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    in Exhibitions

    As Many Museums Weigh Whether to Embrace NFTs, Italian Institutions Are Going All-In With a Wave of Digital Art Shows

    NFTutto bene! It was only a matter of time before NFTs, which upended the art world in 2021, would take over some of Italy’s most prestigious arts venues. 
    In April, when the art world’s literati descended on Venice for the 59th edition of the city’s Art Biennale, an NFT exhibition called “Decentral Art Pavilion” popped up in a Venetian palazzo.
    Displaying works by more than two dozen artists, including Beeple, Robness, Ryan Koopmans, Alex Wexell, XCOPY and others, the event marked a coming-out moment for NFTs in the often cloistered world of contemporary art. 
    Daniel Arsham, Eroding and Reforming Bust of Rome (One Year) (2021),NFT single-channel video with sound. Owned by Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile. Courtesy of the artist.
    Now, another exhibition in Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, “Let’s Get Digital!”, set to open May 18, aims to take visitors on a journey through the vast expanses of digital art, presenting works by Refik Anadol, Anyma, Daniel Arsham, Beeple, Krista Kim and Andrés Reisinger.
    Curated by Arturo Galansino, the Strozzi’s director, alongside Serena Tabacchi, director of the Museum of Contemporary Digital Art (MoCDA), the show has been developed with the Fondazione Hillary Merkus Recordati in Florence.
    According to Galansino, the exhibition is intended “to bring together the avant-garde and tradition, research and popularization,” by looking at the ways in which art and technology are creating new possibilities for experimentation, research and collaboration. 
    Beeple, Infected #34/123 (2020), edition of 123, NFT single-channel video with sound. Owned by Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile. Courtesy of the artist.
    “‘Let’s Get Digital!’ sets out to offer a broad insight into the most recent development in digital art now universally recognized by the contemporary system,” Tabacchi added. “Decentralization, blockchains and NFTs have certified and disseminated the work of countless artists, who could not be considered in that capacity until no more than a few years ago.” 
    Among the highlights of the show is a site-specific installation for the Palazzo’s courtyard developed by Anadol, in which a series of artificial intelligence algorithms are projected onto visitors as they enter the museum’s lush grounds. And the digital artist Beeple, whose career was launched into the stratosphere after selling his EVERYDAYS: The First 5,000 Days for $69.3 million last year, will be presenting a selection of some of his most well-known, post-apocalyptic digital images. 

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    in Exhibitions

    An Off-Ramp, a Trauma Specialist, and Preparedness Pamphlets: How the MFA Boston Reworked Its Philip Guston Retrospective

    As curators at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston were finalizing the checklist for their highly anticipated Philip Guston retrospective, they realized that the one painting the museum owned by the artist was not on it. Apparently, it had condition issues and a conservator needed to examine the canvas. 
    This was last summer, almost a full year after four museums postponed the touring exhibition over fears that Guston’s 1960s- and ‘70s-era depictions of white-hooded figures would be misunderstood in that incendiary moment of racial reckoning.
    The move fomented a fiery controversy. More than 100 artists issued an open letter accusing the museums’ leaders of “white culpability.” Guston’s daughter joined the chorus of dissenters, too: “The danger,” she said at the time, “is not in looking at Philip Guston’s work, but in looking away.”
    Hovering over the MFA’s own Guston work, a flooded landscape scene called The Deluge (1969), the curators saw something that, for them, refocused the debate. Underneath the painting’s oceanic foreground they spotted three subtle Ku Klux Klan hoods, which can be seen only under a certain light, in person.
    “It was a very dramatic moment, as we realized that this painting has been here since 1990 and no one had noticed this,” recalled Ethan Lasser, one of four curators who organized the show. The painting promptly became the “beating heart of the show.” 
    “It really brought home everything we thought Guston was trying to say: that these things are hidden in plain sight,” he went on. “White supremacy is always lurking, always under the water. And here it was, right in our own institution.”
    Philip Guston, The Deluge (1969). © The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    The Deluge is one of 73 paintings in the exhibition, which opened last weekend at the MFA. The selection is accompanied by 27 drawings and a few spare pieces of historical ephemera—a Life magazine spread documenting a Klan rally, for instance, and a series of photos of Nazi internment camps—meant to contextualize Guston’s political messaging. 
    The Boston presentation is smaller than the three that will follow it at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (October 23, 2022-January 15, 2023), the National Gallery (February 26-August 27, 2023), and the Tate Modern (October 3, 2023-February 25, 2024).
    The Boston show, as of now, is the only one to include more than one curator. This wasn’t always the case. Lasser, the chair of the MFA’s Art of the Americas department, was asked to team up with the show’s original organizer, Guston scholar Kate Nesin, in late 2020, after the postponement announcement. He had advocated months earlier for the show to be scrapped altogether, but he agreed to help out on one condition: that Terence Washington, an independent art historian and curator, also join the effort.
    Lasser had seen Washington speak in a Zoom panel this past fall called “Talking Guston,” organized by Helen Molesworth and Laura Raicovich. During the event, Washington withheld his opinion on whether the postponement was right or wrong—”I didn’t really care either way,” he recalled—but instead addressed the tenor of the ensuing debate. 
    Philip Guston in his studio, 1970. Photo: Frank K. Lloyd. Courtesy of the Guston Foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    “I think the conversation around the postponement was framed by and large by people who disagreed with it,” he said. He noted that critics “had been speaking about audience engagement in the galleries as if it was both neutral and abstract… I think some valid questions had been left out.”
    Still one other person joined the curatorial team, and she wasn’t a curator at all: Megan Bernard, the MFA’s director of membership. The reasoning was that, as a group, the curators made a point to emphasize how the show would impact all museum goers, not just the academic ones. 
    As such, they put a number of preemptive measures in place. Visitors to the exhibition are handed an “Emotional Preparedness” pamphlet, penned by a trauma specialist brought in by Bernard. The contextual materials shown alongside Guston’s art are housed in closed vitrines, which are optional for viewers to experience.
    There’s also an “off-ramp” on the exhibition path prior to the gallery where the majority of the 11 artworks with Klan imagery are contained, should viewers wish to opt out at that point. (The show’s original checklist featured 15 Klan paintings. Five were removed for space considerations, and one—The Deluge—was added.)
    The goal, Nesin said, was to “hold on to the open-endedness” of Guston’s work. “We’ve made some strong choices ourselves in the show, but we’ve tried really hard not to make them in ways that might foreclose the possibility that viewers can arrive at their own interpretations of paintings that are often contradictory.”
    “Holding onto to the ambiguity and letting it be uncomfortable, letting it push us to ask questions and sit with those questions,” Nesin added, “has really driven us.” 
    Philip Guston, Couple in Bed 1977. © The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    The curators pointed out that Guston himself often offered contradictory statements about the intentionality of his work, many examples of which are included in the show’s wall labels and audio tour. Historians and critics also offer differing opinions. There’s even a dedicated gallery where visitors are asked to reflect on what they’ve seen and post their responses on the wall. 
    “How do we understand the way people might see these things?” said Washington. He recalled the revelation about the hooded figures hiding in The Deluge: “How is it that things hide in plain sight?”
    Underlining the show is a larger conversation about “the way that we use artists’ intent in a curatorial framework,” Washington said. “One thing that’s important to remember is that intent does not justify impact.” 
    Philip Guston, Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973). © The Estate of Philip Guston. Courtesy of Hauser and Wirth
 and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
    “Philip Guston Now” is on view now through September 11, 2022 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
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    in Exhibitions

    In Pictures: See Long-Lost Paintings by Francis Hines, Who Wrapped Art and Buildings in Fabric, Discovered in a Dumpster by a Car Mechanic

    In a surprising instance of accidental discovery, a car mechanic found several hundred works by the artist Francis Hines in a dumpster outside the late artist’s studio in 2017. Tomorrow, 30 of the paintings and one sculpture are going on show in “Unwrapping the Mystery of New York’s Wrapper” at Hollis Taggart’s Southport gallery in Connecticut. A smaller presentation will also be exhibited in Manhattan.
    The works in question were being cleared from the studio barn in Watertown, Connecticut following Hines’s death in 2016, aged 96. The artist was well known in the 1970s and 80s for wrapping both his artworks and major city structures in strips of synthetic fabric. The most famous example was the Washington Square Arch, which Hines wrapped in 8,000 yards of white polyester in 1980, as part of an effort by New York University to raise funds for its restoration. But by the end of his career, Hines had fallen into near obscurity, and his works were left abandoned in the old barn.
    Taggart says the new show “captures Hines as an artist ahead of his time, as we have seen the ongoing dissolution of boundaries between artforms and dynamic combinations of materials.” 
    The trove’s discoverer, Jared Whipple, who is selling the works, first heard about them from a friend contracted to clear out the studio. At the time, he thought they might work well as a Halloween-themed “haunted art gallery”, until he spotted a signature on the back of one of the canvases. 
    Whipple began tracking down the artist’s family and colleagues in order to further research Hines’s life. Additional archival material related to Hines’s work, including photographs, video footage and drawings, has since come to light, some of which will be included in the exhibition. It has been curated by Hollis Taggart’s director Paul Efstathiou and the art historian Peter Hastings Falk, who helped Whipple with his research and put him in contact with the gallery. 
    Whipple soon realized the collection might be worth several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Twenty-three of the paintings in the show, which are priced at $35,000, have already been snapped up by keen collectors. Whipple plans to use the profits from these sales to renovate his Connecticut warehouse, where he will display other works by Hines.
    “The significance of the discovery has been the four-and-a-half-year journey that I’ve been on,” Whipple said. “It has opened up friendships, avenues and a world which I never thought I’d be a part of, or have such a deep appreciation for.” 
    See the works that will be included in the show below.
    Francis Hines, Legacy (1988). All images courtesy of Hollis Taggart.
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Icon, NY (1987).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983)
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983)
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (circa 1984).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1987).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1987).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1986).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1985)
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1984).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1984).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1984).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1984)
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1983).
    Francis Hines, Untitled (1984).
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    in Exhibitions

    8 Gallery Shows Not to Miss During the First-Ever New York Art Week, From Ellsworth Kelly’s Collages to Nari Ward’s Ode to Morandi

    Following in the footsteps of successful city-wide art events in London and Berlin, the debut New York Art Week opens for the first time this week, and it’s going to an absolute extravaganza.
    Twenty organizations are part of the initiative, including Christie’s, Creative Time, the Independent Art Fair, and the Met, and each will plan its own programming. Alongside their events and exhibitions, galleries around New York, from Chelsea to the Bowery, will stage shows too. Here are a few highlights to put on your agenda.

    “Nari Ward: I’ll Take You There; a Proclamation”Lehmann MaupinThrough June 4
    Nari Ward, A Proclamation (2022). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London.
    Nari Ward’s sixth solo show with the gallery explores many of the artist’s perennial interests (public commemoration, the meanings that found materials carry) through four text pieces created from shoelaces, new works on copper panels, and a large-scale installation made from bottles, candles, milk crates, and suitcases, among other materials. The latter work is partly an homage to the painter Giorgio Morandi, whose quiet still lifes of vases belied intense emotional focus. Ward’s new show is also a reflection on the pandemic and the makeshift memorials erected by everyday people across New York.
    “Xie Nanxing: Adverb High Command”PetzelMay 6–June 25
    Xie Nanxing, Shadows of Painting, No. 5 (2021).
    The artist’s first-ever New York solo show presents two recent series, “The Dwarfs’ Refrain” (2019–20) and “Shadows of Painting” (2020–21), which continue Xie Nanxing’s extended reflection on the contradictions of oil painting. Using abstract grids alongside references from photographs, the works are Nanxing’s attempts to “target” figurative painting and upend its traditions, yet retain a painterly touch and emphasis on craft, according to the gallery.
    “William Wegman: Writing by Artist”Sperone WestwaterMay 5–June 18
    William Wegman, Casual (2002). Courtesy of the artist and Sperone Westwater Gallery.
    Texts, drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos made by William Wegman between the 1970s and today are the focus of this show, which includes many never-before-exhibited works. Altogether, the show emphasizes Wegman’s penchant for puns, wordplay, and his interest in the fluidity of language, as well as his deadpan nonsequiturs and winking embrace of banality. The show is accompanied by a new book, William Wegman: Writing by Artist, published by Primary Information and edited by Andrew Lampert, who organized the show.
    “Annette Lemieux: Things Felt“Mitchell-Innes and NashThrough May 27
    Annette Lemieux, Lockdown (2022). Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes and Nash.
    In her latest works, conceptual artist Anette Lemiuex, a member of the Pictures Generation, mines TV, film, and literary history to focus on “isolation, division, and brokenness,” according to the gallery. In one work, titled Midnight Sun and made in part from a film still from The Twilight Zone, Lemiuex depicts an artist painting in vain amid a heatwave that melts the pigment off her canvas. In part a reflection on the difficulties of the vocation, the work also references wider looming troubles ahead.
    “Ellsworth Kelly”Matthew MarksMay 6–June 25
    Ellsworth Kelly, Nuit de Carnaval, Haiti 1980 (2022). Courtesy Matthew Marks.
    Two shows by the late Modern painter will be on view at Matthew Marks, including one focusing on little-seen postcard collages made between 1957 to 1998. The pictures, which Kelly made using found images, highlight the artist’s longstanding desire not to invent new forms, but to isolate and emphasize the many that already exist. Alongside the show, the exhibition “Ellsworth Kelly: Blue Green Black Red” at another Matthew Marks space nearby, will explore works made in those colors.
    “Kerstin Brätsch: Die Sein: Para Psychics I“Gladstone GalleryThrough April 28
    Kerstin Brätsch. Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise.
    Kerstin Brätsch’s “Para-Psychics” works, which she made between 2020 and 2021, were done in a period of self-isolation, during which the artist developed a daily method of visualizing her “own psychic realm,” according to the gallery. The works, made in colored pencil, are partly a meditation on clairvoyance, and were inspired by the artist’s visits to fortune tellers. In the works, as the writer Saim Demircan points out, “figures occasionally appear in various states of becoming or disintegrating into their surroundings.”
    “Lorraine O’Grady: Body Is the Ground of My Experience”Alexander Gray AssociatesThrough June 11
    Lorraine O’Grady, Dracula and the Artist, (1991/2019). Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York © 2022 Lorraine O’Grady / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
    The works in Lorraine O’Grady’s groundbreaking series “Body Is the Ground of My Experience,” presented at her first-ever New York solo show in 1991 at INTAR Gallery, have been brought together for the first time in 30 years for this show at Alexander Gray. When the series, which draws heavily on O’Grady’s interest in Surrealism, was first presented, it was intended as a shot across the bow of the formalism of Postmodern photography, and instead centered on the Black body as “a literal ground on which history acts and is unexpectedly modified,” according to the gallery.
    “Tavares Strachan: The Awakening“Marian Goodman GalleryMay 6–June 11
    Tavares Strachan. Photo by Brook DiDonato, courtesy the artist.
    Tavares Strachan’s first solo show with Marian Goodman in New York focuses on the life of Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican-born Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist who advocated for the settlement of Liberia in West Africa as a land where Black people, including the descendants of American slaves, could determine their own future. The show also pulls in a variety of other themes and motifs (such as mathematical theorems and basketball) as a way of expanding, narrowing, and resampling historical forms.
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    in Street Art

    “RECONNECT” Nuart Aberdeen Festival 2022

    As we emerge blinking from the uncertainty and radical disconnection of the past two years of lockdown and social distancing, it is disorienting to rediscover those social connections and relationships to the people, places and spaces of our cities that have been stretched to the limit and in many cases broken and lost. No longer objects of risk, fear and constant surveillance, we hope Nuart’s “reconnect” edition can help to dial down the background anxiety that had become part of our daily lives.  To help us do this, we have connected with artists, academics and industry professionals from across the globe to explore and present the very best that this culture has to offer.Mural by Elisa-CapdevilaNUART ARTISTS This year’s festival plays host to 11 inspiring national and international street artists. Festival artist Martin Whatson reconnects with a new piece having lost his earlier work to developers, whilst Scottish stencil artist James Klinge makes his debut and Spanish artist and activist Jofre Oliveras’ murals promise new connections with the city’s spaces. We also have a rare festival appearance from Spanish artist Pejac, whose trompe-l’œil techniques have enchanted audiences around the world. Portuguese artist Nuno Viegas will bring his clean and minimal work that draws on traditional graffiti for inspiration, while Barcelona-based Slim Safont’s striking murals offer intriguing links to our daily lives.Mural by PEJACPopular Copenhagen-based muralist JACOBA returns to Aberdeen with an aim to creatively disrupt our sense of disconnection and indifference, and we are pleased to welcome London-based artist and activist for trans rights Erin Holly, whose studio and street-based practice are making an international impact. Spanish artist Elisa Capdevila’s large scale murals promise evocative slices of life reconnected, while Moroccan artist Mohamed L’Ghacham will recreate resonant scenes from everyday life writ large. Joining us from Norway, artist Miss.Printed will delight and surprise audiences with her delicate miniature paper collages placed in the streets. On Sunday 12th, the artist will also be running a Street Collage workshop open to the public, alongside Nuart Aberdeen’s Chalk Don’t Chalk workshops which encourage children and families to create their own chalk street art pieces.Mural by Nuno ViegasTo launch the festival on Thursday June 9th, internationally renowned photographer and subcultural legend Martha Cooper joins us direct from The Congo for a special screening of Martha: A Picture Story, followed by an audience Q+A at the Belmont Cinema, and on Friday June 10th, join festival artists and guests in a chaotic – but possibly educational – street art ‘Fight Club’ hosted by Doug Gillen of Fifth Wall TV at Spin, Aberdeen.NUART PLUS The extended Nuart Plus programme includes artist talks, panel debates, film screenings, walking tours and workshops. The theme for this year’s street art conference (10-11 June) at Cowdray Hall follows the festival theme, Reconnect. The two-day program brings artists, researchers, creative practitioners and the public together for the first time since 2019. Highlights include artist talks from festival artists, and panels with local, national and international creative practitioners.Keynote speaker Dr Lucy Finchett-Maddock (UK) unpicks the powerful relationship between art, transgression and power while Dr Stephen Pritchard (UK) will share his thoughts on the recent community turn in street art. Melbourne-based researcher and curator Dr Lachlan MacDowall (AU) will share his experience curating Flash Forward, a city-wide program combining art and music, while Dr Erik Hannerz (SE) will share his ideas on how we could “re-write” the city, and think outside the grid, by adopting some lessons learned from those who see the city’s surfaces as full of creative possibilities. The program also includes panel discussions for creative professionals on strategies for creating and sustaining independent creative spaces and projects.Mural by Slim SafontIssue 6 of Nuart Journal will be exclusively launched at the Nuart Aberdeen’s Street Art Conference, on Saturday 11th of June. Nuart Journal was first published in 2018 to widespread critical acclaim. Professor Jeff Ferrell, from Texas Christian University has called Nuart Journal “the most exciting mix of political, visual, and intellectual energy I’ve seen in a long time!”Working in collaboration with Aberdeen Inspired and Aberdeen City Council, the multi-award winning Nuart Aberdeen will once again transform the streetscape of the Granite City.Mural by Martin WhatsonInstallation by Martha CooperMural by Mohamed L’GhachamMural by Erin HollyMural by James KlingeMural by Jacoba NiepoortInstallation by Miss PrintedMural by Jofre Oliveras More

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    in Exhibitions

    Must-See Art Guide: What Not to Miss at the 2022 Edition of Berlin Gallery Weekend

    Berlin Gallery Weekend is back for its 18th edition this week, with some 52 participating galleries opening their doors to show works by emerging and established artists, with most galleries participating from Friday, April 29 to Sunday, May 1.
    What’s on our list? We’ll be heading to Esther Schipper Gallery to see “Hempisheres,” David Claerbout’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, which brings together two large-scale video projections that incorporate found footage of an amateur film made in the 1920s mixed with digital renderings. 
    Another must-see is “Mesmerizing Mesh” at Galerie Barbara Wein, featuring 26 collages by artist Haegue Yang made from hanji (traditional Korean paper) as well as two “Sonic Sculptures.”
    But there’s a lot more to see. We’ve put together a list of shows we’ll definitely be checking out.
    David Claerbout, Aircraft (F.A.L.) (2015–21). Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper.
    Exhibition: “David Claerbout: Hemispheres”When: Through May 28, 2022Where: Esther Schipper, Potsdamer Strasse 81E, Berlin
    Philipp Fürhofer, Waldboden (2021). Courtesy of Galerie Judin.
    Exhibition: “Philipp Fürhofer: The Truths Behind“When: April 30–June 11, 2022Where: Galerie Judin, Potsdamer Straße 83, Berlin
    Haegue Yang, Barbell-Powered Sunrising Soul Sheet Atop Another – Mesmerizing Mesh #79 (2021). Courtesy of Barbara Wien.
    Exhibition: “Haegue Yang: Mesmerizing Mesh – Paper Leap and Sonic Guard”When:  April 29–July 30, 2022Where: Barbara Wien, Schöneberger Ufer 65, 3rd Floor, Berlin
    Wolfgang Laib, Reishäuser. Courtesy of Buchmann Galerie.
    Exhibition: “Wolfgang Laib”When: April 29—June 25, 2022Where: Buchmann Galerie, Charlottenstraße 13, Berlin
    Anton Henning, Pin-up No. 244 (2019). Courtesy Galerie Michael Haas.
    Exhibition: “Anton Henning: Future and Grace, No.1”When: April 29–June 25, 2022Where: Galerie Michael Haas, Niebuhrstraße 5 Berlin 
    Gregor Gleiwitz, 21.06.2021 (2021). Courtesy of Setareh.
    Exhibition: “Gregor Gleiwitz: XYLETEN”When: April 29–June 18, 2022Where: Setareh, Schöneberger Ufer 71 Berlin
    Daniel Poller, Birds of Tegel (2022). Courtesy of Galerie Poll.
    Exhibition: “Birds of Tegel: Photography by Daniel Poller”When: Through June 11, 2022Where: Galerie Poll, Gipsstraße 3 (Ecke Auguststraße), Berlin
    André Thomkins, Untitled (ca. 1953). Courtesy of Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner.
    Exhibition: “André Thomkins”When: April 29–June 18, 2022Where: Kunsthandel Wolfgang Werner, Fasanenstraße 72, Berlin
    Hamlet Lavastida, Untitled. Courtesy of Galerie Crone.
    Exhibition: “Hamlet Lavastida: Two Two Three Nine”When: April 29–June 18, 2022Where: Galerie Crone, Fasanenstraße 29, 10719, Berlin
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    David Adjaye, New Red Order, and 26 Other Artists Will Create Work for a Six-Mile Stretch Along a Main Drag in St. Louis

    Nine months ago, in an Op-Ed published on this site, curator James McAnally wondered if “outside the churn of the contemporary art world… could the slow build and release of the triennial offer a more humane pace?” 
    McAnally, the executive and artistic director of the Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis, was thinking about the time needed for a cyclical event like his to incur meaningful change in the communities it serves. It’s an increasingly salient question facing many regional bi- or triennials as they attempt a difficult balance between local-level engagement and national, or even international, scope.
    The question is still on McAnally’s mind as he and others prepare for Counterpublic’s next edition, the second since its founding in 2019, which runs from May 15 to August 15, 2023. (The show was delayed a year because of the pandemic.)
    Bringing together 28 artists and collectives, plus a handful of guest curators, the three-month show will focus “on public memory and reparative futures—how history is told, held, and healed, and how the future can be collectively envisioned towards new liberated lifeways,” according to project organizers.
    “The invitation for the curators, for our community engagement team, and now for the artists, has always been to think along a different scale of time,” McAnally told Artnet News. “The invitation was to think ancestrally: What have we inherited? What are we leaving behind?”
    A preparatory sketch for David Adjaye’s planned Counterpublic installation. Courtesy of the artist.
    As for the latter question: quite a bit, it seems. Among the 30 commissioned installations planned for the exhibition, four will be site-specific and permanent. 
    Most notable among these is a monumental earthwork conceived by architect David Adjaye to be installed at the Griot Museum of Black History. The piece will be erected from materials related to the demolished Pruitt-Igoe apartments, built in St. Louis in the 1950s as a racially segregated housing project. Elsewhere, St. Louis-based artist Damon Davis will erect a mile-long monument to Mill Creek Valley, a historically Black enclave displaced by a city-sponsored urban renewal project in ’50s. 
    Other projects will be more ephemeral. For her part, 82-year-old artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will develop a new map of St. Louis radiating from the city’s oldest remaining burial mound. New Red Order, pulling double duty as both participating artists and curators in the triennial, will likewise turn their attention to what is locally referred to as Mound City, partnering with the Osage Nation to make a film documenting the tribe’s efforts to repatriate the landmark.
    Each of these projects, and the more than two dozen others planned for Counterpublic (including installations by Torkwase Dyson, Steffani Jemison, and Ralph Lemon) will be sited along a six-mile stretch of Jefferson Avenue, which bridges numerous neighborhoods and communities in St. Louis. 
    “We’re working along a single street, but that street runs the full length of the city,” McAnally said. “These neighborhoods are microcosms of the nation in so many ways. They are truly dynamic and resistant to one another. They’re not a single experience.”
    A rendering of Damon Davis’s Mill Creek Valley commemorative monuments. Courtesy of the artist, Great Rivers Greenway, and St. Louis CITY SC.
    In a similar way, McAnally said, St. Louis extends far beyond its geographic borders in the cultural consciousness. “The questions that St. Louis faces are the questions of the moment,” he said. “These issues of public memory, of repair, of how you move forward with the weight of history.”
    Allison Glenn, a former curator at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, said an imprint of the city’s rich history can be felt in the present moment. 
    “I’ve enjoyed learning about, and calling upon, the connections between the ‘founding’ of St. Louis and the larger Louisiana purchase, which are intrinsically connected to real and problematic ideologies of Westward expansion that our nation is slowly confronting,” she noted.
    Glenn, who will be working primarily with Adjaye, belongs to a curatorial collective that includes Risa Puleo, Creative Time associate curator Diya Vij, and the collectives Dream the Combine and New Red Order. 
    “The result is unique,” Vij said. “Instead of presenting a singular voice, we are offering a collection of responses to site and context through our own individual sensibilities and practices.”
    “We’re interested in resisting the typical biennial and triennial approach of summing up a city,” McAnally added. “We wanted there to be multiple points of entry and exit.”
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    in Exhibitions

    When Taiwan Abruptly Canceled Plans for Its Venice Biennale Presentation, Its Organizers Turned to History for a Solution

    The toast to the opening of the Taiwan exhibition at the 2022 Venice Biennale almost never took place. The show was very close to being canceled after its organizers were forced to ditch their original plans just two weeks before the deadline for submitting their proposal. Yet there they were with dozens of supporters, raising glasses at Palazzo delle Prigioni in San Marco.
    “Because of Taiwan’s situation, the Venice Biennale is a very important platform for us. If we don’t come, we would lose the chance of having a dialogue with international communities,” Jun-Jieh Wang, the director of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, which organized the show, told Artnet News. “We cannot give up.”
    The exhibition is a last-minute archival show titled “Impossible Dreams” that traces the history of Taiwan’s appearances in Venice since 1995, first as a national pavilion before being demoted to a collateral event, and from group shows to solo presentations.
    Installation view of ‘Impossible Dreams,’ Taiwan’s Collateral Event at Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
    The problems began last December when a series of sexual assault allegations against Sakuliu Pavavaljung, the artist who was originally selected to represent the self-governed island in the exhibition, emerged online. The 61-year-old award-winning Indigenous artist would’ve fit the theme of this year’s Venice Biennale. But the scandal escalated quickly, with over 1,000 art workers condemning the artist and asking for his show to be canceled. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum had to decide quickly; district prosecutors had already begun an investigation.
    “It was a very tough situation. But this is a very sensitive topic, and it has gone beyond a moral question as it involves a criminal investigation,” Wang said. “We decided to end the partnership in mid-December. We can’t possibly find another artist within such a short period of time after spending nearly two years working with [Pavavaljung].”
    Even if there was enough time, the chances of having another artist agree were highly unlikely, as no one wanted to be the filler artist after the explosion of such a serious scandal, Wang said.
    The team quickly came up with the archival exhibition.
    “The archive is readily available. It’s easy to put together and set up, in terms of transport and logistics,” Patrick Flores, who was originally hired as the curator for Pavavaljung’s show, said.
    Curator Okwui Enwezor at the Taiwan exhibition at the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
    The Politics of Venice Biennale
    As the war in Ukraine haunts this year’s Venice Biennale, Taiwan faces its own imminent military threats from China, a close ally of Russia’s that has been deploying fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace. The existence of Taiwan, self-governed since the Kuomintang political party fled the mainland after losing its war against the Chinese Communist Party, has long been a point of political contention. China, which claims Taiwan as a province, has escalated it saber-rattling recent months, leading some to see parallels with Russia and Ukraine.
    “Of course, there is an ongoing war that involves one country invading another, and then naturally, people from outside of Taiwan would ask: what about the relationship between China and Taiwan? Is it very similar?” Wang said.
    The answers to such questions are complicated, even within Taiwan, the museum director said.
    While on the one hand, there are concerns about whether China will invade Taiwan, there are also pro-Beijing voices within the island that favor maintaining close ties with China.
    “We hope to foster a dialogue with the international communities through art,” he said. “There shouldn’t be just one voice, one perspective.”
    Letter from La Biennale di Venezia inviting Taiwan to participate in the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995. Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
    One of the highlights of “Impossible Dreams” is a 1995 letter from Gian Luigi Rondi of the Venice Biennale to curator Tsai Ching-fen inviting Taiwan to take part in the biennale for its centenary. The event was a milestone, marking Taiwan’s entrance onto the world stage less than a decade after it lifted its three-decade martial law order in 1987.
    The following years saw Taiwan presenting group exhibitions as its national pavilion. Things changed in 2003 when Taiwan was stripped of its pavilion status after successful protests from China (which secured its own national pavilion slot but had to cancel after the Sars epidemic). Taiwan then got bumped to a collateral event, but organizers never gave up, even taking on a long-term lease at a former prison in San Marco.
    Thus, even as a collateral event, Taiwan has a role to play. “Collateral is a symptom of a lack, addressing a gap that needs to be filled,” Flores said.
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