Exhibitions

The world came to a halt. People stopped traveling. But art didn’t stand still. Weightless works using augmented reality by artists including Nina Chanel Abney, Darren Bader, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, KAWS, and Alicja Kwade traveled from London to Beijing, erecting a creative bridge between continents. They appear in the exhibition “Mirage” at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art: the largest-ever institutional show of AR art, which includes a number of newly commissioned works.
Will new immersive technologies like these change the global art world? Philip Tinari, the director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, and Daniel Birnbaum, the director of AR art platform Acute Art, connected to discuss the joint exhibition, the future of the museum, and how to make the art industry less wasteful.
Philip Tinari. Photo courtesy of the UCCA; Daniel Birnbaum. Photo: John Scarisbrick.

Daniel Birnbaum: Sitting in my kitchen in London thinking about our collaboration, I remember an old book on Kraftwerk, the German techno pioneers, that opens with a dream sequence. Founding members Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider are cycling in the Alps. They stop on a mountain pass and take out the tiny computers that they always carry with them. With a special code, they launch simultaneous concerts in London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Amsterdam, Rome, and Stockholm. In each of these cities, a group of pre-programmed robots perform Kraftwerk’s music. 
This is no longer a futuristic vision. We all carry miniature computers in our pockets and have access to innumerable globally distributed cultural events. Today, we don’t need any pre-programmed mannequins. Augmented reality is so much easier. 
What do you think—will these tools be important for an art world that wants to keep the global conversation alive without the frantic traveling?   
Philip Tinari: This was, if anything, the big lesson of 2020: so much of what we took for granted as necessary turns out to be otherwise. As we were emerging from the Chinese lockdown in the spring, we organized an exhibition called “Meditations in an Emergency,” a group show of 26 international artists. A year ago, the idea of installing a work by an artist like Pierre Huyghe, Mika Rottenberg, Wolfgang Tillmans, or Lawrence Abu Hamdan without having them or their team on site would have been unthinkable—and yet it turned out to be just fine. 
Later in the year, we installed a painting show with Elizabeth Peyton over Zoom, and then a more complicated show, “Immaterial/Re-Material: A Brief History of Computing Art,” with many of the digital pioneers actually logging into our computers from Europe or North America to tweak their pieces. 
Our exhibition “Mirage” is a culmination of this long arc—here we have a show that was never meant to be anything other than virtual, and yet at the same time it is also curated in close relation to our context and our space. It demands the viewer’s physical presence, even to interact with works that do not occupy physical space. I think it may offer a taste not only of how artists will continue to work with augmented reality, but of how museums may evolve in the coming years.
Nina Chanel Abney, Imaginary Friend (2020). Courtesy of the artist, Acute Art, and UCCA.

In recent years, works including a virtual component have been on display in exhibitions in ways that obey old institutional structures. One could imagine immersive experiences distributed across geographies in other ways. I think our collaboration shows the potential: Nina Chanel Abney’s Imaginary Friend hovers mysteriously in mid-air and seems to be blessing the grounds. Darren Bader’s giant girl carrying a crucifix and accompanied by a lively little dog seems to have broken out of some religious allegory. KAWS’s large COMPANION floats in the air as if weightless. How do people react to them?
It has been exciting to arrive at UCCA each morning and to know that the lobby, our most public area, is haunted by all these virtual characters and objects that are both there and not there. Even if you cannot see them with the naked eye, after a while, you start to catch yourself intruding on “their” space, or seeing the works in your mind’s eye, even without using the app. They start to feel like old friends.
Which piece do you find most surprising? 
Cao Fei’s Li Nova is certainly eerie. It has been wonderful to see viewers react immediately to this spectral little boy who suddenly appears to be sitting in our lobby, doing his homework, surrounded by little floating turtles.
Once or twice every century, a new visual technology appears that changes what art can be. Writer Douglas Coupland says that the introduction of VR and AR represents a shift comparable to the introduction of TV or even electricity. When a new artistic medium emerges, there is always this window of experimentation—a period of confusion and exaggeration perhaps, when things are not defined yet. Sometimes, that period is the most interesting from an artistic point of view…
One interesting thing has been watching the audience learn to master this new technology on site. It is still emergent, which means there are issues to work out. Add to that the particular nature of the Chinese internet, which means that downloading a new app and unlocking the works contained in it are not as second-nature as they might be elsewhere. And still, there is always this wonderful moment of surprise when the first work appears. It’s as if the viewer is suddenly in a new relationship with a device that is such a part of everyday life, and now becomes a vessel for art. 
Photos of visitors participating with the Acute Art App at UCCA. Courtesy Acute Art and UCCA.

The idea that today’s reactions to the virus represent a kind of dress rehearsal for the climate crisis is a recurring theme in the discourse surrounding the pandemic. Some museums have declared a climate emergency, but so far it remains unclear what the call for radical change could imply beyond the museum doing less of exactly that which made the institution attractive in the first place. I wonder if these new visual possibilities will change the function of the museum?
I think increasingly the function of the museum is to articulate a community, and the most direct way to do that is to assemble people in a common space. That’s what’s most appealing to me about this exhibition: rather than being disembodied, it actually creates an intense engagement with the physical setting and the institutional apparatus of the museum. The show has just been open for one weekend and our visitor experience team is saying that they have never received so many questions, or had so many interactions, as they have in these two days. Sure, some of that is because the technology is emergent and there are questions around how to use the app or activate the works, but a lot of it is also this shared sense of wonder. 
Do we need new kinds of institutions? 
This extended slowdown has allowed and encouraged us to think more carefully about what goes into each of the projects we take on. I have talked about a kind of “new intentionality”: it’s not that we will completely stop doing major international touring shows, it’s just that we will need to have a much clearer idea of what should go into them and what audiences should get out of them. Another trend has been that of institution as caretaker—of its staff, its community, and even of individual artists. This period of difficulty has made the depth of our connections with the scene around us even more clear. That’s why, for example, the show opening just after ours is an emerging artist prize exhibition staged by a company from Hainan—it usually happens in Sanya this time each year, but in this moment of scaling back, we decided to make our space available for works by these 15 finalists and a program of symposia around them.
Clearly, the art fair and biennial models that have dominated the international art world for the past two decades will seem unacceptable to ecologically engaged audiences moving forward. Perhaps what we need are hybrid spaces made possible when physical locations are connected virtually? Thousands of people flying to another continent for a weekend to buy and sell art that also has been transported there by air may no longer seem like the ideal mode of exchange. 
And yet somehow, those offline events were even more suited to being a kind of neutral platform. When you move the art fair online, you immediately come up against the culturally divergent practices and expectations that people bring with them to their screens. The screen is such an immediate and intimate space, and the interface so embedded. I’m thinking here of Chinese collectors trying to log onto the online viewing rooms of major international galleries and wondering why the download speeds are so slow, and why there is no immediate chat assistant, like you find on [Chinese shopping website] Taobao.
Darren Bader, LOVE (2019). Courtesy of the artist, Acute Art, and UCCA.

That form of globalism will end. But what will take its place? New forms of localism? An emphasis on grassroots initiatives? 
My friend Kyle Chayka wrote a piece in Frieze last December about the coterie of art critics who were completely inured to the wonders of the world after years on the international junket circuit. And we all know dealers and curators and collectors who would post from a new city every three days. I think we all knew this would not last forever. Hopefully in the next world, we will still move sometimes, but perhaps physical travel will be the most extreme behavior on a continuum of ways to connect. From the perspective of a museum, there will always be an allure and a rationale for more cosmopolitan projects—it will just need to be stronger. And this may create more bandwidth for local initiatives. 
Remember: digital technologies are not entirely harmless from an ecological perspective. Server farms consume gigantic amounts of power and the green energy revolution has a long way to go to reach carbon neutrality. Will technology save us?
I find the work of John Gerrard very instructive here—his Western Flag occupies the wall behind where all our AR works are installed. So much of his work, and that of the other artists in the exhibition “Immaterial/Re-Material: A Brief History of Computing Art,” is about exactly that: the physical footprint of the virtual world. I often stand near that work and watch as our staff receive all manner of deliveries using the extremely broad and efficient constellation of Chinese “O2O” (online-to-offline) apps, which bring everything to your doorstep thanks to a regimented, algorithmic, and yet still precarious labor force of “delivery knights” on electric scooters.
Olafur Eliasson, Uncertain Cloud “Wunderkammer” (2020) and KAWS HOLIDAY SPACE (2020). Courtesy of the artists, Acute Art, and UCCA.

David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, talks about Silicon Valley’s “Church of Technology” and the belief that the ever-accelerating progress of machine intelligence will save the planet. But, he wonders, how many of us will play augmented reality games on a planet that is 6°C (42.8°F) warmer? On the other hand, AR might help us change our patterns of behavior. 
I suppose that other than doing our part to make our lifestyles and our institutions more responsible, we can also try to make the works do some kind of consciousness raising. I love how Olafur Eliasson’s burning sun appears on the terraced seating at our entrance, a kind of reminder that we cannot sit still for much longer.
Do you think that these art forms will be accepted in China more quickly than in Europe and the US?   
I have always loved how the calcified hierarchies of the 19th and 20th centuries never had time to take root here, meaning that, government suppression aside, the public has always been curious and open in a way that continues to feel fresh. Social media, unable to host difficult social and political conversations, has veered even further toward what I have taken to calling the “autoerotics of authoritarianism”—that endless flow of scripted art selfies. 
And yet it is impossible to take a photograph of oneself with an AR work (unless you are holding two phones, which is very difficult even for the most agile influencer). And so somehow, in addition to reinforcing a connection with the place (by making the viewer stand in a specific spot and scan a specific location), this exhibition also has a relational valence whereby you might need to ask a fellow museum-goer to help you take a photo with your favorite work. Thankfully, the coronavirus is—for now, at least—on the wane, and people are not afraid to touch each other’s devices.
“Mirage: Contemporary Art in Augmented Reality” is on view at UCCA in Beijing through February 10, 2021. 
Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

It’s not customary that an artistic project begins with a postscript, but when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, it turned the world upside down.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s newest work, an ongoing multimedia project co-commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art, was not exempt from this topsy-turviness. In fact, it was especially susceptible to it.
“We began writing in February about the constant mourning, loss, and grief in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and that general area, even though our work always tries to resonate in a broader way,” Abou-Rahme said in a phone interview. “When the pandemic happened and there was this immense global scale of loss and mourning, obviously the text started to take on a completely different significance.”
The first part of May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–), the “postscript,” is now live on Dia’s website, the latest in the institution’s series of online commissions, which began 25 years ago. The project will gradually expand with more chapters in the coming months, and, at an undetermined future time (pandemic developments permitting), be capped off with an exhibition and performance at MoMA, hopefully featuring Palestinian electronic musicians and other performers.
At the time of the Arab Spring a decade ago, the Palestinian artists became captivated with the way everyday people documented and published online their own experiences of the historic events in the Middle East. For them, all this activity redefined what archives are and can be.
They began to download and transcribe videos of public performances, dances, readings, and protests, though they didn’t know how they might eventually use them; many have since disappeared from the internet and exist only in the artists’ archive.
The project took shape slowly and went through a few iterations, and evolved into its present form over the past three years. Its title comes from Roberto Bolaño’s “Infrarealist Manifesto,” an indictment of complacency that the renowned Chilean writer wrote in 1976.
Living in Brooklyn, the artists found themselves at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. “Having the privilege of having left Palestine and not living under those conditions,” Abou-Rahme said, “it was intense to feel that the world had become like Palestine and there was no escape.”
With the entire globe becoming steeped in loss, the meaning of their project—especially amid a glut of “the art world goes online” content—could only change. Although it was initially slated to be released in the spring, Dia and the artists agreed to put on the brakes as the artwork’s meaning was retrospectively altered.
“So,” said Abou-Rahme, “we needed to start with the postscript.”
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Postscript: after everything is extracted (detail from May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth), 2020– . Collection of the artists, commissioned by Dia Art Foundation for the Artist Web Projects series. © Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.

Postscript: After everything is extracted combines the duo’s sometimes rumbling, sometimes meditative downbeat electronic music (they perform as Tashweesh) with sections of found texts. These pop up on small tiles, which the viewer can click on to enlarge, toggle between English and Arabic, and dismiss. They appear alongside images of two phone screens with a man’s and a woman’s avatars on them. It’s a little bit like FaceTiming with these two people while messaging one another poems about loss.
“Every day we mourn another death,” says one text. “We mourn the disappearing land, the severed horizon. We mourn the deterioration of our bodies.”
“We are in the negative / (no) / we are the negative / How easily we mutate / mutate and mourn / how many times have I died / how many times have we died / too many,” reads another.
Under the heading “New York,” one text reads: “This country is on fire. Some things need to burn.” Another, headed “Palestine,” refers to the violence of occupation: “I know the land is scorched.”
In keeping with the long period over which the project has unfurled, the next phase of the online component will expand in summer 2021.
Both born in 1983 (Abbas in Cyprus and Abou-Rahme in Boston), the artists have built up an impressive résumé. Over the last decade, they’ve been included in high-profile shows like the São Paulo Biennale and the Istanbul Biennial, as well as in the Palestinian pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. They’ve mounted solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the Kunstverein Hamburg, and their work has entered well-known collections including that of Berlin’s Julia Stoschek.
“I’ve always been attracted to artists with a research-driven practice who aren’t afraid to approach media and performance in a way that can be a sharing of knowledge,” Dia curator Kelly Kivland told Artnet News. She describes the duo’s practice as a kind of “choreographic thinking” that brings various voices together. “It’s the political themes of pushing against defined borders and cultures that I find incredibly prescient.”
Through this Friday, December 18, two video works, Only the beloved keeps our secrets (2016) and And yet my mask is powerful Part 1 (2016–18), are available on Dia’s website.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

As part of a collaboration with Art21, hear news-making artists describe their inspirations in their own words.
The post ‘It Was About Meeting Myself in the Middle’: Watch Artist Marela Zacarías Meld Ancient Mexican Traditions With Contemporary Sculpture appeared first on artnet News. More

“Rear Window” online at White CubeThrough January 19, 2021

What the gallery says: “In the 1954 thriller, a photojournalist is confined to his New York apartment after breaking his leg and succumbs to an obsession with watching his neighbors. The audience is made complicit in his voyeurism as, unable to tear himself away from his window, he witnesses dramatic scenes unfold within his field of vision.
Featuring paintings and photographs by Ellen Altfest, Jeff Burton, Gillian Carnegie, Julie Curtiss, Judith Eisler, Celia Hempton, Danica Lundy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Laurie Simmons, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, this exhibition invites us to consider how artists construct scenes and suggest narratives, whilst exploring the idea of ‘the gaze’ which Hitchcock’s film was instrumental in formulating.”
Why it’s worth a look: White Cube’s newly launched online viewing room kicks off with an homage to Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchhock curated by director Susanna Greeves. It feels right for this era of life under lockdown, as the pandemic resurges and cold weather creeps in. So many of us are now are limited to only looking these days, as the fear of spreading germs relegates us to a life mediated by screens.
The artists included in this show have focused on the idea of the gaze, exploiting and manipulating it—but also finding new and deeper meaning through looking slow, and long, and with interest. Artists Jeff Wall and Laurie Simmons both construct tableaux that are similar to film directors, while Jeff Burton’s photography is drawn directly from his experience working in the porn industry. A treat all around.
What it looks like:

Jeff Wall, Summer Afternoons (2013). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Jeff Wall, Summer Afternoons (2013). © Jeff Wall. Courtesy White Cube.

Carrie Mae Weems, Scenes & Takes (2016). © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Darkroom Mirror (_2070021), (2017). © Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter, Los Angeles.

Celia Hempton, Jay, Minnesota, United States, 31st August 2017 (2017). © Celia Hempton. Courtesy the artist and Southarn Reid.

Laurie Simmons, Long House (Pink Bedroom), (2004). © Laurie Simmons. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, NY.

Julie Curtiss, The whispers (2020). © the artist. Photo © Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy of White Cube.

Julie Curtiss, Le serpent qui danse (2020). © the artist. Photo © Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. Courtesy of White Cube.

Danica Lundy, Captain (2020). © Danica Landy. Courtesy of the artist and Super Dakota, Brussels.

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Playing harmonica) (1990-99). © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

Laurie Simmons, The Boxes (Ardis Vinklers) Ballroom, (2005). © Laurie Simmons. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, NY.

Laurie Simmons, Study for Long House (Red Shoes), (2003). © Laurie Simmons. Image courtesy the artist and Salon 94, NY.

Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only killed nearly 1.3 million people worldwide—it has also made rituals of collective bereavement dangerous and practically impossible. 
“It’s not natural,” says artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose native country of Mexico is home to a particularly festive form of honoring the departed. “People feel like they’ve been suspended.”
A new artwork by the Mexico City-born, Montreal-based artist proffers a poetic alternative tailor-made for this globalized, techno-mediated moment.
For the work, Lozano-Hemmer developed an AI-operated machine that transforms user-submitted photographs of the deceased into temporary portraits plotted out in grains of sand. 
On a live stream, viewers can watch as the images take shape in the artist’s studio across 30 minutes, as a robotic arm methodically deposits granules until a figure coalesces.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, A Crack in the Hourglass (2020), detail. Courtesy of the artist.

But just as quickly, the board tilts forward, the sand slips, the image dissolves, and only a black backboard remains.
“That’s what helps you understand that this is over, and that you need to let go,” Lozano-Hemmer tells Artnet News. 
The title of the work, A Crack in the Hourglass, is a central metaphor about our broken sense of time in the pandemic.
“What happens if the hourglass has a fissure and sand starts to empty out?” Lozano-Hemmer told Artnet News. “More importantly, how can we move the hourglass to collect the sand that’s been lost [to put it] into something that’s meaningful?” 
The project was commissioned by the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City and was originally intended to be installed on site. But the logistical realities of the pandemic soon made that impossible. (The museum is officially closed for the rest of the year.)

As an alternative, Lozano-Hemmer devised a digital platform that would allow users to submit photos of the dead accompanied by personalized dedications. 
The pivot makes sense: the online format has shifted the work from a local memorial in Mexico City, to a more widely accessible snapshot of the pandemic writ large.
On the project’s website, you can scroll through the archive of portraits already completed. As of November 12, around 50 portraits have been made. (The project launched on November 7.)
Critically, the sand is recycled for each portrait—a reminder, Lozano-Hemmer says, that in death we’re all equal. 
Perhaps more meaningful, though, is that the artwork brings people together, which is harder—and more crucial—than perhaps ever before.
Watch A Crack in the Hourglass live, or submit your photo, at www.acrackinthehourglass.net.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More

Often when looking at photographs, we assume they are true, that they recorded an actual event in a particular moment in time, captured with the alchemy of light and sealed with a chemical reaction.
But photographs are just as often—and perhaps, more often than not—faked. They are staged, cropped, edited, amplified, quieted, and tied to very specific perspectives. Photographs are rarely, if ever, “true.”
The Vancouver-based photographer Jeff Wall, who investigates precisely this in his work, is dedicated to probing this boundary between reality and fantasy, and seamlessly blending fact and fiction.
In an exclusive interview with Art21 as part of the Extended Play series, Wall explains his 2014 work Changing Room, which shows a woman in the midst of trying on clothes inside what looks to be a department store’s fitting room.
Her bottom half is clad in a floral-patterned skirt, while she pulls a wildly printed frock over her head, obscuring her face. We can see that she’s standing opposite a mirror, flush against the changing room wall.

Production still from the Art21 “Extended Play” film, “Jeff Wall: An Impossible Photograph.” © Art21, Inc. 2017.

“It’s not a mirror image, because if you look at the hangers, they say ‘Barneys’ on them, not backwards,” Wall says in the video. “Therefore, the only thing that you can be seeing is what the mirror sees. So, that’s a picture that can’t be made.”
This slippage between fact and fiction is at the heart of Wall’s work.
“If you pay attention to that picture and enjoy it and look at it—get involved in it—it’ll come to you. And when it comes to you, it’ll be exciting” he says.
So the next time you scroll through Instagram or flip through the pages of a magazine—or take a look at one of Jeff Wall’s photographs—remember his words: “The most beautiful artistry is hidden.”
Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21’s series Extended Play, below. The brand new 10th season of the show is available now at Art21.org. 
[embedded content]
This is an installment of “Art on Video,” a collaboration between Artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new series of the nonprofit Art21’s flagship series Art in the Twenty-First Century is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes of other series like New York Close Up and Extended Play and learn about the organization’s educational programs at Art21.org.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More