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.
La profunda crisis actual en la sociedad chilena, llena de marginalidades y gestos fallidos tanto en su discurso como en su arquitectura, es lo que denuncia el artista Pablo Jansana en I without Kleenex, exposición la que presenta alrededor de 20 piezas, entre pinturas escultóricas monumentales y piezas fotográficas escultóricas, donde los materiales usados poseen una fuerte carga simbólica, siendo casi en su totalidad industriales, varios de ellos provenientes de la alta industria fotográfica, además de aluminio, resinas, alquitrán, madera y elementos pre confeccionados, entre otros desechos de las grandes urbes.
Tras cinco años viviendo y trabajando en su taller en Nueva York, ciudad que ha marcado intensamente su obra, el artista retorna unos meses a Santiago con motivo de preparar su próxima exposición en los dos pisos de Artespacio. En este periodo observa y reflexiona sobre las transformaciones tanto urbanas como sociales que han acontecido en nuestra capital. Su obra, marcada siempre por una profunda conciencia social y reflexiva, nuevamente absorbe su entorno y se expresa con un claro contenido político y una materialidad simbólica.
Jansana, quien no mostraba su trabajo en Chile desde hace 7 años, ha sido avalado tanto por la crítica europea como americana. Fue representado por la Galería The Gomaen Madrid y fue artista destacado por ella en la Feria Arco en el año 2012. Recientemente, expuso su obra en la Bienal del Museo del Barrio en New York; curada por Chus Martínez. Actualmente presenta su trabajo en Sculpture Center. En Julio de este año inaugurará en Eleven Rivington Gallery, también en dicha ciudad. En 2015 expondrá en Washington junto a 30 artistas latinoamericanos la muestra “New Geometrics”, en el Museo de las Américas, Museo AMA en Washington DC.
Carolina Castro, investigadora y curadora de Arte Contemporáneo explica el título de la muestra:
“I with out Kleenex” confronta la maquillada y retocada imagen de la ciudad, como fachada de un país económicamente estable, con la realidad y el descontento visible en la fallida geometría de su urbanización simbolizada en sus desechos.”
Artists: Juan Capistrán, Danielle Dean, Harry Dodge, Lecia Dole-Recio, Kim Fisher, Judy Fiskin, Magdalena Suarez Frimkess & Michael Frimkess, Mariah Garnett, Gerard & Kelly, Samara Golden, Piero Golia, Marcia Hafif, Channing Hansen, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, James Kidd Studio, Barry Johnston, Kchung, Devin Kenny, Gabriel Kuri, Caitlin Lonegan, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Tala Madani, Max Maslansky, Emily Mast, Jennifer Moon, Brian O’Connel, Harsh Patel, Marina Pinsky, Public Fiction, Sarah Rara, A.L. Steiner, Ricky Swallow, Tony Greene: Amid Voluptuous Calm, Clarissa Tossin and Wu Tsang.
Made in L.A. 2014
June 15 – September 7, 2014
Curated by Connie Butler and Michael Ned Holte Hammer Museum
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The Hammer’s biennial exhibition Made in L.A. 2014 features works by 35 Los Angeles artists with an emphasis on emerging and under recognized artists. It debuts recent work and new painting, installation, video, sculpture, photography, and performances created specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive hardcover catalogue, as well as a full roster of free public programming.
Artists: Alighiero Boetti, Chris Burden, Ray and Charles Eames, Harun Farocki, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Hikaru Hayakawa, Yumi Kori, L十 (PAK Sheung Chuen, WO Man Yee, LEE Soen Long), Liu Wei, Reanimation Library, Jessica Rylan, Tavares Strachan, Clarissa Tossin, Lawrence Weiner, and Wong Kit Yi.
Bringing the World into the World is an exhibition of international contemporary art about the experience of the act of seeing, and is inspired by the largest object in the Museum’s collection, the Panorama of the City of New York, a 9,335 sq.ft. scale model of the New York City’s five boroughs. Recapturing the lure and the wide-eyed amazement triggered by this historical artifact, Bringing the World revisits the panoramas—the 18th Century crowd-pleasing spectacle of 360-degree circular paintings—and their concepts and roles in the development of visual culture. The exhibition features a diverse body of works exploring the formal, conceptual, and psychological principles of panoramas as devices of wonder and the many ways in which we see, imagine, and comprehend worlds both familiar and unfamiliar.
Organized by Hitomi Iwasaki, Director of Exhibitions/Curator
Argentinian artist Amalia Pica‘s first solo show in France is a continuation of a project begun at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City in the summer of 2013. At La Criée she is presenting a group of sculptures and a new film in which she pursues her formal and political exploration of mathematical set theory. Pica’s works suggest systems of exchange, transmission and reception of information, at the same time as they offer a fresh reading of the avant-gardes and abstraction.
The issue of communication—of the statement and the performativity of verbal and non-verbal language—is a core concern for an artist committed to exploring its systems and modes of functioning. Through sculpture, photography, installation, performance and video, her work sets out to define the communicational codes we share beyond the barriers of language.
At the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 Pica presented Venn Diagrams (under the spotlight), a projection of two coloured circles inspired by the set theory John Venn developed to describe the logical-mathematical relationships of inclusion and exclusion. The Venn diagram reference is especially significant for this artist: under the 1976–1983 dictatorship in her native Argentina the diagrams were banned from the school curriculum on the grounds of their subversive potential for instigating group dynamics and expressions of collectivity. Thus her work foregrounds the inherent political aspect of information exchange.
Since 2013, first at Museo Tamayo in Mexico with the exhibition A∩B∩C, then at Herald St Gallery, London, Kunsthalle Lisbon, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and now at La Criée, Rennes, Pica has been replaying the issues raised by Venn’s diagrams. For A∩B∩C she arranged coloured geometrical plexiglas shapes along the gallery walls: the exhibition was regularly activated by performers who brought the shapes together at the centre of the space, held them up in a way that gave rise to certain combinations, put them back in a different place, and then repeated the exercise forming a new composition.
Photographs and a film resulted from these performances, and the film is being shown at La Criée together with a group of sculptures specially made for the exhibition. A joint venture with Mexican filmmaker Rafael Ortega, the film shows the shapes at rest, their slow activation by the performers and then the way they are combined, making up a new ‘sentence’ each time. As an attempt to start at the crucial point (the intersection) the two screens projection starts with such close angles of the shapes that the narrative appears extremely abstract and it slowly unveils the performance as the zoom travels outwards.
The sculptures—metal structures with the same coloured Perspex shapes suspended from them—are memorials of the different compositions formed by the performers in the film. Functioning as ‘fixatives’ of the shapes meetings, these visual statements form possible interpretations and narratives. Moreover the series synthesises many aspects of the history of abstract sculpture, including Minimalism, Kinetic Art and Constructivism.
Amalia Pica‘s exhibition at La Criée is a wordless narrative, an invitation to reflect on the construction, composition and effectiveness of all narrative and all language: in short, a visual semiotics.
Amalia Pica is born in 1978 in Neuquèn, Argentina. She lives and works in London.
Image: Amalia Pica, “Memorial for intersections #2″(detail), 2013. Courtesy Stigter van Doesburg, Amsterdam; Herald St., London; Johann Koenig, Berlin; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles. Photo: Bruno Lopes.
Artists: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Armando Andrade Tudela, Alexander Apóstol, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Mariana Castillo Deball, Alejandro Cesarco, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Adriano Costa, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilson Díaz, Juan Downey, Rafael Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Dominique González-Foerster, Tamar Guimaraes, Federico Herrero, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, David Lamelas, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Iván Navarro, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Erika Verzutti, and Carla Zaccagnini.
Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today reconsiders the state of contemporary art in Latin America, investigating the creative responses of artists to complex, shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress. The exhibition presents contemporary artistic responses to the past and present that are inscribed within this highly nuanced situation, exploring the assertions of alternative futures.
Organized by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, Under the Same Sun features works by 40 artists and collaborative duos from 15 countries. The artworks are organized around five themes: “Conceptualism and its Legacies,” “Tropicologies,” “Political Activism,” “Modernism and its Failures,” and “Participation/Emancipation.”
