Gallery News
Broomberg & Chanarin at Kettle’s Yard at University of Cambridge
Bandage the knife not the wound, a recent body of work by Broomberg & Chanarin, has its British debut at fig-futures, a programme of quick-fire exhibitions held across four weeks at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge (25 – 29 September). For this series, the duo revisited images that held significance to them during the course of their collaborative career, creating over 40 beautiful and ethereal works that give a unique insight into their thought processes and provoke questions around the changing nature of photography and image production in the twenty-first century.
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 on 'Now and Then' exhibition series at Zeitz MOCAA
Work by Kudzanai Chiurai and the seventeenth century Italian painter Guercino are currently exhibited side-by-side at Zeitz MOCAA as part of the ongoing exhibition series, titled Now and Then (until 24 September). The series brings artists from different time periods into dialogue with one another, exploring how the past resonates with the present through contrasting mediums, forms and processes. By creating this contrast, viewers are urged to consider the unseen, overlooked and silenced histories that shadow each of their respective contexts.
Yinka Shonibare, Kudzanai Chiurai and Sam Nhlengethwa on group exhibition in Michigan, USA
The University of Michigan Museum of Art’s exhibition Beyond Borders: Global Africa reflects on the globalised world by considering how Africa and its artists have been at the centre of complex histories of encounter and exchange for centuries (11 August – 25 November). Bringing together works made in Africa, Europe, and the United States from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, the exhibition demonstrates the international scope and reach of art from Africa and its diaspora. Highlights include paintings, photographs, sculpture, and installations by artists including Kudzanai Chiurai, Yinka Shonibare, MBE and Sam Nhlengethwa.
Tabita Rezaire on group show at Kunsthalle Mainz in Germany
Tabita Rezaire has been included on Virtual Insanity (3 August – 18 November), a major international group exhibition held at Kunsthalle Mainz in Germany, which examines the extension of reality and its shadowy underbelly. The artists included on Virtual Insanity address this subject by creating documents, writing reports and narratives, and developing scenarios. What unites the work on the exhibition is the unique approach each artist takes to the technical innovations and lifestyles brought about by the digital revolution.
mounir fatmi on group show in Texas and Japan’s Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale
The Ellen Noel Art Museum in Texas will play host to the travelling group show Cut Up/Cut Out, which includes work by mounir fatmi (19 July – 14 October). The exhibition includes an international roster of artists who incorporate decorative piercing and cutting into their work through various media such as paper, plastic, rubber and in fatmi’s case, metal. Concurrently in Japan, fatmi will be one of fifty artists selected to create site-specific artwork for the 7th Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (29 July – 17 September).
Congratulations to Carla Busuttil on being shortlisted for the John Moores Painting Prize
Carla Busuttil is one of 60 artists to be nominated from 2,700 applicants for the 2018 John Moores Painting Prize – one of the highest accolades awarded to painters in the United Kingdom. As part of being nominated, Busuttil’s work, Trophy of a Dull Man, will be shown at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool (14 July – 18 November) as part of the Liverpool Biennial.
Solo Exhibition for Hank Willis Thomas at the Delaware Art Museum
Hank Willis Thomas’ Black Survival Guide: or How to Live Through a Police Riot is a series of 13 large-scale retroreflective screen prints commissioned by the Delaware Art Museum for a solo exhibition titled after the work (14 July – 30 September). For the series, Thomas collaged material drawn from the Delaware Historical Society with photographs taken of the 1868 National Guard occupation of Wilmington. The reflective surface of the prints make parts of the work only visible through the use of a torch – a conceptual conceit that refers to the searching required to uncover the unknown stories of our collective past.
Haroon Gunn-Salie on Frieze Sculpture 2018
Haroon Gunn-Salie’s sculptural memorial Senzenina has been selected for Frieze Sculpture, which opens in London’s Regent’s Park (5 July – 8 October). The work depicts 17 life-sized, hunched figures, modelled after the striking mine workers slain at Marikana in one of the most lethal uses of force by South African security forces against civilians since the 1960s. The work debuted earlier this year at the New Museum Triennial in New York. In an interview with the Cape Times, Gunn-Salie said that taking Senzenina to London is a crucial step given that the city is home to the head offices of Lonmin, the Marikana platinum mine operators. “This is an opportunity to take the unresolved issues to their doorstep,” said Gunn-Salie, “and it’s the next step of mobilisation, I believe.”
Candice Breitz and Hank Willis Thomas on major exhibition celebrating ‘the king of pop’ in London
Work by Breitz and Thomas feature on the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, Michael Jackson: On the Wall, commemorating the contribution of Michael Jackson to popular and contemporary visual culture (28 June – 21 October). Taking an interesting angle on celebrating the life of Jackson, the exhibition explores how the singer inspired some of the leading names in contemporary art. Curated by Dr Nicholas Cullinan, this major new exhibition spans several generations of artists who each work across a diverse range of media. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to multiple art institutions including The Grand Palais and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, but opens at the National Portrait Gallery to coincide with what would have been Jackson’s 60th birthday.
Hank Willis Thomas on major group show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo
Work by Thomas features on a major group exhibition, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas, hosted by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo – organised in association with Instituto Tomie Ohtake – in Brazil (28 June – 21 October). The exhibition gathers a wide array of artworks and documents related to the ‘flows and re-flows’ between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. In showcasing a wide assortment of media, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas weaves and juxtaposes images from the sixteenth to twenty-first centuries in order to present a variety of topics including portraiture, religious symbolism, activism and academic engagement from these four regions of the globe.
mounir fatmi holds a solo exhibition at CDAN, Spain
For his solo exhibition The Day of Awakening at CDAN in Spain, mounir fatmi explores the relationship between landscape, history and colonialism (28 June – 7 October). The exhibition presents twenty works made by fatmi between 2002 – 2016, which examine the foundations of history and social nature through drawing, photography, sculpture and video.
Tabita Rezaire at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago
Tabita Rezaire’s work features on a new group exhibition, I Was Raised on the Internet, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (23 June – 14 October). Curated by Omar Kholief, the exhibition explores how the internet has changed the way we experience the world, as well as the relationship between art and the internet today. Divided into five different sections, the exhibition documents a specific moment in time – beginning with 1998 and extending to the present – and focuses on the shifts that have occurred since the millennium. The nearly 100 works in the exhibition span photography, painting, sculpture, film, and video, as well as emerging technologies and interactive elements, which include interactive computer works and virtual reality.
Kendell Geers and Sue Williamson on new group exhibition at MAXXI in Rome
Geers’ T. W. Batons (Circle) and Sue Williamson’s It’s a pleasure to meet you…, feature on MAXXI’s latest group exhibition, Road to Justice (22 June – 14 October). Forming part of the museum’s major group show titled African Métropolis, an exhibition showcasing African art from its permanent collection and organised around the concept of the city, Road to Justice serves as an experimental curatorial project which looks at the social and political oppression and exploitation that has occurred and still takes place on the continent today. In presenting works by contemporary artists who attempt to recount these traumas and hardships, the exhibition asks whether or not reconciliation and healing is even possible.
Samson Kambalu and Kiluanji Kia Henda on group exhibition at MAXXI Museum
African Metropolis is a major exhibition at MAXXI Museum that reflects on the ongoing social and cultural transformations impacting art on the African continent (22 June – 4 November). Curated by Simon Njami and Elana Motisi, the exhibition features 34 celebrated and emerging African artists, including Samson Kambalu and Kiluanji Kia Henda. As its title suggests, African Metropolis brings together work focused on urban space as a location for diverse experiences that create dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity.
First French solo exhibition for Ghada Amer since 2000
The Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré – in Tours, France – hosts a solo exhibition for Ghada Amer, titled Dark Continent (2 June – 4 November); Amer’s first solo museum exhibition in France since 2000 and features a selection of paintings, sculptural works and two outdoor garden installations in its presentation. The title of the exhibition, curated by Elodie Stroecken, is a reference to The Question of Lay Analysis by Sigmund Freud, a text in which he wrote that ‘[t]he sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology’.
Alfredo Jaar on group exhibition at the MAK in Vienna
Jaar’s 2004 Red Vienna is mounted on a group exhibition, Post Otto Wagner: From the Postal Savings Bank to Post-Modernism, currently on view at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art – in Vienna (30 May – 30 September). To mark the 100th anniversary of the death of Otto Wagner (1841–1918), the exhibition investigates Wagner’s role as the “Father of Modernism”. In showcasing a variety of works in different mediums, Post Otto Wagner points out not only the context and the interaction between Wagner and other protagonists of early Modernism, but also the influence his epochal work had on his contemporaries, students, and following generations of architects and designers.
Kentridge’s ‘More Sweetly Play the Dance’ on exhibition in Miami
William Kentridge’s eight-channel video installation, titled More Sweetly Play the Dance is on exhibition at the Miami Dade College Museum of Art and Design in Florida (19 May – 30 September). Hosted in Freedom Tower, the exhibition – William Kentridge: More Sweetly Play the Dance – showcases one of the artist’s most immersive and performative video artworks to date. Serving as an update of the danse macabre, Kentridge’s artwork and parade of death includes a brass band in the lead; followed by people carrying possessions or shrouded bodies, priests, patients dragging their IV drips, skeletons, and a live ballerina who wears a military uniform and carries a rifle. In combining elements of medieval allegory with evocations of recent sights such as Syrian refugees and bodies felled by Ebola, Kentridge presents a never-ending carnivalesque reminder of people’s own mortality that is by turns morbid, chilling, comic, and political. However, in the artist’s hands, the triumph of death ultimately becomes a celebration of resilience and life.
Shirin Neshat and Yinka Shonibare MBE at MAXXI in Rome
Neshat’s Illusions and Mirrors video work, from the Dreamers trilogy, and The Invisible Man by Shonibare MBE are featured as part of MAXXI’s group exhibition, Eco e Narciso. Portrait and self-portrait from the MAXXI and Le Gallerie Barberini Corsini Collections (18 May – 28 October). With 37 works by 25 artists from the Gallerie Nazionali Barberini Corsini and MAXXI collections, the exhibition creates a dialogue between the work of old Masters and contemporary artists on the theme of the portrait and the self-portrait.
mounir fatmi on group exhibition in Poland
mounir fatmi participates in a group exhibition, titled Motherland in Art, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Poland (27 April – 30 September). According to the exhibition’s curatorial statement, ‘Contemporary artists have long adopted the model of a global motherland. They communicate in the global language of images and move between living in different countries with ease, in each finding fodder for their imagination… Their works become all the richer for acquiring the added flavour of the new “motherlands”’. In asking the participating artists what the ‘motherland’ might mean to them, the exhibition raises pertinent concerns about the possibilities and troubles associated with the dream of a universal nation state.
William Kentridge and Hank Willis Thomas on group exhibition looking at tapestries
Works by William Kentridge (in collaboration with Margueritte Stephens) and Hank Willis Thomas are included on the Boca Raton Museum of Art’s current group exhibition, titled Nomadic Murals: Contemporary Tapestries (24 April – 21 October). In looking at how artists today have increasingly incorporated tapestry into their respective oeuvres, no matter the medium for which they are known, the exhibition charts the history of the tapestry as a work of art. From Reubens to Picasso, the tapestry has played a significant and important role in the development of fine art. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from from an essay about tapestry by the modernist architect Le Corbusier.
William Kentridge and Gerald Machona on exhibition celebrating the Friends of the Iziko South African National Gallery
To celebrate a fifty-year relationship and partnership with the Friends of the Iziko South African National Gallery, the Iziko Museums of South Africa hosts a group exhibition titled Friends50, which features works by William Kentridge and Gerald Machona, to mark the occasion (15 April – 4 November). The Friends of Iziko SA National Gallery, a not-for-profit membership-based organisation, has supported the institution in its role as South Africa’s premier public national art museum, through full or partial funding of acquisitions, as well as a variety of educational and conservation initiatives since 1968.
Kiluanji Kia Henda on major group exhibition about environmental transformation at MAAT
Work by Kia Henda is included on MAAT’s latest group exhibition, Eco-Visionaries, in Lisbon (11 April – 8 October). Forming part of the institution’s ongoing project, ‘Eco-Visionaries: Art, Architecture and New Media after the Anthropocene’, the exhibition is centred on current practices that propose critical and creative visions on the environment and its transformation. With contributions from over 35 artists and architects, the show in Lisbon is the first of four exhibitions; all of which will appear simultaneously in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden.
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.
Colorful Shonibare “Wind Sculpture” blows its way into Central Park
As a specially commissioned project funded by the Public Art Fund in New York, Yinka Shonibare MBE presents his first outdoor sculpture in New York City . Titled Wind Sculpture (SG) I, the sculpture is on exhibition in Central Park at Doris C. Freedman Plaza (7 March – 14 October). Continuing in a similar vein to the Wind Sculpture series initiated in 2013, this particular sculpture begins a second generation within the body of work, with a much larger and more complex structure and rippled surface, painted in turquoise, red, and orange.
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.