Gallery News
Yinka Shonibare CBE and David Goldblatt solo exhibitions open at Norval Foundation
The Norval Foundation in Cape Town is hosting major solo exhibitions by Yinka Shonibare CBE and David Goldblatt (13 February – 26 August). Anchoring Shonibare’s exhibition, titled Trade Winds, will be his African Library, an installation of around 4,900 books covered in Dutch Wax fabric first shown at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg last year. The library will be shown alongside Shonibare’s five part photographic series Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters as well as the sculptures Boy Balancing Knowledge II and Butterfly Kid (Girl) IV. Elsewhere at Norval Goldblatt’s iconic photographic series On the Mines is exhibited as a complete set for the first time. The series documents the communities and landscape associated with the gold mines of Gauteng, South Africa in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The exhibition will be accompanied by texts by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.
El Anatsui's solo exhibition at Haus der Kunst, and work in atrium at Zeitz MOCAA
Haus der Kunst is set to open the largest survey ever mounted for El Anatsui, titled Triumphant Scale (3 March – 28 July) The exhibition, curated by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agaul, will incorporate every medium the artist has worked in over the course of his fifty-year career, including wood and ceramic sculptures, wall reliefs, drawings and several new site-specific sculptures. Tsiatsia, a massive tapestry by Anatsui which once covered the facade at the Royal Academy of Art in London, will hang in the BMW Atrium at Zeitz MOCAA from February until December.
Kapwani Kiwanga on view at the MIT List Art Center in New Haven, USA and London's Whitechapel Gallery
Never-before exhibited sculptures by Kapwani Kiwanga are shown on a solo exhibition at MIT List Visual Arts Center (8 February – 21 April). Kiwanga’s new series of sculptural works draw on colonial-era ‘lantern laws’, which required nonwhite people to carry a lit candle after dark. These works are shown alongside a group of 50 prints, a site-specific installation of her ongoing Shade Cloth series, as well as the US premiere of Jalousie, a sculpture incorporating two-way mirrors and steel that addresses visibility and movement in relation to architecture. In addition Kiwanga is on a group exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery titled Is This Tomorrow? (14 February – 12 May). This exhibition brings together ten groups of artists, architects and other cultural practitioners to explore the potential of collaboration and offer their visions of the future.
Shirin Neshat and Candice Breitz on group exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona
Now Playing: Video 1999–2019 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) presents iconic video art from the past two decades (16 February – 19 May). Officially marking the start of SMoCA’s 20th anniversary celebration, the exhibition prominently features Shirin Neshat’s immersive sound and video installation Turbulent and Candice Breitz’s multi-channel video Love Story. These works will take up the entire space of the museum, helping to illustrate in the words of an exhibition statement, ‘the complexities of contemporary art and life’.
Kudzanai Chiurai and Mikhael Subotzky on group exhibition at Fowler Museum of Art UCLA
Video works by Kudzanai Chiurai and Mikhael Subotzky feature on Inheritance: Recent Video Art From Africa, a three-person group show at Fowler Museum of Art at UCLA (17 February – 28 July). Chiurai’s We Live in Silence and Subotzky’s WYE will be screened alongside a work by a Nigerian artist, who similarly raises questions around inherited political, social, and environmental realities. In bringing together these artists, the exhibition seeks to contrast their different viewpoints, specifically in relation to what the work reveals about our future.
Solo exhibitions for Yinka Shonibare CBE at Davis Museum at Wellesley College and Hereford Cathedral, and curator of exhibition at Royal Albert Memorial Museum
A solo exhibition of work by Yinka Shonibare CBE held by the Davis collection is on show at Wellesley College (7 February – 9 June). Titled Guns Drawn, the exhibition ‘exemplifys [Shonibare’s] theatrical depictions of beauty and violence, and his exploration of the inheritances of colonialism in our contemporary, globalised world’. Another Shonibare solo exhibition, titled Creatures of the Mappa Mundi, is on at the Hereford Cathedral (until 1 June). For this exhibition Shonibare presents a series of textile works that respond to the scenes depicted in the Mappa Mundi, the largest medieval world map still in existence. Criminal Ornamentation, a touring exhibition of nearly 100 works by over 50 artists from the Arts Council Collection curated by Shonibare, is on show at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (until 17 March).
Work by Tabita Rezaire features on various group exhibitions around the globe
Work by Tabita Rezaire is on Still I Rise: Feminisms, Gender, Resistance, Act 2, a group exhibition at De La Warr Pavilion in Sussex, United Kingdom (9 February – 31 December). Featuring over 50 artists, designers, architects and archives, the exhibition considers resistance from a gender perspective. Rezaire is also on Producing Futures – An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (16 February – 12 May). The exhibition surveys in the words of the museum ‘the causes championed by feminists in the post-internet era… to stimulate a more comprehensive discussion and generate ideas for a liveable future of emancipation, gender justice, and social equality’. Refiguring Boundaries, an exhibition at Pioneer Works (22 February – 21 April) similarly features Rezaire and other artists who are considering the intersection of identity, the body and the politics of technology.
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.