Happenings provides references on art events, exhibitions, biennales, art fairs and festivals, with a focus on Abstraction in Action artists and post-90s abstraction from Latin America.
Development – 2017
From January 2017 Abstraction in Action will transition to become an independent initiative led by Greg Attaway and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill.
We will continue to develop our mission to promote and research contemporary abstract art from Latin America since the 1990s, seeking to activate the field and foster new perspectives.
The AIA website will continue to operate and after a short pause, it will resume its expansion.
Artist: Ishmael Randall Weeks
Constructive Resistance
November 17, 2016 – December 23, 2016
Steve Turner
Los Angeles, USA
Exploring the legacies of modernism and Arte Povera, Randall Weeks will present a room-sized sculptural installation, Ejercicios Para Un Nuevo Mundo V (Exercises For A New World V) that consists of cranium-size chunks of raw mineral ore (silver, gold and copper) sourced from three mines in the Peruvian Andes. The stones have been drilled and attached to steel-pipe armatures that were bent into forms representing outdoor playground structures common to Latin American housing developments of the 1960s.
Two wall works, Paisaje/Repisa I-II (Landscape/Shelf I-II) will also be presented. Each consists of shelves made of copper plating over steel that has been coated with the mineral dust that was left over from the process of creating the sculptural installation. The shelves hold a copperized mold of a calcified tree that was found in a mine, a copper-plated styrofoam plate, and some fragments of minerals.
Artists: Elena Asins (Spain), Kader Attia (France), Robert Barry (U.S), Pavel Büchler (U.K), Paulo Bruscky (Brazil), Waltercio Caldas (Brazil), Luis Camnitzer (Uruguay), Arturo Cuenca (Cuba), Sandu Darie Romania (Cuba), Antonio Dias (Brazil), Iran do Espírito Santo (Brazil), Juan Downey (Chile, U.S), Marcel Duchamp (France), Juan Francisco Elso (Cuba), Eugenio Espinoza (Venezuela), León Ferrari (Argentina), Marcius Galan (Brazil) , Flavio Garciandía (Cuba), José Antonio Hernández-Diez (Venezuela), Karlo Andrei Ibarra (Puerto Rico), Joseph Kosuth (U.S), Barbara Kruger (U.S), David Lamelas (Argentina), Judith Lauand (Brazil), Glenda León (Cuba), Carlos Leppe (Chile), Anna Maria Maiolino (Brazil), Antonio Manuel (Brazil), Carlos Martiel (Cuba), Cildo Meireles (Brazil), Marta Minujín (Argentina), Priscilla Monge (Costa Rica), Hélio Oiticica (Brazil) | Lygia Pape (Brazil), Michelangelo Pistoletto (Italy), Liliana Porter (Argentina), Carlos Rodríguez Cárdenas (Cuba), Lázaro Saavedra (Cuba), Mira Schendel (Brazil), Franz Erhard Walther (Germany), Horacio Zabala (Argentina)
Toda percepción es una interpretación: YOU ARE PART OF IT
November 30, 2016 – March 12, 2017
CIFO Art Space
Miami, Florida
The exhibition Toda percepción es una interpretación: You are part of it is a retrospective look from the viewpoint of contemporary issues of art, culture, politics and economics. It seeks to reflect on the successive reconfigurations of the art map in the last few decades, on the displacements and relocations of its primary centers, from Paris to New York, from Venice to São Paulo, from Basel to Miami. It speaks of areas that have succeeded in alternating centripetal or centrifugal forces, where art has relocated its meeting points and its observation points. We also pay attention to the effects of redrawing the financial or political map, with the repercussion it has on how one makes and proceeds in art.
Artists: Carlos Arnaiz, Ernesto Deira, Sarah Grilo, KIRIN, Juan Lecuona, Lucía Mara, Georges Nöel, Kvĕta Pacovská, César Paternosto, Fidel Sclavo, Eduardo Stupía, Valeria Traversa, Jan Voss.
The Lines of the Hand
November – December, 2016
Jorge Mara – La Ruche
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Artist: Iván Navarro
Mute Parade
October 26, 2016 – December 23, 2016
Paul Kasmin Gallery
New York, USA.
Upon entering Mute Parade, the viewer is confronted by a towering pyramid of six drums with the words HIGH, TONE, TUNE, BASS, MUTE, and DEAF embedded in LED lights. This monumental work, titled TUNING, 2015, produces a visual representation of sound while simultaneously removing and negating the original function of the instruments; ‘playing a song,’ in the absence of sound. In the center of the adjacent room, two freestanding drums– each six-feet in diameter– incorporate neon, LED, mirrors, and electricity to produce Navarro’s iconic infinite vanishing points. Circular texts, written in light, repeat the words KICKBACKand KNOCKNOCKNOCK in a seemingly boundless loop. The inherent silence and stillness of the artworks creates an uncanny perception of audio and movement, probing the relationship between sight and sound.
A final installation consists of four 6 x 6 foot structures that make up the Impenetrable Room (2016). This new compositional innovation co-opts the materials and format of portable “road cases,” which are customarily used to transport and protect musical instruments. Refitting the cases with mirrors and neon light, Navarro transforms these static objects into deep spaces that appear to reverberate in perpetuity. Silent and monolithic, these self-contained rooms resonate with unspoken narrative power.
Throughout the exhibition, black and white paper squares are scattered across the floors of all three galleries. The words “Read You” and “Loud Unclear,” printed on opposite sides of the cards, call attention to the disjunction between the visual and auditory aspects of communication. Informed by the aesthetics and rhythms of military parades, Mute Parade contemplates the juxtaposed feelings of celebration and intimidation that martial music begets.