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    Marina Abramović’s Latest Immersive Installation Will Take You on a Journey Through Her Life Story

    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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    The Sistine Chapel (Experience) Is Coming to a City Near You, Letting You See Michelangelo’s Work (Or, Um, Images of It) Up Close

    Michelangelo’s famed Sistine Chapel is coming to cities across the U.S. thanks to high-resolution, nearly full-scale reproductions of the artist’s famed frescoes.
    “Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition” has been touring the globe since 2015, and previously went on view in New York beneath the soaring ribbed ceiling of Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus at the World Trade Center in 2017, under the title “Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel.”
    The latest iteration of the show, which has opened in Chicago, San Antonio, and Charlotte, North Carolina, and will soon be back in New York, seems to have been retooled to capitalize on the newfound popularity of the runaway hit “Immersive Van Gogh.”
    The earlier chapel presentation struck a scholarly note, with detailed wall texts identifying the figures in the paintings. And despite the Oculus’s location inside a mall, the brightly lit space recalled the classic white cube gallery. More

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    Grimes, Bon Iver, and Other Musicians Are Creating Immersive Art Experiences to Draw Attention to the Climate Crisis

    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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    An Artist Just Transformed Berlin’s Berghain Nightclub Into an Eerie, Immersive 3D Swamp—See Images Here

    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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    In Pictures: See Inside the Italian Futurist Painter Giacomo Balla’s Apartment, and Works From His Long-Awaited Retrospective in Rome

    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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    LACMA’s Game-Changing Partnership With Mega-Collector Budi Tek Will Kick Off With a Show of Contemporary Chinese Art

    In 2018, Chinese-Indonesian art collector Budi Tek announced an unprecedented partnership with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that effectively granted the museum—vis-a-vis a dedicated foundation—co-ownership of his vaunted collection of contemporary Chinese art.
    Now, for the first time, a selection of art from that trove is on view at LACMA. Twenty pieces from Tek’s collection make up the new exhibition “Legacies of Exchange,” including works by Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and Qiu Anxiong, among others.
    The show “highlights works that relate to cross-cultural exchange, both recent and historical, between China and the West,” said Susanna Ferrell, LACMA’s assistant curator of Chinese Art who organized the show, in a statement.
    The first of the show’s two sections brings together examples of Chinese artists in conversation with historical European paintings. In a 2006 canvas, for instance, Zhou Tiehai reimagines Jacopo Palma’s Venus and Cupid with the mascot for Camel cigarettes standing in for the Roman Goddess. In a 1997 painting, Yue Minjun recreates the central young girl in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas as a hysterical pink man.
    The second half of the exhibition, meanwhile, looks at the ways in which artists have appropriated the language of commercial advertising in their work, such as in Huang Yong Ping’s 1997 installation Da Xian: The Doomsday. The piece comprises a trio of larger-than-life porcelain bowls filled with boxes of cereal that all give the same expiration date: July 1, 1997, the day of Hong Kong’s handover to China.
    Yue Minjun, Infanta (1997). © Yue Minjun. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    A prominent entrepreneur, Tek began collecting art in 2004. By 2014, he had amassed a personal collection of more than 1,000 pieces and founded a 9,000-square-foot private institution—the Yuz Museum in Shanghai—to house it all. Then came an unfortunate turn: The following year, Tek was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
    Just as quickly as his museum opened its doors, Tek was forced to decide its long-term future. After China denied attempts to make the Yuz Museum public, Tek turned to Michael Govan, LACMA’s CEO and director, with an alternative idea. Their eventual collaboration yielded a new foundation to oversee the collection, which would live in China but otherwise travel between LACMA and the Yuz museum for temporary exhibitions.
    Likewise, the foundation is governed by a board of trustees made up equally of representatives from LACMA and the Yuz Museum.
    “I said to Michael Govan, ‘Now we are like a husband and wife. You don’t vote by saying I’m one percent bigger than you—you can’t outvote someone,’” Tek told Artnet News in 2018.
    The first fruits of the partnership came in the form of “In Production: Art and the Studio System,” an exhibition of works from LACMA’s collection that brought in over 20,000 visitors to the Yuz Museum in 2019. 
    See more images from “Legacies of Exchange” below.
    Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
    Wang Guangyi, Joseph Beuys’ Dead Hare (1994). © Wang Guangyi. Photo: Arnold Lee, Dijon Yellow Imaging.
    Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
    Qiu Anxiong, The Doubter 2010). © Qiu Anxiong. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Wang.
    Installation view of “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2021. Courtesy of LACMA.
    “Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation” is on view now through March 13, 2022 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
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    Damien Hirst’s Cherry Blossom Paintings, a Sentimental Ode to the Joys of Spring, Are Now on View in Paris

    The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris has opened a new solo show featuring works by Damien Hirst, making it his first museum show in France.
    The artist, best known for making artworks out of dissected sharks, pill cabinets, and suspended animals, recently made a return to painting to realize a 107-piece series of canvases featuring flowering cherry blossoms inspired by Pointillism and Impressionism.
    Thirty of the works are now on view at Cartier’s Paris-based foundation through next January.
    The works present branches laden with blossoms in white, maroon, pink, and green, all depicted in short, thick brushstrokes with elements of gestural painting that nod to Action Painting. More

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    Works From the Fabled Collection of Late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee Are Finally on Public View in South Korea

    This week, the Korean public got its first chance to see a smattering of artworks from the multi-billion-dollar collection amassed by the late Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee. 
    Two shows dedicated to Lee’s former possessions went on view at major venues in Seoul Wednesday, July 21. The events marked the first time that any pieces from his collection have gone on public display since being conferred to two institutions in April. 
    The National Museum of Korea unveiled a presentation of historical artifacts from the Lee collection, including 28 pieces designated by the state as National Treasures. The 77 objects on view represent just a fraction of the more than 21,600 items donated to the institution by Lee’s heirs. 
    Meanwhile, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) opened an exhibition of 58 Modern and contemporary paintings and sculptures by 34 Korean artists selected from the almost 1,500 artworks gifted from the Lee collection. 
    Jeong Seon, Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang (1751). Courtesy of the National Museum of Korea.
    “We selected items that have artistic and historic value for this exhibition,” National Museum curator Lee Soo-kyung said during a press preview, according to the Korea Herald. “Our main purpose is to show the characteristics of Lee Kun-hee’s collection.”
    On view in the two-month-long National Museum exhibition are rare examples of paintings, porcelain, metal statues, and wooden furniture dating from the prehistoric era to the early 20th century. The highlight of the group is Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang, a 1751 landscape painting by Joseon-period artist Jeong Seo. It’s thought to be the Samsung chairman’s first major art purchase.
    “A large part of the 1,488 artworks donated to our museum from Lee’s collection is Modern art, which our museum has a shortage of,” Park Mi-hwa, curator of the MMCA exhibition, explained in a preview of that institution’s show.
    “Accordingly, for the first of our special exhibitions featuring the donated Lee collection, we selected Modern art pieces by Korea’s most popular artists.” Among those represented in the exhibition are landscape painter Byeon Gwansik, abstractionist Kim Whanki, and sculptor Kwon Jinkyu.
    The historic gifts to the two museums this spring ended a months’-long debate about the fate of the more than 23,000 works of art following Lee’s death in October of 2020.

    MMCA 이건희컬렉션 특별전: 한국미술명작국립현대미술관 서울2021. 7. 21. ~ 2022. 3. 13.
    MMCA Lee Kun-hee Collection: Masterpieces of Korean Art MMCA Seoul21. Jul. 2021 ~ 13. Mar. 2022 pic.twitter.com/gVnh6rQK2c
    — 국립현대미술관 (@MMCAKOREA) July 20, 2021

    Media outlets had previously speculated that Lee’s heirs, including his son Lee Jae-yong and widow Hong Ra-hee, might sell some of the prized artworks to international buyers in order to cover the $11 billion (₩12.5 trillion) inheritance tax bill on the $20 billion (₩ 22 trillion) fortune the chairman left behind.
    Ultimately, the heirs chose to keep the collection in the country, distributing its pieces among state institutions, including the National Museum, MMCA, and the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art.
    But the artworks, owned by the state, won’t stay in these institutions for long. Earlier this month, the South Korean minister of culture, sports, and tourism, announced plans to build a new museum solely dedicated to the Lee collection. 
    Reservations to see the National Museum show are booked for the next month, a spokesperson for the museum told the Herald.
    Tickets to see the MMCA show aren’t quite as hard to get. There, reservations are unavailable through early August, per Korea JoongAng Daily. 
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