LONDON EXHIBITONS
MIRRORCITY, Hayward Gallery
mirrorcity.southbankcentre.co.uk
14 October 2014 – 4 January 2015
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX
London is one of the world’s centres for contemporary art. MIRRORCITY shows recent work and new commissions by key emerging and established artists working in the capital today, who seek to address the challenges, conditions and consequences of living in a digital age.
JG Ballard believed that reality had already exceeded the visions conjured by science fiction by the end of the 20th century. Drawing on the digital era we now live in, the artists in MIRRORCITY respond to and address this new perception of the world.
Artists have always created alternative realities but recently they have been exploring where the digital and the physical space crossover and fold into each other.
The exhibition considers questions specific to our time such as: ‘How can we navigate the space between the digital and the physical?’ and ‘What is the effect of advanced technologies on our lives?’
The engagement, innovation and complexity of the works selected for MIRRORCITY also directly or indirectly reflect the multi-faceted character of London itself.
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Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Preparatory collage for Concrete Gown for Immaterial Flows, 2014 © Pil and Galia Kollectiv
KP Brehmer, Real Capital–Production, Raven Row
25 September – 30 November 2014
Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London E1 7LS
KP Brehmer (1938–97) found new ways to visualise global capitalism which are of increasing relevance today. In collaboration with his Estate, this exhibition presents drawings, prints, paintings, films, objects and publications, many of which have never been exhibited before. This is the first solo exhibition of Brehmer’s work in the UK.
The earliest works in this exhibition are associated with Capitalist Realism, often conflated with Pop Art, which artists including Brehmer, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter developed through René Block’s gallery in Berlin between 1964 and 1971.
From West Berlin, Brehmer confronted the visual regimes of the Cold War, interpreting the city’s double life of socialism and capitalism. Using common information systems as templates – figures and charts from educational books and magazines, maps of racism and fascism and graphics from sociological studies – he linked data-management to the operations of capitalism, and anticipated much of the effects of its globalisation familiar today. In sympathy with (though not a member of) the Deutsche Kommunistische Partei when it was banned in West Germany, he authored his work using the initials of his first names, Klaus Peter.
Brehmer sought ways to mass distribute his work, using his early training in graphics and printmaking to address the commodification of art. He also co-founded the co-operative gallery Vorsetzen in Hamburg, where he taught at the Art Academy until his death in 1997.
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Richard Hards, One eye is enough, Beaconsfield
15 October – 6 December 2014
Beaconsfield, 22 Newport Street, Vauxhall, London SE11 6AY
Richard Hards recently graduated from the Royal College of Art in Sculpture (MA) and has since been invited to make an intervention in Beaconsfield’s Upper Space Gallery.
Hards’ previous works are characterised by their direct and often combative response to found site or subject. Architectural intervention or excavation has more recently been augmented by a number of video works.
Can’t Act, 2014 is an ambitious video work featuring the Austrian actor Arno Frisch who played one of the psychopathic characters in Michael Haneke’s 1997 film Funny Games. Based in Berlin, Frisch was sought out by Hards, who then developed a directorial relationship with the actor, leading to the artist’s second film What kind of tone is that?, 2014.
As an undergraduate Hards engaged in an exercise of institutional critique in response to a real political situation, paradoxically upsetting the status quo whilst fulfilling his promise as a critically engaged young artist. Afterword, 2005, published in the industry journal Art Monthly, used advertising space paid for by a cohort of anonymous lecturers, technicians and students at Goldsmiths College and became a public indictment of a widespread crisis in art education where erudition is sidelined by the demands of capital.
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Richard Hards, One eye is enough, Beaconsfield 2014
Beyond Zero, Calvert 22 Gallery
8 October – 30 November 2014
22 Calvert Avenue, London E2 7JP
Two revolutionary events took place in 20th century Russia that changed the way we look at the world: the emergence of non-objective art and the founding of the Soviet Union’s space programme. Beyond Zero is a homage to these historic moments and explores how contemporary artists continue to challenge conventional notions of time and space.
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Pavel Klushantsev, The Moon, 1965, detail. Courtesy of Gosfilmofond, St Petersberg
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Anne Collier, Studio Voltaire
12 October – 14 December 2014
Studio Voltaire, 1a Nelson’s Row, London SW4 7JR
Taking place during the gallery’s twentieth anniversary year, Studio Voltaire presents concurrent exhibitions by Turner prize nominated Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and US-based Anne Collier. Both exhibitions will be the artist’s first solo presentations to take place in a public gallery in London.
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd: Hermitos Children 2
Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s new work Hermitos Children 2 is the artist’s largest film commission to date. Chetwynd has become well known for her carnivalesque live performances, which feature homemade costumes and a varying ensemble of friends and family. These performances share elements of the bawdy anarchy of sixteenth-century wandering troupes, foregrounding key moments from art history and cultural production.
Hermitos Children is an ongoing project that takes the form of an experimental television crime drama. Each episode follows female detective Joan Shipman as she uncovers and solves sex-crimes. The film combines staged cinematic sequences with footage of live performances. Rather than documenting events chronologically, Chetwynd coheres both scripted and live elements into a single overarching narrative. Filming for Hermitos Children 2 has taken place in London, Nottingham, Gothenburg, Gozo, Glasgow and Australia. Hermitos Children 2 is presented in the gallery within a large-scale installation, incorporating locations and props from filming.
Anne Collier: Women with Cameras
Women With Cameras is a new commission by US-based artist, Anne Collier. Collier has exhibited internationally, and is subject to a major survey exhibition currently touring across North America including CCS Bard, MCA Chicago, Aspen Art Museum and The Gallery of Ontario, Toronto during 2014 – 2015. Solo exhibitions include: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, US (2014); High Line Art billboard commission, New York, US (2012); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2011) and Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, DE (2008). The artist is represented by Corvi-Mora, London; Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Marc Foxx, Los Angeles and The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.
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Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Hermitos Children 2, production still on location in Gozo, 2014, detail. Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Credit: Luke Caulfield
REGIONAL EXHIBITIONS
Fiona Banner, Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield
20 September 2014 – 4 January 2015
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4LG
Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) presents Wp Wp Wp, an exhibition by UK artist Fiona Banner featuring ambitious new project, Chinook, and related work. The onomatopoeic title of the exhibition mimics the sound of helicopter blades in action, as commonly used in movie storyboards and comics.
Highlighting the absence of a helicopter’s body, Chinook is formed from two sets of helicopter blades – suspended from the ceiling of YSP’s Longside Gallery – rotating in opposition to one another at various speeds. Carefully choreographed to overlap, the blades give the sensation that they might collide, an effect that is both mesmerising and unnerving.
Related works also reveal Banner’s consideration of film and text, including site-specific work, Ha-ha, 2014, which spans the huge windows of the gallery giving an unreal sense of the landscape beyond; Tête à Tête, 2014, a film in which two mechanically operated windsocks become the main protagonists in a bonnet drama, set in the grounds around Longside Gallery; and Mirror, Banner’s 2007 film in which actress Samantha Morton reads, for the first time, the artist’s nude portrait of her, rendered in word not image.
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Fiona Banner, Wp Wp Wp (detail), 2014. Indian ink on wall. Dimensions variable © the artist and Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Matt Stokes, In Absence of the Smoky God, Site Gallery, Sheffield
27 September – 8 November 2014
Site Gallery, 1 Brown Street, Sheffield S1 2BS
In Absence of the Smoky God by Matt Stokes is a major new commission inspired by hidden Sheffield locations, sci-fi literature and Barry Hines’ 1984 BBC TV production Threads, which portrayed a fictional cold-war nuclear attack on Britain. 30 years after its original broadcast, the artist envisions the impact of such an event on the human body, and its social and cultural consequences.
Working in collaboration with composer Ben Gaunt and a cast of 10 Sheffield-based vocalists, Matt has constructed a vision of a transformed post-apocalyptic society in which archaic customs and systems prevail. In the two-screen video and audio installation, Matt explores the possibilities of communication. He creates a new two-tier language spoken by two different societies; one living in a lamp-lit underworld, the other above ground. Heard together the two different groups produce conflicting vocal sounds, which as the work progresses, move closer to each other, from disharmony to harmony, eventually attempting to achieve union.
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Matt Stokes, In Absence of the Smoky God, 2014. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Pixelwitch Pictures
Raphael Hefti, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham
www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
17 October 2014 – 04 January 2015
Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB
Raphael Hefti has a novel approach to experimentation with materials. He is fascinated with processes and often invents his own. His works blur boundaries between natural and industrial, abstract and representational. He frequently collaborates with technicians, scientists, and even dogs, to reveal unexpected beauty in ordinary materials.
For his solo exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary he visited industries in the East Midlands. His visit to the Rolls Royce factory in Derby focused on the composition and treatment of metals in different states. New works made for his exhibition here reflect this coming together of high tech and heavy metal. As in his other work, Hefti refers to processes that otherwise remain invisible, but which form the crucial substructure of contemporary culture.
Hefti’s iridescent glass pane sculptures, each unique, are made from special anti-reflective glass, commonly used to protect artworks and intended to be invisible. By multiplying the anti-reflective coating, Hefti renders the invisible visible. After a lengthy research phase in the workshop, he has intervened in the process of manufacture to create what is “his” product.
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Raphael Hefti, from the series Lycopodium 2013. Courtesy the artist, Ancient&Modern and RaebervonStenglin
Susan Philipsz. Broken Ensemble: War Damaged Musical Instruments (brass section), Eastside Projects, Birmingham
20 September – 6 December 2014
Eastside Projects, 86 Heath Mill Lane, Birmingham, West Midlands B9 4AR
Eastside Projects presents a new installation by Susan Philipsz — internationally acclaimed artist, 2010 Turner Prize winner and 2014 OBE recipient. The Berlin based artist has created an acoustic environment as a growing musical ensemble of battered, bullet holed and broken instruments unheard for a century or more.
Philipsz has made new recordings of the sounds produced from five brass musical instruments damaged in Germany during various conflicts, and since conserved in museum collections. Each of these instruments becomes a performer or member of the ‘“Broken Ensemble”, formed for the first time in Eastside Projects.
Pursuing the sculptural qualities of objects, space and sound, the artist plans to grow the “Broken Ensemble” over time with new recordings being made of further musical instruments used in war over the coming years. During the exhibition, in October, a sixth recording will be made of the “Balaklava Bugle” used to sound the Charge of the light Brigade in the Crimean War in 1854. This sixth “voice” will then be added into the installation as a new performer, or member, shifting the musical score and character of Philipsz’s “Broken Ensemble”.
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Susan Philipsz from the exhibition Broken Ensemble: War Damaged Musical Instruments (brass section), Eastside Projects 2014. Courtesy the artist and Eastside Projects
