Nora Chipaumire (styled ‘nora chipaumire’) describes gadzi as an ‘organism’, a term she feels suits it better than ‘installation’. Live performance, sculpture, touch, sound, and moving images share one space, brought to life by people moving through it. ‘My organism holds energy,’ she says, explaining that the work is meant to be experienced physically, through the connection between body and space rather than as an object to view.

Presented as Tate Modern's Infinities Commission 2026, curated by Valentine Umansky and Francis Hardy, gadzi takes its name from gadziguru, the oldest and most powerful feminine presence in Shona cosmology, an indigenous African worldview. Drawing on the legends, stones, and soil of Zimbabwe, the work transforms Tate Modern’s Tanks into an immersive environment where visitors move through sculptural forms, sit on speakers embedded within them, and experience sound physically as it travels. Built from wood, wire, and cardboard, the monumental sculptures give new meaning to everyday materials. Over the past decade, Chipaumire's practice has increasingly focused on the stories and cosmologies of the Shona people, drawing on ancestral knowledge and looking beyond the colonial histories that shaped southern Africa.

Chipaumire rarely separates the physical from the philosophical and almost never speaks about the work as a collection of materials or disciplines. Instead, her work explores memory, landscape, and what it means to remain. At its core, gadzi is shaped by an understanding of the feminine rooted in ancestral belief, moving fluidly between installation and performance to give form to a philosophy that has long existed beyond ‘the very dominant Eurocentric ways in which we try to think about ourselves’.

Chipaumire is not interested in presenting the feminine as a metaphor but as a way of understanding the world, grounded in maturity, lived experience, and knowledge passed across generations. Now 61, she believes gadzi could only have come to life at this point in her career. ‘I'm old enough now to be able to tackle perhaps concerns that are outside of time, and also old enough as a woman to understand what is sacred about the feminine.’ She returns to this phrase almost instinctively, linking age not only to experience but to another way of understanding knowledge itself.

The same refusal to separate ideas from lived experience emerges when the conversation turns to sound. Chipaumire begins with the body: ‘Sound is vibration. It's breath. We are in sound as we breathe, as we speak. Every time we make our voice, and we open our throat, we are in sound, so this is a physical experience.’ Within gadzi, that physicality is carried by a monumental dub sound system embedded throughout the installation. Broadcast through ‘mountains of speaking wood’, the sounds of Chimurenga, both a revolutionary movement and Zimbabwe's celebrated musical tradition, meet the deep bass frequencies of dub. The handmade resonators acknowledge the ingenuity of African and African diasporic approaches to sound technology, where vibration is as significant as melody. ‘To me, sound is physical, is visceral, is the body, is inside of the body.’

Movement, for Chipaumire, is inseparable from sound and the act of listening itself; gadzi is experienced through the body before it is understood intellectually, allowing vibration, movement, and landscape to unfold together. Makeshift lights fashioned from repurposed petrol bottles cast a soft glow across the room, while moving images show the artist navigating the balancing rocks with care. ‘You can walk in and allow your heart to lead,’ she says. ‘This too is the highest form of thinking.’

On view until 23 August 2026, gadzi draws on Zimbabwe's balancing rocks to reflect on the longer histories of colonialism and extraction that continue to shape the present, but the commission refuses to be defined by absence or loss, turning its attention instead to what cannot be taken. ‘There are aspects of us that are not harvestable, that are not extractable, and it is this which I bring into this space. The refusal, the obtuseness to say, “And still we stand, proudly, with elegance.” You could not extract this beauty.’

Here, Chimurenga, literally meaning ‘revolution’, sits alongside dub and punk, allowing different histories of resistance to speak to one another through sound. ‘They are all sounds, different registers, different harmonisations of our collective no. Whether the dub coming from the New World, the Chimurenga coming from the old world, the punk coming from the centre of the so-called Commonwealth, they are all sounds, frequencies, volumes that are saying no.’

A series of live activations animate gadzi further with movement and sound. Tate Modern Lates on 26 June sees the commission spill beyond the East Tank with an evening of music, conversation, film, and workshops, followed by performances on 27 and 28 June. A monumental speaker installation, designed with Ari Marcopoulos and Kara Walker, occupies the Turbine Hall, celebrating the enduring legacy of sound systems within the museum.

Questions of identity give way to questions of power, asking not what it means to be African, Black or female, but how those identities came to exist in the first place. ‘These are constructions,’ she says. ‘We were the first resource to be extracted out of Africa. What is power? Is it the strength to extract and sell others, or is it this truth that we remain?’

Chipaumire is less interested in directing how the work should be read than in inviting audiences to move through it on their own terms, entering what she describes as an ‘energy exchange’ where understanding emerges through participation. ‘All the responsibility,’ she says, when asked what role art can play at a moment marked by displacement, extraction and environmental crisis. ‘The artist is the last intellectual, is the last philosopher who can tackle these issues.’

Darrell Thorne appears like a glitch in the Matrix. Ornate and mirrored, headdress high, often on prosthetic stilts, body painted, horned, winged, caped, crowned (sometimes all at once), he doesn’t enter so much as materialise. Not quite male or female, not entirely human or alien, he moves through space as something in-between. A guest from another realm, summoned by those who find the visible world insufficient. Gala committees, fashion houses and private clients seek him out for something that floats beyond the boundaries of reality.

Part character designer, part performance artist, pure spectacle, Thorne turns flesh into fantasy. When pop’s grandes dames (Liza, Cher, Madonna) crave something otherworldly, they turn to his singular talents. ‘Sometimes people want more than beauty,’ he says. ‘They want to feel mythic.’

Thorne grew up in small-town America and his family moved often (Alaska, Arkansas, Missouri). He was the youngest of five, raised under the strict codes of the Missionary Baptists. His grandfather was a preacher. His parents were devout. Television was forbidden. Hell was not a metaphor.

His escape wasn’t rebellion, it was books.

The first artist who mattered to him was Chris Van Allsburg, the writer and illustrator behind Jumanji and The Polar Express. From there he reached Narnia, Middle-earth, and beyond. Stories became his passport into wilder, more fantastical dimensions, but within his oppressive upbringing, there was a twist: Thorne’s father, despite his religious fundamentalism, was also an amateur artist.

The contradiction was striking. By day, he enforced a world view that left no room for the frivolous. At night, he built things. That paradox left an outsized mark on Thorne, giving him an early fluency in contradiction – an instinct for holding opposites without needing to choose between them. As a child, he once sat through a sermon by Fred Phelps, the notoriously homophobic founder of the Westboro Baptist Church.

‘Very, very strict,’ he says when describing his formative years. ‘Through religious dedication, our family could be saved, but everyone else was going to burn.’

The severity of his upbringing had unintended side effects: it stirred the depths of his imagination. ‘The repression built slowly, but unavoidably,’ Thorne says. ‘After being compressed for so long, I needed to express myself. I needed to be seen.’ His early life is a textbook case of how unaccepted adolescent desire, and the ache of queer isolation, can turn a child into a world-builder.

His adult rebellion came in stages: college dance classes, the Hubbard Street Dance Company in Chicago, go-go platforms in LA, and eventually New York. By day, he worked in healthcare as an administrator at a cancer centre. By night, he worked at The Cock, half-naked, half-painted, wholly unclassifiable. ‘I wasn’t a drag queen. I wasn’t a muscle go-go boy. I was something else.’

That in-between quality began to crystallise through collaboration. Weimar New York, a decadent performance lab, took him in. Among fellow shape-shifters, such as Machine Dazzle, Thorne found the freedom to mutate, exaggerate and transgress. Each night became a provocation: how far could he push it?

The goal was always escalation, each transformation more elaborate than the last. Reinvention became an obsession, an urge that soon required a studio, a space that would allow him to fully execute his vision.

He never had a job description – no existing title seemed to fit. Costume designer felt too flat, too literal. Thorne doesn’t just dress people, he conjures up auras. ‘I’m not just transforming appearances,’ he says. ‘My aim is to transform the energy of the room.’

His work eventually caught the attention of nightlife ringleaders Susanne Bartsch and Brandon Voss. In Thorne, they found a young talent charging into the unknown with courage, ambition and body paint.

Both supported him with opportunities that fostered his development.

Nightlife impresario and entrepreneur Daniel Nardicio, one of the first to hire Thorne, recalls, ‘He was never a traditional go-go boy, he was always a performance artist on a platform. He brought a certain je ne sais quoi. It’s been exciting to watch him grow into one of New York’s larger-than-life personalities, and move beyond nightlife into fashion, theatre and acting.’

Somewhere along the way, the requests expanded – he wasn’t just designing looks for himself, he was conceptualising entire characters for full performance troupes. The invitations evolved, too: less underground, more institutional; less queer, more corporate. ‘The gay scene didn’t always know where to put me,’ he says. ‘Straight parties had more money, and less imagination.’

Today, Thorne’s work straddles multiple worlds. He is at once designer, director, performer and storyteller, bringing spirit and unpredictability to spaces often stiff with tradition. His client list reflects a rare ease across extremes, from liberal to conservative, high-minded to high-budget: Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, Bergdorf Goodman, Gohar World, Martha Stewart, Dom Pérignon, Red Bull, Cipriani, Gracie Mansion and RuPaul’s Drag Race, as well as financial firms, including Uprising Capital, Ridge Ventures and Carson Wealth.

Watching him in action, a techno Ganesha prancing in a mirrored headdress, sheer neon fabric billowing behind him, the moneyed crowd falls into ecstatic awe. He’s not unlike a court jester. Officially powerless yet granted rare permission to dazzle, disrupt and even critique, from within. His costume signalled both his marginality and his access.

Like the jester, Thorne isn’t there to dismantle the institution, but to enchant it, queering formal events with beauty, absurdity and the kind of fantasy that momentarily suspends the rules. ‘I enter spaces where everyone else is buttoned up,’ he says. ‘And I become the rupture. A beautiful rupture. It gives people permission.’

Not every transformation aims for the sublime. Many luxuriate in camp and theatrical excess. The results aren’t always tasteful, but they aren’t meant to be. Thorne’s sensibility courts the grotesque and the baroque, revelling in maximalism. And yet, in a culture steeped in cynicism, his candid spectacle feels almost illicit, brazen enough to risk being unfashionable. Its power lies there: sincerity barbed with decadence. Now in his forties, Thorne still carries a boyish, wide-eyed, almost mischievous exuberance. He has lived for years in the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Bushwick in an apartment that feels like a living mood board: surreal, meticulous, strangely durable.

Part laboratory, part art installation. ‘Lighting is important,’ he says. ‘So is height. I need room to hang things.’ The kitchen is seafoam green and lit by a gold wrought-iron fixture that, he says, was once a street lamp. ‘Leap and the net will appear,’ reads a ceramic tile on his stove, bought years ago from a former investment banker-turned-ceramist at an art market. He took it, naively maybe, as a sign to quit his job and commit fully to his creative life.

The living room centres on a mural of clouds painted by his upstairs neighbour, artist Matt Austin. The bedroom shimmers with reflective surfaces. Like his creations, the home overlays global and historical references – sacred artefacts drawn from a multitude of cultures and time periods – into a cohesive, unmistakably personal world.

Many of the studio’s details are gifts from his father, including deer antlers from past hunts and feathers from an albino peacock (his father once kept one as a pet).

His father also designed the mirrored ceiling grid where his headdresses hang, their surfaces catching the light in neatly choreographed rows. ‘Today, my parents are extremely proud of me, and of my work,’ says Thorne. ‘They even share my viral TikTok videos with their neighbours.’ The studio hums with the combined energy of the many characters he’s inhabited. Here it becomes apparent how the duality he experienced as a child has manifested in his way of layering beauty and contradiction into a single space. One of his signature contributions to performance is a mirrored headpiece that vertically bisects the face.

When he turns to one side, the other vanishes. It builds on a classic drag conceit – half-male, half-female – but the headdress heightens the extremity and sharpens the illusion. Thorne uses it to stage every kind of pairing: angels and devils, Mother Earth and Father Industry, Vikings and sea witches.

‘The mirrored duet is my invention,’ he says. ‘A lot of people now use something similar, but I’m 100 per cent certain that no one was doing that before me.’

The headdress is a visual manifestation of his lifelong meditation on duality, proof of how naturally Thorne holds contradiction. ‘I’m a Gemini, which I don’t put that much stock in,’ he says. ‘But in so many ways, I contain polar opposites.’

Viewing his extensive archive, it’s clear that his work refuses restraint. The handmade, the excessive, the obsessive – these aren’t indulgences, they’re tactics. It’s not quiet. It’s not respectable. And it feels especially urgent in a country increasingly hostile to anything outside the power structure’s current idea of normal.

This feels like the right moment to ask how he sees his work in a time of rising authoritarianism and perpetual war.

‘Sometimes I feel like, how can I be making this floral skirt when the world is burning?’ he says. ‘But in moments of political fear and psychic fatigue, beauty can be a lifeline.’ He doesn’t offer escape so much as a reminder: a stranger, more bearable world is still possible.

Film directed by Michael Bullock and Bob Hoste. Cinematography: Bob Hoste. Interview by Michael Bullock. Camera assistant: Ian Wishart. Sound design: Duffy Sound.

Correction: The nightclub 'Catch One' referred to in the film was located in Los Angeles, not New York as the film suggested.

In 2010, Marina Abramović sat on a chair in the atrium of the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art for 736 hours and 30 minutes as part of her performance piece, The Artist is Present. As she sat, members of the public were invited to sit opposite her and, quite simply, stare into her eyes. In a fast-paced world, and an even faster-paced New York, it was radical, and often moving, to simply sit, stare and acknowledge.

One of the most captivating things about The Artist is Present was its simplicity. There were no fancy props or special effects – just two people and two chairs. This functionality is a recurring theme in the work of the Serbian conceptual and performance artist.

Perhaps it’s not altogether surprising, then, that Abramović has now turned her hand to design, and specifically the design of chairs, unveiling her debut furniture collection at Mexico City Art Week this month (February 2025). The collection, called Elephant in the Room, has been created in collaboration with woodworking design studio La Metropolitana.

Abramović is late to join our video call to discuss the collection, calling me to apologise from the back of a cab in Mexico City. When she finally appears on-screen, she assures me that, in Mexico, arriving 10-to-15 minutes late is normal, so much so that there’s an idiom for it which translates to ‘I am already there, but not yet’.

Naturally, I'm keen to understand what attracted the 'grandmother of performance art' to the medium of design: 'There's actually a lot of crossover between the two in my work, because I constantly use objects that people can sit, stand and lie on – that they can use,’ she says. I’m reminded of Abramović's 1974 performance, Rhythm 0, where she laid out a series of objects, including scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun and a bullet, and stood still while the public was invited to do whatever they wanted to her.

‘I love functionality,’ continues Abramović. ‘I hate coffee table books with a passion. I hate that no one ever reads them and they’re purely decorative.’ She is inspired by the approach of the Japanese: ‘It's not that they don't have stuff, it’s that their stuff is always fit for purpose. In spring time, they will put the spring vase on the table. When winter comes, they bring out the winter vase.’ Abramović also admires the philosophy of the Shakers, the Christian sect who live by the mantra ‘beauty rests on utility’. Spatial minimalism, she says, allows for a ‘free mind’: ‘I have enough going on in my head. Emptiness is something that I like. Emptiness and void.’

Sure enough, the chairs that make up Elephant in the Room are minimal and unadorned. They are made of wood and copper, with what look like little shoes on the ends of the legs.

Despite this, the collection represents a domestication of Abramović’s work that feels incongruous. Functional objects have usually acted as a prop to her art, with the exception of her 1988 collection Transitory Objects, a series of objects that ‘were there for the public to interact with’: a copper bed to lie on, a quartz cushion to lean on, an iron chair to sit on.

Abramović made these as a reaction to a previous performance, The Lovers, an epic adventure where she walked half the length of the Great Wall of China (roughly 2,000km) to meet her partner, German performance artist Ulay, in the middle, where they planned to get married. (Organising the walk, however, turned out to be a maze of red tape which took five years to navigate. By this point, the pair had grown apart and, while they agreed to go ahead with the walk, they decided that they would meet to break up rather than to marry.) ‘When I got back from China, I realised that the public had not been present – we’d been completely alone in nature,’ recalls Abramović. ‘I started thinking about creating something that the public could participate in.’ The result was Transitory Objects.

Elephant in the Room may represent a domestication, but, for the artist, ‘domestic’ is not an insult: ‘My grandmother’s kitchen table was the centre of my world. Now, in America, you have these enormous, super-luxurious kitchens, and nobody even cooks. You just pick up the phone and order a pizza. People don’t have that domestic life anymore, and that’s so sad. Our lives have become so complicated that we forget about the power of simplicity.’

Just because something is minimalist or mundane – stripped back to its most essential components – it doesn’t mean that it is devoid of meaning, says Abramović. Take her performance art: while some may see it as simply existing for shock value, the artist insists that she ‘never [makes] art to provoke’. ‘To me, that’s cheap and vulgar,’ she continues. ‘I create work that makes people think, and if you’re just shocked then you’re not thinking about it.’ Similarly, Elephant in the Room, says Abramović, is ‘all about the content, what I want to say. Not about decoration’.

What does she ‘want to say’ with Elephant in the Room? This was where La Metropolitana, and its founding trio Rodrigo Escobedo, Mauricio Guerrero and Alex Gutiérrez, came in. ‘They think about the history of the wood, which ties into the history of Mexico. They work with indigenous people, local artisans and disadvantaged people. They also use traditional techniques and ethical craftsmanship,’ says Abramović. ‘La Metropolitana wants to tell the stories of their objects. It’s not just about production for hotels and so on, which is why it was so important for me to work with them.’

The materials used in the collection range from precious wood sourced from government seizures to copper recovered from coins and industrial waste. This copper, according to Abramović, represents nervous and energetic systems. This is something of a full circle moment: the Transitory Objects were functional, but the materials they were made of, to Abramović’s mind, also made them vessels to ‘trigger physical or mental experiences’.

Elephant in the Room was inaugurated with a piece of performance art, further imbuing the pieces with meaning. When they were launched, a dinner was held at the La Metropolitana factory. The chairs all had different words written on the back – ‘risk’, ‘love’, ‘adventure’, ‘insecurity’ , ‘harmony’ – and guests had to pick one to sit on. One of the chairs was labelled ‘elephant’, and the person who sat on this wasn’t allowed to talk (as one doesn’t discuss the ‘elephant in the room’).

‘Nothing just because it’s beautiful, it has to be functional,’ Abramović says. Design and art doesn't have to be beautiful, according to Abramović and La Metropolitana, but it does have to have meaning.

The founder of experimental gallery Olfactory Art Keller Dr Andreas Keller isn’t a nose or a perfumer in the traditional sense.

But, he is obsessed with ‘smell’ as the stimulus for conversation, memory and experience. Working with artists, he curates bespoke ‘odours’ to exhibit at the space, which opened in 2021 in New York’s Chinatown, examining how ‘smell’ can become an art piece in itself.

Inside Olfactory Art Keller, the experimental New York gallery exhibiting ‘smell’

Dr Keller has investigated ‘scent’ over the past 20 years, obtaining PhDs in both neuroscience and philosophy, with a research focus on what he would refer to as ‘olfaction’. His 2018 book Philosophy of Olfactory Perception explores the relationship between ‘sight’ and ‘smell’, examining the objective experience of each. ‘Many of the smells here are conceptual,’ Dr Keller tells me, of the works on display at Olfactory Art Keller. ‘It’s not, “Oh, this smells like banana.” It’s an idea, more than anything.’

Whilst the approach to each exhibition varies – and does incorporate visual elements at times – it largely engages with the ephemeral. And, as Dr Keller explains, the number of artists practising in this medium seems to be increasing, due to an uptick in responses to his open calls for work around a particular theme. ‘I think the first time I put out a call maybe 40 people applied,’ he explains. ‘Last time it was closer to 100 people.’ Some of the subjects explored in group exhibitions have included ‘Portraits in Scent’, with pieces that capture ‘the intangible (or is it the invisible?) that eludes photography and painting’. Also ‘Minimal Scents’, a show focusing on the relatively new concept of ‘minimalism’ in scent creation.

Olfactory Art Keller also stages time-based work in its Project Rooms, plus performances and workshops, in collaboration with this expanding community. Some are still amateurs in the world of scent, learning how to mix and make odours as they go; others are professional noses, working in their day jobs as perfumers. ‘I always know when a scent submission comes from a perfumer,’ Keller says. ‘They find it much harder to create a really “bad” smell.’

The ‘unpleasant’ is certainly not something that Olfactory Art Keller shies away from. One of the scents from the recent exhibition ‘Scent as a Creative Medium’ by Rachel Barfield was simply called ‘Shame’, a perfume juxtaposing ingredients that resemble ‘human secretions’ with florals, soft musks and ambers. To me, it smelled of bad decisions: overpowering sweat; a touch of lingering alcohol.

‘You’d have to be pretty ashamed to wear it, right?’ Dr Keller says, with a laugh. ‘But maybe, after a while, you could own it.’ (For those who are curious, ‘Shame’ is available to purchase through Olfactory Art Keller’s online store).

Other times, Olfactory Art Keller will highlight an artist for a solo exhibit, like Brooklyn-based Elizabeth Renstrom. Her show ‘Basenote Bitch’, which ran between February and March this year (2024), displayed fragrant works – images, objects and scents – to evoke adolescent ‘nostalgia’.‘Like a first love or a first shame, it’s hard to forget your first scent,’ read the exhibition notes. ‘Each tends to occur during those heady, hormone-filled teenage years when everything's at once fresh, exciting, awkward and unbearable.’

Alongside pop-cultural iconography from the late 20th and early 21st century, perfumes highlighted by Renstrom spanned from Dior ‘Fahrenheit’ (1988), ‘Country Apple’ by Bath and Body Works (1997), ‘Love Spell’ by Victoria’s Secret (1999) and Gap ‘Dream’ (1995). The current show, which runs until 21 December (2024) is a collaboration between California-based artists Sean Raspet and Maxwell Williams. Titled ‘Missense’, it tries to ‘on purpose, create the most ambiguous smell that would be perceived differently by everybody.’

In such a densely populated art area as downtown Manhattan, Dr Keller finds that Olfactory Art Keller offers his audience respite from an oversaturation of solely visual works. Certainly, it’s a relief to think critically through a different sense – and even consider owning a piece of conceptual art that has been distilled into liquid form and can fit inside a handbag.

Olfactory Art Keller is located at 25 Henry St, New York, NY 10002.

olfactoryartkeller.com

Walking through Palermo’s historical centre, the stunning old city soon reveals itself as a palimpsest. Street names, edifices and ornaments often disclose traces of the many cultures, rulers and religions that have travelled across the Mediterranean and left a mark on the island. It is discernible in the architecture, customs and cuisine. And it is legible, to nearly impossibly utopian degrees, in Sicily’s spirit of inclusivity. Genoa-born artist Vanessa Beecroft, who staged a previous tableau vivant here in 2008, returned to Palermo on 8 December 2022 with her latest one-time performance, which paid tribute to Sicily’s dizzyingly diverse cultural and historical narratives. 

Titled VB94, to indicate the work’s sequence within the artist’s practice, the new performance was specifically created for a small gallery inside Palazzo Abatellis, a museum that houses the Regional Gallery of Sicily. But just like most buildings in Palermo, the Palazzo has seen several incarnations. Originally built as an aristocratic residence in the 15th century, it later became a cloistered convent for 400 years, until the Second World War. After the last of the nuns had left, the palace was transformed into a museum in 1953-1954 by Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa, and is considered a masterpiece of international museology thanks to Scarpa’s extraordinary exhibition design. It seems there’s no better place to stage a signature Beecroft work – which links the past and present, stasis and movement, art and life –than these history-filled stone quarters remodelled by a modernist master. 

‘I idealised this museum so much that now I feel like I’m in a dream,’ Beecroft said on the eve of the performance. ‘The first time I visited this museum was in 1987, and since then I’ve considered it the most beautiful museum in the world. Antonello da Messina’s Annunciation and the bust of Eleonor of Aragon by Francesco Laurana made a profound impression on me. Over the years I have continued to visit it, and when the possibility of making a performance here materialised, I thought about how to express my relationship with such a special place.

‘I trust that the city of Palermo has a deep understanding of the complexity and dialectic of my work and this makes me feel safe,’ she added. 

In the palazzo’s moonlit courtyard, visitors queued to enter a small gallery where a group of models, draped in variously diaphanous fabrics and wearing golden leather shoes, stood or sat amid Beecroft’s sculptures of heads and busts cast in ceramic, bronze and wax. An original soundtrack by composer Gustave Rudman (of Euphoria fame, amongst many other accomplishments) induced an ethereal, timelessly thrilling mood. In fact, this is the first time that the Los Angeles-based artist has combined live models with sculpture and sound. 

While the sculptures referenced some of the artefacts in the museum’s collection of Renaissance art, the performers – women from Palermo, some from a lineage of local aristocracy while others are first or second-generation immigrants – evoked the women who have inhabited the dwelling throughout the centuries, from the noblewomen of the Abatellis family to the nuns of the Santa Maria della Pietà convent. A porcelain-skinned performer was nursing her baby but retired to a back room as the infant grew tired. 

For models, Beecroft’s tableaux are demanding feats of endurance. Participants must stay in character for several hours, keeping movement to a barely perceptible minimum. ‘It was very challenging,’ Emma Preisler, a yoga teacher who embodied a goddess figure in the three-hour performance, said the following morning. ‘It was an exchange between me and the audience; from my spot, it looked like they were touched deep inside, somewhere where it hurt.’ 

‘But it helped that Vanessa was in the room; every time I was in doubt I searched for her and that became the golden thread carrying me through.’ 

Vanessa Beecroft’s one-time performance ‘VB94’, took place on 8 December 8 at Palazzo Abatellis. The artist’s sculptures will be on view at the museum until January 8, 2023. vanessabeecroft.com

It is an unorthodox trinity Cosey Fanni Tutti creates between herself, Delia Derbyshire and Margery Kempe in her new book Re-Sisters. 

The book recounts the lives of Derbyshire, one of the 20th century’s most innovative, if under-acknowledged, pioneers of electronic music; Kempe, a 15th-century Christian mystic credited with writing the first English language autobiography; and Fanni Tutti, who interweaves stories from her own life throughout. Fanni Tutti’s life story is recounted more fully in her breakout 2017 autobiography Art Sex Music, but all of the major plot points are also referred to in this new book – her childhood in post-war Hull, her role as a founding member of the performance art collective COUM Transmissions, a progenitor of industrial music with Throbbing Gristle, post-industrial and synth innovations with Chris & Cosey, and her years spent working in the sex industry as a form of performative investigation and expression.

Fanni Tutti was inspired to write Re-Sisters when Derbyshire and Kempe’s stories serendipitously intersected with her own – Derbyshire’s when she was approached to write the music for the 2020 film Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and The Legendary Tapes, and Kempe’s when she happened upon a biography of the mystic’s life in a bookstore. Speaking to Fanni Tutti over the phone from her Norfolk home, where she has lived with her life and creative partner Chris Carter since 1984, she tells me she felt a kinship with these two riotous women and became, ‘interested in diving into how they felt about their lives, their experiences – what they had to do in order to be themselves. That’s the core thing that brought us together, the connection between the three of us.’ 

‘Selfhood’, what that means and how we express it, is the axis around which all of Fanni Tutti’s work turns; it’s so important that the book is dedicated to ‘Selfhood’ with the word ‘self’ italicised throughout. Fanni Tutti’s motto, ‘My life is my art, my art is my life’, is a summation of her belief that there is a porous boundary between our everyday activities and the higher consciousness we label creativity. 

COUM, formed in 1969, was the earliest realisation of this idea. It was a forum for its members to freely enact any idea or impulse without judgement in order to, as Fanni Tutti describes in Art Sex Music, ‘give free rein to ideas, about not being limited by rules or self-doubt, which lead to some confrontational situations as we challenged and broke established rules and cultural social conventions’. These ‘confrontational situations’ included performances in which Fanni Tutti whipped another member on an X-shaped cross after covering him in flour paste and chicken feet; and Fanni Tutti swinging across a stage as she peed through a heart-shaped hole on the seat. One performance, in Los Angeles, was so disconcerting that even Chris Burden (who was famously shot in the arm in the name of art) walked out in disgust. 

It was during this period that Fanni Tutti began infiltrating the sex industry, posing for magazines, acting in pornographic films and dancing in strip bars. The experience of being in this world was part of her art, as were the photographs and other documents that would go on to become a fundamental aspect of COUM’s show ‘Prostitution’ at London’s ICA, which was so controversial it inspired a debate in the House of Commons about the state of ‘contemporary art.’ 

As with everything Fanni Tutti does, her sex industry work was an exercise in self-expansion. She gained a deeper understanding of who she was and what she was capable of by becoming a part of a dissident environment and then pushing herself to the extremes of what she felt comfortable with. At one point in Re-Sisters, she mentions a conversation with Pussy Riot’s Maria Alyokhina about the way ‘actions break fear’. It was Alyokhina’s phrase but it could easily be used to describe Fanni Tutti’s work and her belief that fear can be conquered through knowledge, and knowledge can only be gained through experience.

When I ask Fanni Tutti why she feels the urge to throw herself into the unknown, she responds, ‘I think it's down to the limitations that are put on me. Like I’ve said, I don't like limits. So if I’m doing something for a project, I don’t just do it to the extent of what I need to do [to get it done]. That won’t do. I need to know everything about it. So, like when I was doing the pornography [project] and a situation came up where they wanted to see something that I wasn't sure I wanted to do, I would think, ‘Well, why don't I want to do it? And will I ever be in this position again where I can see if I liked it or not?’ And it's those situations that are important to me. I have to gather as much information as I can, then assimilate it and I know that I've done it.’ 

Like Fanni Tutti, Delia Derbyshire and Margery Kempe pushed themselves psychically beyond what was comfortable to understand themselves. They shared a ceaseless drive to, as Fanni Tutti describes it, ‘try and find a solution to the restless, unquantifiable passion and emotional expression we call creativity’. For Derbyshire, that meant creating an entirely new form of music using synthesised sounds and compositions structured around mathematical precepts (the Fibonacci sequence, Fourier synthesis), rather than traditional musical scales. While for Kempe, it took the form of an ecstatic devotion to her god, expressed through violent bursts of fitful crying, a vow of abstinence and pilgrimages around Europe and the Middle East. 

For Fanni Tutti, the connection between herself, Derbyshire and Kempe ‘comes back to the limitations', she tells me. ‘Limits are set by other people. The rulebook for Margery was the Bible and for Delia, it was mathematics and classical music training. But then they stepped over the edge and took it elsewhere. It's very similar to me. [It’s the idea that] that’s someone else's version of that experience, but why did they stop there? Why can't we go somewhere further? That's really important, otherwise we don't move forward.’ 

One of the most affecting takeaways from Re-Sisters is not so much that all three of these women felt the urge to push themselves to such extremes, but the cost they paid for doing so. The sexism Derbyshire faced as one of the few women working at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop from 1960 to 1973 meant she routinely had to justify what she was producing to her colleagues and, when successful, fought for recognition in her role. While at the BBC, she also started her own initiatives (Unit Delta Plus and Kaleidophon), but much of her later life was blighted by alcoholism and a series of destructive romantic and professional relationships. 

Kempe faced a lifetime of derision and violence after she renounced her status as a noblewoman and devoted her life to Christ. She was arrested numerous times and had to defend herself in court against accusations of heresy. Fanni Tutti, meanwhile, was disowned by her family, villainised in the press, and repeatedly creatively undermined; in Art Sex Music, she alleged she was abused by her former partner, COUM co-founder and Throbbing Gristle bandmate Genesis P.Orridge, allegations the latter denied in The New York Times (9 November 2018). 

So, after years of ‘breaking fear through action’, what has frightened her the most? ‘There's fear and then there's intense fear,’ she responds, ‘and I would say intense fear is something [where] you have to suddenly act to break it and you can't go back. I think [that was strongest] when I was young and I didn't feel that I fitted in and feared that I would never find a place where there were other people like me. And I knew that unless I left the situation I was in, that family unit, I would be stuck there and feel like I was lost for the rest of my life.

‘So I just did things I was told not to do until the point where my actions then got me thrown out of home,’ she continues. ‘[I knew] those actions would get rid of the fear I had of being in this family unit where I was going to be positioned in a place in society I just did not want to be.’

Fanni Tutti did of course find like-minded people, and now, she has found widespread acceptance, even acclamation. But she doesn’t care. ‘I’m not the kind of person that gets accepted and thinks, “Now I’ve got a formula so I’ll stick with that.” That’s what success is called [and] I’m not interested in that,’ she tells me. 

If anything, she thinks that our culture’s emphasis on acceptance and approval has fractured culture rather than united it. ‘There are so many more people now than there were a few years ago who are following trends and not actually listening to themselves,’ she says. ‘They are almost being someone else and I think that leads to a lot of frustration and possibly even depression. You have to listen to yourself and experience the world in your own way. It is about individuality, and the more we have that, and the more we express it, the world would move forward, we'd be more compatible with one another, rather than like clones.’ 

But she has hope that things are changing, with more insurgent creatives coming onto the scene; although, she concedes, ‘it's terrible that we have to hit rock bottom in this kind of crisis for people to get angry [and expressive] enough’. She notes that some of the projects exciting her at the moment are musicians such as Gazelle Twin, Lucrecia Dalt, Hannah Peel and Squid’s performance at Glastonbury this year. 

Fanni Tutti isn’t one for teaching lessons, but any creative might be wise to adopt her philosophy. 

‘If you do something with the rule that people will accept it and like it, [and] make it marketable and [then] it doesn’t work, the sense of failure is on you,’ Fanni Tutti says. ‘Whereas if you do your own work the way you want it, then it doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it because that’s the way it’s meant to be. You haven’t compromised yourself in any way.’

INFORMATION

coseyfannitutti.com

The path to creative transcendence has never been a clear one, but no one has come quite as close to forging it as Marina Abramović. The Serbian artist and titan of performance art has spent the last half-century stretching the human body to breaking point, offering herself as an object of experimentation for audiences, and eroding the seal between body and soul. 

Through staggering performances, she’s subjected her body and mind to distressing symbolic rituals, reconfiguring the thresholds of pain, endurance and suffering. 

Among these, The House With The Ocean View (2002) at Sean Kelly Gallery, for which Abramović lived, entirely exposed, on three raised platforms for 12 days with no food and only water. And lest we forget The Artist Is Present(2010), in which she sat motionless for at eight hours per day over three months, engaged in silent eye contact with hundreds of strangers, and some friends, one by one. More recently, the artist dominated London with a multifaceted homage to soprano Maria Callas. 

Her interest in participation is cemented in the so-called Abramović Method, an approach conceived by the artist to engage the public with participatory exercises to conjure ‘inner strength, concentration and endurance’ to confront life’s challenges. The method blends radical contemporary art with self-help, making the otherworldly connotations of transcendence feel jarringly down to earth. Last year, as part of a year-long collaboration with file sharing platform WeTransfer, the artist unveiled a digital manifestation of The Abramović Method available 24/7 to the platform’s 80 million-strong global community. 

Now, this famed method is being made available as a set of physical instruction cards published by Laurence King. Created by Abramović and arts and fiction writer Katya Tylevich, the 30-card set makes some ambitious and alluring promises: to ‘purge your mind of all unnecessary distractions and anxieties’ and ‘unleash your creativity’. 

So what’s on the cards? For starters, you might try ‘complaining to a tree’, in which you ‘Choose a tree you like. Put your arms around the tree. Complain to the tree’, for 15 minutes. If tree-hugging isn’t your jam, perhaps you could try ‘holding a mutual gaze’ with a willing partner? Or ‘releasing static electricity through a strand of your hair?’ (there’s a first time for everything). 

In 2023 Marina Abramovic will present a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, and become the first female artist in the institution’s 250-year history to occupy the entire gallery space with her work.

INFORMATION

The Marina Abramović Method, Instruction Cards to Re-boot Your Life, by Marina Abramović and Katya Tylevich, will be released on 10 February 2022, £16.99. laurenceking.com

Judy Chicago’s career is defined by a fierce self-belief, prodigious creative flair, a zest for social justice, and a lot of smoke. 

In the early days, she injected expression into the emotion-deprived landscape of 1960s minimalism and met acclaim, and notoriety, with The Dinner Party (1979), a work that shook the foundations of art history. What Chicago has created since has been no less prophetic, fearless or radical; it continues to unearth the untold facets of history and penetrate contemporary culture deeper than most will dare to.

Judy Chicago’s limited-edition cover for Wallpaper’s February 2022 issue features Forever de Young, 2021, a fireworks performance in collaboration with Pyro Spectaculars by Souza. Staged on 16 October 2021 in front of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, Forever de Young was sponsored by philanthropist Jordan D Schnitzer, in memory of his late mother Arlene Schnitzer (1929-2020). Photography: Donald Woodman. Limited-edition cover © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Chicago began her Atmospheres series in the 1960s. In these site-specific cinematic works, plumes of pigment gush the air, liberating colour from the rigidity of painting and sculpture. They were an unobtrusive, ephemeral reimagining of what land art could be, but also, as Chicago told us in a recent interview: ‘an effort to feminise and soften an exceedingly male-centred art scene.’ 

These days, Chicago’s adventures in pyrotechnics (including her recent contribution to our Artist’s Palate series) are no less dramatic. On 16 October 2021, in celebration of the artist’s first retrospective, at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, Chicago filled the skies with a new smoke sculpture, Forever de Young, created in collaboration with Pyro Spectaculars by Souza. The work, awarded Best Fireworks in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2022, also adorns the limited-edition subscriber cover for the issue. 

The volcanic, multi-coloured smoke performance erupted from a 27ft-high tiered scaffold in front of the museum; non-toxic pigments danced in the wind and light in a spectral chromatic haze. The piece was staggering in scale, concept and choreography, and a fitting reflection on Chicago’s epic career. ‘I was marginalised for many decades because nobody could fit me into the narrow categories of contemporary art. When I was young, I wanted to fit in, but now I’m old, I’m like, “I don’t want to fit in.”’

INFORMATION

Judy Chicago’s cover is the latest addition to the Wallpaper* limited-edition cover series, which features a specially created artwork by a different artist, architect or designer each issue, available exclusively to subscribers. 

judychicago.com; deyoung.famsf.org

‘It’s all gone a bit, Santa Barbara’. If you are ever in Russia, this is a phrase you might hear when something has gone a bit wrong, or become a bit messy. The saying originates from the name of the first-ever American soap to run in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. It became a hit and is credited with having a massive impact on post-Soviet Russian culture.

Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson has taken on this cultural phenomenon to inaugurate GES-2, the V-A-C Foundation’s new House of Culture in Moscow, a former power station reimagined by architect Renzo Piano.  The commission began life as a takeover, but as Kjartansson began to plan, the idea bifurcated into both an exhibition of the artists’ work, Santa Barbara – A Living Sculpture, and a parallel show featuring some of his favourite artists titled To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!, curated by Kjartansson’s partner, the artist Ingibjörg Sigurjònsdottír.

Known for his six-hour film of the band, The National performing their track Sorrow and his clever, insightful performances and film, Santa Barbara, which incorporates live elements, marks a new direction for the artist. 

The exhibition and launch of GES-2 come at what might be the highest levels of tension between the United States and Russia since the Cold War. The exploration of this American cultural import, performed in Russian and exploring the concept of cultural colonisation, could not come at a more poignant time. In examining this relationship between the two cultures, Kjartansson has created a living sculpture which will play out over the next three months. 

‘I remember being raised in Iceland, between Moscow and Washington, that you really felt the Russians and the Americans were fighting for our little souls with cultural material,’ recalls Kjartansson as we sit down in Moscow.

In a long durational performance that recreates Santa Barbara, a production team will shoot an episode a day for three months, live in the museum. The fully reconstructed open film set includes four sets, actors, costumes, make-up and props and at the end of each day's filming an episode will be edited and displayed in the museum. Kjartansson aims to produce around 100 episodes in total, creating something of a living history painting.

Kjartansson’s approach to the project, directed by Ása Helga Hjörleifsdóttir, is one more akin to live theatre than film or television. Part improvised, part scripted as per the original episodes, there is a hands-off element to the work which will unfold live, in front of the Moscow audiences who visit. 

‘As visual artists; I think we are always trying, with new work, to invent some kind of new form. This [work] is a sort of experiment in trying to do that like a kind of theatre, film and performance art,’ he said of his process.

Santa Barbara exemplifies Kjartansson’s ability to communicate his artistic vision of the world while remaining utterly universal no matter the complex nuances at play in his subject matter. In calling the work a ‘living history painting’ and ‘emotional sculpture’, he captures a particular aspect of modern visual culture parsed through film. 

‘In a way, a society is created here with all the actors and the filmmakers, etc. They are all responding to things happening around them.’ 

Santa Barbara takes place alongside the show ‘To Moscow! To Moscow! To Moscow!’. This features works by Kjartansson like The Visitors, 2012 which sees musicians play one song simultaneously in different rooms of an Icelandic mansion, and Me and My Mother, 2000–2020 where the artist's mother spits in his face captured over twenty years. These are staged alongside works by other artists that have proved inspirational for Kjartansson and Sigurjònsdottír. Chosen without any curatorial agenda, purely because the artists wanted them in the show, we see an illuminating choice of works by artists including Roni Horn, Theaster Gates, Carolee Schneemann and Emily Wardill. 

Presiding over the exhibition and the set of Santa Barbara in the vast new knave of the Renzo Piano-designed museum is Three Sisters (remake of Jay Ranelli’s lost photo c.1990), 2021 titled after a 1900 play by Chekov. Kjartansson’s photograph depicts three smiling McDonald’s servers taken in the branch of the burger chain in Red Square – a moment of cultural assimilation between the Russian and American exchange with a distinctly un-American feel to it.

Santa Barbara, as a history painting, is unique in its inspiration and its practice, but is it also a no-brainer? History as we see it now is fluid. Like time, it never stops to stand still in a fast-changing world. Perhaps Kjartansson’s three-month snapshot is the most realistic representation we can hope for.

INFORMATION

Santa Barbara – A Living Sculpture by Ragnar Kjartansson, until 13 March 2022, GES-2 House of Culture, Moscow. v-a-c.org

ADDRESS

Bolotnaya Naberezhnaya, 15
Moscow, 119072

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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 the work of German artist Anne Imhof, the human body is a tool, canvas and concept. Through radical performances, she has redefined body language and become one of the most distinctive creative voices of her generation.

Imhof spent her formative years in Frankfurt am Main, where she taught herself to draw and compose music while working as a nightclub bouncer. Now based between Frankfurt and Paris, she has spent the last decade probing the intensity of isolation, fetishising contemporary consumer culture, and imitating the motifs of neoliberalism. Her performances – spectral, dynamic and unsettling – explore how moments of physicality are becoming increasingly constrained in the digital age. 

Anne Imhof is one of five radical creatives chosen by French culture and fashion icon Michèle Lamy for ‘5x5’, Wallpaper’s 25th Anniversary Issue project. Her practice spans painting, drawing, film, music, installation, sculpture and hard-edged architectural interventions, as well as acclaimed live performances in which disciplines often intersect. 

Imhof’s live endurance performances confront the power dynamics between performer and viewer, leaving the latter wondering what’s dictated and what’s improvised. One of her most compelling pieces, Faust, secured her a Golden Lion at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Outside the German pavilion, four live Dobermans occupied a cage. Inside was a glass floor (or ceiling, depending on whether you’re the spectator or spectated) beneath which a cast of activewear-clad performers chanted, gyrated, mutated, and engaged with props to an eerie soundtrack. Her work could be considered intentionally uneasy on the eye, searingly memorable, and entirely unrepeatable. 

The artist is currently taking over the entire Palais de Tokyo with a carte blanche solo show, ‘Natures Mortes’, for which she worked with composer and longtime collaborator Eliza Douglas and 30 guest artists. The once-white galleries have been stripped back to their gritty bare bones; a glass-walled maze punctuates the space and disorientates viewers; a polyphonic soundtrack impales the senses. 

In October, Imhof will activate the show with a group of performers, who will engage with the architecture, Imhof’s installations, and one another. Simultaneously, she is staging the third of three chapters of ‘Sex’ at Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, featuring large-scale paintings, performances and engagement with historical works from a parallel exhibition on expressionist art, ‘Espressioni. The Proposition’.

In Imhof’s work, expression is emitted through those who participate, whether that be performers or viewers. As she has explained of her choreography: ‘It's basically the thoughts of the people that are performing in it that, in the end, shape it.’ 

INFORMATION

Anne Imhof, ’Natures Mortes’, until 24 October, Palais de Tokyo, palaisdetokyo.com

A version of this article appears in Wallpaper’s October 2021, 25th Anniversary Issue (W*270), on newsstands now and available to subscribers – 12 digital issues for $12/£12/€12.
Meet more creative leaders of the future nominated by Michèle Lamy here.

Marina Abramović is an artist who knows the power of a simple idea. Her seminal works are easy to summarise – walking the entire length of the Great Wall of China, living on three open platforms at a gallery for 12 days, locking eyes with 1,000 strangers from across a wooden table – while striking an emotional chord with audiences far beyond the art world and leaving a searing impression on our lives.

The Serbian conceptual and performance artist is widely admired for an enormous and unwavering self-discipline, and a willingness to push the boundaries of the human body and mind. These convictions are evident in the dish she has chosen for her Wallpaper* artist's palate recipe, which originates from a cookbook by Austrian doctor Nonna Brenner. The artist explains that the barely seasoned ‘diet soup’ of flax seeds, oats and oat bran is meant to be consumed on the first day of fasting: ‘Monastic, simple and pure, it is deeply satisfying and keeps your mind peaceful and clear.’ 

In September, the artist will have a notable presence in London. Her ‘Seven Deaths’, a new show of work inspired by the tragic life of operatic legend Maria Callas, runs from 14 September – 30 October at Lisson Gallery on Cork Street and Lisson Street; she will stage an ‘multimedia sensory experience’ with WePresent at the Old Truman Brewery, and will take part in a three-artist group show at Colnaghi which will also see works by Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich, and Nico Vascellari in dialogue with a range of historical masterworks. 

Find peace of mind with performance art pioneer Marina Abramović's soul-cleansing soup, as featured in our monthly Artist’s Palate series

Ingredients

Flax seeds
Oats
Oat bran
Pinch of herb salt
Zest from a frozen lemon

Method

Add 1.5 litres of water to a large saucepan and bring to the boil. Add all the ingredients and cook for 5 minutes, adding salt to taste. Add the lemon zest and serve. 

A version of this article originally appeared in the September 2021 Style issue of Wallpaper* (W*269). On newsstands now, and available for free download. 

INFORMATION

lissongallery.com

mai.art

JR, Homily to Country, 2020, a live procession in Menindee Lakes, New South Wales, Australia on Saturday 27 February 2021. Courtesy: NGV

French artist and photographer JR’s Homily to Country is a multi-part work that draws attention to the ecological decline of the Darling/Baaka river system in south-eastern Australia. The impact of this is both environmental and intensely human, the result of intensive water extraction due to irrigation, climate change and drought. 

Composed of three distinct parts involving documentary, portrait photography and installation, JR’s project is a poignant reminder of the local and global effects of human behaviour. 

The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), in Melbourne, hopes that JR’s artwork will stimulate necessary debate in Australia, and emphasise the ecological priorities of the Darling/Baaka river system. ‘This is a real situation playing out around us, affecting real people in various communities including regional towns, farming families and Indigenous community members,’ says Ewan McEoin, senior curator of contemporary design and architecture at the NGV, who worked with JR on this project. ‘It’s no accident that we’re releasing this film with JR on Earth Day, a moment to reflect on our relationship to and reliance upon natural systems.'

This is a project that has its roots halfway around the world in Italy, where JR, alongside Italian film director Alice Rohrwacher, felt compelled to address the destruction of the local agricultural landscape. The resulting film was Omelia Contadina, which depicted a farming community gathering on a plateau on the border of Umbria, Lazio and Tuscany, for the ‘funeral for traditional agriculture’.

Similarly, Homily to Country comprises aerial-view footage of a live procession in the dry bed of Lake Cawndilla, in Australia’s New South Wales. The event, which took place in February, features four 30m-long portrait photographs transported through the arid Menindee Lakes district by the subjects of the portraits themselves. This poignant, provocative piece brings into sharp focus the plight of individuals affected by the Darling/Baaka river’s decline, and those fighting to save it. It also spotlights the tensions that often exist between Indigenous peoples, ‘family farms’ and multinational agribusinesses.

Above: Installation view of JR’s work Homily to Country 2020 during NGV Triennial 2020, which ran from from 19 December 2020 – 18 April 2021 at NGV International, Melbourne © JR. Below: Aerial view of Homily to Country 2020 during a live procession in Menindee Lakes, New South Wales, Australia on Saturday 27 February 2021. Photography: NGV

In the NGV Grollo Equiset Garden, the artist installed an open-air chapel, which was on display as part of the NGV Triennial. Stained-glass windows feature photographic portraits honouring those who have close connections to the river. These include senior elder of the Baakandji people and respected spokesperson on the Darling/Baaka river, Badger Bates; orchardists Rachel Strachan and Alan Whyte, who have both had to remove their once highly-productive commercial orchards due to lack of irrigation flows; and Wayne Smith, a sixth-generation farmer whose family have lived and worked along the river since the early 1890s. As McEoin says, ‘JR’s artwork draws attention to one of Australia’s most pressing ecological challenges and reveals the potential of contemporary art to tell important stories of our time.’

INFORMATION

jr-art.net

ngv.vic.gov.au

At Museum Frieder Burda’s Salon Berlin, visitors can expect to be consumed by a cloud of pink: strings of rhythmic pink pom-poms dangle from the ceiling; soft pink carpet cushions underfoot. Here, Paris-based American artist Matthew Lutz-Kinoy is exercising his fascination with immersive spiritual transitions and offering viewers a portal to an alternative reality, even for just a moment. 

When it comes to media, the artist’s allegiance is far from set in stone. But at the heart of a practice that spans sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and painting is performance. In his exhibition, ‘Window to The Clouds’, the wool pom-poms, which frame new paintings and ceramic works, are both filters through which to view, and interactive installations in their own right.

Lutz-Kinoy’s paintings are embedded with all the carnal potency of 18th-century traditions: liberal application paint, vigorous bodily forms, gestural brushstrokes and ethereal translucent layering which explores depth, both in concept and physicality. These works are dense with references to divine and spiritual symbolism: there are cherubs, angels, and nods to Auguste Rodin’s La Porte de l'Enfer (1880-1917), itself inspired by Dante’s monumental narrative poem, Inferno. 

Among his many influences, Lutz-Kinoy draws on the work of performance theorist José Esteban Muñoz, specifically, his book Cruising Utopia (2009), in which he writes, ‘Futurity can be a problem,’ arguing for the existence of many potential futures within the present. In ‘Window to The Clouds’, Lutz-Kinoy fuses the vocabulary of representation and performance to illustrate that time, though quantifiable, is not linear. §

INFORMATION

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, ’Window to The Clouds’, until 5 June 2021, Salon Berlin, Museum Frieder Burda

museum-frieder-burda.de

ADDRESS

Auguststraße 11-13
10117 Berlin

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Gillian Wearing is an artist of many faces. Turner Prize winner, YBA, and the artist behind the first statue of a woman in London’s Parliament Square. Through sculpture, photography, performance and film, she has spent the last three decades confronting identity, artificiality and the many selves we exhibit to the world.

Masks and role play have been recurring devices in Wearing’s portraiture, for which she’s transformed into the likes of Meret Oppenheim, Eva Hesse, and Andy Warhol in drag. She’s aged herself digitally, ‘worn’ her 17-year-old self, and seen actors ‘wear’ her using face-swapping AI. In her 2020 sculpture, Mask Masked, the mask itself assumes a new role in the context of Covid-19.

At the Guggenheim, New York, ‘Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks’ (until 4 April 2022) marks the first retrospective of Wearing’s work in North America. Featuring more than 100 pieces, the show traces the artist’s evolution from early Polaroids to her latest self-portraits, all of which explore identity as performance, with masks cast as both props and metaphors. 

Wearing’s work has often involved the experiences of others. She’s invited perfect strangers to confess their fantasies, terrors and truths on paper and behind masks, placing private lives in public spaces and giving voice to otherwise unvoiced thoughts. Through self-examination, self-expression and self-confession, Wearing brings any assumption of the self to its knees.

To mark Wearing’s seminal Guggenheim show, we revisit our 2020 interview with the artist, where we discussed the noise of social media, and how, for the first time in 33 years, she returned to painting in a new series unmasked self-portraits at Maureen Paley. 

Wallpaper*: Where are you as we speak?

Gillian Wearing: In my studio, it sort of looks like an office with a very long table/desk, cabinets, a sofa and three office chairs. I always wanted a space like an office as I was a secretary before becoming an artist; I liked the comfort of offices. Michael Landy, my husband, has the downstairs space and we share the studio with our beloved Staffordshire Bull Terrier, May.

W*: Your work explores themes of self-awareness and the ‘masks’ we present to the world. What attracts you to these ideas and has the ubiquity of social media changed your approach?

GW: My work explores portraiture and in turn identity. And that’s what makes us, I can’t think of a more interesting subject.

My early work preceded social media and shares some of the same interests, like giving voice to people that weren’t seen or heard in the media outlets of the time. I remember thinking when social media came along maybe a certain part of my work is done, but I still see gaps in how certain stories aren’t being told. A new media can look infinite in the early stages and then when it becomes very popular it moulds to a certain shape where certain voices are just not heard through the noise of the most popular ones.

W*: Your photographic self-portraits have seen you physically assume a range of identities, from Eva Hesse to Albrecht Dürer, and Andy Warhol in drag. What draws you to the characters you take on, and how do you prepare for the roles?

GW: I am drawn to their work, I couldn’t have been an artist if there weren’t artists I admire, they are my spiritual family they give me the sustenance to make work. You can get so close to someone’s work that it feels almost like your own work, it helps you make sense of how you might bring something unique to the world as well. When I prepare for one of my portraits, I have a definite image of how I would want the final photograph to look, and I also think about how the artist might want to have been seen or how the photographer might have portrayed them at the time. For instance, Me as Meret Oppenheim is not based on an image that exists, I created it thinking what would a Man Ray and Meret Oppenheim collaborative work look like. The preparation towards the image takes a few months, it’s intensive: a mask is made, a set is built, clothes are either hired, made or bought, there is a long lead up of thinking and tweaking until the day of the shoot. 

W*: You’ve invited people to write their thoughts on signs, share the views from their windows, and submit themselves as models for your sculptures. What have these participatory works taught you about what it means to be human?

GW: It’s been an honour to meet so many people through my work, and being able to speak to people outside my immediate world. There is a wealth of lived experience that is different to my own and of course, at times I can draw parallels with some of the people I meet. When I started my signs series in the early 90’s, I didn’t realise that people would be so amazingly open to me, a stranger, and the text they wrote broke through the barriers of how we perceive someone we don’t know. So if anything it has taught me not to rush to judgement on others, to allow someone to speak first and to listen, we sometimes forget to do the latter. My overwhelming experiences have been really positive; there is a lot of humanity in the world.

W*: Which artists, writers or musicians have had the biggest impact on you?

GW: Warhol, Arbus, O’Keefe, Cahun… you know this is easy since I have become a lot of the artists in [my] ‘My Spiritual Family’ series. In terms of writers, it would be Erving Goffman, and so much music I couldn’t even begin to list the names of musicians. I was fortunate to work with Adrian Utley (from Portishead) last year for my documentary on George Eliot and to see how his wonderful music elevated the story. Music I love makes me feel there are possibilities, it allows me to daydream and to imagine.

W*: Which career moment will you never forget?

GW: The unveiling of my statue of Millicent Fawcett. Having worked right up to the unveiling day, I hadn’t given the ceremony much thought. But when I arrived at Parliament Square, the police were cordoning off all the roads, I then realised it was going to be a massive event. All the major political parties came and the statue was swamped after the speeches. It was fantastic, at long last, to have a statue of a woman for the first time in Parliament Square.

W*: Your solo show at Maureen Paley focuses on a new series you’ve created during lockdown. Tell us about what you’ll be presenting, and what inspired these pieces?

GW: I am presenting self-portraits that I have painted during lockdown. I was going to be painting myself before the pandemic hit. Then everything fell silent in terms of contact with the outside world, and this increased that intensity of reflection. I haven’t painted for 33 years so it was quite a journey getting used to the two mediums. I always say my work is about portraiture and it seems fitting that I am now working in the most traditional of mediums for this genre. I love it!

I have also been continuing with my Your Views film project, which is a large global project where people submit filmed views from their window. I started it in 2013 and each year work on it with my producer Lisa James. Our views from our window have been our connection to the outside world more than ever during the early days of lockdown so the project took on an even more relevant angle. I will also be exhibiting this at the gallery. If anyone wants to submit a view they can do so here. 

W*: What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read, watched or listened to in the last month?

GW: I thought I had seen the film The Parallax View by Alan J Pakula, but when I started watching it with Michael the other night I realised I hadn’t. It’s a great film, as befitting of our time now as it was in the 1970s.

INFORMATION

Gillian Wearing will exhibit new works created during the Covid-19 pandemic at Maureen Paley from 16 September - 25 October 2020. maureenpaley.com

ADDRESS

Maureen Paley 
60 Three Colts Lane
London E2 6GQ

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E-Werk contemporary art centre launched a fortnightly conversation series in July, exploring the ways in which artists' ideas can contribute to a more equal arts industry, against the backdrop of a pandemic and global racial injustices.

The programme includes contributions from artists including Harold Offeh and Peles Empire and confronts the urgent need to restructure the ‘top-down art world system’, placing artists front and centre of debates pertinent to 2020.

For its latest episode, E-Werk gives the floor to French, London-based artist Paul Maheke and London-based writer and Wallpaper* contributor, Benoît Loiseau to unpick ‘Coexistence in the Age of Collapsing Ecosystems’.

Paul Maheke’s work explores the ‘body as an archive’, examining identity and memory through dance, collective performance, film, installation, sound and video. The conversation centres on an open letter Maheke wrote after his planned performances and exhibitions were put on hold due to Covid-19. Titled, ‘The Year I Stopped Making Art’, and published on activist art platform Documentations, the letter travels through time, addressing disparity, inequality and institutional hierarchy in the art world.

‘It was something I wrote in a bit of a rush,’ Maheke explains to Loiseau. ‘All my performances and exhibitions were cancelled. This moment made me realise how much of a precarious position my practice occupied and how some of my friends, artists, or people who were artists and had to stop were rendered invisible, completely erased from this.’

The letter is written in the first person, but Maheke is quick to note that this is not his own voice, but that of collective voices. He also observes the shortcomings of using first-person plural ‘we’, acknowledging that not everyone will share the same experience. ‘We are talking about “we” like the community or the audience as this kind of homogeneous group of people,’ says Maheke. ‘It invisibilises the existence of any potential power dynamic in terms of class, gender, race, sexuality. I find it troubling because it’s often a way for people to hide behind something that prevents us from addressing the real issue, the deeper stuff, the thing that lurks in the shadow image.’

An extract from the letter reads:

‘So when in the last months of 2020, I was home, still bed-bound and the museum didn’t pay me, I knew this was the year I would have to stop art. How was I to pay for my living expenses otherwise? This was going to last for a while, they said. “I am sorry to hear you’re experiencing difficulties. It’s a tough time for us all”, you said. I wondered who you meant when you were saying “us” because I didn’t feel like a part of your we.’

The conversation then turned to the complex and divisive subject of public monuments with problematic histories, specifically the toppling of 17th-century merchant and slave trader Edward Colston’s statue, thrown into Bristol Harbour by protesters in June. ‘In terms of the monuments, they definitely speak very directly to the idea of erasure because they live on,' says Maheke. ‘Especially in situations of oppression, we tend to forget that if something is invisible, it doesn’t mean it doesn't exist, and that’s something that, for me, is almost the perfect definition of privilege, which is this blind spot.’ 

On 10 September, the open letter will form the focal point for the show, ‘YESN'T’ at Galerie Sultana in Paris, co-curated by Maheke. The group exhibition aims to redistribute funds to artists in France whose work was impacted by Covid-19 and are ineligible for government aid.

E-Werk Luckenwalde will reopen to the public on 12 September (coinciding with Berlin Art Week) with a ‘Utopian’, climate change focussed sculptural programme.

Episode 4 of E-Werk's The Artist As Consultant series, which sees Paul Maheke and Benoît Loiseau discuss ‘Coexistence in the Age of Collapsing Ecosystems’

INFORMATION

’Coexistence in the Age of Collapsing Ecosystems’, can now be viewed on E-WERK’s website. The next episode, published on 10 September, will see Peles Empire and Anna Gritz discuss ’Motherhood and the Arts’. kunststrom.com

During lockdown, museums, galleries and art institutions around the world hurriedly launched digital initiatives to bring their exhibitions to life online. Now, as many of these same spaces begin to reopen in Berlin, they’re unveiling new models, integrating digital components with their physical spaces, and focusing on hyper-local initiatives in an effort to balance what they learned during quarantine with the facts that strict regulations remain in place and many other cities, as well as borders, remain closed. 

Earlier this month, for example, Wentrup gallery opened the group exhibition ‘Zoom In – Zoom Out’, but rather than the standard ‘opening night’, a day-long opening took place from 11am to 6pm, with only three people allowed inside at once. ‘We found the procedure worked very well,’ Tina and Jan Wentrup explain. The title of the show references the current state of global communication and staying in touch with international communities via applications like Zoom, and the majority of works were produced by the gallery’s artists during quarantine specifically for the show.

Shortly after their physical reopening, Wentrup launched an online viewing room (post-quarantine, indeed), as the platform is more than an attempt to virtually recreate a physical exhibition: it features a comprehensive overview of the featured artist’s practice with installation views and images of individual as well as a curatorial essay and additional supporting textual materials. 

‘The online viewing room exists for itself and has no direct link to the current [physical] show but is ultimately linked to the overall programme of the gallery, just like a real showroom in a gallery space,' the Wentrups explain. 

Also taking a different approach is the gallery Dittrich & Schlechtriem, with its offline-only exhibition series titled ‘Berliner Luft’ (Berlin Air). Every Sunday, the gallery digitally announces the artist whose temporary exhibition will be on view for the next seven days alongside a brief introduction to the show. The catch? There are no preview images.  ‘I wanted to reclaim the gallery as a physical space that one must visit, rather than checking Instagram or the website or, in the last years, just visiting a booth at an art fair,’ André Schlechtriem explains. ‘The idea is that for one week, the work is exclusive for people who make an effort to visit the space.’ He notes, however, that this approach is ‘not against an international audience,’ as the gallery will happily send images if someone writes an email or calls to enquire.

Meanwhile, one of Berlin’s most trafficked museums, Gropius Bau, has swiftly adapted its exhibition ‘Lee Mingwei:禮 Li, Gifts and Rituals,’ which is largely activated by human interaction, to acquiesce with the demands of social distancing. ‘Lee’s work is all about conversation, listening, and care, so putting new measures in place felt applicable to the thematics of his work,’ Gropius Bau director Stephanie Rosenthal recently said in an interview. During lockdown, intimate video calls were offered as extensions of certain installations in the exhibition. For example, Lee adapted his Sonic Blossom, a performance that entails a one-on-one operatic serenade, to be performed with individual guests via Instagram live.

Now, the opera singer is in the museum space, albeit behind a sheet of Plexiglas on wheels. In an adaptation of The Dining Project, visitors can enter a lottery to participate in a tea ceremony with the artist from home via video conference, instead of the initial plan to host such meetings within the museum. To enter the building itself, visitors must pre-book tickets online with a specified time of entry and, of course, wear a mask.

In the context of Lee’s exhibition, Rosenthal noted that disinfection has become an additional ritual, and Plexiglas a symbol of care. This statement reflects an overarching message seen across various initiatives, both on and offline: Objects, spaces, and actions have assumed new meanings through various re-imaginings and recontextualisation. As the Wentrups say, ‘Every crisis is a challenge in a sense, but it also offers the chance for something fresh and new.’ 

INFORMATION

wentrupgallery.com
dittrich-schlechtriem.com
www.gropiusbau.de

Solange began 2019 with the release of her fourth album, When I Get Home, accompanied by a dreamlike film that merged images of urban Texas, brutalist architecture, black cowboys on horseback and a futuristic animated sequence featuring people riding flying machines. She finished the year curating a thrilling fusion of music, dance and Afrofuturist philosophy in a live performance at the Getty Center in LA. In between, Solange has progressively expanded her artistic reach, with a repertoire that, in addition to music, now encompasses filmmaking, choreography, performance art, sculpture and design. The latest project of her creative agency, Saint Heron, is a home product collection with Ikea inspired by the exploration of ‘time, space, light and matter’.

While the scope of her activities runs wide, Solange’s work is underpinned by a desire to foreground the artistry and lived experience of people of colour. ‘As a young contemporary artist I was very frustrated that there weren’t spaces “for us by us”,’ she reflects. ‘I wanted to connect with other black and brown artists, hear their stories, talk about our practices, and for them to feel safe and uninterrupted by the need to explain or certain cultural energies we carry amongst ourselves and want to celebrate.’

That ethos of black solidarity is at its most tangible in the series of live performances that Solange has staged in architecturally significant cultural meccas like the Getty, the Guggenheim in New York, Tate Modern in London, and Donald Judd’s sprawling Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. At these events, Solange choreographs physical space as much as she directs the artistic programme. In a performance at the Guggenheim based on her 2016 album A Seat at the Table, she had horn players emerge sporadically from various levels of the museum while dancers processed through the circular atrium below. With its racially diverse cast and audience, the event felt like a stirring celebration of black creative practice as well as a riposte to the historical reluctance of such institutions to engage with black artists. The performance, says Solange, was about occupying the building on her terms, as the most fitting site with which to bring her album to life.

‘It’s about choosing spaces that are in alignment with this already existing language of architecture that I’m creating with the movement of bodies, sonic language and space,’ she says. ‘Like the roundness in the rotunda of Guggenheim with the roundness of the work or placing the brass sections to call and respond in different spaces. But often times the work may belong in a different landscape like the desert in Marfa, or even office buildings in Houston in the When I Get Home film.’

It’s her desire to build spaces of social connection and emotional affinity that led Solange to name Muller van Severen’s ‘Match’ kitchen among her choices for this year’s Wallpaper* Design Awards. ‘I feel really connected to the idea of having agency over your own “landscape” through their “landscape for living” concept,’ says the artist. ‘I also love how self-contained the design is and the imagination of using multi-use materials in a creative and thoughtful way.’ 

INFORMATION

solangemusic.com

solange.blackplanet.com

Alice Mann was only 26 when she won the prestigious Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2018 — the first time the award had been given for a series of work. Mann’s Drummies documented young female drum majorette teams in the photographer’s native Cape Town — uplifting and strident. She shot the pictures in collaboration with the girls and young women at primary schools in some of the city’s most marginalised areas. Despite their day to day reality, what we see in Mann’s pictures is strength, joy, and a sense of self-worth that eschews stereotypes and reframes narratives. The series also won the Photography Grand Prix du Jury and Wallpaper* ‘New Generation’ x Hyères Photography Prize at 2019's Hyères International Festival of Fashion and Photography. It is currently in the process of being turned into a publication with Gost Books, due for release in 2020.

Drummies was something of a breakthrough for Mann and it’s since toured the world, going on show everywhere from Arles to Addis Ababa. It marked the beginning of her ongoing study of the relationship between community and creativity, exploring African communities in Europe — where she is now based — and back at home in South Africa. In previous projects, Mann has photographed Congolese men living in London and Paris who use fashion to empower themselves, and she’s documented the traditional clothing worn by the West African diasporic community to attend Sunday service at Walworth Methodist Church.

Earlier this year Mann was selected for Studio 1854’s Adidas Breaking Barriers commission — spending two weeks with women footballers at clubs in London, it gave Mann a chance to evolve her interest in sport as a form of community and creative expression. Using a large, heavy medium-format camera means Mann has to work slowly and steadily. Getting to know her subjects is an essential part of the process — it’s important to Mann to represent people as they want to be seen, and to see themselves.

All of this comes vibrantly to life in Mann’s shoot for Wallpaper’s December issue. In typical Mann style, she isn’t interested in giving us the expected, but plays with traditions and tropes. Shot in the new Battersea Arts Centre, it combines colour, movement and a mix of old and new. ‘I prefer to work on a concept by responding to the people I am photographing and the location. I did know I wanted to work with real people, and the three ladies we worked with were part of a female dance group. From there it made sense to work around a concept of dance/ performance,' she explains.

Trained in Fine Art Photography in South Africa, Mann mixes documentary and formal portraiture in her work, which gives it its distinct feel: staged and performed while spontaneous at the same time — and mature beyond her years.

It’s not always easy to manage the demands of success, with all eyes on her next move. ‘I am a huge perfectionist, so for me it’s always been about working out a balance between needing things to be perfect and allowing the work to develop without putting to much pressure on it! Honestly, I did struggle a bit after feeling added pressure of other people being aware of what I was doing, so it took a little while for me to come to terms with that and not let it inhibit what I was doing.'

INFORMATION

alicemann.co.za

Known for his starring role in Andy Warhol’s film Sleep, John Giorno passed away on 11 October after suffering a heart attack, it was confirmed by his husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. Over his 50-year career, the artist’s practice expanded beyond poetry to encompass film, painting, sound installation and sculpture.

Rondinone curated Giorno’s first retrospective, staged by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2015. More recently, Giorno created an augmented reality public artwork for Apple’s [AR]T Walk project, while last month New York gallery Sperone Westwater opened its first show of work by Giorno (running until 26 October), including new text paintings, watercolours, and for the first time in the US, bluestone sculptures carved with poetic phrases.

Giorno, who was born in 1936, spent his childhood between Brooklyn and Long Island, the son of Italian-American immigrants whose ancestors can be traced back to Puglia nobility. His father, Amadeo Giorno, ran a clothing company in which his mother, Nancy Garbarino, worked as a designer. Giorno was raised Catholic, and was quoted as saying he came to terms with being gay after realising he was attracted to male priests while at Sunday Mass with his parents.

While in his early twenties, Giorno briefly worked in New York City as a stockbroker. But, in 1962 he met Warhol during the artist’s first New York solo pop art exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. The pair quickly developed an intense romantic relationship over the course of the next two years, during which they lived together on and off. Warhol’s film, made the next year at their flat and shot on a Bolex camera fixed on a tripod, lasted for more than five hours, capturing the 26-year-old Giorno’s naked body as it rested in the depths of sleep. Warhol made the film after finding inspiration in Renaissance depictions of Jesus Christ.

Through Warhol, Giorno became friends with the writer William S Burroughs whose circle included Beatnik poets Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and Neal Cassady. He also met that other icon of the pop art movement, Robert Rauschenberg. Later, he and Rauschenberg would also become lovers. Giorno’s primary medium of interest was poetry. He was inspired by Warhol, Rauschenberg and other doyens of The Factory too, in poetry as in art, finding creative inspiration in everyday objects, and using new technology to explore ways to reach out to audiences beyond the spheres of art and literature.

With this in mind, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit foundation which in 1968 launched Dial-A-Poem, a public artwork comprising six phone lines connected to answering machines housed at the Architectural League on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Anyone could (and still can) call the number, at any time, and hear, from the end of the line, the voices of Ginsberg, Rauschenberg, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe as they read their luminous poetry.

In an era when being gay was not yet an accepted lifestyle – even in New York – the content of Dial-A-Poem was often explicitly sexual and homoerotic in content, not least with Giorno’s own celebration of queer sexuality, 1964’s Pornographic Poem. Millions of people rang in. Two years later, in 1970, Dial-A-Poem was prominently featured in curator Kynaston McShine’s watershed exhibition ‘Information’ at MoMA. Giorno said at the time: ‘Using the telephone as a new media, I wanted to expand our conception of art and expose poetry to a public who would not otherwise be responsive to it. Also, much poetry is meant to be heard, not merely read.’

Giorno lived through the AIDS crisis that laid waste to the gay community of New York in the mid-1980s, which saw the community aggressively ostracised even further to the margins of society when little was known of the disease. After losing many of his own friends, Giorno founded the AIDS Treatment Project in 1984, a charity that gave direct financial and other support to individuals with AIDS. The charity continues its work for AIDS victims today. What’s more, Dial-A-Poem remains in operation. So, in Giorno’s memory, if you’re ever in need of sex, passion and beauty spoken down the phone, just call 641-793-8122.

INFORMATION

speronewestwater.com

Hiroshi Sugimoto, the renowned Japanese artist, has directed a dance production of At the Hawk’s Well for the Opéra National de Paris, adding to his already diverse repertoire. The 40-minute piece is a new interpretation of a one-act play, written by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats almost a century ago.

Yeats’ original, in which immortal water is the subject, blended Celtic esotericism with the six-century-old Japanese tradition of Noh theatre and its parallels to shamanic rituals. Although Sugimoto wasn’t particularly familiar with the world of dance, the idea of reinterpreting Yeats appealed immediately when he was approached by Aurélie Dupont, dance director of Opéra National de Paris.

Within the quintessentially European surrounds of the Ópera Garnier, the distinctively Japanese hair and make-up in Sugimoto’s production immediately stands out. ‘They are clearly a Noh reference. And it works! I myself am amazed,’ reflected Sugimoto right after the general rehearsal. The costume design, meanwhile was entrusted to Rick Owens, who Sugimoto was quick to praise. ‘Rick attended a Noh presentation and looked through original costume sketches for the first presentation of At the Hawk’s Well in 1916.

The great thing is that in spite of this research, his design was not literally influenced by Noh costume, but a reconsidered version.’ Owens has dressed the character of the old man in silver metallic briefs and a humongous origami-like coat. Cuchulain, a young hero from Celtic mythology, wears a version in gold. A third key figure, the Hawk-Woman (or ‘Guardian of the well’), appears in a red bodysuit with geometrically placed holes, paired with a metallic red bolero, exaggerated in form and proportion.

The performance is directed by the Japan-based Italian choreographer Alessio Silvestrin, a former collaborator of William Forsythe. It marries contemporary dance and Noh movement, characterised by nodding, posing and sometimes stomping. Throughout the show, what the audience hears is not necessarily ‘danceable’ music but instead, abstracted electronic sound composed by Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda.

‘The awakening gong-like sound in the very last scene is actually a Tsuzumi (a traditional Japanese percussion instrument) tapped by a wooden fan, which Ikeda recorded and digitalised. This is more than a sound effect, but an expression of ma. It’s excellent,’ Sugimoto enthused. (Ma can be roughly translated as interval, referring to the Japanese aesthetic ideology of subtle timing that breaks silence.)

Conceived by Sugimoto himself, the stage design is all about lighting and offers the perfect showcase for acclaimed photographic work. In the backdrop, a slightly curved line symbolises the horizon, a view from the isolated island where the well is situated. Meanwhile, bright red or blue round shapes emerge to evoke the burning sun or the infinite sea.

The only prop is a wooden platform set in the middle of the stage, where Noh master Kisho Umewaka appears for the finale. ‘The show does include real Noh elements, but it’s not the narrative; it’s far too different from its authentic form. Noh might make you doze off. This show doesn’t!’ laughed Sugimoto.

INFORMATION

At The Hawk’s Well, until 15 October, Opéra national de Paris. operadeparis.fr

ADDRESS

Palais Garnier
Place de l’Opéra
75009 Paris

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A ninth-century Venetian church largely closed to the public for more than 100 years has reopened as the home for Ocean Space, an interdisciplinary arts centre with a focus on marine conservation. An immersive multimedia installation by American artist Joan Jonas inaugurates the new ‘embassy for oceans’, which has been spearheaded by the eco-minded offshoot of Austrian art patron Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza’s foundation TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary).

‘Today, [Venice] struggles alongside numerous other coastal communities and island states the effects of climate change and sea level rise, making the mission and programme of Ocean Space ever more topical to the local community and its visitors,’ explained Thyssen-Bornemisza in a statement. Since its inception in 2011, the nomadic TBA21-Academy has collaborated with a global network of artists, scientists, explorers, legal experts, and policy makers intent on fostering a greater understanding of our oceans through the lens of art. The academy’s diverse non-profit programme encompasses exhibitions, installations, commissions, residencies and expeditions.

Curated by Stefanie Hessler, Jonas’ installation Moving Off the Land II is the culmination of three years of research in aquariums worldwide. The work intertwines prose by writers including Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville with moving images captured during Jonas’ residency off the Jamaica coast. Oceans have surfaced in the artist’s work previously, including her project for the 56th Venice Biennale – a poetic reflection on the fragility of nature.

Dozens of drawings of marine life suspended from scaffolding carry the eye upwards to the church’s lofty ceilings. ‘I purposefully left the scaffolding up because I like the kind of roughness of it, and the idea off temporality and the situation relating in some way to the situation in the oceans,’ said the artist. Coinciding with the Venice Biennale vernissage, Jonas will perform in the space on 7 May, accompanied live by composer and drummer Ikue Mori.

Following the conclusion of Jonas’ exhibition at the end of September, further work will begin on the interiors before Ocean Space’s programme relaunches in spring 2020. Spanish architect André Jaque of Office Political Innovation is responsible for the interior architectural intervention, which is expected to complete within the next two years. Taking advantage of the soaring nave within the Church of San Lorenzo, Jaque’s design centres on a modular structure of platforms, allowing for a range of exhibitions, installations and workshops.

INFORMATION

‘Moving Off the Land II’ is on view until 29 September. For more information, visit the Ocean Space website, TBA21-Academy website and Office for Political Innovation website

ADDRESS

Church of San Lorenzo
Campo San Lorenzo
30122 Venice

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The Park Avenue Armory’s summer installations have long been a highlight of the New York art season. In the past decade, the industrial grandeur of the 55,000 sq ft Wade Thompson Drill Hall has served as a stage for a wide range of installations and performances, including Paul McCarthy’s Disney-inspired ‘WS’; site-specific concerts from The XX, Taryn Simon’s ‘An Occupation of Loss’; and ‘Hansel & Gretel’, the shared effort from Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron and Ai Weiwei.

Joining the ranks this year is the Chicago-based artist Nick Cave who has created ‘The Let Go’ – a celebratory performance that invites visitors to participate in a shared, dance-based cathartic experience. Cave has transformed the storied venue into a colourful dance-hall, with two 40ft tall curtains festooned with shimmering Mylar streamers that represent the sense of liberty that takes over when people simple let themselves go. Armed with dancers, live music and an open invitation for visitors to participate, the large-scale, multi-sensory experience knows little precedent.

‘In today’s tumultuous world, Nick’s artistic vision and desire to build understanding through dance is more vital than ever,’ says Rebecca Robertson, the Park Avenue Armory’s founding president and executive producer. ‘By harnessing and cultivating the power of community, this commission serves as a spirited reminder of our shared humanity.’

By night, Cave conducts a troupe of dancers, who don his signature soundsuits and perform to accompaniment by baritone Jorrell Williams and the Sing Harlem Choir. As a continuing feature in Cave’s body of work, these wearable sculptures intentionally conceal gender, race, age and class, thus upholding Cave’s longtime commitment to challenge traditional concepts of visual art.

These Up Right performances, which feature new choreography and music, are precluded by the ceremonial delivery of the soundsuits to the Drill Hall, an initiation of disassembling and reconstructing the suits around the wearer, piece by piece.

‘“The Let Go” is a testament to Nick’s unwavering commitment to uplifting communities and affecting change through art,’ says Tom Eccles, curator of ‘The Let Go’. ‘His participatory performances have become some of the most beloved experiences to be found in the contemporary art landscape.’

INFORMATION
‘The Let Go’ runs until 1 July. For more information or to purchase tickets, with the Park Avenue Armory website

ADDRESS

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue at 67th Street
New York

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Art Night has announced the latest details of its 2018 programme, with new commissions to debut alongside one-off projects from emerging and established artists. Now in its third edition, the festival takes place over a single night, commandeering iconic venues throughout south London for the first this year.

London’s largest free contemporary arts festival will kick off at 6pm on Saturday 7 July, running through the next morning until 6am along a trail between Hayward Gallery and Battersea Power Station, through Vauxhall and Nine Elms. It’s a rare chance to access some of London’s most special spaces after hours, including the British Film Institute (BFI); the Bargehouse at Oxo Tower Wharf; the historic Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens; the member’s room of the Kia Oval Cricket Ground; and more.

Hayward Gallery director Ralph Rugoff has overseen the development of 12 core projects with Art Night’s exhibition team, working to the themes of ‘home’ and ‘urban landscape’. Rugoff’s efforts are complemented by this year’s Art Night Open programme, which will see over 50 institutions and venues ‘activate’ the trail with immersive multimedia installations, interactive experiences, film screenings, performances and experimental music.

Highlights of the Art Night Open programme include the UK premiere of Mexican artist Bosco Sodi’s interactive installation Muro (2018), a 2m high by 8m long wall comprising 1,600 clay bricks built by the artist in the riverside square of the National Theatre on the South Bank. Once installed, passersby will be invited to dismantle the wall brick-by-brick throughout the night, taking part of the artwork home.

Further down the trail, Random International will be unveiling a permanent outdoor commission, titled Self and Other (for Albert Embankment), in the Albert Embankment Plaza at St James’ Merano Residences, which will be activated throughout the night by dance performances by Studio Wayne McGregor. Elswhere, Newport Street Gallery is extending its opening hours until midnight, exhibiting work by Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville, and will host a special DJ set by the latter at the gallery’s in-house restaurant Pharmacy 2, with a bespoke Art Night menu created by Mark Hix no less.

‘Art Night Open represents a diverse cultural scene of London and beyond, with artists, curators and arts organisations contributing special projects in response to the celebratory spirit of the night-time festival,’ explains Art Night Open director Zarina Rossheart. ‘From an artist take-over of an entire building at Oxo Tower Wharf, through to an intimate installation at the Nine Elms Pier, every project of Art Night Open is a unique site-specific experience.’

New this year is an evening of video screenings presented by Art Night and the David Roberts Art Foundation (DRAF) at Battersea Power Station’s Village Hall, including works by artists David Shrigley, Cyprien Gaillard, and Nicolas Provost. The event will be followed by a club night hosted in collaboration with Lisson Gallery (open until 4am); featuring a special screening of Hans Berg and Nathalie Djurberg’s Waterfall Variations and music sets by artists Hans Berg and Haroon Mirza. 

INFORMATION

Art Night 2018 will run from 6pm on 7 July throughout various locations in south London. For more information, visit the Art Night website

The British art director Tom Hingston is behind some of most innovative album artwork of the post-Peter Saville era. Over the last two decades he has worked with the Rolling Stones, Nick Cave, U2, the Chemical Brothers and Young Fathers as well as collaborating with David Bowie on his final music videos. Perhaps his best-known work though are the covers created for Massive Attack in collaboration with band member and artist Robert del Naja and the photographer Nick Knight, including 1998’s Mezzanine (part of Moma’s permanent collection) and 100th Window from 2003.

To celebrate his studio’s 20th anniversary, Hingston has joined forces with Paul Smith to create ‘Progress’, an exhibition to open in Smith’s flagship store on London’s Albemarle Street. The show (2 – 20 May) will include 16 of Hingston’s album covers reworked as lenticulars. Del Naja, Nick Cave and The Chemical Brothers have also worked with Hingston and Smith to create a superior range of band merchandise. The Nick Cave blue velour bomber jacket features embroidered mermaids based on the artwork for his Lovely Creatures album; The Chemical Brothers knitwear features zig-zags taken from the Born in the Echoes sleeve while del Naja is part printing, part painting some of his own artwork onto leather jackets.

Del Naja, better known as 3D, established a reputation as a graffiti artist in Bristol before helping found Massive Attack and his artwork has been featured on all the band’s sleeves. He has also collaborated with United Visual Artists on Massive Attack’s live shows.

To help celebrate Hingston’s anniversary we sat him down with del Naja to talk beetles, biker jackets and the future of the rock artefact in the digital age...

W*: So, when did you two meet?
Tom Hingston: I guess a year before Mezzanine was released in 1997. Robert had worked with a bigger design studio and there was an impetus on his part to explore a more one-on-one relationship, something that was a bit more collaborative.

W*: Given your background in graffiti art Robert, it was never going to be a case of outsourcing the band’s artwork – did working with Tom make that easier?
Robert del Naja: Yeah, but it’s a very different thing from having lots of ideas and concepts and sketches and having the ability to realise them and see them through and make them into something that has a format and that you can print from. I had always used symbols in my painting and when we collaborated very early on with Judy Blame and Michael Nash, we talked a lot about symbology – that’s how we ended up with the flame and those kind of industrial symbols associated with Massive Attack. So then we talked about how you take that from a concept to something that looks great as a piece of cardboard, to something that you can hold in your hand.

W*: So you worked on the Mezzanine cover for a year, just trading ideas back and forth?
RDN: Yeah, and a lot of that process has to do with materials as much as it does imagery and sources. We looked at a lot of different materials, printing processes and things along the way and that would often define how the artwork went. Rather than finishing a piece of art work and then thinking, 'well how do we print this?’. It was the other way around.

W*: How many iterations did you go through to get to what is now an iconic design?
TH: It is interesting how that whole thing evolved. When he and I had our first conversation there were a whole load of references that he had found, blown up pictures of spider skin and insect skin and then there were these Rorschach images he had been playing around with. That was very much our starting point. And seeing those was the spark that lead us to Nick as there were lots of parallels in the subject matter held been exploring in his work.

Nick had done a whole series of images with Simon Foxton where they montaged fight sequences. They were really kinetic with shattering glass and paint explosions, combined with stuff that was very figurative. That really opened our eyes to the possibilities of creating collage, or photo-montage that had much higher production values.

RDN: Yeah, it’s funny because our music is often described as collage. And it is a collage process. Nothing is written in a traditional classic sense. It would often be a collision of ideas. And I had always grown up with the collage process. When we were designing flyers and doing things for the parties with the Wild Bunch in Bristol, the very process of putting things together was collage.

But when Tom started working with Nick, it was almost like deep collage, working with photomontage, working on Paint Box and using programmes that I hadn’t seen before and after effects that you would normally see in movies you know, to blend things and cut into things, build things that almost snap together in a three-dimensional space within a flat plane. In a way the process was no different from working back in the day but the techniques and the machinery and the abilities, the people you were working with, meant you could get deeper and deeper into a similar way of working.

Nick would take something that had a lot of different elements to it but end up as something very symbolic. You could stand back from it and see a sculptural shape and that really appealed, coming out of the work that used very direct industrial symbology, amongst other things, in terms of Blue Lines and Protection. It was a really interesting evolution in terms of going into the world of photographic collage work but end up with something that was symbolic.

TH: That concept of iconography has always been something has always been an over-arching idea with Massive Attack. You take the flame or the Euro-child or the beetle or the figure from a 100th Window, what connects them all is that they are a series of powerful emblems.

RDN: Yeah, maybe it is an innate need to simplify everything, to break it all down into one thing because to describe it in another way is too complicated and long winded.

W*: It’s a branding exercise in some ways but the way it is a branding exercise has changed over the years?
RDN: Seeing what Public Image Ltd did was really formative, the idea of turning a band into a brand. And in the political climate of the time. I thought was really interesting, the idea of creating an anti-brand symbol. And the promotion and marketing of Massive Attack, right up to Heligoland has always been about that, creating a symbol that under normal circumstances would be considered a brand identity but actually was the opposite.

Mezzanine came out at a time when the whole idea of what branding and identity was – think of Adbusters magazine and Naomi Klein’s No Logo – was being rethought and questioned and subverted.

TH: Definitely, and I think also at the time that Mezzanine was released we were coming to the end of the Brit Pop era. Back in the day that fly posters were the fabric of the streets if you like – it was a very multi-coloured landscape, Spice Girls, boybands and so on. That was something that we were really conscious of and wanted to create the antithesis to that. So the whole campaign had to be monochromatic and black and white because at the time it sliced through everything else that was out there.

RDN: We designed our own typeface. It was a chrysalis moment where we were trying to emerge as something different. In terms of brand identity, we had gone through that whole Nineties thing of being the new kids on the block and becoming part of this movement called trip-hop and that was like a small satellite that was feeding off the giant Brit Pop team. And none of us felt a part of that. We just wanted to firmly establish our own identity and I think Mezzanine was the opportunity to do that.

W*: How did the collaboration with Paul Smith come about?
TH: I’ve known Paul for years as a friend and there were two conversations in parallel really. One of them was that we as a studio are 20 years old this year and Paul suggested it would be great to do a product collaboration to mark that anniversary. He’s curious about artist merchandise; how badly produced it is, how underwhelming the offering is and it is actually a conversation that Rob and I have also had over the years. Paul has this long-standing relationship with people like Patti Smith, Bowie, REM. His passion for music goes back a long way and so he was interested in exploring this idea of very limited edition one-off pieces that the artist or musician could sell on tour or be sold in Paul Smith stores. High end merchandise if you like. But mostly it was about raising the bar on what exists out there at the moment.

W*: And what was the idea behind the lenticular covers?
TH: We have taken 16 of the better-known artworks and represented them as lenticulars. I’ve always been interested in taking more traditional processes and bring something new to them. So we took the original sleeves and we’ve remodelled them into a 3D space and that’s the data we’ve used to create the lenticulars. It gives a different dimension and depth to the image. They are a weird half-way point between the physical sleeve and how you might view a sleeve on screen.

W*: And Robert, you’ve been painting jackets (pictured above)?
RDN: Yeah, it is a sort of throwback to the biker jackets with the album sleeve painted on the back, the way a dedicated punk fan would painstakingly paint an album sleeve on the back of a jacket.

W*: It’s interesting that the more music become immaterial, because of streaming, the more there is a fascination with the physical artefacts of rock or a physical connection.
RDN: Yeah, and that is very much what going to gigs is all about, that special moment that you share with friends and strangers. And that is something that everybody is trying to capture and monetise at the moment. It’s impossible because it is of the moment but I like to think that there is a way of bridging that emotional space with the physical space and something digitally in between. And people can plug into that at any moment and see what’s happening. And that could be location-based, be time-based, mood-based but not in a prescriptive platform situation but something that is more direct between the artist and the listener and vice versa.

And the physical sense of having that object in your hand is not something that will go away. Books and vinyl, they fill that same need for something to touch and hold. But there is a way of transferring that value to the augmented world, there are definitely ways that we are exploring at the moment. You can actually represent the values of what the band is all about, what it stands for, what’s its beliefs are. I think that is where the real interest is at the moment.

As originally featured in the May 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*230)

INFORMATION 

‘Progress’ is on view from 2 – 20 May. Profits from the sale of selected works in the show will be donated to the Teenage Cancer Trust charity. For more information, visit the Paul Smith website

ADDRESS

Paul Smith
9 Albemarle Street
London W1S 4HH

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Since its founding in 1992, The Watermill Center in New York has served as an incubator for the performing arts and humanities. Established by the visionary theatre director Robert Wilson and situated in a former Western Union research facility – coincidentally where the first fax machine was developed – the interdisciplinary laboratory has supported countless emerging artists with year-round residency programmes and fellowships as they’ve developed new ideas.

This summer, The Watermill Center will celebrates its 25th anniversary with a characteristically big party on its idyllic grounds on Long Island’s East End. Touted as an ‘enchanted forest and performance art extravaganza’, one can only imagine the different creative interpretations of the theme ‘Time Bomb’ that lie in store.

Earlier this month however, a group of distinguished guests did get a taster of the things to come at The Watermill Center’s first Pre-Summer Party, held at Spring Place in New York. The two-part evening kicked off with an immersive dinner experience created by the Austrian artist-chef Paul Renner. Starting with a smorgasbord of open-faced sandwiches that the artist served himself, the dinner then moved on to a clear minestrone soup, a hearty short rib stew (topped with gold leaf) and an espresso panna cotta made with Illy coffee, accompanied by a selection of cheeses from Austria, brought over by Renner as well.

After dinner, guests were treated to dancing and a performance from Watermill alumna Kembra Pfahler and her punk rock band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. Donning her recognisable red body paint, exaggerated black wig and heavy eye make-up, Pfahler and her troupe of lookalikes pulled no punches while touching on subjects like sexuality, capitalism, the right to bear arms and other hot topics. A colourful collusion of art, design, culture and philanthropy all rolled into one, the evening was the perfect precursor to summer’s main event.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Watermill Center website

Having gathered professional mourners from around the world to perform their laments in New York in 2016, artist and erstwhile Wallpaper* Guest Editor Taryn Simon is now bringing her groundbreaking artwork to London, opening this evening. We caught up with Simon in midst of rehearsals to talk about grief, performance and ephemerality.

Unlike Simon’s previous works, An Occupation of Loss has a live element at its core. ‘I’d been exploring professional mourners in A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, and was looking into it being one of the chapters,’ she recalls. ‘I realised that the medium that would best meet the subject matter was not photographic, nor was it textual. Lament occupies this space that is not music and not speech. And it’s both spontaneous and scripted, in a way that is difficult to translate. So it almost in and of itself insisted of being performance.’

The installation assembles 21 mourners from around the world, who respond to many forms of grief in their performance. Some mourn the passing of an individual and help carry their soul to the afterworld, some bemoan the loss of love, while others express their grief in the face of war and displacement, exile and fatalities it entails. Many of the laments can trace their roots to pre-Christian and pre-Islamic traditions, though Simon is not so much interested in ethnographic study than she is in their contemporary reverberations. Like the cultures from which these traditions came, modern-day London (and New York) lacks a prevalent, organised religion.

In its absence, says Simon, organisation becomes communal, national, or media-driven. ‘You can even see the influence of Twitter and these sort of social feeds shaping and directing grief and how we organise, manage, define and represent it.’ What a grief-ridden tweet and a centuries-old lament have in common is that they are public demonstrations of emotion, which actually have ‘quite a lot of authority and power, and can pose a threat to structures that organise populations’.

Simon is also quick to point out that the performance of laments is not a vestige of times past. A Yezidi lament in An Occupation of Loss responds to recent mass killings in Sinjar, Iraq, while Ecuadorean ones are played on national radio and used in very public stages beyond funerals. A Chinese mourner within the installation even uses contemporary sound technology, including a microphone, synth, amp and mixing board.

An Occupation of Loss takes place in subterranean space in Islington Green, which took four years to find, and will open to the public for the first time on the evening of 17 April. While architectural photography is under tight embargo until the first performance is done, Simon has revealed that the venue will be a concrete dodecagon with multiple tiers. ‘Michael Morris [the co-director of Artangel, who collaborated with Simon on the work] calls it a folly, because it’s built in such an impossible way that it can never be anything.’ Still, she was drawn  to its special sonic properties. ‘Sound travels up and down and bounces in unusual ways which are hard to decipher. A certain spot will be completely deadened, while another will echo in broad ways.’

Zamfira Ludovica Muresan performing at An Occupation of Loss, London, 2018, by Taryn Simon. 

The centre of the dodecagon has been left empty, so ‘the object of mourning isn’t present or defined’, and the viewer can bring to it whatever they wish. Meanwhile, the mourners will occupy a series of architectural interventions which Simon refers to as hexagons, though they will be missing some sides. Like the towers that the artist brought to the Park Avenue Armory (designed in collaboration with OMA), the hexagons will have a pipe-like sonic quality, though they encourage more interaction between viewer and mourner, and the bleed of sound is more extreme. Says Simon, ‘it feels like a further unfolding, disorientation and complication of the instrument.’ The resulting cacophony, she believes, will mirror the many ways in which we engage with loss in the contemporary world.

This being a Taryn Simon piece, there is of course an element of meticulous documentation as well. At the exit to installation, viewers are handed a booklet that describes the painstaking process of bringing each performer to London – visa applications to the home office, testimonials from anthropologists to support entry, biometric appointments and the like. ‘Artworks often end up on a single wall, or in storage. Books are much more democratic,’ she quips. The booklet allows An Occupation of Loss to live on after the last viewer has departed, a counterpoint to the ephemeral nature of performance-based art. On this note, Simon admits to struggling with putting so much into a certain thing, and then having it vanish. ‘It feels like insanity sometimes. But I am very much addicted to performance now. I love it.’

INFORMATION

An Occupation of Loss is on view 17-28 April. Entrance on Essex Road at the corner of Islington Green, London. Tickets are available here. For more information, visit the Artangel website

Behind the scenes of Björk’s music video for Arisen My Senses, directed by Jesse Kanda

‘Cloud-based computer file transfer service’ doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but WeTransfer is more than just that, having made the Internet a more beautiful place with its on-point curation of full-screen wallpapers from artists and brands around the world.

It may then surprise you less to learn that the Amsterdam and Los Angeles-based company is also a creative incubator, recently announcing a four-part documentary series with Pi Studios exploring what makes artistic partnerships tick. First up: the indelible Björk and visual artist Jesse Kanda.

The pair are frequent collaborators and best friends – their close rapport evident in the brilliantly bizarre art Kanda has realised for the Icelandic musician’s latest album, Utopia. (There is also possibly no moment more Björk, than Björk emerging from a glowing chrysalis in the Kanda-directed music video for Arisen My Senses, below, writhing slug-like creatures notwithstanding).

‘There’s so much more to music than just work,’ says Björk in the inaugural instalment of Work in Progress. ‘If I collaborate, then I want connections to be genuine, for them to be for real.’ Kanda adds: ‘Collaborations forces you to think about where to draw lines, and who you are and who they are.’ You’ll also be treated to some bonus early performance footage of a teenage Björk, who breaks down the Icelandic music scene and how every member of its small but perfectly formed community has their own aesthetic language.

‘With this series we wanted to look at how collaboration really works. We want to go beyond the standard behind-the-scenes, and tap into what creativity looks, sounds and feels like,’ says Jamal Dauda, WeTransfer global head of music. ‘We don’t claim to explain it, but we believe that by showing how creative minds see the worlds around them, and understand each other, we’ll window onto some of the magic and the mystery.’

WeTransfer’s editorial platform – rebranded and relaunched as WePresent at the end of January – has previously presented an online exhibition with Ryan McGinley, created an original podcast series with Gilles Peterson, and sent photographer Nadia Lee Cohen on a US road trip, among other unique commissions.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the WePresent website and the Pi Studios website

When Wayne McGregor rang up Edmund de Waal to ask if he would be interested in collaborating on his latest production for the Royal Ballet, de Waal’s answer was: ‘Yes. Obviously.’

‘I must be one of Wayne’s biggest fans,’ says the British ceramics artist of McGregor, who has enjoyed 12 remarkable years as the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer. ‘He is, I think, the busiest man on the planet. But what I find extraordinarily productive is that each project he takes on is unique, and has its own identity. He never repeats himself.’

The fandom is mutual. ‘McGregor had seen some of my installations, read a few of my books,’ adds de Waal, wryly. ‘But, importantly, he also recognised that this particular project might appeal to me because of my background.’

To mark the centenary of American composer Leonard Bernstein’s birth, McGregor has created a new work inspired by his choral piece Chichester Psalms (1965), enlisting de Waal’s help to design the set. De Waal grew up in cathedrals – his father was the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral from 1976 to 1986 – so the pulsating rhythm of psalms are as familiar, and close, to him as a heartbeat. The resulting work, Yugen – on stage at London’s Royal Opera House until 8 April – is a sermon on the power of artful collaboration.

The journey to get there was reciprocal, shared, tactile. ‘We spent wonderful days at my studio, picking things up, playing with clay, and then I spent time with him, over the course of a year, in his extraordinary experimental space in Stratford.’

Of course, delicate de Waalian ceramics and overextending ballet dancers are not a good combination. McGregor ‘pushed and gently tested’ de Waal outside of his comfort zone, to create a series of functional, imposing vitrines, between which the dancers and lighting spill. ‘There’s a kind of irreducible quality to this piece, and I think we’ve achieved that with the set. It talks a language of essential, elemental movement.’

Its a diversion from McGregor’s recent shows, which so often dazzle with technological wizardry, and the pulse of contemporary pop. There is a distinct absence of glittering tech here. There’s a pared-back purity, a meditative peace, a privation of ‘nowness’. ‘The powerful music from the Bible is in no way literalised,’ de Waal makes clear. ‘But I was trying to produce spaces that had some kind of symbolic power.’

Power, in its purest, spiritual form, is in abundance on opening night, which de Waal describes as ‘one of the most amazing of my life’. But it was also utterly ‘petrifying’. He got up on stage and took a bow – to rapturous applause – sparking in him the excitement of immediacy not often extended to artists, who usually must wait, somewhat disconnectedly, for the reviews.

‘There’s enormous adrenaline in making museum exhibitions and gallery shows, but you don’t get that apprehension of connection in the moment as you do when working with performance,’ he continues. ‘I can see how profoundly addictive that might be.’

In fact, his first experience with creating performance art has been a ‘revelation’ for de Waal. ‘This process has opened up another line of thinking and working. It’s wonderful. I want more.’

INFORMATION

Yugen continues until 8 April. For more information, visit the Royal Opera House website, Wayne McGregor’s website and Edmund de Waal’s website

ADDRESS

Royal Opera House
Bow Street
London WC2E 9DD

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Jasmina Cibic presents three historic moments of European crisis through her theatrical video works on display at Newcastle’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art for the exhibition ‘This Machine Builds Nations’. Addressing themes of national identity, nation-building and European relations, Cibic’s works are layered critiques of the patriarchal structures upon which 20th-century modernism was built.

In Cibic’s work, architecture forms a stage for these debates, upon which she adds theatrical and literary references drawn from her research into politics, architecture, philosophy and feminism: ‘It’s about questioning how the female presence is totally eradicated from the 20th century of patriarchal construction,’ says Cibic of her Nada series of performative video works.

NADA: Act I, II and III are all centred around modernist constructions designed by male architects: the unrealised Yugoslav Pavilion for the 1958 EXPO in Brussels; Arne Jacobsen’s Aarhus City Hall; and Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Lange and Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany. The series began following Cibic’s experience working on an earlier piece set at the Former Palace of the Federation in Belgrade.

‘All the paintings, frescoes and murals are very abstract, non-figurative, but the sculptures in this palace, were not just of female nudes, but eroticised female nudes,’ she says. ‘This kind of representation prompted me to think more about the analogy between the female body and the nation state, to figure out mother nature, this dichotomy – this paradox – that has to lure, and be a seductress, but also has to be a mother. This duality, as well of a nation state, of what it has to do. Is it able to be united or not?’

Nada Act III, is set in Krefeld, Germany, at Mies van der Rohe’s residential villa designed for two wealthy male art collectors, Hermann Lange and Josef Esters: ‘He [Mies van der Rohe] purposefully designed the boudoir, the room for the lady of the house, where he distributed cacti and female nudes. I’m probably going further towards Lacan than Freud, but the whole gendering of the spaces is about control.’

In addition to the design of buildings, Cibic looks at the surrounding cultural system – the preservation and image in public life today: ‘The biggest point of this project is how these patriarchal structures are historical, but still existent’ says Cibic. ‘When the museum took over [the Mies house at Krefeld] they started building this sculpture garden and there’s not a single female artist there.’

The final scene in the film shows a nude female sitting on large, weathered corten plinths, being sketched by a class of male artists. The ‘plinths’ that are in fact, Richard Serra sculptures – a satire embedded by Cibic into the piece. ‘They just serve as plinths,’ says Cibic of the multimillion-euro Serras. ‘There was a lot of negotiation with the institutions because these are all listed buildings and there are copyright issues, so there’s a performative negotiation with even getting access. But even trying to put the naked woman onto the Richard Serra... pigeons can shit on it, but a woman’s naked butt can’t sit on it?’

Cibic has a brilliant sense of humour and a dark grasp of the societal issues surrounding being female today. Her delivery is smart, sharp and clean – and her means of communication are seductive too. Her work treads the very balance she questions. Cibic describes the series as ‘a play with allegorical structures, and very theatrical – the whole thing is verging on the tipping over of and becoming a very stylised entity’.

She looked to archival sources including images of women in historic political meetings for casting and costume design. ‘The entire structure is piecing together different languages – on one hand the historical readymade, but on the other hand other alphabets of style and thought acceptable by the power elite of the moment.’

At moments Cibic’s editing style in Nada: Act II is almost commercial, with freezing frames skipping and fast-forwarding – colliding in style somewhere between an episode of Black Mirror and a seductive dance performance (choreographed by Lea Anderson) worthy of the Royal Opera House. The literary works of Margaret Atwood or the artist Julian Rosenfelt’s Manifesto spring to mind. By using narrative and seductive editing, her work is entertaining and accessible – the contemporary art equivalent to the socialist manifestos painted on the opening wall of the exhibition in the work, Show the Land in Which a Wide Space for National Progress is Ensured. Here, performers paint political phrases across unrolling scrolls, floating in a dark European-looking landscape, composed of references from the photographic archive of Yugoslavia’s first president, Josip Broz Tito.

It’s hard not to think about Brexit and Britain’s current identity while looking at Cibic’s work: ‘This situation is happening day to day,’ she says, ‘there’s so much there you can’t not touch it. I’m from Slovenia, living in London for 15 years. I have an immigration lawyer now, I’ve got a kid who has dual citizenship.’ Speaking about the current situation in relation to the issues she addresses in her work, Cibic says: ‘It is the rebranding and a reassertion of a national identity which is incredibly interesting, in terms of its “Europeaness” that we [the UK] never really managed to construct – and it’s probably unconstructable.’

Today, women take part in constructing our nations, yet like Cibic’s players, they are still navigating on a patriarchal stage, always performative, self-conscious, stereotyped, critiqued for the act of purely being female. Cibic’s work is historical portrait of the 20th century, yet her process is evidence in itself that the topics she addresses are still present in the 21st century.

INFORMATION

‘This Machine Builds Nations’ is on view until 28 May. For more information visit the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art website

ADDRESS

Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
Gateshead Quays
South Shore Road
Gateshead NE8 3BA

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Apple has released a four-minute short for its HomePod, Welcome Home, directed by filmmaker Spike Jonze. Set to Anderson Paak’s new song ‘Til It’s Over (available on Apple Music, of course), the surreal spot stars English singer and dancer FKA Twigs who injects just the right amount of theatrics into the charming video.

In the film, a dejected Twigs arrives home after a busy commute, asking her HomePod, ‘Hey Siri, play me something I’d like.’ From there, the living room warps and opens up to reveal a rainbow wormhole, with Twigs eventually engaging in a dance-off with a mirror image of herself. 

Jonze, an Oscar winner (and former Wallpaper* Design Awards judge), is no stranger to dance. He helped choreograph Fatboy Slim videos in the late 1990s; more recently he made waves with his memorable fragrance ad for Kenzo in 2016. Jonze collaborated again with Carol Lim and Humberto Leon during New York Fashion Week in September 2017, writing and directing the dance performance Changers for Opening Ceremony’s S/S18 collection.

The Jonze-directed short is the first in a series of longer-form commercials for the HomePod. It’s fun stuff from the technology brand, which hasn’t shied away from art-led advertising pushes for its products. Apple’s HomePod has been available for purchase since February (read our HomePod review and see more smart home speakers), retailing for $349.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Apple website

London-based arts organisation ArtAngel announced today that multidisciplinary artist Taryn Simon will bring her 2016 work An Occupation of Loss to London this April.

Originally staged at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, the project saw Simon bring professional mourners from some 30 countries to enact their native rites of grief and lamentation, many of which date back to pre-Christian and pre-Islamic eras. Every night for a week, the mourners would perform within a series of 11 concrete towers, created in collaboration with OMA. In typically meticulous fashion, Simon also documented the process of research, arranging appropriate visas for the performers to enter the United States, and rehearsal in a monograph, published by Hatje Cantz the following year.

The specifics of the London iteration remain shrouded in mystery. The venue has been announced as ‘a cavernous undiscovered space beneath Islington Green’, with the artist declining to release exact details or architectural photography ahead of time, so as to preserve an element of surprise for the first visitors. In lieu of the OMA towers, Simon is designing a series of sculptures to house the mourners, who hail from 11 countries including Azerbaijan, China, Russia and Venezuela.

Promised recitations include Albanian laments that excavate ‘uncried words’; Venezuelan rituals to safeguard the passage of the soul to the Milky Way Greek laments that weave together stories of life and afterlife and Yezidi performances that recount experiences of exile and displacement. ‘Loss yields an emotional space and a vulnerability in which individuals seem to operate without artifice,’ says the artist and erstwhile Wallpaper* Guest Editor (W*163).

‘I want to look at the potential of this space, and the mechanics of it – even the ways it can be programmed or performed.’ She adds that the project is about ‘how we mourn individually, nationally, globally – how organized religion, government or civic leadership guides and shapes mourning and how citizens are mobilized in those moments of loss.’

The London performance is a homecoming of sorts, seeing as the project began as a conversation between Simon and ArtAngel co-director Michael Morris in the British capital six years ago. ‘The enactment of mourning in this ambitious new work for London sees Simon turn a found site into a sonic instrument for the performance of grief, measuring losses beyond language,’ says Morris. In a country currently beset by social fracture and political uncertainty, the anxiety and catharsis of An Occupation of Loss will no doubt resonate.

INFORMATION

An Occupation of Loss will be on view 17 – 28 April. Entrance on Essex Road at the corner of Islington Green, London. Tickets are available through ArtAngel

Bringing together leading artists, writers, architects, musicians, filmmakers and other creative luminaries with the brightest young stars in their field, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé programme is an ambitious cultural exchange. Following on from our story in the November 2017 issue, three of the latest protégés reveal what mentoring has meant to them.

Born in Peru, Pauchi Sasaki is a violinist, composer and performance artist whose work spans different styles and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Electronic Music and Recording Media programme at Mills College in California, and composes music for video, film, theatre, dance, and site-specific projects and installations. Her Rolex mentor is Philip Glass, a master of minimalist music and arguably the most popular classical composer alive today.

W*: How have you and Philip Glass interacted over the year?
Pauchi Sasaki: At the beginning, I followed him on tour around Japan, Europe, California and New York, which was fascinating, as his tours demand a lot of teamwork, and it was really useful to learn about the logistics behind the scenes. Later we were able to get together in New York, where we had the space and time for wide-ranging talks, especially about music and film. Philip is a great storyteller and he’s worked with so many amazing people, like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese.

W*: Has his mentorship had a practical side?
PS: Right from the start, Philip told me that I should be the owner of my music, and that I needed to set up my own publishing company, which I have done now. He’s also helping with me a letter for the artists’ visa programme for the US.

W*: How do you feel your work has developed as a result of your discussions?
PS: Philip is a very pragmatic person. He has so many things to take care of, but he really knows how to manage them without getting overwhelmed. That ability and that kind of wisdom is very inspiring for a young artist like me. In terms of music, mine sometimes is quite abstract, but his has a quality like light – not without weight, but beautiful. Little by little, perhaps, elements of my music will emerge which will sound a bit happier, and that may be his influence.

W*: Do you have any performances coming up?
PS: I recently performed with the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, on the same night that Philip presented his take on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. On 11 March I’ll be at National Sawdust in New York as part of Du Yun’s Pan Asian Sounding Festival, and on 1 June I’m performing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of a suite of micro commissions by Aizuri Quartet.

As originally featured in the January 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*226)

INFORMATION
For more information, visit Pauchi Sasaki’s website and the Rolex Mentor & Protégé Initiative‎ website

For 25 years, The Arts Foundation has given opportunities to artists, designers, poets and choreographers at the start of their careers. Wayne McGregor, writer Ali Smith, poet Alice Oswald and artist Alex Hartley have all benefited from the annual award, which is known as London’s ‘honest’ art prize, because of its unassuming nature. ‘It asks and expects nothing of its winners’, says Rufus Norris, director of the National Theatre and winner of an Arts Foundation bursary in 2002. ‘It just says “go out and enjoy”.’

This year, two awards (each worth £10,000) were made possible by The David Collins Foundation, which was set up in 2016 to honour the legacy of late architect and designer David Collins. The David Collins Foundation who began supporting the awards last year, sponsoring Max Frommeld as the winner of the Furniture Design category. As a special tribute to the awards 25th year, Frommeld has been invited back (along with 15 previous winners) to nominate their favourite applicant – an apt way of celebrating the awards’ quarter-century.

Each nominee will receive £1,000, while five of the most promising are selected as the overall winners, as chosen by a panel of expert judges, including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alice Rawsthorn and Julian Isaacs. It was announced that the two fellowships supported by The David Collins Foundation went to glass blower Jochen Holz (nominated by Max Frommeld), and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins (nominated by illustrator Slawa Harasymovicz).

We caught up with Holz and Baczynski-Jenkins to find out what the Arts Foundation grants will mean to them...

Jochen Holz, glass artist

In another life, London-based Glass artist Holz was a scientific lamp worker making glass apparatus. ‘It was all about precision and functionality,’ he says. ‘I only really developed a style during my time at the RCA, after years of following more traditional approach.’

‘The fellowship will give me the freedom to experiment,’ he adds. ‘I would like to undertake a range of colour experiments using enamels and lustres to expand on the limited commercially available existing colour palette tubes. I’d also like to experiment with coloured glass neons, exploring the full range of possibilities, including filling bigger pieces.’

Bridging art, design and installation, his elegant work has ‘the potential to push to a different creative level with the Foundation’s help’, says Frommeld. Indeed, Holz believes awards like this are of the upmost importance. ‘It’s very hard for most artists to be fully engaged in their work and to square this with making a living, so giving creatives supported breathing space can be a really vital contribution.’
  
Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, choreographer

‘The great thing about this type of award is that it’s not a commission. Its important to have time for researching and not thinking immediately about the outcome,’ says Baczynski-Jenkins, whose choreography draws attention to the structures of desire, empathy and queer pleasure. ‘There is a paradoxical relation between inefficiency and efficiency in making art work – having time for non-productive research gives the work more volume and texture in the long term.’

His work, which has been displayed at (and is a perfect fit for) London’s Chisenhale Gallery, was praised by nominator Slawa Harasymovicz as ‘strong, contemporary yet timeless’. Particularly impressive is his eight-minute performance piece Federico, which focuses solely on the hands of two performers. Baczynski-Jenkins describes as ‘a sort of micro-archive of intimate touch’.

Winning the award compelled Baczynski-Jenkins to offer advice to other aspiring artistic talents: ‘Be honest in your practice and take risks. Remember that art is about offering an experience, and trying to make the world a better place, even through the smallest gestures.’ 

It’s a thought that seems to sum up the attitude of The Art Foundation and its simple, understated – yet utterly life-changing – award ceremony. It concludes by looking forwards, to the possible futures of its nominees and winners. Rufus Norris mutters, ‘Now the fun starts. Let’s do this.’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit The Arts Foundation website and the David Collins Studio website

Masters of their respective disciplines, Marina Abramović, Iris van Herpen, and Marco Brambilla are not the first names you would associate with opera. In fact, none of them have ever worked on one before – until now. Each have thrown their creative might behind a new production of Debussy’s famously dark and disturbing masterwork Pelleas et Melisande, set to debut in Antwerp next week. Abramović took on set design, van Herpen costumes, and Brambilla an abstract video backdrop.

Despite their lack of operatic experience (not to mention the fact that they live on different continents) the trio got on famously. ‘Everything has gone a lot smoother than one would think,’ says Brambilla, who is best known for directing Kanye West’s critically acclaimed Power video (2017). He had wanted to work with Van Herpen and Abramović for ‘ages’, and when this opportunity presented itself, he ‘couldn’t resist the massive potential for cross-pollination of interdisciplinary ideas’.

Talks began a year ago in New York, when the great and the good were gathered in the city for Frieze. Led by co-directors Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet (of Antony Gormley’s production Babel(words), 2010), the creative team met to discuss a ‘contemporary retelling’ of Debussy’s seminal work, to premier in the 100th year since his death.

The production, billed as ‘a new concept of abstract staging for an opera’, will see film, costumery and set design perform in chorus, in front of a vast, concave mirror, which merges seamlessly into an inclined floor – the brainchild of Abramović. ‘The audience will be under the impression that they are inside a great, silvery eye ball,’ says Brambilla. The ‘iris’, so to speak – a seven-metre screen suspended in the centre of the ‘retina’ mirror – will play Brambilla’s cosmic video compositions.

‘It will begin in eclipse,’ he explains. ‘There will be a sunrise behind a planet, and as the storyline unfolds, nebulas and galaxies will dance.’ The footage – manipulated from real NASA photography taken by the Hubble Telescope – is mesmeric, terrifying, and artful. It seems it can’t have been plucked from our skies.

Grand celestial visions are the ideal match for Pelleas et Melisande, with its dream-like atmosphere and Symbolist libretto adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck’s play of the same name. Among imagery of forests, castles, and oceans, a deathly love triangle plays out, as the skies explode intimidatingly in the background. 

Such themes resonate with Brambilla, who has a penchant for big ideas, allegory and gradiose classical imagery. ‘Both the libretto and the music have always screamed of the cosmos to me. There’s so many references to looking, eyesite, and vision’, he says. ‘It compelled me to look up.’

Others have had similar compulsions, and it isn’t the first time the opera has been abstractly produced. So innovative and ambitious were the original stage notes, Debussy spent years trying to find a suitable venue, until it eventually premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1902. Jean Cocteau designed a graphic set in the 1960s, and in 1997, almost a century after its first iteration, Robert Wilson directed a wildly successful production for the Paris National Opera. Brambilla and the team could only start with an entirely blank slate, rather than drawing upon the progression of previous adaptations. ‘Where Wilson’s production was paired back and minimalist, we have created a warmer, more rounded world,’ he says. ‘There’s a primal energy to this production; it verges on science fiction – it takes the audience into another dimension, abstractly, dreamily.’

If anyone is under the disillusion that operas are stuffy, academic things, a pastime of the older middle classes, this production will turn you around. It’s a visually electric masterwork, for and of the 21st century; the product of a brave pas de trois between some of opera’s newest visionary minds.

INFORMATION

Pelleas et Melisande will premier at Opera Vlaanderen, Antwerp on 2 February and run until 16 June. It will tour to Luxembourg, Strasbourg, Geneva and Venice in 2019. For more information, visit the Opera Vlaanderen website

ADDRESS

Opera Vlaanderen
Frankrijklei 1
2000 Antwerp

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Every other year since 2002, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative has brought together leading artists, writers, architects, musicians, film-makers, theatre directors and other creative titans with early-career contenders. Past mentors include Magaret Atwood, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor. In November 2016 we profiled the latest seven lucky protégés, paired with guiding lights such as Philip Glass, David Chipperfield and Robert Lepage. The protégés reveal what mentoring has meant to them and how their lives have changed as a result.

Londiwe Khoza was born in Soweto, South Africa, and became a soloist in the Cape Dance Company while still studying at the Cape Academy of Performing Arts. In 2016, she joined Batsheva – The Young Ensemble in Tel Aviv, which is part of the Batsheva Dance Company, of which her mentor, Ohad Naharin, is artistic director.

W*: How much time have you been able to spend with Ohad Naharin over the period of the programme?
Londiwe Khoza: I was lucky enough to be in a situation of always being in his environment, regardless of whether or not I saw him. I was constantly learning every day, even when I didn’t see him. We’ve had a very meaningful time together so far and, as the year unfolded, we worked more closely together. I’m so happy that I could be in such a position.

W*: Where did you meet up?
LK: Batsheva is based at the Suzanne Dellal Center [Tel Aviv] and that’s where we spent all of our time. Between Ohad’s busy schedule and the schedule of the ensemble, we didn’t spend all day every day together, but we’ve spent a good amount of time together.

W*: Do you think this year has changed you?
LK: I feel as though my approach to my work has changed. I’ve changed and developed so much as a dancer and embarked on this new journey of self-discovery.

W*: What work is coming up next for you?
LK: My contract with Ensemble Batsheva began in August, so hopefully a long relationship with Batsheva Dance Company. The 2017/2018 season is very exciting.

W*: If you had to sum up the scheme in just a few words, what would you say?
LK: It’s an incredible initiative that changes the lives of young artists, allowing them the opportunity to learn from a master in a professional environment – it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Rolex should be so proud of the work it has done and the opportunities it has created, as well as the lives it has changed.

As originally featured in the November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*224)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Rolex Mentors & Protégés Initiative‎ website

Every other year since 2002, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative has brought together leading artists, writers, architects, musicians, film-makers, theatre directors and other creative titans with early-career contenders. Past mentors include Magaret Atwood, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor. In November 2016 we profiled the latest seven lucky protégés, paired with guiding lights such as Philip Glass, David Chipperfield and Robert Lepage. The protégés reveal what mentoring has meant to them and how their lives have changed as a result.

Argentine artist Matías Umpierrez has been pushing the boundaries of theatre since 2007, when he became head of theatre at the Rector Ricardo Rojas Cultural Center in Buenos Aires. His mentor is the Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage.

W*: Has any new work come directly out of your time so far with Robert Lepage?
Matías Umpierrez: Towards the end of my year I proposed that we collaborate on a new production. He will be one of the protagonists of a project named The Museum of Fiction, which reflects on how fiction can be displayed in a museum. The first work I’ve chosen for my museum is an adaptation of Macbeth, which will star Robert and a renowned Spanish actress.

W*: How has this last year changed you?
MU: I love the idea of facing the uncertain, a complex space of creation in which the only way to relate to the other is to connect with the present, regardless of any anxiety.

As originally featured in the November 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*224)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Rolex Mentors & Protégés Initiative‎ website

A night at the museum collided with a night at the opera last week in Paris thanks to Francesco Vezzoli and the Amis du Centre Pompidou. As a continuation of the festivities marking the Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary, the Friends of the Museum gave carte blanche to the Italian artist, who turned the fifth floor permanent collection into a series of fantastic tableaux vivants.

To achieve his one-off Opéra Pompidou, Vezzoli recruited 12 singers and 10 musicians from the Académie de l’Opéra national de Paris, assigning each pair a familiar aria or nostalgic song that they performed in the presence of a modern masterwork. He called up pal and patron Miuccia Prada to costume his dramatis personæ, a diverse group that included Gertrude Stein, Elvis Presley and Anne Boleyn. He asked the ever-charming choreographer Stephen Galloway to nudge a little extra frisson out of the moment. And he reached out to M/M Paris to conceive a limited-edition libretto and poster. Amid all the events organised to seize on people in town for FIAC, this one was a work of art in its own right.

And it was engaging in all respects. Guests dashed from performance to performance, catching a street style Arlequin singing ‘O sole mio next to Matisse’s Luxe, calme et volupté (1904) only to discover a reincarnation of Robert de Montesquiou, the dashing early 20th-century bon vivant, serenading people with Verdi’s La donna è mobile beside Francis Picabia’s smiling nudes with a bulldog and André Derain’s portrait of his wife, Alice (a cheeky staging, to be sure).

By placing the Elvis-like character against the backdrop of Andy Warhol’s portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, where he sung Maria from West Side Story, Vezzoli dialled up the camp (Galloway coaxed a hip swizzle from tenor Juan de Dios Mateos), while mezzo-soprano Farrah El Dibany in the role of Madame de Pompidour seduced the crowd with an enchanting rendition of Bizet’s Carmen sung to Picasso’s Harlequin (1915).

The mood turned sober as Danylo Matviienko’s Jean Cocteau ended Tchaikovsky’s Again, as before, alone by taking the knee in the shadow of André Masson’s Gradiva (1939). In a sumptuously black coat and heels embellished with feathers,  singer Jeanne Ireland – taking on the role of the late Luisa Casati – held her own against Niki de Saint Phalle’s outsized plaster bride.

As each took their turn, the alto and soprano voices echoed through the dimmed galleries, which only further animated the art. Giacometti’s long nosed sculpture looked as though he were smiling along with the activity; the colours of a Kandinsky seemed to vibrate as though channeling the violin.

At once intimate, inspired and indulgent, it was Vezzoli at his theatrical best. And while he proved difficult to locate in the moment, more present later during the after-party, Galloway happened to be on hand and graciously steered me through the sequence, offering some intel along the way. Rehearsals in the space, for instance, only began two days before the show.

Having collaborated once before with Vezzoli for a performance featuring Lady Gaga and the Bolshoi Ballet at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, he noted how the setting here introduced a completely different dynamic. ‘When you come into an established space like this, all the preparation you can have is just the understanding that it is all going to change,’ he said, as we passed Vezzoli’s living version of Ingres’ Madame de Moitessier (1844–1856) in a draped floral gown, soprano Angelique Boudeville, who later sang Puccini. ‘It’s the luxury of these types of situations versus a staged theatre situation; you can build it from the beginning.’

To signal the finale, Bernard Blistène, director of the Musée National d’art Moderne sang a lively duet with the museum’s head conservator Véronique Sorano-Stedman. That these esteemed figures could carry a tune with such talent no doubt surprised the crowd. Quite simply, Vezzoli pulled off a brilliant celebration in which every moment felt surreal.

INFORMATION
For more information, visit the Société des Amis du Musée National d’art moderne Centre Pompidou website

Three years in, Veuve Clicquot’s ‘Widow Series’ has become an autumn staple of London’s cultural calendar. Invented to celebrate the pioneering champagne icon Madame Clicquot, who was widowed at just 27, the immersive art event is handed to a different creative team each year, with the aim of fashioning a night to remember while raising money for AIDS charity Amfar.

Last year’s FKA Twigs-curated installation was a hit, selling out in 20 minutes and garnering over 11 million online impressions. With a lot to live up to, this year’s team was in safe hands, with style doyenne and iconic fashion editor Carine Roitfeld steering the ship alongside creative director Patrick Kinmonth.

The longtime collaborators, who first worked together on a Mario Testino photo shoot in the 1990s, are a formidable force, as well as being fierce friends. ‘Patrick is the most generous storyteller,’ says Roitfeld. ‘And this was a big production – which is putting it mildly.’

Entitled ‘Seven’, and themed around the deadly sins, guests are taken on a vice-laden journey across four floors of raw concrete in an expansive subterranean Islington venue, journeying into the pits of Dante’s Inferno. It’s a bold move for Roitfeld, a self-confessed ‘pages person’, to work on an installation of this scale. ‘I work in magazines – this is totally new for me,’ she says. ‘So I’ve brought a few of my fashion family in to help.’

Notable collaborators have shown up in force. Guests feel the furore of wrath through the eyes of Fendi and we’re toyed with by lusty models in red PVC courtesy of Atsuko Kudo, all the while being satiated with VC Extra Brut by ‘widow’ waitresses dressed in black lace by Tom Ford.

The melding of art installation and ‘the fashion world’ is something Kinmonth has enjoyed seeing develop throughout his career. ‘The change has been tremendously slow but absolutely permanent,’ he says. ‘Fashion is no longer regarded as something superficial, where clothes just come at the end. People understand that clothes are a manifestation of deep cultural processes. They are extremely legible and can be experimented with in these kinds of settings.’

The costuming, set design and performance act as the crystal glass in which the champagne sits – with the latter remaining very much the star of the show. In a final act of pure, unadulterated extravagance (and a full embodiment of gluttony) guests are invited to chuck their champagne glasses over a ledge and watch them fall four stories, creating a mosaic of shards across the floor. If this is Inferno, we want a one way ticket to hell.

INFORMATION

‘Seven’ ran from 20 – 22 October. For more information, visit the Veuve Clicquot website

ADDRESS

17 Islington Green
London, N1 2XH

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Benjamin Millepied and BETC LA join forces for an innovative new dance workout platform, LA Dance Workout

Choreographer and director (of Black Swan fame) Benjamin Millepied has dragged the dance workout video out of the 80s, and given it a Los Angeles-style makeover.

From this week, fitness and dance enthusiasts across the US can sign-up and experience elegantly crafted video workouts, choreographed and led by the fresh-faced dancers of Millepied’s ballet-meets-contemporary studio, LA Dance Project. The 31 interactive workouts, including Cardio, Floor Routines and Easy Legs, emphasise the art of movement, capturing some of the city’s prima ballerinas against the backdrop of its most striking hotspots – from abandoned warehouses to hilltop vistas.

‘I look at dance as a universal language. Pretty much everyone can speak it,’ says Millepied. ‘The problem is giving people the confidence to open their mouths.’ His main aim in creating the programme was to get people up, moving, and having fun. ‘By completing this programme from your own living room, you can literally dance like no one’s watching, because on one is.’

Dancers from LA Dance Project feature in Millepied’s project

Sensibly, Millepied didn’t attempt to shift the nation's ‘dance confidence’ culture alone. His raw creativity, passion and choreographic know-how is balanced by the sheer guile of business-bolstering, start-up enthusiast Clarisse Lacarrau. Hailing from leading French advertising agency BETC, Lacarrau moved to LA in 2014 to head up its new sibling, BETC LA. Its first project, LA Dance Workout follows in the footsteps of BETC’s successful European creative partnerships, like the Venice Biennial's French Pavilion with Xavier Vielhan.

Lacarrau has a history of spearheading creative collaborations between start-ups and branding heavyweights, having co-founded the BETC Start-Up Lab in 2012. But, she says, there’s a lot more work to be done. ‘Brands have been kicked out of the conversation,’ she says. ‘Artists and creators own it – they can mobilise people and create impact. Now is the right moment to bring both parties together.’

Here, big business and individual creativity dance an intimate duet, in what has turned out to be an extraordinary partnership. ‘The ad industry model is dying,’ says Lacarrau. ‘We need to challenge the way we do business, our output and practices, and the way we work with talent, to bring value back to our industry.’ So BETC LA and LA Dance Project will each own 50 per cent of the start-ups intellectual property, and have contributed equally to its creative conception. Lacarrau and her team have assisted with everything from IP contracts, to social-media strategy, to editorial content for an accompanying online dance magazine.

This is more than just a forward-thinking fitness programme. It it Lacarrau’s LA calling card for the type of bespoke ad model she believes in, and it hits the beat bang on. With LA Dance Workout’s virtual cocktail of well-being, dancerly prowess and LA chic, Millepied is right in thinking ‘we’ve got something special on our hands here’. Jane Fonda eat your heart out.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the LA Dance Workout website

Film director and artist Miranda July is going to great – if unconventional – lengths to celebrate one of London’s great unsung heroes: the local charity shop. ‘Nowhere else I know in the world has such an eclectic and diverse array of charity shops,’ she says. ‘There’s so much hope in that.’

Housed in the unlikely location of London’s temple of transactions – Selfridges – the off-beat artist’s interfaith store assembles a random mix of wares from four local London charities: the Norwood Jewish Charity Shop; London Buddhist Centre Charity Shop; Spitalfields Crypt Trust; and Islamic Relief. Bobbly jumpers sit side by side with costume jewellery, furry photo frames hang next to headscarves.

And she’s calling it ‘art’. ‘The wonderful thing is, that this installation is not art on the surface,’ she explains. ‘So many people coming in won't be thinking of it that way. That will be one of the most fun things about it.’

This is shopping; it's light and fun. But there’s also an underlying gravitas. Flying out of a post-Trump America, and into a post-Brexit Britain, the interfaith aspect was essential for LA-based July. ‘We’d all be so offended if there was just, say, one Christian charity shop present. It needs to invite everyone, as the store does.’

Working from across the pond, she relied on Google (along with hazy memories of hunting through bargain bins when living in London in her 20s) when researching which stores to involve. ‘I Googled “charity shops UK” and Islamic Relief popped out,’ she explains. ‘It may not jump out to you, but as an American, we couldn’t have an Islamic Relief charity shop. There’s not a big enough Muslim population. And people just wouldn’t have it. For me, there’s a comfort in a mosque just being on a logo.’

The concept actor, who often draws intimately from personal experience, applied the same ‘deep-dive’ techniques when conceptualising her charity boutique. ‘At one point, it hit me. What does “charity” actually mean?’ she says. To understand the concept more fully, July met with different religious leaders.

One was Rabi Gluck, a prominent figure in London’s interfaith movement. ‘He said to me, “In my tradition, the meaning of charity is to give enough so that they, in turn, will have enough to give to someone else.” Charity is a human right. The ability to help some one else is what makes you human.’

The team at Selfridges responded to this concept with aplomb, and allowed July free reign to design the store as she wished. ‘They understand that's how we'd achieve the best result,’ she explains.

She hopes that her low-priced pop-up will attract a different audience to Selfridges, as well as offering the normal clientele an eye-opening alternative option. She’s disrupting the mindlessness we often fall into when shopping. ‘You go into a store, you make a choice, you pick something that reflects you,’ she says. ‘Sometimes, you go into a little room and take off all your clothes, having just walked in off the street! You look at yourself, think about yourself, who you are, what you can spend. Then you give a stranger money behind the till.’

These are more than just Trainspotting-esque musings on life’s little mundanities. July is fascinated by the apparent absurdity of the shopping process. ‘It’s something everyone does everyday,’ she says. ‘We already know how to do it, we don’t have to explain the rules.’ Her pop-up is a way of creating a consumer experience that has meaning enough to shake up our daily performances, transforming them into something elevated, meaningful, considered.

Or not. ‘It’s ultimately up to the viewer, as in any piece of art, if they find meaning in it,’ July explains. We certainly do. She uses the high profile nature of the Bond Street location to propel us into thought, playing on one of the city's ubiquitous pastimes, July is selling us a complex, performative artistic idea in a package we can all buy into.

INFORMATION

The Interfaith Charity Shop is open until 22 October. For more information, visit the Artangel website and Miranda July website

ADDRESS

Selfridges
400 Oxford Street
London W1A 1AB

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Left, coat, €1,365, by Dirk Bikkembergs. Jumper, £350; trousers, £295, both by Coach. Shoes, £2,092, by Raf Simons. Socks (worn throughout), £15, by Falke. Right, jacket, £760; roll-neck, £135, both by Paul Smith. Trousers, £295, by Coach. Belt, £230, by Marni. Shoes, £710, by Prada. Fashion: Jason Hughes. As originally featured in the September 2017 issue of Wallpaper* (W*222)

At just 23, Anders Hayward has already fit three careers under his beautifully buckled belt. Among his many talents, the dancer, model and experimental choreographer has the rare ability to turn a hectic fashion shoot into a carefully orchestrated waltz.

For our September 2017 Style Special, we tapped Hayward to direct the movement for a menswear fashion shoot photographed by Liam Warwick, in which we celebrate clashing checks and plucky plaids. Creating a sense of movement beneath all these juxtaposing Prada, Calvin Klein and Salvatore Ferragamo patterns was essential. ‘During the styling process, I chose thematic movements that I felt would suit the clothes,’ Hayward explains, ‘I’m interested in designers that create clothes for characters – I enjoy creating fashion narratives.’

Game to become the leading men were our models, Georges Labbat and Baptiste Faure – despite their differing levels of dance experience. Labbat was the perfect match for Hayward, having trained in Belgium under intensely musical choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker. But Anders enjoys the surprise and (sometimes inelegant) quirks that come from working with models with minimal formal dance training, like Faure. ‘It’s great to see a model who has never really been choreographed before come out with some really interesting, organic movement. On the other side I love pushing more experienced dancers, like Labbat, to move in ways that they’re not necessarily familiar with.’

Hayward also grappled with a sculptural set and an eclectic mix of refined furniture – including pieces from Aram, B&B Italia and Rodolfo Dordoni. ‘I had sketches and blueprints of what the space was going to look like before, so I had a few ideas in mind – especially for the image with the two boys in the circle,’ says Hayward. ‘We found that it worked best if they were constantly moving. When the two were in constant flow, I could just tweak a hand movement, a shoe placement, or the flourish of a lapel.’

Though we’re only treated to the static, freeze-framed result, the arching backs, awkward necks and stretching fingers of each model capture Hayward’s momentum-filled choreography – while proving one can do impressive backbends in a tailored Fendi suit.

Left, coat, £1,560; top, £780; trousers, £620, all by Calvin Klein 205W39NCY. Right, coat, £1,825; trousers (part of suit), price on request, both by Salvatore Ferragamo. Roll-neck, £155, by John Smedley. Belt, £310; shoes, £710, both by Prada. ‘Pollock’ armchair, £1,755, by Charles Pollock, for Knoll, from The Conran Shop. ‘Cesar’ side table, £808, by Rodolfo Dordoni, for Minotti

‘There isn’t really an English word for what we have created. It's kind of an experience; a performance; a living artwork.’ So says Random International’s dramaturg Heloise Reynolds, of the practice’s latest installation, unveiled in London last week.

Staged in the echoing Roundhouse theatre, the art-meets-technology studio has designed seven helium-filled white globes that hover and swarm around the space on tiny propellers. In one moment, they’re pack-like, curious. In others, they’re inanimate, programmed, droning. ‘We’re trying to create a sense of otherness,’ says Random International co-founder Hannes Koch. ‘We want people to feel like aliens. We want to say, “This is how it feels to be intimately exposed to a very advanced organism.”’

Dreamt up in an unlikely industrial estate in Balham, where Random International’s engineers have spent the last five months buried under complex behavioural data maps, the spheres’ flocking behaviour is determined by generative algorithms built to resemble human characteristics. Able to react to their environment, the computer-controlled orbs select individuals from the audience to hone in on – swooping inquisitively towards them, or sinisterly mirroring their movements. In a landscape of driverless cars, digital butlers and ‘the robots are coming!’, these oddly familiar spheres pull at the tangled thread of what it means to be human in the age of AI.

Frequent Random International collaborator, choreographer Wayne McGregor, has long been fascinated by this ever-slimming intersection between man and machine. Through his futuristic staging and his boundary-defying collaborations, McGregor does more than walk the ‘uncanny valley’, he dances there.

As he has done here, engaging a troop of his dynamic studio dancers to perform underneath the hovering, human-like globes to an electronic score especially composed by Warp Records’ Mark Pritchard. The formidable likes of Edward Watson and Fukiko Takase look anonymous, painted with either a ‘+’ or ‘–’ symbol. They are human magnets, pulling together and pushing apart. The elemental dancers enter into a loose dialogue with the globes, staying low, as the orbs twist into lofty formations overhead.

The human and technological aspects of the exhibition interact seamlessly, a testament to the well-matched collaborators – despite the fact McGregor didn't know exactly how the installation would look and act until it was installed. ‘I got it conceptually, and that was enough,’ he explains.

It helps that the collaborators are ‘on the same page aesthetically’. Instead of shunning technology as a clinical device, both McGregor and Random International use it as a theatrical tool to evoke emotion. ‘I think technology can make you feel something,’ McGregor continues. ‘It’s visceral. It can help the audience to embody a performance.’

That’s exactly what the spheres do here. As the dancers file out, the stage is left empty for audience members to enter into their own duet with the white globes, in what Koch describes as an ‘emotive experiment’. Forgetting our inhibitions, we enter into a game of computerised cloud-gazing, in a display of how the human imagination, and the artificial one, can partner to create something out of this world.

INFORMATION 

Wayne McGregor’s ‘+/– Human’ performances run until 28 August, and ‘Zoological’ is on view until 31 August. For more information, visit the Roundhouse website, the Random International website and Wayne McGregor’s website

ADDRESS

Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road
London NW1 8EH

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The Manchester International Festival has been tempting Londoners north of the Watford gap for more than a decade with its programme of cross-disciplinary events.

Of this year's eclectic catalogue, the live performances are the hot tickets in town. One of the more sought-after stubs was last week's minimalist revival of the ballet 'Available Light' at the Palace Theatre, with sets by Frank Gehry, music by John Adams and choreography by Lucinda Childs. It marked 35 years since the ballet's original, groundbreaking performance in the nascent Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, still under construction.

'This is the kind of cross-cultural collaboration for which MIF has become wildly renowned,' says John McGrath, the festival's artistic director and CEO. 'Three artists from very different fields – in this case classical music, contemporary dance and architecture – come together to make a work that none of them could have envisaged, let alone created, without the other.'

It's easy to see how the maverick trio might have fought against one another unproductively, as big personalities often do – after all, they'd never met before this collaboration. But they waltz. Gehry's split-level set, backed by a chain-link screen downstage, acts as an industrial, multi-platform backdrop for the choreography, which is similarly elemental. Childs' dancers hypnotically re-enact the same restrained sequences, in chorus and rondo, with impeccable synchronicity. Likewise, Adams' pure, reverberating synths speak to the clinical severity of the architecture and choreography.

The score recalls the city's great traditions in popular synthetic music. And it's not been the only one. Over two weeks, visual artist Liam Gillck has joined forces with Factory Records stalwarts New Order on a series of spectacles in the Old Granada Studios. 'New Order have had an enormous influence on the way I make art,' says Gillick, who contructed an immersive, 'responsive' stage on which the band perform an avant-garde set, refusing to resurrect their classics. 'Their music continues to create new levels of intensity and control based on a constant testing of fundamental structures.'

To balance the big-ticket evening events, daytime treats are dragging festival-goers out of synthesised hangovers. 'True Faith', a monumental exhibition on the visual legacy of Joy Division and New Order at Manchester Art Gallery, centres on four decades of contemporary work from artists inspired by the two bands. It's an impressive list, including Gillick, Jeremy Deller, Mark Leckey, John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Raf Simons.

As always, it's a (Northern) star-studded scene. And Wallpaper* is making its own appearance. At the soon-to-be-developed London Road Fire Station, we have launched our own project: bespoke interior design service, Wallpaper* Composed. Find out more in our October issue, on sale 7 September.

INFORMATION

The Manchester International Festival continues until 16 July. For more information, visit the website

To transcend the human by aesthetic means is an ambition the American director Robert Wilson has in common with the late Andy Warhol. Never has this been more apparent than in Wilson’s opera adaptation of The Sandman, which debuted in Düsseldorf over the weekend, following its world premiere at the Ruhr Festival in Recklinghausen.

Oh, Olimpia! It is this spellbinding android that Nathanael falls for and soon feels a connection with, greater than with his flesh-and-blood fiancée. But it’s not only the protagonist in The Sandman who navigates a fine line between desire and delusion; Wilson admits to sharing a fascination with the mechanical masterpiece. And you believe him immediately: each one of his productions features a character resembling Olimpia. Wilson imbues her perfectly cool and elegant exterior with the shimmering breath of life with his highly visual theatre.

Another leitmotif of the black-romantic gothic tale is also firmly rooted in the director’s work: the eyes. Nathanael is traumatised by the tragic death of his father, as he is by the grisly bedtime story of the Sandman, which his mother used to tell him often. As the story goes, the Sandman would scatter grains of sand into the eyes of children who would not sleep, until their eyes fell bloody from their heads.

Wilson has staged ETA Hoffmann’s ambiguous play as a tragi-comic Grusical (horror musical), in which the aesthetics of the multi-tasking Wilson (director, lighting, stage) once again prove that he truly is a visual pioneer. Critics accuse him of superficiality, but the 75-year-old counters, ‘The horror may well be lurking behind a smooth façade. And is all the more sinister for it.’

The perfection for which Wilson is known makes his The Sandman a sensual experience as well. His lighting design, as well as his deft handling of space and time transcend reality. ‘Without light there is no space,’ he says, quoting Einstein. The stage design developed by him for the Düsseldorf production has only minimal props, but the exceptional lighting design fully makes up for it.

Wilson starts by rehearsing his plays as though they were silent films, whose gestures appeal to him. ‘I reject naturalistic representation. The mimetics – and gesture-laden staging of Asian mask theatre like [Chinese] Bian Lian and Japanese Noh is much more to my liking.’

No wonder that it isn’t the script in Wilson’s production that plays the main role. Repetitions of individual passages reinforce the surrealism of the key scenes, the precise body language of the actors is almost staccato-like. Outstanding performances come from the actors who play Nathanael (a silly and mysterious Christian Friedel) and his mother (Rosa Enskat, funny); they beguile with their entrancingly doll-like performances while surprising with their vocal power.

The music has been composed specially for The Sandman by young British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi. Ranging from new wave to new romantic, it is a stark contrast to the stiff Biedermeier look of the costumes. In combination with the exalted movements of the actors and their mask-like make-up, it evokes memories of voguing, a dance style from 1980s New York that is the embodiment of all that is superficial and narcissistic. 

ETA Hoffmann’s play has certainly not lost any of its topicality. In the age of virtual reality, of Second Life, avatars, cyborgs and bots, the play is surprisingly relevant – despite having been written 200 years ago.

The public voiced their opinions in the form of standing ovations – and in return they were offered a rendition of the secret title song of the evening, There Will Be a Horror, by the ensemble. The composer Calvi, who was present at the premiere, pitched in, while Wilson himself joined the choir. Bravo!

INFORMATION

The Sandman continues until 9 July. For more information, visit the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus website and Robert Wilson’s website

ADDRESS

Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz 1
40211 Düsseldorf

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Wayne McGregor has revolutionised the world of contemporary dance. Now, he is revolutionising rehearsal spaces. Gone are the days of stuffy locker rooms and splintering, chalky barres with little elbow room. McGregor’s new London space designed by interior architecture firm We Not I is a perfectly choreographed masterpiece.

Based at the Here East Campus in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the project has come a long way since we visited last year to see McGregor’s ‘Polyphonic Playground’ performance, where the audience sat cross-legged on the floor of a raw, unfinished space. The whole site has been completely transformed. There’s acres of retail space, canal-side bars and dozens of hanger-sized studios – blank canvases begging to be bedecked by creative minds.

Despite myriad changes across the campus, the pre-existing industrial-edge remains intact, fitting for the Hackney location. Stoic, concrete walls abound. A sense of eeriness surrounding the site also remains, having laid largely dormant since the London Olympics, when it housed the world’s media. It won’t be this way for long. Already, the cavernous studios are being filled with forward-thinking residents, including The Bartlett School of Architecture, and innovation hub Plexal, which hosts a multitude of agile technology start-ups.

McGregor fits right into this technology driven community. ‘At Studio Wayne McGregor, we share the belief that the arts are a nexus for intersections of knowledge. No walls, no restrictions, no rules – simply free,’ McGregor explains. ‘We wanted to create a making space that engendered these ideals.’ The king of collaborations sought the help of the innovative We Not I to help bring the studios to life.

We Not I share Studio Wayne McGregor’s conceptual approach. Unusually, it keeps the identity of its designers and architects completely anonymous, and its enigmatic website contains nothing more than three words in the centre of the screen: ‘nothing between us’. The mysterious firm did let us in on a few secrets from the design process. ‘In place of a brief, we received a proposition from Wayne,’ one of the designers told Wallpaper*. The proposal was to create a space ‘where the body and architecture are mutually defined at the limits of each other’.

It’s ambitious stuff – but million-mile-an-hour McGregor doesn’t tend to do things by halves. The space is so large that a freestanding architectural structure has been created within it. Inside, along with the largest dedicated dance studio in Europe, a multi-level network of slim corridors and staircases open out on white-washed oceans of world-class rehearsal space.

Outside, the structure’s facade has pockets of architectural interest, texture and intrigue at every turn, in the form of a glass mezzanine balcony, cutout skylights and a three-tone wood finish. Inside, the clean and minimal studios provide a blank canvas for the dancers to work from. The outcome, We Not I explain, is a ‘repeatedly rehearsed, performed, reconfigured space. It’s a continuous project altered daily’. McGregor was involved at every step, and continues to stand firmly at the helm of what he calls a ‘collaborative adventure’.

If you needed further proof that this is not your typical dance studio, look to the expansive white walls that stretch the length and breadth of the hanger (outside the freestanding structure). They are festooned by blinking, technology-themed artworks – on loan from Lisson Gallery – including pieces by Tatsuo Miyajima and Haroon Mirza. Or look to what’s below your feet in the meeting room – a bespoke, tessellating floor based on a work by Bauhaus artist Anni Albers.

As conceptual as it is, the studio complex also manages to be homely and welcoming. There's a kitchen with a well-stocked fridge, gym equipment for anyone to use and quiet seating areas hidden behind partition walls.

It’s a space to be inspired by. Fittingly, it's home to two new outreach initiatives from Studio Wayne McGregor. Firstly, FreeSpace offers 25 artists per year 5,000 hours of free access to studio spaces for rehearsal, research and creation. In return, FreeSpace artists will trade their time and expertise to deliver arts projects in the community. Secondly, PEER is a mentoring programme for final year vocational dance students and recent graduates. Annually, it will offer six participants a year long mentorship programme with Studio Wayne McGregor dancers.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Wayne McGregor website

ADDRESS

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
London E20 3BS

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Wisdom, wit and the right amount of weirdness are three things that come naturally to moustacheod artist Gavin Turk. The original YBA is known for his radical approach to contemporary sculpture, his vocal politics, and his talent for mimicry – in the halcyon days of the early 90s he impersonated everyone from punks to Pollock.

It’s unsurprising then, that Turk finds himself friendly with similarly avant-guard creative minds. Enter experimental theatre director Patrick Eakin Young. Known for his contemporary operas – sometimes harrowing, othertimes hilarious – Eakin Young heads up London-based theatre company Erratica. The likely duo were ‘pushed together by friends’ back in 2014, when they joined forces on a three-part production, Triptych, to great critical acclaim. Turk’s ‘exhibition-like’ set comprised theatrical recreations of his renowned trompe-l'oeil works, which doubled as props for the actors.

During a rehearsal of Eakin Yong’s upcoming production Remnants, the two artmakers – and friends – met for a catch-up to a backdrop of rhapsodic opera singers and metronomic sound engineers.

Patrick Eakin Young: What are you currently working on?

Gavin Turk: I just got back from an opening in Amsterdam’s Museum Van Loon where I have created a whole exhibition based around tulips, particularly Turkish tulips. As well as my own pieces, there’s a portfolio of works by other artists in the show. After, the show will move to the Bowes Museum in County Durham this summer. Alongside this, we have just had a kind of ‘tulip baptism’ in London.

PEY: What on earth is a tulip baptism?

GT: As of this week, I will have my own species of tulip.

PEY: What have you called it?

GT: Gavin Turkish. The flower farmers and the registrar initially vetoed the name, saying that there were too many tulips which were called Turk or Turkish. But when they realised my name was actually Gavin Turk, they couldn't resist. So this week – at The Print Room in London – there was a theatrical baptism. We had a stage act, and an exhibition of my tulip portfolio. I understand you’re also taking to the stage at The Print Room later this year?

PEY: Yes, Remnants starts its run there in June. I began conceptualising the piece two years ago, workshopping ideas around women’s neurosis and ghost stories. During research, I found a memoir written in the early 2000s by Courtney Angela Brkic. It had in it everything I wanted to say. It’s about her family, the Bosnian war, and her migration to America. In the 90s, she went back to Bosnia to become a part of the forensics team that were digging up the graves of those killed during the war. I wondered, ‘Why did she go back? What was she looking for?’

GT: It sounds interesting – but also heavy, without much get out. When we worked together on Triptych back in 2014, it had a jolly act in the middle, a tragic one at the end and an intriguing, questioning one at the beginning. Each of these components must pull together.

PEY: It is a heavy subject, and Remnants is a dark piece. But there are lighter ideas running through - like the music, which is a combination of original voice and traditional folk. We use something called klapa – a kind of warm, coastal, barbershop quartet, with lush vocal harmonies. So there’s balance. I don’t want to destroy my audience, but I want to make them think.

PEY: In the memoir, Brkic talks a lot about the separate cultures of Bosnia, and how they started drawing lines between themselves in the early 90s. It’s funny, I started working on this project two years ago – since then we’ve gone through Brexit and Trump. It reminds us that fissures in society can be aggravated. After Brexit, biking around London’s East End, as a Canadian immigrant myself, I felt paranoid.

GT: The general consensus round here was that we were going to stay inside the European Union. It was strange to find out the result, and it’s a confused state that we are in. As an artist, I always thought it was my job to be confused. Artists articulate confusion. Now that everyone is confused, perhaps every one is an artist! I don't know. Maybe that’s what works about creating art around difficult subjects at the moment. The audience can pitch it against their own life experience.

An early version of Remnants was performed last year at The Print Room in London, where it will return for a full run this June

PEY: Since working with you in 2014, I’ve been trying to render these ideas of confusion and disjointedness in each project I do. I want to surprise people with my contemporary, experimental genre of opera. After Triptych, I staged a production in the MET museum in New York, called La Celestina (2015). I like the interaction between artworks and my productions. For instance we’re making a concert performance of Remnants on Friday at the Marian Goodman gallery, in amongst Annette Messager's exhibition on uteruses – which will probably be a perfect setting!

GT: Yes – it’s great when the set (whether immersive or otherwise) can become like an additional character. In the production we worked on together, I tried to create a set that acted as the fourth part of the triptych.

PEY: What I loved about your Tripytch set was its use of your own artistic practice. It featured your interest in copying or forgery. Your painted bronzes look so much like the real thing, but there’s something fake about them. Like with Bag – it almost looks like a real trash bag – but not quite. It’s like when you Google translate something over and over again, it shapeshifts and starts to tell its own story. That was kind of what I was trying to do with my theatre company – create something disjointed from opera in the traditional sense. Do you have plan to create a theatre set again?

GT: Nothing solid yet. Triptych was my first theatre commission, but you look into art history and find countless artists have worked on theatre sets. Think Dada and David Hockney. Picasso did a whole load of them. But generally it seems to be ‘make a large artwork’, and then the performance happens in front of it. Maybe that’s okay.

PEY: I’d like to create something where the art is the starting point, and allow the drama to flow from there.

INFORMATION

Remnants runs at The Print Room from 12 June – 1 July. ‘Turkish Tulips: Gavin Turk’ is on view at Museum Van Loon until 29 May. For more information, visit the Erratica website and Gavin Turk’s website

ADDRESS

The Print Room
103 Notting Hill Gate
London W11 3LB

Museum Van Loon
Keizersgracht 672
1017 ET Amsterdam

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Something has been brewing outside the Switch House. From our perch at Wallpaper* HQ – located directly opposite Tate Modern – we've seen a flurry of activity on the South Terrace. Early this week, somewhat disconcertingly, great clouds of white smoke began billowing from the curved parameter walls, punctuated by a series of alien white lights.

It turns out, it wasn't the landing of some extra-terrestrial space ship. Technical staff were testing a major new installation from 83-year-old Japanese fog-sculptor Fujiko Nakaya, which launches officially today. Nakaya, who first came to prominence through her collaboration with Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) in 1970, has been working with water vapour for over 40 years. Her misty moments have adorned bridges in Bristol, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and Philip Johnson's Glass House. This particular amorphous work acts as a barometer, reading shifts in atmospheric conditions – sometimes producing a faint mist, other times rocketing out great puffs of smoke. Of the work, Nakaya says: 'Nature controls herself. I try and let nature speak.'

Like all great fogs, Nakaya's work is concealing something. Underneath, in the Switch House Tanks, performative works are already installed. Hosted by artist in residence Isabel Lewis, the curated programme of live events – dubbed 'Ten Days Six Nights' – begins today. Lewis has transformed the usually stark Tanks Foyer into a kind of Brutalist botanical garden; a serene surrounding in which Lewis will welcome visitors, microphone in hand, while conceptual dancers perform around her.

At this point, performance art naysayers might head to the bar (or out onto the terrace to be consumed by the fog). But the programme of events is so diverse, there's bound to be something for everyone. Spread among the atmospheric South Tank, East Tank and Transformer Galleries, artists range in age (from 32 to 83), nationality (from Japan to the Dominican Republic) and work in every conceivable media. Even the most miserable skeptics will raise an eyebrow to Lorenzo Senni's funky neon trance installation.

It's a wide reaching project, in line with the institution's ambitious itinerary of 'Tate Live' events, which began in 2012. But, says director of exhibitions Achim Borchardt-Hume, it's essential to an institution's programming to feature live art. It's what the public want. 'In our connected, digital age, artists and audiences are ever more fascinated by live experiences, shared in the moment with those around them.' With this in mind, to fully appreciate 'Tate Live' events, we suggest you throw caution to the mist, and join in.

INFORMATION

'Ten Days Six Nights' is on view until 2 April. For more information, visit the Tate Modern website

ADDRESS

Tate Modern
Bankside
SE1 9TG

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Last November, Angela Missoni caught a performance of Romina de Novellis’ La Veglia in the Geneva home of collectors Julie Castoriano Bugnone and Edoardo Bugnone. The performance artist unravelled a web of yarn in the nude for a whole day, as a failed attempt at the liberation of the body. ‘You should be nearly entering the meditation that she is while she’s doing the knots,’ says Bugnone. ‘Listening to these traditional songs from the south of Italy that are sung in the local dialect.’

Raphael Castoriano, the founder of Kreëmart
and Missoni’s friend and art advisor, suggested that the fashion designer bring the performance to New York. The problem, was, she didn't have a house in the city. ‘I said, “No, we’re going to recreate the space”,’ recalls Angela. Castoriano was receptive, and called on his network to help fill the Missoni flagship store with art and furniture, while Angela provided her own personal possessions. Salotto Angela Missoni was born, with De Novellis’ performance inaugurating the space for the first three days. Part of the brand’s 'Surface Conversion' mission to merge art and fashion, the Kreëmart
-presented space will be open by invitation in Missoni’s Upper East Side boutique until 22 April.

Inside Raphael Castoriano and Angela Missoni's installation space, featuring Missoni poufs and a carpet by ABC

‘We wanted to create a salon so people would speak to each other and what you see here – some people talking, some people leaving, coming back,’ says Castoriano, who filled it with work by artists including Tracey Emin and Nir Hod – all practitioners held in Missoni’s collection. ‘My houses are very much alive, always between friends and family,’ she continues.

Upon entering the Salotto, which feels like a bohemian living room, guests are greeted by a photographic work by Mickalene Thomas. Further in stands a sculpture by Josephine Meckseper. Assouline coffee-table books fill the shelves, while exotic rugs cover the floors. Angela added her own trinkets, like vintage Missoni pillows, family photographs and even a Missoni Barbie doll. ‘I have sort of decoration, which is kind of eclectic,’ says Angela. ‘A mix of precious and less precious things – things that are precious for me.’

Both Castoriano and Missoni emphasised the need to keep the gatherings small, thus keeping it to a select group of friends and family. ‘It cannot be a crowded space,’ says Missoni. ‘We need to keep this intimate.’

INFORMATION
Salotto Angela Missoni is on view until 22 April. For more information, visit the Kreëmart website or the Missoni website

ADDRESS

Missoni
1009 Madison Ave
New York NY 10075

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Equal parts social experiment and exhibition, WORK by ESP TV inhabits Brooklyn creative space Pioneer Works’ entire main floor with a televisual installation of office life. For their most recent endeavour, ESP TV’s Scott Kiernan and Victoria Keddie take their experimental live television tapings and broadcast collaborations to the next level.

The six-week exhibition places the entire Pioneer Works’ staff into an office set where they will be filmed throughout the workday. The set itself is arranged to feel like a stereotypical office and is surrounded by movable chroma blue walls (which function as green screens and at times will have custom effects cast on them). ‘It’s a large, site-specific office sculpture,’ explains Kiernan. Meanwhile, ESP TV and their camera crew will be working around the office to film and produce each episode, which will be broadcast weekly on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

The set features modular blue chroma walls, which will at times have custom effects cast on them

The result disrupts the hierarchy of television—offering the viewer an equal view of the actors, crew, and behind-the-scenes production work. ‘It takes what you love from television, from theatre, from blooper reels and it forces you to acknowledge what is real and what is synthetic,’ says Keddie. Rather than distract from the daily routine of office life, Keddie and Kiernan lean into it, creating what curator David Everitt Howe describes as 'such a production for boring work, it shows the funny conceit of office labor’.

Although the ‘cast’ won’t be given dialogue (the voices the audience will hear will be Kiernan and Keddie producing the episode), the artists plugged the employees’ names and 32 production terms into an algorithm feed that creates an ongoing script of nonsensical camera commands that the employees can choose to follow or ignore. ‘We have so much reverence for machines today, and we wanted to show that there is no real relationship,’ Keddie says. 'The algorithm shows the absurdity of machines and their relationships as rigid, one-sided ones.’

Installation view of ’WORK’ at Pioneer Works

Other playful touches, such as commercial jingles by sound artist Suzanne Ciani (famous for her creation of Coca Cola’s ‘Pop ’n Pour’ sound) played each hour and a satirical audio tour of the space, complete the improbable, charmingly absurd series. However, ‘what will actually happen over the next six weeks, we don’t know,’ says Keddie. ‘It’s all about the presence of live.’

INFORMATION

WORK is on view until 26 March. For more information, visit the ESP TV website

ADDRESS

159 Pioneer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231

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