Entering its third year, the Kirin ‘Big in Japan’ exhibition, created by ksubi today announce the event will now be open to a public audience with the contemporary arts and cultural event returning to both Sydney and Melbourne in November 2011.
The ksubi- curated events will introduce public audiences to an eclectic selection of artists from all corners of Japan working across multiple mediums including artists performing, installations, contemporary dance, live music, video and art installation. The Kirin ‘Big in Japan’ 2011 cultural exchange program allows the artists to display their talents to both a broader Australian and international audience focusing the limelight on modern Japanese expressionism.
Mid-way through its run (the performance opened on March 1, 2011), Daniel Arsham’s Dig installation is nothing short of inventive.
Dig is an installation and performance by Daniel Arsham/Snarkitecture at Storefront for Art and Architecture and made possible by OHWOW that explores the architecture of excavation. Storefront’s distinctive gallery space will be filled with a solid volume of EPS architectural foam, engulfing the existing interior in an unyielding flood of white. The volume will then be excavated using simple tools – hammers, picks and chisels – to transform a stock industrial material into a strange, unexpected cavern for both work and play.
The action is all taking place at the Storefront for Art and Architecture (97 Kenmare Street, New York, NY 10012). Visit the site or check out regular updates at OHWOW.
Boooooom! reports, ““Kolo”, created by French-artist Natacha Paganelli during her artist residency in Serbia. It is currently on display at Kunsthalle Mulhouse (France) until January.”
Last night in Stockholm, at a ceremony presided over by Christine Macel, chairman of the Absolut Art Award Jury and Chief Curator at the Center Pompidou, Thai artist Rirkrit Trivanija was awarded the 2010 Absolut Art Award. Now in its second year, the Absolut Art Award recognizes and celebrates artists who challenge convention. Trivanija, who successfully challenges any conventional catagorization, proves a perfect recipient.
Speaking with Trivanija, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1961, he mentions about his art, “It is really about ideas.” Those ideas manifest in performances and installations inviting visitor interaction and prefaced on an exploration of material life. Given Trivanija’s diverse background, it is not surprising that much of his work revolves around cultural exchange. He most famously achieves and creates experience via live cooking and sharing of subsequent foodstuffs. During the award presentation we are reminded of Trivanija’s “coming out” to the art world – a performance piece that left the audience to ponder cultural exchange, with pizza in one hand and a spring roll in the other.
Providing layers of information in all his installations and performances, Travanija leads his audiences through investigative processes. The discoveries, he hopes are less about the objects and more about exploring the complexity of everyday life.
In addition to life as a leading artist, Travanija also teaches at Columbia University.
Curated by Gavin Morrison (of IFF), “Whoever You Art” draws together the work of three artists – Thomas Feulmer, Fraser Stables, and Catherine Street – with a shared interest in exploring notions of authenticity.
Thomas Feulmer uses the text from gay personal ads that is then stenciled paintings on paper. The text remain anonymous but characterize both the desired partner but also the author. The texts utilize a lexicon related to specific sub-groups yet often through negation: “NO FATS, FEMS, PNPER’S, TWEAKERS, DADDIES…” Fraser Stables has, for a number of years, been documenting the stories and environment of Scott Martinez. Scott’s stories are lyrical descriptions of fanciful events from his youth. The videos present these vignettes but also show Scott’s current environment, his home in suburban Houston which points to a more commonplace existence. The veracity of the stories he recounts is neither challenged nor proven, yet material evidence is often eluded but not provided. Catherine Street practice melds live performance with drawing and writing. In her performance at the opening at Number 35, Street will use her body in adapting and mutating commonplace actions, disjunction is created from these by the ambiguous texts she recites which point to a parallel narrative. Accompanying this will be drawings which hold in tension the prosaic aspects of language with more mutable forms.
The exhibition is held at Numberthirtyfive Gallery in New York City (located at 39 Essex Street, between Hester and Broome), and will be on view through November 28, 2010.
(Credit for image: Thomas Feulmer. Online Personal Ad (PREFER BIG GUNS…), 2008. Spray paint on vellum).
Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance opened on March 27, 2010 at the Guggenheim New York and will run through September 6, 2010.
About the exhibition -
Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by ghostly apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive media, as well as in live performance and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, this art embodies a melancholic longing for an otherwise irrecuperable past. Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance examines myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice and in the process underscores the unique power of reproductive media while documenting a widespread contemporary obsession, both collective and individual, with accessing the past. The works included in the exhibition range from individual photographs and photographic series, to sculptures and paintings that incorporate photographic elements, and to videos, both on monitors and projected, as well as film, performance, and site-specific installations. Drawn primarily from the Guggenheim Museum collection, Haunted will feature recent acquisitions, many of which will be exhibited by the museum for the first time. Included in the show will be work by such artists as Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Roni Horn, Zoe Leonard, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol. A significant part of the exhibition will be dedicated to work created since 2001 by younger artists.
View a superb video introducing Haunted at artbabble (outlining all the themes) and be sure to visit the online exhibition at Guggenheim.
Jim Cuno, Director of the Art Institute of Chicago, introduces the museum’s year long program 500 Ways of Looking at Modern. Celebrating the new Modern Wing, the programing series brings in art, lectures, literature, music, and more. A strong year for contemporary and modern arts in Chicago. (via Artbabble).
Celebrating a new wave of Mexican artists Escultura Social includes sculpture, paintings, and a selection of works by Dr. Lakra (on of Mexico City’s best known tattooists). The exhibit is on view at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art.
This exhibition explores recent developments in contemporary art in Mexico City through the theme of escultura social (social sculpture), a term derived from the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, who proposed that sculpture, if made from everyday materials and displayed in a “real world” setting, has the potential to affect society most broadly. The show focuses on works by a generation of young artists who came to maturity in Mexico City in the 1990s. It focuses on four themes: the transformation of everyday materials, social engagement with the public, the role of language and text in contemporary art, and the impact of music, popular media and performance.
Escultura Social remains on view until June 7, 2009. A few of Dr. Lakra’s pieces follow the jump.
