The Lemurenheim group exhibition at Vienna’s GalerieMeyerKainer is opening January 16 and running to February 24.
The show is an oscillation between ‘spirit’ and ‘esprit’ and includes work by Ei Arakawa, Kerstin Brätsch, Sigmar Polke, Franz West, KAYA and Katja Novitskova.
Tapping into the transformational, uncanny and irrational, the exhibition is “brought to life by the ambivalent, the enigmatic, the dubious” and its title is taken from a previous collaboration organised by GalerieMeyerKainer between Rudolf Stingel and Franz West in 2002 at Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.
The I pledge Allegiance group show is on at New York’s On Stellar Rays, opening February 28 and running to April 3.
Curated by Elisa R. Linn and Lennart Wolff’s km temporaer curatorial project, the exhibition takes it title from poet, art critic and poet Rene Ricard‘s 1981 essay on the East Village gallery scene ‘The Pledge of Allegiance’. The press release features an excerpt that refers to a certain ‘Artist Zero’ in conversation over ‘Marchesa de X’, a writer at “the nexus of creative forces” yet largely unrecognised.
The parallels between this text and the art world of the past still resonates with the global political climate of the present, as the 30-year-old essay references individualism, a “conspiracy of excellence” and war:
“We are living in a time of war: war remembered, war actual, and war anticipated. The sense of the moment has led us to the encampment where deserters from all armies are burning the small fires of discourse.”
Time and how it manifests in art is a key theme of a 14-page, print-only written exchange between curatorial project km temporaer‘s Elisa R. Linn and Lenart Wolff and curator Hicham Khalidi. It forms the basis of the One step ahead moving backward group exhibition held at Berlin’s LEAP, running October 31 to November 22 and features solo and collaborative works from 12 contributors, including Andreas Greiner, Armin Keplinger, Wolfgang Laib and Paolo Thorsen-Nagel among others. The outcome is an eclectic exhibition of art and artist ideas made up of disparate, at times conflicting elements that somehow coagulate under the notions of contemporary artwork as gesture, curation as process and communication as value.
Outlines of human figures and drawings of organs cover thin fabric, half stretched and hanging from the ceiling in Mariechen Danz‘s ‘Tower Vessel Tooth, Book B / Book C’ (2013). It explores information transmission through a combination of Mesoamerican art and contemporary technical language in drawing and print, while another sculpture, ‘Modular Glyphic System’ (2013) – made in collaboration with Genghis Khan Fabrication Co. – resembles a PC computer case of thin metal that can be taken apart and recombined into other forms.
One step ahead moving backwards (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.
In the background the grafitti inspired wall painting overlaid with a video projection is Kerstin Brätsh and Debo Eilers‘ collaborative project KAYA + n.o.madski. It’s an installation using a certain ‘street’ vernacular more visible in the public rather than private space, yet dominates a LEAP gallery wall in ‘untitled – rewind’ (2014). Meanwhile, a zoom-out in scale presents Adriana Ramić‘s text-based work ‘The Return Trip is Never the Same (After Trajets de Fourmis et Retours au Nid, M. Victor Cornetz, 1910)’ (2014) across three touch screens. Recently shown as part of the Never cargo terminal… exhibition at LA’s Smart Objects in July and based on French civil engineer Victor Cornetz’s studies of insect movements, the work follows an ant pathway across multilingual translations and crowd-sourced dictionaries using an Android Swype. Navigating through their pages, the audience follows their nonsensical logic via colourful abstract lines that are the sequential index of keyboard gestures.
Language and its interpretations and barriers is again explored via Brian Jungen and Duane Linklater‘s ‘Modest Livelihood’ (2012), as the two artists of British Colombian ethnolinguistic heritage screen a hunting trip with Jungen’s uncle within the bounds of a First Nation territory since restricted to within “moderate livelihood”. Tina Kohlmann‘s own reinterpretations of ethnological artefacts are realised in her brightly coloured textile installation named after the inuit sea mammal specialty ‘Mattak’ (2014), while Fabio Marco Pirovino‘s ‘Drawing (Scribble) VIII’ (2014) presents abstract drawings using its eponymous digital ‘Scribble Pen’ that allows its user to scan colour in the ‘real’ world and transfer it to a tablet or mobile device and thus a virtual one.
One step ahead moving backwards (2014) installation view. Photo by Ivo Gretener. Courtesy LEAP, Berlin.
Documenting the performance of holding a bubble-level tool straight while jumping out of a plane to the tune of ‘Theremin Queen’ Dorit Chrysler‘s cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ is ‘Untitled (Leveling a spirit level in free fall feat. Dorit Chrysler’s BBGV dub)‘ (2009). It’s a video work by João Onofre examining the relationship between physical performance and cinematography, screened from a TV and propped in a corner, while Luca Pozzi‘s curved ‘Wall String #8’ (2013) crosses the art and science divide most succinctly, where pieces of diamond plate aluminium is curved into organic shapes that are poetically ended by balls that stretch out and almost touch each other. All the while Tiril Hasselknippe’s series of five flat sculptures are spread out in ’29 Palms’. Working with nature, the forms are made of thin synthetic material and earth becoming hybrid islands that dot the suspended non-space of a neutral-grey gallery floor. **
