Agenda
SCOPE Miami 2010
Wynwood Gallery Arts District, Miami, USA
Miami in early December is where the international art crowd sets up camps (Art Miami, Pulse, Ink, Verge, Photo Miami ao) – although the only tents you are likely to find are those that figure in artworks. From the big boys and girls of the world art scene, the upcoming and emerging galleries and individual artists, there will be special events, talks, performances, and more than likely Pamela Anderson doing her modern muse turn. But digging through the flash and the brash (not to mention the hypnotic effects of people watching at such orgies), the collective feeling of all the individual fairs is a barometer for the art market.
ANY DAY NOW: David Bowie - The London Years (1947 – 1974)
Proud Camden, London, UK
David Bowie's relationship with the camera in the early years of his career is documented in this exhibition, which promises rare and unseen portraits by photographers including Brian Duffy, Kenneth Pitt, Terry O'Neill, Denis Taylor, Ray Stevenson, Geoff MacCormack, David Bebbington, Jak Kilby and Bob Solly.
AC/DC
Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia
If you think that Highway to Hell sounds like perfect funeral music then maybe this exhibition won’t be on your playlist. However, for those for whom AC/DC isn’t about electric currents, this show celebrates the history, music, performance and creativity of one of the world’s biggest rock bands. They’ve been around long enough to have three generations of followers and have sold a massive 200 million albums worldwide since 1975. Here costumes, original instruments, stage props, photographs and rare hand-written material such as letters, notebooks and lyrics come together, with Angus Young’s schoolboy uniform and Gibson guitar naturally making an appearance. (www.acdcfamilyjewels.com)
David Claerbout
Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Germany
Time is the central theme in the oeuvre of the Belgian artist David Claerbout. In his image-rich work, he frequently uses historical photographs he has found, which he then reworks digitally to set them in motion, as well as material he has shot himself. The exhibition, prepared in close cooperation with Claerbout, consists of five space-claiming works: in addition to the video installation 'Long Goodbye' (2007) acquired by PIN for the Sammlung Moderne Kunst, they include two early works, 'Kindergarten Antonio Sant´Elia' (1998) and `Shadow Piece` (2005), as well as two more recent works `Riverside` and `Sunrise` (both 2009).
Boris Becker
FotoMuseum, Antwerp, Belgium
Together with other names such as Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, and Thomas Struth, German photographer Boris Becker (°1961) belongs to a generation of photographers who reworked the detached style of their renowned teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher into a personal yet still highly characteristic visual language. Becker’s first solo show in Belgium traces an overview of his work – from the early 1980’s to the present – and presents images from his most well-known photo series: Bunkers, Houses, Constructions, Fields and Landscapes, Fakes and Artefacts.
Contriving Inquiries
Seelevel Gallery (Het Magazijn), Amsterdam, the Netherlands
In Contriving Inquiries Seelevel presents six representatives of the current generation of photographers who - in an exploratory way - pursue staged photography. By creating an illusory reality they examine, question and criticise our conditioned perception of reality, thereby also searching for the boundaries between fantasy and reality. Participating photographers include Sofie van Dam, Freudenthal/Verhagen, Astrid Hermes, Ellen Kooi, Brigida Mendes and Nadine Tasseel. Seelevel is a gallery for Dutch photography talents that organises contemporary exhibitions in different locations – this time in a monumental canal house (Het Magazijn).
The Record
Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (NC), USA
This exhibition explores the culture of vinyl records through 50 years of contemporary art, presenting work by 41 artists from around the world, who use the glories of grooves as subject or medium in sound, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance. And for those not North Carolina bound, there’s a free iPhone app of The Record, which features an audio tour of the exhibition with the voices of many of the participating artists and curator Trevor Schoonmaker on the work of Laurie Anderson, William Cordova and Taiyo Kimura ao. (Other featured artists include former DAMn° cover designers David Byrne and Mingering Mike).
Take Me To Your Leader!
Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway
An international group exhibition that focuses on contemporary artists who have drawn inspiration from science fiction. As a genre, science fiction has often served as a barometer for the dominant culture or the political climate. What remains when we take away all the mutants, other-worldly aliens, spaceships and time travellers, is the genre’s fundamental question: What is a human? The exhibition presents works by some 20 artists from different countries and periods, including John McCracken, Mike Kelley, Bjørn Dahlem, Sun Ra, Ride 1 and Nathalie Melikian, along with original drawings for films such as Barbarella and Metropolis.
Cars in Rivers
National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland
An exhibition of six photo series by Ólafur Elíasson. Cars in rivers, 2009 describes man‘s struggle with unpredictable nature, while suggesting a symbolic depiction of the financial crisis that has hit Iceland in the last couple of years, equated with the drowning of highland 4x4's in violent torrents. Jökla Series, 2005 is the artist‘s account of the glacial river Jökulsá á Dal (Jökla), from its glacial source to the area where the dam at Kárahnjúkar was already taking shape. In addition Ólafur will show three new works, Six sticks series, Iceland series (small fault) and The windswept series, all from 2010. (See also www.i8.is)
Anish Kapoor
Kensington Gardens, London, UK
This autumn The Royal Parks and the Serpentine Gallery will present a major exhibition of large-scale outdoor sculptures by Anish Kapoor in Kensington Gardens. The free exhibition will showcase a series of major recent works never before shown together in London. Constructed from highly reflective stainless steel, the giant curved mirror surfaces will create illusory distortions of the surroundings and will be visible across large distances, creating new vistas in this famous setting. The sculptures will be sited to contrast and reflect the changing colours, foliage and weather in Kensington Gardens.
SCAPE Biennial of Art in Public Space
Locations throughout Christchurch, New Zealand
Like a hand in glove when it comes to site and subject matter this edition of the Biennial presents a set of artistic projects that aim to probe, refocus and enhance existing experiences and future projections of the inner city as a collective, civic space. Featured in the programme are seven new large-scale temporary public artworks that will join with four of the city’s permanent works to form the SCAPE 2010 Public Art Walkway. Participating artists include Darryn George (New Zealand); Joanna Langford (New Zealand); Richard Maloy (New Zealand); Ruth Watson (New Zealand); Ash Keating (Australia); Ahmet Ögüt (Turkey/The Netherlands) and Hector Zamora (Mexico/Brazil).
Liverpool Biennial 2010
Various locations throughout Liverpool, UK
Touched is the International 10 exhibition of this year’s Liverpool Biennial and across the city newly commissioned artworks aspire to affect the viewer in a total context (mind, body and place: relatedness in space and time), asking ‘Can art touch a city?’ Among the projects is a new film by Norwegian artist Lars Laumann at the Open Eye Gallery and curated by Patrick Henry; contributions by Daniel Bozhkov and Carol Rama at Bluecoat in a selection by Sara Jayne Parsons; and the work of Sachiko Abe and Antti Laitinen at A Foundation, where curator Mark Waugh explores the emotional impact of art.
Arts Festival Watou 2012
Various locations throughout Watou, Belgium
A yearly international arts festival in Watou, a culturally-minded village in the Westhoek region of Belgium (just ask fans of Gregorian music). Locations such as barns and stables serve as creative scenery for stories from young and well-known curators (Jan Van Woensel, Christophe De Jaeger, Joost Declercq) and the Dutch author Oscar Van den Bogaard, with Willy Tibergien, director of the Poëziecentrum in Ghent selecting a whole range of poetry. Experimental works, both indoors and out, the Festival mixes up the generations and artistic disciplines and features Celine Butaye, Masashi Echigo, Miks Mitrevics and Jan Op de Beeck, ao.
Les Recontres d'Arles Photograhie
Various locations, Arles, France
A taste of summer seems appropriate for one of the featured works in France 14. A group show conceived in the southern French city of Arles by 14 guest photographers on Raymond Depardon's programme in 2006, on the occasion of Les Recontres D'Arles their personal perspectives on France will be on show at the Abbaye de Montmajour as part of the Changeover Trail. (Mick Jagger can be found in the Rock Trail.)
Les Recontres D'Arles Photograhie
Various locations, Arles, France
Now in its 41st edition, Les Recontres D'Arles Photograhie is an international photography festival that features numerous workshops, exhibitions, colloquiums, projections & other activities. The event will also see the announcement of the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie 2010 prize-winners, with the company also supporting the Clicks for Classes project (a countrywide scheme that saw schoolchildren & photographers working to reinvent the class photo) and France 14.
Being Singular Plural: Moving Images from India
Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany
An exhibition that unites a group of emerging and established artists and filmmakers in the field of contemporary Indian art today. Developed as a site-specific exhibition in intimate relation with the architecture of the Deutsche Guggenheim galleries, Desire Machine Collective (Sonal Jain & Mriganka Madhukaillya), Shumona Goel & Shai Heredia, Amar Kanwar, and Kabir Mohanty all adopt and adapt film and video in specific ways, generating counternarratives and histories that are at once personal and prescient, poetic and political. Among the supporting special events is India meets Bollywood, where Indian films will be screened and Indian cuisine offered in the atrium of the Deutsche Bank (28/08).
Weaving In & Out
Tapestry Building, 124th and 2nd Ave in East Harlem, NYC, USA
Olek (the Polish-born, Brooklyn-based Agata Oleksiak, who recently blogged on http://agataolek.com that 'Hour after hour my madness becomes crochet') has invigorated the art of the hook with her public installations, wearable sculptures, performance pieces and costumes. As one of the artists featuring in Weaving In & Out she will perform the suitably loopy Crocheted Grapefruit, in a collaborative exhibition curated by No Longer Empty that seeks to explore the immediate and larger spatial, cultural, aesthetic, urban and environmental contexts, potentials and interactions of the show's site - the raw ground floor of a residential property called Tapestry in a new 'green' development in East Harlem. Textiles, construction and bridging are prominent in many of the artworks, with the 'Weaving' a metaphor for the intertwining actions, projects and ideas. Participating artists also include Isidro Blasco, David Antonio Cruz, Manny Vega and Carol Warner, ao.
No Longer Empty is a non-profit organisation that organises public art exhibitions in empty storefronts and buildings in New York City and was 'conceived as an artistic response to our present economic condition'.
6th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art
KW Institute for Contemporary Art & other locations, Berlin, Germany
Housed in several locations in Berlin, this year’s Biennial takes as its focus how contemporary artists respond to the theme of the present. Or moreover on reality, what it means to different people, how it relates to different situations and how with so many different visions of what reality means whether that ultimately leads us to question contemporary art, and its relationship to reality. The Biennial’s theme is contextualised by an exhibition with works by Adolph Menzel (1815-1905), curated by the American art historian Michael Fried, as well as work such as photography by Michael Schmidt.
GEO-Graphics
Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR), Brussels
With no fewer than 17 African countries marking 50 years of independence in 2010, Belgium's BOZAR and Royal Museum for Central Africa are organising the Visionary Africa festival. Geo-Graphics will be the keynote exhibition and will display some 220 ethnographic objects in 'a visual and narrative dialogue with contemporary art'. The traditional works of art come from Belgian private and museum collections, while Doual’art (Douala, Cameroon), La Rotonde des Arts (Abidjan, Ivory Coast), Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCA Lagos) (Lagos, Nigeria), Centre for Contemporary Art East Africa Nairobi (CCAEA Nairobi) (Nairobi, Kenya), Picha (Lubumbashi, Congo), Darb 1718 (Cairo, Egypt), Appartement 22 (Rabat, Morocco), and Raw Material Company (Dakar, Senegal), will present their own artistic identity and works by 'its' African artists. In addition, architect and artistic director of GEO-Graphics David Adjaye will present images from his 10-year photographic journey through urban Africa.
Emscher Art 2010
Emscher Island (located in the northern part of the Ruhr region between the River Emscher and the Rhein-Herne Canal), Germany
As the biggest art project of the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010, Emscher Art 2010 reflects a huge project to regenerate and renaturise the areas along the River Emscher. For this event attention is focused on the so-called Emscher Island, where 40 artists have created 20 works at sluice gates, in the canal or on the surrounding industrial wasteland. With participating artists including Monica Bonvicini, Rita McBride, Mark Dion, Ayse Erkmen, Jeppe Hein, Olaf Nicolai, Tobias Rehberger and Tadashi Kawamata, the exhibition can be reached by boat, bicycle and car.