“The ground slips between us” (Workshop by Shilpa Gupta in collaboration with Renata Cervetto, March 11-16, 2024. Fundación Botín) is a workshop that encourages the sharing of practices and experiences in art and education based on the work of the artist Shilpa Gupta. The workshop invites artists, curators, cultural agents and mediators working within institutions or community projects to rethink their current processes and challenges based on the themes and methodologies that traverse the artist’s work. Topics such as strategies of creative resilience in the face of censorship and repression; the ideological and geopolitical barriers that cross our bodies and systems of thought-action-mobility; and imagination and radical listening as tools of resistance and community building will be exercised by contemplating the working contexts of the people participating in the workshop.
If you’ve traveled via the Long Island Rail Road service in Manhattan and traversed the MTA’s brand new Grand Central Madison station, you may have noticed a slice of nature indoors in a monumental, wall-spanning mosaic of a woodland deer. Acclaimed artist Kiki Smith completed the piece in 2022, and it’s one of the most recent works in which she honors the natural world and humanity’s role within it. [..] Smith’s works subtly imply a tension between the knowable and unknowable and the potency of consciousness. [...] Celestial bodies and astronomical phenomena often appear in the form of comets or a swirling night sky dotted with geometric stars, reflecting a timeless fascination with the infinity of the universe and our timeless drive to understand it.
Opening a few days before Ono’s 91st birthday, “Music of the Mind” (Tate Modern, London, 15 February-1 September 2024) will range back to Ono’s early career in the 1960s—well before she entered Lennon’s orbit—exploring a period of participatory work that included the infamous Cut Piece, in which Ono’s clothes were snipped off by her audience, and Bag Piece, in which she performed inside a large black bag. The Tate show’s co-curator Juliet Bingham stresses that a key aim is to highlight that Ono was, artistically speaking, fully formed by the time she crossed paths with The Beatles.
“I am intrigued by how we look, register, remember and what we see—in the gaps and fractures between the image, eye and the invisible nerve endings which retain and transform it over time. I am interested in visibility and invisibility; notions of reality, truth and definitions; in sound, silence and silencing and in the possibilities of listening.” In her own words this is indeed the inspiration for Shilpa Gupta. As an Indian artist of international repute, she has been a significant part of the Art movement in the UAE, an enabler in the confluence of South Asian & Middle Eastern Art. She will keep inspiring the younger generations in the times to come.
The strength and pleasure of Gerhard Richter’s work lies in its boundlessness, its variety, its sneakiness, its reliance on inner compulsion and intelligence. Contradictory, antithetical, incompatible: Richter swerves from one way of working to another, in an exhibition that fills two floors of David Zwirner in London (until 28 March). This could almost be a group show rather than work made by a single artist. Richter won’t be pinned down, and he still wants to surprise himself, even as he approaches his 92nd birthday next month.
Series two of the Frieze Master Podcasts brings you eight conversations between leading artists, writers, museum directors and curators that reflect the ethos of the Frieze Masters fair: looking at the past with a contemporary gaze. Including Shirin Neshat.
German gallerist Mike Karstens is exhibiting works by William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, and Rosemarie Trockel in a portfolio published by Art-19 to benefit Amnesty International, with the artists are contributing 100% of their fees to the cause. The name Art-19 comes from an abbreviation of Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” Kiki Smith and Emilia Kabakov are presenting a talk on Sunday, February 18, titled, “In Conversation: Art in the Light of Conscience; Art-19 to Benefit Amnesty International.”
Kiki Smith wurde 70 Jahre alt. Im Kunstbetrieb etablierte sie sich mit Druckgrafik, z.B. mit Siebdrucken auf Kleidungsstücken, aber vor allem auch als Bildhauerin. Als Hauptthema zieht sich die Anatomie des menschlichen Körpers durch die verschiedenen Schaffensphasen, oft auch mit politischer Konnotation.
The show "Music of the Mind" (15 February 2024 - 01 September 2024, Tate Modern), explores some of Yoko Ono’s most talked about artworks and performances, from Cut Piece (1964), where people were invited to cut off her clothing, to her banned Film No.4 (Bottoms) (1966-67), which she created as a ‘petition for peace’. Alongside her early performances, works on paper, objects, and music, audiences will discover a selection of her activist projects such as PEACE is POWER and Wish Tree, where visitors can contribute personal wishes for peace.
Edited by the artist Shilpa Gupta and the writer Salil Tripathi, the anthology borrows its haunting title from a medieval Azeribaijani poet, Imadeddin Nesimi, invoking the many dimensions of the incarcerated imagination. At the same time, the book’s stark subtitle – “Encounters with Prison” – suggests the brutality of imprisonment. Traversing diverse mediums and genres – poetry, illustrations, sculptures, installation photographs, self-accounts, interviews, reports – the book offers a multi-sensory window into prison experience. It includes short profiles and the works of over 60 poets and writers who cover many aspects of imprisonment, as well as of exile.
The exhibition “Gerhard Richter” (25th January–23rd March 2024, David Zwirner), also featured are important recent works that illustrate Richter’s longstanding interest in the idea of reflection—in both the material and the phenomenological sense of the word. His large-scale paintings and room-sized installations, which are notable for their use of glass and mirrored surfaces, serve as sites for the perpetual creation and contemplation of a new kind of abstract image.
In spring 2024, William Kentridge and The Centre for the Less Good Idea will host a collaborative residency with Brown Arts Institute (BAI), launching the second project of its IGNITE Series, which was inaugurated in fall 2023 with Carrie Mae Weems’ campus-wide activation, Varying Shades of Brown. The semester-long residency will involve three activations that unfold across campus from February 9 to June 16, 2024. The collaborative residency, hosted by Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace, co-founder of The Centre, will feature performances of a dramatic work, Houseboy; arts education workshops; and post-show conversations in the new Lindemann Performing Arts Center, as well as a video installation in Cohen Gallery, housed in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts. Each aspect of the project invites the Brown and Rhode Island communities to join in surfacing, rupturing, and re-reading complex narrative histories and the visual archive for the contemporary moment.
