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    in Exhibitions

    It’s on Us to Queer the Metaverse: A Digitally Savvy Athens Biennale Tackles the Promises and Pitfalls of Web 3.0

    Of the many era-defining societal shifts and inequities that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into focus and accelerated, the change in the ways we use and navigate the metaverse are perhaps the least widely recognized and understood. Our dependence on the virtual realm seemed to swell overnight, as those who could moved their work to online rooms, minted NFTs, traded cryptocurrencies, and sent their avatars gaming with like-minded strangers. Only now are we realizing that this version of Web 3.0 being created has the potential to be as grim as the current moment in our physical world: For one, right-wing extremists recruiting and organizing in online quest games has very concrete ramifications in real life.
    In his nine-part Metaverse Primer, updated in June 2021 in response to the effects of the pandemic, venture capitalist and former head of strategy for Amazon Matthew Ball offers this definition: “The Metaverse is an expansive network of persistent, real-time rendered 3-D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments, and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence.” Or, to put it in simpler terms, “No one really expected the next generation of the internet would come from mobile gaming, and yet here we are.” That some of the most in-depth writing about this new reality comes from a venture capitalist says it all.
    Nektarios Pappas performing The Last Judgement–Reloaded at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
    “ECLIPSE,” the 7th Athens Biennale (AB7), cocurated by Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah and Omsk Social Club—a Berlin-based group whose practice is anchored in speculative role-play gaming—under the artistic direction of Poka-Yio, homes in on questions surrounding the utopian promise of Web 3.0. It is up to us, this divergent curatorial team argues, to lay claim, create, meet, build, and thrive in those digital realms. It’s on us to queer the Metaverse.
    Fittingly, the list of participating artists includes many individuals and collectives working under pseudonyms and exploring the possibilities of digital practices. Afro-Hungarian artist Huntrezz Janos delivered a digital performance titled Eclipsatrix Exuvia during the biennial’s opening weekend, her bejeweled, chimeric avatar twerking and spinning on a screen inside one of the exhibition’s venues, a former department store. Nascent, a Berlin-based duo founded in 2018, is showing a multipart work titled Temporal Secessionism.  A series of digital clocks installed on all floors of the abandoned store, the work keeps track of three different time-measuring systems: one is based on real-time Bitcoin transactions; one shows the consensus of time that syncs all online servers; and another, dubbed “healing time,” moves according to the frequency of broken quartz, the crystal used in analog clockwork. On the 3rd floor, the pseudo-company Hypercomf (brainchild of the Greek artists Ioannis Koliopoulos and Paola Palavidi) has set up an office environment, replete with ergonomic chairs, branded mugs, and indoor plants, and desks made of pressed plastic waste. Some of these elements are coated with organic matter to enable mycelium growth, possibly inviting strands capable of decomposing plastics. Mycelium also happens to be the name of a popular Bitcoin wallet.
    Claude Eigan, Inner Saboteur II (2019), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Emilios Charalambous.
    Despite its digital-savvy focus, AB7 also raises issues concerning our fragile physical existence and the class and racial inequalities affecting it. The approach, however, is to address and activate viewers’ tacit and embodied knowledge, rather than beating them over the head with identity politics: the messages are communicated not discursively but instead appeal to viewers’ intuitions surrounding social hierarchies and racial divides. It’s portraiture in lieu of manifestos.
    In fact, there is a dazzling amount of photography on view by artists who consider, claim, and reimagine the ways in which to represent nonconforming, disobedient, or other-ed bodies. A series of portraits of members of South-Africa’s LGBTQ community by Zanele Muholi is stunningly straightforward; Kayode Ojo’s glossy portraits are jarring in their rejection of representational tropes, a rallying cry to turn our (luscious, warm) backs on excessive consumerism in favor of a celebration of the unbranded self. Awol Erizku’s still lifes, populated with signifiers of Black culture, are blown up to cover entire walls in what used to be the department store’s sports section.
    Andrew Roberts, RHYTHM RATTLESNAKE: The world ends with you, baby centipede (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
    There are numerous soundscapes and sound installations by artists, including Moor Mother, whose activist spoken-word and protest poetry, which deals with intersectional feminism, inherited trauma, and systemic racism, resonate through the main venue. An installation by the Belgian composer and artist Billy Bultheel, commissioned for AB7, fills the basement of the former Santaroza Courthouse in Dikaiosinis (or Justice) Square, which stood empty for 30 years. The biennial’s organizers initiated the building’s reopening to the public, as well as the cleanup of the small green lung—so scarce in Athens—that the square provides between two main thoroughfares.
    Labor and exhaustion was one of the curators’ considerations, too, often implied via its actual remedy—an invitation to take a seat. A series of upcycled chairs made at an Athens workshop, commissioned by London-based designer Yinka Ilori as part of his program for people in addiction recovery, greets viewers on the department store’s first floor. (Ilori was enlisted to design ONX Studio in Athens, the Onassis Foundation’s new extended-reality center, slated to open in 2022). On the upper level, fantastical animal-headed furniture by Nuri Koerfer invites viewers to pause and sit on the sculptural works.
    Ayesha Tan Jones performing The New Elementals at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
    In the biennial’s third venue, an abandoned office building, Miles Greenberg, who’s the youngest artist on view at 22, enthralls with the video work Late October (2021). A protégé of Marina Abramović, Greenberg edited footage from a seven-hour durational performance he staged Paris last year, in which seven Black performers (including himself), each representing a figure from Greek mythology, perch atop slowly revolving plinths. Treating the body as sculptural material, the 20-minute piece speaks of the erosion of both artifacts and empires.
    Cajsa von Zeipel, Formula X (2020), at the 7th Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE.” Courtesy of the artist and Company Gallery. Photo: Nysos Vasilopoulos.
    But perhaps no other work captures the oscillation between the two realms we have come to create and exist in than Formula X (2021), a sculpture in silicone, rubber, and steel by Swedish artist Cajsa von Zeipel. Like a Mad Max: Fury Road amazon of the metaverse, a hyper-human pregnant figure is steering a three-wheel ATV into the unknown. Her bags are packed with diapers for her first baby and soon-to-be born second, and treats for her two dogs in tow, everything strapped onto her body or the vehicle with leather and rubber biker gear. The work’s dimensions are larger than life-size, just like the expectations and strain put on single mothers, not only during pandemic lockdowns. She is fierce and in control as she rides over sushi, which lodges between the tracks of the wheels. Or is this a projected avatar emerging from a deeply exhausted human existence?
    The seventh Athens Biennale, “ECLIPSE,” is on view at various venues throughout the city, September 24–November 28, 2021.
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    in Street Art

    “Mou Mou” by Elian Chali in Rabat, Morocco

    Argentinian artist Elian Chali recently worked on a mural project entitled “Mou Mou” in Rabat, Morocco. The mural is made of acrylic paint that stretches over 50 x 8 meters of the building’s facade. The project was done in collaboration with Jidar Festival, curated by Salah Malouli.Elian creates vibrant murals that balance a simple aesthetic with carefully calculated designs. He often incorporates anamorphic shapes into his murals, placing squiggles and squares at the corners of buildings, creating the illusion of floating patterns. Clean lines and flat color fields almost seem to be rendered digitally rather than laboriously hand-painted across hundreds or even thousands of square feet.His aesthetics are inspired by the Pop-Art, minimalism, Russian constructivism, and neoplasticism. Through his work, the artist seeks to open a discussion that goes from the social problems to the poetry of the habitat in which he creates.Scroll down below for more photos of the mural and check back with us shortly for more updates from Elian Chali. More

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    in Street Art

    Coverage: “Subliminal Matrix” Solo Exhibition by Zhang Ji at Volery Gallery, Dubai

    Last September 22nd, Volery Gallery opened Subliminal Matrix, a solo exhibition by Beijing-based Chinese painter Zhang Ji. This exhibition showcases a precisely calibrated selection of 12 paintings, created from 2018 – 2020, which demonstrates Zhang’s wholehearted engagement with the very structures and systems of painting. Subliminal Matrix is a collaboration of Volery Gallery with art collector and advisor Fabien Fryns who has been active in the contemporary art scene since 1986.The series, simply titled The Skin of Truth, features the artist’s minimalistic yet richly intricate detailed artworks which appear to radiant into immediate material presence whereupon he shapes the aesthetical effect. From earthy tones to magnetic blue and crimson red etc, Zhang used a variety of rich, bright hues as well as pure white, black and grey etc.His process calls attention to the paintings’ silken surfaces, loaded with oil paint; strengthened with the sheer physicality and expressive power of his medium. Gazing at these ethereal, atmospheric embossed-like paintings provide the viewers the sensation of a commanding optical quality, floating freely, bulged and ebbed, as if unanchored by gravity.In this exhibition, each composition is an independent work but also integral to the whole. Each work, elucidated the others, commenting on proportion, texture and the handling of the medium. The glossy was juxtaposed with the matte, the flat with the protruded, and the monochromatic and polychromatic panelling. Viewed together, these paintings convey a sense of symbolic matrix that can readily shift in relation to the painterly space and viewer’s angles of perception, yet captured visceral at its most subliminal.True to the paintings’ original premises, in this series, Zhang has painted with a restless, innovative and complete technical mastery. Each artwork is a fresh visual adventure with a strong sense of continuity not only as themselves, but also in relation to one another. The artist proves that you don’t have to go colossal to convey epic themes. But if one is to engage them on his/her own terms, they slowly reveal themselves as the artist’s response to his life observation and they allow the sense of things being painted and how we imagine the world through the imageries whereupon Zhang shapes a kind of expanded interrelation, articulated through correspondences of colour, shape and material inspiring trajectories of thought and narrative across the painterly properties.All in all, Zhang’s paintings evoke familiarity and memory in their vastness of collective illumination.Check out below for more photos of Subliminal Matrix and its opening night.The exhibition will run until 12th of October, 2021. 1:00 PM – 7:00 PM at Volery Gallery, Dubai International Financial Center, UAE. RSVP required. Book a visit here. More

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    in Street Art

    “The Riders” by Fintan Magee in Sydney, Australia

    “The Riders” was painted on the Alexandria Hotel in the shadow of the Waterloo Public housing estate. In 2015, the LNP government in NSW marked the building for re-development, leaving many low-income families worried they will be pushed out of the area.  Painted in a bevelled glass technique, the riders appear broken up out of focus and distant. The work depicts the youth as transient, asking where displaced public housing residents will go as more public land is sold off within the city. The mural highlights the ongoing issue of gentrification in Sydney and how the cities working young are ignored by housing policy and pushed further into the suburbs, creating a disconnect between its most productive residents and economic opportunity. Fintan Magee is a Sydney based social realist painter, specializing in large-scale murals. His earlier large-scale paintings often inhabited the isolated, abandoned and broken corners of the city, and today are found all over the world including in London, Vienna, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Moscow, Rome, Jordan, and Dublin among others.Magee’s practice is informed by a profound interest in political murals, inspired by exposure at a young age to those of his Father’s native Northern Ireland. This is reflected in the socialist nature of his public artworks, which combine journalistic elements with public art. Magee’s work is driven by his recognition of the power of murals to communicate political and social viewpoints and thus divide or unite communities.Take a look below to see more photos of Fintan Magee’s “The Riders” More

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    in Exhibitions

    How the Fondation Louis Vuitton and an Army of Conservators Persuaded Russia to Green Light a Landmark Exhibition of Modern Art

    Russian brothers Mikhail and Ivan Morozov amassed one of the world’s strongest collections of Impressionist and Modern Art. But their world-leading collection was nationalized in 1918 after the Bolshevik revolution, and fell into obscurity for decades.
    Now, for its exhibition, “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art,” on view through February 22, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris has reunited around 200 artworks from the collection, which is now mostly dispersed between the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. The works by Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Bonnard come from the first two museums, the works by Russian artists from the latter.
    “Reuniting all these pieces from major collections was very complicated and an enormous diplomatic undertaking,” Anne Baldassari, the exhibition’s curator, told Artnet News. The diplomatic significance was evident at the opening, which was attended by French President Emmanuel Macron and the Russian culture minister, Olga Lioubimova.
    Installation view of “La Collection Morozov. Icônes de l’art moderne,” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. ©Fondation Louis Vuitton / Marc Domage.
    The feat of showing the Morozov collection outside Russia for the first time is a “landmark” event, said LVMH’s president, and art collector Bernard Arnault. It was achieved partly thanks to the Fondation Louis Vuitton helping the Russian museums restore works by some of the artists and being involved in organizing the Morozov exhibition at the Hermitage in 2019.
    This is the second exhibition at the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton that Baldassari has curated on major Moscow collectors—the first was devoted to Sergei Shchukin in 2016 and 2017. “[Had their collections not been seized during the Bolshevik revolution] Shchukin and Ivan Morozov had the idea of joining their collections to create a big museum, which would have constituted the most extraordinary museum on French art in the world,” Baldassari said.
    The history of the Morozov collection is a family saga. Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, born in 1870 and 1871 respectively, were the great-grandsons of a serf. With five rubles from his wife’s dowry, their ancestor set up a ribbon workshop, which developed into a factory, and bought his family’s freedom. In a few generations, the family—who were Old Believers (opposed to reforming the Russian Orthodox Church)–became wealthy, philanthropic industrialists. The first room in the exhibition features paintings of their circle by leading Russian artists of that era, such as Mikhail Vrubel and Valentin Serov.
    Auguste Renoir, Portrait of the Actress Jeanne Samary, Paris (1877).Coll. Ivan Morozov, 26 November 1904. Musée d’Etat des beaux-arts Pouchkine, Moscou / Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
    At the turn of the last century in Russia, the upper social echelon spoke French and the Morozov brothers formed their stupendous collection on the advice of Parisian dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard. Mikhail, who died prematurely at the age of 33, discovered Bonnard’s work in Paris and acquired the first paintings by Gauguin to enter Russia. His brother later commissioned Bonnard to decorate the main staircase of his mansion. Ivan Morozov adored the work of Cézanne—indeed, having tried their hand at landscape painting in their youth, the brothers felt affinity for the landscape genre—and acquired 18 works by him.
    Black-and-white photographs displayed at Fondation Louis Vuitton give a sense of the splendor of Ivan Morozov’s mansion and its painting galleries. Some were taken by Maurice Denis, who was commissioned by Ivan Morozov to paint large panels on the story of Psyche for his music room, which has been restaged in the exhibition.
    After the Morozov collection was nationalized in 1918, Ivan Morozov fled to Finland and died in Karlsbad, Germany, at the age of 49. The collection would form part of the Museum on Modern Western Art, which Stalin ordered to be closed in 1948, dispersing its contents between the Pushkin and the Hermitage. The Soviet state sold several works for economic reasons, including Van Gogh’s Café de Nuit (now in the Yale University collection) and Cézanne’s portrait of Madame Cézanne (now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum). But things could have been worse. “Stalin hated [Western] art and could have asked for its destruction,” Baldassari said of the danger posed to the collection.
    The curator began researching the Morozovs by traveling to Russia and studying the archives in 2014. Several works, including a painting by Gauguin, that had “suffered in storage” were restored with support of French expertise and high-tech equipment. Others will require more elaborate restoration techniques in order not to risk damaging them. “Some of Van Gogh’s marvelous works couldn’t come—such as the only painting that Van Gogh sold in his life-time, Red vineyard in Arles,” Baldassari said. “Ivan Morozov purchased it from a young Belgian artist who had bought it from Van Gogh.”
    Vincent Van Gogh, The Prison Courtyard, Saint-Rémy (1890). Coll. Ivan Morozov, 23 October 1909. Musée d’Etat des beaux-arts Pouchkine, Moscou / Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.
    However, Van Gogh’s The Prison Courtyard (1890), which he made while in the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence psychiatric hospital, has made it to Paris. The artist’s brother Theo had sent him a photograph of Gustave Doré’s drawing of a London prison’s courtyard which Van Gogh reinterpreted into a primarily greenish blue-hued painting, the conditions of the prisoners echoing his own confinement.
    Further highlights include Matisse’s Moroccan Triptych (1912-1913) in rich blues, comprising a view from a window, a portrait of a young girl and an entrance to the Kasbah; Gauguin’s lush paintings of Tahiti; Picasso’s Cubist portrait of Vollard, the face dissolving into geometric shapes; Monet’s misty depiction of Waterloo Bridge, and Serov’s striking portraits of the Morozov brothers. What’s also fascinating is how a group of Russian avant-garde artists, the Cézannistes, were ardent followers of Cézanne.
    Lifting the veil on this chapter of Russian history “is only at the beginning,” Baldassari says. “Now we need to go back to the [Russian] avant-gardes; there are a lot of points that remain obscure and more research needs to be carried out in Russian museums. What we’ve done on the Shchukin and Morozov collections is like lifting an enormous block; perhaps now more things will be able to come out.”
    “The Morozov Collection: Icons of Modern Art” is on view at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through February 22, 2022.
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    in Exhibitions

    In Pictures: See the Highly Ambitious, Two-City Jasper Johns Retrospective at the Whitney and the Philadelphia Museum of Art

    Between its two parts at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” has a staggering amount of work in it. The giant two-part career survey features all the hits by the 91-year-old icon of American art—the targets, the flags, the maps—plus enough obscure works and curatorial flourishes to make it feel like an event, despite the fact that Johns has not exactly lacked for major museum attention in recent years.
    In the lead-up to the show, there was some gossip, aired in Deborah Solomon’s Johns profile in the Times, about the museum’s two curators—the Whitney’s Scott Rothkopf and the PMA’s Carlos Basualdo—not getting along. Whatever the case may be, the two shows don’t really feel like they offer dueling visions. They work together just fine.
    It’s a lot of Johns to take in when stacked together, and the full pilgrimage to both locations might not really be necessary for all but the most extreme Jasper-heads. But those who do make the trip between New York and Philly will get a fittingly Johnsian two-part experience: two different views of the same subject, with mysteriously slightly different accents and colorings.
    There’s more to be said in a proper review. While the thoughts come, here are some photos of “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror.”

    Whitney Museum of American Art
    The entrance to “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Untitled (1960-61) in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art . Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Target With Four Faces (1968) in the “Disappearance and Negation” gallery of “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Flags and Maps” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Memory Place (Frank O’Hara) (1961-70) in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art . Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Studio (1964) and Untitled (Halloween) (1998) at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Untitled (2011) in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “According to What” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney, with a display of Marcel Duchamp’s The Green Box from the artist’s personal collection at left. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Studio II 1960) and Harlem Light (1967) in the “Leo Castelli, 1968” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney, recreating a 1969 show at Leo Castelli gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
    The “Savarin Monotypes” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Mirror/Double” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze 1960) at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of two versions of Racing Thoughts in the “Mirror/Double” gallery (left: 1984; right: 1983) at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Fall (1986) and Spring (1986) in the “Mirror/Double” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Dancer on a Plane (1979) at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Dreams” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Dreams” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Untitled (Leo Castelli) (1984) in the “Dreams” gallery. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Untitled (2018) and Untitled (2018) in the “Elegies in Dark” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of four versions of Jasper Johns, 0-9 at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Jasper Johns and the Whitney” in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Whitney. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Philadelphia Museum of Art
    The Philadelphia Museum of Art, with banners for “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror.” Photo by Ben Davis.
    The entrance to “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns, Target (1958) and Star (1954) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Numbers” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Numbers” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Leo Castelli, 1960” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, recreating a 1960 gallery show by the artist. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Japan” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Usuyuki (1982) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Ushio Shinohara, Drink More (1964). Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Summer Critic (1966) in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of a display of ephemera related to Jasper Johns’s time in Japan at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Works by Tomio Miki and Aiko Miyawaki from Jasper Johns’s personal collection, on view in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns’s copy of Folrades/Fizzles by Samuel Beckett, with illustrations by Johns. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Doubles and Reflections” gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Doubles and Reflections” gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Jasper Johns, Target (1992) and Two Flags (1985) in the “Nightmares” gallery of “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of the “Trial and Working Proofs” gallery in “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Display of Jasper Johns’s “Untitled” series of handprints (1998) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of Jasper Johns’s “5 Postcards” series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Installation view of “Rolywholyover,” a prints show within “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    Looking at the floorplan and computer connected to Rolywholyover, an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an experimental installation for which a different configuration of Jasper Johns prints is generated every day. Photo by Ben Davis.

    Prints from the Philadelphia Museum of Art on display in in-gallery storage as part of “Rolywholyover,” waiting to be selected and reconfigured. Photo by Ben Davis.
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    in Street Art

    Brandalism Hacks More Than 200 Billboards Across UK

    Billboards and bus stops across the UK have been hacked with spoof Barclays adverts by activists, as climate campaigners increase pressure on the bank to stop funding the expansion of the fossil fuel industry.Deisgn by Darren Cullen in LondonMore than 200 billboards and bus stop spaces in 20 towns and cities have had satirical artworks installed without permission, as calls grow for the bank to stop offering credit to fossil fuel companies flouting climate pledges. Barclays is currently considering updating its policy on fossil fuel lending ahead of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow this November.The posters designed by 11 artists reference Barclays financing of companies involved in Arctic oil drilling, coal mining and fracking as well industrial meat companies such as JBS, who are accused of deforestation in the Amazon. They also link the bank’s sponsorship of the football Premier League with fossil fuel profits. One billboard artwork by Darren Cullen reads, “Our plans to stop forest fires: cut them down first.” Another by Inzione shows an Arctic oil rig and reads, “Drilling our way to Net Zero.”Design by Fart Attack in BristolTona Merriman from Brandalism accused Barclays of making disingenuous claims to become a “net zero” bank whilst granting $4.4bn in loans and bonds to fossil fuel companies in 2021 alone.“The posters showcase the environmental impacts we don’t see in Barclays’ own adverts: the deforestation, the ocean drilling, the oil spills, the wildfires, the threat to wildlife. They’re a corrective, right of reply to the greenwash messaging of Europe’s dirtiest bank.”“Ahead of COP26, banks like Barclays will tell the world how much they’re investing in renewables. But what’s more significant is how much they continue to pour into fossil fuels. Put simply, it’s not enough to fund the good stuff, they’ve also got to stop funding the bad stuff.”Design by SoofiyaThe artworks were designed by 11 artists including Darren Cullen, Soofiya, Fokawolf, Merny Wernz, Rhonda Anaconda, Frank Riot, Michelle Tylicki, Inzione, Seize The Mean and F-Art-Attack.Barclays has attracted criticism for being Europe’s biggest fossil financier, granting greater sums to fossil fuel companies last year than any of its European competitors.Pressure has grown on Barclays following the publication of new findings by the International Energy Agency (IEA). The respected industry body has now stated that, in order to reach net-zero by 2050, no new coal, oil or gas projects should be undertaken or financed.Deisgn by Inzione in ReadingThe bank has committed to net-zero emissions by 2050 and campaigners argue that, according to the IEA findings, this means the bank should immediately commit to cease any further financing of companies expanding coal, oil and gas output and infrastructure.Brandalism is an anonymous, creative arts network taking direct action against corporate advertising structures.  Intervening into ad spaces that usually celebrate consumption, the group use ‘subvertising’ as a lens through which we can view the social and environmental injustices issues that capitalism creates.http://brandalism.ch/Scroll down below to view more spoof adverts from the protest.Design by Rhonda in NorwichDesign by Polyp in BrightonDesign by Fokawolf in BrightonDesign by Merny Wernz in Bristol More

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    in Exhibitions

    Kara Walker’s Museum Survey in Basel Is Difficult, Disturbing—and Very Necessary

    Black American contemporary painter, installation artist, silhouettist, print-maker, and filmmaker Kara Walker’s large-scale presentation of more than 600 works at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland reads as something like the excavation of masterworks from an artist’s mind. Assembling works from some 30 years, the survey is a grand collection of archival works, plans, inner thoughts, and dreams, and seems to be both an exhibition and an imaginative biography of a Black woman’s life over time. The show, titled “A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be,” magnifies the United States’s realities of prejudice, perversion, and plunder, offering a taunting exposé of the racial, psychological, and (at times) psychosexual ties that bind and cut.
    Across a broad assemblage of sketches, collages, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and confessions, Walker’s black pencil and deft ink strokes blur the spectator’s capacity to decipher which figures represent races, Black, white, or biracial. This blurring is symbolically important: One could say that she depicts descendants on both the right or wrong side of slavery, both the protagonists and the antagonists—but not necessarily clearly arrayed on either side, but betwixt or in between. Her vignettes, scribbles, and typed tales narrate both the artist’s and viewers’ imagined stories of social subjugation, restitution, and emancipation, sprouting from her preoccupation with the unseemly psychic aspects of a racialized master/slave dynamic.
    Walker’s critics would say that the deliberately controversial style of her art warrants questioning her position as a Black commercial artist. The fact that such images are favored by an unregulated art market might also provoke some ethical questions for gallerists and collectors. Such difficult questions emerge from the way that Walker’s work displays either an inability or a refusal to positively represent one race of people—a task Black artists are often assigned.
    Instead, I believe Walker has carved a liberated path for herself and her career exactly by refusing to censor her mind for the prudishness of any audience’s eyes. Walker’s pattern of playing with expected tropes is unmatched. In this epic showcase, this proposition is perhaps most memorably demonstrated in the cathartic “Success and the Stench of Ingratitude,” her 2012 series where the artist reflects on BLACK ARTISTS I ASPIRE TO BE LESS LIKE (as a text embedded in the work states), offering a list: “broke,” “forgotten,” “taken advantage of,” “bitter,” “crassly-commercial,” “short-lived,” and so on.
    Installation view of “Kara Walker: A black hole is everything a star longs to be” at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo by Julian Salinas, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel.
    Works within her series “Untitled” (2002-2004) and “Palmetto Libretto” (2012) embody the artist’s knack for mimicry and startling transposition of racially inspired violence. Throughout these series and in several other works by Walker, audiences find artworks depicting what seems to be sexual domination if not torture or abuse. In one image, a black mandingo and white woman appear to be locked in fierce intercourse within the bush. In another, a Black woman resembling the artist herself is drawn, tired-eyed, day-dreaming of an orgy scene featuring white men with disfigured bodies, one notably armed with a nose resembling a male’s member, molesting a handcuffed Black woman who resembles the character Mammy, played by Hatti McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. In other works, characters with white masks, akin to the Klu Klux Klan, maraud as they haunt the night.
    With such images, Walker creates a form of art that is alarming to both Black and white folk, besmirching the hierarchical and archetypal roles that persist in American popular culture and folklore. Her practice deliberately exaggerates images of orientalist desires and Black minstrels. Stereotyped Black body parts such as big lips, hips, and dicks persist. Yet I read Walker’s themes of sadomasochistic lust and fascination with interracial sex, domination, and submission, with their mix of grief, pleasure, and guilt, as actually a way to claim a sense of strength—by decimating one-dimensional narratives of power.
    Installation view of “Kara Walker: A black hole is everything a star longs to be” at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo by Julian Salinas, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel.
    I’d argue that the key to Walker’s hold over her audience is the alternation of conditions of control. In some works, slavers enjoy power by inflicting entrapment, shame, and disgrace. In others, Walker creates dreamscapes where Black characters are desired, courted, and return the favor of racially inspired violence to white figures, seemingly both deserving and undeserving. Facing this kind of manipulation of the imagery of racialized or gendered domination and fetish, the spectator—whether the ancestor of a victim or perpetrator—is both enthralled and shamed by Walker’s heinous sketches of fantasies known to exist, but restricted to private life.
    A surface-level encounter with Walker’s work can offend the untrained eye. But by a deeper interaction, we might see the invention of a new constellation of thought about race, power, gender, sex, and violence. This artist’s ability to collapse definitions, boundaries, and inherited associations might unlock a new route to taking control over narratives that we can, in fact, have autonomy over.
    “Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be” is on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel, through September 26, 2021.
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