International Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
“Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art”
NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA
OTTAWA
Through September 2
Curated by Greg Hill, Candice Hopkins, and Christine Lalonde
For millennia, human beings have constructed their histories through before-and-after narratives of first inhabitants and newcomers. Lodged deep in the collective consciousness, these stories have manifested themselves in various art forms over the centuries, and their retellings continue in literary and artistic practices, their tone dependent on the sociopolitical climate and the identity of the speaker. “Sakahàn” (To Light a Fire) surveys the contemporary topography of indigenous art, featuring more than 150 works made during the past decade by eighty-one international artists—including Jimmie Durham, Brian Jungen, and Teresa Margolles—who acknowledge their own indigenous heritage and question what this label might mean now. Ambitious in scope and scale, the project represents years of research by its organizers, who will also present their findings in the catalogue, alongside essays by eleven artists, curators, and scholars, providing a much-needed reassessment of this age-old topic’s complexities.
— Kristina Van Dyke
General Idea, P is for Poodle, 1983, color photograph, 30 x 25".
General Idea
ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
TORONTO
Curated by Frédéric Bonnet and Odile Burluraux
“Haute Culture: General Idea, a Retrospective, 1969–1994” will change the image of Conceptual art as “lab test” into something much more fabulous. Emerging out of the 1960s Canadian counterculture, which accepted and even encouraged polymorphous perversity, General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) established itself as an outfit of anti-art art-pranksters, living their work as theater and working prolifically to exploit every medium. In this show, which spans the group’s activity from 1969 until Partz and Zontal died of aids in 1994, we’ll see how they chilled us, thrilled us, confounded us, or just pissed us off—always delivering an extraordinary display of control over both format and dissemination. The exhibition catalogue features a previously unpublished 1991 interview with the artists.
— Gregg Bordowitz
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Killing Machine, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable.
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO
TORONTO
Through August 18
Curated by Kitty Scott and Bruce Grenville
This survey of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s collaborations brings together eight installation works made between 1995 and 2010. Viewers will encounter a series of environments, including a miniature diorama (the 1999 Muriel Lake Incident, for which you put on earphones and poke your head into the eerily accurate model), some rooms you can’t enter (as in the cabin-size construction Opera for a Small Room, 2005, seemingly possessed by poltergeists), and newer works you can huddle in with a good friend (such as the abandoned dentist’s office of Storm Room, 2009). This duo’s characteristic mayhem is consistently orchestrated via computer programming of precisely recorded binaural sounds that, as the show will surely demonstrate, run the gamut from whispers aimed only at you to bone-rattling thunder and lightning that seem to shake the world.
— Caroline A. Jones
David Bowie wearing striped bodysuit designed by Kansai Yamamoto for the Aladdin Sane tour, 1973. Photo: Masayoshi Sukita.
“David Bowie Is”
VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
LONDON
Through July 28
Curated by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh
Always changing, ever evolving, David Bowie actualized the shift from young mod Brit to full-blown icon of pop, a stamp on people’s minds even now, as the exhibition title’s “is” reminds. Culling some three hundred items from the David Bowie Archive, including costumes, set designs, storyboards, films, diary entries, instruments, handwritten lyrics, and album art, the V&A will show an array of Bowies—from sixteen-year-old David Jones to Ziggy Stardust spaceman to impresario of glam rock and the New Romantics to late-’90s Alexander McQueen–cloaked “earthling”—all under a single roof. An accompanying catalogue explores how Bowie shaped fashion, with essays addressing his polymorphous musicality, his extreme charades, and his encounter with William S. Burroughs, which brought him down from space and back to the street.
— Jeff Rian
Christoph Schlingensief, Mutters Maske (Mother’s Mask), 1987–88, 16 mm, color, sound, 85 minutes.
Christoph Schlingensief
KW INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
BERLIN
Curated by Susanne Pfeffer with Klaus Biesenbach and Anna-Catharina Gebbers
Whereas the Fifty-Fourth Venice Biennale’s German pavilion staged a requiem for Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010), this first retrospective dedicated to the auteur, theater maker, opera director, and performer promises to throw the relentless vitality of his boundary-crossing oeuvre into relief. The exhibition, which will remain open day and night for the show’s duration, will offer not only a rich selection of Schlingensief’s filmic works but also several impromptu contributions by his longtime collaborators—a plan poised to accommodate the artist’s patently idiosyncratic fusion of Actionism, Fluxus, “social sculpture,” and the inanities of spectacle culture. A catalogue with essays by the curators and Elfriede Jelinek, Tilda Swinton, and Alexander Kluge, among others, will further elucidate the tactics and legacy of this pivotal figure of postreunification Germany.
— André Rottmann
Cover of Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools (Fall 1968). From “The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside.”
“The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside”
HAUS DER KULTUREN DER WELT
BERLIN
Through July 1
Curated by Diedrich Diederichsen and Anselm Franke
Nature or network? This was the question haunting 1960s California. And the answer was, of course, both. Ecology and technology were seen as part of a single teeming system, hopefully headed toward homeostasis: Counterculturalists led the search for a universal equilibrium between tools and worlds, minds and machines and energies, as a way of remaking the postwar world in all its crisis and promise. This exhibition endeavors to trace that quest, taking as its figurehead Stewart Brand—impresario and visionary creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, that manual for life in the nuclear age. With an eclectic range of more than forty works by artists from then and now, including Eleanor Antin, Bruce Yonemoto, and the Otolith Group, curators Franke and Diederichsen aim to tell the story of how the West tuned in, dropped out, and became Silicon Valley.