LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Roman Vasseur: Designs Towards a Meeting Place for Future Events of Universal Truth, Cubitt
17 January – 17 February 2013
Roman Vasseur installs a temporary interior architecture that privileges the ‘meeting’ as performance and as art — an art that seeks an epic address.
The installation’s design is informed by a correspondence between Vasseur and Christopher Gibbs, the famous aesthete and set designer for cult 1968 film, Performance. Gibbs was asked to reflect on the hermetic spaces of the film that suggested an erotic nucleus to both the counter-culture that the film captured, and the private interests of that time which sought to reformulate their power in the shifting economies and class structures of the late sixties.
Fragments of rituals and spaces of commune arrive with the viewer as both background and as a form of accelerated archeology. The salon, the gallery and the executive meeting room are collapsed together in the construction of a space where ideas, as art, seek ascendancy, dispersal and sovereignty. Vasseur delivers political material within the exhibition as a fiction — dormant artifacts or sculptures around which publics are manufactured and assembled.
The exhibition extends into the offices of Cubitt where a text painting is installed as a mantra for the host organisation’s members and administration.
Image: Roman Vasseur, Designs Towards a Meeting Place for Future Events of Universal Truth, installation view, Cubitt Gallery, 2013. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy the artist and Cubitt Gallery
Juergen Teller: Woo!, Institute of Contemporary Arts
23 January – 17 March 2013
Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, Juergen Teller is one of a few artists who has been able to operate successfully both in the art world and the world of commercial photography. This exhibition will provide a seamless journey through his landmark fashion and commercial photography from the 90’s, presenting classic images of celebrities such as Lily Cole, Kurt Cobain and Vivienne Westwood, as well as more recent landscapes and family portraits..
Teller’s provocative interventions in celebrity portraiture subvert the conventional relationship of the artist and model. Whatever the setting, all his subjects collaborate in a way that allows for the most surprising poses and emotional intensity. Driven by a desire to tell a story in every picture he takes, Teller has shaped his own distinct and instantly recognisable style which combines humour, self-mockery and an emotional honesty.
Image: Juergen Teller, Bjork and son, Iceland, 1993. © Juergen Teller
Peles Empire, FORMATION, Cell Project Space
31 January – 17 March 2013
www.cellprojects.org
Cell Project Space presents a newly commissioned work by the artist duo Peles Empire. Using the Armory room of a 19th Century Romanian Castle as a starting point for the exhibition’s construct, the artists have created 3D interpretations using original photographic documentation they made of the castle’s interior and artifacts. Reproducing these into two-dimensional renderings this complex process of evolution transcends collage or deconstruction by combining print and ceramics to present a dissemination of the artists’ imaginary.
Founded in 2005 Peles Empire is a collaborative work by Katharina Stoever and Barbara Wolff. The project borrows its name from the Romanian castle Peles, built between 1893 and 1913 at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, The rooms of the existing castle copy a range of past architectural styles, combining Art Deco, Orientalism, Renaissance and Rococo. The creators of Peles opposed any current design trend by establishing an almost ironic representation of the ‘ideal’ castle. Stoever and Wolff have reproduced over ten rooms of the castle since the project began and have collaborated with a range of artists.
Image: Peles Empire, FORMATION 2-7, 2013. Digital Photo Copy Print on Paper unglazed porcelain, ceramic grog. Courtesy the artists and Cell Project Space
Susan Hiller: Channels, Matt’s Gallery
13 February – 14 April 2013
Channels, Susan Hiller‘s fourth exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a vast audio-sculptural installation in which disembodied voices report on ‘near-death’ experiences.
Hiller uses audio accounts in many languages from people who believe they have experienced death as the raw materials for her new work. Vivid stories of those who believe they have died and returned to tell the tale constitute a remarkable contemporary archive, whether the accounts are regarded as metaphors, misperceptions, myths, delusions or truth.
Channels is an artwork designed to engage us in a consideration of some of the gaps and contradictions in our modern belief system and collective cultural life. It is not intended as a religious consolation nor ‘new age’ fantasy, but rather as a de-stabilising aesthetic device opening to the un-representable.
Image: Susan Hiller, Channels installation in progress. Photograph and copyright © 2013 Bernard G Mills.
Light Show, Hayward Gallery
30 January – 28 April 2013
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/haywardgallery
Light Show explores the experiential and phenomenal nature of light, bringing together sculptures and installations that use light to create specific conditions. The exhibition showcases artworks since the 1960’s in which light itself is used as material to sculpt and shape space, often creating evocative environments and sensory works that operate at the edges of the viewer’s perception. Light has the power to affect our states of mind as well as alter our perceptions, and Light Show will include some of the most visually stimulating artworks created in recent years as well as rare works not seen for decades and re-created specially for the Hayward Gallery.
Artists in the exhibition include: David Batchelor, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flavin, Ceal Floyer, Jenny Holzer, Ann Veronica Janssens, Anthony McCall, François Morellet, Ivan Navarro, Katie Paterson, Conrad Shawcross and James Turrell.
Image: Anthony McCall, You and I Horizontal, 2005. Courtesy the artist and Hayward Gallery
NON LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Dawn Mellor: What Happened to Helen? Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea
14 January – 30 March 2013
For her first major solo project made specifically for a UK regional visual arts institution and her largest exhibition of new work to date, Dawn Mellor has made a series of paintings based on the complex identity of the Southend-raised actress Dame Helen Mirren.
If Mirren often plays on her Russian heritage in interviews, and draws on her British working class background in other contexts – in what has become a polarised form of role play to manipulate the media’s perception of her – then the images used in this exhibition represent her corresponding parts for film and television that show issues of domination, subjugation and control, such as in The Queen, Caligula and Prime Suspect.
Mellor has translated these portraits through the dramatic lens of the two servants Claire and Solange in Jean Genet’s 1947 play Les Bonnes or The Maids. If both characters self-consciously construct elaborate rituals by taking turns to portray master and servant while their mistress Madame is away, then Mirren, who similarly flits between two different social classes to self-consciously construct her own personal identity, is seen taking turns in Mellor’s paintings to act each side of the power divide. Thus, the characters of Claire and Solange become a performative vehicle to depict Mirren – who was honoured with the 2,488th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles on 3 January 2013 – devouring herself in a contemporary dramatic tension involving status, power and the polarity between self-destruction and self-emancipation.
Image: Dawn Mellor , Claire as Madame as Queen Elizabeth II (II). Oil on canvas, 152cm x 120cm, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Focal Point Gallery
Anna Barham: Suppose I call a man a horse, or a horse a man, Site Gallery, Sheffield
9 February – 23 March 2013
Coming up next at Site Gallery is a residency with UK artist Anna Barham. With a research-based practice, Anna’s exploration of language, linguistics and systematic structures is presented through drawings, digital animation and audio. Throughout her residency, Anna will be researching the relationship of symbol and sound to meaning; the relationship of words to images; the collaborative nature of language and the voice, which will culminate in the production of a new video work.
Anna Barham was born in the UK in 1974. She graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2001. She works in a variety of media, including sculpture, performance, video and drawing.
Image: Anna Barham, still from Liquid Consonant, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Site Gallery
Simon Starling: Black Drop, Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford
Off-site exhibition commissioned by Modern Art Oxford in association with Oxford University
23 February – 24 March 2103
Black Drop, a new film by Turner Prize-winning artist Simon Starling, will debut at the Radcliffe Observatory, Green Templeton College, Oxford from 23 February. The film responds to the rare planetary phenomenon of the transit of Venus and its relationship to the beginnings of moving image technology.
A transit of Venus took place in June 2012, and was only visible in its entirety from the mid-Pacific. The next transit will take place in 2117, making 2012 the last in our lifetimes. With the medium of film rapidly disappearing, Starling journeyed to Hawaii and Tahiti to film the transit and the sites of previous observations – Point Venus, Tahiti in 1769 and Honolulu in 1874 – documenting the last transit to be recorded using 35mm technology.
Black Drop is a multi-layered documentary illustrated with still and moving images of geographical locations and historical information, set against the backdrop of a 35mm film-editing suite. Janssen’s photographic rifle was developed to record the 1874 transit and is now widely recognised as a predecessor to modern cinematography. This intriguing story highlights how film emerged from early scientific exploration.The Radcliffe Observatory was built on the suggestion of the astronomer Dr. Thomas Hornsby, following his observation of the 1769 transit of Venus. Responding to the building’s origins, Starling’s new film engages with the uniqueness of this historical site.
Image: Simon Starling, Black Drop, 2012 (still), 35mm film transferred to HD. Courtesy the artist and Modern Art Oxford
Version Control, Arnolfini, Bristol
2 February – 14 April 2013
Version Control is a large-scale survey exhibition about the notion of appropriation and performance in the expanded field of contemporary artistic practice. Instead of an understanding of performance as a live activity or connected to an exploration of the artist’s body, the exhibition explores performance in a radical sense as a method of making the past present. Performativity, in this way, explores the conscious moment of staging, appropriating, archiving and re-visiting images and other forms of representation, touching on questions of historiography, mediation, subjectivity, and ownership.
The project will include works from artists of different generations and backgrounds, from visual art, theatre and digital culture, presenting film and video, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Through a series of interventions and ‘performing objects’, the exhibition will be itself performative and change over the course of the show.
Artists include: APNews, Giles Bailey, Gretchen Bender, Bernadette Corporation, Gerry Bibby, Ruth Buchanan, Antoine Catala, Nicolas Ceccaldi, David Raymond Conroy, Simon Denny, Tim Etchells, Loretta Fahrenholz, Felix Gmelin, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Andy Holden, Morag Keil, Oliver Laric, Louise Lawler, Tobias Madison, Eva & Franco Mattes, Melvin Moti, Rabih Mroué, Ken Okiishi, Amalia Pica, Seth Price, Emanuel Rossetti and Nora Schultz.
Image: Tobias Madison, Feedback, 2012, still from HD video. Courtesy the artist, Karma International, Zurich and Arnolfini
Alice Channer, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Linder, Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
16 February – 12 May 2013
This spring The Hepworth Wakefield presents three separate but linked exhibitions by artists Alice Channer, Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Linder. All three artists have engaged with the legacy of Barbara Hepworth as part of the process of making new works for their exhibitions. Light-boxes, collage assemblages, sculptures made from everyday objects and ambitious installations are among the diverse practices employed by each artist in their inventive art that explores representations of the human body.
This will be the solo debut in a public art gallery of Berlin-based Jessica Jackson Hutchins; Alice Channer’s new body of work entitled Invertebrates will follow on from her recent solo shows at South London Gallery and Lisa Cooley, New York; and Linder Sterling builds on work inspired by a period of research at Tate St. Ives, culminating in a ‘living collage’ performance work entitled The Ultimate Form, to premiere at The Hepworth Wakefield on Saturday 11 May 2013.
Image: Jessica Jackson Hutchins, SAP, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. © The artist
