Urs Fischer

KUNSTHALLE WIEN
Museumsplatz 1
February 17–May 28

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011, paraffin wax mixture, pigment, steel, wick, dimensions variable.

Urs Fischer’s exhibition “Skinny Sunrise,” which spans fifteen years of work, won’t wow as previous exhibitions have—there is no hole in the floor, no house of bread. Fischer is known for his excavation and alteration abilities, for his talent of turning the viewing experience into a carnivalesque activity, but this exhibition is impressive for more subtle reasons: It provides a chance to see the artist’s concerns beyond monumentality. While unsettling the stability of a space in a grand way can throw the viewer for a loop, masking any potential aesthetic an artwork may have, that sort of bravado is absent here. Instead, “Skinny Sunrise” inspires new ways of encountering sculpture, prompting questions about the breakdown or magnification of materiality, and what that has to do with the space in which an artwork is perceived.

Untitled, 2011, is a life-size, colored wax candle sculpture of Fischer sitting at a table. As the work slowly melts, the figure’s head, which originally looked slyly at the floor, lumps forward onto the table—an amusing self-effacement, or Fischer’s play on “all that’s solid melts into air”? Comic effect aside, it engages the viewer’s perception of a changing space through the delightful disappearance of the object in it. Elsewhere, in a large, mechanical piece, Untitled (Branches), 2005, two silver-colored branches with melting candles on their ends are suspended by chains and swung in overlapping circles, creating a messy Venn diagram on the floor. Like the medieval-looking exit installed nearby, Untitled (Door), 2006, this work gives us a possible outlet from tortuously serious large-scale sculpture through its steady, droll movement. Fischer may have a reputation as a master of grand gestures, but as these works reveal, he also possesses a delicate, balanced touch, like a butterfly on the horn of a croissant.

— Aaron Bogart

Ariella Azoulay, Aïm Deüelle Lüski, Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann

STUK KUNSTENCENTRUM
Naamsestraat 96
April 17–June 3

Ariella Azoulay, Civil Alliance, Palestine, 1947–48, 2012, still from a color video, 48 minutes.

This exhibition gathers work by four Israeli artists who engage with the photographic image as a tool for critical reflection. The show’s centerpiece is Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Alliance, Palestine, 1947–48, 2012, a video making its world premiere here, which portrays people of mixed Palestinian and Jewish background dressed in mid-twentieth-century clothing. Gathering around a circular table, the group recites short stories in Arabic and Hebrew about civil contracts and agreements achieved between January 1947 and May 1948 in Mandatory Palestine. These narrated fragments testify to a joint civilian will to imagine a peaceful coexistence.

Azoulay provides a larger context for Civil Alliance via mostly black-and-white archival photographs and short texts installed on the projection room’s exterior walls. Titled Potential History, 2012, the sequence begins with a contemporary color photograph of an encrusted wooden box that was looted from the former Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Now in Azoulay’s possession, the box becomes a tool not only to claim the “right not to be a perpetrator” (as she explicitly seeks to give it back to its rightful owner), but also to urge for forgiveness and promise.

While rendering visible traces from an erased historical moment, the images included in Potential History put reigning hegemonic discourse in perspective. So do Aïm Deüelle Lüski’s sixteen abstract photographs, which primarily explore historical phenomena, such as lost Palestinian villages or the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Made using four cameras that Lüski constructed, which expose negatives through peepholes often as small as a pinprick, they bear the physical traces of their unconventional process. The photographs thus become modest testimonies to an extremely complex political reality and call for imagining a nonconflictual, shared future. Eitan Efrat and Sirah Foighel Brutmann’s video Printed Matter, 2011, delicately intertwines personal histories with this debate. This helps the visitor to discover a similar connectedness between the private and the public in Potential History and Civil Alliance: The table, at first only a metaphor for bringing people together, transforms into a space that organizes profound geopolitical divisions before subsequently becoming a Pandora’s box.

— Hilde Van Gelder

“The Magic Circle”

LORAINI ALIMANTIRI GAZONROUGE
8 KYKLADON
March 10–June 2

View of "The Magic Circle," 2012.

Entering this exhibition is like walking into somebody’s house, a feeling that is expertly cultivated in Loraini Alimantiri and Christoforos Marinos’s curatorial ode to Greek modernism. Made by fifty Greek artists (as well as three philhellenes), 120 works spanning the entire twentieth century and beyond inhabit—along with objects, furniture, books, plants, and posters—a small, modernist house and studio that acts as a historical and conceptual frame. Designed by an associate of Le Corbusier, Aristomenis Provelenghios, this house has served as a home and work space for various trailblazers, beginning in 1957 when it was constructed as a studio for sculptor Jeanne Spiteris-Veropoulou. For those associated with the building whose works are also on view in the exhibition, like ex-tenant Diohandi, “The Magic Circle” is both a homecoming and a time warp. Some of the names of these former residents are documented in a book (on the living room bookshelf) from which this exhibition takes its title. The volume contains reviews by Alekos Drakos of most of the solo and group shows featuring Greek artists that took place in Athens from 1961 to 1964.

Through this community of objects, the historical and the contemporary meet in a celebratory gathering of sorts, evident in the upstairs salon, where ceramicist Ira Triantafyllides’s two malformed animal sculptures from 1960–70 come alive juxtaposed against Tula Plumi’s 2010 ceramic, almost feline form. Nearby, Kostas Roussakis’s 2012 wooden coffee table meets Nikos Tranos’s 1997 cardboard sofa to create a space in which the many stories surrounding this enchanting show might be shared—like when, four days before the opening, octogenarian artist Michalis Katzourakis, so taken by the curatorial concept, hand-delivered a frying pan containing a glass-shard-and-resin omelette for the kitchen, to supplement his works already installed in the office and bathroom. It’s stories like these that make this exhibition feel somehow familiar, like a home worth spending time in.

— Stephanie Bailey

Rafel G. Bianchi

CENTRO GALEGO DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
c/ Valle Inclán s/n
March 30–June 24

View of “La bandera en la cima” (A Flag on the Summit), 2012.

The fourteen highest mountains in the world, known collectively as the eight-thousanders (peaks over 8,000 meters above sea level) and located in the Himalayan and Karakoram mountain ranges, stand as a challenge and an aspiration that beckons to many mountain climbers. The most ambitious adventurers dream of summiting all fourteen—a feat that takes many years to accomplish, often with considerable risk to the climber’s life. This risk is the subject of Rafel G. Bianchi’s current exhibition, “La bandera en la cima” (A Flag on the Summit). Here Bianchi creates a parallel between the tremendous work it takes to reach a mountaintop and the efforts inherent to every creative process. His own endeavor is, in its own way, a romantic yet arduous quest that has also taken him many years to complete.

Bianchi never went to the Himalayas. At the heart of the show are fourteen paintings, each depicting one of the eight-thousander mountains. He painted these in his studio in Barcelona using photographs as a reference, meticulously mimicking the images in a mechanical way. Then he uniformly covered each canvas’s surface with paint from different Pantone palettes. The result, although vibrant, is somewhat hermetic, and satisfies Bianchi’s formal interests while simultaneously opposing the romanticism of the iconography.

“La bandera en la cima” comprises, however, much more than a painting installation: The exhibition features elements ranging from drawings and photographs to films, videos, and a musical score by Antonio Ortega. Bianchi displays some of his research materials in vitrines as well as documentation of the whole process, which perhaps conveys its sheer absurdity.

— Javier Hontoria

Nevin Aladağ

ARTER - SANAT IÇIN ALAN | SPACE FOR ART
Istiklal Caddesi No: 211, Beyoglu
April 6–June 9

View of “Stage,” 2012.

The latest in Arter’s new commissioned series of solo exhibitions is Nevin Aladağ’s “Stage,” six installations, made of brightly colored artificial hair, that mimic the look of stage curtains. The works frame the walls of the space and offer multiple outlets—a crimson, fringed opera-style drape; maroon pigtails reminiscent of an amateur theater prop; and an azure blue clownish bob—to provide for a variety of potential performances and audiences. References to women’s hair coverings, cloths, or wigs are often a clichéd and complex topic in Turkey. But Aladağ sidesteps this debate by composing an eccentric and playful scene, where fake tresses (usually a substitute material for real hair) replace the fabric that both conceals and also opens upon dramatic performance.

Concurrently, Aladağ is also exhibiting her work at Rampa. Here photographs, sculptures, and a video make evident Aladağ’s interest in performance as a structuring device for her output. Her physical works are not simply traces of performance, but interventions that result from or encourage action. A new piece produced for this show, Leaning Wall, 2012, is again an installation of colorful elements. Eighty-four ceramic body imprints in seven different pastel hues are hung across one length of the gallery and recall the holds of a climbing wall. Yet visitors are not invited to climb it; instead the more leisurely and sophisticated act of “leaning” is encouraged. Comical as it is to lean one’s face or shoulder into an imprint, there is more at issue here: With this work—as with the hair in “Stage”—Aladağ cleverly recomposes an existing bodily extension, in form and function, to draw the viewer into a curious play that is too enticing to refuse to be a part of.

This exhibition is also on view at Rampa, Şair Nedim Caddesi No: 21a, until May 26.

— November Paynter