.org

Kader Attia’s breakthrough work, Ghost (2007), began as a cast of his mother. Childhood memories of seeing her in prayer, among dozens of devout Muslim women, prompted the artist to wrap her in layers of aluminium foil as she knelt, creating a life-size figure with the characteristically shiny material. He then repeated the process until he had a crowd of 40 figures, with minor variations in posture and arranged neatly in a grid to form an installation (subsequent iterations have involved more figures cast from different people). Viewers approach the figures from behind, mimicking the perspective from which Attia would have encountered the long and narrow spaces that often served as mosques in the Paris of his childhood. Only when they reach the other end of the exhibition space do they realise that the figures are empty shells; their burka-like hoods each conceal not a face but rather a haunting void.

Despite its beginnings as a personal gesture of filial love, Ghost is mostly about wider, weightier ideas, among them the perception of religion, the search for a sense of belonging, and the promises and pitfalls of multiculturalism. These complex themes have long fascinated Attia: his first sculpture, titled The Dream Machine (2003), showed a hooded figure staring at a vending machine stocked with purportedly halal versions of items that are either forbidden in the Islamic faith, or intertwined with ideas of modernity: pork products, alcohol, an American passport, a visa card. Conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, ‘it was an ironic way of showing how racialised communities also mirror what the dominant society is producing and consuming,’ recalls Attia, reached in his Berlin studio via video call.

The Dream Machine took on colonialism and its modern manifestations: ‘There’s this idea that non-white [populations] have to become white inside, all the while staying the basis of society, the slaves of capitalism,’ adds Attia. He considers the work to be an early form of a critique he can make about today’s gig economy: ‘The owners of Uber say their drivers are not employees, but rather their own CEOs. And I think this sort of neoliberal rhetoric is very dangerous, because it shows that colonisation continues. The extraction of values from the racialised body continues.’

Born in 1970, Attia grew up between a Paris banlieue and Algeria, a former French colony and the country of his ancestors, while, by his own admission, struggling to figure out where he belonged. ‘My father used to tell me that as a migrant, the most important thing is neither the kind of place where you live, nor the one you’re going to find. The most important thing is the journey,’ he says. 

His multifaceted upbringing inspired a yearning for travel: in his twenties, to fulfil his national service requirement, he worked for three years at an NGO in Congo. During this time he put on his first exhibition, a series of photographs that documented a journey along the Congo River on a massive passenger boat that he likens to a floating city. ‘It was one boat with 1,000 people and then attached to this boat, probably five other boats without motors, each with 1,000 people living on them.’ He was the only foreigner apart from two missionaries who were translating the Bible into Pygmy, and among the passengers was a man who had three live crocodiles, their mouths tied with raffia, who explained that he would sell them in order to afford to stay for a few days at his next stop. The journey took Attia to the most remote places he’s visited, and impressed on him the shock that capitalism brought to these parts of the world.

‘What drives me to travel is not only the need to find the traces of what I’ve read in books,’ Attia says, gesturing to the fully-stacked library behind him, ‘but also the reaction of these locations to the contemporary global order. I’m not into the idea of the journey as a sort of ethnologist or anthropologist, but rather, as a philosopher or artist. Cultures always counteract a hegemony, particularly when the hegemony comes from another culture which is occupying it, a Western one.’

Attia’s next project explored the fringes of modernity in a different way: back in Paris, he stumbled upon a café that was frequented by transgender Algerians, many of them illegal immigrants who had recently fled civil war in Algeria and were now doing sex work to make ends meet. He befriended them, awed by their courage to live authentically in a world where their gender and migrant identities made them doubly alien: ‘For me, they were really the incarnation of total bravery.’ These friendships resulted in the photo series The Landing Strip (2000-02), showing moments of happiness amid hardship. Attia wanted to disprove the notion that the lives of marginalised people are consistently miserable: ‘It’s not true. There are moments when we need to laugh, we need to drink, we need to party.’

With its defiant joy, The Landing Strip gives a voice to dispossessed groups that have often been forced to hide in silence. Attia continued this work in the 2011 video piece Collages, travelling to Mumbai with the journalist and transgender activist Hélène Hazera to visit communities of hijras, who identify as third gender and often struggle to fit into Indian society (their exclusion is in part a legacy of British colonial law, which categorised them as criminals and deviants). 

He is interested in the ills of Western civilisation and the lingering effects of colonialism, but equally, how non-Western cultures have resisted. He mentions his grandmother’s involvement in the Algerian War of Independence, collecting jewellery which she melted down and sold to support resistance efforts. Much of this jewellery had been made from old coins, bearing the countenance of colonial rulers. Similarly, while travelling in Asia two years ago, he came across women’s hair jewellery forged from the coinage of French Indochina. He sees these modest objects as small counter-reactions to colonial history: ‘Silent resistance which works through craft productions is, for me, the first sign of reappropriation, which will one day become a revolution,’ he contends.

This month, the rich and varied strands of Attia’s work have come together in a major solo exhibition at the Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, curated by its former director Abdellah Karroum. Titled ‘On Silence’, the exhibition highlights the stifling effects of postcolonial trauma and the need for psychiatric ‘repair’. It is at once global in scope, including works such as Ghost and collages from the Hijras series, and conceived specifically for the Middle East, which Attia considers ‘one of the most hindered regions in the world today’. ‘I’m thinking about the last 20 years, the way the Americans have completely destroyed Iraq, the way Israel is with Palestine, the way Saudi Arabia is driving a colonial war in Yemen. There’s an unbelievable continuity of colonialism today.’ 

In his view, silence, or an unwillingness to confront tumultuous histories and correct injustices, has normalised colonial domination, and ‘On Silence’ is a valiant effort to criticise today’s perpetrators as well as awaken the silent enablers.

Crucial to the show are two new installations. The eponymous On Silence comprises a roomful of prosthetic limbs, suspended from the ceiling to occupy the visual field of the viewer. Attia was keen to avoid pieces that ‘looked like they belonged in a collection of contemporary art’, and deliberately sought out prosthetics that bear traces of their former owners. ‘I want something that really speaks by its own texture and patina of a used object, that whispers of political violence,’ he explains. Many were sourced from Syrian refugees, but the intent of the piece is broader: ‘Prosthetics refer most of the time to mine bombings, to war in [places like] Angola, Vietnam and Palestine, everywhere where colonial domination happened. You have dead people, and the survivors are the ones who are amputees. And you can be amputees both ways, physically, but also traumatically. Most of the time, they’re both.’

The other new installation, The Object’s Interlacing, takes on the cultural legacy of colonialism, specifically how former colonial empires have taken art from other parts of the world that they ravaged. Attia has long been interested in the question of restitution (a 2013 work, Dispossession, scrutinised the origins of the Vatican’s ethnological collection). Here, he’s created an hour-long video piece that stitches together interviews with key players in the debate: historians, anthropologists, politicians, psychoanalysts, offering different points of view. Serge Guézo, a direct descendant of King Gezo of Dahomey and now an activist for the preservation of cultural heritage in Benin, features in the film, as does the great-grandnephew of the French general who sacked Gezo’s palace (in 2018, President Emmanuel Macron pledged that France would return the looted artworks to Benin).

Attia’s objective is not to advance a particular agenda, but rather to highlight the cultural and economic significance of artefacts, and the complexity of untangling their histories. Opposite the video projection are 27 copied African artefacts – some of them made in Senegal by contemporary craftspeople, others 3D-printed in Germany – anthropomorphic and appearing to watch the film alongside the show’s visitors, reinforcing the idea that history has its eyes on today’s decision-makers. 

Given Kader Attia’s choice of subjects and the weight of his ambitions, it is easy to imagine him as a tortured soul, frustrated by our collective inability to heal the wounds of our troubled past. But he calls himself an optimist, crediting a love of art and philosophy for his faith in human virtue. ‘I’m not optimistically naive,’ he qualifies, ‘If we need to struggle against very complex, powerful forms of repression or dominance, we need relevant artworks, and relevant discourse.’

In 2016, the desire to promote discourse led him to join forces with restaurateur Zico Selloum to create La Colonie, ‘a laboratory of life’ in Paris that offered workshops, exhibitions and other events around big cultural issues. While the venue was forced to close last year because of the pandemic, Attia recently organised a new series of pop-up workshops called Fragments of Repair/La Colonie Nomade, taking place at the La Dynamo de Banlieues Bleues concert hall in Pantin, alongside an online series of lectures, conversations, and assembly forums. He concludes, ‘it’s very important to listen to the other: other cultures, other contexts, other economies’ – so they will be silent no more.

INFORMATION

‘On Silence’ is at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, until 31 March 2022

mathaf.org.qa

kaderattia.de

This feature was first published in the May 2021 issue (W*265). Subscribe to Wallpaper*

In partnership with Prostoria

Prostoria’s ten, transformative years in the furniture manufacturing business are celebrated in a project that offers a diverse review of the Croatian company’s culture, aesthetic process and philosophy.

‘Prostoria 10’ – recently exhibited at Zagreb’s Meštrović Pavilion – encompasses new content as well as existing projects, such as the photographic portfolio ‘Revisiting Architecture’, produced in collaboration with the Zagreb Tourist Board.

Art directed by Biro Architects, ‘Revisiting Architecture’ sees a series of images drawing a connection between the city’s architectural heritage and Prostoria’s modernist design language. The images place particular furniture designs in front of modernist and brutalist Zagreb landmarks, each of which continues to play an inspirational role for the company in terms of form, texture and ambition.

A collection of sculptures entitled ‘The Essence’, meanwhile, created by Zagreb’s Boir studio, offers an interpretation of Prostoria’s natural materials and master skill.

A section titled ‘Art in the Factory’ tells the story of Prostoria's furniture production through a series of art installations created by sculptor Anđela Vilić from remnants of manufacturing materials.

The exhibition, designed by Croatian studio Grupa and the visual identity by Swedish agency Kurppa Hosk, was divided into ten rooms in total, and featured classic designs from the company’s first decade. The final room, themed ‘Makers at the Core’, included all 233 of the brand’s employees presented in an animation.

The project is accompanied by a short film, also titled Prostoria 10, which shows the path of development of the brand’s furniture icons, among them the ‘Polygon’ armchair and the ‘Revolve’ transformable sofa. The cinematic narrative explains Prostoria’s at once contemporary and traditional approach; the evolution of a brand thriving on local inspiration, talent and methods.

‘Prostoria 10’, explains company founder Tomislav Knezović, was born of both celebration and reflection. ‘Just as we were approaching Prostoria’s tenth anniversary, the pandemic threatened both global health and the global economy, forcing all of us back into our homes. We used this period to reflect on our aims, and strip ourselves down to the very essence, to show who we are.’

INFORMATION

prostoria.eu

A stream of plasma televisions snakes around the floor, each flashing a display of objects from the collection of Mudac, Lausanne’s Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts. From Mario Botta chairs to citrus wrapping papers and Swiss milking stools, the animations illuminate the ceiling of the cavernous space – still under construction – much like the shimmering light of a swimming pool. ‘It’s a different world up here,’ Christian Marclay reflects. ‘I was thinking of puddles [during the making of the installation] and this image of water became true in an unexpected way. The amount of light that it creates – I never imagined that it would divide up the space like that.’

Ahead of the building’s grand opening next summer, the Swiss-American artist (and erstwhile Wallpaper* Guest Editor) was given carte blanche to inaugurate the future exhibition halls of the Photo Elysée (formerly the Musée de l’Elysée) and Mudac with a duet of experimental installations that celebrate their collections. The installations, on view to the public from 6 – 7 November, will give Lausannois a fleeting opportunity to explore the forthcoming site of the two museums for the first time.

For the Photo Elysée, Marclay has conjured an immersive environment of digital projections with images mined from the photography museum’s million-strong archive documenting the entire history of the medium. At first glance, the myriad images – projected on every possible surface at different scales, some overlapping each other giving a double exposure effect – are seemingly random. But the clusters are threaded by themes, some more ambiguous than others: in one instance, the projector cycles through images with circular motifs, while another slideshow depicts black-and-white portraits with subjects who have placed a hands on their faces. ‘The installation reflects the improvised quality of this opening,’ Marclay notes, ‘and this idea of unpacking and showing aspects of the collection.’

Both installations are, notably for Marclay, absent of sound. The artist was opposed to introducing this characteristic part of his practice – ‘Every moving image now has to be with sound otherwise people feel very deprived, it’s very odd,’ he muses – in order to give reverence to the images and the fine art objects they represent. ‘I also believe that photographs are objects. Some of the photographs that I looked at were produced with old techniques, such as cyanotype or bromide prints,’ says the artist. ‘When you actually see the object, it’s magical – they feel very ephemeral because they’re very fragile. Museums have this role of preserving. But it’s also embalming and preserving history for another generation.’

It’s a topic that has long interested Marclay, who has previously created several works directly inspired by the museum collections of the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Walker Art Center. ‘Over the past decade, museums have increasingly digitised their collections, making them available on the web and giving an invaluable insight into what is stored,’ says the artist. ‘This new form of virtual archiving has transformed the way we experience art today.’

But it’s not just exhibitions that will be drawing visitors in. A complex feat of engineering more akin to bridges than buildings, the structure that houses Photo Elysée and Mudac has been designed by Aires Mateus, the Portuguese firm helmed by brothers Francisco and Manuel Aires Mateus, who won the project competition in 2015. The smooth white cube exterior of the structure – punctuated only by a glass ‘smile’ – belies an interior saturated with converging angular planes. Inside, the yawning concrete space expands and contracts as visitors move through. Throughout there are subtle architectural cues, such as floating staircases, that the building is suspended over three load-bearing points.

The challenge for the architects lay in designing a building that would service the needs of two very different museums: on the one hand, Photo Elysée required a space that would allow for tightly controlled lighting to protect the integrity of its photographs, while on the other, Mudac’s collection would benefit from natural light. They also had to factor in the archive requirements for both. ‘The idea was, in a way, to reduce the scale of the building, and make a continuous connection between the outside space and the inside space,’ explains Manuel. A triangular window in the corner of Mudac’s upstairs space, for example – not part of the original design – forms a direct visual connection to the railway tracks outside and nods to the building’s location on the former site of SBB (Swiss Federal Railways) locomotive sheds.

The new building is the latest addition to Plateforme 10, an up-and-coming arts district taking shape next to Lausanne’s central train station. The cultural platform – whose Foundation Board includes Audemars Piguet president Olivier Audemars as well as Agnès Sire, artistic director of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation – is already home to another arts museum, MCBA (Musée cantonal des Beaux-arts), which opened in 2019 in a concrete monolith developed by Barcelona-based architecture practice Barozzi Veiga. As Plateforme 10 gears up for the launch of Photo Elysée and Mudac’s new premises in June 2022, an old adage rings true: all good things come in threes.

INFORMATION

plateforme10.ch

mudac.ch

elysée.ch 

In Palermo, the Fondazione Merz has unveiled its second site, ZACentrale, which aims to transform the city’s ZAC (Zisa Arti Contemporanee) building into a contemporary art powerhouse. 

ZACentrale is sited within Cantieri Culturali alla Zisa, Palermo’s cultural district and hub for artistic experimentation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the area was home to one of Europe’s leading industrial producers of furniture. The Second World War prompted a gradual decline in factory output before production ceased altogether in 1968. After a block on demolition efforts, the City of Palermo began an ambitious process of regenerating the site, which is now home to more than 20 cultural organisations. 

Fondazione Merz – an independent institution established in 2005 by Beatrice Merz, named after Beatrice’s father, legendary Arte Povera artist Mario Merz – will operate ZACentrale from the 1,560 sq m ZAC building for a minimum of three years, turning it into a new cultural hub. 

The foundation is no stranger to breathing new life into historically significant structures. Its original Turin site is a former heating plant for the Lancia car factory and a quintessential example of the city’s 1930s industrial architecture. 

Group show ‘L'altro, lo stesso’ is part exhibition, part ecosystem, treated not as individual works, but as a living, breathing whole. Featuring new commissions by local Sicilian artists and works by international artists including Afghan artist Lida Abdul, Rosa Barba, Alfredo Jaar, Joan Jonas, Mario and Marisa Merz and Lawrence Weiner.

ZACentrale’s inaugural exhibition (on view until 27 March 2022) takes its title from L'altro, lo stesso (The other, the same), a collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges, written in 1964. ‘In these poems, nature is the protagonist and through Borges’ gestural language, its strength and fragility are both explored,’ say curators Beatrice Merz and Agata Polizzi. ‘The dialogue between these varying generations of artists, who differ in time and intention, becomes a collective network, with each artwork contributing to the concept and function of the exhibition.’

INFORMATION

‘L’altro, lo stesso’, until 27 March 2022, ZACentrale, Fondazione Merz, fondazionemerz.org

In Vienna, Berlin-based Italian artist Monica Bonvicini is exploring history, memory, and power via an architectural vocabulary in ‘Stagecage’. 

The show’s title is inspired by the 2017 exhibition ‘StageCraft’ at Columbia University, which showcased intricate models of buildings by legendary architects including Le Corbusier, Norman Foster, and Peter Zumthor.

In Bonvicini’s show, which runs until 30 October 2021, cool-cut aluminium structures are bound by a mass of knotted watches and leather belts. On the sleek, gleaming surface, these are family homes on a doll’s-house scale, perhaps drawing on themes of domesticity. But these are far from homely; they are prison-like structures with another subtext: sexuality, fetish and humour, and the suffocating cages of patriarchal structures.

The artist, who was awarded the Golden Lion at the Biennale di Venezia in 1999 is known for large-scale works and a versatile approach to materials and media. Through

performance, photography, video, painting, collage and text-based pieces, Bonvicini explores architecture and its relationship to identity, sexuality, control, gender, space, surveillance, and power; sinister meets sublime in a cavern of intrigue.

Placed on reflective surfaces, her houses appear suspended or extended. Bonvicini’s use of mirrors is both an illusion and a reminder: all that shines must be maintained through hard, continuous labour and care. The houses look unoccupied, but there are hidden forces in the absent space: feminist desires, witty fancies and a lot of questions. 

Visitors also find Willy Guhl’s iconic midcentury 'Loop' chairs for Eternit shrouded in leather aprons, and the new neon work Joy, Power, Humor & Resistance, 2021 which glows with authority, empowerment and ambiguity. The work is evocative of billboard advertisement in form, but its content asserts a message of courage against capitalist oppression. Joy, Power, Humor & Resistance is duplicated by the large-scale wall piece, Elsewhere In Be Your Mirror, 2020, which traps its surroundings and all those who spectate in hazy reflection. §

INFORMATION

Monica Bonvicini, ‘Stagecage’, until 30 October 2021, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna, galerie-krinzinger.at

‘MASSAGE: €35/60 min, €45/90min, sans rendez-vous’, reads the decal on a ground-level window on Paris’ Avenue Matignon, a stone’s throw from the Champs-Elysées. The choice of font – Brush Script for the headline, Comic Sans for the rest – and the suggestion of spontaneous, suspiciously cheap treatments is sure to turn heads. But don’t jump to the conclusion of a neighbourhood in decline. What appears to be a massage parlour is in fact a new show at Perrotin, ‘New Tenants’, by artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset.

Through the window, we see a treatment room with a two-toned wall (white and mint green, reminiscent of the artists’ swimming pool installations), with a bamboo rack in the corner containing massage oils, towels and slippers. In the centre is a massage bench where a life-size silicone figure of a naked man lies prone, covered only by a white towel over his hips. This is hardly an aspirational visual: the massage bench is an off-the-shelf, collapsible model upholstered in off-white artificial leather, and the naked figure appears deliberately ordinary, with pallid skin, body hair in unflattering places, and not much visible musculature. 

The Touch, as the installation is ironically titled (the masseur is nowhere in sight), continues on Elmgreen & Dragset’s ongoing interest in how we interact with our surroundings. Masters of spatial transformation, they have converted Seoul’s Plateau gallery into a modernist airport terminal, Whitechapel Gallery’s ground-floor exhibition space into a derelict swimming pool, and the nave of Berlin’s St Agnes church (now owned by König Galerie) into an indoor tennis court. Similarly, The Touch subverts expectations and sparks our imaginations, with a dash of irreverence that makes it difficult to turn away.

‘When we come into a room, even if it is an amazing institution, we are constantly asking ourselves how we can transform it into something that changes its identity for a time,’ says Michael Elmgreen in a recent interview for Sculpture magazine. ‘Maybe that has to do with us not being brought up in a museum environment. We never take an art space for granted.’

The show continues in the adjacent room, where a selection of bodily-related sculptural works are on display: monochrome diving boards, displayed as a duo (Couple) and trio (Ménage à Trois), a Möbius-shaped swimming pool in polished stainless steel (Human Scale (Loop Pool)), and a mirrored surface that has been repeatedly ruptured by a lacquered bronze hand (Doubt, Fig. 3).

Also present is a pair of sinks, installed perpendicular to each other and linked with a twisting pipe – so that water poured down one sink would in theory re-emerge in another. Titled Separated, this 2021 work nods to the 2004 installation Marriage which showed two interconnected sinks side by side. The new iteration seems to suggest the way two people can remain intertwined after their relationship has collapsed, however hard they try to extricate themselves.

Outside the gallery is a brushed bronze and stainless steel sculpture from 2020, depicting a vulture perched on a barren tree. This predatory motif – which the artists previously employed at London’s Frieze Sculpture Park in 2018, and at their V&A show ‘Tomorrow’ in 2013 (it was also part of their cover portrait for the October 2013 Guest Editors issue of Wallpaper*) – is given an ambiguous spin with the title of the work, Hope. We like to think that hope springs eternal. But Elmgreen & Dragset’s new show points to the illusory nature of our post-pandemic optimism, and reminds us that the promise of release may turn out hollow, like the masseur who never arrives and the divorce that doesn’t quite materialise.

INFORMATION

Elmgreen & Dragset, ‘New Tenants’, until 20 November 2021, Perrotin Matignon 

perrotin.com

elmgreen-dragset.com 

ADDRESS

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2 bis avenue Matignon
Paris 8e

We are each a record of all that has led to this moment. This is the central tenet behind ‘We Are History’, a group exhibition in the Terrace Rooms at Somerset House. Curated by Ekow Eshun, the exhibition straddles history and cartography to trace the origins of the contemporary climate emergency back to 15th-century plantation and colonial systems.

The exhibition not only asks us to look far back, but also to look wide as it considers the perspectives of communities outside of the Global North. Coinciding with the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, ‘We Are History’ presents the perspectives of 11 artists, each with personal connections to countries in the Caribbean, South America and Africa, together forming a lyrical documentation of history, community and the fragility of nature. 

Created in the aftermath of Hurricane Dorian, the worst natural disaster in the history of the Bahamas, Alberta Whittle’s videos situate changing weather patterns in the Caribbean as a part of the legacy of slavery and European intervention in the region, exploring the effects on flora, fauna and peoples. Likewise, Louis Henderson film’s The Sea is History critiques European colonial history by adapting Derek Walcott’s poem of the same name in a piece that features Lago Enriquillo, the hyper-salinated lake in the Dominican Republic that often floods due to the drastic rise in sea temperatures.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla highlight the damage done to Puerto Rico’s geography during the 60-year occupation by the US military. The artist duo photograph palm trees that were used as markers for disposal sites of hazardous waste and overlay the images with black-ink screen prints to taint and corrupt the natural harmony of the scene. 

Artist duo Mazenett Quiroga explore the appropriation of resources across cultures and map the lifecycle of these resources from the natural world to the globalised economies of our daily lives. The jaguar takes centre stage as a significant physical and spiritual animal in most Native American cultures, and is set against the reality of the threats to its natural habitat through mineral mining in the Colombian Amazon.

Shiraz Bayjoo’s newly commissioned work looks at the lives and afterlives of the native populations of the Indian Ocean. Using archive materials of unidentified people and untold stories alongside new works of ceramics, sculpture and textile, Bayjoo seeks to re-dignify these peoples and communities and recognise their place in history.

Nigeria-born Otobong Nkanga juxtaposes the cultural significance of the kola nut in Nigeria with its commodification and flourishing in the global market as a result of it being at one time a key ingredient in Coca-Cola. The large-scale photographs of Franco-Algerian photographer Zineb Sedira are poetic laments on erasure and ruin, focusing on transoceanic movement and trade between France and Algeria. Malala Andrialavidrazana’s work also considers movement as well as the relationship between traditions and globalisation. Her large-scale prints, reminiscent of traditional maps, are speckled with recognisable symbols of nation, economy and the recent past, such as banknotes and stamps.

Caroline Caycedo looks to Colombia, Mexico and Brazil as she documents the effects of damming on surrounding communities and landscapes in a long accordion-fold book that amasses images, maps, poems, satellite photographs and research material. The artist unpacks corporate power structures, mass production and the impact of local communities.

In an ambitious show that spans a wide breadth of culture and experience, we are presented with a spectrum of viewpoints through which to interrogate our histories and geographies. ‘What these artists offer is new paradigms and new ways of imagining how we live’, explains Eshun. So, while the exhibition undoubtedly labours on the despoiling of the beauty of nature, it is, in essence, also an ode to the beauty of perspective.

INFORMATION

'We Are History', until 6 February 2022, Somerset House. somersethouse.org.uk

In partnership with Porsche

When Porsche first told Cyril Lancelin about its new initiative, ‘The Art of Dreams’, the artist was ‘immediately seduced’. His work, after all, explores the curious space that dreams inhabit: between the real and the unreal.

‘The Art of Dreams’ is Porsche’s new global series of interactive art and design installations sited across major metropolises. For each activation, Porsche will commission a creative, ranging from a designer to an artist or an AI programmer, to develop a work under this theme. A further edition is set for Milan, coinciding with the 2022 Salone del Mobile, while another will take place beyond Europe in late 2022, and more are planned.

‘By commissioning immersive artworks that explore the motif of dreams from different conceptual angles over the coming years, Porsche aims to provide inspiration and positive drive to vibrant communities and societies,’ says Robert Ader, CMO of Porsche AG. ‘The brand also wants to signal support to the art and culture scene that was particularly hard hit by the pandemic, which is in line with our strategic approach of being a “partner to society”.’

For its inaugural edition in Paris, coinciding with FIAC 2021, Lancelin has created Remember your dreams. On view from 15 – 24 October, the monumental, monochromatic inflatable installation will envelop viewers in what the artist terms an ‘artificial landscape’.

Lancelin was selected via Porsche's extensive network in the arts and felt like a natural choice from the outset. ‘His surreal, dream-like interventions in the public domain make him the perfect artist to explore the topic of dreams in a way that is sophisticated yet accessible to a wider audience,’ Ader explains.

For the artist and Porsche, public participation is integral to the work. ‘I thought of the work as a 3D mesh in which we fit. I used arches with a tubular section so that the light was diffused and there were no sharp edges. The repetition of this module in three dimensions creates the volume; a place conducive to a kinetic experience.’

Sited on an outdoor terrace between the majestic 18th-century Palais Galliera Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris and its surrounding gardens, Remember your dreams will offer a link between these environments. For Porsche, the destination’s reputation as a hub for fashion, design and creative spirit made it the perfect setting. ‘The classic Parisian palace and the surrounding garden offer different ways of approaching the work. The large installation creates a connection between the site, the audience, and the different moods at different times of the day,’ says Ader. ‘I want the public to browse the work from the inside but also the outside. You also have to take the time to see the sunlight going through the work. It must be understood as a space for research on colour and light. The public must create their own experience,’ Lancelin continues.

Lancelin uses the same processes in his art that he employed in his former career as an architect. ‘I don't draw my sculptures like a designer, I think of them with rules,’ says the artist, who uses 3D modelling software to conceive his ideas. ‘I then imagine the structure in the site and adapt it to align with the views, interactions and particularities of the place.

I like it when you do not know if the photo represents a physical or virtual work, because this border between the two fades more and more.’

Though all his works are born in the digital space, some never leave. Since 2018, Lancelin has also entered the realms of AR and VR, a migration that feels natural to his otherworldly creations, and opens up more possibilities.

Both Porsche and Lancelin believe in the power of art to render apparent impossibilities possible, capture global imaginations, and make dreams attainable. Following a time when in-person art experiences and human interactions have been in short supply, these sentiments carry a new potency. As Lancelin explains, Remember your dreams is ‘a sculpture to be lived’.

INFORMATION

porsche.art

The words of Azerbaijani poet Mikayil Mushfig (1908 – 1938), labelled an enemy of the state by the Soviets, hover in the air. From a canopy of 100 low-hung microphones, a chorus clusters and repeats the poet’s statement. There is heavy breathing. Hums dissolve into whispers. Fingers click and hands furiously clap. An unpredictable rhapsody of disembodied voices darts around a dimly lit room, creating a dense fog of sounds that lingers over a field of metal spikes. 

Once your senses adjust, you can edge through these spines that comprise Shilpa Gupta’s sound installation, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017 – 2018). Rising up to waist height, the spears forge a constricted path. Each pierces a leaf of paper bearing fragments of the spoken verses, written by a poet incarcerated for their beliefs. It is a panoply of resistance spanning time and place, with the words of dissident writers such as Maung Saungkha from Myanmar, arrested in 2016 for his risqué claim that he had a tattoo of the president inked on his penis, melding with those of Ayat al-Qurmezi, jailed in 2011 for supposedly defaming Bahrain’s royalty. 

The enveloping piece is part of Gupta’s poignant exhibition ‘Sun at Night’ at the Barbican Curve. In a year when the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia, for their courageous advocacy and practice of press freedom, and when digital censorship is alarmingly on the rise, the show is a testament to the force of words and the fragility of our commitment to free speech.

From Gavin Bond's archival photo series 'Being There'

Gupta, however, finds a refreshingly subtle way of rallying for free expression while keeping those poets at the fore. She treats their words preciously. She has ‘preserved’ the verses of censored poems by speaking them into a collection of ostensibly empty medicine bottles that form the piece Untitled (Spoken Poem in a Bottle). 

The thresholds of expression have long preoccupied Gupta. She once built a library of stainless steel books, each a replica of a title written anonymously or pseudonymously. And on the spine she explained the reasons why, capturing a range of society’s neuroses and prejudices. Gupta’s practice is characterised by its delicate investigation of social injustices and finding pathways to empathy. As she tells me, the objective of her work is ‘speaking with you and not at you and not against you. It maybe has to do with a sense of hope that a conversation might mean something.’

Come November 2021, Gupta will continue this dialogue with her first solo show at London’s Frith Street Gallery. ‘There will be spillover from the Barbican show,’ she explains, drawing a link between the genre of isolation that has been enforced throughout the world this last year. She has created a new flap-board – the kind typically associated with airport and train arrivals – that flickers through letters and settles to find our connective tissue. It spells out ‘We are closer than you ever imagined’

INFORMATION

Shilpa Gupta: ‘Sun at Night’, until 6 February 2022, The Curve, Barbican Centre, barbican.org.uk

London's art scene is marking a return to normal-ish service with crowd-pulling but concept-heavy multisensory installations. As the Hyundai Commission by Anicka Yi fills Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with strange smells and AI-enabled entities, AA Murakami are doing something similar at Superblue’s temporary Piccadilly space.

Silent Fall is an entrancing forest of mechanical trees that release bubbles packed with mist and various foresty scents, inviting interactive fun. Visitors can wander through the installation, popping bubbles as they go, and even cradling them and bouncing them around while wearing special gloves. 

The more design-literate among the audience will recognise the piece as an updated and expanded version of New Spring, the Instagram smash first presented by Studio Swine in collaboration with COS during Milan Design Week in 2017. It was subsequently exhibited in Miami and Shanghai. (Studio Swine founders Alexander Groves and Azusa Murakami have now bisected operations, if only nominally, with Studio Swine handling product and furniture design and AA Murakami taking on the conceptual installations.)

As with Yi’s work, Silent Fall brings together what Groves calls ‘ephemeral technology’ and scent-making – they worked with perfumer Paul Schütze on this installation – to investigate our dysfunctional and destructive relationship with the natural world.

‘We see it as an archival forest in the sense that in the future there might not be real forests but replica forests that store information,’ he says. Walls of mirrors stretch this forest of bone-white techno trees to infinity, while the forest floor is alive with bubbles. ‘We're interested in the primordial origins of life,’ says Groves. ‘Scientists have done primordial soup simulations and discovered that life originated with self-organising fatty bubbles. The first cells were bubbles.’

Groves says that as much as they enjoy developing and employing ephemeral technology, they want to maintain a sense of material engagement. ‘A lot of tech art lacks materiality. It’s all audiovisual and the interface is the same as when you are dealing with emails. We want the interface to be ephemeral, bubbles or smoke-rings, shifting states of matter. And I see the future of technology as much more integrated into our built environment or natural environment.’

Silent Fall is the first UK presentation for Superblue, which is staking a claim as patron and commercial partner of experiential artists. It was co-founded by Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, who set up the London outpost of Pace Gallery, and Marc Glimcher, Pace's president and CEO, and began life as a PaceX, a Pace Gallery side project (many of Superblue's artists are also represented by Pace, which will continue to handle sales of physical works, and Superblue has temporarily taken over the old premises of Pace Gallery, following the latter’s move to a Jamie Fobert-designed space on Hanover Square).

Now a separate business, and backed by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective and Therme Group’s Therme Art initiative, it already claims a compelling cluster of artists including James Turrell, Random International, Nick Cave, Es Devlin, Drift, Jakob Kudsk Steensen and teamLab as well as AA Murakami.

‘We became fascinated with these artists who were making experiences but not being served by the gallery market,’ says Dent-Brocklehurst. 

Superblue opened a permanent 50,000 sq ft space or ‘experiential art centre’ in Miami in May 2021, featuring installations by Turrell and teamLab, and opened an exhibition of multisensory works by Drift at Manhattan's The Shed in late September. Dent-Brocklehurst says Superblue is looking to open other sites in the US and possibly London.

INFORMATION

AA Murakami, Silent Fall, 2021, 12 Oct 2021 – summer 2022, Superblue London, superblue.com

The work of the Korean-American artist Anicka Yi takes in science, microbial activity and air-carried markers of identity, amongst other things. The perfect pick, then, for Tate Modern’s first Turbine Hall commission (officially the ‘Hyundai Commission’) since Covid closed operations.

The commission is Yi’s largest and highest profile to date – and art commissions don’t come much larger and higher profile – but Tate Modern’s enforced closure at least gave her a good run at it. She’s been working on the installation for the last two years, a process she calls a ‘radical voyage with no roadmap’ and a journey she admits was as personal as creative. ‘There was so much transformation of every facet of the project, internally, externally. And it's a radically different project than the one we would have produced had we opened last January, or last October, as we were originally slated to do.’

When we talk, Yi is still at work on site. Details of the installation don’t stretch much beyond the fact that it will somehow touch on science, scent and artificial intelligence and Yi can’t get into specifics yet (since the interview was conducted, we have discovered this involves a series of levitating robots powered by helium and AI). She’s clear the commission, titled In Love With the World, has been a huge challenge, on multiple fronts.

Tate Modern is the most visited space for contemporary art in the world and previous Turbine Hall installations, from Anish Kapoor’s ten-storey trumpet through Carsten Höller’s slides, Ai Weiwei’s seeds, Olafur Eliasson’s artificial sun and Kara Walker’s giant fountain, have redefined the possibilities of popular public art. It’s a daunting legacy to deal with. There’s an inevitable pressure to create a huge, accessible spectacle and the trick for the Turbine Hall artist is arriving at something that works for that vast, awkward and ambiguous space.

For Yi, there is an extra level of pressure. This is her first public art project of any size. ‘The hardest part is really getting over your fear and anxiety about the wild unknown of the public,’ she says, only half joking. ‘In a gallery or a small museum, it’s a very controlled environment. Here it just feels so lawless, [there’s] so much mayhem and chaos. And now I’m on site, it’s no longer abstract, or on Zoom and spreadsheets and Word documents. I’m interfacing with the public and I'm thinking, “Oh my lord, they’re a living, breathing entity.”’

The timing and place of the commission have encouraged a new kind of generosity and legibility. ‘I think it's almost impossible to enter into the project without thinking about the loaded vastness of the space and what all of that entails. But luckily you have time to figure out your relationship to that. For me, it meant that I wanted to be exceedingly generous to the public in a way that I never have. I’ve had a very trepidatious, anxious relationship with the audience, but this project was almost like a gift to them. I reserve very little for myself. In past projects, it’s been more hermetic, codified but this is an unvarnished, unfettered sort of coming out.’

Now 50, Yi was born in Seoul but her family moved to Alabama when she was two. Her mother worked in biomedicine and had a passion for fragrance. Yi moved to London in the early 1990s, working as a fashion stylist and copywriter before moving to New York later in the decade and becoming friends with the fashion and art collective, the Bernadette Corporation.

Unsure of her calling, Yi tentatively committed herself to art, working with unusual materials and, picking up on her mother’s passion, set on sculpting with scent. Yi was determined on reversing the marginalisation of the olfactory senses in art and unpacking the cultural baggage of scent and the tight bundling of smell, misogyny and racism, what she calls the ‘bio-politics of the senses’.

She didn’t have her first solo show until 2011 but that year’s Convox Dialer Double Distance of a Shining Path, a pungent soup of powdered milk, antidepressants, palm tree essence, shaved sea lice, and ground Teva sandal dust, was a signal of intent. She also began collaborating with scientists and technologists (she describes her art as a kind of techno sensualism) and in 2014 – 15 was a visiting artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology.

Her creative adventures in material science have seen her work fermented kombucha into leather, create tempura flowers, and inject live snails with oxytocin. In 2015 she asked 100 female friends and colleagues for swab samples from orifices of their choice, used the samples to grow bacteria in petri dishes, and analysed the results to create a chemical fragrance, released at an exhibition called ‘You Can Call Me F’. 

She developed the idea a year later with ‘Life is Cheap’, collecting swabs exclusively from Asian-American women to grow bacteria on Plexiglas tiles, showing them alongside thousands of carpenter ants, a complex commentary on female labour and networks again set within a scent-scape of her own creation.

In 2019 she created two pieces for the Venice Biennale. Biologizing the Machine (tentacular trouble) featured animatronic moths flying inside giant lanterns made from kelp. For Biologizing the Machine (terra incognita), meanwhile, she developed a light-based language from bacteria.

Yi’s art, then, is smart, complex and heavy on the concept. Yi says there will be smell and there will be ‘entities’ at the Turbine Hall and all the conceptual density you would expect of her work. ‘It's been driven by the philosophical and theoretical, objectives, questions and interrogations.’ But she insists the installation will also provide an instant experiential hit. ‘This is so experientially driven, you don't need all of this sort of backstory.’

The show includes ‘advanced algorithmic machines’, she promises, technology far more ambitious than the animatronic moths that fluttered to life in Venice. And there is nothing fictive or sleight of hand about it. ‘There’s no screen door that you can use to pretend you did this while you were actually doing something else. It’s actually doing what we say it is doing and I’m really proud about that.’

Yi and the Tate team have been testing out elements of the work with the public and Yi has been surprised and somewhat de-centred by the strength of reaction. ‘There is a tremendous amount of feeling and it's very destabilising for me. I thought, “Oh my god, how do rock stars absorb all of that energy and emotion?” I'm by no means up there, but I've never experienced anything like this before and I don't know how you prepare for it.’

Ultimately, she hopes she has created a new kind of public experience. ‘I really hope it foregrounds how porous we all are and that what you experience is not as a monolithic public but a microcosmic, granular experience that is very overpowering.’ 

Yi’s larger goal has always been to unroot and relocate us within nature, to sensitise us to different kinds of connections. ‘We think that we have vanquished nature, that we are separate from it and let all other lowly beings, animals, plants and microbes, deal with scent. That’s why scent really, really bothers human beings, because it ties us to the natural world.’

Fittingly, for a high-concept, big-impact post-Covid exhibition, Yi’s key material in the Turbine Hall is the air we breathe. ‘We're all immersed in it, we have to share it. It reminds us that we're all genetically linked, that we are all interdependent and that there is no real beginning, middle, or end. The air we are breathing now still contains atomic nuclei from the fires that burned Joan of Arc.’

Ultimately, she is asking us to breathe in and think again. Think hard. ‘All of these scientific and philosophical certainties are starting to crumble. We need to actually come up with new ideas and update every facet of human engagement, culture, philosophy, technology, all of it.

INFORMATION

’Hyundai Commission: Anicka Yi’, 12 October 2021 – 16 January 2022, Tate Modern, tate.org.uk

Pace Gallery has unveiled its new London home at 5 Hanover Square with inaugural shows by New York-based artist Torkwase Dyson and late abstract expressionist legend Mark Rothko. 

Dyson’s Liquid a Place will serve as a dynamic inaugural offering for the gallery. On view from 8 October –  6 November, coinciding with Frieze Week 2021, the multi-media installation transforms one of the new gallery spaces with sculptures, activated by a site-specific sound piece.

The artist, self-described as a painter across different media, grapples with how space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies. On 7, 9 and 11 October as part of Pace Live, Dyson’s installation becomes a stage for leading writers, poets, dancers and musicians, selected by the artist, to engage with issues of environmental racism, spatial liberation and sensoria. 

‘Working in London offers me the opportunity to lengthen my questions around human geography. This history/timeline of carving the earth, the construction of the canals and all the mechanistic infrastructure and architecture connected to it. And the River Thames’ history of docks and dispossession,’ says Dyson. ‘What is systemic world building? How do we separate planetary world building and issues of climate change and relationship/difference to the Western construction of the universal that flattens and disappears people? When I continue my research in the space it simply also opens up space to hold liberation strategies and recognise autonomy/self-possession.’

Elsewhere in the gallery, Mark Rothko’s ‘1968: Clearing Away’, offers a show of rarely seen paintings on paper created during the final years of the artist’s life. These works, developed during a time of ill-health and personal troubles for Rothko, mark a shift in scale from his characteristically monumental canvases to smaller works on paper. Though intimate in scale, these works are no less intense, meditative or intoxicating.

The gallery, previously home to Blain Southern, which closed in 2020, has been reimagined by Jamie Fobert Architects, the practice involved with Pace’s original London gallery on Lexington Street. 

Fobert has transformed the interior architecture of the existing building, creating versatile galleries across two floors. The levels will be connected by a new feature staircase rendered in black steel. ‘At the beginning of the project, Pace considered carefully the way gallery spaces should relate to workspaces within the new gallery. This became the generating idea of our work,’ says Fobert. ‘The positioning of volumes and connections, both horizontal and vertical, has created a sense of fluid movement through the building. Art spaces and workspaces are integrated, giving the visitor a continuous dynamic experience.’ *

INFORMATION
Torkwase Dyson: ‘Liquid a Place’. Exhibition: 8 October – 6 November 2021 Performances: October 7, 9, 11, 2021

‘Mark Rothko 1968: Clearing Away’, 8 October – 13 November 2021

 ADDRESS

Pace Gallery
5 Hanover Square
London W1S 1HE

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In 1999, when Petrit Halilaj was 13, Serbian troops swept through his native Kosovo and forced him and his family to flee into refugee camps in nearby Albania. Wartime destruction, forced displacement and loss came to define his youth, and eventually shaped his career as an artist. Now one of the foremost cultural figures to have emerged from his young homeland, he has explored these themes with poignant urgency.

Cultural identity, nationhood and heritage

At the Berlin Biennale in 2010, Halilaj famously reconstructed the scaffolding of his family home, which was burned down in the village of Kostërc during the war and would later be rebuilt in the capital city of Pristina, and let loose a flock of live chickens as symbols of rural life and recovered freedom. He subsequently meditated on migration and integration through large-scale recreations of the jewellery that his mother had buried in the soil in their original home when they prepared to escape, and by filling an Art Basel booth in 2011 with the same soil.

Contemplating wider themes of nationhood, he created a giant bird’s nest out of Kosovan soil, branches and twigs for the country’s first pavilion at the Venice Biennale two years later, and then resurrected specimens from the vanished Natural History Museum of Pristina for a solo show at the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels.

Adding to this more recent projects – such as Ru (2017), inspired by Neolithic artefacts from the town of Runik that wound up in Serbian hands because of the war and remain inaccessible to Kosovars; and Shkrepëtima (2018), which presented collective memories of Runik’s citizens as a performance on the ruins of the former House of Culture – and Halilaj’s ability to give widely resonant form to his personal histories becomes abundantly clear.

Petrit Halilaj's new exhibition at Tate St Ives

There is, however, one aspect of his biography that Halilaj was hesitant to mine for many years – his actual experience of the Kosovo War, which he is finally drawing on for a major installation at Tate St Ives, his first solo exhibition in a UK museum. ‘For a very long time, I preferred to not talk about it, or to not remember it in detail, because I’m fascinated by what I can do today, speaking to personal and national identity, and what it means on a larger scale,’ he explains over Zoom from his Berlin studio. ‘I never went back to the conflict, and I was very annoyed by journalists who were interested in my experiences as a refugee.’

What changed? The passage of time, which empowered Halilaj to finally confront his traumas head-on. Ongoing experiences of erasure, which prompted a realisation of how a conflict from two decades ago continues to reverberate in contemporary politics (in 2019, the president of Serbia expressed public support for the demonstrably false claim that the Račak massacre of 1999 never happened). There was also the Covid-19 pandemic, which compelled the normally peripatetic artist to slow down and revisit his memories. 

In lockdown, he had plenty of time to call an old friend, the Italian psychologist Giacomo ‘Angelo’ Poli. They first met at the Kukës II refugee camp in Albania in 1999, where Halilaj and his family were living, and Poli was part of a humanitarian mission. Poli wanted to help children at the camp to communicate their experiences, but he couldn’t speak any Albanian nor they English or Italian – so he offered them felt-tip pens and paper and asked them to draw.

‘After almost a month in the camp, where we had no education, I heard there was a programme for kids. I often describe it as one of the best presents of my life,’ the artist says. The workshops were therapeutic, a respite from the hardships of the camp and a much-needed outlet: ‘We drew about the war, and it was one of the first times an adult would give us space to say something [about our experiences]. It wasn’t just the personal need for expression. We were trying to inform everyone we could about who we left behind, and what we just saw, and the extremely hard time Kosovo was going through.’

He depicted scenes of devastation – military helicopters descending on Kosovo, tanks tearing their way through the countryside, homes going up in flames, soldiers holding civilians at gunpoint, a family being massacred. But with Poli’s encouragement, he also drew the same things he had drawn before the war, the idyllic landscapes and fantastic birds that now seemed a world away from his current situation but could offer a sense of normalcy and spiritual sustenance. Halilaj made quite an impression, first with his insistence on having twice the number of pens as other children (he is ambidextrous) and then with the drawings themselves, which attracted the attention of the international press and eventually the then UN secretary general Kofi Annan, who asked to see the young man on a visit to the camp.

Halilaj struck up an immediate friendship with Poli, who had to depart after 15 days, taking with him 38 artworks by Halilaj and leaving behind contact information and more drawing materials. ‘I wrote to him anytime I could in the years to come,’ Halilaj says. ‘Back in Italy he showed my drawings, alongside those of other kids, and persuaded his municipality to give me a grant to go to the only art high school in Kosovo after the war. Eventually, Angelo and his wife hosted me for three years when I was at university [the Brera Academy in Milan]. They became my second family.’

Petrit Halilaj on the stories that shape our lives

It was thanks to his recent conversations with Poli that Halilaj decided to revisit his 38 early drawings for Tate St Ives. He asked Poli to scan the drawings (he still prefers that the psychologist keeps them), and they began to discuss them one by one. Five or six drawings in, ‘I started to be fascinated by how reality and fiction were already mixed in my mind [at the time], and I was asking questions about what I could do with such stories that shape your life, and how impossible it is to keep them frozen, because they still shape you’, explains the artist.

‘I thought it would be amazing to have the chance to elaborate on the idea of traumatic events talking to your biggest hopes and dreams, how the two can sustain each other.’

He was also inspired by the work that Poli had been doing with theatre techniques – acting as a way to process trauma. From there came the idea of creating an immersive environment in Tate St Ives’ largest gallery (measuring 26m x 16m x 7m), like a gigantic theatre set, formed from magnified fragments of the drawings suspended from the ceiling. Each fragment, an outsized piece of felt printed on one side and offering only a silhouette on the other, relates to either war or fantasy, and Halilaj is configuring them so that viewers, on entering the gallery, witness a happy, utopian scene featuring birds in vivid colours, unaware of the horrors that await. ‘The further you go in, the more the story of the war will unfold, and when you reach the other side and turn around, the impression is that of terror.’

Visitors exit the gallery from the same door they came in, so they have to traverse Halilaj’s environment from this wartime perspective. As they leave, should they choose to look back, they will once again encounter the original landscape, but in all likelihood they will struggle to shake off the visions of devastation, says the artist – ‘I’m interested in this idea that you will never see only the birds again. In your memory, it will always be the other side.’

Titled Very volcanic over this green feather, the work encourages empathy with the victims of war, but also articulates a certain optimism: while most of the 84 fragments hover mid-air, one is placed on the floor and printed on both sides. It’s the child from the drawing that Halilaj had presented to Annan in 1999, and in the context of this installation it feels autobiographical. ‘There’s a magic to bringing together all these different events in your life, and building a new story with them somehow,’ says Halilaj, who considers himself one of the lucky ones, to not only have survived the war but also found a better life afterwards. 

To contextualise the installation, Halilaj is dedicating an adjoining gallery space to additional information about the war, and the political and social contexts that continue to impact Kosovar society and diaspora. Among the exhibits will be a replica of his grandfather’s diary, which sees recollections of normal life brutally interrupted by vignettes of war, and a photo album from Poli, alongside Annan’s notes on the Kosovo war and footage of his visit to Albania, to contrast local and international perspectives.

‘I share the story of presenting my drawing to Kofi Annan. He asked me to give it to him, so he could bring it to the UN for a meeting on Kosovo the next week, and all the nations would see it. Today, I understand what he was saying. But at the time, I just remember my father saying that the war would have stopped earlier if Annan had wanted. So I didn’t give it to him,’ recalls the artist.

Petrit Halilaj’s installation for Tate St Ives, Very volcanic over this green feather, 2021. Top, gently frayed rope and visible stitches add an element of tactility to the installation; above, at the centre of the installation is the only element printed on both sides and touching the ground – a crying boy from the drawing that the artist had presented then UN secretary general Kofi Annan at Kukës II refugee camp, Albana in 1999.

Trauma, hope and joy

Halilaj’s exhibition has been curated by Anne Barlow, director of Tate St Ives, who says she is ‘captivated by the power and presence of what he does. [This] significant new work is perhaps his most personal reflection on the trauma of the Kosovo war, shaped through the perspective of time. It draws on his own experiences of the war, but it also acts as a touchpoint for the memories and experiences of others, and this in turn opens up important conversations for all of us about the unique perspectives that art can bring to issues like conflict, displacement and oppression.’

Halilaj admits that he embarked on this exhibition to move past his own traumas. ‘Actually, you learn that trauma will always be in life,’ he reflects. ‘It’s just how we use it, and what we do with it that can change, that’s in our hands.

‘It’s not in our hands to take trauma out of our lives. It’s what makes us who we are.’

Halilaj at his Tate St Ives installation

In a way, Very volcanic over this green feather dovetails with an installation that Halilaj and his life partner, fellow artist Alvaro Urbano, created for Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal last year. Transforming the glasshouse into a giant bird’s nest, they installed a series of enlarged flowers (made from painted canvas stretched over a steel framework) that represent milestones in their relationship. The installation not only stood as a dedication to queer love, but also expressed an aspect of Halilaj’s identity that he once thought incompatible with his Kosovan heritage – ‘We don’t have Pasolini, we don’t have Almodóvar’, he quips in reference to his country’s lack of prominent queer figures.

Happily, the tides seem to be changing; this July, he and Urbano were invited to present the flowers under the cupola of the National Library of Kosovo, as part of the Autostrada Biennial and coinciding with the nation's fifth annual Pride Week. It felt like a homecoming, he tells me, a testament to the joys of living authentically and without fear, of sharing one’s full self with the world.

Top: To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love, by Halilaj and his life partner Alvaro Urbano at Madrid’s Palacio de Cristal in 2020. The artists created an installation of giant flowers, made from painted canvas stretched over steel frames, representing milestones in their relationship. courtesy of the artist, ChertLüdde, Berlin, Kamel Mennour, London/Paris. Above, Urbano (left) and Halilaj under the cupola of the National Library of Kosovo in July 2021, with their giant flowers installed for the Autostrada Biennal, and coinciding with Kosovo Pride Week

INFORMATION

‘Very volcanic over this green feather’, 16 October 2021 – 16 January 2022, Tate St Ives, tate.org.uk