Ten years ago, M presented an exhibition by photographer Geert Goiris (1971). Today, Goiris returns, but this time as curator of a presentation from the contemporary art collection. The exhibition is entitled DOKA, which is short for “darkroom” in NL, and refers to the magical space where images are created.
“The darkroom is where images are created through the interaction of light and chemistry – a magical process. That is also how I see this collection presentation: works that have been in a dark storeroom for years are now suddenly coming to light.”—Geert Goiris
A colorful exhibition designed as a mockery of decorum and good taste, Ravalement de façade pokes fun at the magma we call identity. with the magma we call identity. A fluctuating, imprecise matter, it becomes here, through playfulness and audacity ; plural, chosen, uncompromising, a powerful opening onto the world…
With Grégoire Alexandre, Marion Auburtin, Carla Barkatz, Mike Boursheid, Christophe Brunnquell, Nina Childress, Famous People Cakes, Beth Frey, Anais Gauthier, Laura Gozlan, Antony Huchette, Gil Lesage, jess mc cormak, Sarah Olivier, Nina Orliange, Laurent Poleo-Garnier, Maroussia Rebecq, Christine Rebet
Vue d’exposition / View of the exhibition Ulla von Brandenburg. Le milieu est bleu, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2020. Photograph: Aurélien Mole
The work of artist Ulla von Brandenburg (Karlsruhe, Germany, 1974) is shaped by her early training as a stage designer and a brief stint in the world of theatre, two cornerstones of her work. The variety of mediums and techniques — installations, films, murals, performances — represent a meticulous control of stage language with which the artist meshes other areas of interest such as psychoanalysis, magic and esoteric rituals to investigate social structures and put forward new alternatives.
Von Brandenburg’s installations give rise to subjective spaces which immerse the spectator in suspended places that straddle reality and fiction. The artist resignifies the once impassable fourth wall, often employing curtains and drapery which rather than establishing a dividing line with visitors, encourage them to participate in the work and become part of the scene. Thus, she champions a concept of the arts that is much more permeable and less hierarchical and one which encourages an exchange between spectator and actor. Further, her attraction to colour underlines the influence of Wolfgang von Goethe, whose theories conferred an emotional and phenomenological quality to colours, refuting the theory of Isaac Newton and his claim they were merely physics.
The Palacio de Velázquez in the Retiro Park becomes the ideal context for a new installation by the artist, whereby visitors knowingly move deeper into the space and activate a staging that interweaves the individual and the collective, reminding us that life is a theatre in which everyone chooses the role they wish to play. On this occasion, the artist incorporates into the exhibition structure a selection of her films, most of which are recorded in a single long shot to encourage spectators to move through this new staging of spaces and overlapping stories.
Ulla von Brandenburg has exhibited her work at the Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst in Bremen (2022), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2020), Whitechapel Gallery in London (2018), Kunstmuseum Bonn (2018), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2016) and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2016), among other museums and institutions.
Thursday, November 30, 7pm, Tina Kim Gallery, New York, USA.
Tania Pérez Córdova’s performance, In OtherNews, will be followed by a conversation with Humberto Moro, artist and curator of her show at SculptureCenter, New York, Generalization.
Tania Pérez Córdova’s In Other News (commissioned for her 2022 exhibition at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City) is a live reading presenting a continuous flow of recent world events, a collection of headlines rewritten to abstract from any specificity (names, spaces, times), resulting in a single line that has the tension of a story. The work serves as a review of the world outside of the gallery during the time of her exhibition. It functions as a backdrop to a collective experience which, as in most of Pérez Córdova’s work, describes an ongoing narrative that deviates and reconfigures into new forms as it unfolds. At the same time, the juxtaposition of events, almost unintentionally, evinces the contradictory nature of social and political events and their intersections across geographies and socio-political spheres.
Through the figures of emblematic spies, from Mata Hari to Carrie Mathison, and from OSS117 to Edward Snowden, this exhibition explores a new history of the relationship between cinema and espionage. It’s the starting point a play of mirrors between the two disciplines, practices par excellence involving capture, simulacra and concealment.
Travelling exhibition: From 05/10/2022 to 14/05/2023 Cinémathèque française – Musée du Cinéma, Paris From 29/06/2023 to 29/10/2023 Fundación la Caixa, Madrid From 29/11/2023 to 31/03/2024 Caixa Forum Barcelona
Michel Blazy, Corail, 2009. Crème dessert au chocolat et à la vanille, oeufs sur bois grignoté par des souris / Chocolate and vanilla cream dessert, eggs on wood nibbled by mice. 60 × 80 cm / 65,5 × 85,5 × 5,5 cm (framed). Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris.
The exhibition explores different variations of the symbiotic perspective within the creations by some twenty artists. Although presented non-chronologically, the exhibition is situated in comparison to the canon of linear perspective through the presence of a drawing by Niccolò Martinelli (known as Il Trometta, c. 1540-1611). The exhibition reminds us that certain 20th-century artists initiated a paradigm shift, notably Claude Gilli (1938-2015) and Jean-Luc Vilmouth (1952-2015) who are shown here.
With Art Orienté Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet & Benoît Mangin), David Bihanic, Michel Blazy, Clément Borderie, David Christoffel, Edith Dekyndt, Laurent Derobert, Claude Gilli, Jérémy Gobé, Andy Goldsworthy, Victoire Inchauspé, Susan Jacobs, Chloé Jeanne, anne marie maes, Ariane Michel & Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Valérie Mréjen, Luc Petton, Tomás Saraceno, Niccolò de Martinelli, dit il Trometta, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Yang Zhichao.
Intimate confession is a project is a group exhibition that considers transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure. Through the work of eleven artists spanning generations and geographies, the exhibition thinks through infrastructure as an intimate holding cell, capable of affective and affirmative power.
The title is borrowed from a sonnet line by poet Juliana Spahr, and is recast to reflect on the relational infrastructures of cultural material. In recent years, a surge of scholarship on the built and unbuilt environments has emerged contrasting “humans, things, words, and non-humans into patterned conjunctures,” to quote feminist theorist Michelle Murphy. This exhibition examines how infrastructures can be understood as “affective” in their varied expressions of movement and imprint on cultural life.
Our Ecology will feature four chapters of diverse expression courtesy of an impressive lineup of international artists, from historical works to a number commissioned especially for the exhibition.
Above all, the title Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living asks who we are, and to whom the Earth’s environment belongs, and the exhibition urges us to think about environmental problems and other issues not only from an anthropocentric perspective, but also by looking at the Earth’s multiple ecologies from a broader, more comprehensive standpoint. This sustainable exhibition, designed to reduce the use of transport to a minimum by reusing and recycling as many resources as possible, will make the Mori Art Museum a place to contemplate how contemporary art and artists have to date engaged with environmental issues, and how they can continue to do so in the future.
