All posts tagged: Exhibition review

The Weight of the Posthumous: A Review of Etel Adnan “Light’s New Measure” at the Guggenheim Museum

October 8, 2021 – January 10, 2022Guggenheim Museum1071 5th Ave, New York, NY 10128 Beyond any doubt, the recent passing of Etel Adnan (1925-2021) transformed the sense of her exhibition Light’s New Measure at the Guggenheim. What started as an exhibition of a living artist is now the retrospective of a historic figure, locating the show between two different times: the historical and the contemporary. However, the shift in meaning of the exhibition due to the interruption of death is not the only reason that Light’s New Measure is special. The curators Katherine Brinson and Lauren Hinkson not only brilliantly establish a relation to the exhibition Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle (which opened simultaneously on October 8), but also emphasize Etel Adnan’s admiration for the Guggenheim building’s designer, Frank Lloyd Wright. A wall text in the exhibition reveals that Adnan, who originally aspired to become an architect, was fascinated with the influence of Mesopotamian forms on Wright’s architectural practice. The Guggenheim, which she imagined as a contemporary version of Babel Tower, provides the unique opportunity …

Moving In: A Review of ‘Home Body’ at Sapar Contemporary

February 19 – March 23, 2021 Sapar Contemporary9 North Moore St, NYC For better or worse, every art exhibition over the past year has been framed by the COVID-19 pandemic. At its onset, this connection occurred by default; but as time went on, galleries began to incorporate the pandemic into their programming as a subject or theme. The decision to contextualize exhibitions in this manner resurrected an age-old question: what purpose does art serve in periods of crisis? Home Body, an exhibition brilliantly curated by Nico Wheadon that features exquisite work by Elia Alba, Baseera Khan, Sola Olulode, and Maya Varadaraj, offers one poignant reply: when the relationship between art and the present is brought to our attention, we would do well to focus on the minutiae of the moment. In an essay accompanying the exhibition, Wheadon emphasizes that one’s sense of isolation during the pandemic inevitably reshapes notions of embodiment. For Wheadon, this sense of embodiment senses the body as a “home, or interior world,” that we can “return to or seek refuge in.” …

Sometimes, You Have to Laugh: A Review of Nicola Tyson ‘Sense of Self’ at Petzel Gallery

September 2 – October 3, 202035 E 67th Street Written by Peter Murphy, University of Rochester Stepping into Petzel Gallery on the Upper East Side, I felt beside myself. Months had passed since I last visited a gallery; would I remember how to behave amongst Nicola Tyson’s wondrous paintings? Fortunately, Tyson seems to be a kindred spirit for those unsure of themselves. She states in the press release that that her “center of gravity had shifted” during the pandemic. Tyson started a series of new paintings prior to lockdown, only to abandon them as the world came to a halt. She returned to eight canvases this past summer and found that “what had begun as an exploration of relationship to another, refocused instead on relationship with self.” This turn toward the self is standard for Tyson—her oeuvre is filled with vibrant and exaggerated self-portraits in which she is identifiable by her familiar auburn hair. What is not standard, of course, is the current state of the world and our presence within it. With this exhibition, …

Curatorial Fabulations: Difference, Subversion, and Exhibition-as-Form in ‘Outliers and American Vanguard Art’

Review of Outliers and American Vanguard Art written by Kendall DeBoer, University of Rochester Outliers and American Vanguard Art: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., January 28 – May 13, 2018 High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 24–September 30, 2018 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, November 18, 2018–March 18, 2019 Seraphine Louis, “Feuilles,” (c. 1928), oil on canvas. Attempts to highlight non-canonical artworks and their makers tend to fall into common traps. Some fetishize the identities of the artists; others gloss over identity in favor of formalist readings. Many erase narratives of inequality that the artists had intended to address with their reparative work. Lynne Cooke’s exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art, remarkable for its breadth and depth, evades these pitfalls in its examination of difference. Cooke’s show presents an ambitious, complex web of works connected across aesthetic, temporal, geographic, cultural, and political lines. Through her curatorial choices informed by her practice of critical fabulations, Cooke proposes new areas of inquiry and inspires meaning-making in a field that has often felt foreclosed and inaccessible. …

How Heritage Feels: An Artist’s Sensuous Archaeology of Iraqi-American Relations

Exhibition review by Hilary Morgan Leathem, University of Chicago Figure 1 Michael Rakowitz, Backstroke of the West, Installation view, Reproduced with permission of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, September 16, 2017—March 4, 2018. “It bemoans its lost wisdom There’s nothing left Its heritage is lost And one question follows the other…” —Tarek Eltayeb, “A Hoopoe”1 While heritage has become a subject of sustained interest across disciplines in the last few decades, most studies focus on its economic dimensions, allowing the moral, symbolic, and affective power of heritage to fall to the wayside.2 A recent exhibition at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Michael Rakowitz: Backstroke of the West, curated by Dr. Omar Kholeif, gives us a window into how to address this absence, exploring the moral economies of history and heritage, in part, by reconstituting missing, looted, or destroyed artifacts from Iraq. It also builds on the assertion that there still remains a palpable disconnect between the socially constructed “self” and “other,” “us” and “them,” …

If Only Radiation Had Color: The Era of Fukushima

Exhibition review by Line Ellegaard, associate lecturer at The University of Copenhagen.  “If Only Radiation Had Color: The Era of Fukushima.” X AND BEYOND, Copenhagen. April 1, 2017 – July 2, 2017. In March 2011 a 9.0 earthquake hit the near-off shore of Japan creating a tsunami that, caused tremendous damage on land, initiating a series of explosions, and the meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant owned by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The ensuing release of radioactive material contaminated a large part of Fukushima and prompted the evacuation of another 154.000 citizens, in addition to the 470.000 already evacuated because of the earthquake and tsunami.1 During summer 2017 a three-part exhibition-series at X AND BEYOND surveyed work made by contemporary Japanese artists in the wake and aftermath of this nuclear disaster. “If Only Radiation Had Color: The Era of Fukushima”, co-curated by director of X AND BEYOND, Jacob Lillemose, the Tokyo based curator, Kenji Kubota, and independent critic and curator Jason Waite, looked at reconfigurations of the social in …

My East Is Your West

Review by Sophie Knezic, University of Melbourne. Shilpa Gupta and Rashid Rana, My East Is Your West. 56th Venice Biennale. May 5 – October 31, 2015. A satellite exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale, My East is Your West was presented at the Palazzo Benzon, whose interior architecture of adjoining rooms, narrow corridors and cordoned-off, dimly-lit spaces suggested a mise en abyme of thresholds and crossings. Commissioned by the Gujral Foundation, conceived by its Director Feroze Gujral, and curated by Martina Mazzotta and Natasha Ginwala, the exhibition juxtaposed Pakistani artist Rashid Rana and Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s respective explorations of geographical divides and subcontinental tensions. As nations locked in postcolonial conflict for much of the second half of the 20th century, neither India nor Pakistan has had the privilege of a permanent national pavilion at Venice, making this a particularly pointed curatorial pairing. Choosing to deploy a method of appropriation, Rana covered two walls with pixelated digital prints of two canonical works from Western art history: Caravaggio’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1598-99) and Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii (1784), …