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.
Tomás Saraceno, Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, 2009. Installation view, Venice Biennale, 2009.
Tomás Saraceno
BONNIERS KONSTHALL
STOCKHOLM
Through June 15
Curated by Sara Arrhenius
Imprinting the organic onto the built environment, Tomás Saraceno worked with arachnologists and astrophysicists for several years to make Galaxies Forming Along Filaments, like Droplets Along the Strands of a Spider’s Web, the awe-inducing room-size installation first presented at the 2009 Venice Biennale. His inquiry into the correlating geometric structures of spiderwebs and the universe, interweaving ideas of scale and habitation, will evolve at Bonniers, where Saraceno installs a new iteration of the work—a complex, crowd-engulfing network of black elastic cords that simultaneously represents the impossibly minute and the incomprehensibly expansive. Accompanied by a catalogue, the exhibition will incorporate background materials such as drawings, photographs, texts, and films.
— Nana Last
Artur Barrio, SITUAÇÃO.................. ORHHHHHH..., 1969. Performance view, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 1969. Photo: César Carneiro.
“Tropicália”
KUNSTHALLE WIEN
VIENNA
Through May 2
Curated by Thomas Mießgang
The recent fire that destroyed much of Hélio Oiticica’s oeuvre portends that even more attention will be given to an already hot area—1960s Brazil—in coming years. Reprising a 2006 survey at the Barbican in London, this show focuses on the generative effect of Oiticica’s 1967 Tropicália environment, which spawned a short-lived but fertile movement across the arts in Rio de Janeiro. As with the earlier effort, Tropicalismo is here conflated with neoconcreto (Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape) and Brazilian conceptualism (Cildo Meireles, Antonio Dias), emphasizing participation and sensory appeal, though the differences between these movements may prove equally compelling. The show brings together roughly seventy pieces, including material from contemporary artists such as Assume Vivid Astro Focus and Ernesto Neto, whose work suggests that today Tropicália is more a national tradition than an avant-garde.
— Daniel Quiles
Mark Boulos, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 2008, still from a two-channel color video, 15 minutes.
Morality
WITTE DE WITH
ROTTERDAM
Through June 1
Curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicholas Schaffhausen
It seems a given among contemporary practitioners that all art is political and therefore implicitly holds an ethical position. No doubt that idea will be healthily interrogated in Witte de With’s ambitious nine-month project comprising five exhibitions, film and performance programs, a three-day symposium, a website, a culminating publication, and an intriguingly broad list of artists, ranging from Sarah Morris to Nedko Solakov to participants in the Polish punk scene of the 1980s. What needs to be taken into account is an anthropology of morals that instantiates moralities, not morality, and countermands any universalist ideal of Kant’s founding question of ethical action, “What ought I to do?” The answers offered by this hugely ambitious project will surely be kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic, and highly contestable.
— Steven Henry Madoff
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (America), 1994, lightbulbs, waterproof extension cords, waterproof rubber sockets. Installation view, Lymington Road, London, 2000.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form
WIELS CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTRE
BRUSSELS
Through April 25
Curated by Elena Filipovic with Danh Vo
Remember Felix Gonzalez-Torres? The question is not facetious. As the universe spins us further away from his time on earth, one of the better questions is: Whose memories, whose records, will shape the artist’s legacy in years to come? Will it be the institutions that administer his eternally mutable sculptures? The nameless viewers who set them in motion? Or the generation of artists eating cucumber sandwiches in his cool, conceptual shade? Elena Filipovic has an exquisite response: Assemble some fifty pieces of Gonzalez-Torres’s work made between 1986 and the mid-’90s, and invite a different artist to reinstall the exhibition at each of its European venues. Danh Vo will take the first turn, at Wiels, followed by Carol Bove at Fondation Beyeler in Basel (May 21–Aug. 28) and Tino Sehgal at Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt in 2011.
— Joe Scanlan
Bjarne Melgaard, Untitled, 2007, oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 118 1/8".
Bjarne Melgaard: Jealous
ASTRUP FEARNLEY MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
OSLO
Through April 25
Curated by Grete Årbu, Gunnar B. Kvaran, and Hanne Beate Ueland
Even Edvard Munch’s madness is no match for the outpourings of Bjarne Melgaard. Compounding his work’s surplus of feeling and confessional tone, Melgaard proceeds in a multitude of media, from furniture and wax figures to video and text-based neo-expressionist painting—as well as the odd carved tree trunk. A midcareer survey, “Jealous” will present more than one hundred works tracking the past fifteen years of Melgaard’s artistic adventure. The emotional charge of his work will no doubt also surface in the coinciding film series curated by the artist (hosted by Norsk Filminstitutt) and a special broadcast on Norwegian radio network NRK featuring an interview with Melgaard and a program of his musical selections. The exhibition catalogue features essays by Ann Demeester, Jan Hoet, and John Kelsey, among others.
— Lars Bang Larsen
Andrei Molodkin, Project, 2009, acrylic tubes filled with crude oil and neon tubes, 133 7/8 x 102 3/8 x 9 13/16”.
“Futurologia: Contemporary Russian Artists and the Heritage of Avant-Garde”
GARAGE CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE (GCCC)
MOSCOW
Through May 25
Curated by Hervé Mikaeloff
The Russian historical avant-garde has become a popular brand, often drafted to raise interest in the country’s subsequent cultural phenomena. Organized by visiting French curator Hervé Mikaeloff, “Futurologia” offers two paintings by Kazimir Malevich as appetizers to a survey of contemporary Russian art, with works ranging from Viktor Alimpiev’s hermetic, dance-inflected videos to Ilya Gaponov and Kirill Koteshov’s hyperrealist paintings of coal miners. Mikaeloff proposes that, like Malevich, those more recent artists aim their gaze at the future. “Utopias,” a concomitant exhibition at the Garage: Center for Contemporary Culture, expands on this thesis. While it’s uncertain whether either show will trace a sound lineage between a visionary determined to change the future and the myriad artists content to fantasize about doing so, the attempt promises to be no less interesting to consider.