Gallery News
Kapwani Kiwanga named winner of Canada’s largest annual art award
Kapwani Kiwanga is the winner of the 2018 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious prize given annually to artists aged 40 or younger. Kiwanga’s work often deals with what she calls ‘multiplicities’, exploring subjects including independent African nationhood, gift-giving as a diplomatic activity and astronomy. Kiwanga was praised by the award jury for the ‘urgency of her research and the emotive, formal qualities of the artworks that result’ – with her practice being described as ’necessary at this time’. An exhibition of work by Kiwanga and the other shortlisted finalists is currently on view at the National Gallery of Canada (until 10 February).
Sue Williamson receives Ellen Kuzwayo Award
Sue Williamson has received the prestigious Ellen Kuzwayo Award (30 November). The award is given to individuals who make outstanding contributions toward the betterment of society and higher education by the University of Johannesburg. Williamson was recognised for her socially-based practice that uncovers hidden histories, being honoured alongside Judge Edwin Cameron and Sophia Williams-De Bruyn.
Shirin Neshat, Sue Williamson, Tabita Rezaire, and William Kentridge on Kochi-Muziris Biennale
Shirin Neshat, Sue Williamson, Tabita Rezaire and William Kentridge are included on the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India (12 December – 29 March). The biennale will take place across various public spaces and heritage sites in the town of Kochi. For biennial curator Anita Dube, the event aims to counteract ‘the virtual hyper-connectivity that has paradoxically alienated us from the warm solidarities of community’. The exhibition runs from 12 December until 29 March 2019.
Alfredo Jaar and Kendell Geers on group show at MAXXI Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, Rome
Kendell Geers and Alfredo Jaar are included on The Street. Where The World is Made, a group exhibition at Rome’s MAXXI Museum (7 December – 28 April). The exhibition explores, in the words of a press release, ‘the street as a continuously mutating manifesto of contemporary life, an element of connection but also of rupture, the setting for everyday experiences such as street festivals, improvised cinema or street food’. The work on the exhibition includes a variety of mediums including performances and site-specific interventions displayed in a series of galleries that help bolster the curatorial concept by mimicking a street.
Alfredo Jaar at Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam and Faena Public art project in Miami
This Is Not America , a 42-second animation by Alfredo Jaar, lends its name to the inaugural Faena Art Festival taking place during Miami Art Week (3 – 9 December). First displayed on an electronic billboard in New York City’s Times Square in 1987, the animation will reappear on an LED jumbotron mounted on a boat set to travel along the Miami shoreline during the festival. Jaar will also present his second in a trilogy of installations at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam (26 January – 13 May). Titled Shadows, the work is based on a photograph of the same name by Koen Wessing depicting two Nicaraguan women who have just learned of their father’s murder.
Broomberg & Chanarin on group show at C/O Berlin
Broomberg & Chanarin’s War Primer 2, a series of images embedded in a book by Bertolt Brecht, is included on The Last Image: Photography and Death at C/O Berlin (8 December – 3 March). The exhibition presents a selection of over 400 photographic works which grapple with death. The images chosen for this extensive survey include personal, journalistic, scientific and studio photographs taken since the invention of photography in 1839.
Grada Kilomba on group show organised by Participant Inc. and e-flux
Grada Kilomba’s video installation Illusions Vol II., is included on Journeys with the initiated, a cross-continental exhibition organised by e-flux and Participant Inc. The exhibition forms part of the Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology project, an ongoing initiative which seeks to create conversations around the work of the late queer German novelist, poet and ethnographer Hubert Fichte. This exhibition presents work that deal with themes around spirituality, queerness, and black subjectivity in relation to Fichte’s novel The Black City. Kilomba’s work is on view at e-flux in New York (2 December – 13 January).
mounir fatmi on group show at Museum of Arts and Sciences, Daytona Beach, USA
Cut Up/Cut Out, a group show at Daytona Beach’s Museum of Arts and Sciences, features work by Moroccan artist mounir fatmi (8 December – 27 January). The exhibition explores the captivating methods of decorative piercing and cutting, using a wide range of media from paper and plastic to metal and rubber. fatmi will be showing his sculpture Between the Lines, a large circular saw blade embossed with Arabic calligraphy.
An essay by Clive van den Berg published in "Future Anterior" journal
An essay by Clive van den Berg has been published alongside several of his artworks in Future Anterior, a peer-reviewed Columbia University journal. Future Anterior features essays by artists and academics addressing the theme of historic preservation from positions of critical inquiry, rigorous scholarship, and theoretical analysis. Van den Berg’s essay looks at his New Killings series, which addresses the violence inflicted on gay men due to their identity.
William Kentridge’s "The Head & The Load" at Park Avenue Armory and "Wozzeck" at Sydney Opera House
Following its critically-acclaimed debut at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, William Kentridge’s multimedia performance The Head & The Load travels to the Park Avenue Armory in New York (4 – 15 December). The Head & The Load tells the untold story of the almost two million African porters and soldiers who served in the British, French and German armies during the First World War. Kentridge’s celebrated rendition of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck will also have another run at the Sydney Opera House in early 2019 (25 January – 15 February). The opera, which premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2017, is centred on the experiences of a homicidal soldier – a tale brought to life by Kentridge through his characteristic charcoal drawings depicting bleak landscapes, denuded of their trees and scarred by shell craters.
Samson Kambalu translates film script for Chiwetel Ejiofor’s "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind"
Samson Kambalu has translated the film script of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind into Chichewa. Based on the true best-selling book by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer, the film follows the story of a 13-year-old boy who finds a way to save his village in Malawi from famine. The film is Chiwetel Ejiofor’s directorial debut and has been picked up by Netflix for international distribution.
Solo exhibition of work by David Goldblatt at the A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town
Titled Picture Theory, the A4 Arts Foundation presents a solo exhibition of photographic work by David Goldblatt (opens 25 October). As an exhibition, Picture Theory deviates from the convention of presenting Goldblatt’s images within their original essays or bodies of work. Instead the project uncouples images from their chronological and contextual sources, seeking poetic connections that span decades and series.
Kudzanai Chiurai’s "Madness & Civilization" at Kalmar Konstmuseum in Sweden
Following its debut at Goodman Gallery Cape Town earlier this year, Kudzanai Chiurai’s solo exhibition Madness and Civilization travels to the Kalmar Konstmuseum in Sweden (20 October – 3 February). Including works in mixed material on paper, photography, film and installation and taking its name from Michel Foucault’s influential 1964 text, Madness and Civilization presents work typical of Chiurai’s method of returning to and rejecting the post-colonial national state and ‘colonial futures’ – a perception which urges Africans to think, speak and act as their colonisers.
William Kentridge and Shirin Neshat on Portuguese museum show about love
William Kentridge and Shirin Neshat are two of several artists, including Sophie Calle and Marlene Dumas, featured on the Museu Coleção Berardo’s latest group exhibition, titled Quel Amour!? (11 October – 10 February). The exhibition brings together several artists from different generations, countries, and cultures for whom ‘love’ has been a source of inspiration.
Alfredo Jaar on group shows at MET Breuer, Draiflessen Collection, and LagosPhoto
Alfredo Jaar’s Manhattan’s Milosevic is on view at the Met Breuer as part of Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy (until 6 January). The group exhibition explores the ‘hidden operations of power’ within Western democracies by presenting an alternate history of postwar and contemporary art that is also an archaeology of our troubled times. Jaar’s work also appears on across boundaries at the Draiflessen Collection (14 October – 27 January), a group exhibition which pairs various maps from history alongside artworks by contemporary international artists who ‘examine the cartographic depiction of space or the influence of maps on our view of the world.’ In addition, Jaar is featured on the 9th edition of the LagosPhoto Festival (27 October – 15 November). Titled Time Has Gone, this year’s festival explores how the past, present and the future interact within the medium of photography.
Retrospective exhibition for David Goldblatt at MCA Sydney
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia presents a major retrospective for David Goldblatt as part of the Sydney International Art Series (13 October – 3 March). Curated by MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent in close collaboration with Goldblatt, the exhibition presents photographs spanning his six decade-career, as well as early vintage prints and never-before- exhibited material from a personal archive. The photographs encompass the darkness of Apartheid, the history of the country’s mining industry, the lives of the white middle class, forced segregation of black and Asian communities into townships under the Group Areas Act, as well as the stories of ex-offenders and their crimes, providing a ‘powerful reflection and insight into South Africa’s turbulent history.’
Shirin Neshat on museum group exhibition in Italy
Work by Shirin Neshat is included on the latest group exhibition, War is over? Arte e conflitti tra mito e contemporaneità, at the Museo d’Arte della città di Ravenna in Italy (6 October – 13 January). Curated by Angela Tecce and Maurizio Tarantino, the exhibition is organised and connected to the centenary of the conclusion of the First World War. Through showcasing works by historical Masters and contemporary artists alike, War is over? proposes a path that, through a series of artworks spanning two centuries, reflects on conflicts not purely historical but in a wider, artistic and poetic, personal and collective, aesthetic and ethics.
Work by Candice Breitz on museum show in Finland
Work by Candice Breitz is featured on the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum of Art’s current group exhibition, titled Civil War (5 October – 13 January). The exhibition considers the armed conflicts from the perspectives of a war’s civilians and victims. Although it is timely to look back at the Finnish Civil War and World War I, both fought in 1918, this exhibition also covers present-day conflicts around the world by presenting a selection of works by various international artists who deal with the wars of our own time.
Dallas Contemporary hosts a solo exhibition of Ghada Amer's ceramic works
Titled Ceramics, Knots, Thoughts, Scraps, Dallas Contemporary hosts an exhibition of Ghada Amer’s ceramic artworks (30 September – 17 December). Having recently turned to the medium as a mode of production, and the first show dedicated to Amer’s ceramic sculptures, the works on view reference the legacy of male artists who represent highly gendered practices – including Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and John Chamberlain. While Amer’s embroidered canvases speak to the language of painting, her ceramics serve as sculpture. In the artist’s hands the delicate, pliable nature of the clay is a fitting vehicle through which to evoke the fragility of edifice. The women Amer renders are presented as vessels. The illusion of women as purely aesthetic entities is easily shattered, much like the material they are incised into.
Kendell Geers on group shows at MOCA Toronto and White Box in New York
Kendell Geers’ neon sculpture, BELIEVE, features on the inaugural exhibition of the newly reopened MOCA Toronto (22 September – 6 January). Taking its title from the sculpture, the exhibition showcases 15 international artists whose work examine the beliefs & systems that inform our values, behaviour and the fundamental issues of our time. Concurrently at White Box gallery, Geers is on a group exhibition titled White Anxieties, which brings together work that looks at what haunts the conservative American psyche (21 September – 13 October). The exhibition features ‘depictions of an America that is less white, heterosexual, and male, where languages other than English are spoken, and where People of Colour can openly express their cultural traditions without accusations of not being ‘real Americans’.’
Candice Breitz's "TLDR" and "Sweat" on view in Germany
Candice Breitz: Sex Work at the Museum Frieder Burda in Berlin presents the artist’s TLDR and Sweat, video works which address the rampant gender-based violence faced by sex workers (21 September – 5 January). Shot shortly before #MeToo went mainstream in October 2017, the works resonate poignantly within this debate, re-focusing questions that are central to the movement. The exhibition features Breitz’s work in dialogue with pieces by American artist William N. Copley from the collection Frieder Burda. Both artists oppose the discrimination of sex workers, but from two different points of views: Copley’s depictions feature erotic and faceless nudes dominated by the male gaze, while Breitz gives these individuals back their voices.
Kentridge's "Thick Time" travels to the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester
William Kentridge’s touring exhibition Thick Time, travels to the United Kingdom and runs at the Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester (21 September – 3 March). This major touring exhibition focuses on the artist’s large-scale film installations including O Sentimental Machine and The Refusal of Time, an immersive work exploring the technology of time-keeping and string theory, created in dialogue with physicist Peter Galison. A display of new and recent tapestries, works on paper and artist books accompany the film projections, presented within an environment designed by Kentridge’s long-term collaborator Sabine Theunissen.
Candice Breitz on group exhibition in Switzerland
Candice Breitz’s Love Story forms part of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen’s group exhibition, titled The Humans (15 September – 24 March). The exhibition explores how artists formulate their independent views of the world and how they immerse themselves in realities that are inaccessible to traditional media. In addition to the role of our consumption of digital media, the participating artists also shed light on questions about how we deal with people on the margins of society and our attitude toward global migrations.
Solo museum exhibition for William Kentridge in Australia
Highlighting the nexus of art, ideology, history and memory emanating from William Kentridge’s experiences of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the Art Gallery of New South Wales presents a museum show of the artist’s broad and diverse oeuvre (8 September – 3 February). Titled William Kentridge: That Which We Do Not Remember and curated by the artist, the exhibition encourages viewers to trace visual and thematic links between diverse aspects of Kentridge’s practice, from his engagement with opera to his interest in early cinema, from his inimitable animated drawings to sculpture and works on paper.
Hank Willis Thomas on group show at Duke University
Hank Willis Thomas’ work features on the latest group exhibition, People Get Ready: Building a Contemporary Collection, hosted by the Nasher Museum at Duke University in North Carolina (1 September – 6 January). Since opening in 2005, the Nasher Museum has been dedicated to building a groundbreaking collection of contemporary art. The museum’s collecting strategy emphasises works by diverse artists who have been historically underrepresented, or even excluded, by mainstream arts institutions, and maintains a particular focus on artists of African descent. Drawing primarily on the collection built over the last 12 years, People Get Ready includes works dating from 1970 to 2018 that engage issues ranging from cultural identity to social justice and environmentalism.
Kudzanai Chiurai and Yinka Shonibare MBE are included on 21c Museum Hotel’s latest group exhibition in Louisville, Kentucky
Kudzanai Chiurai and Yinka Shonibare MBE feature on 21c Museum Hotel’s new group exhibition, Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation, in Louisville (1 April – 31 March). The exhibition explores the role that costume plays in constructing one’s identity and confronting history. With over 35 participating artists from 22 countries, Dress Up, Speak Up offers a global investigation into such concepts, whilst reconfiguring, reimagining, and reconstituting history in order to examine the legacy and effects of European colonialism.
Tracey Rose on a group show in San Antonio, Texas
Work by Tracey Rose is featured on the Linda Pace Foundation’s group exhibition, Reclaimed, showcasing 25 monochromatic works by some of the most influential contemporary female artists working today (9 March – 26 January). As its title implies, the exhibition addresses the concept of ownership – both literally and figuratively – and the notion of “reclaiming” what belongs to a person and their communities, from their lands and governments to their physical bodies and basic human rights. Drawn from the Foundation’s collection, the exhibition serves as a departure from the institution’s typical spotlight on experimental and new media works, and provides insight into the depth and variedness of its permanent collection.
Sue Williamson work included in the Birmingham Museum of Art’s permanent exhibition of contemporary art
Sue Williamson’s Mementoes of District Six forms part of the latest installment of the Birmingham Museum of Art’s permanent exhibition, Third Space /shifting conversations about contemporary art, the museum’s first large exhibition of contemporary art from its own collection (until 6 January). Mementoes of District Six is an immersive installation that humanises the destruction of an entire area in South Africa during Apartheid. Within the context of the exhibition, the work highlights similarities between post-apartheid conditions and the result of segregation in the American South.
Oltmann, Nhlengethwa and Thomas feature on a group exhibition at 21c Museum Hotels
Work by Walter Oltmann, Sam Nhlengethwa (in collaboration with Marguerite Stephens) and Hank Willis Thomas feature on the 21c Museum Hotel’s group exhibition, SEEING NOW, in Nashville, USA (1 February – 31 December). The exhibition, curated by Alice Gray Stites, aims to explore and reveal the visible and hidden forces shaping what the contemporary world looks like.