Shows & Exhibitions

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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There’s a new way to experience the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Art lovers making a pilgrimage to her hometown of Mexico City, where she lived at La Casa Azul with her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera, can now add a second stop to their itinerary: “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.”
That’s right, Kahlo, perhaps the world’s most famous woman artist, has gotten the “Immersive Van Gogh” treatment, with a 35-minute projected light show that animates 26 of the artist’s works in larger-than-life fashion. Because Kahlo specialized in self-portraits, the experience is something of an immersive autobiography, telling the story of her struggles with illness and disability, as well as her unconventional and often fraught romance with Rivera.
The exhibition is a way “to get to know Frida’s paintings, which have been around the world, but with a little bit of familiarity and intimacy,” the artist’s great-grandniece Mara de Anda told Agence France Presse. “I believe that Frida was very avant-garde and modern so this fits perfectly. She was a woman ahead of her time.”
But while the show does have the Kahlo family’s stamp of approval, it is also is a corporate affair, presented by the National Bank of Mexico Citibanamex and OCESA, a Mexican concert promotion company. The show was produced by Iñaki Barcos Melga and features visuals by Mexican multimedia experience company Cocolab, which bills itself as working at the intersection of art, technology, and entertainment.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
“FRIDA is an immersive, multi-sensory experience that takes the work of artist Frida Kahlo and presents it on a monumental scale accompanied by music, scenography, sculpture, interaction, and digital animation,” Cocolab said on its website.
The experience opened on July 6, to coincide what would have been the artist’s 114th birthday. It’s on view at Fronton Mexico, an entertainment venue housed in an Art Deco building.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Two-and-a-half years in the making, the experience features famous Kahlo paintings such as The Two Fridas, Girl with a Death Mask, Me and My Parrots, and The Broken Column, Mexican music, and narration drawn from the artist’s letters and diaries. It uses 90 projectors and 50 speakers to present a 360-degree vision of Kahlo’s life and career.
There is also an interactive “Free Stroke” installation where visitors can draw digitally, and a “Fantastic Creatures” room where they can chose the figures in Kahlo’s artwork that best represents them.
“You can also listen to the music she listened to, you can see details of her work, [and] you can also find out family secrets,” Frida Hentschel Romero, another great-grandniece, told Reuters, calling the experience “very different from what we have seen [before].”
Tickets range from MX$280 ($14) to MX$369 ($18).
See more images of the installation below.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo by Claudio Cruz/AFP via Getty Images.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
Installation view of “Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva.” Photo courtesy of Cocolab.
“Frida: La Experiencia Immersiva” is on view at Frontón México, De La República 17, Tabacalera, 06030 Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico, July 6–September 30, 2021. 
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The Folkestone Triennial opens to the public today, July 22, in the British seaside town of the same name.
For the fifth edition of the town’s triennial of public art (through November 2), organizers have commissioned 23 works by 25 artists. Curated by Lewis Biggs, who founded the Liverpool Biennial, this year’s edition is titled “The Plot.”
The triennial was postponed last year for logistical reasons, but Biggs said the pandemic context has made people “more willing to slow down and take notice of their physical surroundings,” adding that the public is “searching for [the] color and life-affirmation” that the exhibition offers.
“Following a year of lockdowns, stress and anxiety for everyone, it feels like there is a renewed energy here in Folkestone,” said Alastair Upton, the chief executive of Creative Folkestone, which organizes the triennial. “Collectively we are ready to welcome people back to the town: a place that is proud of its independence, resilience and creativity.”
Mariko Hori, Mellowing the Corners. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Among the works on view is a flaming “Climate Emergency Services” van by artist Mike Stubbs, which offers a warning that feels apt during the U.K.’s current searing heat wave, and a series of tongue-in-cheek billboards by Gilbert & George, such as a poster designating a “good behavior zone.” 
Meanwhile, minimalist benches by Richard Deacon have been installed in Kingsport Gardens, Jacqui Poncelet has created surreptitious peepholes in a wall with a kaleidoscopic view onto the former site of the town’s gasworks, and the Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum has given colorful new life to a slew of beach huts on Lower Saxon Way.
See more images of the 2021 Folkestone Triennial below.
Richard Deacon, Benchmark 1-5. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Morag Myerscough, Flock of Seagulls Bag of Stolen Chips. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Mike Stubbs, Climate Emergency Services. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Mariko Hori, Mellowing the Corners. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Jyll Bradley, Green _ Light (For M.R.. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2014. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Jason Wilsher-Mills, I Am Argonaut. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021 and produced by Shape Arts as part of the Adam Reynolds Award. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Jacqueline Poncelet, Looking Ahead. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Jacqueline Poncelet, Looking Ahead. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Jacqueline Donachie, Beautiful Sunday. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
HoyCheong Wong, Simon Davenport and Shahed Saleem, Nūr. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Gilbert & George, CHAIN BRAIN (2019), exhibited at Creative Folkestone Triennial courtesy of the artists. Photo by Thierry Bal.
Assemble, Skating Situations. Commissioned for Creative Folkestone Triennial 2021. Photo by Thierry Bal.
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The highly anticipated—and highly criticized—Humboldt Forum will finally open its doors to the public in Berlin tomorrow after years of delays.
The €680 million ($802 million) cultural institution will open with six shows this week, followed by a staggered rollout of further exhibitions in the fall and early next year.
Since its originally planned opening in December was effectively canceled due to the pandemic, the building has stood empty, apart from the curators working inside. Patio chairs dotting the main courtyard did little to add warmth to the Franco Stella-designed building, which is both a plaster-cast ode to the Prussian palace that once stood on the site before World War II, and a hyper-modern structure of cold concrete.
The opening of the more closely watched parts of the institution—the ethnological and Asian art collections—will open on September 22. Early next year, a temporary exhibition of the Berlin State Museums’ Benin bronze collection, one of the largest in the world, will open, and Germany has pledged to begin restitution that year to Nigeria. Further sections of those collections’ displays will open at the same time, including those related to South America, Islam, and southeast Asia.
Exhibition view “terrible beauty” © Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Photo: Alexander Schippel
Society and Nature
For now, the first and second floors of the building will host large-scale public shows that address the intersection of society and nature. The building’s name comes from Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian-era scientist and naturalist who is thought to have been one of the first to discuss human-induced climate change. (He was also complicit in colonial-era expeditions where he carried out his research.)
Highlights of the Humboldt’s inaugural program include “Terrible Beauty: Elephant. Human. Ivory,” an exhibition that looks at the history of the ivory trade, and spans the millennia of human’s fascination with the animal part.
“Ivory has a unique relationship with nature and culture,” said one of the show’s co-curators, Alberto Saviello. “It is a symbol of purity, wealth, and power, but also ruthless exploitation of nature and humans.” The show drives home the illicit industry’s global scale. Historical objects, like the first-known sculpture of mammoth, carved with mammoth tooth ivory, dates back 40,000 years, a delicately carved jewelry box from 16th-century Sri Lanka, and a crushed car from a failed elephant rescue mission are set within a blood-red space. In the entire exhibition, one can hear the labored breathing of a dying elephant.”
Exhibition view “terrible beauty” © Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss / Photo: Alexander Schippel.
After all the criticism around how objects arrived into the Humboldt’s collections, the exhibition remains slightly opaque on provenance. More often than not, details about the source of objects are not included in the show’s many instructional panels; instead, they’re tucked into red drawers that one needs to pull out to read.
Despite its sturdy exterior, the Humboldt Forum lies on increasingly fragile ethical ground. In the more than 10 years since its plans were drawn up, awareness around Europe’s long history of illicit acquisitions has moved from academic backwaters into mainstream news headlines.
One of the most engaging shows is the Humboldt Lab’s second-floor exhibition “After Nature,” which takes a novel and deconstructed approach to a scientific show about how climate change and species extinction is interrelated with democracy.
Kulturprojekte Berlin and Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. Photo: Alexander Schippel.
Glass vitrines hang from a gridded metal track on the ceiling in rows. The interactive exhibition is a sort of wunderkammer of diverse items that reconsider the political ideologies inextricably entwined in scientific research. The show’s curator, Johanna Stapelfeldt, described it as an act of “ambivalent remembering.”
Of course, even with the inaugural offering of ambitious exhibitions, the institution continues to draw discussions about whether it should even exist at all. The German Democratic Republic’s parliament, the Palast der Republik, stood in the same spot until 2006, when it was torn down to make way for what would become the Humboldt Forum. An exhibition in the cellar tries to offer some reconciliatory perspective by showing the many manifestations of the site from the relics that were found in the dig—conveying how the location has an even longer history than the Prussian era. Through its halls, small pieces of the Palast der Republik hang or appear on special displays. (A permanent video panorama by design bureau chezweitz tells the story of the location’s history more effectively.)
“I don’t think anyone would have torn down the Palast der Republik today,” said Alfred Hagemann, head of the Humboldt’s “history of the site” department.
It is indeed encouraging to finally see the museum’s intellectual prowess working in concert with the building, but how well it will all play out given the challenges that remain in public opinion is an open question.
The Humboldt Forum in Berlin opens July 20.
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Next week, half a dozen newly minted NFTs by artist Urs Fischer will go on view in a digital exhibition hosted by Pace, another step in the gallery’s full-fledged commitment to crypto-art.  
The show, presented in collaboration with the Loïc Gouzer-founded Fair Warning auction app and the digital market platform MakersPlace, will live on Pace’s website. 
Each of Fisher’s NFTs features two quotidian objects floating in a blank white space like a trippy screensaver, constantly converging with one another to form Frankensteinian compound-sculptures: a broccoli stalk bisecting a green sponge, a showerhead merging with a red Nike shoe. Weird stuff. 
The works belong to “CHAOS,” a larger series of 501 NFTs produced by the Swiss artist.
For buyers, each piece comes with a reference rendering, access to the raw data behind the visuals, and instructions for how to exhibit it.
“The individual objects selected for ‘CHAOS’ are engineered, cultured, or manufactured by humans and sourced from the physical world and transformed into a 3D digital model through 3D scanning,” the project’s website explains. They’ll be offered up for $50,000 a pop, according to the gallery. 
The artist will offset the carbon emissions involved in the minting of each work through a partnership with the nonprofit Conservation International. 
Urs Fischer, CHAOS #23 Splendor (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Fischer debuted “CHAOS” in April when he partnered with Pace to sell the first entry in the series, CHAOS #1 Human, which depicts a lighter colliding with an egg.
The work sold through Fair Warning for $97,700. (The collaboration reportedly caused a rift between the artist and his longtime dealer, Gagosian.) Pace did not disclose the prices for the new NFTs.
The first 500 “CHAOS” works will be unveiled over the course of several months. After that, a capstone 501st artwork, composed of all the objects in the pieces that came before it, will be minted. 
Among mega-galleries, Pace has been perhaps the most ardent embracer of the crypto art wave. Earlier this month, the gallery announced that it would accept cryptocurrency as a form of payment for all artworks, physical or digital. And in September, it will launch its own dedicated platform for selling artists’ NFTs.
See more examples from Fisher’s upcoming show below.
Urs Fischer, CHAOS #20 Sashay (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Urs Fischer, CHAOS #22 Simulacrum (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Urs Fischer, CHAOS #24 Analysand (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
Urs Fischer, CHAOS #25 Gratis (2021). Courtesy of Pace Gallery.
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Lithuania’s Golden Lion-winning performance at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which drew snaking lines around the pavilion, is going on a world tour.
Sun & Sea (Marina), a poignant live performance that sees opera singers and volunteers sing songs that address our delicate relationship to the planet, will travel to the U.S. after its showing in Berlin this weekend.
The performance will premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from September 15 to 26. (Tickets go on sale July 27.) After its New York run, the production will tour Arcadia Exhibitions in Philadelphia, the Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, ARTnews reported. (Dates beyond New York have yet to be confirmed.)
The collaboration between Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytėm, struck a chord with the public as they looked down from a balcony to watch performers stretch out on an artificially sandy beach, bake in fake lights, and sing harmonies about their mundane existences, which the pavilion’s curator Lucia Pietroiusti described as “songs of worry and of boredom, songs of almost nothing.”
Only slowly does the reality of climate change set in for the viewer, as a wealthy mother brags about seeing the “bleached, pallid whiteness” of the Great Barrier Reef and a young man complains that it did not snow on Christmas, and instead “felt like it could be Easter.”
Co-Artistic Directors, Helen Turner and Pablo Wendel with their dog Coal in the Bauhaus swimming hall, which will be the location of the Sea & Sun performances in Berlin this weekend. © Lukas Korschan for The FACE.
The performance is likely to resonate even more after the pandemic, a time when our anxieties about natural calamities reached a fever pitch and immersive performances were impossible to stage.
The Berlin chapter, set to take place July 17 and July 18 at an abandoned Bauhaus swimming pool outside of Berlin, sold out in two days. (Walk-ins may be accommodated, organizers say, but there are no guarantees.)
“It’s been two years in the making, and after four postponements, it’s completely surreal that its finally happening,” said Helen Turner, the director of E-Werk Luckenwalde, which is organizing the event. “The piece is powerful, especially in the location we have, an abandoned swimming hall, which speaks to ecological catastrophe and increasing feelings of fragility and vulnerability.”
While 5,000 people normally would have been able to attend, social-distancing restrictions will limit that number to 1,500. Masks must be worn on site.
The performance is well-suited to the E-Werk location—an arts center that doubles as an electrical power station, fueling both the surrounding area and its own art projects.
But even with clean energy, the production is… quite the production. For just two days, it cost €130,000 (around $153,500) to get off the ground, according to Turner, and involved 60 performers and cultural workers (not to mention tons of sand, which was carted in from nearby). Organizers in Venice estimated the original version cost $3 a minute to stage.
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