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.
“When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013”
FONDAZIONE PRADA | MILAN
VENICE
Through November 24
Curated by Germano Celant, Thomas Demand, and Rem Koolhaas
This summer, every young curator’s dream comes true: Instead of perusing that good old catalogue, in itself an art-world fetish of the highest caliber, everyone will be able to see the contents of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann’s most legendary exhibition in the flesh. “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form” appeared at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969 as Europe’s first major survey of Conceptual art. The local criticism was so ruthless that Szeemann decided to resign as the museum’s director, only to assume a new role (one that he is credited with inventing): that of independent curator. Organized by Germano Celant in dialogue with artist Thomas Demand and architect Rem Koolhaas, this reconstruction will include 90 percent of the show’s original works and will be accompanied by a publication with no fewer than fifteen essays by such historians as Mary Anne Staniszewski and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
— Daniel Birnbaum
Cildo Meireles, Marulho (Surge of the Sea), 1991, wood decking, books, audio track. Installation view, Museu de Arte Moderna de Rio de Janeiro.
Cildo Meireles
MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
MADRID
Through September 29
Curated by João Fernandes
One of the most significant Brazilian artists to emerge in the 1970s, Cildo Meireles epitomizes the ways in which Latin American artists have reshaped art-historical narratives of modernism and its aftermaths. His practice opens onto the experiential with formal elegance and arresting political critique. In Madrid, Meireles presents more than 100 pieces, a selection organized around an axis of four major works: Olvido (Oblivion), 1987; Marulho (Surge of the Sea), 1991; Abajur (Lantern), 2010; and Amerikka, an installation conceived in 1991 that comprises a floor of 20,000 wooden eggs set beneath a ceiling of 50,000 bullets and that will be realized here for the first time. Expect this survey to cement Meireles’s role in forging the visual forms, communication models, and perceptual strategies through which art has come to represent, and continues to contest, the social sphere. Travels to the Fundação Serralves, Porto, Portugal, Oct. 26, 2013–Jan. 27, 2014; HangarBicocca, Milan, Mar. 6–June 1, 2014.
— Nuit Banai
Ericka Beckman, Out of Hand, 1980, Super 8 transferred to 16 mm, color, sound, 25 minutes.
Ericka Beckman
KUNSTHALLE BERN
BERN
Through August 4
Curated by Fabrice Stroun
In her Super 8 sound films of the 1970s and ’80s, American artist Ericka Beckman created sharp-edged concatenations of lo-fi visual effects, dance-like performances, and No Wave audio compositions, always pointing toward the concept of play and its aesthetic and psychological implications. Beckman’s survey at the Kunsthalle Bern this summer will feature some of the best of these seminal works—including We Imitate; We Break Up, 1978; The Broken Rule, 1979; and Out of Hand, 1980—as well as a selection of photos, drawings, and later films such as Switch Center, 2002, and Tension Building, 2012, through which she has continued her ludological investigations. Anchoring this comprehensive display will be Boundary Figures, a major 1989 installation comprising light, sound, and photography, and a new room-size piece conceived specifically for this venue. The catalogue will feature an essay by influential game designer and theorist Eric Zimmerman.
— Ed Halter
Gianni Piacentino
CENTRE D'ART CONTEMPORAIN GENÈVE
GENEVA
Through August 4
Curated by Andrea Bellini
Turin-based sculptor Gianni Piacentino came of age in the 1960s, when the northern Italian city was still essentially a car town, dominated by Fiat, Lancia, and Moretti. His first career retrospective will demonstrate the ways in which his works have consistently embodied the industrial aesthetics of the local trade. From the wooden geometric structures included in early Arte Povera exhibitions to his most recent four-wheeled aluminum constructions, Piacentino’s large-scale minimal sculptures, with their slick, often poly-coated or enameled surfaces, are redolent of prototypes for aerodynamic machines. Perhaps most evocatively automotive are a series of handmade objects from the early ’70s “signed” with stylized metal initials that suggest hood ornaments. The exhibition, organized by newly installed director Andrea Bellini, will include a sidecar decorated by the artist, one of Piacentino’s many forays into designing real racing machines.
— Elizabeth Mangini
Cameron Jamie
KUNSTHALLE ZÜRICH
ZURICH
Through August 18
Curated by Beatrix Ruf
Taking on the major cultural stakes of vernacular social phenomena, Cameron Jamie locates the convergence of spectacle, performance art, and ethnography in order to air the seriously unheimlich in working-class suburbia. Take, for example, the backyard wrestling of BB, 1998–2000, or the domestic dance insanity of Massage the History, 2007–2009, which Harmony Korine declared “the single greatest dance film ever made.” This summer, the Kunsthalle Zürich surveys Jamie’s oeuvre, with selections from the early 1980s to the present. Expect a spectrum of materials to be on view, from drawings and
ceramics to the documentary movies for which this expat American artist is most celebrated—a rare treat given that, despite having apotheosized (and prefigured by nearly a decade) the ways in which subcultures would self-present on YouTube, Jamie’s nondigital footage is basically unviewable at home.
— Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Meret Oppenheim, Pelzhandschuhe, 1936, mixed media, dimensions variable.
“Meret Oppenheim: Retrospective”
BANK AUSTRIA KUNSTFORUM
VIENNA
Through July 14
Curated by Heike Eipeldauer
It behooves the twenty- first century to look and look again at pioneering assemblagist and feminist provocateuse Meret Oppenheim (1913– 1985). Her famous “Object,” aka Le Déjeuner en fourrure, which she produced at the astonishing age of twenty-three, will not travel to this retrospective. But some two hundred items will, including paintings, drawings, photographs, fashion designs, and sculptures—for example, versions of her Urzeit Venus, a hermaphroditic fetish, drafted in pen and ink (1933) and sculpted in terra-cotta (1962) and bronze (1977). The catalogue will feature texts by Elisabeth Bronfen, Christiane Meyer-Thoss, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, as well as reminiscences by Oppenheim’s colleagues and friends; a parallel volume, published by Oppenheim’s niece Lisa Wenger, will bring to light a selection of the artist’s previously uncirculated writings. Travels to Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Aug. 16–Dec. 1.