Category: Shows

Design · Paint/Illust./Mix-Media · Sculpt/Install · Shows

THE HAPPY SHOW BY SAGMEISTER

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Stefan Sagmeister’s ‘The Happy Show’ is centered around the well known designer’s ten year exploration of happiness. Having gathered the social data of Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Steven Pinker, psychologist Jonathan Haidt, anthropologist Donald Symons, and several prominent historians, ‘The Happy Show’ also includes a personal narrative, underlinig Sagmeisters individual experience. Furthermore he has focused on social data detailing the role of age, gender, race, money, and other factors that determine happiness. According to him: ‘The Happy Show offers visitors the experience of walking into Stefan Sagmeister’s mind as he attempts to increase his happiness via mediation, cognitive therapy, and mood-altering pharmaceuticals.’

Art/Aesthetics · Sculpt/Install · Shows

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

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The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, installation view (detail) the Bluecoat, Liverpool. 2013. Photo Jon Barraclough.

Francois Dallegret, Ted’s Opera Cosmic Space Suit, 1968, Courtesy the artist (c) the artist.

Space Dog Suit. Image courtesy the National Space Centre.

Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has curated an exhibition that explores the magical world of new technology, as well as tracing its connections to the beliefs of our distant past.

Historical and contemporary works of art, videos, machines, archaeological artefacts and iconic objects, like the giant inflatable cartoon figure of Felix the Cat – the first image ever transmitted on TV – inhabit an “enchanted landscape” created in Nottingham Contemporary’s galleries, where objects seem to be communicating with each other and with us.

In Leckey’s exhibition “magic is literally in the air.” It reflects on a world where technology can bring inanimate “things” to life. Where websites predict what we want, we can ask our mobile phones for directions and smart fridges suggest recipes, count calories and even switch on the oven. By digitising objects, it can also make them “disappear” from the material world, re-emerging in any place or era.

Text and Images Nottingham Contemporary

Sculpt/Install · Shows · Technology

Light Show tricks meaning out of physics and biology

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Light Show explores the experiential and phenomenal aspects of light by bringing together sculptures and installations that use light to sculpt and shape space in different ways. The exhibition showcases artworks created from the 1960s to the present day, including immersive environments, free-standing light sculptures and projections.

From atmospheric installations to intangible sculptures that you can move around and even through, visitors can experience light in all of its spatial and sensory forms. Individual artworks explore different aspects of light such as colour, duration, intensity and projection, as well as perceptual phenomena. They also use light to address architecture, science and film, and do so using a variety of lighting technologies.

Read Article: Light Show tricks meaning out of physics and biology.

Light Show runs at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 28 April.

Architectonic · Art/Aesthetics · Public Space · Shows

Do not sit on the art! Ina Weber’s exhibition at Haus Am Waldsee

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“Do not sit on the art!” is something you don’t hear very often at contemporary art shows, making Ina Weber’s new solo exhibition Architectures, Memories, Utopias at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee an exception. The confusion of some attendees (at least three on Sunday afternoon) is understandable: Weber makes sly, playful sculptures that mimic the ordinary objects and mundane buildings of the modern city. Consequently the red bench, one of a cluster of objects that make up the show’s first work Fußgängerzone (“Pedestrian Zone”), could easily be mistaken for, well – a red bench. Upon a closer look the artifice becomes apparent, but the object-imitations hew close enough to the originals to provoke our normal reactions to such objects, confounding in their similarity.

Weber is adroit in small acts of deception (a skill she might have picked up from the Martin Kippenberger, who taught her at the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Kassel). In one room of the exhibition, 13 small sculptures of ceramic and concrete depict unassuming buildings in Berlin and beyond: a Chinese restaurant, a department store, a Mietskaserne, a post-war apartment block. Sitting in two rows directly on the floor, at the mercy of wandering toddlers, the diminutive models cut a sharp contrast to the oversized and ungainly sculptures on display elsewhere in the show. These distortions of scale and proportion in Weber’s work are disconcerting. Something is off here, but what exactly, is hard to say.

Continue text by Jesse Coburn HERE

Image above: The service isn’t great. Mix Café (2011). (Photo: Bernd Borchardt, Courtesy of Ina Weber)

Art/Aesthetics · Science · Shows

The Abstract painters blurred the boundary between science and spiritual

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It is like the message above Dante’s Gates of Hell. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Except that we are not entering hell, we are entering an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The message at the Gates of MoMA is in the form of a question. It asks, “Must we not then renounce the object altogether, throw it to the winds and instead lay bare the purely abstract?” The writer of the message is neither God nor Satan. He was a human being, and from Russia. His name was Wassily Kandinsky.

The attempt to answer Kandinsky’s question led to a transformation in painting the implications of which are still being felt today. The transformation was Abstraction. Painters, just a few years prior to Kandinsky, happily portrayed human beings and animals and landscapes and historical events. After Kandinsky, pure forms and shapes and colors took over the canvas. This was a shocking and more or less unprecedented development. It took the art world by storm and carried the oft-bewildered public along with it.

Excerpt from an article written by Morgan Meis at The Smart Set. Continue HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Events · Photographics · Shows · Vital-Edible-Health

Death: A Self-portrait

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Wellcome’s winter exhibition showcases some 300 works from a unique collection devoted to the iconography of death and our complex and contradictory attitudes towards it. Assembled by Richard Harris, a former antique print dealer based in Chicago, the collection is spectacularly diverse, including art works, historical artefacts, scientific specimens and ephemera from across the world. Rare prints by Rembrandt, Dürer and Goya will be displayed alongside anatomical drawings, war art and antique metamorphic postcards; human remains will be juxtaposed with Renaissance vanitas paintings and twentieth century installations celebrating Mexico’s Day of the Dead. From a group of ancient Incan skulls, to a spectacular chandelier made of 3000 plaster-cast bones by British artist Jodie Carey, this singular collection, by turns disturbing, macabre and moving, opens a window upon our enduring desire to make peace with death.

Death: A Self-portrait
15 November 2012 – 24 February 2013

Image above: Marcos Raya, Untitled (family portrait: group), 2005

Art/Aesthetics · Performativity · Sculpt/Install · Shows

The Research and Destroy Department of Black Mountain College

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For a brief moment the revolutionary ideas on art and living of Black Mountain College resonate in the spaces of W139. The work of more than 30 young conceptual artists meets in an experimental Wunderkammer and engages in a tactile dialogue creating a performative space.

THE RESEARCH AND DESTROY DEPARTMENT OF BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE brings together a group of bricoleurs, conceptual artists whose work share the idea of collecting. The physical shape of the work is determined by the content of their own research. The gathering, or ensemble of different ideas in literary images tells a story, and stands close to the notion of anachronism. In the exhibition mostly three-dimensional works will be presented, forming a dynamic parcours, as a forest of metonymic sculptures and images. The displaying of this anti-digital show will create new conceptual reflections between the different works. With 30+ artists the exhibition spaces of W139 will take on the temporal form of a giant cabin of curiosities, a physical embodiment of knowledge. The unforeseen encounters will be spurring new insights and fuel an active dialogue on exchange, collaboration and collection. Together, the large group of artists will have to overcome the inhuman proportions of the W139 exhibition space and engage in a spatial relationship with each other’s work, In the rear space Thomas Raat will transform the pattern of the mosaic floor of the Radio Kootwijk building into an enormous mural, making the large back wall an impressive rhythmic backdrop of repetitive ornaments.

Texts by Anne van Oppen and Jean Bernard Koeman

Curated by Jean Bernard Koeman

More Info HERE

Architectonic · Design · Festivals · Human-ities · Shows

Did someone say ‘Adhocracy’? An interview with Ethel Baraona Pohl

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Adhocracy: Organizational philosophy or style characterized by adaptive, creative, integrative behavior which (in contrast to a bureaucratic style) is flexible and non-permanent and which, therefore, can respond faster to a changing environment.

Ethel Baraona Pohl develops her professional work through links to numerous architectural and design publications. She has collaborated with blogs and magazines, including Domus, Quaderns and MAS Context, among others. She has been invited to present work at events like Postopolis! DF and the international architecture festival eme3. She was co-founder, with Cesar Reyes Najera, of the independent publishing company dpr-barcelona, whose projects, both digital and printed, subvert the limits of conventional publications, and approach the architecture and design publications of the future. Currently, Ethel serves as associate curator of Adhocracy one of the two exhibitions of the first Istanbul Design Biennial, that opened on October 13th, 2012 and runs through December 12, 2012.

Text BR&S. Continue to Interview HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Performativity · Shows · Social/Politics

The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79

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The first retrospective of the pioneering artists’ organisation Artist Placement Group, or APG, conceived by Barbara Steveni in 1965 and established a year later by Steveni and John Latham along with Barry Flanagan, David Hall, Anna Ridley and Jeffrey Shaw, among others.

Between 1966 and the turn of the 1980s, APG negotiated approximately fifteen placements for artists lasting from a few weeks to several years; first within industries (often large corporations such as British Steel and ICI) and later within UK government departments such as the Department of the Envirnoment and the Scottish Office. APG arranged that artists would work to an ‘open brief’, whereby their placements were not required to produce tangible results, but that the engagement itself could potentially benefit both host organisations as well as the artists in the long-term. Artists’ work in proposing and carrying out placements will be represented here in diverse ways, in films, photographs, texts and correspondence and sometimes in art objects.

APG was a milestone in Conceptual Art in Britain, reinventing the means of making and disseminating art, and anticipating many of the issues facing cultural workers today. It represented itself in a number of exhibitions and events, notably in the exhibition Art and Economics at the Hayward Gallery in 1971 with artistic interventions by Garth Evans, Barry Flanagan, John Latham and others. Emulating APG’s emphasis on the discursive, the exhibition will host frequent public discussions relating to art and social organization.

Via RavenRow

Architectonic · Digital Media · Performativity · Sculpt/Install · Shows · Technology

QR Code Rooms: Venice Biennale 2012: i-city / Russia Pavilion

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The first national pavilion that we visited was the Russia pavilion, curated by Sergei Tchoban. The exhibit, designed by SPEECH Techoban / Kuznetsov (Sergei Tchoban, Sergey Kuznetsov, Marina Kuznetskaya, Agniya Sterligova), showcases the Strolkovo Innovation Center, a new development that aims to concentrate intellectual capital around five clusters (IT, Biomed, Energy, Space, Nuclear Tech), with projects by David Chipperfield, SANAA, OMA, Herzog & de Meuron, Stefano Boeri, SPEECH, and Mohsen Mostafavi among others.

An interesting project, presented in detail with tons of information, yet invisible inside the space of the pavilion. A series of QR Codes wrap the inside of the Russia pavilion spaces, and all you can sense at first is light and space. At the entrance you are provided with a tablet, and you walk around the pavilion scanning these codes to obtain the information about Strolkovo.

Text and Images via archdaily. Continue HERE

Architectonic · Art/Aesthetics · Design · Events · Shows · Social/Politics · Theory

Postmodernism, Style and Subversion 1970–1990

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The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in London is the leading museum for art and design worldwide. With the unique «Postmodernism, Style and Subversion 1970–1990» exhibition, the V&A is visiting the Swiss National Museum in Zurich. Its exhibition shows a bold new interpretation of recent art and design history, postmodernism. Tribute will be paid to this era for the first time in Switzerland in a comprehensive presentation using international objects from the areas of architecture, design, music and graphics. Postmodernism substantially changed the familiar notions of our everyday world. Architects and designers rejected the strict concepts of the modern age and made room for a bright and multifaceted diversity. The Swiss National Museum in Zurich is delighted to present this successful exhibition from London. It will be complemented by key Swiss representatives.

Text and Images via http://www.postmodernism.ch/

Film/Video/New Media · Sculpt/Install · Shows

Ron Arad to Bring a Levitating Circular Cinema to the Israel Museum Next Month

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Architecture has taken the cinema to new heights in recent months, with the transformation of both the Hirshhorn Museum and Sydney Opera House into behemoth multi-media screens by architect Doug Aitken and German artist URBANSCREEN, respectively. Following suit this summer is Ron Arad, whose forthcoming “720°” installation at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum trumps both in scope.

The Israeli designer and architect will offer 720 degrees of film and video art by the likes of Mat Collishaw, Ori Gersht, Christian Marclay, and David Shrigley — whereas Aitken’s installation, which wrapped the circumference of the circular museum, was limited to a mere 360 degrees. The installation concept suspends 5,600 silicon rods 26 feet above the museum’s Isamu Noguchi-designed Billy Rose Art Garden, forming a circle. Visitors have the option of viewing projects from the outside, or experiencing the immersive, unannounced live performances within. At its scale, “720°” is not merely a cultural spectacle; it becomes a built part of the museum’s 20-acre campus and a glowing addition to the Jerusalem skyline.

Text and Image via ArtInfo

Performativity · Science · Shows · Technology

Superhuman: An exhibition exploring human enhancement

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Glasses, lipstick, false teeth, the contraceptive pill and even your mobile phone – we take for granted how commonplace human enhancements are. Current scientific developments point to a future where cognitive enhancers and medical nanorobots will be widespread as we seek to augment our beauty, intelligence and health.

Superhuman takes a broad and playful look at our obsession with being the best we can be. Items on display range from an ancient Egyptian prosthetic toe to a packet of Viagra, alongside contributions from artists such as Matthew Barney and scientists, ethicists and commentators working at the cutting edge of this most exciting, and feared, area of modern science.

Text and Image via Superhuman: An exhibition exploring human enhancement.
19 July – 16 October 2012

Sculpt/Install · Shows

Collapsible leaves by Azuma Makoto

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Collapsible leaves by Azuma Makoto.

Art/Aesthetics · Film/Video/New Media · Paint/Illust./Mix-Media · Shows · Videos

Interview with Bassam El Baroni

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“When it Stops Dripping from the Ceiling”, cur. Bassam El Baroni with: Jesse Ash, Luis Camnitzer, Iman Issa, Per-Oskar Leu, Metahaven, Setareh Shahbazi, Humberto Velez; also featuring: unidentified copies of sculptural works by Martin Kippenberger. Kadist Foundation Paris.

Via Kadiview

Art/Aesthetics · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Events · Shows

Download Manifesta 9 Newspapers

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Download the Manifesta 9 newspapers as PDF to get informed before your visit to Manifesta 9, or to reflect after you’ve seen the exhibition.

Art/Aesthetics · Events · Human-ities · Shows · Social/Politics · Theory

Museum as Hub: We Who Feel Differently :: Sexual and gender “difference” after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics.

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“Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently” is a multipart project that explores the idea of sexual and gender “difference” after four decades of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex, Queer, and Questioning politics. Through an exhibition, series of events, and an opening symposium, the project seeks to invigorate discussion around a queer “We” that looks beyond tolerance or assimilation toward a concept of equality that provides for greater personal freedom. The project draws from Motta’s evolving database documentary wewhofeeldifferently.info, which proposes “difference” as a profound mode of possibility for both solidarity and self-determination.

The exhibition features a video installation based on fifty interviews with an international and intergenerational group of LGBTIQQ academics, activists, artists, politicians, researchers, and radicals. Motta—together with editor Cristina Motta—identified five thematic threads from this research that address subjects ranging from activism to intimacy, art to immigration. Drawing upon early queer symbols and imagery, a series of new sculptures and prints situates narratives of the LGBTIQQ movement in dialogue with developments in art and history, while also considering their critical significance in contemporary queer discourse and culture at large. The design of the Museum as Hub by Carlos Motta and architect Daniel Greenfield—anchored by the installation of multicolored carpeting—gives the gallery an aesthetic and functional makeover that invites extended viewing and collective activity.

Text via the NEW MUSEUM
More info about “Museum as Hub: We Who Feel Differently” HERE

Art/Aesthetics · Events · Shows · Social/Politics

Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction

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Pumzi, 2010, Wanuri Kahiu

Kempinski, 2007. Video installation. Artist : Neil Beloufa

Common Task (Mali), 2008. Photographic documentation of an action by Wieslaw Niedzwiecki. Artist : Pawel Althamer

The spaceship Icarus13, view from the Chicala Island, Luanda, 2007. Digital Chromogenic Print on matt paper.

Astronomy Observatory, Namibe Desert, 2007. Digital Chromogenic Print on matt paper.

Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction surveys the recent tendency for artists and filmmakers to apply the forms and concerns of science fiction to narratives situated in the African continent. It considers the complex undercurrents for this occurrence in art today, and posits other and possible realities existing simultaneously, via careful re-orientations of tense; elevating the need for vigilance towards the present and future over a concern for the past.

Africa has had a rare yet distinct place in popular science-fiction, from the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicting the mysterious appearance of a black monolith in the cradle of civilization, to the recent success of Neill Blomkamp’s debut movie District 9, a multi-layered allegory on South Africa’s recent internal and external tensions. Imagining a new space-time to the typical “third worldist” representations of the African continent, caught in a perpetual state of crisis, the works in Superpower project an alternative landscape of possibilities.

Artists include:

João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva
Kiluanji Kia Henda
Luis Dourado
Mark Aerial Waller
Neïl Beloufa
Neill Blomkamp
Omer Fast
Pawel Althamer
The ARPANET Dialogues
Wanuri Kahiu

Text via Arnolfini. More Info HERE. Images via This is Tomorrow


Trailer For PUMZI a Short film Produced By Inspired Minority and Writer/Director: Wanuri Kahui and Producers: Simon Hansen, Hannah Slezacek and Amira Quinlan.

Art/Aesthetics · Performativity · Shows · Videos

Ukrainian Body: Exhibition Forbidden

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On February 10th, 2012, the President of the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Serhiy Kvit banned “The Ukrainian Body”, an exhibition that explores the issues of corporality in contemporary Ukrainian society. The entrance to the gallery is now locked. Serhiy Kvit explained his decision in the following way: “It’s not an exhibition, it’s shit”.

After the act of censorship concerning the exhibition «Ukrainian Body», which drew a wide response in the Ukrainian and foreign media, the President of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Serhiy Kvit has initiated a number of bureaucratic restrictions against the VCRC as the organizers of the exhibition. On February 23rd the Academic Council’s decision stopped the activities of VCRC. The governing body of NaUKMA were exasperated by the public attention and the condemnation of censorship at the ‘most democratic’ university. As a result of the administration’s sanctions, the work of Visual Culture Research Center is no longer possible.

Open letter to The Visual Culture Research Centre by the Academic Council of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine (5 April 2012)

Paint/Illust./Mix-Media · Shows

Jakuchu’s Colorful Realm of Living Beings

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Do not zoom-in these images by Jakuchu. Go see the “Colorful Realm of Living Beings” exhibition in Washington, and slow down your metabolism as you closely experience these detailed vertical silk scrolls.

Schedule: National Gallery of Art, March 30–April 29, 2012

‘Colorful Realm,’ Works by Ito Jakuchu at National Gallery

Events · Performativity · Projects · Shows

The Abramović Method

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The Abramović Method was born from the artist’s reflections on three major performances from the last decade: The House With the Ocean View (2002), Seven Easy Pieces (2005) and The Artist is Present (2010). These performances left a deep imprint on Abramović’s perception of her work in relation to the public.

“In my experience, as developed in a career of over 40 years, I have arrived at the conclusion that the public plays a very important and indeed crucial role in performance,” she explains. “The performance has no meaning without the public because, as Duchamp said, it is the public that completes the work of art. In the case of performance, I would say that public and performer are not only complementary but almost inseparable.”

The PAC in Milan is the venue chosen by Marina Abramović to host her eagerly awaited new body of work, entitled The Abramović Method. This is the first major museum exhibition premiering new works since her groundbreaking retrospective in 2010 at the MoMA, New York. The Abramović Method will be on view at the PAC from March 21 through June 10, 2012.

Text taken from
The Abramović Method

Paint/Illust./Mix-Media · Performativity · Public Space · Shows

Propulsion Paintings by Evan Roth

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Propulsion Paintings is part of Evan Roth’s exhibition, Welcome to Detroit. This show will feature nearly all-new work, much of it made during his residency. The work follows his core conceptual framework of appropriating popular culture and combining it with a hacker’s philosophy to highlight how small shifts in visualization can allow us to see our environment with new eyes, whether online, at home, in the city or at the airport. His work acts as both a mirror and vault to contemporary society, creating work that reflects and withstands a world of rapid advancements in computing power, changing screen resolution and repainted city walls.







Text via Welcome to Detroit

Evan Roth’s website HERE

Earthly/Geo/Astro · Photographics · Shows

Last Days of the Arctic

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Last Days of the Arctic: a moving and insightful photographic portrait of a disappearing landscape and the Inuit people who inhabit it, by celebrated photojournalist Ragnar Axelsson.

Inspired by the fast – diminishing way of life of communities dependent on nature and the land around them for survival, Axelsson presents us with a breathtaking introduction to a life of Greenlandic hunters in one of the most remote regions of the world, and at once demonstrates its temporality.

As the world turns its gaze toward the Arctic; the landscape whose inhabitants have done the least to cause climate change is where the devastating effects are most visible. Their ancient culture is set to become extinct; the probability of these communities continuing to live traditionally is becoming increasingly unlikely. In his native Iceland, Ragnar looked at the fishermen and farmers of remote villages and thought if he did not photograph them, then no one would know they ever existed. It is this thought that has led to this unique body of work captured in Greenland, with unprecedented access to a community that rarely let outsiders in.

Presented by Proud Chelsea, Last Days of the Arctic is a unique photo-reportage exhibition including these exceptional photographs of a society in its twilight, the awe inspiring landscapes they live in and the unique hunting rituals which are part of their cultural identity.

Text via Proud

Horns, Uummannaq, West Greenland, 1998

Dog on a Chain, Sermiliqaq, East Greenland, 1997

Art/Aesthetics · Book-Text-Read-Zines · Public Space · Shows · Technology

New Dystopia by Mark von Schlegell

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Sternberg Press: 2011. A kulturnaut, a squid, a Shakespeare, a dog, an artist abstract, a chrononaut, a washerwoman, Tom Ripley and his bones all pass through New Dystopia. Their sped-up speculations lead to new models of deterritorialized life. Visionary and hallucinatory models. Through them, Mark von Schlegell “displays” some of the facets of the invisible catastrophe breaking up our world, which artists in particular are responding to.

Put together in the wings of the “Dystopia” exhibition at the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, acting as a resonance chamber, this illustrated novel raises the issue of possible futures in the form of a critical fiction, and involves the outposts of the novel to come. About New Dystopia, the city in which the novel’s protagonists live, the narrator states: “As an American … one only came to New Dystopia City to become an artist. That only there was it a way of life.” According to von Schlegell, we are living in that new metropolis. He states, “Dystopia is today.”

After Venusia (2005) and Mercury Station (2009), both published by Semiotext(e), New Dystopia is Mark von Schlegell’s third novel.

Artists: Wallace Berman, Cosima von Bonin, Brian Calvin, Tony Carter, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Peter Coffin, Simon Denny, Andreas Dobler, Roe Ethridge, Keith Farquhar, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Aurélien Froment, Cyprien Gaillard, Isa Genzken, Dan Graham, Robert Grosvenor, Sebastian Hammwöhner, Roger Hiorns, Ull Hohn, Des Hughes, Peter Hutchinson, Eugene Isabey, Sergej Jensen, On Kawara, Michael Krebber, Jesus Mari Lazkano, Rita McBride, John Miller, Pathetic Sympathy Seekers, Manfred Pernice, Stephen G. Rhodes, Glen Rubsamen, Sterling Ruby, Julia Scher, Frances Scholz, Michael Scott, Markus Selg, Reena Spaulings, Michael Stevenson, Tommy Støckel, Josef Strau, Blair Thurman, Mathieu Tonetti, Oscar Tuazon, Franz West, Jordan Wolfson

Via Sternberg Press

Art/Aesthetics · Events · Shows · Social/Politics

Where is the “No Lone Zone” exhibition? I cannot find it

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No Lone Zone is a technical term that applies to a restricted area in which at least two individuals must be within visual reach overseeing a critically sensitive procedure.

No Lone Zone, at the Tate Modern’s Level 2 Gallery, is an exhibition that brings together works by Teresa Margolles, Cinthia Marcelle, David Zink Yi and the collective Tercerunquinto to explore this concept in relation to the vulnerability of current social and economic structures. Comprising sculpture, video and installation, these works reflect on the sense of loss, danger and urgency that affect the realm of human actions and collective endeavors within this global scenario.

The No Lone Zone exhibition has been curated by Iria Candela and Taiyana Pimentel in association with Gasworks. However there is no trace of the show at the Level 2 Gallery. Perhaps another tactical act.

Image above: Screenshot of the Tate’s website
Image at top: “Score Settings 16” by Teresa Margolles

Art/Aesthetics · Performativity · Shows · Sonic/Musical

Kraftwerk – Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

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Over eight consecutive nights, MoMA presents a chronological exploration of the sonic and visual experiments of Kraftwerk with a live presentation of their complete repertoire in the Museum’s Marron Atrium. Each evening consists of a live performance and 3-D visualization of one of Kraftwerk’s studio albums—Autobahn (1974), Radio-Activity (1975), Trans-Europe Express (1977), The Man-Machine (1978), Computer World (1981), Techno Pop (1986), The Mix (1991), and Tour de France (2003)—in the order of their release. Kraftwerk will follow each evening’s album performance with additional compositions from their catalog, all adapted specifically for this exhibition. This reinterpretation showcases Kraftwerk’s historical contributions to and contemporary influence on global sound and image culture.

More Info via MOMA

Film/Video/New Media · Performativity · Shows · Sonic/Musical

Congotronics vs Rockers

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A first glimpse at Pierre Laffargue’s musical documentary (currently in production) about Congotronics vs Rockers, which follows the entire process, from the initial encounters between the musicians (Konono N°1, Kasai Allstars, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Wildbirds and Peacedrums, Matt Mehlan from Skeletons and Hoquets) to shows around Europe and the recording of the album.

Via CTVSR

Congotronics vs. Rockers Live by Crammed Discs

Congotronics vs Rockers official live video: “Ambulayi Tshaniye”

Film/Video/New Media · Performativity · Shows · Sonic/Musical

Daria Martin: Sensorium Tests

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Daria Martin’s first survey exhibition in a UK public gallery presents a selection of short 16mm films made over the last 10 years, including the premier of an ambitious new work, Sensorium Tests. Throughout this period, Martin has pursued a sustained enquiry into numerous pressing issues relating to film, art and culture, including enchantment, voyeurs and artificial intelligence.

The exhibition includes the following films: Closeup Gallery (2003), in which a magician and his assistant engage in a strange game where cards dance, as if equivalent with inner worlds; Soft Materials (2004) where intimate relationships between man and machine are nurtured in an artificial intelligence laboratory; Harpstrings and Lava (2007) a dark narrative that animates dream images through clashing textures and structures; and the new film Sensorium Tests (2012), which revolves around a recently recognized neurological condition called ‘mirror-touch synaesthesia’.

People affected with mirror touch synaesthesia experience a physical sense of touch on their own bodies when they see other people, or sometimes even objects, being touched. Using staged scenarios based on a real life experiment into this condition, the film explores how sensations might be created and shared between people and objects.

Encountering art has always produced varying degrees of engagement and interaction, whether triggering personal memories, associations or feelings, or more recently in literal, physical responses to immersive, participatory installations. In some ways, Martin’s work turns these distinctions on their head, using mirror-touch synaesthesia to render virtual or remote activities indistinguishable from literal actions.

Daria Martin: Sensorium Tests
20 January – 8 April 2012
MK Gallery

Reviewed by Amy Budd, MK Gallery. Continue reading the review of this show HERE
Images above from Daria Martin’s Soft Materials. 16mm film, 2004.

Art/Aesthetics · Bio · Science · Shows · Sonic/Musical · Vital-Edible-Health

EDIBLE: THE TASTE OF THINGS TO COME

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Who knew that a forkful of food could have such a far reaching effect? Science Gallery’s first foray into food, EDIBLE, tackles this vast topic from the perspective of the eater, probing how our actions as eaters shape what is sown, grown, harvested and consumed.

More Info HERE

Thanks to Design Goat we are able to hear some food. They say:

For the preview party we were asked to do a multi sensory event using sound and jelly. We had three different jellys and three sounds. We asked guests to listen to all three sounds and pick the most appetizing one, essentially tasting with their ears. We told nobody what was in any of the jellies and we are putting it up here for people to find out. We have also posted the sounds below so they can listen again.


Honey, Beetroot and Walnut


Lemon, Thyme and White Chocolate

Architectonic · Bio · Design · Performativity · Science · Sculpt/Install · Shows · Technology

The Extreme Environment Love Hotel. Carboniferous Room

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The Extreme Environment Love Hotel, by Ai Hasegawa, simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity. A love hotel is a place for discrete intimacy but also a place for intensive physical and mental exercise. How might our bodies change, struggle or even adapt with varying conditions around us? For example, during the Carboniferous period, ancestors of the dragonfly Meganeura grew up to seventy-five centimeters due to the huge concentration of oxygen in the air, a tremendous boon to the insect but high levels of oxygen would be toxic to our fragile bodies.

Recent figures speculate that around 10% of children are now conceived by In Vitro Fertilization. The world around us and our reproductive technologies have given rise to new ideas of what sex is or could be and where it stands between our biologically-programmed needs and inclinations and our human fetishes and desires. Perhaps the Extreme Environments Love Hotel might give rise to new evolutions and mutations of the human body and sex and give it a brand new role away from any of these historical precedents.

Ai Hasegawa studied computer graphic animation and interactive media art at the International Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, Japan. On graduating I created animations for educational TV programs in Tokyo. After moving to London I began working as an animator, character designer, illustrator and interaction designer.