Wolfgang Tillmans: Monochrome

Wura-Natasha Ogunji: A Tortoise Walks Majestically on Window Ledges

Yang Fudong: 7 Intelectuals in a Bamboo Forest

Nairy Baghramian

Artist Nairy Baghramian in front of her sculpture.

The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni

          This haunting and beautifully formed documentary is a meditation on the life of Egyptian screen legend Soad Hosni, who starred in eighty-two feature films between 1959 and 1991. Hosni’s mysterious death in London in 2001 sent shockwaves through the Arab world, and this is the first film which look into her life and work. Using filmic montage, director and video artist Rania Stephan reveals the diverse modes of female representation embodied in Hosni’s charismatic roles, and creates an ebullient picture of the iconic actress who captivated the modern Arab imagination.                                  

Sculpture Undone: Stele

                                                      Alina Szapocznikowa, Stele, 1968

Alina Szapocznikowa

artist Alina Szapocznikowa in Paris in 1967.

Isa Genzken: Rose II

How Much Fascism?

An exhibition in the framework of FORMER WEST. 

Curators WHW: “we need to turn our attention to the silent fascism that is becoming normalized through the systematic violence seeping into the laws and everyday administration practices of the nation-state, and to assess the mechanisms of oppression and the various symptoms of contemporary fascism that are being presented as unavoidable, pragmatic necessities.”

Truth is Concrete

A 24/7 marathon camp on artistic strategies in politics and political strategies in art.

A selection of video documentations 'truth remixed' is now available online

The Refusal of Time

Claire Tancons on Pussy Riot

Supporters of opposition punk band Pussy Riot participating in a music video shot in Berlin for electro-pop artist Peaches.

Read the article Carnival to Commons: Pussy Riot Punk Protest and the Excersise of Democratic Culture by Claire Tancons hERE

The Tanks@Tate Modern

Trustees at MoMa

Trustees at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Atlas Group

The Atlas Group is a project established in 1999 to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. One of our aims with this project is to locate, preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that shed light on contemporary history of Lebanon. In this endeavour, we produced and found several documents, including notebooks, films, videotapes, photographs and other objects. Moreover, we organized those objects in an archive, The Atlas Group Archive. The project's public forms include mixed-media installations, single channel screenings, visual and literary essays, and lectures/performances.

Walid Raad: Scratching on Things I Could Disawow

Walid Raad shows at the dOCUMENTA (13)
Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World, 2010-2012
Performance Lectures, Mixed-media installation, including films, sculptures, prints and sound
Walid Raad presents Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, a series of one-hour walkthroughs for visitors guided by the artist through his installation of miniature artworks. The project revolves around the (art) history of the Arab world, its present and future, and oscillates between fact and fiction, documentation and interpretation.

Scratching on Things I Could Disavow engages with the fast-paced development in cities such as Abu-Dhabi, Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Istanbul and Sharjah of a new infrastructure for the visual arts. In a context where cultural tourism has become an instrument of economic growth and power, Raad’s project considers the ideological, economic and political dimensions of this phenomenon to ask whether and how culture and tradition in the Arab world may have been affected, materially and immaterially, by the various wars that have been and are still being waged in this volatile region. Raad’s works also lean on Jalal Toufic’s concept of “the withdrawal of tradition past a surpassing disaster.”

Walid Raad takes the visitor from a detailed case study of The Artist Pension Trust and its enmeshment with a network of neoliberal actors, to an account of the accelerated emergence of art spaces and institutions in the Arab world, and finally to inexplicable physical phenomena like the flattening of art spaces, the shrinking of artworks, and the availability of colors, lines, and forms for contemporary Arab artistic creation.

Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World expands upon the research-based methodology of Raad’s The Atlas Group (1989–2004), the visual and performative archival project he has initiated to document the social, political, psychological and aesthetic conditions of the Lebanese wars (1975–1990/91). The new project marks a critical juncture in Raad’s practice, at once a departure from The Atlas Group while expanding its historical and theoretical reference. The form of this project is an exhibition / performance. It was first shown by TBA21 in Vienna in 2011.

(after Taswir Projects)

Olafur Eliasson: Your Blind Passenger

Communist Chique

COMMUNIST CHIC, A COMUNIDADE POR VIR? A PROPÓSITO DO PROJETO iFORMER WEST/i | ROSANA SANCIN | ARTECAPITAL.NET

Book Presentation: Etel Adnan

For Etel Adnan writing is the shadow of painting and painting is the shadow of writing.

Watch hERE

On Conviviality: A Seminar on Living Together

                                         
                                         Kristina Buch, Lover, 2012

Watch the seminar, part of dOCUMENTA (13) hERE

Slavoj Zizek in Athens

Slavoj Zizek speaking at Benaki Museum, Greece:

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=2098

Amour (trailer)

Tsai Ming-Liang: Face

The World is Not Fair

Toshiki Okada, "Unable to see" , 2012.

The architecture collective raumlaborberlin in cooperation with the theatre venue Hebbel am Ufer presents The World is Not Fair:

"These pavilions are not to be understood as state agents for national branding, but instead as places of highly subjective artistic and political reflection. Beyond the boundaries of cultural disciplines, architects, theater artists, performers, and visual artists will seek to examine ideas, systems, and phenomena by which even the most outlying cultures are now globally connected with each other. What will be exhibited is not the world as it is or should be, but how we perceive, understand, and interpret it. Can it still be represented and negotiated as a totality at all? "

One of the proposals:

"In an architectural structure reminiscent of the damaged reactor blocks in Fukushima, the director Toshiki Okada, who comes from Yokohama, together with his theater troupe chelfitsch, will examine the abstraction and immeasurability of the catastrophic events in a language of reduced gestures and limited words. "

More on Raumlaborberlin:

"Raumlaborberlin has been working at the boundaries of architecture, art, and urbanism since 1999. Strategies for urban restructuring are examined in interdisciplinary working teams. As opposed to a city of inclusion and exclusion, Raumlabor is on the lookout for a city of possibilities. In terms of its practice, architecture is a labor for experimental, collaborative, passionate action in urban space. Construction is thus not so much to be understood as working on an object, but as developing a narrative that becomes part of a place. "

Beyond What Was Contemporary Art

Starting today@Secession, Vienna:

If we imagine Contemporary Art to be a historical period that emerged from 1989 in parallel to other hegemonic formations such as global neoliberalism, could it be argued that, in sync with the current seismic shifts in society, politics, and economy, it has now reached a dead end? Is Contemporary Art—art in and of the epoch of neoliberalism—on its way out, together with the system that made it possible? What kind of challenges and possibilities might then lie before us in the space of art in times when “business as usual” is no longer an option? Can we speculate collectively on how to move beyond the present confines of Contemporary Art’s normalized and normalizing practices, and articulate what can appear from Contemporary Art’s “formerness?”

Aérea Negrot

Zarina Bhimji: Out of Blue

“This project is about learning to listen to “difference” , the difference in shadows, microcosmos and sensitivity to difference in its various forms. Listening with the eyes, listening to changes in tone, difference of colour. It attempts to link to similar disturbances that have taken place in Kosovo and Rwanda. The work is not a personal indulgence; it is about making sense through the medium of aesthetics. It is a question that is close to my heart since the significant ethical issues have a resonance for me. I want to register these issues, to mark what has happened; elimination, extermination and erasure. Within the broader questions of difference an important part of the project would be the possibility of creative difference. Such a combination of personal and public aspects holds a particular resonance at the start of the 21^st century. I would hope that the work that emerges would be distanced from its personal or historical specifications. “ Zarina Bhimji

Watch the film on zarinabhimji.com

On Postcolony

Francisco Tropa, "Scenário" , 2011.

“a headless figure threatened by madness and quite innocent of any notion of centre, hierarchy, and stability...a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of the tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete...in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos. “ Achilla Mbembe, political scientist

Occupy Museums

Tonight@16Beaver:

Please join us for an open forum to explore some of the following questions:
Is effective political protest possible inside the arts institution?
How does co-optation work, and can its dynamics be flipped in our favor?
Is political art neither political nor art?
What are the pros and cons of international mobility within the arts?
Is Occupy Museums, or other arts groups, co-opting Occupy Wall Street?
Who are our role models, those who have engaged in effective institutional
change? What are the historical precedents can we look to as we approach
this event?
What are some of the ways other Occupy groups are effectively working with
institutions?

La femme américaine libérée des anées 70s

Samuel Fosso, "La femme américaine libérée des anées 70" .


"In every photograph the beautiful Fosso is subject, object and creator. Occasionally he includes other people, but their posture and placement relegates them to a secondary position. In one stagy, understated and slightly bizarre image, for example, Fosso, in large sunglasses autographs a book for an anonymous man, who inclines deferentially towards him. In other photographs, like an indifferent, latter-day and urbanised Narcissus, he’s pictured sitting or standing with himself through the magic of a double exposure. The shallow depth of the studio is transformed with flowers, cane furniture and patterned cloth into a parody of a genteel boudoir. Unlike Narcissus, however, it’s impossible to separate the reflected Fosso from the original - like a happily married couple, one ‘self’ co-habits comfortably with the other. It’s interesting to compare these double images with 19th- and early 20th-century ‘before-and-after conversion’ double-portrait photographs distributed by European missionaries as proof of their ‘civilising’ influence on various African colonies. Fosso’s playful fragmentation of the self-portrait creates a clever counterpoint to the continent’s history of photographic colonialism, a form of aesthetic Euro-centrism, which reduced indigenous cultural and social complexities to convenient one-liners. "

Ghada Amer: 8 women in black and white

Ghada Amer, "8 women in black and white" , 2008.


A 21st century Sheherazade that uses visual language for the caliph to stop killing.

ISINGQALA by Mamela Nyamza (extracts - HD)

Iman Issa: Spectacle for an Imaginary Audience

Iman Issa: Spectacle for an Imaginary Audience (installation on the roof on Tahrir Square) , 2003

SHIFT by Mamela Nyamza (extracts)

Suely Rolnik: Arquivo para uma obra-acontecimento

Read the article by the psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik on the artist Lygia Clark hERE

Artist-in-Residence: Filipa Almeida

Jalal Toufic: Forthcoming

The Atlas Group, "we decided to let them say we're convinced twice" , 1999-2004

" With regard to the surpassing disaster art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there. " Jalal Toufic, Forthcoming.

Berlim: Curators on the Move

" ... floating cities of the future, whose structures, similar in construction to cells or clouds, mean that the inhabitable platforms can subdivide and re-emerge, allowing them to change their form and composition constantly. " 

Read & Share the full article:

BERLIM: CURATORS ON THE MOVE | ROSANA SANCIN | ARTECAPITAL.NET

Isaac Julien: Encore

Check Isaac Julien's film installation Encore II (Radioactive) hERE

Runa Islam: Emergence

"British artist Runa Islam (b. 1970, Dhaka, Bangladesh) primarily uses the medium of film in austere and minimal installations that combine a rigorous logic of conception with a highly poetic style. They often take the conventions, histories, materiality, and grammar of film—its language of framing, panning, zooming, editing, and projection—as the bases for structural investigation and narrative experiment. Astutely aware that perception of the world is mediated by cinematic and technological representation, Islam positions her images on the boundaries between visibility and invisibility, legibility and silence, stability and instability, syntactical simplicity and symbolic complexity. "

Emilie Jouvet: Roof

Ghada Amer: The Woman Who Failed to Be Sheherezade

"I believe that all women should like their bodies and use them as tools of seduction, " Amer stated; and in her well-known erotic embroideries, she at once rejects oppressive laws set in place to govern women's attitudes toward their bodies and repudiates first-wave feminist theory that the body must be denied to prevent victimization. By depicting explicit sexual acts with the delicacy of needle and thread, their significance assumes a tenderness that simple objectification ignores. Amer continuously allows herself to explore the dichotomies of an uneasy world and confronts the language of hostility and finality with unsettled narratives of longing and love. Ghada Amer's work addresses first and foremost the ambiguous, transitory nature of the paradox that arises when searching for concrete definitions of east and west, feminine and masculine, art and craft. Through her paintings, sculptures and public garden projects, Amer takes traditional notions of cultural identity, abstraction, and religious fundamentalism and turns them on their heads .

More about Ghada Amer hERE

Exhibition: Beyond the Truth

What is the correlation between the truth, storytelling and the narratives of history? Can the truth take on visual form? Does truth appear in a different form from untruth? Who is telling the truth? And how do we shape fictions to suit our personal truths?

Selected Artworks: Citadella by Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang, "Citadella" , 2011

Events with Nameless Neighbours

Haegue Yang, "Doubles and Halves- Events with Nameless Neighbours" , 2009

More still-images of the project by Haegue Yang here

Surpression / Distraction

"Haegue Yang's exhibition is an elegant argument for the affective emancipatory possibilities of abstract sculpture. The roomsize installation- an austere landscape of venetian blinds, space heaters, fans, and theatrical lights- combines the phenomenological bent of James Turrel and Olafur Eliasson with the machine aesthetic of Dennis Oppenheim. Suspended from the ceiling in a darkened, cavernous gallery, the blinds form a mazelike structure lit by slowly rowing beams from high-tech theatrical spotlights and the warm glow of nearby heating elements. Moody shadows encircle the room, and slippery moiré patterns appear and dissolve across the blinds. The overall effect is an eternal twilight, that melancholy juncture between day and night, between one moment and the next. But this pensive mood is recast as a deadlock by the arrangment of heaters and fans, whose extravagant expenditures of energy cancel each other out. "

Occupy Nigeria at Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos

Jelili Atiku, "Nigerian Fetish" , performance, 2011

"The week started off with small pockets of unrest and moderate demonstrations that gradually gave way to full-fledged civil resistance throughout the nation. This movement, in consonance with other 'Occupy' protest demonstrations around the world, can be seen in light of a variety of issues that currently plague the nation—foremost among them being the country's stagnant economy, its dilapidated transport, education and health infrastructure, and the ever-present parasitic forms of political and economic corruption.

Within this context, CCA, Lagos initiated an open-ended programme to discursively engage the nation's current state of affairs, the mechanisms underpinning Occupy Nigeria as well as the movement's immediate impact and potential long-term effects. "

Runa Islam: Trust

Raqib Shaw: The Garden of Earthly Delights

"Raqib Shaw’'s gloriously opulent paintings suggest a fantastical world full of intricate detail, rich colour, and jewel-like surfaces, all masking the intense violent and sexual nature of its imagery. Inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’'s fifteenth century visionary triptych, Shaw’'s series of works similarly titled ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ celebrate a society free of any moral restraint. Populated with a wealth of hybrid creatures, Shaw portrays a dizzying scene of erotic hedonism, both explosive and gruesome in its debauchery. Fusing an array of vibrantly painted flora and fauna, Shaw creates an eco-system inhabited by figures such as phallus-headed birds, bug-eyed butterfly catchers, reptilian warriors or monkeys holding parasols, anthropomorphic in their gestures and regalia. "

Zarina Bhimji: Waiting

“I am interested in the spaces, micro details and the light of these distant interiors. The location of light is an element of my composition. Information and research become crucial aspects of my work. I would hope that the work that emerges would be distanced from its personal or historical specifications.”

Watch Zarina's film "Waiting" here

Music: Aérea Negrot

Fades

The Transfinite

The Black Box

Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova

"The Museum Contemporary Art Metelkova derives its specificity not only from its geopolitical and cultural position, but also from its orientation which questions hegemonic history through a multiplicity of narratives, heterogeneous approaches to historicizing, resonance between the urgencies of different localities, and reciprocal methods of learning. "

Alfred Barr: Abstract Cabinet and the Modern Narrative

Lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana:

"This is a story about a collaboration between a museum director who completely changed the appearance
of art history through innovative museum displays and an avant- guard artist who invented a new way to
exhibit abstract art. It is also a story about an ambitious dictator who passionately believed that "art is noble
and up to the fanaticism demanding mission". His desire was to shape the course of art by building a huge
temple of art and staging exhibitions of both "false art" called degenerate and "real art" he thought was truly
for the people. Finally it is a story about a young director of the modern museum on another continent who
reinvented modern art by abandoning the notion of "National Schools" and introducing instead "International
Movements" as basic principle for both the museum and the history of modern art that became widely accepted and remained until today. "

Raqs Media Collective

“Strikes at Time” is a lucid dream, readings from an occasional anonymous journal, and a long walk at the edge of the city of the night.

"The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as a curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs follows its self declared imperative of 'kinetic contemplation' to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures. "