In Why is the No Video Signal Blue? Or, Color is No Longer Separable From Form, and the Collective Joins the Brightness Confound  (2011) Andrew Norman Wilson deconstructs the linguistic and symbolic convention that usually communicates the signal’s absence on any screen or projector. In Derridian way he shows that this blue’s metaphysical meaning is generated by an invisible game from which the individual is excluded. The blue’s detracted ontological presence leads to a never-ending displacement of its meaning’s grounds, giving rise to a feeling of precariousness that Wilson relates to our dematerialized environment. Opening up the linguistic level to a broader framework, the New York-based artist explores social arrangements or systems of objects, both seen as taxonomic, regardless of whether they are real or fictious, offline or online. Wilson’s videos, performative installations, screenings and web-based projects employ the communication, aesthetic and operative modes of economic and knowledge production in the semio-capitalist age thus showing, in reverse, their modernist, utopian side. As in Uncertainty Seminars (2013), his most recent “guided meditation” which will be displayed in collaboration with Nick Bastis at Fluxia, Milan, Wilson’s practice encourages us to recognize abstractions and to physically embody them in order to have possibility to participate in an actual adherence, a proximity to reality and realness. (Bianca Stoppani)

The Lustful Turk (1828) is an erotic epistolary novel about the adventures of Emily Barlow, an innocent English girl kidnapped by the Dey of Algiers during an Eastern journey. The main themes emerging from this story are marked by the ambiguity that is also the undertone of Patrizio Di Massimo’s project of the same title. Recently he presented several new works at Gasworks, London: large-scale paintings, sculptural assemblages with furniture and trimmings and a wall painting. If the starting point sounds purely descriptive, the artist’s gaze brings out the novel’s mysterious allure of symbolic and turbid elements, suspending the works in a mild and drowsy grace. Developing his fascination for the relationship between bodies and objects, later Di Massimo staged this seductive role-playing game with Inside Me (2013), a performative installation made of a 130 stacked cushions, occasionally activated by the presence of a man inside the installation. The secretive representation of the individual’s most inner and unconscious longing for the Other is then re-absorbed and suspended in the expanded time of the miseen- scène. Yet, on the occasion of “Me, Mum, Mister, Mad,” his first solo show at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Patrizio Di Massimo will present several new works, emphasizing his concern with exposing those unsaid, hidden aspects of relationships, which result in an impossible and tragic grasp of meaning and of possession. (Bianca Stoppani)

Patrizio Di Massimo’s solo show at Kunsthalle Lissabon will run through April 12.

For Dakis Joannou, the act of collecting is “an excuse to meet artists.” The Greek-Cypriot civil engineer and founder of the DESTE Foundation of Contemporary Art in Athens, has always privileged the alchemical moment that occurs when different personalities experience a meeting. This interest in forging greater connections has led him to collaborate once more with Massimiliano Gioni, the so-called “ingenious” curator and director of this year’s Venice Biennale, as both of them share a similar vision about the collective potential to generate knowledge. After curating several shows at the DESTE Foundation, and perhaps following the idea at the core of Dakis Joannou’s own research, Gioni seems to have used works from Joannou’s collection as an excuse to delve deeper into the practice of some its most compelling artists. Hence the DESTE 2000 Words volumes, an on-going series of small, bright monographs published by the DESTE Foundation and edited by Karen Marta, well-known editor and co-founder of the Institute of 21st Century. In September, DESTE has released the first six books dedicated to Paweł Althamer, Roberto Cuoghi, Urs Fischer, Elad Lassry, Josh Smith and Andro Wekua, each of them examined respectively by Gioni himself, Ali Subotnick, Jessica Morgan, Tim Griffin, Anne Pontegnie and Gary Carrion-Murayari. Featuring a critical essay and a survey of the artists’ oeuvre, this series proposes a thoughtful fusion of the horizontal and the vertical approach to knowledge, that is, experience. (Bianca Stoppani)

KALEIDOSCOPE is pleased to present The Asia Conversations, a new series of specially-commissioned online interviews with Asian-based artists and cultural producers, coordinated by online editor Bianca Stoppani.

Part of an ongoing investigation, evidencing KALEIDOSCOPE’s commitment towards establishing a presence in Asia, these special features run parallel to our newest print issue entirely dedicated to contemporary art and culture from the region. As of today, we have already published Simone Krug’s interview with Pakistani artist Imran Qureshi; Nick Warner’s interview with Thai artist Pratchaya Phinthong; Matt Packer’s interview with Chinese artist Xu Zhen; and Francesco Tenaglia’s interview with Shibuya-kei expert W. David Marx.

Check them out on KALEIDOSCOPE’s website and stay tuned for upcoming conversations with Hong Kong artist Kwan Sheung Chi, the recent winner of the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award; and Ute Meta Bauer, the newly-appointed director of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore.

Displaying several points of view at the same time is a challenge to the uniqueness of vision. In 1952 this critical stance led to the foundation of Aperture, the quarterly of and about photography, dedicated to create a forum in which experts and enthusiasts could meet and confront one another. While postwar photojournalism seemed to absorb the debate about photography-as-art, the magazine’s founders, an important group of art critics, writers and photographers such as Minor White, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Nancy Newhall and Beaumont Newhall, demonstrated that there could be alternatives. On the occasion of its 60th birthday, Peter C. Bunnel has curated the quarterly’s first anthology, which includes a selection of the best critical contributions from the legendary period of Minor White’s editorship (1952-1976), highlighting his pivotal role in photography at large. Today Aperture magazine and the Aperture Foundation are two sides of a multiform platform devoted to cultural development, including publications, exhibitions and workshops. Looking onto 2013 with a new visual identity by the London-based design studio A2/HK/SW, the recent “Hello, Photography” issue—which features, among others, Christopher Williams, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Michele Abeles, and an interview with Lucas Blalock by Jeff Wall—follows in the footsteps of White’s artistic and theoretical research, aimed to generate a visual literature. But perhaps, as Nancy Newhall stated in 1952, we are (still) not ready. (Bianca Stoppani)

In terms of density, bouillon cubes and infosthetics have more in common than one may expect at first blush. Zak Kitnick, one of the artists “Younger Than Jesus” included in the 2009 edition of the New Museum triennial, points his research towards the inner connections, both for position and meaning, generated by empty objects when they run a system informed by certain methodologies. In his series from 2011, “Compendium” and “The Bridge,” the Brooklyn-based artist creates posters in which several items are strictly combined with decorative grids: their spatial distribution stresses how the entropic multiplication and accumulation of consumer goods removes the object by anesthetizing its material truth in plain appearance, and by diluting its potential function as merely organized information. With the same minimal language, his sculptures A Representative (2011) and Perfect Schedule (2011) mock the market rules: following the principle that “form forecloses function,” they are standard shelving units assembled against the logic of their common use as supports, but with a new physical presence and availability. Shifting these capitalistic dynamics to a spiritual level in his recent solo shows at Clifton Benevento, New York, and Off Vendome, Düsseldorf, Kitnick presents feng shui as a form of interior design. Here the ba gua grid, once represented and divided into serial products, creates an offshoring system where objects are site-specific without being site-contingent: it is a pure organization of the aesthetic space of information. (Bianca Stoppani)

Zak Kitnick has current solo shows at Off Vendome, Düsseldorf, through June 21, and at Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva, through June 26.

In the early ‘50s Henri Chopin threw all of his poems in a bag and then he burned it on the bank of the Seine: this was his first act of poetry. Founder of the Poésie Sonore movement, film-maker, publisher of Revue OU, sculptor, painter and typographer, this eclectic French poet was above all “an inner space explorer,” as his friend William Borroughs stated. Swallowing a small microphone, Chopin discovered the body as a factory of unceasing sound from which he created his well-known “audiopoems”: multilayered compositions of sounds that he materialized with electricity, going beyond the traditional verbal dimension of poetry and opening it up to a spatial one. His research came to touch the body cavities as ancestral synesthetic depths where there are no words but the purest and most basic units of sound, which he then assembled in a poetry of the internal spaces. Similarly, in his typewriter poems Chopin extracted the micro-particles of the language (i.e. the letters) in order to highlight their serial and conventional status as geometrized and predetermined sounds. For example, in La Crevette Amoureuse (1967-1975), his manuscript presented by Supportico Lopez, Chopin developed the narrative and the visual plot in a dynamic thickening of types that also generates ERnest MARiette, the pointy main characters, with a constant trespassing of the senses. Likewise the display, curated by architects Kuehn Malvezzi, unfolds the 146 pages of Chopin’s typewriter poem in a sculptural structure, adding a cinematographic uniqueness to the whole. (Bianca Stoppani)

Henri Chopin’s exhibition at Supportico Lopez (Berlin) will run through June 8.

Almanac Projects is a new non-profit space in Dalston Junction, London. Founded few months ago and led by Astrid Korporaal, Francesca von Zedtwitz-Arnim and Guido Santandrea, its second event, “Postscript (p.s. I love you),” a solo show of works by London-based artist Charlie Woolley, sought to test the “potential spaces for the formation of collectivities.” The exhibition featured a text by Rózsa Farkas and Harry Burke, which is part of an extensive program of publications, projects, installations, performances and workshops that, after taking the solo show as the program’s starting point, is conceived to activate it. On the occasion of “Evolution&Comfort,” the Swiss artist Yves Scherer’s first solo show, Almanac Projects hosted Conquer the sky!, a workshop for children aged 5-12 run by Derek Di Fabio and Blarney 5×3, a performance by Luca De Leva. This exhibition too featured a publication engaging several contributors, including the graphic designer David Rudnick and artist Alex Turgeon. The interest in creative collaboration shared by the three founders bears witness to their on-going research on deepening artistic and curatorial practices. On April 20 they will present a solo show by Samara Scott, and then a project of T-A-X-I in collaboration with Cripta 747 next month. Despite its old-school flavored name, Almanac Projects holds a freshly assertive position derived from its constant focus on the public - maybe one of the few ways of believing in cultural change. (Bianca Stoppani)