LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Curators’ Series #5. Bouvard and Pécuchet’s Compendious Quest for Beauty, David Roberts Foundation
5 April – 9 June 2012
www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com
Caroline Achaintre, Phyllida Barlow, Yto Barrada, Morton Bartlett, Bram Bogart, Boyle Family, Sir Frank Brangwyn, Peter Buggenhout, Gerard Byrne, Carter, Susan Collis, Burt Glinn, George Condo, John Currin, Jules Dalou, Thomas Demand, VALIE EXPORT, Graham Hudson, Tamara De Lempicka, Roy Lichtenstein, Mark Manders, Susan Meiselas, Marlo Pascual, Grayson Perry, Seth Pick, Man Ray, Santiago Sierra, David Shrigley, Jamie Shovlin, Andreas Slominski, Oscar Tuazon, Gavin Turk, and Douglas White.
Simone Menegoi and Chris Sharp are the fifth guest curators invited by DRAF to be part of the Curators’ Series. The title for the exhibition is taken from Gustave Flaubert’s last, unfinished novel where two Parisian copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet meet, become dear friends, and stoke each other’s curiosity to know the world and its rational, post-Enlightenment ways better.
Image: Exhibition view (from left to right): Boyle Family, Study of a Coloured Tile Path with Red, Black and White Tiles, 1988; Peter Buggenhout, The Blind Leading the Blind #4_4, 2004; Yto Barrada, Wallpaper-Tanger, 2001. David Roberts Collection, London. Image: Alessandra Chila.
Yael Bartana, And Europe Will Be Stunned, Art Angel
22 May – 1 July 2012
And Europe Will Be Stunned, Israeli artist Yael Bartana’s powerful and challenging trilogy of films made in Poland between 2007 and 2011, will be presented by Artangel this summer in a special exhibition at Hornsey Town Hall in London’s Crouch End.
And Europe Will Be Stunned revolves around the activities of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), a political group that calls for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to the land of their forefathers. The films traverse a landscape scarred by the histories of competing nationalisms and militarisms, overflowing with the narratives of the Israeli settlement movement, Zionist dreams, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and the Palestinian right of return. Apart from realising the film trilogy, a new political movement has been established by the artist.
Image: Yael Bartana, Zamach (Assassination), 2011. Image by Marcin Kalinski. Courtesy of Artangel.
Amalia Pica, Chisenhale Gallery
25 May – 15 July 2012
Chisenhale Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Amalia Pica, featuring newly commissioned works across sculpture, photography, installation and performance. The exhibition elaborates upon Pica’s ongoing interest in the social act of listening, sites of celebration and technologies of mass communication.
Pica’s wide-ranging practice includes sculpture, drawing, photography, installation, performance and film. For her exhibition at Chisenhale, Pica also focuses on the gallery space as a public site with works situated in areas usually excluded from the arena of exhibition display.
Image: Amalia Pica, 2008, Tableau vivant by two actors that had never met efore holding a string of bunting for hours at a time. Installation view. Artis Den Bosch, NL, 2008.
Courtesy Herald St, London, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles, and Diana Stigter, Amsterdam
Wide Open School, Hayward Gallery
11 June – 11 July 2012
The Hayward Gallery’s Wide Open School is an unusual experiment in learning. Its programme of classes is devised and delivered by over 100 artists from approximately 40 different countries. It is not an art school however. Instead it is a wide-ranging forum where artists lead and facilitate workshops, collaborative projects, collective discussions, lectures and performances about any and all subjects in which they are passionately interested.
That is a territory as expansive as the imaginations of artists.
REGIONAL EXHBITIONS
Olivia Plender, Rise Early, Be Industrious, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
20 April – 17 June 2012
This exhibition by British artist Olivia Plender brings together sculpture, embroidery, posters, board games, architectural models and a video produced over the last ten years. Devised as a ‘museum of communication’, four room-sized installations are organised thematically, drawing on a broad range of references to explore how attitudes towards mass education have evolved over time.
Olivia Plender, Rise Early, Be Industrious, is an exhibition in three episodes presented with Arnolfini, Bristol and Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. The next episode will open at the Arnolfini on 14 July 2012.
Image: Olivia Plender, Open Forum (2008- ongoing), installation view. Photograph: Andy Keate. © MK Gallery
News from Nowhere, firstsite, Colchester
20 May – 27 August 2012
Lynda Benglis, Mary Ellen Bute, Lynn Chadwick, Lygia Clark, Richard Deacon, Naum Gabo, Isa Genzken, Roger Hiorns, Nam June Paik, John McCracken, László Moholy-Nagy, Eduardo Paolozzi, Xanti Schawinsky, Paul Thek, Mungo Thomson, Mark Titchner, Stan VanDerBeek
News from Nowhere features sculpture, drawing, print, photography and film from the early twentieth century to present day, bringing newly commissioned work together with loans from national and international collections to highlight the impact of developments in modern science and technology on the artistic imagination.
Image: Mark Titchner, And waiting we plunged into dreams, 2012, digital print on vinyl. Courtesy the artist and Vilma Gold.
Caroline Achaintre, Sara Barker, Alice Channer, Eastside Projects, Birmingham
26 May – 28 July 2012
Caroline Achaintre, Sara Barker, Alice Channer is a three person exhibition forming the space of the gallery with discreet and autonomous moments of object making via careful labour. Exemplifying a strong resurgence in material practices across the UK, the three artists produce sculptural works exhibiting precise languages of process, material or contextual manipulation. With a nod to the long lost divide between abstraction and figuration their divergent works take positions of figure, foreground, background, and architecture as a scene of unrelated moments forced into dialogue.
Image: Caroline Achaintre, Posyno, 2012. Image copyright the artist, courtesy of Arcade, London. Alice Channer, Cold Metal Body (detail), 2012. Photo credit: Andy Keate. Image courtesy the artist and The Approach, London. Sara Barker, story of a house, 2012. Image courtesy the artist and Mary Mary, Glasgow.
FormContent, It’s moving from I to It. Scene 3: Not surprisingly, he is wearing gloves, Eastside Projects, Brimingham
26 May – 7 July 2012
A ‘mystery’ exhibition in two parts (story/investigation) curated by London based collective FormContent in Eastside Projects Second Gallery. ‘Not surprisingly, he is wearing gloves’ is Scene 3 of ‘It’s moving from I to It’, a 15-month programme on visual language, abstraction, disappearance and the object.
In a locked room, a mystery, possibly, has taken place. There is nothing clear to show that the mystery happened, yet the situation (the exhibition itself) arouses a common suspicion that a problem needs to be solved, questions answered, meaning disclosed.
Image: Goldin+ Senneby, “I dispense, divide, assign, hold” with Pamela Carter (Playwright), Ismail Erturk (Senior Lecturer in Banking), Anna Heymowska (set Designer), Hamadi Khemiri (Actor). Performance view: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 2012.
Redmond Entwistle, Walk-Through, International Project Space, Birmingham
20 June –28 July 2012
International Project Space presents Walk-Through, a new film by British artist Redmond Entwistle set in the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. The film explores the site, design and philosophy of CalArts as a starting point for posing wider questions about contemporary pedagogical models and their relationship to new forms of social, political and economic exchange that have emerged since the 1970s.
Borrowing formal and atmospheric motifs from 1970s giallo films by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Walk-Through re-imagines CalArts as a site of potential intrigue, subtly calling into question the artistic and democratic tenets embedded in the school’s founding ideology. Through a style and form that shifts from didacticism to fiction the film expresses some of the complexity of the changing status of the body, memory and language in current educational and political formations, especially at a time when government cuts threaten arts education, and higher education is being marketised worldwide.
Image: Redmond Entwistle, Walk-Through, 2012. Courtesy the artist.
Luke Fowler, new film commission,The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield
23 June – 14 October 2012
Coming soon to The Hepworth Wakefield is Luke Fowler‘s major new film commission. Based on research and material from archives in the North of England, the film will focus on the work of the radical socialists Edward Palmer-Thompson, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart whose influential writing were honed in the norther working class communities.
Image: Luke Fowler, The Poor Stockinger, The Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcott, 2012. Commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Film and Video Umbrella., through the Contemporary Art Society Annual Award: Commission to Collect. Image: WEA Archive, YUC Library, London Metropolitan University. Photo: A.S. Parkin.
Kelly Richardson, Legion: Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
5 July – 29 September 2012
Canadian artist Kelly Richardson is one of the leading representatives of a new generation of artists working with digital technologies to create hyper-real, highly charged landscapes, alongside figures such as John Gerrard and Saskia Olde Wolbers. Legion is her first one-person exhibition in the UK, and provides a retrospective of over a decade of her work, including the UK premieres of three large-scale projections.
Image: Kelly Richardson, Exiles of the Shattered Star, 2006. High definition video with sound, 16:9 aspect ratio. 30 minute loop, single channel. Image courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato.
