LONDON EXHIBITIONS
Saskia Olde Wolbers: Yes, these Eyes are the Windows, Art Angel
3 May – 22 June 2014
87 Hackford Road, London SW9 0RE
What traces of lives can a place contain? A blue plaque on the front of an innocuous terraced house in Brixton commemorates its past resident, a young man by the name of Vincent van Gogh, a tenant from 1873 until 1874.
Taking advantage of a postal strike in the 1970s, a local postman traced Van Gogh to this property, then occupied by a family. The ensuing plaque shielded not only the house but much of the surrounding area from demolition at the time, yet since 2012, the residents now departed, the house has stood empty. Every day people visit the street and can come no closer to the truth of time spent there by its most famous occupant than the front door.
Now Saskia Olde Wolbers opens this door to the public and invites them in to experience what lies beyond. Frustrating the desire to uncover a history of one man’s time in the house, the artist weaves a fictional narrative from the accounts of oral histories, press archives and literary works, and presents visitors with one particular narrative that enables the space to speak its past.
Click HERE for more information
Image: Saskia Olde Wolbers, Yes, these Eyes are the Windows (2014). Courtesy the artist and Artangel
Matthew Barney and Jonathan Bepler: River of Fundament, English National Opera
29 – 30 June 2014
ENO presents the UK premiere of River of Fundament. This radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings is an epic story of regeneration and rebirth, set in three major American cities – Los Angeles, Detroit and New York. A collaboration between visual artist Matthew Barney and composer Jonathan Bepler, the film was conceived as a contemporary opera that combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filmed elements of performance and sculpture. Barney reconstructs Mailer’s hyper-sexual story of Egyptian gods and the seven stages of reincarnation alongside the rise and fall of the American car industry.
River of Fundament features a notable and diverse cast, including actors Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paul Giamatti, Elaine Strich and Ellen Burstyn. An eclectic group of musicians include avant-garde vocalist Joan La Barbara, percussionist Milford Graves, and baritones Eugene and Herbert Perry. In addition, the film features characters from Barney and Bepler’s previous collaboration Cremaster 3, including characters played by Barney and Aimee Mullins.
Click HERE for more information
Image: River of Fundament / Hugo Glendinning
Jimmie Durham: Traces and Shiny Evidence, Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art
12 June – 9 August 2014
For this exhibition Jimmie Durham has created a new installation that covers the entire gallery space of the foundation. While the installation on the ground floor is vivid, physical and colourful, the installation on the first floor is sedate, ethereal, and black and white.
Durham is an artist, poet and prominent writer. His eclectic artistic practice spans five decades and is sustained by an investigative and remarkably creative mind. Primarily comprised of sculpture and installation, it also includes drawing, photography, performance and video. Many of his works are collages or collections of discarded objects and fragments of organic matter, the nature of which he intelligently and astutely transforms and often paints in dazzling colours. His work commonly refers to the attributes of mankind and animals, their life and past history.
Click HERE for more information
Image: courtesy Jimmie Durham. Photo Kai Vollmer
Re-Materialising Feminism, The Showroom and ICA
www.rematerialisingfeminism.org
Part I: 6 – 8 June 2014 at The Showroom
Part II: 20 – 21 June 2014 at the ICARe-Materialising Feminism is a collaborative project aimed at interrogating a diverse range of artistic and theoretical feminist practices in contemporary culture. The project begins as a conference and series of events, taking place across The Showroom and the ICA. A publication documenting the project will be published by Arcadia Missa publications later in 2014.
Part I at The Showroom is concerned with understanding key conversations within materialist feminist critique, namely the relationship between labour and gender, and the terms ‘reproduction’ and ‘abolition’. These terms will be unpacked and examined alongside notions of radical (female) subjectivities, and queer theory. Where does resistance to reproduction occur, in particular within the formation of affect? Can embodiments of failure and/or self-authoring operate as refusal of the reproductive qualities of patriarchy?
Part II of the project at the ICA comprises of a series of text-based interventions, performances, screenings and onstage conversations that reconsider older feminist strategies of representation in light of a resurgence of interest in feminism in culture and the mass media. The focus is on mapping the complex, and at times ambiguous, demands brought about by a considerable range of artistic and theoretical practices that expose the exploitation of the female subject – and even of feminism itself.
Participants include Penny Goring, Beatrice Loft-Schulz, New Noveta, Hannah Black, Rozsa Farkas, Morag Keil, Larne Abse-Gogarty, Ellen Feiss, CUNTemporary and Jay Bernard.
Organised by Alice Brooke, Rózsa Farkas and Giulia Smith.
For more information please visit: www.theshowroom.org / www.ica.org.uk
Image: Courtesy Alice Brooke
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Gustav Metzger: LIFT OFF!, Kettles Yard, Cambridge
24 May – 31 August 2014
“When I was young I wanted art that would lift off – that would levitate, gyrate,
bring together different – perhaps contradictory aspects of my being.” Gustav MetzgerVisitors to Lift Off! will be submersed in Gustav Metzger’s world of creative experimentation and activism between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Bringing together archive, film, sculpture and installations, this ambitious exhibition focuses on Metzger’s auto-creative work – the alter ego of his better-known auto-destructive practice.
The exhibition includes Metzger’s landmark piece Liquid Crystal Environment (1965 remade 2005) on loan from Tate. This hypnotic environment is composed of projections that create constantly shifting psychedelic patterns. The exhibition will also showcase works that use air, water and heat that Metzger first made in a university laboratory in Swansea in 1969 and which have not been seen since.
The show highlights Metzger’s close connections with the city of Cambridge. Born in Nuremburg in 1926, Metzger came to Britain as a refugee in 1939. He began his education as a student at Cambridge School of Art in the 1940s and lived in East Anglia throughout much of the 1950s. Two of his most significant lecture demonstrations, in which Metzger presented his ideas around auto-creation and auto-destruction, were staged at Cambridge University in 1960 and 1965.
Click HERE for more information
Image: Gustav Metzgar, Liquid Crystal Environment, 1965, remade 2005, Tate
Whitstable Biennale 2014, Whitstable
31 May – 15 June 2014
Whitstable Biennale stages a festival every two years of new visual art film and performance. The event has grown out of Whitstable’s extensive artistic community, and has developed an international reputation for showcasing the UK’s most exciting up-and-coming artists, and engaging audiences in a rich programme.
Their Biennale deeply engages with Whitstable by working with artists over time to slowly understand and utilise the rich texture of the seaside town. Audiences are brought together to experience durational works that might last for 2 minutes or 24 hours, to be experienced by just one person at a time, or seen by crowds of hundreds. The festival is woven into the town, into the odd halls and huts, the shops and bars, the alleyways and oyster beds, the working harbour and the steep shingle shoreline. Virtually all of our works are new commissions.
Please see the Programme section of the website for full details of this year’s festival. Our developing Archive section showcases previous works.
Alongside the main programme, Whitstable Biennale organises education projects, and the popular fringe has evolved into one of the UK’s most important open-platform for early career artists.
For the full 2014 Programme click HERE
Image: Louisa Martin, The Lighthouse: Scenes 1 and 2, 2014. Courtesy the artist and Whitstable Biennale.
Eva Rothschild, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin
23 May – 21 September 2014
The Irish artist Eva Rothschild (born in Dublin 1971, lives and works in London) is one of the most important protagonists of a generation of artists dealing with the expanded concept of sculpture. This exhibition at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane is the first solo museum presentation of her work in Ireland.
In Eva Rothschild’s work, the formal values of modernism and its ideas of utopia are inverted. The history of 20th century abstract art is deconstructed through her installations and through the materialism of her objects they become inquiries into how we as humans develop structures (both physical and metaphoric) to support our values. Rothschild manages to deliver sensation, memory, perception, personal idiosyncrasies and diverse cultural traditions, through the transformation of everyday materials into alien artefacts.
Click HERE for more information
Image: Eva Rothschild, Black Atom, 2013, steel, concrete, paint, 98 x 61 x 68cm. © Eva Rothschild. Courtesy Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich.
