Kate Newby, Wild Was the Night, 2019. Ensemble de 9 vitres. Verre, technique de fusing. Dimensions variables.
This exhibition is intended as a milestone in the “Towards a cosmomorphic world” research cycle conducted by the Brain Space Laboratory since 2016. The exhibition Cosmomorphic Practices is proposed as such: an ensemble of experiences and practices which, through their ecological, human, social, and pedagogical dimensions, could well be the foundation stones of a post-anthropocene.
Two sets of glass works by Kate Newby are presented: Wild Was the Night, an installation of 9 glass panes produced in 2019 for the group show “Otium#4” at IAC, and a new work conceived for the site and this event.
This spring, DAS MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam will present the group exhibition Soft Power, which positions textile design as an artistic means of expression that can be employed to question power relations. The exhibition addresses various aspects of textile art in three chapters.
The chapter “Invisible Hands” focuses on the production conditions of textiles and their raw materials, including the history of the Leipzig-Lindenau cotton mill, among other examples. It will demonstrate the interrelation of historical and contemporary production conditions, trade relations, and their enduring ecological implications. “Disrupting Patterns” is the title of the second chapter. Textile patterns are often based on the repetition of graphic structures, which typically originate from long traditions and can convey information about power hierarchies or status. The works presented in this chapter of the exhibition question existing patterns and relationships. The chapter “Ancestral Threads” traces the lines that connect us to the past. Just as individual threads can combine to form fabrics and larger networks, the historical and contemporary works in this chapter refer to past traditions that continue to have an effect today.
Soft Power shows works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Caroline Achaintre, Wilder Alison, Leonor Antunes, Ouassila Arras, Kevin Beasley, Mariana Chkonia, Edith Dekyndt, Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers (Ella Mae Irby, Candis Mosely Pettway, Quinnie Pettway), Philipp Gufler, William Kentridge, Maria Lai, Joanna Louca, Sandra Mujinga, Gulnur Mukazhanova, Ramona Schacht, Gabriele Stötzer, Johanna Unzueta, Hamid Zénati, and others.
The exhibition will be curated by Daniel Milnes, who has worked as a curator at DAS MINSK since June 2023. Milnes grew up in Leeds, Great Britain, and studied modern languages (German and Russian) in Oxford and art history in Freiburg and St. Petersburg. After completing a traineeship at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, he was part of the curatorial team at Haus der Kunst in Munich and subsequently at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin. In 2019, he was part of the curatorial collective that curated the 12th Kaunas Biennial.
““Wild Grass: Our Lives” was conceived at the end of 2021 as an exhibition theme for the 8th Yokohama Triennale. It was a time when the world gradually emerged out of COVID-19 pandemic, restarting and reconnecting. The preparation for the 8th Yokohama Triennale was part of this worldwide recovery, with an aspiration to set new standards, to distinguish itself among the 250 or so biennales and triennales that are held around the world today. This ambitious and courageous initiative exudes the light of hope. This light shoots out of a backdrop of devastation, desperation, and a profound sense of crisis brought about by the pandemic, climate change, the widespread turn towards conservative nationalism and authoritarianism, the Russian war in Ukraine, the rise of conspiracy theories in popular consciousness, and other multitudes of adversities. We were inspired to search for an exhibition theme that speaks of humble humanism, courage, resilience, faith, and solidarity.”
— LIU Ding and Carol Yinghua LU Artistic Directors 8th Yokohama Triennale
Bringingtogether nearly 150 works, the exhibition Artistes et paysans. Battre la campagne contextualizes and highlights the meeting points between art and agriculture, while exploring how this dialogue has evolved in a context of redefined relationships between humans and their environment.
Ulla von Brandenburg, Sweet Feast, 2018. Film Super 16 mm (transferé sur vidéo HD), couleur, son,11 min 25 s. Edition of 5 plus II AP
With Sweet feast, Ulla von Brandenburg invites us to enjoy an immersive, joyful, physical and mental experience, based on the themes that permeate her work: theater, fabric, stage, color, movement and ritual. With his highly holistic approach, the artist has imagined a total project for Le Parvis, uniting the exhibition space of the contemporary art center with that of the Hall, which guides public circulation to the adjoining theater and cinema.
In the art center, two large-scale textile environments follow one another, hosting three films as visitors make their way through, proving once again that for the artist, working with space and the body are never separate. While in the Hall, a monumental wall drawing evokes the round, pop and acidic aesthetics of the seventies, and celebrates the venue’s fiftieth anniversary. These two spaces, which respond to each other through a dichotomous narrative between interior and exterior, empty and full, develop a “looping” language that returns visitors to the immanence of the installation, to the place that welcomes them. With Sweet feast, Ulla von Brandenburg invites us to take part in a veritable voyage of initiation into color and matter, into other spaces and temporalities.
Vue d’exposition / Installation view « Sortir le travail de sa nuit », CCC OD, Tours, France, février 2024. Photo by: Aurélien Mole
“Sortir le travail de sa nuit ”* (Bringing work out of its darkness)* aims to open the way for a cross-disciplinary reflection on the notion of invisibility. It’s about work that’s invisible, about globalized mechanisms that are omnipresent and structuring, yet remain opaque, and about voices that fail to make themselves heard, remaining inaudible in public spheres. The aim is also to broaden the horizon and examine the phenomena of disappearance and erasure through a more aesthetic, philosophical and poetic lens.
Punctuated by abstract or metaphorical incursions, ghostly or enigmatic presences, and words chanted to remedy a lack of representation, the exhibition unfolds along three thematic axes: women’s work and care, globalized exchanges where the movement of goods and the migration of beings intersect, and dematerialized digital work and its new forms of hidden exploitation.
These are all fields that reactivate the problem of social invisibility addressed by Jacques Rancière more than twenty years ago, when he spoke of “the struggle of proletarians to bring work out of its night – its exclusion from common visibility and speech ”**, a struggle that still resonates today with current political events.
Kate Newby, ‘us, call us’, 2023/2024 et ‘always, always, always’ 2023/2024. Photo credits: Nacása & Partners Inc. / Courtesy of Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès is currently presenting “Ecology: Dialogue on Circulations”, an ongoing two-part exhibition series that examines ecological practices in art.
Following the first exhibition by Jaeeun Choi, Dialogue 1 “La Vita Nuova”, the second installment, Dialogue 2 “Ephemeral Anchoring” will be held from February 16, featuring four artists: Nicolas Floc’h, Kate Newby, Takeshi Yasura, and Raphaël Zarka. The exhibition will be a dialogue exploring the potential of communication and the phenomenon of energy circulation between nature and humans within the platform of contemporary art.
Under the title La Société des spectacle, the Fondation Pernod Ricard presents a duo show with Farah Atassi et Ulla von Brandenburg from February 13 to April 20. Curator: Marjolaine Lévy
What might be the common denominator between the practices of Farah Atassi and Ulla von Brandenburg, two artists who at first glance have nothing in common? Perhaps an exaltation, a celebration of the spectacle of forms that a half-drawn curtain presents to us. [The] viewer is invited to enter Ulla von Brandenburg’s environments and traverse the colours and monumental textile paintings that the artist majestically deploys within the space.
La société des spectacles examines the use of the stage, spectacle, and artifice, and all the ambiguities that they give rise to within very different art practices, while both fall within a modernist legacy.
Nina Childress, Goldengirl, 2023. Huile sur toile / Oil on canvas. 60 × 81 cm. Courtesy the Artist and Art : Concept, Paris.
To kick off this Olympic year in style, Les Franciscaines presents the exhibition Sport, for the beauty of the gesture, an exploration of the sporting gesture in its physical, technical and spiritual dimensions.
An expression of the athlete’s genius, the grammar of the sporting gesture has always been a source of inspiration for artists, between power and mastery, grace and performance. The exhibition reveals this aesthetic of gesture, which strives for perfection through eight sporting disciplines: tennis, soccer, rugby, boxing, high jump, diving, archery and running.
To this end, Le sport, pour la beauté du geste brings together a selection of works of art, documentary images, models and photographs from the collections of INSEP (Institut national du Sport, de l’Expertise et de la Performance), the Musée National du Sport, the Centre Pompidou and the iconothèque of the newspaper L’Équipe. From the photographic canon that captures the truth of the gesture to the views of artists who idealize or even transcend it, the exhibition highlights the back-and-forth between sport and culture, two worlds that constantly enrich each other.
Curated by Thierry Grillet, former director of cultural diffusion at BnF, essayist and writer.
Vue d’exposition / exhibition view, Le parti pris des choses, 2024, CRP/ Centre régional de la photographie Hauts-de-France, Douchy-les-Mines/FR. Courtesy Ulla von Brandenburg
In the studio, between the walls of their home-studio, the artists gathered here take as their objects spoons, potatoes, toothbrushes and even the indispensable cell phone: all things opportunely banal. In their company, they set out to “disaffect” their medium, be it photography or video.
With Stefano Bianchi, Anna et Bernhard Blume, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Thorsten Brinkmann, Robert Cumming, Elspeth Diederix, Alina Maria Frieske, Barbara Iweins, Baptiste Rabichon, Augustin Rebetez, et Patrick Tosani.
Curator: Raphaëlle Stopin, Directrice du Centre photographique Rouen Normandie.
