International News Digest

JANUARY 19

In an interview with Catrin Lorch from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, artist and curator Artur Żmijewski brought politics to the forefront of his practice. Their conversation took place on the heels of Martin-Gropius-Bau director Gereon Sievernich’s recent decision to remove Żmijewski’s work Berek (The Game of Tag), 1999, from the show “Tür an Tür” (Side by Side) at the space. Apparently, Hermann Simon, director of Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, sent a letter to Martin-Gropius-Bau registering his offense at the video, which depicts a group of naked people playing catch who were allegedly filmed in a gas chamber at a former concentration camp. Lorch reports that Sievernich, after receiving the letter, turned the video off without consulting the artist. Żmijewski added, “The curator of the show, Anda Rottenberg . . . was not even informed of this authoritarian decision.” Żmijewski, who will be curating the 7th Berlin Biennale, also told Lorch that he wants the biennial to question “our idea of art as being free,” noting, “The dominance of the commercial sector, of the art market, leads to a future where the only art in existence is the one that turns politics into an aesthetic spectacle, a gentle inefficient critique that assimilates everything.” Żmijewski also spoke about his decision to make the Russian performance collective Voina and its members associate curators of the biennale, saying, “They redefined Saint Petersburg as a battlefield.” Discussing the international warrant issued against Voina member Natalia Sokol, he added: “We as a team of the 7th Berlin Biennale have to protect her from arrest.”

In Paris, a seemingly altruistic decision by the Louvre to send its works to Fukushima to show support for victims of the Japanese nuclear disaster has provoked outcry from people who are concerned about radiation levels and the safety of the work. Le Monde and Der Standard report that twenty works are being sent to Japan as part of an exhibition, “Encounters,” that will travel to Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima prefectures. Jean-Luc Martinez, curator of the show, reassured the public, telling Le Monde, “In the first two cities, [radiation] values are perfectly normal. At the Fukushima museum, inside the exhibition spaces, [levels are] comparable to what can be found in a Parisian museum. Outside, the highest level was detected on a lawn, namely 1.72 microsieverts per hour. This means that if a visitor sits on the grass for one thousand hours, he would be exposed to a dose equivalent to what he receives when he receives an X-ray.”

Tilo Richter, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, looks back on the history of Galerie Beyeler, the illustrious Basel gallery that closed its doors last year after six decades, as the two-year anniversary of the death of its founder, Ernst Beyeler, draws near. Beyeler began the gallery in 1951, transforming it into an art space from its former existence as a small bookstore called La Librairie du Château d’Art. He went on to become a major dealer of works by artists like Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klee, and Giacometti. The gallery was run by Beyeler and his wife, Hildy, as well as a very small staff. His second-in-command, Claudia Neugebauer, closed the space last summer, as instructed by Beyeler’s will. Richter sums up by noting that even if Beyeler’s original gallery no longer exists, his legacy persists in a number of other ongoing institutions: He founded Art Basel with Trudl Bruckner und Balz Hilt in 1970, and in 1997 made his collection permanently accessible to the public via the Beyeler Foundation, a Renzo Piano–designed venue that now sees 400,000 visitors a year.

Curator Cuauhtémoc Medina spoke with Monopol’s Kirsten Wandschneider about his plans for Manifesta 9. He told Wandschneider, “The title of this year’s Manifesta is ‘The Deep of the Modern.’ The show consists of three sections, all based on our reflections on social restructuring at the beginning of the industrial age, as well as on the insight that this process is far from finished.” When asked about his perspective on Limburg, he responded: “In previous projects I worked with artists and cultural and political ideas from Latin America. As a Mexican I had a clear starting point that way. In Limburg I am trying to interact and mediate a cultural and economic past that is not mine. [. . .] Limburg was enormously important in terms of industry, one of the largest coal mining regions in Belgium. The population originally came from European-wide recruiting of workers. The mines led to the restructuring of the landscape and the development of the infrastructure. [. . .] We will integrate this dynamic into our show.”