A colossal wave crashing onto the two-sided rectangular LED display on the external façade of COEX in Seoul’s Gangnam district was a sight that captivated many Seoulites. They stopped to stare, mesmerised, into a three-dimensional tank of screens that offered a cathartic visual experience.

On the other side of the world, a larger-than-life waterfall flowed in the middle of Times Square in New York, stealing the show amid the visual noise of its surroundings. 

WAVE (2020) and Waterfall-NYC (2021) by South Korean digital media design company d’strict are two of many public artworks that astonished crowds amidst the pandemic and catapulted the firm to fame with their instantly-recognisable, captivating aesthetic. Both pieces were created using anamorphic illusion, a type of projection technique used to create an illusion of depth and three-dimensionality. 

While d’strict now frequently collaborates with big-name brands, a’strict – the artistic arm of the company – is open to digital media artists from both within d’strict and outside. A’strict functions as an art collective creating non-commercial artwork with more creative freedom.

‘Among our projects, WAVE was the most popular. I think it came from the unexpectedness of the artwork in the middle of the city. No one would expect a wave to be there and to be so real,’ said Sang Jin Lee, vice president at d’strict. ‘Timing worked well for us because we became well-known during the pandemic. Waves and waterfalls in the middle of the city provided solace and were a stress reliever for many, in times of frustration. I think this made our work connect with the audience,’ she says.

Starry Beach (2020), exhibited at Kukje Gallery in Seoul in September 2020, is an example. Maximising sight and sound, a’strict created an intuitive and immersive beach experience, which enthusiastic visitors queued for hours to see. Morando (2021), which was shown at the much-acclaimed ‘LUX: New Wave of Contemporary Art’ show at London’s 180 The Strand, uses an X-ray technique to depict infinitely blooming peonies and the ethereal cycle of life. 

‘A’strict focuses on intuitive artwork which can be enjoyed without prior knowledge of art and something that can resonate with people’s everyday lives,’ Lee explains. ‘Nature is a theme that people can intuitively resonate with and immerse in, and also gives them a sense of comfort.’

Through immersive digital art installations, both d’strict and a’strict aim to bring nature closer to people’s lives. D’strict’s own exhibition space, Arte museum, is structured around nature-orientated themes such as ‘beach’, ‘wave’, ‘waterfall’, ‘forest’, ‘flower’, ‘garden’, and ‘jungle’, to name a few. The museums are currently located in Jeju, Busan, Gangneung and Yeosu in Korea, with d’strict’s first overseas branch having debuted in Hong Kong in October 2022. Plans for 2023 include museums in Las Vegas, New York, Los Angeles, and Chengdu. 

As well as anamorphic illusion, generative art technology is also an integral part of a’strict’s work. A recent collaboration with crypto artist duo Hackatao resulted in Spirit Forest Incanto, in which a reindeer changes its colour subject to the movement and behaviour of visitors. The colour of the reindeer – red, green, yellow, etc. – is responsive to how visitors walk towards them or touch them. Using code, the reindeer can generate multiple appearances that shift based on subjective input.

A’strict will soon launch a flower project titled Mugunghwa, which uses generative technology to produce multiple variations of Korea’s national flower. The aim is to create 815 different variations of the flower to be sold as NFT editions, meaning that each collector can own a unique version. The flower will be incubated and exhibited from the seed stage in one museum, then presented as a blossomed flower in a travelling show across Arte museums across Korea.

‘Using a technology called real-time engine, the flower will be coded to bloom and die continuously and change its colours. The characteristic of generative art is that there is no beginning and end. The work keeps moving,’ said Lee. 

‘For example, if we code to create five red flowers in five types of shapes with five different stems, we will have multiple random variations possible within this setting. We can also program it to reflect the reality, such as when it snows, the flower will be white, if it rains, it will turn yellow and so on.’

D’strict also has a crypto art project arm called Arte Meta under which these NFT projects are handled. 

The digital revolution in generative art emerged due to NFTs, says Lee. ‘For NFT artworks, many of them have to be mass-produced and often each one represents each person’s identity so each work would have to be unique. Unfortunately, it is difficult to create 10,000 different variations of an artwork,’ she said. 

‘People started using generative technology to produce random variations of works. What differentiates generative art from randomness, however, is that combinations will be made from pre-coded settings.’

D’strict’s next project will touch on environmental issues. ‘Ice’ will be a work of anamorphic illusion of the arctic melting, exhibited at one of its Arte museums. ‘It won’t be an explicit statement on saving the environment, but it can send a message indirectly,’ said Lee. 

dstrict.com; kukjegallery.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

INFORMATION

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

Coinciding with World AIDS Day 2021, a new art film by AA Bronson and General Idea will be ‘virally transmitted’ on screens around the world. VideoVirus, a hypnotic, text-based video animation will poignantly mark 40 years since the HIV/AIDS disease was first recorded in 1981, and has been created in collaboration with UNAIDS and Terrence Higgins Trust. Presented by Circa on billboards in London, Seoul and Tokyo, the project comes as international health organisations continue to strive towards achieving zero new HIV transmissions by 2030.

The film will be presented daily from 1–30 December 2021 on London’s Piccadilly Lights (20:21 GMT), Seoul’s Coex K-Pop Square (20:21 KST), and Tokyo’s Yunika Vision (09:00 JST), as well as on the Circa website. 

General Idea, an art collaboration between AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, was first formed in Toronto in 1969. The group’s provocative, activist imagery confronted social power structures and experimented with traditional creative formats. 

The installation reimagines their seminal work, Imagevirus, first initiated in 1987 for a global audience. The project was a powerful reworking of Robert Indiana’s iconic Love design of 1966. In sculptures, paintings, videos, posters and shows, General Idea famously substituted the word ‘LOVE’ for ‘AIDS’, rendering starkly visible a then largely ignored crisis. In 1994, both Partz and Zontal passed away from AIDS-related causes. 

‘General Idea first developed the concept of viral images in the early 1970s. In the mid-1980s that work became prophetically and tragically true, with the appearance of the HIV virus. In 1987 we exhibited our first AIDS painting and papered lower Manhattan with AIDS posters in the hope of making the image indeed viral,’ said AA Bronson, an artist, healer, curator and sole surviving member of the General Idea art group.

‘Thirty-five years later, and marking the 40th anniversary of AIDS first being recorded, I am honoured to join the Circa platform with this reimagined VideoVirus. General Idea's VideoVirus replicates the spread of HIV to the four corners of the world; it expands General Idea's signature theme of ‘image as virus’ for a global audience.’

Alongside the film, two new prints by AA Bronson + General Idea will be available to purchase via the Circa website. Sales proceeds will be invested in the #Circaeconomy, a circular model that supports their free public art programme and creates life-changing opportunities for the art and culture community.

Harnessing art as a catalyst to reduce stigmas and minimise the risk of people contracting HIV, Circa will also seek to educate audiences online via a programme of talks and informative videos guest-curated by new LGBTQ+ charity and new London-based arts hub Queercircle. To honour the collaboration, a #Circaeconomy grant of £5,000 has been awarded to Queercircle who will deliver an artist-led participatory residency and exhibition with an HIV positive person during their Winter 2022 season.

INFORMATION

circa.art

In partnership with Oppo

Nurturing the concept of technology as an art form, the Oppo Renovators Project for emerging artists – the initiative of smartphone innovator Oppo, its name inspired by the brand’s Reno series phone – launched in 2019. Here, we showcase works by the project’s 2021 winners and outstanding entrants. 

The project’s message? Designers and artists are no different from everyone else. Everyone should leverage the power of technology, facilities, materials and creative talent to bravely express themselves. Everyone can be, and is, an artist.

Oppo: pursuing technological artistry

Ever since the launch of its first, Smiley Face mobile phone, in 2008, Oppo has pursued the perfect synergy of aesthetic satisfaction and innovative technology. On a mission to elevate life through technological artistry, while striving to be a sustainable company contributing to a better world (the brand was one of the first to join a pan-industry Eco Rating labelling scheme, in May 2021, to give transparency to customers), the technology company now provides a wide range of devices – from earphones to a watch and a fitness band – spearheaded by the Oppo Find and Reno phone series. 

Oppo Renovators 2021 Emerging Artists Project: the brief

For its 2021 Renovators project, working with the theme of light, Oppo created two categories, Art Tech and Art Toy. For Art Tech, Oppo encouraged participants to submit conceptual proposals, creative research, and ideas for business incubation that would bring together the worlds of art, science and technology. The Art Toy track found Oppo encouraging participants to tender artworks based on the concept and image of Oppo’s mascot Ollie – a virtual guardian of emerging artists’ dreams.

The project saw 3,345 individual entries submitted by emerging artists based in 40 countries. Topics included technology, humanity, environmental protection, biology, history, social interaction, and current trends, while the works produced spanned digital media, interactive experiences, stage installations, wearable devices, and biological and material designs.  

Through their submissions – including outstanding pieces that were showcased at London Design Festival 2021 in September – the emerging artists demonstrated their distinct views on a wide range of issues, reflecting the connection between humans, technology and nature, and how technology and art can create a better future for all. 

Meet winners and outstanding artists

Explore works by some of the winners and outstanding entrants of the Oppo Renovators Emerging Artists Project 2021 below. Wallpaper* took the opportunity to talk to some of the talents, asking each of them what inspired them to become an artist, as well as if they see themselves as an artist.

Chengxiu Yin

Work: Point to Planet: perceiving nature with light (in collaboration with Hengyue Zhao) 
Winner: 2021 Artistic Creativity Award

‘I’m currently studying at the School of Design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts [in Beijing]. Studying art has improved my taste and eye for design, but right now, I don’t see myself as mature enough to be called an artist. Being called an “artist” is just a label – my hope is for my work to receive more attention and recognition so that other people see me as an artist.’

Xinyi Zhao

Work: Dreamcatcher 
Winner: 2021 Future Design Award

‘I’ve studied art for 17 years now, and I’ve been creating art for almost four years. My friends and relatives around me usually describe me as “an excellent student”, “good at my job”, and someone who “creates beautiful art”, but no one thinks of me as an artist. I don't consider myself an artist either, because I have not reached the level of an artist, so I call myself a designer.’

Jelle Valk – WERC Collective

Work: AR Graffiti
Winner: 2021 Creative Excellence Award

‘I was inspired to be an artist by my great grandfather, who was a sculptor. I liked the quiet environment, and the artistry is just right for me, so it was a natural fit.’ 

Liang Xiao

Work: Autonomy of Plants
Winner: 2021 Creative Excellence Award

‘When I exhibited in London in 2018, I was already communicating with the audience as an artist. Identifying in this way felt natural and extremely positive, I felt completely awakened spiritually! After my parents saw the change in me, they became really supportive of my decision to pursue art professionally.’

Peter William Holden

Work: AutoGene 
Winner: 2021 Creative Excellence Award

‘The moment that one defines oneself as an artist is the moment one becomes an artist, and what you do after that results in whether society defines you as an artist. I realised I was an artist shortly after I moved to Germany [from the UK], but at that time, without parental support and financial resources, I faced a difficult situation. I remember one time when I had just finished a kinetic sculpture and the only money I had was to buy food or pay the exhibition fee for the sculpture. I chose to pay the exhibition fee without hesitation! I‘m not sure if I’m an artist.’

Petko Tanchev

Work: Stems
Winner: 2021 Shortlist Award 

‘I'm an artist by nature. Making art allows me to be myself and to use my mind and skills to shape things, and I love that freewheeling lifestyle. My mother is also an artist, and we often discuss our creations together.’

Noriyuki Suzuki

Work: *
Winner: 2021 Shortlist Award 

‘I've actually been calling myself an artist for 15 years, but I still don't feel quite qualified. I love reading stories in all forms – they were my refuge when I was young and my inspiration for making art. My parents sponsored me to finish art college in Japan, and I’m now based in Germany where I make art.’

Youhong (Friendred) Peng

Work: Skin-awareness
Winner: 2021 Shortlist Award

‘I loved sketching when I was young. At the time, this was art to me. Years later, I saw the “Rain Room” exhibition [by Random International at Yuz Museum Shanghai in 2015), which completely changed my understanding of art, so I started to go to metal workshops for inspiration and to try to make art. My family didn’t support me to study art – they didn’t see the value in it – but I finally went to London to study on my own. Now I am teaching in London and have my own studio. I’m not really an artist.’

Daniel Karaj

Work: Cymatic Projections
Winner: 2021 Shortlist Award 

‘My family has always encouraged a balance between the technical and the creative. I don’t think it’s necessary to be a full-time artist with big physical works. Alongside art I have also worked at Google as a software engineer.’

From conversations with the entrants, we can conclude that artists are no different from the rest of us. They have joys, worries, and are moved by the world around them. Becoming an artist, to express our emotions and create from the things we perceive around us, requires bravery. With this courage, there’s an artist in all of us waiting to be discovered. 

Oppo Renovators 2021 Project: full list of interviewed artists 

• AR Graffiti, by Jelle Valk – WERC Collective , 2021 Creative Excellence Award
• AutoGene, by Peter William Holden, 2021 Creative Excellence Award
• Autonomy of Plants, by Liang Xiao, 2021 Creative Excellence Award
• Cymatic Projections, by Daniel Karaj, 2021 Shortlist Award 
• Point to Planet: perceiving nature with light, by Hengyue Zhao & Chengxiu Yi, 2021 Artistic Creativity Award
• Dreamcatcher, by Xinyi Zhao, 2021 Future Design Award
• Light High, by Jacqueline Hen, 2021 Best Performance Award 
• Stems, by Petko Tanchev, 2021 Shortlist Award INSIDE / OUTSIDE, by Dariusz Makaruk, 2021 Shortlist Award
• Parasite 寄, by Yajun Shi, 2021 Best Performance Award
• Skin-awareness, by Youhong (Friendred) Peng, 2021 Shortlist Award
• Splice, by Yiming Yang, 2021 Shortlist Award
• Xiang Phase, by Haozhe (Seph) Li, 2021 Shortlist Award
• *, by Noriyuki Suzuki, 2021 Shortlist Award 

INFORMATION

campus.oppo.com

The Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement, delayed by a year by the pandemic, is a unique event in more ways than one. Since director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Andrea Bellini, took over in 2012, all the featured work has been commissioned specifically for the biennial. Each iteration is co-curated by Bellini and an outside curator of his choosing, this time the New York-based collective DIS.

‘I think the big difference between DIS and all the other curators in the art world is that they have a constant dialogue with the artists they work with, it's a family, it's a community,’ Bellini says.

‘A Goodbye Letter, A Love Call, A Wake Up Song’ comprises 15 works, the majority of which have been made during the pandemic, satisfying a need to mirror the moment, unprecedented in our lifetimes. Artists including Camille Henrot, Juliana Huxtable & Hannah Black, Telfar, Will Benedict & Steffen Jørgensen, Mandy Harris Williams, and Leah Hennessey & Emily Allan raise questions about hierarchies, in terms of identity, finance, race, gender and even species.

According to Lauren Boyle of DIS, the curatorial process was a fluid one, as film is a collaborative medium, which led to a cross-pollination as some artists contributed to each other’s work. As a result, there is a consensus in the messages behind the works. 

The industrial space has been divided up to embody a ‘hotel’ for the art on view, with each installation inhabiting its own room with a small porthole you can peer through before entering. The dark curtained corridors are dimly lit by works from Grau’s Fire, 2021, a series of light sculptures. Large lozenge-shaped, throbbing orbs of red and blue light guide you through the hotel. This evokes a feeling of existing inside a screen, as the works play with the sense of reality as they mark the way through the darkness from film to film.

Everything But The World, 2021 created by DIS, defies the nebulous space we have until now occupied. A historical tour guide deconstructs ideas about feminism and witchcraft, satirical internet personalities Wit and Banter ask us if we know ‘that most fossils are actually unhappy with their condition’, and a White Castle burger-joint drive-through operator lectures his customers about late-stage capitalism as they wait for their food. An overarching narrative is provided by artist and filmmaker Leilah Weinraub, who plays the role of Shock Jock, leaving us with the question ‘Why are you mad?’

The sending up of manifesto and performative identity is a common theme. Mandy Harris Williams’ Couture Critiques looks at performative intellectualism, asking why we need to perform ideas and what doing this via social media can do to their content and meaning. 

Juliana Huxtable & Hannah Black and And Or Forever debunk the hierarchy of species in Penumbra, 2021, a reworking of the original play staged at Performance Space New York. Elsewhere, Simon Fujiwara talks about identity politics outside the digital space in Who is Who? 2021, and Will Benedict & Steffen Jørgensen tackle our relationship with food and digestion. Leah Hennessey & Emily Allan’s film Illuminati Detectives in which Byron and Shelley investigate the paranormal for the Illuminati brings some serious laughs. 

All the works, although often laced with humour, challenge the infrastructure of our lives and inherent identities – from Akeem Smith’s Social Cohesiveness, and Telfar’s TELFARTV, 2021 a live stream, to Theo Anthony’s exploration of the narrative of police body-cam footage. Anthony’s project is serialised on DIS.art, where there are continuations of certain works.

There is something deeply liberating about experiencing work dealing with themes brought into relief by the pandemic. Whether overloading, confusing, life re-assessing, identity re-evaluating or simply offering a chance to step back, universal questions are captivatingly parsed through this exhibition.

INFORMATION

Biennale de l'Image en Mouvement 2021: ‘A Goodbye Letter, A Love Call, A Wake Up Song’, until 30 January, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. centre.ch

This week, the Opéra Garnier in Paris is vibrating with strange sounds, at once contemporary and primitive, first composed by the British artist Oliver Beer in response to a crisis. 

In 2017, Beer was in the bowels of the Sydney Opera House, exploring its sound frequencies as part of a residency, when activists climbed the building’s façade to protest against the conditions of refugees on Manus Island. Though Beer was sympathetic to their cause, the protest wreaked havoc with his plans. Since the opera house was a national monument, the national guard showed up, found Beer and his singers rehearsing in the foundations, and kicked them out as a potential security threat. Beer managed to sneak his way back in, but was ultimately locked out, and had to quickly come up with a plan B.

Exploring the acoustics in architecture

Trained as a musical composer, Beer (who created a ‘Vessel Orchestra’ for his 2019 solo show at the Met Breuer) works with the acoustic fingerprints of architecture, asking vocalists to stimulate their natural harmonics. ‘Since I was a kid, I could hear the notes of buildings,’ he says, explaining that a room is like a seashell, constantly making its own sounds. 

When he found himself on the wrong side of the Sydney Opera House, he led his four local singers to an external nook of the building, then asked them to lock lips and treat each other’s bodies as architecture. ‘The acoustic space that they’re working with is the empty mouth of the other person that they’re singing through.’

Because their mouths created a seal, he says that sound could only come out through their noses. ‘Something wild and magical happened. It was like a third voice appeared at the meeting point of those two voices. They were literally playing each other’s faces like instruments.’

Beer asked them to sing the first piece of music they could remember hearing in childhood. In Australia, with its complicated history, that request brought layers of significance (on top of the fact that the Sydney Opera House is built on sacred Indigenous land). One male singer sang an Aboriginal song whose words had been lost along with its language, while his singing partner sang a Christian missionary song he learned in the 1970s. 

An immersive sound and video installation at Opéra Garnier in Paris

The artist filmed the experience for five or six hours, then distilled it into two short films, called Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me). At the Opéra Garnier, he has installed the work as an immersive sound installation for the first time. It is in the Espace Devialet, a room off the foyer outfitted with Gold Phantom Opéra de Paris speakers, renowned for their exceptional sound. A video screen sits at one end of the room, facing a round red velvet banquette and surrounded by a small army of space-age speakers.

The first video starts, a close-up of the two men locking lips, each one singing in turn while the other maintains the harmony, their voices vibrating together like spiritual chanting. Eyes closed, they look like they are kissing. The speakers’ woofers flutter silently like wings along with the music.

In the second video, the female singers tilt their heads a little more, their noses flaring as they breathe. Each holds her hand to her ear to hear her voice, and in close-up it appears that she is gently cupping the other woman’s face. The performance is extremely intimate – but then again, the human voice is an intimate thing. ‘We are constantly penetrating each other, making voices vibrate’ says Beer.

Architecturally, the opulent 19th-century Opéra Garnier is the polar opposite of its counterpart in Sydney. ‘It is exciting to push a building like that to express itself in a different way,’ says Beer, and he recalls taking a walk around the space while they were setting up the installation. ‘This sound piece is super loud, and it echoes throughout the entire building. So as you walk through these extraordinary corridors, the sounds of these embracing singers make every atom in the building vibrate in synchronicity with a sound that came from the other side of the world.’

INFORMATION

Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me), until 2 October 2021, Espace Devialet, Opéra Garnier, Paris. Entry is free, tickets can be booked here

The installation is part of Paris Art and Engagement week, organised by Thanks for Nothing, a non-profit association that delivers artistic and solidarity-driven projects with a major impact on society.

oliverbeer.co.uk

Surfacing from the industrial brutalist labyrinth that is 180 The Strand, it’s customary to feel like your senses have been through the wash a few times. But after Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s new solo show, your eyes can hear, and your nose can see. 

This does not feel like an exhibition, it feels like a sensory assault course that one does not view, one survives.

Presented by The Vinyl Factory and Fact magazine in collaboration with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, this is Ikeda’s largest show in Europe to date. Five years in the pipeline, it features six global premieres and five works shown in the UK for the first time. Under normal circumstances, an artist might adapt their work to fit a building; in this case, the building has been reconfigured for the artist. But as we soon learn, there’s little normality to be found here. 

The first thing of extraordinary visual note in this subterranean maze happens in ‘room 3’; spectra III, co-commissioned for the 2019 Venice Biennale, is a tube-like corridor saturated on all sides with searingly white LED light. The experience verges on optical pain, but never quite crosses the threshold. It’s an addictive discomfort that leaves you hungry for more, and oh my, does Ikeda oblige. 

In the following room, a wasp gets inside your ear. A (continuum) is a sonic work that plays what it says on the tin: six ‘super directional’ SB-1 Meyer speakers tuned to the note of A (concert pitch) modulate and undulate in a semi-abrasive soundtrack unique for each visitor. That would explain the wasp.  

Next up, an unavoidable void pulsates at you: point of no return turns out to be both the title and a warning. As Ikeda explains, ‘point of no return is a very simple, very intense piece. I paint a black circle on a wall and project light around it, and this intensifies its blackness. It feels like it's always firing, you get a bit scared. It becomes overwhelming.’ If these are the words of its creator, there’s little hope for anyone seeing this for the first time. Is this abyss, nirvana or purgatory? Whatever it is, it’s strobing so hard you can’t stay for long. This must be a pitstop to elsewhere, but soon even that becomes a recurring thought. 

Film of point of no return at 180 The Strand. WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES

Now that we are officially past the exhibition’s point of no return, we may as well accept our fate, which first arrives in the monumental form of data-verse trilogy, commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary in 2015. Of the works so far, this is the least physically intrusive. Conceptually, it’s a different story. Ikeda has condensed the whole world onto three screens; a symphonic, data-driven suite attempting to encompass all scales in nature, from elementary particles to the universe.

The artist uses colossal scientific data sets from a variety of sources, including Nasa, Cern, and the Human Genome Project, which are then processed, transcribed, converted, transformed, de/re/meta-constructed (no, me neither) and orchestrated to form sonic and visual output – so pretty straightforward stuff. 

The screens almost shudder with computer code, which seems to snarl as it scrolls; then come bones, bodies, motherboards, sped-up brain scans, graphs and coordinates, webs, maps and molecules. Suddenly it all feels too medical, too data-ry, too current, too soon. 

In a marginally similar thematic vein, the penultimate room hosts data.flux, a brand new piece created specifically for the show. This is yet another example of Ikeda’s mathematical precision, technological prowess and deep understanding of the human sensory system and its limits. Using genome and DNA codes, the artist offers a physical and sensory exploration of the data that surrounds, informs and shapes our existence, and it’s all happening on the ceiling. 

Ikeda leaves the showstopper until last: test pattern is what we all came to see, the artist's populist masterwork. He describes the piece as ‘like a concert. It’s very physical and abstract. The soundtrack is a signification of pure data, it’s very brutal, very strong.’ Viewers are invited to physically step onto, or into, a floor flickering with black and white imagery that floats and convulses in barcode and binary patterns harvested from text, sounds, photos and films. When you finally step off, it’s like experiencing solid ground after three hours on a trampoline. 

With this show, Ikeda doesn’t politely request your attention, he gets inside your head and plays your eardrum like a snare. In brief, the whole experience might be comparable to watching sci-fi thriller Cube (1997) to a soundtrack by Crystal Castles while at the tail end of a bad trip.

When you eventually emerge, there’s euphoria. Not just because you’ve seen good art – which you undoubtedly have – but because you’re alive.

Film of Ryodi Ikeda discussing his piece test pattern, now on show at 180 The Strand, London. WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES 

INFORMATION

‘Ryoji Ikeda', until 18 September 2021, 180 Studios, 180 The Strand

180thestrand.com

ryojiikeda.com

ADDRESS

180 Strand
London WC2R 1EA

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Lurking deep in an alleyway in Kingston is a curious, and possibly even enlightening sight. The subject of Echolocation, Mat Collishaw’s first permanent public installation in the UK is Kingston’s All Saints Church, a site that has borne witness to many a milestone moment in English history. 

The original chapel, now long gone, was the coronation site of several Saxon kings including Athelstan, who, in 925, was crowned the first king of a unified England. ‘These kings weren’t crowned because they were nice guys, [people] assumed that they were divine,’ says the British artist via Zoom from his Camberwell studio and home, a former pub. ‘I wanted to interrogate the space and its spiritual allure.’

The church survived Henry VIII’s reformation and witnessed Kingston’s evolution from scattered settlement to modern-day town. Collishaw’s task was a multifaceted one: to excavate almost a millennium of Kingston’s history and create something, as he puts it, ‘coherent, accessible and engaging and not didactic or information heavy.’ 

The result is an eleven-meter-long, three-channel video installation now on view at the Undercroft, a long alleyway that runs between the river Thames and All Saints Church.

Collishaw used architect-grade 3D laser scanning (Lidar) to resurrect the church in an eerie, spectral haze. Like an X-Ray, these skeletal white shards, rendered in microscopic detail and toying with negative and positive space, feel simultaneously tangible, and not of this world. ‘You can see the architecture, but you can also see through the architecture,’ says Collishaw, who meticulously scanned the interior and exterior of the modern-day church building, now an amalgam of architectural styles. 

In the process, the artist drew on yet another parallel with the town - a bat conservation area - the mysterious echolocation method used by the nocturnal animal to navigate. ‘It’s a high-tech way of reading, navigating and plotting out space, so there is a synergy between those things,’ he says. Collishaw casts a translucent bat as his animated protagonist in this otherworldly tale, gliding through the deserted church in eerie solitude. With video recordings of bats mid-flight few and far between, 3D-modelling its body, recreating its distinctive movement and plotting its journey through the church’s interior was easier said than done. ‘I’m constantly looking at frames of people or animals moving and how that can break down,’ says the artist, who collaborated with Kingston University’s animation department on the project. ‘Bats are so quick, so they are the worst possible animal to track.’

Accompanying the perpetually-looping installation is a composition comprising solo cello overlaid with a virtual choir and a soundtrack of bat noises. Ordinarily, when the flying mammals use echolocation, humans are only able to discern the occasional, very faint click. Slowed down, as Collishaw has done here, these clicks become perceptible to the human ear; endearing chirps with distinct tonal progressions.

Beyond its technical feats, the piece is a commentary on sacred space, a theme the artist’s work has long explored. Growing up in a highly religious environment, Collishaw talks of the similarities between the roles of gallery and church: ‘[in a gallery] everything is just pushed to one side and you can meditate on Carl Andre’s pile of bricks, or whatever you're there for. You have a relationship with the artwork, whether it sings to you or not, or resonate or not.’

Collishaw also took Kingston’s prodigal son Eadweard Muybridge as his muse, the pioneer of stop-motion photography and whose work laid the groundwork for motion-picture projection. Muybridge was born in 1830 and christened Edward at All Saints, only later assuming the spelling Eadweard after the Saxon kings. He died, aged 74, a mile from the site of Collishaw’s installation.

The final piece of this complex web of sound and vision is the projection itself, cast onto a semi-transparent net-like mesh, another deft nod to Kingston’s history of fishing. 

Best experienced at dusk, Echolocation is a homage to Muybridge’s meticulous breakdown of physicality in motion, the rich history of Kingston, the mysterious prowess of bats and the ethereal beauty of sacred space.

INFORMATION

Echolocation, open daily until 11pm, was commissioned by Canadian and Riverside Estates Ltd, owners of Riverside Walk, Kingston. 

matcollishaw.com

ADDRESS

6 Riverside Walk
Kingston, KT1 1QN

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The Dia Art Foundation might always be first known for its idyllic premises upstate in Beacon, New York, but now it welcomes a new chapter in New York City with the reopening of its Chelsea foothold following an extensive two-year renovation. Armed with an expanded footprint that brings three of its former buildings together into one cohesive space, the new Dia Chelsea continues the institution’s history of repurposing and revitalising existing buildings. 

Designed by Architecture Research Office (ARO), Dia Chelsea retains the character of the original Chelsea neighbourhood which Dia has been a part of since the 1980s. Coming in at 32,500 sq ft, the gallery not only offers a substantial amount of street-level exhibition space (20,000 sq ft to be exact), but also has the capacity to host public performances and educational programmes (which it will conduct both in person and online). It also sees the return of the celebrated Dia Bookstore to New York City.

With such rare and dramatic environs on hand, Dia Chelsea suitably reopens with two new large-scale commissions by American artist Lucy Raven. Comprising a film Ready Mix (2021), and an installation from her Casters series (2021), the two projects address the formation and depiction of landscapes and civic spaces, specifically of the American West, and use abstraction as a means of giving them a fresh perspective. 

‘Dia’s mission has always been to help artists achieve ambitious projects. In a “post-pandemic” world where funding is scarce, this goal seems more important than ever and we have been expanding our collection and exhibition programme to include a greater breadth of artists,’ shares Dia’s director, Jessica Morgan. ‘The inaugural exhibition of new work by Lucy Raven has stemmed from more than four years of working closely with Raven and the resulting show is an investigation into film, perception, and the mythologies of the American West. In fact, all of the first exhibitions in Dia Chelsea are all with artists who are women, including Camille Norment and Delcy Morelos, which will similarly be the result of many years of collaboration. The approach of long-term conversation and support of artists remains our greatest priority.’

She continues, ‘Having exhibitions on view for extended periods offers the opportunity for long-term engagement; our exhibitions at Dia Chelsea will be on view for around nine months. We have also eliminated the admission fee at Dia Chelsea, so exhibitions will be permanently free to the public like all of our NYC sites. We felt this was incredibly important, both to encourage new visitors from the New York community, and to inspire repeat visits.’

‘We also have a distinct architectural approach in so far as we made a conscious decision with Dia Chelsea to preserve the unique qualities of these industrial buildings and not to build anew,’ she adds. ‘Our architects, ARO, have taken a ‘light touch’ approach to the buildings, retaining the natural light in the single-storey galleries from the skylights, as well as respecting the vernacular of the neighbourhood.’

‘The most challenging aspect of the Dia Chelsea renovation was designing three new facades to create an ensemble of distinct but related buildings,’ share ARO’s Kim Yao and Adam Yarinsky. ‘The design engages the scale and organisation of the internal spaces, addresses the functions of the openings for people and art and expresses the detailing of the brick walls. All of this comes together to present Dia’s identity, which is grounded in the character of the neighbourhood and the qualities of the existing buildings.’

In ARO’s hands, Dia’s legacy of creating exciting dialogues between art and architecture takes a more contemporary turn, particularly against the neighbourhood’s larger backdrop of soaring luxury residences that have sprung up in recent years. ARO’s work on Dia Chelsea is part of a longer-term collaboration, which includes the creation of Dia Soho, a new 2,500 sq ft exhibition space on Wooster Street, the revitalisation of two iconic Walter de Maria works, ‘The New York Earth Room’ (1977) and ‘The Broken Kilometer’ (1979) next door, and the expansion of the lower level at Dia Beacon and its surrounding landscape

‘For Dia (and in all our work) we believe that ‘design-centric’ means being strategic about what design means for Dia in terms of its history and mission and thereby define the role of architecture in the project,’ Yao and Yarinsky explain. ‘All our projects for Dia are connected by the fact that we frame our design approach to support Dia’s mission, which is centred on supporting the artists’ visions. The most visible thread is adapting and renewing the structure, materials, space and daylight of existing buildings (given Dia’s long history of adapting and reusing existing structures). Through this, the design of these buildings has reciprocity with the art.’

Morgan concludes, ‘Dia first established an exhibition space in  Chelsea  in 1987. With the opening of the new Dia Chelsea, I am so happy to finally give us a permanent home in this neighbourhood. It is vital that arts and culture are accessible to all and we are committed to offering an open door to everyone in our New York community and beyond.’ 

INFORMATION

Lucy Raven’s exhibition is on view until January 2022. diaart.org

ADDRESS

537 West 22nd Street
New York 10011

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The work of Emma Talbot is part art, part poetry. Much of her ideas are autobiographical, yet also confront some of society’s most pertinent structural issues, from gender inequality to environmental collapse. Her work eschews pessimism and cynicism in favour of hope, a timely sentiment as spring emerges and the world begins to recalibrate in response to one of the bleakest periods in recorded history. 

Coinciding with International Women’s Day earlier this month, Talbot became the latest Circa artist, staging work on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights screen following projects by the likes of Patti Smith and Ai Weiwei.

For the commission, Talbot created four animated films in collaboration with Whitechapel Gallery, Collezione Maramotti and the Max Mara Art Prize for Women. Titled Four Visions for a Hopeful Future, the films follow a woman at the gateway between an old and new world. Mirroring the year, the screens light up with Talbot’s work at 20:21 each evening, disrupting the usual advertising on a rolling four-night schedule throughout March. ‘I really wanted to make some work that spoke of our times, to narrate the extraordinary zeitgeist,’ she tells Wallpaper*. ‘In lockdown, I’d been struck by the way a lot of contemporary thinkers (e.g. Valarie Kaur, Rebecca Solnit, Isabelle Stengers, Starhawk) were articulating the need to take time to reconfigure the ways we act, to build a more equal, considerate, sustainable, responsible, caring future.’ 

Talbot’s influences for the piece are wide-ranging – from Arundhati Roy’s article, The Pandemic is a Portal to the work of medieval visionary Hildegard von Bingen. Her work is anchored in the here and now, observing the bleakness of recent times, while also harnessing the transformative and cathartic power of springtime. The films, comprising hand-drawn landscapes of dreamlike natural beauty, rich with floral and bodily forms. ‘The four animations come at the subject from different perspectives – they ask various questions; what a city is, how have power structures have been constructed, how powerful can communities be, what voices get heard, how can we connect with nature,’ says Talbot, who taught herself how to translate her drawings into animation during the first lockdown.

Last year, Talbot became the recipient of the eighth Mara Art Prize for Women, a biannual award established in 2005 in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery. As the sole visual art prize for women in the UK, it aims to promote and nurture female artists who are yet to receive a major solo exhibition. Talbot’s winning proposal focused on the perceived shame attached to female ageing, a feminist response to Gustav Klimt’s painting The Three Ages of Woman (1905). Klimt’s work depicts a baby, a young woman and a nude elderly woman seemingly stooped in shame. ‘I was fascinated by the painting on a personal level, thinking about the ways ageing is considered negatively, but I also had a sense there was more to the subject,’ Talbot explains. 

In response, Talbot will turn the concept on its head, reframing the woman as someone with agency. ‘The elderly woman will be a future survivor, who learns permaculture and sustainable living, relearning ancient practices and she will go back to the past and reconfigure the roots of power. To do this, she will perform the twelve trials of Hercules. Instead of resolving the tasks by killing, capture, theft and trickery, as Hercules did, I imagine the wise elderly woman would use more considered, benevolent means, such as commensalism and mutualism.’ 

When travel restrictions permit, Talbot will embark on a six-month residency organised by Collezione Maramotti. On her trip, she plans to research Etruscan pottery depicting the Herculean myths in Rome, visit permaculture sites and the ruins of the Temple of Hercules in Sicily, and explore the history of hand-painted silk in Italian fashion houses and learn intarsia knitting in Reggio Emilia. This will result in a new body of work to be shown first at Whitechapel Gallery and then at the Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy in 2022.

INFORMATION

Four Visions for a Hopeful Future will be on view in Piccadilly Circus, London until 31 March, 2021. circa.art

emmatalbot.org.uk

maxmara.com

collezionemaramotti.org

whitechapelgallery.org

Anri Sala’s work explores the moment between the tangible and intangible. It exists somewhere between a time and a space, perhaps even ricocheting between the two. Sala’s thought-provoking and evocative time-based work goes to often difficult places, giving voice to thoughts, feelings and events for which language is not enough.

His latest major work is a monumental installation at the Bayou Buffalo Park Cistern, an underground reservoir in Houston, Texas. It combines film, sound and installation, tapping into the sense of equanimity of above and below that the artist associates with the ‘Space City’. Titled Time No Longer, the immersive work is inspired by African American astronaut and saxophonist Ronald McNair, who was launched on the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 with the intention of recording music in space. Had the rocket not exploded seconds after take-off, he would have.

Subterranean and vast, the Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern is 87,500 sq ft large and 25ft tall, with 221 columns throughout. It evoked space exploration to Sala, who visited the space with one idea in mind, but recalled the story of McNair when standing inside the unique structure and went with that instead. 

‘Every person who travels so far away from Earth is a pioneer by nature, but McNair was also a man who aimed to be the very first person to seriously record music in space,’ Sala says.

Projected intermittently onto translucent Hologauze is a turntable, floating, weightless. The stylus grasps for purchase on the record’s grooves, sometimes managing to communicate music, other times skipping and revolving back into space resonant of the moment McNair never played. As the motion repeats we hear snippets of music.

‘It’s like a train of thought, or of music being continuously interrupted and us somehow wanting to make sense of this interruption,’ Sala explains.
 
The screen is only visible when the film is projecting, leaving the viewer to contemplate the space in darkness. When the film is running, it is reflected in the surrounding water, creating the illusion of infinite turntables tumbling through infinite space.
 
The work’s soundtrack is a mixed clarinet and saxophone rendition of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, perhaps the most famous piece of music composed in captivity. Written by Messiaen while in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War, the music communicates a deep sense of loneliness for Sala. 

In the recording, it’s hard to distinguish one instrument from the other, a deliberate effect. ‘Sometimes it sounds like one and sometimes like the other. It is also playing with this idea that the clarinet might sound like a saxophone before it exists, in a sense asking what would a song sound like before it plays?’

The original music McNair intended to record was due to feature on the album Rendez-vous, in collaboration with French composer Jean-Michel Jarre. It was later performed and recorded by Jarre at a tribute concert following the accident. Sala has used jazz in his work previously and is drawn to the music for its lack of narrative. The work Long Sorrow (2005) saw him suspend the saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc 60ft in the air from a disused housing project in Berlin.

‘He was anchored in space and he used music as a way to make his mind drift away from the situation he was in, while Time No Longer is the other way around, because it's about drifting in space, like the turntable, but being anchored in time.’

Time No Longer, like Long Sorrow and Answer Me (2008) – which was shot in a geodesic dome at Teufelsberg in Berlin – relates to its architecture. ‘I like to find a narrative that conveys the attributes of the space. One which treats the space as if it was an organ, not merely a receptacle.
 
‘In other words, I tend to try to approach space as an instrument, rather than a backdrop to a narrative that’s being played solo within it.’ Sala explains. ‘When the space becomes tangible, allowing it to play a collaborative part in a form of retelling, it elicits curiosities about context and history, quite unlike and beyond those that storytelling conveys.’
 
A performance without a performer, a lonely turntable floating through space, this reflective work speaks to the experience of many of us in recent times. 

INFORMATION

‘Time No Longer’, until 12 December 2021, Buffalo Bayou Park Cistern, Houston

buffalobayou.org

ADDRESS

105b Sabine St 

Houston, TX 77007

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To walk into an exhibition by Jeremy Shaw, we’re asking to get high. We want to find out what gets people high and what defines high ideals. 

Edging up a claustrophobic ramp towards Gallery 3 of Paris’ Centre Pompidou, there might be a niggling sense of trepidation. This is a Jeremy Shaw exhibition after all, and they’re never particularly forgettable encounters. Inside the show’s new title work, Phase Shifting Index (part of the museum's Mutations / Créations programme) are seven screens on which people move, writhe, and dance in singular hypnotic rituals to their own soundtracks. These films feel archival – possibly from the 1950s to 1990s – but are in fact rendered through outmoded, and disorientating use of 16mm film and Hi8 video. 

Aurally, it’s almost as overwhelming as Cildo Meireles’ Babel, a towering sculpture comprising hundreds of radios, each tuned in to a different station. Shaw’s environment spins viewers into a state of unease through intense aural overlaps, but unlike Babel and much to our relief, Phase Shifting Index does eventually reach fruition. A crescendo brews, then each strand unites in pure, ‘cross-temporal’ sync – a moment of collective catharsis for Shaw’s protagonists, and for us. ‘I’ve always found that watching people work themselves into a trance has a proxy-like effect on me,’ he explains, ‘that is something that the dramaturgy of Phase Shifting Index aspires to do with those who engage with it.’

Much of the Canadian, Berlin-based artist’s interests fall on the cultural fringes, like rave and techno-era subcultures or 1960s and 70s psychedelia. Belief systems, technology, sociology, mass-consumerism, ludicrous parascience, sci-fi and straight science are all thrown onto a level playing field and spun into Shaw’s academic, fictional web. In an era where distinguishing genuine news from satire, sensationalism from plausible scientific breakthroughs, Shaw’s hypothetical plots suddenly feel quite close to home. 

Shaw’s fascination with transcendence can be traced to his roots: growing up with Catholicism, playing games to ‘intentionally black out’, excommunicating himself, exploring spiritual hedonism and toying with limits. 

Since the mid-2000s, his ideas have become more intuitive and propositional. ‘My early work followed a more didactic, conceptual approach whereas the newer works are much more alchemical in their combining of various formal, aesthetic and conceptual elements into autonomous wholes,’ he explains.

It’s Shaw’s command of film and deep engagement with his ideas that make his work so acutely disorientating. In 2004, he made the piece that pricked the ears of the art world. In DMT, eight subjects, including Shaw, take the hallucinogen dimethyltryptamine (DMT) on camera. Subtitles capture the detached, incoherent commentary of the corporeal self in an out-of-body experience. As Shaw described in an interview with the Swiss Institute’s Simon Castets and Laura McLean-Ferris, ‘This quickly revealed to me how insufficient language was to elucidate such a mind-blowing experience, with most participants struggling dramatically to put into words the profundity of what had transpired.’

Shaw doesn't need conventional language to transport his concepts; his talent lies in allowing unsuspecting spectators to become integral to the work before they know it. In 2012, for the group show ‘One on One’ at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, artists were commissioned to create a work that only a single person could experience at a time. Shaw’s piece invited a viewer into a chamber where they sat on a chair in a fixed position. A video started playing, which Shaw describes as ‘some dated novelty you might find in a thrift shop discount bin’, riddled with subliminal messaging. If the viewer stood up, the video stopped.

Shaw’s art grips us through multisensory manipulation, in a similar way that a DJ might command the behaviour of a club with frequencies and subfrequencies. It’s not so much about what we’re seeing or hearing, but how it makes us feel.

At König London, concurrent with the Centre Pompidou show, Shaw is having another moment, ‘Selected Facets and Translation’. In the ongoing series, Towards Universal Pattern Recognition, he studies high states of mind through low-tech methods. Multi-faceted acrylic boxes frame and distort archival photographs of people experiencing some form of ‘awakening’, the nature of which is hard to deduce – is it ecstasy, salvation or desperation? A cheerleader clasps her hands and prays, a yogi meditates, someone undergoes psychic intervention and whirling dervishes practice physical endurance to honour their higher power. ‘I’m specifically interested in the human notion of transcendence – of actively searching it out, however one attempts to do so. Be it through dance, religion, drugs, technology, etc. – the human desire to escape one’s perceived reality and the apparent universality to the phenomena fascinates me to no end.’

Lining another wall, his series, Aesthetic Capacity, sees Shaw engage with the Kirlian photography technique. For this, he listened to the 1969 ‘Billboard Hot 100’ and at a particular point in each track, charged his index finger with a bolt of electricity and placed it on Polaroid film. The result is a grid of fingerprints surrounded by a halo-like aura, supposedly an optical snapshot of Shaw’s bodily response to each song.

The work of Jeremy Shaw can take us to spaces where the inconceivable becomes real for just a few moments, or as one of the DMT participants – mid-drug-induced stupor – uttered, ‘just somewhere completely elsewhere.’ To understand his work wholly might take months of scholarship, but one thing we can learn is to always expect the unexpected. 

INFORMATION
Centre Pompidou, Paris and König, London are temporarily closed to the public. centrepompidou.fr; koeniglondon.co.uk

Excerpt from Doppelgänger, 2019, by Stan Douglas. © Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner

History is fickle; those who write it are fickler still. The slippage between truth and fiction has been a long-standing preoccupation for the Canadian artist Stan Douglas, whose video installation Doppelgänger traces two parallel timelines, each as seemingly plausible as the other. Set in an alternative present, Doppelgänger is displayed across two square-format, translucent screens – both of which can be viewed from either side. A looped narrative unfolds in vignettes that depicts concurrent events occurring in worlds that are light years apart.

The protagonist, an astronaut named Alice, is teleported to a spaceship bound for a distant planet – as is her clone. Then, along with her ship the Hermes II, she returns suddenly and inexplicably. The aftermath of Alice’s mission ‘failure’ (in fact, she has arrived in a world where everything is the reverse of what she once knew) and her reception back on Earth plays out across the two screens. In one reality, Alice is lauded and received compassionately, where is treated to B12 vitamins injections and bed rest. In the other, she is considered a hostile alien, quarantined and interrogated.

Beneath the film’s retro-futuristic veneer and vibrant passages of colour – a stylistic nod to avant-garde cinema – lies a pressing message for our times. Douglas addresses the position of the ‘other’ in society through the lens of science fiction and quantum entanglement. The artist further magnifies viewers’ sense of displacement through overlapping vantage points and narratives, suggesting the possibility of infinitely diverging alternate realities.

Doppelgänger made its debut at the 58th Venice Biennale last year, and is now being staged in tandem – rather suitably – in London and New York exhibitions, at Victoria Miro and David Zwirner respectively. Additionally, Victoria Miro is presenting selected works from Douglas’ photographic series Scenes from the Blackout, in which the artist imagines the entropic effects of a total loss of power in present day New York, and how its denizens would react in the fallout. A panoramic view of a near blacked-out city is juxtaposed with glimpses of individual experience – ingenuity and lawlessness, altruism and malevolence. Douglas is holding up a mirror to our dysfunction, and it’s up to us to accept the reflection we see.

INFORMATION

‘Stan Douglas: Doppelgänger’, until 14 March, Victoria Miro. victoriamiro.com

ADDRESS

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

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When she talks about her practice, Hilary Lloyd is always quick to point out that she is ‘not a filmmaker’. And yet, video footage always makes its way into her works, shot in her singular style and identifiable for its repetitive movements, jump cuts and sweeps. It’s a frenetic rhythm that’s been related to the restlessness of the contemporary viewer, who consumes images hard and fast.

Lloyd is, by her own admission, something of a techie when it comes to equipment. Her favourite piece of technology is currently ‘the mobile phone’ – although she doesn’t actually own one. Her latest installation includes scenes from a nightclub in Turin, shot spontaneously on a borrowed iPhone and edited together with choppy cuts. You never quite get a clear image of what you’re looking at other than a sense of the atmosphere of the lived moment. ‘Earlier this month I was in Turin, installing the first exhibition in Federica Panelli and Annalisa Stabellini’s new gallery BAR,’ Lloyd tells us. ‘The film was made during the opening night and afterwards we went clubbing and the film was shot using Federica’s phone, because I don’t have one.’

The urban landscape is Lloyd’s muse for ‘Car Park’, her current exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, and particularly the surroundings of her new studio in Thamesmead. The southeast London locale appears in multiple video works that make up the exhibition, becoming the surprising subject of a series of mural paintings in muted palettes on the gallery walls, reproductions of smaller-scale paintings in pale emulsion. It’s the first time the Turner Prize-nominated artist has tried her hand at the medium, 30 years into her career – a sign of her willingness to experiment and keep curious.

Taking time out from installing her exhibition in London before she heads to the US for her next project, Lloyd explains: ‘The studio I recently moved to used to have two nightclubs in the building and I’ve heard that everyone in Thamesmead used to go to them, I think they were hugely popular. I think about them a lot and fantasise about what it would be like if they were still there – I’ve been working above these spaces and most of all wishing that they were still here so I could go.’

It’s perhaps no wonder that Lloyd, who constantly blurs the borders between inside and out, image and abstraction, physical and digital, is interested in an area like Thamesmead. It’s on the cusp of the countryside and at the edge of a heaving metropolis where postwar architecture pans out into Southmere Lake.

‘Inbetweenness’ or perhaps, the interconnectedness between what Lloyd refers to as ‘stuff’, is a leitmotif that runs through the works: men standing around in the eponymous car park, rats and birds, sights and sounds blend together at a lingering pace. ‘I like the way Thamesmead looks and that its homes are built among hills and trees, with wide rolling green open spaces and a boating lake,’ she says. ‘There’s loads of wildlife, including horses, and I love the freedom that this landscape creates for everyone to do whatever they like.’

Meanwhile in Florida, from 3 December and coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach, Lloyd will transform Loewe’s Miami boutique with some of the works from the Thamesmead project. The artist has been tapped for the fifth entry in the Loewe Foundation’s ‘Chance Encounters’ exhibition series. In their American setting they inhabit quite a different context, more strange and exotic than they appear to the local back in London.

The exhibit incorporates prismatic textile works stitched by Lloyd in a technique that’s not dissimilar to the way she edits her digital works: both have the same handmade, rough-cut and spontaneous feel. Tailored specifically to the site, as with all of Lloyd’s work, the installation demonstrates why the artist is ‘perfectly attuned to the contemporary moment and the way in which we engage with the visual world around us’, as Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson notes. Lloyd’s films – displayed on monitors – meet the equally rough-and-ready surfaces of large-scale ceramic sculptures by fellow Brit, the late Ewen Henderson.

INFORMATION

‘Car Park’, until 20 December, Sadie Coles HQ. ‘Chance Encounters V’, 3 December – 21 January 2020, Loewe Miami. sadiecoles.com; craftprize.loewe.com

Alex Prager’s newest film, Play the Wind, showing now through 26 October at Lehmann Maupin’s 22nd Street gallery in New York, opens with a quote from Ray Bradbury about the dangers of nostalgia. ‘You will never understand time, will you? ... Why do you save those ticket stubs and theater programs? They’ll only hurt you later.’

And then the film really opens, or so we think, with Los Angeles, as seen through a car, driven by a man (played by Dimitri Chamblas, dean of the Sharon Disney Lund School of Dance), which is the way everyone knows to see the city but which is somehow – as becomes increasingly clear – different through Prager’s lens. The driver rolls through parking lots, past an accident, into a group of people running from an unseen horror. Women see him.

This film is about Los Angeles but also about the ideal of California itself: the golden state, the legend of Calafia, the place where dreams are made and shattered, where the everyday is special and vice versa. Three minutes in, we see the actress Riley Keough standing on a corner and then, immediately, locking eyes with the driver. She’s wearing a red dress; they make eye contact.

And then, an extraordinary sequence, on the verge of uncannily and physically too difficult to watch: Keough falls and falls and falls and falls through space and then, we think, time. She bursts through boxes and her clothes disappear. The feeling – and it’s a phenomenological feeling – is one of nightmarish vertigo. She falls, white sky turning to blue turning to clouds turning to the most verdant landscape, and she lands, in a green suit she’s picked up in the air along the way.

But this is just an account of what happens in the film, and what really happens is that the viewer is constantly invited to know better, to see more clearly, to pay closer attention and to think. Watching the film in the gallery is essential. The film audience watching Keough step in front of a screen reminds the gallery audience of what they’re doing, which is watching an artist.

The rest of the show comprises large-format photographs, stills from the film. It’s hard not to think of shades of Cindy Sherman in the visceral brightness of it all, or maverick director David Lynch. But it’s also hard not to think of Prager as someone forging brand-new territory amid well-trodden ground. Her film is a little sharper, a little brighter, a little more elusive, a little more terrifying (okay, a lot more terrifying). It’s more of the now – in its intimations of offscreen violence, in the happenstance of tragedy. The film is of today, purely, in that it articulates and capitalises on the fact that our world is ending, and our world is beautiful. It will only hurt you later.

An excerpt from Play the Wind, exclusive to Wallpaper.com. Courtesy of Alex Prager Studio and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, and Seoul

INFORMATION

‘Play the Wind’, 5 September – 26 October, Lehmann Maupin. lehmannmaupin.com

ADDRESS

Lehmann Maupin
536 West 22nd Street
New York

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In his 1990 book Poetics of Relations, Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant famously argued for the ‘right to opacity for everyone’, as an ethical stance against imperial conquest. This notion is central to the practice of American artist Wu Tsang, as manifested across the moving image and glass-based works featured in a new major exhibition, opened at Gropius Bau. Entitled ‘There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody’, it spans seven rooms, incorporating film, sculpture, text and sound and is the result of a yearlong residency at the Berlin institution – the first of its kind.

‘I am working with transparency and opacity as metaphors for language,’ says Tsang of her site-specific, blue stained glass windows Sustained Glass. Words are etched into the pane using acid, forming an overlapping text that fades in and out of legibility. Responding to the proportions of the 19th-century, neo-Renaissance building, the sculpture inverts the tradition of stained glass windows, depicting allegorical stories through images. ‘The glass is literally shaped by the mouth and by breathing,’ Tsang says of the medieval hand-blown technique, perfected in Bavaria, ‘which makes a very physical connection to the voice.’

Best known for her innovative approach to documentary filmmaking, particularly in relation to queer politics and underground spaces, Tsang returns with a new film, this time dealing with the experience of migration. Shot on the island of Lesbos, One emerging from a point of view addresses the trauma of forced displacement experienced by the hundreds of refugees reaching Greece’s shores every week. Weaving together fact and fiction in the style of magical realism, the film questions modes of representation in the context of the refugee crisis. ‘I feel less reactionary to representational politics,’ the filmmaker says of her new work, which is screened via two overlapping video projections. ‘I don’t feel constrained by genre or rules of filmmaking.’
 
Collaboration is key for the artist, who regularly draws in diverse practitioners into her work. ‘My work often takes shape in dialogue with others,’ explains the 37-year-old artist, recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant in 2018. This is reflected in the exhibition, where a number of protagonists make central appearances, from poet Fred Moten to performance artist Boychild and photographer Eirini Vourloumis. ‘I see my role as a sort of director or host, in the sense that I try to create the circumstances for interactions to unfold,’ she says.

As the American artist continues to take Europe by storm – soon joining the Schauspielhaus Zurich as director in residence – Tsang’s Berlin exhibition offers a thoughtful overview of her practice to date, while glancing at the future.

INFORMATION

‘Wu Tsang: There is no nonviolent way to look at somebody’, 4 September 2019 – 12 January 2020, Gropius Bau. berlinerfestspiele.de

ADDRESS

Gropius Bau
Niederkirchnerstrasse 7
10963 Berlin

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The work of Pipilotti Rist is imbued with idiosyncratic humour. That much is obvious from her pseudonym, a portmanteau of the Swedish children’s book character Pippi Longstocking, as well as the Japanese electrician’s jackets that she favours (she sports a canary yellow one as she tours us around her recent show), and of course, the now-iconic self portrait that shows her flattening her face against a pane of glass, her bright red lipstick smeared along one cheek. And true to form, her first solo exhibition in Scandinavia, titled ‘Open My Glade’, presents a brilliant bundle of eccentricities.

Taking place at Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, which had been a nobleman’s country house before its modernist additions and its transformation into a cultural hub, the exhibition feels eerily like home. Rist speaks of the museum as a ‘collective living room’, and has taken advantage of the museum’s low-slung architecture and warm material palette to create an inviting environment, starting from the tactile fabrics that line the entrance hallway, to the soft furnishings that viewers are welcome to clamber over, all the way to the show’s final room, which is quite literally presented as an apartment space, albeit overlaid with all manner of fantastic projections.

Rist’s greatest hits are all on view – the early video Ever Is Over All, showing a woman gleefully skipping down a street while she clobbers multiple cars with a long-stemmed flower; an outdoor installation of Hiplights (or Englightened Hips), comprising laundry lines of illuminated underwear; Pixel Forest, an immersive matrix of crystalline lights, simulating the experience of existing within an LED screen; and the famed 4th Floor to Mildness, which invites us to lie down and gaze at an oddly mesmerising video projection, showing the muddy depths of a river outside Zurich.

There’s a dash of confident rebellion, clever references to social themes and Rist’s typically dreamy staging, but more importantly, there’s a deeper meditation on what it means to see. Working in perfect tandem are the unusual angles at which Rist films her video works, the equally unusual objects on which they are projected, and the somewhat transgressive situations in which we have to put themselves (lounging in bed alongside a stranger, for instance) to fully appreciate them. ‘The eyes are blood-driven cameras’, the artist has often said. And by dragging us along fields of tulips, through murky waters and into digital dimensions, she puts the limits of these cameras to the test.

The show includes two new works. A circular video of everyday scenes is projected on a ceramic artwork by the great 20th-century Danish artist Asger Jorn, who features prominently in Louisiana’s permanent collections. It references Jorn’s habit of painting over artworks gathered from flea markets, and its title, Come In, Come On [Jorn caressed by Rist] is itself a poetic homage. This occupies a corner of the large space at the top of Louisiana’s South Wing, whose walls have been clad with the other new work, Reversed Eyelid.

For this installation, Rist worked with Kvadrat to adapt the Danish textile manufacturer’s ‘Soft Cells’ acoustic panels, here custom made with a vibrant, visceral motif that depicts the inside of our eyelids, offering a microscopic view of the human body and again compelling us to marvel at the gift of sight. Within the darkened space, the 54m long installation doesn’t exactly jump for attention. But it pushes the boundaries of design collaboration in the right ways – and ties in perfectly with the theme of home, both bodily and domestic.

INFORMATION

‘Pipilotti Rist: Open My Glade’ is on view until 22 September. For more information, visit the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art website, Pipilotti Rist website, and Kvadrat website

ADDRESS

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Gammel Strandvej 13
Humlebæk

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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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When Philippe Parreno was a teenager, he and his friends would sneak their way through the back door of an adult movie theatre in one of the seedier parts of Échirolles, a rough suburb of Grenoble, southern France. The backstreet XXX dive was called Cinema Permanente, because porn played all day, all night.

At a public talk at the 2019 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Parreno bashfully admits that watching the illicit movies acted as inspiration. In the dark, as the images writhed and morphed without sense of beginning, middle and end, so he formed his idea of what art should be. ‘We were always so alert, because we were scared of getting caught,’ he remembers. ‘But my sense of time became warped in the movie theatre. I started to think a permanent cinema is a beautiful idea.’

Parreno is here to present his new feature film, No More Reality Whatsoever, a combination of 20 years of disparate footage taken from dozens of art projects and edited together to create a ‘film of films, a seance of cinema’. The artist, who is 55, has the words ‘do so’ tattooed on his left wrist, a reference to the hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. He is soft-spoken, drinks tea over coffee, is dressed as if he might leave the cultured environs of the film festival for a quick hike along the canals of Rotterdam, and has a dry, self-deprecating sense of humour.

As he is interviewed by Andrea Lissoni, curator of film and international art at Tate Modern, Parreno speaks of ‘practising white magic, but – don’t worry – never black magic’. ‘Magical forms have an ability to articulate a disparate idea,’ he explains. ‘We’re always looking for things to make sense, but maybe there’s another way to approach them. Besides, an artist is like a shaman. A film is like a seance.’ He is not someone, you get the impression, who takes himself too seriously. Indeed, he often talks about his work playfully, as if he is creating make-believe at a child’s birthday party.

But it’s possible to be both an irreverent and a serious artist. Few contemporary artists can point to a massive retrospective at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (2013) or a large-scale solo exhibition in New York’s Park Avenue Armory (2015) or full usage of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2016). Parreno has done these and more, and now he is turning his hand to arthouse filmmaking, with a star turn in Rotterdam.

Parreno talks of the ‘the exhibition as medium’. He is perhaps the best known member of a school of European artists who practice what in artspeak is referred to as ‘relational aesthetics’, a term coined in 1998 by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud (who was, at the time, Parreno’s roommate in New York). It’s the idea an artist should be the architect of a shared experience, the creator of a sensorial and transportive and essentially transient event, rather than the creator of a precious and permanent artefact. Rather than use a gallery as a hallowed space where static objects are hung in anticipation of reverence, it should be a space where we come to believe anything might happen, that disorientates our concepts of time and space, that upsets our inbuilt GPS.

‘It doesn’t matter what it is,’ he says of what he presents to the public in a gallery space. ‘It’s the way it appears that interests me. I’m interested in the nature of an image, and it’s relationship to what it’s supposed to represent. I’m interested by the production of a form in a public space, and how that form can change the public. All that stuff.’

No More Reality Whatsoever is playing directly before the latest film from the 88-year old Jean-Luc Godard, who is using IFFR to screen his new film Le livre d’image after it premiered in Cannes last year. The film is presented in the way Godard originally intended: in a specially designed replica of his home studio – Persian rugs included. The proximity pleases Parreno. ‘There was a strong movie culture where I grew up,’ he says.‘The legacy of the nouvelle vague [pioneered by Godard] and the literature around that had more of an impact in France than visual art I think.’

Parreno’s film starts with an introduction of sorts from a Rotterdam resident of Indonesian descent. The man is a Dhalang, a master of Indonesian shadow puppetry and ‘a fascination’ for the artist. The Dhalang waxes lyrical on the nature of time before singing a folkloric Indonesian hymn. He departs as Mikhail Rudy, a classical pianist, takes his seat at a grand piano, situated in front of the cinema screen, and starts playing a strange, atonal symphony, often layered on top of the film’s score.

Our 3D glasses are already in place. The split faces of a young women, a manga anime character called Annlee, is beamed onto the screen. Annlee addresses the audience directly, referencing how, in 2002, Parreno created the independent Annlee Association, transferring copyright ownership back to Annlee herself. The 3D is effective: close one eye, one huge manga Annlee is present on screen. Close the other, and a separate Annlee looms above us. The film moves from a female robot trapped alone in a hotel room to a train rolling through a rural town, the inhabitants of which stand and silently stare. We’re taking on a tour of the fishtanks in the restaurants of Chinatown New York, to a protest led by schoolchildren against the information age. ‘No More Reality’, their placards read.

Parreno was born in Algeria. Échirolles is not all that far away from Marseille, where a certain athlete called Zinedine Zidane, also bald, also of Algerian descent, and also an artist of sorts, was born and raised. Parreno is still best known for his beautiful 2006 feature film of Zidane: a movie that simply follows the movement of the player over the course of a 90-minute football match between Real Madrid and Villareal.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was co-created with the Turner-Prize winning artist Douglas Gordon, featuring a soundtrack from the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai and was shot in real-time using 17 synchronised cameras. During the creation of the film, Parreno got to know Zidane personally. I ask if he feels he shares anything with Zidane – a kinship of sorts? ‘Zidane told me that he always had to prove it, but only to himself. He was so focused on continually proving it to himself – that he was or could be a great athlete. He had to be intensely into the moment, as a great actor can also get intensely into the moment. He was able to ignore his presence totally. I think art can do that as well.’

Do you feel that need to prove yourself, I enquire. ‘Yes, totally,’ he says, with an emphatic nod. ‘I think I suffer the same as many people. The syndrome of the imposter? Imposter syndrome, yes... I have always had that. I try and combat it by trying to reinvent, by putting things in new contexts. It’s the best way I think, no?’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the International Film Festival Rotterdam website

A virtual reality adaptation of Universal Everything’s open-world crowd performance Emergence will have its world premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, presented by Within as part of the New Frontier showcase of experimental media works. The original piece – which currently forms part of the UK-based art and design studio’s solo show at Istanbul’s Borusan Contemporary (on view until 17 February) – ‘expresses the primal desire to maintain your individual identity while being part of a crowd’.

In the interactive version, the audience is invited to take control of a glowing protagonist surrounded by an anonymous swarm of thousands that react to the character’s every movement, traversing through surreal backdrops that recall natural and manmade environments. Emergence continues Universal Everything’s exploration into VR following Inside the Sound, a series of 360° audiovisual environments released at the end of 2018, as well as its ongoing investigation into the human form and movement in digital art.

‘Emergence is striking example of a next generation artist using algorithms and high powered real time graphics processing as their paint and canvas,’ explains Within CEO and co-founder Chris Milk, who established the virtual and augmented reality storytelling firm with the aim of bringing ‘the highest caliber of immersive experiences’ to a wider audience. Milk first met Universal Everything’s Matt Pyke in 2016 after they both exhibited in the Barbican’s ‘Digital Revolution’ exhibition: ‘Matt makes things digitally that feel incredibly organic and human, with just the right amount of LSD thrown in for good measure.’ With Emergence, being alone in the crowd certainly has never seemed so appealing.

We caught up with Universal Everything founder and creative director Matt Pyke to find out more...

Wallpaper*: Did you envision Emergence evolving into a VR work from the beginning of the project?
Matt Pyke: The project started as software based improvisation. We coded a custom crowd simulation, which became the basis for a number of experiments. The first was Disciples, which humanised your Twitter followers, revealing the people behind the usernames. From this we observed the elegant human behaviours emerging, and developed a series of scenarios where the crowd is influenced by your avatar's movements. The crowd follows you, mimics you or avoids you. A happy accident lead us to switch into VR mode, and this was our eureka moment – Emergence found its perfect medium, immersing the viewer amongst the crowd.

The project is described as showing ‘5,000+ intelligent human behaviours’...
Our work often depicts abstracted human forms and movements, using a single figure or a duet. Now, with today’s graphics technology we can expand into choreographing an entire crowd. By programming each crowd member with intelligent behaviours – such as avoidance, following or mimicry – we can reveal elaborate patterns of human behaviour at a huge scale.

Do users have a particular goal to reach with their avatar?
We left the goal intentionally open: you arrive surrounded by the crowd and, as you walk around freely, the environment begins to react. Colossal beams of light tower up to the sky, tempting you like a moth to a flame. If you do walk into the beam of light, your world is transformed into a new scenario – new crowd behaviours, dramatic coloured lighting and a corresponding soundtrack all combine to form a series of emotional contrasts, altering the relationship between you as an individual and your fellow 5,000 followers. You control your avatar from a drone-like point of view, allowing a wide angle survey over the crowd so that you can appreciate the behaviours fully.

The soundtrack by Simon Pyke is especially enthralling.
We worked together to develop a soundtrack to amplify the sense of mass human collaboration with an almost spiritual intensity. Simon developed layers of vocal cycles, sampled from remote field recordings of tribes.

What can viewers at Sundance Film Festival expect?
The strongest response so far from early viewers has been one of awe – of a powerful experience which derives from an instinctive love or fear of crowds. It has been suggested that exposure to crowds could have a therapeutic benefit, for people who struggle in crowded spaces. We hope that this response with continue at Sundance and provoke thinking about how VR can be used to enable us to step into our fears, in a safe environment.

The studio has recently increasingly dabbled in VR, for example with the Inside the Sound audiovisual environments. Do you see it becoming more central to your practice?
We have created many physical video immersive experiences, where visitors ‘step into the screen’. Now we can use VR to expand our ambitions infinitely – with no constraint on immersive scale, the potential for multi-sensory experiences is huge. Our goal is to create digital spaces which contribute to people’s wellbeing, help them face their fears, and transform their worldview.

Sundance Film Festival runs from 24 January until 3 February. For more information, visit the Universal Everything website and Within website

‘Strange Days: Memories of the Future’, an off-site exhibition by New York’s New Museum at The Store X, London, takes its name from a 1995 science fiction film by Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron. Set at the turn of the millennium, the film imagines a world in which people get their thrills from watching videos in first-person view, thus trying on the recorded experiences and sensations of others.

‘In other words, it’s about the birth of virtual reality,’ observes Massimiliano Gioni, the New Museum’s artistic director and curator of the London exhibition. Unlike its cinematic counterpart, the show doesn’t involve any headsets, let alone brainwave-transmitting circuitry, but it’s addictive all the same.

Within a three-level space in the bowels of the brutalist building 180 The Strand, Gioni has brought together 21 video and film installations, each by a contemporary artist who has exhibited at the New Museum within the past decade. Ranging from Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost to American director (and mastermind of Beyoncé’s Lemonade) Kahlil Joseph and Egyptian artist Hassan Khan, the selection is reflective of the museum’s programme: geographically diverse, visually enthralling, and thematically sound.

It begins, appropriately, with Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, created for the 2013 Venice Biennale (also curated by Gioni). The 13-minute piece shows a series of browser search windows alongside archival activities at the Smithsonian Institution in  Washington, DC, while the background narration tells of creation myths across countries and cultures. The aim is to show the breadth and limitations of human imagination and endeavour. ‘It explores knowledge and delusions of omniscience, which is very much what this show is about,’ remarks Gioni.

The ensuing works follow the same wistful tone – Ed Atkins’ CGI work Happy Birthday!! speaks to physical and semantic disintegration, while Pipilotti Rist’s 4th Floor to Mildness invites the viewer to lie down in bed to gaze at video projections on the ceiling, imbuing poetic underwater scenes with haunting undertones. Further down, Swedish artist Klara Lidén’s The Myth of Progress shows her moonwalking through the streets of Manhattan by night, which appear eerily post-apocalyptic on the grainy image.

One level below, the show turns to explore the relationship between technology and identity, sexuality and desire. Jungle of Desire, an animated work by Hong Kong artist Wong Ping, centres on a struggling animator who dreams up a revenge plot on a client of his sex-worker wife. Bursting with colour, the piece projects a jovial tone at odds with its tale of repression. Meanwhile, Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s almost-monochrome Teeth, Gums, Machine, Future, Society (One Body, Two Souls) shows the performance artist, wearing only silver bodypaint, dancing dynamically among Bruno Gironcoli’s metallic sculptures, disrupting their stolid immortality.

There are dramatic shifts in mood along the way – for one, Ryan Trecartin’s Item Falls, a raucous live-action piece parodying contemporary reality television, is placed next to Prouvost’s introspective Into All That is Here, which highlights a yearning for sensuality in a world of flat screens. And the snaking layout of the show encourages immersion and provides the viewer with less autonomy than a more conventional configuration) ‘It might be a little prescriptive of me,’ admits Gioni, ‘but I like shows where the viewer discovers the show and the show unravels for them.’ Judging from the lingering crowds, the viewers seem to agree.

On the lowest, and final level, the UK debut of John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea takes centre stage, collaging spectacular seascapes and images of violence and environmental destruction to tell the story of the Atlantic. But it’s a work by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, O Peixe [The Fish], that steals the show. The camera hones in on fishermen in northeastern Brazil as they catch and then hold their prey to their chests, in an intimate yet mortal embrace. This invented ritual, viewed through an exoticised lens, paints a complex and poignant portrait of humanity.

The Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson is given the last word with A Lot of Sorrow, which documents a six hour concert by indie rock band The National in New York. The band performs only one song, their 2012 ballad Sorrow on loop. There is an unusual beauty to their repeated expressions of melancholy, or as Kjartansson himself put it, ‘in the saddest of songs there is happiness’. And it is on this surprisingly hopeful note that the visitor emerges in the open, ‘Strange Days’ now past.

INFORMATION

‘Strange Days: Memories of the Future’ is on view until 9 December. For more information, visit the New Museum website, the Store X website, the 180 The Strand website and The Vinyl Factory website

ADDRESS

The Store X
180 Strand
London WC2R 1EA

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Yoko Ono has coolly defied being pigeonholed by her critics for over 50 years, wearing many hats (figuratively and literally) along the way: a pioneer of performance art, a staunch peace activist, a dance hitmaker, just to name a few. At 85 years old, the conceptual artist, singer and songwriter shows no signs of slowing down as she is set to release a new record, Warzone.

Ono is revisiting 13 songs from her catalogue spanning 1970-2009, the messages woven into her lyrics still pertinent – perhaps more so than ever today. ‘Things are very difficult for everybody. It’s a war zone that we are living in,’ wrote Ono in a statement. ‘I like to create things in a new way. Every day things change.’

Each of the tracks on Warzone have been brought to life by artist Jonny Sanders in a series of short conceptual videos using Ono’s drawings from the Franklin Summer series, as well as a font created from her handwriting. The illustrations echo the pared-back arrangements of the artist’s new LP, which places emphasis on Ono’s voice and her messages of peace, empowerment and caution.

She concludes the ominous questions of Now Or Never (1971) with one of her most memorable lines: ‘[A] dream you dream alone is only a dream, but a dream we dream together is reality.’ The final entry of Warzone is an alternate reimagining of John Lennon’s Imagine, for which Ono received a songwriting credit in 2017 – 46 years after its debut.

Warzone will be available in full from 19 October on Chimera Music, the label helmed by Sean Ono Lennon.  Leading up to the launch date, Ono will release a new song each Tuesday on her website Imagine Peace and on streaming services. Watch the lyric video for I’m Alive – the album’s 11th track – exclusively below.

INFORMATION

Warzone is available from 19 October. For more information, visit the Imagine Peace website and the Chimera Music website

‘Do not eat the sweets yet,’ German artist Ulla von Brandenburg commands, walkie-talkie in hand. After a few tense moments, each of the 100 schoolchildren she has recruited for her Sweet Feast project edge sheepishly in single file through the doors of London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

The camera rolls and the subjects (though with some hesitation) fall in line – unlike their counterparts in this exact spot in January 1973. Back then, to hail the UK’s entry into the European Common Market, more than 500 schoolchildren had been invited to sample a small selection of sweets to learn about ‘confectionery as an art form’.

There were contributions from members of the newly expanded European community, including Eiffel Tower shaped lollipops, German gummy mice, coffee-flavoured Hopjes from Holland, Italian marzipan fruits and salty Danish licorice. But events took a bittersweet turn when the overly zealous children succumbed to temptation, overwhelmed the gallery guard and devoured the entire exhibition. 

In a multidisciplinary piece in partnership with Le Prix Marcel Duchamp, von Brandenburg has recreated this unexpected turn of events through performance and film, marrying the structure of theatre with the freedom of art. ‘This was all very frightening for me,’ she laughs, having previously worked on films and performances with an all-professional cast of actors, ‘this wasn’t rehearsed, it was more of a “happening”.’

Behind the scenes, a teacher mouths instructions frantically from the sidelines as the children – from local school Arnhem Wharf – meander around the sweet-stacked tables. A tambourine signals the completion of a scene and so far, all sweets are still miraculously intact. As the next scene develops at an accelerating pace, the distress of the guard (the only trained actor in the film) mounts, and the anarchic children dominate and eventually demolish the display.

Screened in the Whitechapel’s immersive second gallery, the film is accompanied by a geometric and vibrant seating structure, designed by the artist and upholstered in fabric by Nanna Ditzel for Danish textile experts Kvadrat. Viewers are invited to clamber onto the structure, as though a seamless extension to the film. ‘It’s important to make the barrier between the public and work as small as possible,’ von Brandenburg says.

Both playful and political, the work also explores the radical shift in attitudes towards sugar, which is rapidly becoming the forbidden fruit of our time. ‘There are a lot of obese kids, which is a big problem, so I didn’t want to handle a very difficult topic in a naïve way,’ the artist continues.

In her multilayered Sweet Feast, von Brandenburg combines the curiosity of childhood, the looming uncertainty of Brexit and skilfully refines the art of controlled chaos in the process.

Related: tuck into Ulla von Brandenburg’s recipe for orangettes

INFORMATION

‘Sweet Feast’ is on view until 31 March 2019, two days after the UK is due to leave the European Union. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

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From the Technicolor skateboard ramp at the heart of the Palais de Tokyo in 2012 to the seven monumental stage curtains at this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong, German artist Ulla von Brandenburg’s work is always theatrical. ‘Sweet Feast’, a new project for London’s Whitechapel Gallery, was inspired by a 1973 exhibition of European sweets that was abruptly halted when a group of children devoured the exhibits. Mobilising 100 primary school pupils, von Brandenburg has created a video re-enactment of the event as a discussion of Britain’s changing relationship with the EU. Her contribution to our artist’s recipe series is naturally a sweet treat – orangettes, made from whole discs of orange rather than just the peel. Dig in.

Ingredients
1 orange
70g sugar
2 tsp lemon juice
2 tsp brandy
100g plain chocolate

Method
Wash the orange, then poke a number of holes in it with a bamboo skewer. Put in a pan with some water and set over a medium heat. When it begins to simmer, reduce the heat and boil for 2 minutes. Adjust the heat so that it is boiling steadily.

Drain the water away, then return the orange to the pan with fresh water and set over a medium heat. Repeat as above.

Once the orange has been boiled twice, return it to the pan with more water and leave it for about an hour to remove the astringency.

Slice the orange into 5mm-thick rounds, then arrange them in a large pot and add half the sugar, the lemon juice, brandy and 150ml water. Set over a medium heat. Once it starts to simmer, cover with foil, reduce the heat and continue to simmer for 15 minutes, then turn off the heat. Remove the foil to add the remaining sugar, then replace the foil and set aside to cool.

Once cool, set over a medium heat again. Bring to a boil, then immediately reduce the heat to low and simmer, covered, for 10 minutes. Turn off the heat and leave to cool. Then repeat this step. If there is any juice left after the second boil, simmer it a bit more. The orange slices should start to turn transparent but be careful not to boil too much.

Preheat the oven to 100C. Dry the slices on a drying rack. Line a baking tray with baking paper, then arrange the slices on the tray and bake for 40 minutes, turning halfway. The slices should now be dehydrated, sparkly and transparent. Transfer them to the drying rack and leave to cool. Roughly chop the chocolate, then place in a glass bowl set over a pan of simmering water and allow to melt, stirring well. Carefully coat half the orange slices with chocolate, then place on a sheet of baking paper and put in the fridge for 20 minutes to cool and harden.

As originally featured in the October 2018 issue of Wallpaper* (W*235)

INFORMATION

‘Ulla von Brandenburg: Sweet Feast’, in partnership with Le Prix Marcel Duchamp, is on view at Whitechapel Gallery from 21 September 2018 – 31 March 2019. For more information, visit the Whitechapel Gallery website

ADDRESS

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London E1 7QX

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It is one of the first ever experimental art games ever made and for the past decade, Bill Viola’s The Night Journey has been exhibited in venues around the world as a work in progress. Now, Bill Viola Studio and USC Game Innovation Lab have launched the award-winning game worldwide on Mac and Windows PC (and on PlayStation in the US), marking the first time home players have been able to experience it.

Using both game and video technologies, The Night Journey tells the universal story of an individual’s journey towards enlightenment. It is cryptic from the start: there is no single goal to achieve, nor a narrative – linear or otherwise – to follow. Players are prompted to navigate an interactive open world over which a mysterious darkness is looming. Their actions determine how the landscape transforms: players can pause to ‘reflect’, and may eventually slow down time itself and forestall the fall of darkness.

Drawing from The Night Journey Notes, 2001-2009

Viola’s previous works provide reference for the game world, while the in-game ‘reflections’ are drawn from the American artist’s archive of video footage. A custom set of post-processing techniques was even developed to give the 3D environment the sense of ‘explorable video’. Text from the 3rd-century philosopher Plotinus and 13th-century Islamic poet and mystic Rumi, among others, have also been incorporated into the game.

The game’s makers asked: What is the game mechanic of enlightenment? How can we model such an intensely personal yet archetypal experience in a game? The answer, apparently, is the antithesis of mainstream modern gaming, from The Night Journey’s lo-fi monochrome visuals to its defiantly slow pace. It’s a curious, meditative, puzzling and at times mystifying endeavour that is sure to divide players.

The Night Journey debuted at digital art gallery SIGGRAPH in 2007 and has since travelled to institutions including The Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul; and Museum of Design, Atlanta. The game was developed with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Intel, Zero1 Art & Technology Network, and the Annenberg Center at the University of Southern California.

INFORMATION

The Night Journey, $19.99, available on Windows PC and Mac, and on PlayStation 4 for players in the US. A USB box set is also available from Blain|Southern. For more information, visit The Night Journey website and USC Game Innovation Lab website

As a young man exited the small, curtained nook where Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price was exhibiting her latest two-channel HD video, txtʃərz, he remarked at how refreshing it was to catch an esteemed artist in the backwoods of Waterloo Station. The artist, he said, was bringing her message to the masses – a rare delight.

The venue in question was the Morley Gallery, part of the arts centre at the eponymous college of adult learning in London’s Southbank. And the message, delivered in a dispassionate electronic voice evocative of Stephen Hawking, was of a higher education in turmoil. Price, a former teacher born to two teachers, envisions a field that is increasingly corrupted by money, distrust and corporate greed.

txtʃərz is, at its most basic, a phonetic play on words. Price’s simple graphics superimpose her transcribed script atop backlit stencils of lace fabrics silhouetted like ecclesiastical robes – as perfectly symmetrical as Rorschach tests. While the choppy voice dictates and its missive unfurls across the screen, a narrative unfolds.

A group of disaffected professionals in some futuresque world are sitting a series of silent protests in which they communicate nothing. Any speech comes out in random glottal utterances, which, when strung together, roughly resemble the word ‘teachers’ – though in reality we learn nothing definitive about their demands.

When the media and academia take notice, the effort to define their struggle and its origin creates divisions among the protesters. It’s an absurd premise rendered more so by the robotic narrator: who’s programmed it? Is it impartial? Who can, or should, we trust?

Price’s layering of voices, fabrics, suspenseful music and even time (past and future mix seamlessly with the present) create the requisite texture in this quick, seven-minute hit. You’ll probably want to watch it twice, but ultimately, it’s a lecture on the absence of lecturing that demands your attention.  

INFORMATION
txtʃərz is on view 5 – 14 July. For more information, visit the Morley Gallery website

ADDRESS

Morley Gallery
61 Westminster Bridge Road
London SE1 7HT

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It started as an ambitious experiment, and two years on, Copenhagen Contemporary is one of Denmark’s largest and most dynamic art spaces. While its previous waterside location on Copenhagen’s Paper Island already covered a vast 3,400 sq m, its new home on the historically industrial Refshaleøen is double the size, inhabiting what was once a welding hall for the Burmeister & Wain shipyard.

The size is unrivalled in the city. ‘It is great to be able to offer opportunities to artists that not all institutions can,’ says the recently appointed director of the enormous new premises, Marie Nipper, who is no stranger to large institutions, having worked at both Tate Liverpool and ARoS Kunstmuseum. ‘Vast spaces definitely hold great potential in the sense that they allow the artist to think big,’ she continues, ‘but large spaces also require a great deal of the artworks as the scales need to match – and of course it requires more funds and is often technically challenging to create these immersive installations for large space.’

Copenhagen Contemporary’s programme will continue to be devoted to large-scale, interactive installation art from around the world, with an emphasis on introducing important works to a Danish audience. ‘It is easy being seduced by the possibility offered by large spaces but we always have to remember that it’s about the quality of the work, not its extent and spatial dimensions,’ adds Nipper.

Dealing with this unique challenge of showing art that can fill a room of this scale and still speak to the heart – and minds – of visitors, Nipper has invited Danish collective Superflex and American artist Doug Aitken to open. Familiar to anyone who visited the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall earlier this year, the brightly-coloured swings of One Two Three Swing! reappear in an entirely new configuration created for Copenhagen Contemporary.

Elsewhere, Aitken’s 35-minute video installation, SONG 1, takes over Hall 3, structured around The Flamingo’s hit song from 1973, I Only Have Eyes for You. Nipper explains: ‘We believe that this is a work that resonates with many people and city-dwellers today as it points to the contemporary condition that many of us experience in the big cities of today; the feeling of being lonely in the vast crowd, of searching for belonging and connectivity in what can at times feel like a fluid and intangible world.’

Copenhagen Contemporary has itself been part of the complex, gentrifying urban landscape, and in Refshaleøen – now home to a mix of world-class restaurants (including Amass), markets, and independent businesses – it sticks to its principle of collaboration and community, reflected in these two major artworks by Superflex and Aitken. ‘The special quality of this area is defined by its industrial history: it is raw and green and brimming with initiatives issuing from progressive creative forces,’ says Nipper. ‘Here one will glimpse an aspect of Copenhagen vastly different to that of the inner city.’

INFORMATION

The inaugurating exhibitions by Superflex and Doug Aitken are on view until 30 December. For more information, visit the Copenhagen Contemporary website

For Doug Aitken’s most recent work, New Era, the artist elevates his signature film installations into a totally immersive experience at 303 Gallery in New York. The 10-minute-long video loop centres on the cell phone, featuring interview clips with American engineer Martin Cooper – the man who made the first handheld cell phone call.

Aitken worked on the piece for about two years after having an epiphany in a coffee shop that literally everyone around him was on their phones. His research led him to Cooper, and the men ultimately spent two days filming an interview discussing the cell phone and the ultimate impact it had on the world.

‘I had an enormous amount of content, but I wasn’t interested in making a documentary or even a document. I decided to use just a few fragments of the conversation– almost like music notes – and embed them in the film,’ said Aitken. ‘The video is not so much about Martin Cooper, even though he is the only human in the work. He takes you to a different place; he rehumanises this moment of radical technology and reframes it within a person’s life.’

Aitken reconfigured the standard white cube space to best display the film. ‘We were really disruptive in how we took the architecture from a four-sided-room to a six-sided-one with mirrors that reflect [the screens] and speakers that project sound from different parts of the room,’ Aitken says. The result transports the viewer into a kaleidoscopic world, amplified through the video itself, with fragmented images of circuitry grids and boards and Motorola cell phones that spin and distort, juxtaposed with soothing, landscape panoramas and Cooper’s interview.

‘I am trying to articulate these views of the world and show the inherent tension and juxtaposition of the landscapes and the grids, repeating and repeating,’ explains Aitken. The artist worked with composer Terry Riley, who drafted a few piano pieces for the images, to create a soundtrack that wavers between soundscape and song.

A curtained hallway branches off from the room and leads to Jungle, a sign that spells out ‘jungle’ three times in myriad coloured lights. Jungle, which also appears New Era (Aitken often references pieces of his work in other works), refocuses the viewer on a single concept after the cacophony of the film experience. The total effect is contemplative, rather than chaotic, a meditation on technology and the human experience.

INFORMATION

‘New Era’ is on view at 303 Gallery until 25 May. The exhibition will then travel to Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich where it will run from 9 June – 21 July. For more information, visit the 303 Gallery website and Galerie Eva Presenhuber website

ADDRESS

303 Gallery
555 W 21st Street
New York

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Video games are about to level up as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London announces a major exhibition dedicated to the medium, opening later this year. ‘There is a wealth of creativity to explore, from the craft of the studios to the innovation of the audience as players,’ explains V&A director Tristram Hunt, who considers video game design as ‘one of the most important design disciplines of our time.’

The V&A exhibition will focus on video game design from the mid-2000s, and while this will mean the stunning omission of history-making games such as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998), there will be plenty else to feast the eyes on, from concept art to moving footage, prototypes, character design sketches, and interactive installations.

Highlights will include glimpses into the creative process Nintendo’s Splatoon (2015), and of The Last of Us (2013) – a breathtaking post-apocalyptic marvel from Naughty Dog (a sequel is currently in the works). Also on view will be the painstakingly accurate recreation of the continent of Westeros from Game of Thrones in Minecraft, and a section exploring DIY arcade games and grassroots gaming culture.

Video games are big business. The eSports industry alone cracked the $1 billion mark last year, earlier than predicted (footage from the League of Legends World Championships will be shown as part of an immersive installation at the exhibition). Independent studios will get their dues too: take Cardboard Computer’s Kentucky Route Zero (2013), a magical realist adventure game. Its parallax scenography draws on brutalist architecture, theatre, set design, typography and – surprisingly enough – René Magritte’s 1965 optical illusion painting La Blanc Seing (The Blank Signature).

‘Video Games: Design/Play/Disrupt’ will be jointly curated by Marie Foulston – who arguably holds one of the world’s most enviable museum posts as the V&A’s Curator of Videogames – and Kristian Volsing, research curator. Pernilla Ohrstedt Studio will oversee the exhibition design, with support from Squint Opera (AV design), Julia (graphic design) and Coda to Coda (sound design). To coincide with the exhibition, the V&A is also inviting applications from UK-based artists, designers or makers involved in the video games scene for a Videogames Residency, which will run from 15 October 2018 until 15 June 2019.

While it may seem an unlikely move by the 166-year-old institution, it’s not the first prestigious art museum to do so. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC staged an exhibition in 2012 exploring the 40-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium, and the MoMa in New York has a number of video games (and a console) in its permanent collection.

‘There is a rich universality to video games in contemporary culture,’ adds Hunt. ‘This is the right time for the V&A to be building on our active interest in video games to investigate this exciting and varied design field at the intersection between technology, engineering and broader visual culture, presenting the influences, inspiration and debates that define it.’

INFORMATION
‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’ will be on view 8 September 2018 – 24 February 2019. The exhibition is supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more information, visit the V&A website

Universal Everything has released a teaser for its latest project, offering a micro view of a macro subject: human behaviour on a mass scale. In the film Tribes, thousands of miniature people move in (and out of) sync, creating a soothing, fluid array of patterns seen from a bird’s-eye perspective.

Amoeba-like clusters of perfectly pixellated humans form in one arrangement, ‘with the crowd’s behaviour revealing patterns that are only visible from a distance’. The work, explains the studio, addresses autonomy, self-organisation and group interrelationships – and there’s a beautiful sense of order to be found in the chaos of the masses below.

‘The aerial viewpoint lends itself to a flat display surface, giving the viewer a sense of grandeur and scale as they observe mass crowd behaviours as if from above,’ explains Universal Everything creative director Matt Pyke. ‘Hopefully this perspective will encourage viewers to consider how people in a common space connect, and the ways in which the movements or actions of both individuals and groups can have knock-on effects on those of others around them.’

Tribes is the latest expression of Universal Everything’s ongoing exploration of human form and movement in digital art, ‘taking it into an ultra-detailed form of moving image that’s only possible thanks to today’s display technologies of 4K and above’, adds Pyke. The London-based digital art and design studio has previously created an immersive 360º video projection of a dance performance for the Science Museum, as well as video artworks for Hyundai’s Motorstudio in South Korea.

The first screening of Tribes will take place at Universal Everything’s solo exhibition at Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, in September 2018.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Universal Everything website

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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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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An excerpt of Spelling Lesson, 1974, by William Wegman. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art

The stately Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is now home to 174 short videos gifted by William Wegman. They’re contextualised in an exhibition, ‘Before/On/After’, which includes works and ephemera from his confederates in the California Conceptual movement; but it was after an appearance on David Letterman’s late night show in 1982 that Wegman’s sly, renegade practice first took hold in the wider, popular consciousness.

Wegman recounted the origin of Spelling Lesson, a 1974 low-tech video he made with Man Ray, his first beloved Weimaraner, which he named for the legendary surrealist. He had been teaching conceptual art at the University of Illinois and had purloined a video camera that had been used to record lectures. After moving to California in 1970, he says, ‘I was doing floor pieces and the dog was a total pest, impossible dog, and I’d be taping something on the floor, and there he was, but he looked great, a lot better than the bits of cheese or nails I was conceptually placing in the corner, and he was grey, that seemed to suit black and white video very well.’

Before/On/After (detail), 1972, by William Wegman. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2016. © William Wegman.

The idea for this particular droll video – actually recorded after he left Long Beach for New York – began on a drive in Syracuse with Man Ray. Wegman was looking for Walnut Street, saying the names of each street they passed out loud. When they came to Beech, Man Ray, a California dog who loved the beach, ‘went bonkers’. The slacker humour of the dog receiving spelling corrections from Wegman as they sit formally together at a table becomes a gentle lesson in how to deal with failure. 

In his three years in California – 1970-1973 – Wegman became part of a group that also included Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Vija Celmins and Allen Ruppersberg, all of whom were poking holes in the stuffier, more academic, East Coast version of conceptualism by using paint, video and photography in ironic ways that turned didactic formalism on its head. In Wegman’s case, ‘putting on the dog’ turned out to be the very opposite of stuffy and pretentious, and contravened a scene in New York that he says ‘nearly did [him] in’.

Yet it is Wegman and his revolving cast of Weimaraners who have taken the journey from lo-fi Long Beach to international celebrity, completing a decidedly unforeseen Hollywood trajectory that belies their humble origins. The exhibition at the Met, of his work and that of his fellow travellers, makes for a cheerful New Year’s antidote to the more challenging news from around the world.

INFORMATION

‘Before/On/After: William Wegman and California Conceptualism’ is on view until 15 July. For more information, visit the William Wegman website and the Metropolitan Museum of Art website

ADDRESS

The Met Fifth Avenue
1000 5th Avenue
New York

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If you’ve ever wondered what a theme park for fans of cars, technology and design might be like, look no further than the Hyundai Motorstudio Goyang
in South Korea. Designed by Austrian architects Delugan Meissl and opened in Goyang near Seoul earlier this year, the 16,719 sq m site boasts nine floors above ground and four underground making it South Korea’s largest centre of automotive culture.

Ribbon like glazed walls that wrap the building’s ground and first floors provide views into the open-plan showroom where the automobiles are presented. Invited to further enhance this awe-inspiring space, digital art and design studio Universal Everything has created five large-scale works of video art for the spaceship-like flagship.

Inspired by Hyundai’s ‘boundary-pushing technology and human ingenuity’, Universal Everything’s video artworks are showcased on a giant 87m long screen that weaves around the space and is visible from far beyond the Motorstudio site.

In the films, glowing helix-like forms spin and twist through darkness, amorphic shapes radiate shimmering rays and a running figure leaves a freeflowing trail of light and colour across the screen.

‘Through their motion, energy and vibrancy, the five animated short films communicate the forward-thinking Hyundai philosophy, echoing some of the cars’ essential qualities,’ explains the studio, which was founded by designer Matt Pyke. ‘They embody Hyundai’s commitment to challenging new frontiers, and make a dynamic impression on the Goyang landscape.’

The new video works build upon the UK studio’s past collaborations with the Korean manufacturer, which include the award winning Vision Hall and Running Man installations. Media architecture is an area in which the studio has been breaking new ground in recent years by creating interactive architectural projections and site-specific video art for some of the world’s most iconic buildings.

In 2015, the studio worked with 20 different animation studios worldwide to create a living mural on the Sydney Opera House, and in 2012, Pyke and his team created 3D video art for the interior media facade of the Jean Nouvel-designed Excelsior in Milan.

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the Universal Everything website and Hyundai website

The way that art is depicted in mass media is both intriguing and revealing. In cinema, precious artworks are placed at the centre of emotionally charged scenes. They become plot drivers, often the cause of grief or the subject of aggression. Likewise, artists are typically portrayed as emotionally unstable, often outcast by society.

‘It’s interesting to see what Hollywood believes contemporary art should look like and what it believes the artist should look like,’ says Simon Castets, director of New York gallery Swiss Institute. ‘The male artist is usually a Dionysian, womanising, alcoholic genius and women are highly sexualised – they can’t help but make art, they can’t control themselves both creatively and sexually. It’s very sexist.’

Intrigued by this clichéd representation, Castets broached the topic last year with the exhibition ‘FADE IN: INT. ART GALLERY – DAY’, where participating artists were asked to reclaim the manner in which art is represented on screen, whether as props, set dressings, plot devices, or character cues.

For 2017, Castets has staged a sequel, this time at a former modernist residence in Belgrade. Showcasing the work of 21 artists, including nine new productions commissioned and selected in close collaboration with independent curator Julie Boukobza, the show has been produced by Balkan Projects – a new initiative led by LA-based Serbian actress Marija Karan, which aims to bring the Balkan art scene to an international stage.

As well as artists who participated in the first showcase, such as William Leavitt and Mathis Gasser, this Belgrade-based follow-up stars a number of Balkan artists, who bring a new and unique viewpoint to the subject. ‘We really liked thinking about it as a sequel,’ says Castets of the new approach. ‘It’s an entirely different movie but it’s the same storyline.’

‘This time, it was about engaging with the rich history of ex-Yugosalvian cinema and working with a number of artists from the Balkans. This is what is at the heart of [Balkan Projects] – to foster cultural dialogue and to also give an occasion to artists from the ex-Yugosalvian diaspora, such as Aleksandra Domanovic, Darja Bajagić and Bojan Šarčević, to return to the region with a different perspective. And that’s been very inspiring.’

Titled ‘FADE IN 2: EXT. MODERNIST HOME — NIGHT’, the exhibition is staged at the city’s cinematic Gallery-Legacy Čolaković – the former residence of collectors Milica Zorić and Rodoljub Čolaković, which was bequeathed by the couple to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, along with their private collection. Opened to the public in 1990, the venue has its own storied history – most dramatically in 1998, when its courtyard was the site of the assassination of Serbian gangster Darko Ašanin.

‘For me it was very important to engage with the courtyard space,’ explained Boukobza, who together with Castets, conceived the show’s summer evening opening to mimic  what a Hollywood interpretation of an art exhibition opening would look like.

With a string quartet playing to the assembled guests in the background, the courtyard’s shallow, sun dappled pool played host to a fire-breathing, Jacques Tati-inspired fountain by Swiss artist Tobias Spichtig. All around it, topless male models clad in jeans waded about the water, stoppin occasionally to paint Modigliani portraits on each other’s backs. The scene, conceived by German artist Danai Anesiadou was inspired by Denys de La Patellière’s 1968 film Le Tatoué, in which a wealthy art dealer discovers a Modigliani portrait tattooed on the back of an old, aristocratic legionnaire.

Up above, wrapping the courtyard’s walls, a repeating poste design by Serbian-born Raša Todosijević advertises a film titled Murder that was never made – a chilling acknowledgement of the location’s violent history. ‘It felt like being in a movie,’ reflected Boukobza of the opening night. ‘It was a representation of what an art performance is – it was about creating a cliché; a mise en abyme.’

Inside, video installations such as Christian Marclay’s film montage provided further analysis of the topic. Called Made to be Destroyed, Marclay pieces together high octane clips of art in movies; Clive Owen battles through a frenetic shoot out in the Guggenheim, Christian Bale sets fire to the Mona Lisa and Jack Nicholson’s Joker gleefully dances through a Gotham City gallery, defacing and destroying artworks as he goes.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Ramírez Pérez’s film Confluence pays homage to Doris, a Serbian singer and former child star who rose to prominence in 1992 with a song written to benefit orphans of the Yugoslav Wars.

‘It’s a new chapter in the Balkan art scene,’ said Balkan Projects founder Karan. ‘I want to consider what the contemporary Balkan art scene currently lacks and how I can help to galvanise its energies, applying my working knowledge of one cultural industry to help build another. There is so much potential from young artists here, they just need the platform.’

INFORMATION

‘FADE IN 2: EXT. MODERNIST HOME — NIGHT’ is on view until 21 August. For more information, visit the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade website

ADDRESS

Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade
Gallery-Legacy of Milica Zorić & Rodoljub Čolaković
2 Rodoljuba Čolakovića Street
Belgrade

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When the Guggenheim Bilbao first opened its doors on 19 October 1997, it presented an ambitious 300-piece survey of 20th-century art. One such work was Bill Viola’s The Messenger (1996), a looped video installation in which a naked man slowly materialises from a vat of electric blue water. Upon surfacing, he takes a breath, only to descend again and dissolve into a similar state.

Now, almost two decades later, as part of the Guggenheim Bilbao’s 20th anniversary celebrations, the US video art pioneer returns to the museum on a far more more substantial scale with a self-titled retrospective. ‘It’s a journey for the soul,’ said Kira Perov, who spoke on behalf of Viola, her long-term partner and collaborator, at the exhibition’s preview last week. ‘It explores the fundamental experiences of human life, using video as a surrogate eye.’

Spanning 40 years, the show seeks to decode how Viola has used video as a transcendental medium in which to explore the human condition. Themes such as birth, death, rebirth, transformation and consciousness are a constant, stoked by his deep-rooted interest in mystic traditions including Zen Buddhism and Christian mysticism. Typically, his work is slow-moving, cyclical and retains a lush, painterly quality. ‘It reaches out to the spectator, who will connect and interpret the work in many different ways,’ explained the exhibition’s curator Lucía Agirre.

This is certainly true of the affective opener: Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), which was recreated especially for the space and comprises a large, two-faced screen (one mirrored) that rotates on a vertical axis. While a close-up of a man’s face is projected, the mirrored side reflects both the footage and its observer. All the while, a deep voice rhythmically chants a list of the states of being. ‘Once you look at something for a long time, especially in slow motion, its essence becomes visible,’ noted Perov, who described the piece as ‘integral’. ‘It becomes an interior for the relevations of a constantly turning mind absorbed with itself,’ said Viola in the accompanying notes.

Elsewhere, more recent works such as Catherine’s Room (2001), Surrender (2001) and The Encounter (2012) highlight how he has consistently commandeered advances in technology – from polyptych displays to rear projections and high-definition film – to gracefully probe the most profound human issues. As Perov attests: ‘Technology is simply a tool, a paintbrush has as much spirituality as a video camera.’

The survey draws to an enlightened close with Inverted Birth (2014), which depicts five stages of awakening through a series of dramatic transformations using different coloured liquids. ‘The fluids represent the essence of human life and the lifecycle from birth to death, here inverted into a shift from darkness to light,’ surmised Viola.

INFORMATION

‘Bill Viola: A Retrospective’ is on view until 9 November. For more information, visit the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website

ADDRESS

Guggenheim Bilbao
Abandoibarra Etorb, 2
48009 Bilbo
Bizkaia

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As far as Erlend G. Høyersten, director of Denmark’s lauded Aros Aarhus Art Museum, is concerned, there’s never been a better time to unveil an ambitious art triennial. 'Not only does the museum’s inaugural fair coincide with Aarhus’s year-long celebrations as the European City of Culture,' he says. 'But, perhaps more vitally, the role that art plays in our society has never felt more important. Hopefully these works can affect change,' he adds.

The triennial, titled 'The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times', examines mankind’s complex relationship with nature over the past 400 years. 'World views, such as religion, politics, science and culture have manifested themselves in man-made natural landscapes for centuries,' notes Høyersten, adding, 'We hope this gives visitors a new understanding of nature.'

The exhibition is separated into three parts: 'The Past', 'The Present' and' The Future'. 'The Past', which opened at the start of April, is situated within the confines of the museum and traces how nature has manifested itself within art. Classical landscape paintings by Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain brush shoulders with poignant contemporary works by the likes of German photographer Thomas Struth, Swiss visual artist Pamela Rosenkranz and Icelandic-Danish icon, Olafur Eliasson.

The remaining two themes were rolled out in and around the capital, sparking a stimulating dialogue between art, environment and audience. California-based Doug Aitken, for example, choose to house his multi-layered sculpture, The Garden, inside a secluded industrial warehouse near the docks. The participatory piece allows volunteers to channel their inner Alex DeLarge and smash up the contents – generic white tables, chairs, sofas – of a glass anger room. This aggressive space, which broadcasts a live stream of footage from six cameras, is tempered by an outer ring of lush vegetation, which, he states, 'creates a tension between the natural and synthetic environment.'

Elsewhere, emerging French artist Cyprien Gaillard transformed the toilets of graffiti-strewn student bar – Shen Mao – with an opulent marble terrazzo floor, flecked with fragments of mother-of-pearl oyster shells. 'With Understory, [Gaillard] has created a link between the toilet and its drains to the natural life existing in Danish waters,' muses Marie Nipper, external curator of 'The Present and The Future'. While in calmer shores, US sculptor Meg Webster calls for an urgent response to the decline in pollinators across the US and Europe with Concave Room For Bees, an ecological sculpture that she cultivated close to the coastline using native flowers, grasses and herbs. She hopes the work will 'attract butterflies, bees, insects and all kinds of pollinators to the site.'

On a different note, Bjarke Ingels Group aims to lift spirits and spread social cheer with their colossal, cloud-like mobile sculpture, ‘SKUM’. Inspired by 'a love of trampolines and bouncy castles,' the bubbly pavilion provides a space for people to interact and enjoy the bucolic views of the park in which its placed. Katharina Grosse's untitled garden painting proves equally exuberant. Using raspberry red and white acrylic paint, the popular German artist infiltrates the Mindeparken area of the park, including its bike lanes, beach and jetties, with a radical wash of unnatural colour that disrupts the landscape. 'It’s intrinsically casual, like scribbling with a felt pen on the edge of your shoes,' she explains. 'In that sense, scribbling is a gesture that interferes with the garden’s controlled principles of nature. I hope the work gives viewers a sense of freedom and uninhabited thinking.'

INFORMATION

’The Garden: End of Times, Beginning of Times’ runs until 10 September 2017. For more information, visit the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum 

website

ADDRESS

ARoS Aarhus Art Museum
DK-8000
Aarhus

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‘It is the first time these works have ever been in conversation together so the show has a very specific conceptual intent in calling them portraits and surrogates,’ says the New York-based artist Taryn Simon, on her first solo exhibition in Hong Kong at the Gagosian.

With Contraband (2010), she presents a selection of images from her photographic archive of 1,075 items confiscated by US customs and postal service officials. Simon lived at the airport for an entire week photographing an eclectic array of items. From counterfeit handbags and dead animals, to intricately wrapped food items and pirate videos, the resulting images are a reflection on how people at the border are defined by their objects.

‘Counterfeit goods were the battlefront of immigration services at that time,’ Simon says. ‘You’d expect more dangerous items but it was an economic battle then.’

The artist is best known for her photography paired with text, as seen in her Paperwork and the Will of Capital (2015) series. Here, she worked with a botanist to meticulously reproduce the formal floral arrangements showcased at the signing of several important international agreements, accords and treaties.

The monumental photographs, accompanied by text about the treaty signing, are presented in mahogany picture frames that Simon says forms an integral part of the artwork. ‘Some of these flowers convey a certain public ceremony, but the aesthetics are completely different to what the texts are about,’ she explains. ‘For me, it is about that disruption of presumption and judgement and perception.’

The artist’s video self-portrait – made in collaboration with a Russian news programme – is the undisputed highlight of the exhibition. It shows how at the close of a video interview on Russia Prime Time, the artist was asked to sit silently and stare at the two newscasters for several minutes so that the extra footage could be used in the editing process. ‘It is about the ways in which you perform in what, at the end, looks natural but is really very awkward,’ Simon says.

Simon usually works on one project at a time – sometimes for several years carrying out painstaking research – without any idea of what the next project will be. ‘Each project is not a building block but almost a rejection. It is like the person who made that project is dead and there is a new author,’ she offers.

‘In my mind there are radical shifts that come from an exhaustion from the former project. There is a jump to a completely new construction of work.’ Good news indeed.

INFORMATION

‘Taryn Simon: Portraits and Surrogates’ is on view until 5 August. For more information, visit the Gagosian website

7/F Pedder Building
12 Pedder Street
Central
Hong Kong

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In her first feature film, Laurie Simmons’ titular character, Ellie Shine, dons a number of famous Hollywood personas, including Marlene Dietrich. Photography: Dylan Nelson

It should come as no surprise that artist, and one-time Wallpaper* guest editor, Laurie Simmons, has released her first feature film, My Art. The veteran, whose work has spanned both photography and film, initially unveiled the film at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, and premiered it to domestic audiences for the first time at the Tribeca Film Festival over the weekend.

The film deals with familiar fodder as it follows a struggling New York artist (played by herself) as she tries to jump start her decades-old dream of establishing her place in the art world. Simmons’ character, the endearingly named Ellie Shine, is a relatable one: she possesses a stable teaching job and successful friends, but success as an artist has continued to elude her. When a famous friend offers her their summer house and studio to stay and work at, Shine grasps the chance and finds inspiration among two out-of-work actors, who tend to the property’s gardens.

Simmons began writing the film in 2011 and shooting commenced in 2013. The enterprise was inspired after her own portrayal of an artist-mother in her daughter Lena Dunham’s film, Tiny Furniture. ‘I became preoccupied with the depiction of artists, particularly women artists. Almost invariably, they are mythologised, romanticised, and made to seem tragic and crazy, which has no bearing on my own experience as an artist,’ says Simmons in her director’s statement.

While My Art ranges from romance to comedy and fantasy, with threads of feminism woven in, it’s Simmons’ depiction of Shine’s art-making that is truly magnetic to watch. As Shine tries to find her artistic path, she eventually gravitates towards producing homespun (and improbable) recreations of iconic Hollywood films.

Simmons says, ‘Believe it or not the biggest challenge in conceptualising Ellie was figuring out what her artwork would be. I agonised over this decision for months, realising it could be any art discipline I chose. I needed to find a way for Ellie to make art that audiences could relate to. It’s not always that interesting to see an artist paint or sculpt on screen. Every artist I know is something of a cinephile so it didn’t seem like a stretch to have Ellie’s obsession with old movies become the basis of her art.'

She continues, 'Video and performance has become more familiar to the general public so I thought video art might provide a more transparent way to show Ellie’s process. The technique of shooting in front of a rear screen projection is something I’ve done for many years. It’s a visual language and style I’ve developed and feel comfortable with. My production team and DP were all really worried that it wouldn’t work. I finally had to say: “Guys, I’ve got this one.”’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Laurie Simmons’ website and the Tribeca Film Festival website

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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'Ever since I was very young i've projected a particular persona. I've been very good at hiding pain. I'm an actress. I play a role.'

So states Joanne Salley, the focus of Simon Fujiwara's Joanne, a new video piece on view at London's Photographers' Gallery. This notion of self-image and artifice – bolstered by an accompanying series of portraits by esteemed fashion photographer Andreas Larsson – forms the crux of the work.

Salley was Fujiwara's secondary school art teacher during his time at Harrow. A few years after he left, she was embroiled in a tabloid scandal when private semi-nude photographs of her were circulated by students, causing her to leave her job.

Half a decade on, Salley and Fujiwara began work on this project in an attempt to reconcile her feelings about the event, as well as reclaim an identity based on her multifaceted talents, rather than looks. The film itself is a mishmash meta-narrative, segueing from moments of soft-focus wellness (replete with an upbeat trance soundtrack) to first-person iPhone testimonials, and surreal, behind-the-scenes photoshoot footage.

Salley employs a PR focus group to help work through the process of reconstituting her image, before literally sourcing an actor to play her brand manager. As a model, beauty queen and actress, Salley's objectively pristine appearance is cannily offset with footage of her in the boxing ring (she's a champion fighter) – her honed physicality given a visceral spin. It's quite unexpected and purposefully untitillating. 

There's plenty of candid self-reflection in here too, not least in a walking tour around Harrow School. Salley's fractious personal background meant that she found a new 'family' in the school, one that was ripped away from her by means outside of her control. 'Trying for me to understand what happened is also coming to terms with not having the community of a family anymore,' she says. Her return to the school grounds is a way of closing the door on a part of her life she never intended to eschew. The emotional clout is palpable.

Then comes the monologue on acting – but just as the tears start to roll and the cod-emotional soundtrack swells, we cut quick to some slo-mo larking and the vaudeville parp of 'Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay'. It's an irreverent juxtaposition that curbs the navel-gazing and actually adds emotional resonance (the chameleon clambering on Joanne's head in this sequence is a neat allegory, and charmingly surreal; the literal mudslinging perhaps a little too blunt).

It's an enveloping, layered work – totally self-aware in its use of visual and narrative tropes to blow open and explore a far darker, emotionally abrasive story. 'I feel like I’m cheating if I say: I am a model, I am a teacher, I am a lover, I am an artist, I am a chameleon, I am a fighter... I am a person... I am a female,' says Salley at the film's outset. It's that final pronouncement – banal when preceding the film, monumental in retrospect – that encapsulates the heart of 'Joanne'.

INFORMATION

'Simon Fujiwara: Joanne' is on view until 15 January. For more information, visit the Photographers' Gallery website

ADDRESS

The Photographers' Gallery
16–18 Ramillies Street
London W1F 7LW

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It takes a curious eye to find beauty in the banal, and few are more curious than Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay. His latest work, a series of six new videos due to be unveiled at White Cube Bermondsey later this week, explore precisely that: the brilliantly boring artefacts that litter London’s streets.

On view from 5 until 10 October to coincide with Frieze Art Fair, these looped works will be screened on the façade of the iconic gallery. Each animation hones in on a different object that is routinely discarded. Here, everything from cigarette butts, to cotton buds and straws star in static images that are then stitched together to form frenetic video animations, by way of Eadweard Muybridge’s zoetrope.

Marclay has collated thousands of photographs taken during daily walks in the city, weaving a digital tapestry from these found objects. 'I was thinking of the Bermondsey community for this projection,’ explains the London-based artist. ‘They are my main audience for this project and that's why I wanted to present a different work each night for a week. Every evening when walking back home, they will encounter a new work.’ It’s street photography – but not as we normally know it.

Like specimens being examined underneath a microscope, they metamorphose in shape (and colour) like living cells, dictated by the sequences Marclay has orchestrated. Silent and enlarged ‘to architectural proportions’, the videos take on a hypnotic, even strangely therapeutic, quality.

'It’s fun to be able to bring back what I found on the streets back to the street,’ the artist says. ‘The large wall used for the projection will be visible by passersby; they don’t have to enter the gallery. The gritty character of the photographs fits the gritty context of the streets – there’s a nice symbiosis.'

INFORMATION

’Christian Marclay: Outdoor Projection’ is on view from 5–10 October. For more information, visit the White Cube website

Artwork imagery courtesy of White Cube

ADDRESS

White Cube Bermondsey
144–152 Bermondsey Street
London, SE1 3TQ

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Suki Chan's films concern themselves with light, in all its shifting, shadow-casting forms. Her latest work, however, focuses on the joys that light affords – perception, vision, sight.

The three-screen video work at Tintype gallery in London hits a lot of the city's current artistic buzz words. It's immersive, interactive and interdisciplinary. But in no way is it box-ticking or generic. Funded by the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England, the work takes us on a high-tech voyage into the human optical system.

Chan is intrigued by the quirks of perception – when playing with a camera obscura, she became fascinated with how our eyes receive images upside down, and yet the brain interprets them the correct way up. Her film reveals how visual information is modified and processed by the eye and the brain in real time, and it becomes abundantly apparent that at any given moment we actually see much less than we perceive. Viewers, if they're brave enough, have the opportunity to evaluate their own rapid eye movements during the show, thanks to cutting-edge tracking technology.

This is no kooky science experiment, however. Chan's photographic eye (as well as being scientifically engaging) is probing, relentless and abstract. Filmed largely within the University of London's Senate House (where Chan spent time during her degrees at Goldsmiths and Chelsea College of Art) we're taken into the depths of the building – the boiler rooms and book stores – in a fitting allegory of the journey into the dark corners of the human brain.

Says Chan, ‘The more I investigated perception and how the brain processes information, the more miraculous and incredible it became: how impoverished and compressed information received via our senses can yield a coherent, high resolution, detailed and multi-dimensional world.’ The impressive film takes our understanding of vision, and flips it upside down. It questions what we see, what we don't, and how our brain fills in the gaps. The resulting work is a powerful mix of artistic prowess and scientific suggestion.

Chan's films concern themselves with light, in all its shifting, shadow-casting forms. This work, however, focuses on the joys that light affords – perception, vision, sight. Watch above. Pictured: Lucida, film still, 2016

INFORMATION

Suki Chan's 'Lucida' runs from 16 September – 22 October 2016. For more information, visit the Tintype website

ADDRESS

Tintype
107 Essex Road
London N1 2SL

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The industrial wasteland of Signal Hill, California, with its pumping oil derricks and fast-food restaurants, couldn’t be further from the transcendent tranquility of Christopher Wren’s London, but it is here that renowned artist Bill Viola has completed his second commission for St Paul’s Cathedral.

Inside a one-storey stucco building, Viola and his wife and creative partner Kira Perov maintain a suite of offices that hum with efficient energy. After 11 years, they are putting the finishing touches on Mary, the video installation that will open on 8 September, official birthday of the Virgin Mary. It is a companion to the artist’s video Martyrs, installed on the opposite side of the High Altar two years ago.

The three vertically-oriented plasma screens, 65in in the centre, flanked by two shorter ones that are 50in each, emulate the proportions of an Italian Renaissance triptych. Hunched over in a folding chair, Viola stares hard at the screens. He and Perov have watched the video thousands of times but still need to fine-tune details, especially the exquisite pacing that is a hallmark of his work.

The opening sequence is simply stunning. A beautiful black woman with closely cropped hair plays the Madonna. She gazes straight at us with an expression of compassion while her baby suckles at one breast. At first, it appears to be a still image but slowly she turns her face down to the child. Behind her looms the glittering, glassy skyline of downtown Los Angeles and MacArthur Park lake, but they are time-lapse images racing by. The speeding lights of cars, clouds scudding across the sky, the sun rising and setting, all is motion and chaos while the Madonna in her red gown sits peacefully, aloof from the mundane chaos of daily life. Her place is eternal.

‘This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,’ says Viola. He spent eight years researching by reading books about the historic and religious figure of Mary, including one about black Madonnas. On a visit to Santa Maria de Montserrat in Catalonia, he and Perov saw the renowned 12th-century sculpture of the dark-skinned Madonna and child. ‘That started something,’ says Viola. ‘I got really excited and started to look for things that could converge with each other. It was perfect timing.’

Viola’s videos rarely imply narrative continuity, so he felt stymied by having to work from the story of Mary’s life. In addition, he felt intense pressure from the ways the Virgin Mary had been portrayed by the greatest artists for two millennia of Western history. He and Perov started and stopped work on the project for five years. Finally, he says, ‘I gave up.’

Very quickly thereafter, he was able to conceptualise Martyrs and complete the installation, which stands above the spot where Wren himself is buried. Four vertical plasma screens each depict an individual figure tormented by one of four natural elements: earth, air, fire and water. Despite their electronic media, Viola considers these pieces to be ‘practical objects of traditional contemplation and devotion’. The UK’s Guardian newspaper called it ‘a hi-tech Caravaggio that redefines religious art’, while the artist explained that Martyrs was about individuals being ‘faithful to values, beliefs and principles’.

Viola himself has been being faithful to his principles for 40 years, despite working in opposition to most contemporary art, which is largely scornful of such sincerity. A pioneer of video art, Viola, now 65, has been regarded as a master of the moving image since the early 1970s when, as a student at Syracuse University in New York, he studied and worked with avant-garde composer David Tudor. Living in Long Beach, California, with Perov and their two sons, Blake and Andrei (named after William Blake and Andrei Tarkovsky) since 1981, Viola has continually expanded his studies of Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism.

With his 1983 installation Room for St John of the Cross, a monastic room with recordings of whispered poems by the 16th-century Spanish mystic, Viola made an overt commitment to an art that explored spiritual search and issues of faith. In 1996, he was commissioned to create a video installation at the 900-year-old Durham Cathedral.

The Messenger, which now belongs to Tate, featured an indistinct form that breaks abruptly through the tranquil surface of water as the body of a naked man. It was the first video installation to be acquired by a religious institution, the Church of England.

Despite this impressive track record, it was a struggle to complete Mary. Perov explains the breakthrough: ‘Then the predella idea came in. But it almost killed us.’

In the early Italian Renaissance paintings that have been important to Viola since the early 1970s, when he worked for two years at the gallery Art/tapes/22 in Florence, the predella offered a manner of expanding on biblical stories in small panels along the base of an altar. A grid of six moving images arrayed on either side of the central screen suggests aspects of Mary’s personal journey as she walks alone beneath rocky red cliffs shot in Zion, Utah, or the harsh nocturnal desert around the Salton Sea, which is shot in black and white. The entire piece culminates with the Pietà, clearly based on the Michelangelo sculpture, with the body of Christ lying in the lap of a young white Madonna, hooded in blue and sitting before a landscape of ruins with an expression of infinite sorrow. Her hand caresses her son’s cold leg before the colour fades to grisaille, so the scene appears to be behind a veil of rain. The piece is an aggregate of suggestion, though it touches on five literal points: the birth of Christ, Mary’s journey, the life of Mary, her dreams and premonitions of her son’s death, and the Pietà.

Viola says it was Perov, who has worked with him for almost 40 years, who put the project on the right track. ‘The feminine principle, that was what was missing,’ she says. ‘It is the life of Mary but in an oblique and symbolic way. It’s not just Christian imagery.’

Viola’s mother was English and Anglican, his father first-generation Italian Catholic. ‘I’m at the cusp of it,’ he says. ‘You feel it. It’s profound. The things you do that are most powerful are always under the radar.’ Perov was raised in the Russian Orthodox church and still loves the appearance of icons. They point out that the story of Mary is cross-cultural, recounted in the texts of many religions, including the Quràn.

Both Martyrs and Mary are gifts from Viola and Perov to Tate but on long-term loan to St Paul’s, a shared commitment to contemporary art from either end of the Millennium Bridge. Tate also owns Viola’s Nantes Triptych, 1992, of a woman giving birth, a man floating, and a woman dying. Like Martyrs, the metal stand for the installation of Mary has been designed by the architectural firm Foster + Partners.

From a larger perspective, there is much attention being paid to Viola in the next year. The first monograph, published by Thames & Hudson, coincides with surveys of his work opening in 2017 at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Deichtorhallen in Hamburg and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

But Viola seems unfazed by awards and acclaim. In something of an awestruck tone, he claims that nothing compares with seeing his work in a sacred site like St Paul’s. ‘Working in a cathedral is so powerful,’ he says. ‘It really comes to you from your gut.’

As originally featured in the October 2016 issue of Wallpaper* (W*211)

INFORMATION

For more information, visit Bill Viola's website

ADDRESS

St Paul's Churchyard
London
EC4M 8AD

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Opening in Johannesburg this week, 'Dreamers' is a new show by Iranian artist and film maker Shirin Neshat. Her first solo exhibition with the Goodman Gallery – and on the African continent – sees the introduction of two new video installations, Roja and Sarah, created this year.

Both are part of a trilogy of video installations exploring the world of women’s dreams (the first, Illusions & Mirrors was made in 2013 and premiered at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). 'I have been haunted by the power of dreams for years,' says Neshat. 'I am fascinated by how in a state of dream, the boundaries in between madness and sanity, reality and fiction, conscious and subconscious are blurred and broken.'

According to Neshat, Sarah is 'about the unfolding journey of a woman as she recollects and breathes annihilation, as she faces residues of destruction, violence, genocide and mortality in a state of dream. Sarah’s anxieties and fears... force her to plunge into imagining her own death.' Even though the works are not set in a certain place or time, the context of a world in conflict is evident from the tone. Perhaps today, or even tomorrow?

'In my opinion, rational interpretations of dreams never seem to properly capture their true meanings and significance within [the] human psyche,' Neshat continues. 'So Roja and Sarah are an effort to make sense of the more subliminal emotional and psychic universe that lives deep inside of us, but is difficult to explain through words.'

INFORMATION

'Dreamers' is on view until 14 September. For more information, visit the Goodman Gallery website.

ADDRESS

Goodman Gallery
163 Jan Smuts Avenue
Parkwood
Johannesburg, 2193

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Developed over a brief three-month period, YellDesign’s ’Papermeal’ project sees recipes recreated as stop-motion paper videos. Pictured: Episode 4: ’Fish & Chips’

'Papermeal', a project developed by the Melbourne animation studio YellDesign and developed over a brief three-month period, has debuted with a first series of five animations. The project – which commenced around lunchtime discussions about the potential of food – comprises reconstitutions of food in paper, with the aim of creating quirky animations to elevate everyday recipes into surreal and colourful works of art.

W*: How did the idea of food come into play? The recipes provide wonderful narratives for the animations but how did you select them?
YellDesign: We started with the concept and production technique first (100 per cent paper), then built the stories around that. For example, we’d discuss the idea of setting an unlikely scenario (like making pasta from scratch on your desktop), then think about what elements in that environment could contribute to the making of that meal. We ended up with more ideas than we could use!

Tell us more about the stop-motion animation. Each short film requires different sets and momentums – how did the team work in that respect?
We had a list of props needed for each shoot/scene. We kept the final sets very flexible, so we could make creative decisions on the fly. We don’t have this luxury with our brand work, so keeping it loose made the process very enjoyable and spontaneous.

Your use of paper is very creative and adds a layer of abstraction to the topic. Would you describe this media as instrumental to the process or more part of the concept and inspiration?
We set out with one goal – make complete recipes out of paper. As our studio style is more quirky and colourful, we naturally started to elevate the concepts using absurd forms and objects. The Jaffle video has loads of high-contrast colours and patterns, just because we thought it would look great – it works well.

In terms of the project’s identity, YellDesign introduces itself as a fully-dedicated production Vine studio. How does 'Papermeal' fit within this agenda?
Last year alone we made over 200 branded Vines – the bulk of our workload – but we also made 100 pieces of longer content. I think as short-form content has evolved, we are seeing more videos in the 15–30 second range, and even a few up to 60 seconds! We made our mark with Vine, but we are also constantly evolving as a creative group.

Finally, where do you think this project might go? Do you have any further plans for it?
Yes, we will be doing another series in future, but have to keep the concept under wraps. We will also be doing a number of larger projects like this each year to give our group the chance to go crazy on the creative – with no restrictions. We think it's important, keeps us fresh!

The project has the aim of creating quirky animations to elevate everyday recipes into surreal and colourful works of art. Pictured: Episode 5: ’Banana Split’

’The Jaffle video has loads of high-contrast colours and patterns, just because we thought it would look great – it works well,’ they explain. Pictured: Episode 2: ’Jaffle’

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the 'Papermeal' website

Photography courtesy YellDesign

Finding interesting ways of presenting video-art is never easy. Lisson Gallery's summer exhibition, 'Performance/Audience/Mirror', aims to step away from the 'uncomfortable chairs in a dark screening room' concept by reaching outside the walls of the London gallery through a programme of live, online screenings designed to provoke world-wide debate. This virtual element 'not only allows global access to the exhibition but also highlights the democratic nature of film while calling into question issues facing artists who work in this discipline', explains curator Emma Gifford-Mead.

The show's title is drawn from Dan Graham’s 1977 performance of the same name, at De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam. Contrasting the web screenings, the exhibition also makes use of an intensely intimate, gallery-bound viewing installation, in the form of Graham's 2001 work, Greek Meander Pavilion, Open Shōji Screen Version, where the 'audience' third of the exhibition is held. The pavilion shows a range of films from the 1960s to the present day on a screen encased between two-way mirrors and Japanese-inspired shōji panels. Films can be viewed from inside or outside of the pavilion, along with any gallery-goers who might be exploring inside – so audience members become an integral part of the viewing experience, as opposed to those who might be watching at home on their laptops.

The latter two sections, 'performance' and 'mirror' are more traditional in layout, but they feature some of the exhibition's real gems. These include the UK debut of a darkly comic claymation, Worship (2016), by Swedish duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, and the rarely seen SPEAK. by British conceptualist John Latham – a psychedelic, ten-minute snapshot of the 1960s.

The show contributes to London's recent love-affair with technological, performative art (think of Whitechapel Gallery's 'Techtonic Superhighway' or 'Performing for the Camera' at Tate Modern), but also follows an increasing number of exhibitions that include a virtual element, like Bruno Ceschel's app-based photography interactions, and The Supermarket's online gallery space. The result is a winning mix of personal, intimate performances and web-friendly progression.

INFORMATION

'Performer/Audience/Mirror' is on view until 27 August. For more information, visit the Lisson Gallery website

ADDRESS

Lisson Gallery
52 Bell Street
London, NW1 5DA

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If you hadn’t already realised it, video art has changed dramatically in the past ten years. A talented young generation of artists has arrived and with them a sophisticated new language for exploring the mish-mash of images, intrigues, desires, fears and ironies that the online world has exposed them to. They take to an editing suite as if it were an extension of their own bodies. And the most brilliant of them, artists like Ed Atkins and Rachel Rose, and socially-minded groups like K-Hole, have come up with some darkly reflective, funny, uncompromising work.

There are many problems with showing this kind of work still. It is difficult and expensive – all video artists require different kinds of screens and environments, good sound, brilliant curators and technicians. What’s more, it needs savvy young like-minded collectors and galleries willing to be generous to their audiences, to select the gems from the mass of pretentious rubbish, and to give this challenging work space, so that people devote the time (sometimes hours) needed to watch it and understand it.

Enter then Julia Stoschek, daughter of the car manufacturing billionaire Michael Stoschek. Aged just 41, she’s been collecting video and performance art since she was in her twenties. Her space in Dusseldorf, which has offered regular exhibitions free to the public since 2007 – including solo shows for artists like Elizabeth Price, Sturtevant and Wu Tsang – has been well received in Dusseldorf and the art world.

This week she brings a similar gift to Berlin, an absolutely of-the-moment exhibition presenting 38 art works by 20 artists who she perceives as stars at the forefront of the digital video age movement. It’s all housed in the 1960s former Czech cultural centre, transformed into a sort of futuristic lab-cum-theatre, decked with white curtains throughout. The best room is the wood-panelled 1960s movie theatre featuring a vast widescreen projection of Ian Cheng’s 'live simulation', a frightening computer-game style action sequence unfolding randomly according to the artist-designed algorithm.

Down the corridor from Cheng’s 2015 work, Cao Fei’s 2007 RNB City feels wonderfully dated and naive, and makes a fascinating point of comparison – an island collaboratively grown with the inhabitants of Second Life, a gentle, curious, optimistic exploration of the many-hands-one-mind creativity of the open-platform universe.

Julia Stoschek has rented this Berlin space for six months, but she says she wants to create a permanent residence there. The collection surely deserves to stay. Devote time to this exhibition and you will leave with a disturbing yet profound sense that our perception of time, our way of being, is changing.

INFORMATION

‘Welt am Draht’ (’World on Wire’) is on view until 18 September. For more information, visit the the Julia Stoschek Collection’s website

ADDRESS

The Julia Stoschek Collection
Leipziger Strassse 60
10117 Berlin

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The multimedia artist multimedia artist William Kentridge, who has spread his reach far beyond drawing and painting by turning to tapestry, film, sculpture and even opera, continues to ratchet up his talents even further. Now his latest endeavor, two 2015 multiscreen film installations showcased at New York's Marian Goodman Gallery could not be more compelling. Both installations in the exhibition, 'William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance & Notes Toward a Model Opera' mark their first presentation in the United States.

In these immersive installations, the South African artist melds film, sound, shadow play, drawings and more. His themes of oppression and social injustice highlight the plight of those desperate to flee poverty, repression and violence.

Played across eight screens, More Sweetly Play the Dance, which was commissioned by the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam and the Lichtsicht-Projection Biennale held in Bad Rothenfelde, Germany debuted at EYE last year. At 17 minutes long, the black and white film spans more than 140 feet across and literally envelops the viewer.

In referencing the danse macabre, Kentridge serves up a seemingly endless procession of real life actors along with his animated figure drawings. Trudging through an abandoned mining site, some figures carry baskets while others pull unbearable loads and appear as cast shadows. Overlaid is an entire brass band playing a dirge-like composition, heightening the sense of gravity.

‘I am interested in political art, that is to say an art of ambiguity, contradiction, uncompleted gestures and uncertain endings,’ Kentridge has said.

The other three-screen installation, Notes Toward a Model Opera, was on view at the Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art this summer. For this film, Kentridge first researched dances and model operas commissioned by Madame Mao. The experience of viewing this is equally disquieting and particularly poignant in light of the migrant crisis. 

INFORMATION

'William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance & Notes Toward a Model Opera' is on view until 20 February

Photography courtesy of the artist

ADDRESS

Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
New York, New York

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With neon art so au courant, a newly installed work at the Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris featuring 77 unique fixtures that read 'Remember Me' might register at first as a witty bid for attention. But reducing it to an Instagram opportunity would be like judging a book by its cover. For starters, the piece was conceived by Oscar-winning director Steve McQueen, whose roster of films—Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave—depict complicated and uncomfortable aspects of the human condition.

As his fifth solo exhibition with Goodman, the show centres around the true story of Ashes, a young man from Grenada whose life and death are represented simultaneously in a darkened lower-level gallery. Footage of him seemingly carefree on the bow of a boat dates back to 2002, when he was filmed live by cinematographer Robby Muller for a separate work. The flip side of the suspended screen reveals a hilly cemetery where craftsmen have been tasked with erecting Ashes’ gravestone. The double projection places the viewer in a destabilising limbo: watch both scenes in their entirety? Shift back and forth between them? Wonder what transpired between the two moments? The artist director supplements his narrative with two explanatory devices: fragmented voice-over testimonials and takeaway posters of Ashes, with the transcribed dialogue scrolling across his grainy image.

McQueen, who was awarded the Turner Prize in 1999 and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale a decade later, opted not to take questions about the exhibition. But writer Jean Fisher notes in the accompanying text how the film channels the late modern French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of 'heterotopia' which explores how spaces can exist in an undefined dimension, like an imprecise mental-physical state, neither here nor there.

And as much as this applies, it doesn’t fully account for the immersive experience here, which for some, may also engage the emotions. For when viewers emerge from Ashes’ story – literally by climbing the set of stairs – the neon fixtures appear different. Coated in dark paint and backlit, they register like illuminated silhouettes, each handwriting example (McQueen’s included) standing for an individual whose story remains unknown.

INFORMATION

'Steve McQueen' is on view until 27 February. For more information, visit Marian Goodman Gallery's website

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

ADDRESS

Marian Goodman Gallery
79 rue du Temple
75003 Paris

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