The six short films, two photographs and a sculptural installation in Luiz Roque’s solo show at Passerelle – Centre d’art contemporain offer a snapshot of the artist’s 20-year career. Eschewing strict chronological order, the works in ‘República’ speak to the artist’s persistent engagement with both global and local issues through his weaving of gender, race, class politics, ecology, modernism and science fiction into sensuous fragmentary, filmic narratives.
ISTANBUL—Sur ce qui paraît être une chaîne d’information en continu, nous voyons l’arrivée d’un cortège officiel d’automobiles à l’entrée d’un palais présidentiel. La porte de l’une des limousines noires s’ouvre et en émerge un sac-poubelle, de la taille d’un homme. Le sac-poubelle et le Président s’étreignent avant d’entrer dans le palais. Dans la prochaine scène, les deux apparaissent derrière deux pupitres identiques lors d’une conférence de presse où les flashes des caméras les illuminent et les journalistes vocifèrent pour leur poser des questions. Ensuite, nous voyons le sac-poubelle s’adresser aux Nations Unies, avant que la caméra ne passe enfin sur une masse de plastique, de la taille d’un continent, flottant dans l’océan.
L’été voit les possibilités d’hébergements militants se réduire et des familles se retrouvent à la rue. Sans-papier, demandeurs d’asile ou même naturalisés, ils sont les premières victimes des carences de l’état en matière de logement.
Europe is in crisis. Right-wing populisms are on the rise and have been for some time now. As the European Union’s once triumphant liberal hegemony sputters under the weight of its own contradictions, politicians such as Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini have seized on a generalized feeling of precariousness to address a more libidinal obsession with national identity, defined in opposition to the non-European other.
‘I have dreamed geometry / I have dreamed the point, the line, the plane, and the volume / I have dreamed yellow, blue and red.’ These lines from Jorge Luis Borges’s poem ‘Descartes’ (1981) are found on the opening page of the catalogue to ‘Géométries sud, du Mexique à la Terre de feu’ (Southern Geometries, from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego). A fitting epigraph, they announce the vertiginous profusion of coloured shapes in the nearly 250 works by more than 70 artists and creators from the pre-Columbian period to the present.
The first work that the visitor encounters upon entering the exhibition is Opening with rain (2018), which looks, at first glance, like a large slab of stone. It's actually painted papier maché, with traces of colorful paint – blood-orange, fluorescent yellow and deep turquoise – set into recessed spaces that appear as zoomorphic hieroglyphs, describing something between insect and totem. These markings radiate out from a stone egg suspended within a crater in the lower half of the composition.
It is more than a film but not exactly an exhibition. Not quite theatre or performance, although elements of both are omnipresent. It has Mongolian shamans, Russian orthodox priests, rabbis, imams and psychoanalysts, if you need to vent. There are meticulously detailed recreations of Soviet-era apartments inhabited by people who only speak Russian. Eminent performance artist Marina Abramović is supposed to make an appearance. (She is one of the project’s many celebrity ‘ambassadors’ who also include physicists and mathematicians Carlo Rovelli and Dimitri Kaledin, theatre directors Peter Sellars and Romeo Castellucci, artists Carsten Höller and Philippe Parreno and the designer Rei Kawakubo, among others.) And, for one euro, a stony-faced barman will serve you watery coffee or a litre of beer. It is DAU, the multimedia art ‘experience’-cum-independent Soviet state that is being hailed by its creators as the art-event of the century and by the French press as a disastrous flop.
For the fourth iteration of the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘Carte Blanche’ series – where a single artist is invited to transform the entirety of the Paris museum’s cavernous 13,000 m2 exhibition space – Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno has conceived a massive black and white parcours. His installations encourage visitors to reflect on their place within the infinitely complex networks that structure our existence, from the minutiae of dust particles and the vibrations of spiderwebs to the collisions of galaxies in the universe. In so doing, the exhibition, which is titled ‘On Air’, explicitly situates itself within the ecologically conscientious conversations around climate change and humanity’s changing relationship to nature in the age of the Anthropocene.
PARIS—La première chose que constate le visiteur de l’exposition Cooper Jacoby, Susceptibles sont les sculptures de couleurs vives—bleu ciel, orange et jaune fluorescents. Elles se dégagent de la blancheur aveuglante des salles de High Art, galerie située au rez-de-chaussée de l’immeuble où Georges Bizet a commencé à composer l’opéra Carmen. Entouré par des lambris blanchis du XIXe siècle, les œuvres de Cooper Jacoby, jeune artiste américain, font allusion aux espaces du quotidien, intérieurs et extérieurs, privés et publics.
A retrospective of Austrian artist Franz West at the Centre Pompidou in Paris begins where most biographical tales perhaps should – with his mother, Emilie West. Born to a well-to-do Viennese Jewish family, she espoused communist ideals and the artist’s father, Ferdinand Zokan, a Serbian coal merchant. The family lived in a public housing complex, out of which Emilie ran a private dental practice. Her clients included many artists and poets, among them Reinhard Priessnitz, a poet and theorist who would give the name Paßstücke (Adaptives) to West’s most iconic series of sculptures. This early contact with Vienna’s artistic milieu would have a profound impact on the young West’s later career, as would the sounds of whirling drills and the image of his mother creating white and pink moulds of teeth from plaster and resin.
The Centre Pompidou examines the thrilling but lesser-known story of the People’s Art School, founded in 1918 by the painter Marc Chagall in his hometown of Vitebsk.
El arte mexicano de la primera mitad del siglo XX es un territorio ampliamente explorado, pero su historia ha permanecido durante mucho tiempo eclipsada detrás de cuatro figuras: los tres grandes del muralismo –Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros y José Clemente Orozco– y, desde los años ochenta, Frida Kahlo. La exposición que se abrió en octubre en el Grand Palais en París, Mexique 1900-1950: Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco et les avant-gardes, parece confirmar desde el título ese predominio. Aunque por un lado no se puede contar la historia del arte moderno en México sin apelar a algunos nombres demasiado conocidos, habría sido un error reducirlo a ellos. La muestra de París es un intento tímido pero necesario para ampliar esa mirada.
The months following the horrific events in Charlottesville have brought renewed attention to Confederate monuments, reigniting the debate surrounding symbols of racism and white supremacy in the United States. As Americans contend with the possibilities of relocating, destroying, or recontextualizing these objects, some have argued that new monuments should be built, ones that honor the achievements of black historical figures rather than their oppressors.
After a previous Leonardo restoration project at the Louvre resulted in multiple staff resignations, the recent cleanup of “Saint John the Baptist” took place under intense scrutiny.
PARIS — On September 7, 1911, French police arrested poet Guillame Apollinaire for stealing the Mona Lisa. Apollinaire hadn’t actually taken the iconic treasure; however, a few days prior to his arrest, he had attempted to anonymously return a pair of ancient Iberian busts stolen for him and Pablo Picasso by their associate, Géry Piéret. Picasso, who modeled the central figures of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” on the bust Piéret procured for him, was also brought in for questioning. Miraculously, neither the painter nor the poet was charged with receiving stolen goods. If they had been, their status as foreigners in the French Republic would most certainly have resulted in their deportation. Luckily, lack of evidence and pressure from the Parisian art and literary establishments forced the police to release Apollinaire six days later — thereby consigning the episode to one of the wilder footnotes of art history rather than to one of its major chapters.
PARIS — Scattered throughout the cavernous nave of the Grand Palais are mountains of shipping containers. Green, blue, and brown, corporate logos and serial numbers stamped on their sides, they reach up to the resplendent glass ceiling of the Palais, like mounds of oversized Legos.
PARIS — On Saturday afternoon, people trickled across the large plaza in front of the Hôtel de Ville. Pausing to admire city hall’s façade, some snapped pictures while others gathered around a group of break-dancers before shuffling off. Meanwhile, tucked away in a far corner of the plaza, an eclectic group was hanging painted banners that read “Modèles” (“Models”), “Modèles d’art: Poser c’est un métier!” (“Live modeling: it’s a job too!”), and the name of their organization, Collectif des Modèles d’Art de Paris (Art Models Collective of Paris).
DES MOINES, Iowa — On June 27th, the third-worst flood in the history of Des Moines, Iowa’s Raccoon River, necessitated the quick and urgent rescue of “Wading Bridge,” the most recent installation by the New York-based artist Mary Mattingly. This move was the fifth of a total of nine displacements that the approximately 4,500-pound installation has endured to date. When floodwaters weren’t threatening to wash it away, it was (according to the Greater Des Moines Public Art Foundation) either the Army Corps of Engineers suddenly vetoing previously approved design proposals or the budget — insufficient to pay for a professional installation crew and equipment — that almost killed the project.
