The WINTER SESSIONS: A Season of Events at American Medium begins December 14 and is running to February 3.
New York’s American Medium gallery will host a number of events at their space over the winter season, with three sections: Alignment presents readings, Folds of Existence presents a series of film screenings and a set of experimental performances in Nocturnal Sub.missions.
– Alignment will feature two readers “at different points” on the same night to explore and create “relations, clashes, or comraderies that would not otherwise have occasion,” featuring Bunny Lampert + Cristine Brache, Adriana Ramić + Mónica de la Torre, and Charles Theonia + manuel arturo abreu, among others.
– Folds of Existence is programmed by Lorenzo Gaorna and Mary Ancel, and brings together moving image works that mediate “the precarious boundaries between public space and personal psyche,” featuring over 2o artists including Benji Blessing, Rouzbeh Rashidi, Basim Magdy, Jodie Mack and more.
– Nocturnal Sub.missions will explore “dark dreamlands and lucidity of the everyday” over six nights and features gage of the boone, Azumi Oe and Whitney Vangrin, plus others.
The exhibition is an attempt to represent ‘a democratic, transparent and conscious present’ rather than through a nostalgic lens of an artists’ pre-success being one of naive, less formed or mature practice. Focusing on “the important period of transitioning from being an aspiring artist to fitting into the forces of the art market and its systems,” the show will bring together a number of disciplines and media, as well as an accompanying online interview series with the artists.
The Syllogy group exhibition at Seattle’s Veronica project space, opened July 22 and is running to September 16.
Curated by manuel arturo abreu, the show includes works by themselves, as well as Winslow Laroche, Adriana Ramić, Aria Dean. In a preview feature about the exhibition, AQNB contributor Minh Nguyen notes that the curatorial premise “observes a through line among the practices of the artists that play with genre disorientation, blurred boundaries, and ambiguity as a response to the politics of language,” as abreu explains, “I’m interested less in illegibility as a strategy and more in it as a dance, a sidestep.”
The object-oriented show is light and minimal, including hundreds of Ramić’s index cards that reference species classification and are lined against the wall. The press release includes a text by Gaelynn Lea, with an excerpt reading:
“We pulled the weeds out til the dawn Nearly too tired to carry on Someday we’ll linger in the sun.” **
The press release does not reveal what’s to be expected, but includes a poetic excerpt by Varadi that meanders and flows through fluidity:
“Cravings are desires; desires are wants; wants are, perhaps, actually needs. And we need more than food and water. Landlocked in a drought. Drowning in debt. Losing receipts down by the sea: Loving everything. We must not be so shallow. We must look up from our own reflections. There is dust on our skin, rust on our bones. Look away at once, for once.”
Adriana Ramić and Harm van den Dorpel team up for a joint exhibition titled The vertebral Silence, running at London’s LD50 from December 10 to January 28, 2016.
The show by New York-based Ramić and Berlin-based Dorpel (with whom we have published an interview here) comes without a press release or extensive details about its themes or material nature.
It’s the accompanying web page, however, at van den Dorpel’s delinear.info, that gives a hint as to what to expect: each page brings a seemingly random composition of text (“Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5).”) and image.
Yves Klein Archives are teaming up with New Galerie for a group exhibition called Plowing Solids and running at their Paris space from March 25 to April 8.
The show, curated by Copenhagen artist Rasmus Myrup (who is currently running the space Weekends) features Myrup along with five other artists for the second in a series of exhibition organised jointly by the Yves Klein Archives and the Paris gallery.
The press release, in the form of an abstract paragraph, paints the scene of a plough sailing through soil, preparing it for the sowing of a seed. Alongside Myrup the other participating artists are Erika Ceruzzi, Kah Bee Chow, Adam Cruces, Adriana Ramić, and Amitai Romm.
The Barbara Vanderlinden-curated series takes place the Exhibition Laboratory of the Academy of Fine Arts at Helsinki’s University of the Arts, and invites the US-based artist to join the Prognostics lecture for a discussion of her work.
Most recently, the photography and new media artist made her Instagram feed into an art project titled ‘Excellences and Perfections’. In the lecture, she’ll discuss the future of art and the role of new languages, models and forms in its creation. The series will also bring US artist Adriana Ramić on March 11, UK artist Rachael Allen on March 25, and Saudi artist Sarah Abu Abdallah on April 8.
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.
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.
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. **
The Lucy Chinen-curated Never cargo terminal has recently discovered the trembling hand of state secrets resounding oversold bounce child – running at LA’s Smart Objects from July 12 to August 8 – lifted its oddball title from a Google-translated text generated from the “Android Swype predictive typing of an ant pathway” by participating artist Adriana Ramić.
Ramić’s featured drawings and ebook base themselves around something as obscure as the studies of insect movements by French civil engineer Victor Cornetz. They’re then retraced onto an Android Swype keyboard, which in turn predicts subsequent words based on gestures, crowd-sourced dictionaries, official documents, and Ramić’s personal habitual vocabulary.
Perhaps, because so much of modern language has become overworked to the point of banality in the context of contemporary art (‘post-internet‘ and ‘speculative realism‘ as examples), more and more modern exhibitions are turning to lyrical, vaudeville-like titles like Never cargo terminal… to differentiate themselves. Except this one, it seems, is no longer meant to elucidate or conglomerate, but rather to point to something more ephemeral – the playfulness, the absurdity, the rapture of art.
Joining Ramić in the group exhibition are artists Kareem Lotfy and his Navajo-style woven blanket, as well as researcher-designer Simone C. Niquille, whose video ‘Here Be Faces: FaceValue Part2’ (2014) functions as a short story exploring the notion of camouflage through facial copyright, encrypted identity and plastic surgery. **