Mierle Laderman Ukeles

GRAZER KUNSTVEREIN
Palais Trauttmansdorff, Burggasse 4
March 19–May 12

View of “Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art Works 1969–1980,” 2013.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Touch Sanitation, 1977–80, is an unparalleled colossus of artistic ambition. For this epic undertaking, Ukeles systematically and personally shook the hand of each of New York City’s 8,600 sanitation workers, saying, “Thank you for keeping New York alive.” The extensive documentation of Touch Sanitation, comprised of a slide projection, texts, videos, and letters, is on view as part of the artist’s first European survey.

Representing the trajectory of the artist’s interests until 1980, the exhibition begins with her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, in which she soberly asks, “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” It then moves to projects such as the meticulous registration of the work of motherhood and the execution of menial tasks in a museum, all of which are represented through textual and photographic documentation. Seeing these works offers a great deal of insight into the thinking that led up to Touch Sanitation, while underlining a significant difference between the two.

Unlike Ukeles’s early work, which is predicated upon a neo-avant-garde impulse to collapse the so-called boundaries between art and life, Touch Sanitation seeks not to aestheticize the everyday but rather to exploit aesthetic license in order to orchestrate an encounter that might otherwise never have taken place. It is for this reason that the project not only escapes the charming utopianism of what preceded it but also makes it one of the most genuinely heroic works of its time. This heroism becomes all the more clear when you read the correspondence with pleasantly stunned sanitation officials and the grateful accounts of individual workers, which ultimately invest the entire project with a pathos that is as heartbreaking as it is illuminating.

— Chris Sharp

Daniel Egg

PROJEKTRAUM VIKTOR BUCHER
Praterstrasse 13/1/2
March 7–April 6

Daniel Egg, Der Buchstabe >e< (The letter >e<), 2010, C-print, 19 x 27”. From the series “Information Stream,” 2010.

Since at least the 1960s, the visual dimension of language and the linguistic dimension of the image have evolved into phenomena on equal footing, exerting a broad influence on art production to this day. Daniel Egg takes this as a point of departure for his latest exhibition, “Words – On Air,” and analyzes the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet. His photographic series “Information Stream,” 2010, consists of supposedly scientific photographs of cigarette smoke, changing from yellow-white to gray. To produce the work, the artist stood in a darkened space and exhaled smoke against a light while pronouncing the alphabet, letter by letter, and fixing this fleeting moment with the technical apparatus of the camera. The density, velocity, and other attributes of the stream of air that leaves the mouth as soon as one begins to speak—the continuous variability of this materiality of the sound—is caught for one brief moment and presented as a motionless state.

Der Buchstabe >a< (The letter >a<) is represented as a slender image rushing in a determinate direction; Der Buchstabe >f< appears as a uniform cloud that corresponds with the softness of this unvoiced sound when it slowly glides out of the mouth over the lips and tongue. Der Buchstabe >k<, in contrast, appears to visualize the short-lived, nearly aggressive interruption in the air stream as an explosion accompanied by a transparent drift of smoke. Egg here counters photography’s claim to reproduce reality and its mimetic potential with the transitoriness of language and the corresponding changeability of our reality. He succeeds in appropriating a scientific method of analysis to produce works that simultaneously reflect a coming-into-being. With “Information Stream,” Egg creates poetic moments in which the boundary between visuality and textuality is suspended.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Franz Thalmair

Esther Stocker

KROBATH | WIEN
Eschenbachgasse 9
April 10–June 1

View of “Esther Stocker,” 2013.

Artist Esther Stocker either chases images into the space of the viewer or drives them back into the shallow depth of the wall. At the center of her artistic practice exists the grid—the foundational organizing principle and paradigm of visual art of the twentieth century that was lauded for its generative output while maintaining an imperviousness to change. Stocker offers new variations on the grid in this exhibition, be they in black, white, or shades of gray, as well as structured in new artistic media.

In her untitled series from 2013, Stocker transfers photographs of her previously painted grids onto epoxy resin, achieving a repetitive seriality with the materials she employs as well as within the images themselves, made up of isomorphic lines and planes in varying intensities of contrast. The epoxy resin coating is supported by an underlying wood construction, creating the shape of crumpled-up wads of seemingly discarded paper, the creases distorting the homogeneity of the cross-sectioned lines. Displayed on the floor, installed sideways on the wall, or overturned on the ceiling of the gallery, the sculptures are haphazardly yet strategically scattered throughout the room.

The variable topography of these sculptures increasingly breaks up the rectilinear grid until finally giving way to a new, fractured system—the antigrid realized in actual space—eliciting a departure from modernist language that draws its energy from the tradition of flattened abstract painting. One’s location in the room determines different visual relationships between the viewer, the object, and the work’s dimension. The result of these varying relationships tosses the viewer within, as opposed to in front of, the now surrounding diagrammatic gesture, the source of access to the constant reinvention found in Stocker’s artmaking process.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Franz Thalmair

Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter

MUSEUM VAN HEDENDAAGSE KUNST ANTWERPEN (M HKA)
Leuvenstraat 32
February 8–May 19

Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, So ist Das (So Be It), 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

The stilted scenarios in Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter’s videos match stupidity, vanity, and cruelty with dull interiors, cheap clothes, and blemished skin, pairing moral and physical ugliness. In the selection screened within this retrospective—part one of an exhibition that will continue next year at Kunsthalle Wien—slouching, fumbling, and gaping live actors in Ten Weyngaert, 2007; Der Schlamm von Branst (The Clay from Branst), 2008; and The Friagte, 2009, give way to stiff, pock-marked polystyrene heads with push pin eyes and bad wigs in Das Loch (The Hole), 2010, and Les Énigmes de Saarlouis (The Riddles of Saarlouis), 2012. The bleak vision providing continuity portrays art as a therapeutic activity, surfacing sexual and violent urges alongside clichés (Der Schlamm von Branst), and as a professional undertaking, breeding careerist machismo and humiliating self-doubt (Das Loch). Sculptures from the videos, many modeled from found photographs, appear as themselves in the gallery, as do dummy characters, including Johannes, the German artist who believes painting can mediate a relationship to the divine, and a selection of his banally daubed works.

The Leibnizian exhibition title, “Optimundus,” relates to the philosophical dad joke that is the lecture video Over de relatie tussen de reële wereld en de parallelle wereld (About the relationship between the real world and the parallel world), 2010. A more revealing frame for the whole of the show, though, is found in a series of drawings, “Untitled (Public Transport),” 2013. Pencil sketches of several Belgian trams and their passengers not only depict the mundane irritations, confusion, and loneliness of the shared space of public transport, but also suggest a cultural specificity to the work. One might notice, for example, that So ist Das (So Be It), 2013—a café table with ridiculously oversize glasses and an unnaturally tall figure obscured by the sun umbrella—is titled in German, not Dutch as you might expect if it were local beer culture being caricatured directly. Or that the excruciating, chorused twins Kitty & Katty, 2013—who ask the sometimes inane, sometimes impossible puzzle questions in Les Énigmes de Saarlouis—are francophone. An uncomfortable edge to the black humor is that it draws on Flemish sensitivities—low-level intolerance of variations in language, accent, and style—a narcissism of small differences, if you like. The show pushes us to sense any version of such in ourselves.

— Jon Bywater

“Changing States”

PALAIS DES BEAUX-ARTS DE BRUXELLES (BOZAR)
Rue Ravensteinstraat 23
February 28–May 19

Alan Phelan, Information deficit blended-in as a tree, 2006, mixed media, dimensions variable.

“I feel vaguely suspicious of borders as brokers of meaning,” writes artist Niamh McCann in the catalogue for “Changing States: Contemporary Irish Art & Francis Bacon’s Studio,” a survey exhibition of twenty contemporary Irish artists that includes notable work by McCann, as well as Alan Phelan, Gerard Byrne, Katie Holten, Garrett Phelan, John Gerrard, Alice Maher, and William McKeown. Alongside these works are images and objects including Irish magazines and books that were culled and brought in from the studio of Francis Bacon. Exhibited on the occasion of Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union, this group show is part of a series of events across Europe focusing on Irish art and culture, yet it resists simple, nationalistic readings.

What links artists from Ireland, if anything, is the consequence of living on a small island: the resulting impulse to travel. McCann’s Tree, 2010, made of a series of bronze, wood, and neon, was conceived during her residency at HIAP, Helsinki. The work implies and conceptualizes movement. The tree, once rooted, is transformed, giving up its traditional form to suggest one of a nautical vehicle. Gerrard’s real-time 3-D projection Dust Storm (Manter, Kansas), 2008, similarly discusses transience, effectively encapsulating the circular relationship between human intervention and nature: Man digs into the once fertile soil of the Great Plains, creating the inevitable Dust Bowl, which gives rise to the epic storm against which the depicted silo stands in defiance.

Alan Phelan’s Information deficit blended-in as a tree, 2006, incorporates office shelving, papier-mâché, and cocktail stick trees, implying the futility of recording history. The daily “facts” of the newsprint texts are molded into papier-mâché heads, which distort as filters in their factual embodiments. Here, history remains volatile. It seems redundant to claim Bacon, who was born in Ireland (though lived and worked in London), as the cultural referent that holds this exhibition together; when work is this strong, it surpasses geographically determined boundaries.

— Gemma Tipton

Thomas Schütte

SARA HILDÉN ART MUSEUM
Laiturikatu 13
February 9–May 12

View of “Thomas Schütte: Frauen,” 2013.

Thomas Schütte’s first solo exhibition in the Nordic countries includes eighteen monumental steel, bronze, and aluminum sculptures from his 1999–2011 “Frauen” series. Displayed on heavy steel tables, they draw not only on the tradition of twentieth-century figurative sculpture—marks of artists as diverse as Aristide Maillol to Henry Moore are alive in these robust works—but also on the history of female representation in general. While the sculptures demonstrate Schütte’s brilliant sense of scale and materials, they are more than exercises in stout bodies, with forms so simplified they almost seem universal.

Indeed, the most consistent stylistic source for his sculptures seems to be the idealized female figure of European Neoclassicism, which experienced a small but notable revival during the 1920s. This is an influence that can also later be seen in the heroic realism embraced by Fascist dictators of the ’30s and ’40s, which is of particular interest to this writer as traces of an almost inexplicable brutality are embedded within Schütte’s clean, stoic forms. By violently cutting, bending, melting, and compressing the figures into almost unrecognizable forms, he reaches beyond mere surface or style. Based on the dozens of small clay figurines that the artist uses as sketches, the sculptures display an almost explosive power, reinforced by their large scale and ponderous materiality.

— Timo Valjakka

Joe Scanlan

DE EXPEDITIE
Leliegracht 47
March 11–May 11

View of “Abstract Labor, or: The Happy Butcher,” 2013.

In the press release for Joe Scanlan’s third exhibition at this gallery, he asks why an artist should “choose the materials of painting” during a time in which artists may work without any “obligation to a medium.” This leaves the viewer to wonder: What is the role of the painter today? The answer to this inquiry, for Scanlan, has much to do with abstracted labor. Throughout the show, he presents works that examine the labor of painting before painting actually begins.

Installed on the walls are clusters and pairs of variously sized semipainted wooden stretchers without canvases. All have cryptic two-letter titles, such as RA, AS, and Sl (all works 2013). The abstract compositions of these monochrome accents on the otherwise bare wood—as well as their relationship to the surrounding others—give them a seemingly autonomous quality. They are apparently unbound from their function as infrastructures or supports. This sense of sovereignty is emphasized by the textiles (or perhaps “canvases”), which hang on laundry-like lines between the walls. The larger of the two clotheslines, Ides, is obtrusively placed near the gallery’s entrance. To proceed by it is an action reminiscent of approaching a suburban house via the backyard and having to duck underneath the newly washed clothes. Each potential sheet of canvas consists of a different color, size, and type of textile.

By deconstructing painting and re-presenting its unique components, Scanlan seems to want to reexamine the potential of labor that painting offers artists. As the canvas has not yet been stretched on its frame, the artist does not yet have to worry about what to produce. His occupation is therefore as simple as that of a baker of pies whose apples are still ripening on the trees.

— Huib Haye van der Werf

Jo Baer

STEDELIJK MUSEUM
Museumplein 10
May 16–September 1

Jo Baer, In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stars), 2012, oil on canvas, 58 1/2 x 58 1/2”.

For her new set of six large paintings, “In the Land of the Giants,” and her solo exhibition of the same name, Jo Baer travelled back to the Irish countryside, where she had settled after moving from New York in 1975, to re-encounter some of her sources of inspiration. She had never been able to forget the impressive Neolithic monuments she saw, scattered over the countryside as if a giant had thrown them there (as one local postal carrier had once quipped to Baer). One of these megaliths—the man-made, phallic Hurlstone, which measures five and a quarter feet tall and has a perfect round hole in its center of almost ten inches—forms the point of departure for Baer’s exploration, in these paintings, into matters like astronomy, skull cults, and ancestor worship.

Since her departure from hardedge abstraction in 1975, a move that she famously explained in her 1983 essay “I am no longer an abstract artist,” Baer has delved into myth and archetypes through figurative painting. But can an artist fully betray her roots? It is fascinating to see how in two paintings from the current series Baer arranges figurative elements around a void in the center of the canvas. A similar void characterized her pre-1975 abstract work and was framed, as it were, by lines acting as boundaries to the picture plane.

Reading the images in Baer’s current show requires a bit of a manual, and it is sometimes hard to follow her research into myth and cult. But her canvases, made with no stretcher and directly taped to the wall, nevertheless have a clarion monumentality. Take for instance, In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stars), 2012, in which Baer depicts herself as a tiny traveler under a spiraling universe—or an elegant Fibonacci spiral—with a black hole at the center. Here it seems that it is not the figurative elements but again the void in the middle that holds all the secrets Baer seeks to discover.

— Robert-Jan Muller

“Lissitzky—Kabakov, Utopia—Reality”

VAN ABBEMUSEUM
Bilderdijklaan 10
January 12–April 28

View of “Lissitzky—Kabakov, Utopia—Reality,” 2013.

From the very dash in the exhibition’s title, “Lissitzky—Kabakov. Utopia and Reality” figures a generational gap as an impermeable spatial divide. On one side of each gallery are works by Russian Constructivist El Lissitzky that envision new forms for a Soviet future; on the other is the oeuvre of Russian-born husband-and-wife team Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, which reflects on that future’s catastrophic failure to deliver. Embracing binary concepts as its structural logic, the show (guest curated by the Kabakovs) poses the question: Might confrontation, rather than conversation, be a productive strategy for assessing the cultural complexities of the Soviet era?

The exhibition spans two floors and pits the Van Abbemuseum’s dazzling collection of Lissitzkys (the largest outside Moscow, with works in this show dating from 1919 to 1937) against various projects by the Kabakovs from 1956 through 2010. Each gallery introduces a new opposition via the title of the room, such as “The Bright Future Ahead/The Bright Future Behind Us” and “Victory Over the Everyday/Everyday’s Victory.” However, formal similarities between the two practices often complicate the thematic polarities. For instance, the skeletal curves of the Kabakovs’ maquette, The Vertical Opera, 1998, echo Lissitzky’s delicate Model for the Meyerhold Theater, 1929–30, while the Kabakovs’ room-size installation, The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment, 1985, and Lissitzky’s similarly sized Proun Room, 1923, (reconstruction 1971) both might be understood as an exploration of the human in relation to the cosmic. In each case, shared visions of radical locomotion betray the Kabakov’s complex indebtedness to Lissitzky even as the staging of their artwork insists on total differentiation.

But even as the exhibition design gives both artists spatial parity, it ultimately remains the Kabakovs’ fable. Certainly, the most thrilling of their fabulous interventions is the inclusion of never-before-built sculptures based on designs from Lissitzky’s portfolio of lithographs, Figurinen, 1923. Commissioned by John Milner for the museum in 2009, these newly minted multimedia constructions have a paradoxical effect: Rather than dating Lissitzky as a utopian Marxist, they render his work surprisingly fresh simply by virtue of its sudden reanimation, one of the many fascinating destabilizations curiously elided in the exhibition’s binary structure.

— Katherine Rochester

“Tradition”

MARRES CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
Capucijnenstraat 98
March 16–May 19

View of “Tradition,” 2013.

In 1986, Conceptual art pioneer Seth Siegelaub founded the Amsterdam-based Centre for Social Research on Old Textiles (CSROT), an institution dedicated to investigating the social history of textiles. Today, the CSROT’s collection contains over 650 objects and 7,000 books. While an exhibition last year at Raven Row, titled “The Stuff That Matters,” privileged Siegelaub’s bibliographic research, “Tradition” takes a pointedly different tack, placing the objects in an unmoored space of inquiry that takes up the constitution of textiles as carriers of interwoven aesthetic and economic histories.

Curators Maxine Kopsa and Krist Gruijthuijsen culled a selection of fifty artifacts from the collection and have installed them among contemporary works by Willem Oorebeek, Lucy Skaer, and Christopher Williams, whose practices ruminate on mechanical reproduction, representation and its deconstruction, and materiality. The textiles smuggle in citations of their social histories and intended functions, but their formal aspects come through more forcefully here, as the curators have emphasized their potential for abstraction. An imposing early-twentieth-century Tapa headdress-mask from Papua New Guinea is doubled by the reflective surface of Oorebeek’s Pirelli Portal, 1994, which is hewn from mass-produced rubber flooring. This curatorial gesture invites the historical artifact into an ahistorical dialogue about industrial production and craft and their varied effects on representation.

Skaer’s Rachel, Peter, Caitlin, John, 2010, plays most with Siegelaub’s interest in the dual character of textiles as vulnerable, aesthetic keepsakes and durable objects of trade. Three 16-mm films intimately crawl over the totemic surfaces of a Gutenberg Bible, a cat’s eye, and a Rothko painting, and are occasionally interrupted by abstract white forms that have been punched from the film. Offering different shapes formed by various ticket punchers used by railroad conductors, these forms introduce an overlooked symptom of industrialization that here becomes rarified and aesthetic. With a Warburgian grasp, “Tradition” holds Siegelaub’s phantomic fragments up to a contemporary discourse on the economy of the image that begins to address the resonances between his early Conceptualism and his current commitments.

— Annie Godfrey Larmon

“I Want The Beatles to Play at My Art Center!”

HENIE ONSTAD ART CENTER
Sonja Henie vei 31
October 28–May 26

Randi Frønsdals ballett, untitled, 1969. Performance view, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, 1969.

In recent years, several projects at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK) have touched upon the inception of the art center itself, and traced its significance in Scandinavian art history. This show in particular emphasizes the organization’s role as commissioner and producer of time-based art, and numerous documentation archives of the projects that have resulted over the years are on view for the first time. It was in 1968 that the former ice-skating world champion, 1930s Hollywood star, and longtime art collector Sonja Henie inaugurated the center with her husband, shipping magnate Niels Onstad. Even the exhibition’s title—derived from a never-fulfilled aspiration of the enterprising Henie—hints at the value that the kunstsenter has placed, since its founding years, on producing and presenting dance, music, installation, performance, and other time-based avant-garde art in Norway.

All these genres can be explored through content from “the HOK’s other collection,” in the words of curator Lars Mørch Finborud: its rich, until-now underexposed archival materials that document the utopian and progressive interdisciplinary projects produced on-site. A maze of monitors and photographs take visitors back in time to a 1982 visit by Joseph Beuys, 1960s and ’70s contributions by local dance groups, work by John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s seminar in 1969. Meanwhile, video of a 1975 staging of Kjartan Slettemark’s iconic, hilarious Poodle Performance—in which the artist appeared in a poodle costume—appears alongside recent live performances commissioned by contemporary fellow Norwegians like singer and performer Nils Bech.

Juxtaposed are a number of large-scale modernist paintings by artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Hans Hartung. In the center’s earliest days this group of works, together, was nicknamed “the world’s most expensive soundproofing”: These canvases used to hang in the “Studio”—the center’s live-music space, where teenagers came for popular concerts—as the directors wanted to make sure even the youngest audience members caught a glimpse of the great masters’ paintings, willingly or not.

— Johanne Nordby Wernø

Fernanda Fragateiro

PROJECTO TRAVESSA DA ERMIDA
Travessa do Marta Pinto 21
January 26–March 25

Fernanda Fragateiro, To Think Is to Destroy (detail), 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Fernanda Fragateiro’s practice is invariably about studying a particular space or situation and intervening in it, her objective often being to direct attention to the unquestioned. In the case of her installation To Think Is to Destroy, 2013, the floor of Ermida de Nossa Senhora de Belém, a eighteenth-century chapel, is the object of her attention.

While the chapel is almost entirely in its original state, during the 1980s the floor was redone in a gray Portuguese marble. This material is noticeably different than those used in the church’s initial construction, so much so that the marble almost seems like an intruder. It is precisely this discrepancy that inspired To Think Is to Destroy. Fragateiro has laid three thousand white mosaic terra-cotta tiles over the altar and the nave. These two areas are separated by a ten-inch-high step, yet the tiles, starting in the higher level and spilling to the lower space, effectively create the illusion that the spaces are level with each other. Fabricated in Meknes, Morocco, they are made of different types of clay and are glazed in different shades of white; this is not a monochromatic ground but a space that approaches the look of a drawing or watercolor. At the same time, the layout and materials come together to create historical and architectural relationships: Here is an Arabic floor within a Catholic chapel, which suggests a larger historical narrative space, one that hints at the formation of the Portuguese nation as well as the economic, religious, and political relations between this country and Morocco.

The title of the work, To Think Is to Destroy, is part of a quote from Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (1982), and lends the work conceptual weight. Curator Paulo Pires do Vale writes in the exhibition catalogue that “the words in the title are also the material that constitutes the work.” These words do not intend to be a moral statement but refer to the idea that thinking is a very active undertaking that alters things from their original state.

— Filipa Oliveira

“Insomnia”

FUNDACIÓ JOAN MIRÓ
Parc de Montjuïc s/n
March 22–June 16

Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, 2013.

“Insomnia” is the result of yet another exhaustive, painstaking, and coherent research project by Catalan curator Neus Miró on the language of film. Not too long ago, she curated a well thought-out show (“The Times of a Place,” 2009) devoted to the concept that landscape, under the temporality of film, was to be understood not as a noun but as a verb. This is, beyond all doubt, a topic she masters. The title of this current seven-artist show stems from Hollis Frampton’s celebrated 1971 quotation: “Film has finally attracted its own Muse. Her name is Insomnia.”

Miró takes as a point of departure Frampton’s position on how the emergence of video in the 1960s favored film’s obsolescence, making it a form of art in itself. The exhibition thus seeks to set experimental film in the context of contemporary art while simultaneously exploring the shift from photography to the moving image. This transition is best epitomized by two of Frampton’s works in the first room of the exhibition. In A Visitation of Insomnia, 1970-73, he succeeds in representing movement within a single image of a naked body through the use of long exposures. In his acclaimed (nostalgia), 1971, however, the photographic image vanishes altogether as Michael Snow’s voice-over describes each still photograph as it slowly turns aflame, releasing narrative from the confinement of the captured picture plane.

Walking through each of the six rooms in the show, one is confronted with the ultimate dissection of certain properties of film, for example, those related to static viewership that expects the assisted unpacking of a plot. Lis Rhodes’s Light Music, 1975, places viewers in a spatial experience that requires their activity: The viewer-cum-participant is forced to stand and move between two abstract images projected against each other, where sound is determined by the visual developments created by each screen. If in her previous show Miró turned landscape into a living entity, “Insomnia” considers film not as a means of contemplation but as a physically engaging landscape.

— Javier Hontoria

Fermín Jiménez Landa

GALERÍA BACELOS | MADRID
Apodaca, 16
January 24–March 29

View of “Fermín Jiménez Landa,” 2013. From left: Sin título (efectos personales) (Untitled [Personal Effects]), 2012; Vaho (Breath), 2012.

An old car is parked in the middle of the exhibition space in Fermín Jiménez Landa’s solo show in Madrid. Its title, Vaho (Breath) (all works 2012), places us before its essential singularity: It is full of steam that only affords a glimpse of its interior. The artist doesn’t help much; he gives no hints and expects viewers to freely interpret his work. As a staunch post-Conceptualist, he might be referencing Hans Haacke’s celebrated Condensation Cube, 1963–65, but as an artist who is not in the least interested in tautology and overstatement, and whose interests lean toward the little things in life, we sense some sort of narrative at play: Perhaps the car has been taken for a spin by youngsters, or a couple is inside having fun. By means of subtle insertions into reality, Jiménez Landa creates evocative, sometimes even bewildering, deviations of meaning.

Vaho plays a key role in the exhibition and epitomizes many of the artist’s concerns, especially representing the frequently ambitious scale of his projects. However, one of the best works on show is much lower profile. Often seduced by printed matter, Jiménez Landa here uses two newspapers with thunderous headlines about the Iraq war to go from the global realm of media to the silent intimacy of the private sphere: In the work, Untitled (Scrabble Word Finder), all the letters from the headlines of both newspapers have been scrambled to form a new sentence, now framed, that reads: “Shake out crumbs from the tablecloth, love?” It is a fine example of the artist’s determination to abolish the distance between the general and the particular, between the gravity of high culture and the familiar ease of the popular.

— Javier Hontoria

“The Society Without Qualities”

TENSTA KONSTHALL
Taxingegränd 10, Box 4001
February 14–May 26

Ane Hjort Guttu, Freedom Requires Free People, 2012, HD video, color, sound, 32 minutes.

At the entrance of the exhibition “The Society Without Qualities,” two monitors and an original poster display images of another exhibition, “The Model – A Model for a Qualitative Society,” organized by Palle Nielsen at Moderna Museet in 1968—which comprised a spectacular playspace for children that was endowed with a foam and rubber basin, swings, climbing ropes, paint, and costumes, among other things. But rather than treating the subject of this preamble as a historic curiosity, curator Lars Bang Larsen has returned to it as a key source of inspiration—as a setting in which children were encouraged to create their own models of play, of societal structures, and of exploration with one another. In keeping with this precedent, the works exhibited in “The Society Without Qualities” variously take up notions of child’s play, models, and the use of the art institution.

Of all these threads in the exhibition, the most intriguing is the concept of the child as an active historical subject, articulated in an accompanying pamphlet. Sharon Lockhart’s film Podwórka, which shows children improvising play in abandoned industrial sites around Łódź, is a lingering portrait of their social interactions and their ability to conceive of possibility in the most arid circumstances. Joanna Lombard’s more sinister slide projection Ljusbacken…, 2007–13, reflects the artist’s upbringing in the eponymous commune. Offering a kid’s perspective on 1960s counterculture, images with accompanying descriptions portray the rooms in which Lombard, as a girl, saw things children aren’t meant to see, such as group sex and suicide attempts. Ane Hjort Guttu’s engaging video Freedom Requires Free People, 2011, is based on interviews with a wonderfully reflective and critical eight-year-old, set in the school he attends, in which he questions some of the rules in effect (such as no tree climbing) and his classmates’ blind acceptance of them. The video portrays a fundamental conflict between individual freedom and institutional framework while displaying, perhaps most important, the resistance that children can offer.

— Theodor Ringborg

Ulrik Samuelson

LARS BOHMAN GALLERY
Karlavägen 9
February 16–April 7

Ulrik Samuelson, Untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 71 x 79".

Though this exhibition—an interplay between paintings, installation, and sculpture—is Ulrik Samuelson’s first at the gallery, the Swedish artist has for decades made work with a distinctive style that also characterizes his public commission at the Kungsträdgården metro station. What strikes one as particularly Samuelsonesque is both a sense of regal power (evoked via classic architectural motifs, Nordic nature scenes, and intersecting geometric shapes), and notions of masculinity explored through sublime color schemes and unflinching landscapes that penetrate the psyche. Shades of amber and russet contrast with blackened charcoal, leaving paintings aflame, violently yearning. Serving as tribute to Samuelson’s now-deceased brother, a shrinelike installation connects works from over the course of the artist’s career, functioning as entry into a private world made accessible. Majestic images of black and white trees wrap around the room, the center of which features a gold-plated, slanted wall resembling the shingled rooftop of a transcendent palace, dominating a light green sculpture in the foreground. Throughout this exhibition, Samuelson asserts the value of solitude and cultivates a safe zone for contemplation.

The artist cajoles viewers into renegotiating their ideas of traditional ornamentation, integrating objects such as draperies and podiums, which, from one perspective, do not simply serve as spatial placeholders but aspire to carry significance. As if these objects remind us that nothing is ever what it seems, “Efter naturen” (After Nature) slithers between a futuristic netherworld and a foreboding, mythological one, hinting at a timeless alternative to reality. None of these works introduce the human form, instead conjuring energy from aureate mountain slopes, the seductively alluring moon, or the omniscient sky. French Impressionism, Carl Fredrik Hill, and Edvard Munch appear to be influences. Gaston Bachelard argues in The Poetics of Space (1994) that the function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams. From this perspective, differentiating between poetry and Samuelson’s paintings might well be futile.

— Jacquelyn Davis

Mika Rottenberg

MAGASIN 3 STOCKHOLM KONSTHALL
Frihamnen
February 8–June 2

Mika Rottenberg, Dough, 2005–06, still from single channel video installation, 7 minutes.

There is a sickly, damp, and claustrophobic feel to Mika Rottenberg’s multiple installations on view here. Videos are projected onto screens that hang precariously inside cartons and crates. A cheap-looking ceiling (complete with water stains) has been fabricated and fitted atop the gallery’s own and the floor has been covered in thin carpet squares, all of which comes together to create a strong aesthetic of outdated, unhealthy, and poorly made workspaces.

The videos introduce an array of female protagonists in a series of fictitious and dubious manual labor roles. We see the women at work in a variety of factories—one that processes lettuce, another that manufactures tissues—as well as in a manicure salon. In these workplaces the hours are long, the quarters cramped, and the work itself is at once serious, tiresome, and futile. At times hints of farce enter, like in Tropical Breeze, 2004, where two women work in an overly elaborate system of production that involves perspiring onto tissues and then packaging them for sale, all while maintaining deadpan expressions. Rottenberg’s complex vision of economics, power, and control is slightly darker, however, and video installations like Dough, 2005–2006, and Squeeze, 2010, illustrate this well. In both works, the artist presents performers from diverse cultural backgrounds working together in multifarious roles: In Dough one squeezes bread dough through a small hole in the floor, while in Squeeze a woman is squeezed until a strange glittering substance is excreted from her skin and bottled.

Rottenberg is an artist who has the ability to capture politically engaging feminist discussions in subtle and compelling ways. In the context of Sweden as a place where gender equality is fastidiously considered from a cultural and political perspective, Rottenberg’s oeuvre presents a deeply intelligent examination on the state of feminism, consumerism, and labor.

— Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

Karl Holmqvist

MODERNA MUSEET | STOCKHOLM
Skeppsholmen
March 16–September 8

View of “Karl Holmqvist,” 2013.

“Give poetry a try” is the irresistible slogan chosen by Karl Holmqvist as the title of his exhibition at the Moderna Museet. It’s a slogan that Holmqvist has used before, and it is, as slogans should be, a straightforward, encouraging one. Holmqvist has dedicated much of his practice to both show that his slogan’s advice is possible and to suggest the extent of its possibilities. Almost everything he does, you can do yourself, in materials and techniques readily available.

The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains several works, including a vitrine filled with innumerable pamphlets, leaflets, and books by Holmqvist dating back to 1991. While viewers are privy to some of the content via iPad slide shows and headphones, the encased presentation of the texts means that they’re visible but not readable. That it is all behind glass is a shame, but understandable, and now that Moderna Museet has added these pieces to its collection, it might manage to make Holmqvist’s publications more accessible in the future. Another piece, a text video titled I’m With You in Rockland, 2005, refers to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and in it there is a sentence that exemplifies Holmqvist’s frequent use of citations and allusions. Modifying Ginsberg’s famous opening sentence into “I saw the best minds, and the best bodies, of my generation wasted…” Holmqvist intriguingly evokes the original’s Vietnam War implications but also adverts to another, later crisis—the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.

The second room shows only the video A IS FOR A=R=A=K=A=W=A, 2012, a title which seems to refer to the artist Ei Arakawa, Holmqvist’s occasional collaborator. In it, following a brief sequence of images, the screen turns black except for lines of text that appear like subtitles, synchronized to Holmqvist’s reading voice. It’s hypnotic—and again, several parts are recognizable as text from various song lyrics, poetry, and films, as well as the writings of artists and philosophers, conjuring memories and ideas of other objects, places, and histories. In many ways the piece is a senseless yet meaningful collage of quotes and Holmqvist’s own writing. And the most successful moments of Holmqvist’s work evoke the words of critic and fellow pamphleteer Viktor Shklovsky: “A revolutionary poet is one that makes the stone a little bit more stony.”

— Theodor Ringborg

İrem Tok

PILOT GALLERY
Sıraselviler Caddesi No.83/2
March 7–April 27

İrem Tok, Time Machine, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

“Against the Wind,” the second solo exhibition by Istanbul-based artist İrem Tok at this gallery, offers a collection of multimedia works produced during a three-month residency at Villa Waldberta near Munich. Together the pieces conjure up an atmosphere of solitude, and bring fairy tales to mind, at least at first. Two C-prints—Self-Portrait with Heart and Self-portrait with Mirror (all works 2013)—present a shy-looking young protagonist. Perhaps a contemporary Alice in a snowy Wonderland, she transforms throughout the exhibition, and she is literally at its core in the form of a mechanical sculpture titled Time Machine, which features a cutout image of the artist at the top, turning like a weather vane. Instead of directions, the piece references time (N for now, P for past, F for future, and U for unknown), and it points to all the works in the show.

Tok is one of the youngest artists represented by Pilot Gallery, and she is relatively new to the local art scene. So far her work has succeeded in conjuring the attitude of a wanderer. For her 2011 exhibition here, for instance, Tok was the main character of a story. A lenticular print showed the artist wearing a snorkel and running into the sea, with a sinking ship in the distance; near this was a periscope through which one could peer into the second floor of the gallery. Now, with her current exhibition, it is possible to imagine that Tok’s work will continue to offer more journeys and additional twists and turns. While the images that Tok presents are familiar—such as a house, a park, and snow—all are infused with the thrill of the unknown.

— Mine Haydaroğlu