Exhibitions

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.
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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.

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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.
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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. 
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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.
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