Jérôme Sans and Guo Xiaoyan, respectively the UCCA’s director and chief curator, define the participants of this show as the most compelling emerging and mid-career artists working throughout China today. Presenting new and recent works by Cao Fei, Chu Yun, Liu Wei, MadeIn, Qiu Zhijie, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Yang Fudong and Zheng Guogu, the exhibition combines genres of painting, sculpture, installation and photography. Featured works include Yang Fudong’s video installation Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2008) and Is Just a Blink of an Eye (2005), a performance piece by MadeIN (culture ltd.), a multi-functional company established in 2009 by Xu Zhen, dedicated to artistic creation, production, diffusion and curation. 

Les Rencontres de Bamako – Biennale Africaine de la Photographie - might be a good pretext to escape the darkness of November - in search for the light in Mali’s capital – in the full running for its 8th edition on the African image and identity. The high ambition is to make Bamako a synonym for ‘African capital of image’.

Under the title ‘Borders’ the event deals with what it says: territorial borders, “from natural barriers to artificial lines traced across the earth, in Africa more than elsewhere, borders and their complex realities represent current problematics and the crystallizations of processes which are political, economic, socio-cultural, and at this time particularly tied up with ethnic, cultural, religious and other sorts of personal and group identifications.” This pan-African contemporary initiative has selected and invited some 40 photographers.

In its 15 years existence the Bamako Encounters have premiered many African photographers, promoting them to the global stage of photographic events. The full exhibition programme in the city will be supported by a symposium, screenings and learning trails – all initiatives to better connect the locals of Bamako closer to the biennial.  

Exploring the theme of the manipulation and reconstruction of reality through photographic images and videos, this show at the CCCS features the work of 23 international contemporary artists. Highlighting the increased ambiguity between recording reality and the parallel falsification of that reality that is the by-product of easy-to-use digital technology, one of the questions posed is ‘Do artists still care about the concepts of reality and truth?’ Among the participants are the following artists: Olivo Barbieri, Sonja Braas, Thomas Demand, Elena Dorfman, Andreas Gursky, Osang Gwon, Ilkka Halso, Robin Hewlett & Ben Kinsley, Cindy Sherman and Paolo Ventura,

Berlin will be awash with art at the end of September, and this event is very much billed as the ‘fair of discovery’, attracting young artists and galleries from across the world. The fair is held in a different location each year and fills places that have fallen into oblivion with new life. The last edition saw over 15,000 visitors and the introduction of a photography section, which in 2009 will be further expanded, along with sense of networking between galleries throughout the fair.

The 11th edition of Istanbul’s Art Biennial takes its title, What Keeps Mankind Alive? from the closing song of the second act of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, written 80 years ago and interpreted by many artists of various genres like Tom Waits, William S. Burroughs and Pet Shop Boys. For the Zagreb-based curators WHW (What, How & for Whom), the proposition will serve as a trigger, as well as a certain script for the exhibition, allowing visitor and the artists to pose questions of economic and social urgency today. The artist list includes Nevin Aladağ, Alimjan Jorobaev, Signs of Conflict: Political Posters of Lebanon’s Civil War (a project by Zeina Maasri), Hrair Sarkissian, Ruti Sela & Maayan Amir, and Oraib Toukan ao.

The work of German photographer Peter Granser can be seen in various group and solo show in the coming few months.

Hidden Places, Kaune Sudendorf  - Gallery for Contemporary Photography, Cologne, Germany, from 5 Sep – 24 Oct.
Group exhibition with work of Katja Stuke, Oliver Sieber, Marina Gadonneix, Stefan Heyne, Greg Stimac, Jason Lazarus and of course, Peter Granser
www.ks-contemporary.com

Alzheimer, solo show at the Kunstzeughaus Rapperswil, Switzerland, from 18 Sep – 1 Nov
www.kunstzeughaus.ch

Germay and China – Together in Motion, Wuhan Museum of Art and The Art Museum of Hubei Academy of Fine Arts, China, from 20 Sep – 30 Oct.
Group exhibition of Chinese and German contemporary art, which includes Granser’s SIGNS project.
www.whmuseum.cn

From Memory, Dr. Guislain Museum, Ghent, Belgium, from 10 Oct – 2 May 2010.
Group show that deals with the fascination for memory in the worlds of art and science.
www.museumdrguislain.be

Half-naked women, gore and monsters have long been a formula for getting people to go to the cinema, and like some of its subject matter rising from the dead, Berlin's Bongout Gallery is resurrecting its exhibition of movie posters from Ghana.

Hand-painted pulp used to promote the country’s travelling cinemas (think man with a VCR, generator and car) since the 1980s, from big-budget Hollywood to debuts from African filmmakers, local artists would paint on old flour sacks that had been stitched together. It appears that seeing the movie was not so important for the people that made the posters, after all, why subject yourself to Bruce Willis when you have imagination and a film still.

Bongout is also publishing Ghanavision, an extended edition of last year’s Ghana Move Posters. Texts in German, English and French, the book documents the collections of Dr. W. Stäbler and Bongout.

My dad told me about this one, so Banksy’s ‘secret’ exhibition is well and truly public now and looks set to become a bona fide ‘event’. The story goes that while the Museum was closed for setting up the show, even Bristol’s top officials didn’t know what was going on. Replacing many of the Museum’s artefacts, the anonymous artist (formerly know as ‘street’?) has installed around 100 works that infiltrate the gallery spaces. With the burnout ice-cream van, depictions of British politicians as chimps, other installations, animatronics and a sensory display, Banksy’s humour might sometimes bite from the obvious cake, but there is an incisive inventiveness to much of this new work that is an exhilarating example of engagement with the audience.

At the time of writing, the context in which this exhibition is viewed is subject to almost hourly change. It looks at the influences of homeland and diaspora on the artistic language of 56 contemporary Iranian artists, examining the means through which a young generation of artists is reconciling the daily implications of cultural and geographical distances with the search for individual artistic expression. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, over 200 works of painting, sculpture, photography, video and installation will be on show, with participants including Barbad Golshiri, Farideh Lashai, Mitra Tabrizian and Shoja Azari.

The Italian photographer Massimo Vitali (b.1944, Como) is renowned for his monumental photographs of large groups of people. These focus especially on contemporary leisure time activities: the beach, the disco, and mass tourism. Typical of his work is the congregation of a large, impersonal group, in which details and individual stories can nevertheless be identified. Vitali’s photos are the result of a complex work process. He usually uses a classic wooden Deardorff 11-x-14-inch camera to record everything with the greatest of precision and from an elevated vantage point. The exhibition at Foam comprises Vitali’s new work, complemented by an overview of existing work.