The Shilpa Gupta's minimalist interventions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, grapple with absence, erasure and exile. In his treatise on literature’s relationship to loss and the limits of representation, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Maurice Blanchot suggests that ‘[w]hoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet’. For the French theorist, writing is inextricably linked to absence, erasure and exile, shaped by the spectre of what cannot be said. This negative space left behind by writing – and, indeed, by art – finds poignant expression in Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s solo presentation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, ‘Some suns fell off’. Through a series of minimalist interventions, Gupta articulates the keenly felt absences of voices exiled from public life, while probing incorporeal structures that shape systems of control, such as the nation-state.
Read MoreNEWS
"Multidisciplinary artist Kiki Smith visited the Clark Institute of Art last Saturday to discuss her evolving body of work — which spans sculpture, etching, printmaking, photography, drawing, and, most recently, textiles. Her art wrestles with themes of sex, reproduction, mortality, and nature. Her large-scale tapestry, Seven Seas, was the most recent addition to Wall Power!, a special exhibition on show at the Clark until March 9. The exhibition showcases a collection of contemporary French tapestries on loan from the Mobilier national of France."
Read MoreThe William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company’s masterpiece, Faustus in Africa comes to The Baxter, 30 years after its phenomenal success. Thirty years after its premiere and following on from its resounding success, William Kentridge and Handspring Puppet Company re-unite to present Faustus in Africa! at The Baxter from 26 February to 22 March 2025.
Read MoreKunsthalle Wien presents a major new exhibition examining the pioneering role of women in digital art. Organised in collaboration with Mudam Luxembourg–Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 (February 28–May 25, 2025), brings together over one hundred works by fifty artists including Rosemarie Trockel, with painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts.
Read Moreillycaffè, the global coffee brand renowned for its sustainable quality and its unique connection to the world of contemporary art, continues its collaboration with Frieze Los Angeles as the official global coffee partner. At this sixth edition of the international contemporary art fair illycaffè presents for the first time to the American market its last illy Art Collection which showcases the stories of four famous artists. These artists are Simone Fattal from Syria, Shirin Neshat from Iran, Monica Bonvicini from Italy, and Binta Diaw, a Milanese artist of Senegalese origin. Each artist has used the illy cup as a canvas to reflect on pressing cultural, environmental, and social issues, sharing their experiences as women from diverse geographical and social backgrounds.
Read MoreThe exhibition is featuring works from across Ono’s groundbreaking career. The show will be presented on the occasion of her touring retrospective exhibition YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND, on display at Berlin’s Gropius Bau from 11 April to 31 August 2025. At the same time, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) will be presenting the work TOUCH by Yoko Ono in their billboard series. The exhibition invites viewers to move beyond passive observation and engage in active participation – both physically and mentally. Often beginning on an individual level, these actions evolve into broader collective efforts, demonstrating the transformative power of communal actions in working toward peace and imagining a different world. The works invite collective actions of repair, healing, cleaning, mending, wishing, imagining, and dreaming.
Read MoreOn Wednesday February 12, 2025, William Kentridge was officially installed as a foreign associate member of the Académie des beaux-arts by fellow member Erik Desmazières, member of the engraving and drawing section, under the Dome of the Palais de l'Institut de France. He was elected on Wednesday, September 15, 2021, to the seat previously occupied by Greek goldsmith and jeweler Ilias Lalaounis (1920-2013). At the end of the ceremony, which concluded with "La Couleur Oui", a film created by William Kentridge for his installation, Catherine Meurisse presented him with his academician's sword.
Read MoreIstanbul Modern is hosting a solo exhibition by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota as part of the 100th anniversary celebrations of diplomatic relations between Japan and Turkey. Undoubtedly, the most striking feature of the exhibition is the large-scale installation the artist created specifically for Istanbul Modern. Curated by Öykü Özsoy Sağnak and Yazın Öztürk, the exhibition focuses on themes such as memory, existence, migration, journeys, and the human experience—subjects Shiota frequently explores through various mediums, including performance, video, installation, and painting.
Read MoreOrganized by six groupings — Infinite Possibilities, Systems of Value, Becoming a Commodity, The Private and The Public Body, The Notion of the Facade, and In Front of the Camera/Behind the Scenes — the exhibition is curated by Manetti Shrem Museum Associate Curator and Exhibition Department Head Susie Kantor. Spanning 45 years, this exhibition (including works of Shirin Neshat and Rosemarie Trockel) points to the long and ongoing conversation around these topics. “We are excited that Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has chosen our university museum as the venue for the U.S. premiere of her collection,” said Founding Director Rachel Teagle. “It’s an extraordinary opportunity to showcase diverse, groundbreaking work and build upon the museum’s track record of featuring women artists at significant moments in their careers.”
Read MoreThis summer, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston ( ICA) opens the 2025 Watershed season with "Chiharu Shiota: Home Less Home", on view May 22 through Sept.1, 2025. The exhibition features two large-scale installations by the Berlin-based, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (born 1972 in Osaka, Japan), including the debut of a new commission made for the ICA Watershed. Shiota foregrounds universal stories of migration, home, connection, memory, and survival. Her signature approach combines intricate, immense, and web-like installations built of thread and rope with quotidian objects—such as shoes, suitcases, beds, chairs, dresses, and keys—that serve as symbols for human presence and memory.
Read MoreThere are everyday chamber operas, and then there are the works conceived and directed by South African artist William Kentridge. Kentridge’s "The Great Yes, The Great No", which is being presented Feb. 5–8 at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills and March 14–16 at Cal Performances in Berkeley, is an opera that is also part play, with a Greek chorus thrown in for good measure. Based on actual events, the work involves a who’s who of mid-20th-century thinkers, including French surrealist André Breton, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, depicting their historic escape from Vichy France on a cargo ship sailing from Marseille to Martinique.
Read MoreIshara Art Foundation opens 2025 with Lines of Flight, Shilpa Gupta's first solo exhibition in West Asia (from 18 January to 31 May 2025). Featuring a diverse selection of artworks from 2006 to the present that include a new sound installation, site-specific interventions, sculptures, drawings, prints and videos, the exhibition foregrounds Gupta's longstanding critical engagement with narratives of mobility, control and acts of resilience. Over the last two and a half decades, Shilpa Gupta's interdisciplinary art practice has challenged how individual and collective identities are perceived, governed and orchestrated by state and societal forces. Her work questions how people, places, everyday objects and languages get recast through nationality, gender and economic relations. By focusing on moments of unrest, Gupta's work encourages viewers to participate in imagining a new poetics of resistance.
Read More