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“Formidable Savage Repressiveness” Exhibition view at Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, 2012
Courtesy of Credac, Ivry and Kunstmuseum St. Gallen

VISIT
Koenraad Dedobbeleer’s solo exhibition at Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine

January 21 2013
2:06 PM

Initiated by Koenraad Dedobbeleer and Kris Kimpe in 2006, UP is an architecture fanzine featuring image spreads of architecture icons photographed by Kimpe and Dedobbeleer. Each edition highlights one of their favorite spaces, such as Achille Castiglioni’s former studio in Milan or Edward Krasinski’s in Warsaw. Strongly relating to the given space in which they are installed and exhibited, the works by Belgian artist Koenraad Dedobbeleer attest to his interest in architecture and design. The artist’s traveling solo exhibition, jointly organized by three host institutions yet individually titled, debuted at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen last fall. It now opens at Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine in January 2013 with a final stop scheduled at De Vleeshal, Middelburg in mid-April 2013. Published on this occasion, Oeuvre sculpté, travaux pour amateurs, Dedobbeleer’s artist book gives further insights into his practice. In “Workmanship of Certainty” at le Crédac, Dedobbeleer’s objects are stripped off their functionality, playfully assembled into poised compositions. Here, in the former industrial building of the Manufacture des Œillets (grommet manufacturer) built after the model of an American daylight factory with large windows, Dedobbeleer is interested in reading the space through his work, stressing the interplay between inside and outside in his ongoing interrogation of objecthood and sculpture. (Anja Isabel Schneider)

Danilo Correale, The Warp and the Weft, Installation View at Peep Hole, 2012
Courtesy The Artist and Supportico Lopez Berlin.

STOP BY
Peep-Hole, Milan

January 18 2013
1:45 PM

In 2010 Peep-Hole, a non-profit organization based in Milan, paid tribute to Corrado Levi with the exhibition “Quasi, autoamori di Johnny e Una Poesia,” curated by directors Vincenzo de Bellis and Bruna Roccasalva. The show may also be seen as a clin d’œil to Milan’s history of alternative spaces, with Levi as a forefather: some decades earlier, his studio was to become the city’s first project room in support of young artists. Since its inception in 2009, Peep-Hole has been establishing itself with a not-to-be-missed programme, including solo shows by Renata Lucas, Rosalind Nashashibi, Francesco Arena and Mario Garcia Torres. At the same time, its team has carried on a remarkable editorial activity with a quarterly, Peep-Hole Sheet, dedicated to artist’s writing, with monographic issues devoted to the likes of John Miller, Jonathan Horowitz, Jimmie Durham and, most recently, Nick Mauss. Collaborations with other institutions — both within Italy and internationally — played a key role in Peep-Hole’s success, resulting in a list of steadily expanding partnerships (among them Museion Bolzano, CAC-Vilnius, and recently CAC Bretigny). January/February 2013 promises a programme of workshops, talks and conferences at Museo del Novecento in Milan and Museo di Villa Croce in Genoa. Yet there is still more news to come: Peep-Hole is soon moving to a new and larger venue. (Anja Isabel Schneider)

group
Courtesy of grouphab.it, Berlin

STOP BY
grouphab.it, Berlin

November 1 2012
10:23 PM

Although its domain may be misleading, grouphab.it is both the name and the website of a new art space founded and run in Berlin- Pankow by Simon Denny and Yngve Holen, the artists responsible for the celebrated Body Xerox parties initiated two years ago that turned photocopiers into disco lights. A photo album on grouphab.it’s facebook page documents their first event in June 2012, the publication launch of the “THE SMART FRRRIDGE READER.” Originally a downloadable PDF, it now comes as a print-on-demand publication in multifarious formats. The reader accompanies an exhibition project co-curated by Yngve Holen in late 2010 at Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz. The show featured work by Nicolas Ceccaldi, Ilja Karilampi, Morag Keil, AIDS-3D (Keller/Kosmas) and Marlie Mul, with whom Holen has also created XYM, an online publishing project dedicated to artist publications in PDF-format temporarily available to download, like Aude Pariset’s PDF-edition “No One Would Confuse a Utensil with a Mock” (2011). Follow grouphab.it’s programme, which includes a Berlin specific project by Lucky PDF. With its social network steadily expanding, it is the habitual being there that counts. (Anja Isabel Schneider)

Jonathan Binet, Hitiste, Spray paint on canvas, 2009
Courtesy the Artist and Gaudel de Stampa, Paris

MEET
Paris-based artist Jonathan Binet

October 29 2012
6:42 PM

In his essay “Painting Beside Itself,” published in October magazine (Fall 2009), David Joselit defined “transitive painting” as a “capacity to hold in suspension the passages internal to a canvas, and those external to it”—a quality clearly present in Jonathan Binet’s works. Binet (b. 1984), a recent ENSBA graduate based in Paris, has developed a working method in which painting is closely linked to performative practices and installation. In his recent solo show at Gaudel de Stampa, “Les mains dans les poches, pleines,” the gallery acts as a surrogate studio. The artist’s gestures and movement —a clin d ’oeil to action painting— are re-inscribed into the given architecture and become traceable. Embracing chance in the process of creation, Binet creates indexical yet open frames and networks in response to the context in which his work is shown. He delineates space: a spray-painted line moves from walls to ceiling. Here and there, an abstract canvas leans casually against the wall, as if to stress its material presence. With two upcoming solo shows this fall, at CAPC, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Jonathan Binet keeps us in suspense. (Anja Isabel Schneider)

Photography by John Lewis Marshall
Courtesy of Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

STOP BY
The re-opened Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam

October 17 2012
9:56 PM

After years of construction and renovation, Stedelijk Museum re-opened its doors to the public on September 23, 2012. Founded in 1874, the museum has been described by Hein Stünke as the “first modern museum in the world.”. If the museum’s visionary director, Willem Sandberg, imagined it to be a laboratory, turning scaffold- ing structures into viewing platforms, the notion of “temporary” as a testing ground for ideas became all the more pertinent during the museum’s eight-year closure. The re-opening was preceded by “Temporary Stedelijk,” a dynamic three-part program of exhibitions and events curated by Ann Goldstein, who was appointed director three years ago. The now fully renovated historical building invites us to rediscover works by Lee Bontecou, René Daniels and Lucio Fontana, alongside new acquisitions from Dan Flavin, Simone Forti and Danh Vo. Two group shows mark the inauguration of the new building: “Beyond Imagination,” featuring commissions from artists based in The Netherlands, and a temporary exhibition comprising works from the museum’s collection in the perfectly suited immense open-plan gallery space. Boldly hovering over the old architecture, Stedelijk’s innovative extension is signed Mels Crouwel, from Benthem Crouwel Architects. In homage to the museum’s famous director, it is painted in “Sandberg white.” (Anja Isabel Schneider)

Michael Snow, La Région Centrale, 1971
Courtesy of Haus der Kunst, Munich

VISIT
“Ends of the Earth —
Land Art to 1974,”
at Haus der Kunst, Munich

October 16 2012
7:40 PM

In the late 1960s to mid-1970s, land artists were interested in aspects of process, site and temporality. While Land Art has been mainly associated with such American artists as Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim, the first major survey exhibition “Ends of the Earth – Land Art to 1974″ contributes to a better understanding of the movement’s history and roots. After the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA), the show will move to Munich’s Haus der Kunst this fall. Featuring over 80 international artists, including Keith Arnatt, Nicolas Garcia Uriburu, the OHO Group, Avital Geva and Ana Mendieta, the show unearths numerous “hidden” and lesser known works. Yet, how to account for the difficulty in siting these ephemeral practices? If earth art’s often remote locations denied any direct access to the work of art, it could generally only be viewed through its documentation or through the work’s transfer from one context into another. Assimilated into the museum or gallery through photographs, films and textual displays, Land Art’s oppositional, anti-formalist stance, which was mirrored in the period’s political, ecological, social and cultural debates, became questionable. However, it is precisely through the investigation of these media—for instance the role that photography plays in Mendieta’s indexical Silueta series—that we gain further insights into these earthworks. (Anja Isabel Schneider)

"The Still Life of Vernacular Agents," Installation view
Left to right: Ettore Sottsass, Fatima Al Qadiri and Thunder Horse Video, Katja Novitskova
Courtesy of Kraupa Tuskany

TOP 10 SUMMER SHOWS
Rank 4: “The Still Life of Vernacular Agents,” at
Kraupa Tuskany, Berlin

August 2 2012
11:30 AM

Fascinated by non-Western cultures and their philosophies, Ettore Sottsass’s memories of his journeys are as vivid and sensual as his color lithographs, two of which are on view in Kraupa Tuskany’s current group show “The Still Life of Vernacular Agents.” In his design studies for teapots from the “Memories of India” series, the functional objects are imagined as temples or “‘super-instruments’ in which to take drugs, have sex, listen to music and watch the stars.” The exhibition also includes Poster for Olivetti’s Philos 33 (1997), showing Sottsass’s laptop design set against the portrait of a Kouros; a now-pixelated archaic smile animates the screen. In line with the suggestive nature of the show’s title, most of the works brought together here seem strangely infused with life, despite their inanimate materiality.

Hybrid forms, oscillating between subject and object, are at the heart of this thoughtfully curated show. Take for instance the Voodoo-inspired sculptures by Getho Jean Baptist and Celeur Jean Herard, composed primarily of found objects. These creatures take on an eerie presence. Michele Abeles’s seemingly high-tech still lives defy definition; and trigger 3-D effects through multiple overlaps fuse body parts with objects, frames and screens, to achieve a three-dimensional effect. Fatima Al Qadiri’s electro-tropicalia sound-piece paired with Thunder Horse Video’s psychedelic animations make up the exhibition’s soundtrack. Put together, these “vernacular agents” are about to take on a life of their own. (Anja Isabel Schneider)

Langlands & Bell, The House of Osama bin Laden
(Detail: still from interactive animation), 2003
Courtesy of the artists and VSpaceLAB

VISIT
“Image Counter Image” at
Haus der Kunst, Munich

June 15 2012
4:07 PM

How does one perceive a conflict transmitted through images? The exhibition “Image Counter Image” at Haus der Kunst, which marks the museum’s 75th anniversary alongside “Histories in Conflict: Haus der Kunst and the Ideological Uses of Art, 1937- 1955″ on view simultaneously, focuses on a crucial and timely topic: how do artists respond to images of conflict and violence as portrayed in the media?  In a period of time spanning the First Gulf War (1990-1991), September 11, 2001 and the Arab Spring of 2011, the works of over 20 artists, including bureau d’études, Harun Farocki, Omer Fast, and Ahlam Shibli, bear witness to these events and their mediation. From traditional photo-journalistic accounts competing in printed media or television, to images uploaded onto the Internet and circulated via social media platforms, violent conflicts obtain an intensified dimension through their visual depiction and global distribution network. Yet what sub-texts do these images hold? Nin Brudermann’s depictions of Iraqi targets in “Waiting for War” (1998) are countered by Hans-Peter Feldmann’s found newspaper coverage the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, while Alfredo Jaar’s “Untitled [Newsweek]” (1994) and Jasmila Žbanić’s “Images from the Corner” (2003), investigate journalistic responsibility, image by image, frame by frame… (Anja Isabel Schneider)

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