Eliana Willis

Rose of Jericho, Starry Night, essays by Susan Sontag. If Marina Abramović were to bury a time capsule today, those are some of the items she’d put in. 
That’s the conceit of the performance art star’s upcoming show, “Traces,” a three-day experience in London that will take visitors on a journey through her life in five rooms.
Conceived as an immersive installation, each room will be inspired by an object or idea that, like the aforementioned herb and Van Gogh painting, has proven to be a particular influence on her work. 
The pop-up exhibition, set to go on view September 10 through 12 at Old Truman Brewery in London, will also showcase two of Abramović’s earlier works—Crystal Cinema (1991) and 10,000 stars (2015)—before concluding with a new interview she recently recorded herself.
A still from WeTransfer’s presentation of Marina Abramović’s The Abramović Method. Courtesy of WeTransfer.
“Traces” marks the culmination of Abramović’s year-long partnership with WePresent, the editorial arm of the file-sharing platform WeTransfer. Earlier this year, she inaugurated WePresent’s guest curator series, showcasing a handful of up-and-coming performing artists around the world on the site, and sharing a “digital manifestation” of her own participatory form of meditation, the Abramović Method.
“Using WeTransfer’s knowledge of design and media, we have brought her practice to millions of people around the world in a variety of ways, adding something new to the cultural landscape,” the platform’s editor in chief, Holly Fraser, added. “We hope to inspire the general public and artists of tomorrow with the work and life of one of our most important living artists.”
In a statement, Abramović said WePresent “have always been willing to look at new interpretations of my work and passions.”
The show will be free, but advanced tickets are required for entry. They will be available from August 18 here.
For the Abramović heads that can’t make it to London, Traces will also exist as a digital experience on the WePresent website.
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Next month, Grimes, Bon Iver, The 1975, and other musicians will try their hands at art in the name of raising awareness around the climate crisis. Each act will lend their vision to a separate immersive multimedia experience for a pop-up exhibition opening September 9 in Brooklyn. “Undercurrent,” as the event is called, is the debut outing of a new event company of the same name. 
Each of the event’s 11 installations will be developed in collaboration with one of three environmentally-focused nonprofits: Kiss the Ground, Ocean Conservancy, and Global Forest Generation. 
A “portion of ticket sales” will be donated to the organizations, but a spokesperson for Undercurrent didn’t specify how much. The event’s organizers will also set up education modules dedicated to each of the three nonprofits.

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The art projects, meanwhile, will extend across 60,000 square feet of installation space, along with food and drink vendors and areas for special programming. 
Most of the details regarding what the individual works will look like have yet to be made public, with the exception of Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon’s contribution. His will take the form of an immersive three-channel video installation that mixes collaged video, audio, and an improvisational dance directed by artists Eric Timothy Carlson and Aaron Anderson. 
“I just want somebody to walk out changed and to be thinking about things outside of the normal concepts that they’re usually worried about,” Vernon said in a statement. “We want them to walk out having a wider perspective on the meaning of life and what we can leave behind.” 

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Grimes also provided a little hint to what she’s thinking about in a statement about why she signed on: “If we don’t protect the environment, the future of consciousness will be artificial, not biological. Would mental health and wellness even be relevant in a world where emotions aren’t an evolutionary advantage?” 
Her project, which she describes as “A.I. Meditations,” was made with a generative language program that’s initially fed human-made meditations and then makes its own. “Personally, I find beauty in this work, but it represents a distinct artistic shift from things written by humans,” she said. “This work isn’t critical of A. I., but rather a neutral depiction of what the wellness landscape might look like without us.” 
The 1975. Courtesy of Undercurrent.
Other musicians contributing to the event include Jorja Smith, Khruangbin, Miguel, Mount Kimbie, Actress, and Nosaj Thing. (Each will be paid for their contributions, according to the Undercurrent representative.)
Undercurrent was created by business partners Steve Milton and Brett Volker, who previously founded Listen, a sound agency that designs audio and music for sonic branding.
“We’re all hoping Undercurrent becomes something that moves people to search out to imagine, to create in ways that benefit not just humanity, but our earth and all the various finite ecosystems that rely upon each other to make sure that everything works and everything is in order,” said Miguel. “Because right now,” he added, “it’s obviously not in order.”
Tickets for “Undercurrent” are on sale now. They cost $45 each.
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It feels familiar and alien at the same time. Many Berliners have stepped inside the towering walls of Berghain, the most famous nightclub in Germany, but it is different this summer. Its halls are not yet again filled with strobing lights and beating techno music. Instead, filling its empty dance floors is a glimmering, two-story art installation featuring an unusual soundscape of flora and fauna. The club has been re-wilded.
Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s ambitious installation, Berl-Berl, which opened this month, delicately transforms the notorious nightclub into a swampy 3D ecosystem using innovative technologies and gaming software. The artist, who is based in Berlin, stitched together masses of archival and original images to create a fluidly moving filmic landscape that twists and turns across vast and microscopic panorama.
“Berl,” the first syllable of Berlin, is actually an old Slavic word for swamp, a testament to the Slavic populations that used to reside in the region (some still do), and to the landscape’s former state, before it was drained in the 18th century. All the moving imagery used for the show was culled from around the German capital’s traces of remaining wetlands, or from the Nature Museum’s extensive archives. It immerses viewers in a fictional world of nature that feels impossible and infinite, but very much stems from the real—a realization that feels particularly harrowing in a summer of back-to-back climate emergencies, including Germany’s worst-in-a-century floods.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl (2021). Live simulation (still). Courtesy of the artist.
The sophisticated imagery is splashed across nearly a dozen screens over two levels, with reflective flooring creating a watery slick that doubles the vibrant imagery. It’s a unique take on immersive art that is tactile and contemplative—soothing, too, at a time when the theme of climate is wrought with anxiety.
Steensen, a recent resident at the Luma Arles Foundation in France, often focuses on the environment and harnesses technology to achieve a supernatural result. He tapped the acclaimed musical artist Arca to collaborate on the soundscape. She will have a performance at the exhibition in September.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s installation Berl-Berl is on view until September 26 at Halle am Berghain in Berlin.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, Halle am Berghain, 2021. © Timo Ohler
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl (2021). Live simulation (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl (2021). Live simulation (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl (2021). Live simulation (still). Courtesy of the artist.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl, Halle am Berghain, 2021. © Timo Ohler
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Born in Turin in 1871, artist Giacomo Balla went on to become one of the world’s best-known Modernist artists. Associated with the Italian Futurists, he left an indelible mark on the history of painting, uniting elements of fantasy with close studies of light, space, and movement.
Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s dynamic photographs, and along with peers Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, and Mario Sironi, Balla infused his works with the Futurist ethos that pervaded Italy in his day. It was not without controversy: members of the movement, including the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who wrote the Futurist Manifesto, were closely aligned with Italian Fascism. Those ties are what led Balla to break with the group.
Alex Cecchetti’s Come la luna si vede a volte in pieno giorno at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Balla’s work is on view now at the Fondazione MAXXI in Rome, the city in which he lived for more than 30 years. The show, titled “Casa Balla: From the House to the Universe and Back,” also includes a thematic exhibition of works inspired by Balla and his home.
The apartment where the artist and his family lived until his death in 1858, Casa Balla, is a kaleidoscopic space filled with cloud-scapes and mosaics, where each object, utensil, and article of clothing is a work of art unto itself. According to curators Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Domitilla Dardi, the apartment is a true gesamtkunstwerk.
See more images from the exhibition and Balla’s home below.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
Detail of Balla’s apartment at Fondazione MAXXI. Photo: ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini.
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