Edgar Honetschläger

CHARIM GALERIE
Dorotheergasse 12/1
November 16–January 21

Edgar Honetschläger, Shinto Priest Procession, 2010, watercolor on canvas, 53 x 114”.

Perhaps best known as a filmmaker, Edgar Honetschläger makes work that often features sparse and symbolically charged actions. The Austrian artist’s latest film, AUN – The Beginning and the End of All Things, 2011, forgoes a linear narrative and instead seduces the viewer into a search for a livable future via a wondrous and poetic sci-fi world. His current exhibition, “framboise frivol,” features new drawings and large-scale paintings. These are humorous, philosophical works in which small and repetitive figures are arranged on wide, white, and empty spaces.

Here, the artist, who lived for many years in Japan, creates images not through the illusion of perspectival space but through its omission. The motifs––umbrellas, kites, and vegetables––appear flat against the page. Shinto Priest Procession, 2010, for instance, presents a long row of similar bodies marching in line. An entire world of stories seems to unfold through the indefinite empty spaces, which in many ways recall his films. Honetschläger opens up space by presenting us with a frame. He offers us only the opening moments and perhaps a storyline, and then we must create the more detailed stories.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Sabine B. Vogel

“Ars 11”

KIASMA MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Mannerheiminaukio 2
April 15–November 27

Vincent Meessen, Vita Nova, 2009, still from a single-channel video, 26 minutes.

“Ars 11” is the latest edition in a series of large-scale, thematic exhibitions staged by Kiasma and its institutional predecessors since 1961. While the topic of the current show is African contemporary art, this is not just a cavalcade of works from that continent. It is a show about a place in flux, seeking its own role and identity in an increasingly globalized world; an exhibition about dreams, and especially realities. A banner above the museum entrance reads “Changes your perception of Africa”—and this exhibition does just that.

Anyone looking for the usual clichés will be disappointed. “Ars 11” is a white-cube exhibition spread across the museum as well as eleven satellite venues. It includes such well-known names as El Anatsui and Romuald Hazoumé among its thirty artists and collectives. But to drive home the curatorial emphasis on a wider range of perspectives, the organizers also include artists neither born nor living in Africa; among these are Chilean-born Alfredo Jaar and Eija-Liisa Ahtila of Finland, two artists whose works address social and political issues such as immigration and ideological conflict.

Pieter Hugo’s apocalyptic photographs from the series “Permanent Error,” 2009–10, challenge romantic notions of pastoral plains and lolloping giraffes. They show us a vast dumping ground where Western computer waste is burned to harvest precious metals, giving off clearly toxic smoke. Of the many videos, the one that most caught my attention is Vita Nova, 2009, by Vincent Meessen. Based on a chapter in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), it traces the story of a Senegalese boy soldier once pictured on the cover of Paris Match, intercutting this with the life of Barthes’s grandfather, one of the founders of the French colony of Cote d’Ivoire. The work is a good reminder of the complex ways the history of Africa is linked to the politics of the Western world.

— Timo Valjakka

Charles Sandison

HAMEENLINNA ART MUSEUM
Viipurintie 2
September 30–February 5

Charles Sandison, Tavastehus kronomagasines, 2011, computers, projectors, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Charles Sandison’s latest exhibition contains only one work, but it is a big one: Tavastehus kronomagasines, 2011, fills both floors of the museum, yet the viewer experiences it as a single piece, not a thing in two parts. The Scottish-born, Finland-based artist is known for large, continually changing text collages governed by computer programs and projected onto the walls, floors, and even ceilings of museums and galleries. The individual words in his previous pieces often relate to human behavior; together they form images or attempts at full sentences. At the core of these artificial intelligence–operated works is the idea of language as a living, self-perpetuating organism.

The starting point for Tavastehus kronomagasines is the Hämeenlinna Art Museum’s history as a granary, and Sandison has now exchanged his floating words for showers of fast-moving pixels that resemble grain or seeds. These animations are mixed with recurring, looped information pertaining to grain, from hieroglyphs to real-time data on rye, wheat, and barley futures. The organisms of language have now been overshadowed by the organisms of economics, and the result is both joyful and ceremonious.

While it is fun to learn from a wall text that the computing power driving the whole installation is equivalent to that which governs a small town’s traffic-light system, the work does not celebrate technology. Rather, it is an impressive, complex metaphor for life and evolution, inspiring its viewers to contemplate how atoms create worlds as seeds give rise to life.

— Timo Valjakka

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

GALERIE GABRIEL ROLT
Elandsgracht 34
January 13–February 18

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Plate 3, A sunbathing tourist comes to the aid of one of 46 would-be immigrants on La Tejita Beach on the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife, Thursday Aug. 3, 2006, after the boat they were in ran a ground. (photo Arturo Rodríguez) www.fohguild.org/forums/screenshots/10545-funny-strange-randompics-2372.html, 2011, silk screen on paper, 11 3/8 x 9 1/2".

What purposes can monuments now serve, in a culture so full of messages, meanings, and temptations? That question underlies the exhibition “Portable Monuments” at Galerie Gabriel Rolt, by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, two British photographers who have always been fascinated with what goes unseen in a photograph, an image. In the series “Poor Monuments” (all works cited 2011), the specific object of their fascination is Bertolt Brecht’s book The War Primer (1955), which combines photographs clipped from newspapers (Hitler orating, Dresden after the bombing) with four-line poems. Broomberg and Chanarin have placed a translucent red rectangle over each page; supplementary materials indicate what contemporary image (accessible on the Internet and invariably related to the present-day “war on terror”) should be imagined there.

It is this delayed visual gratification, this prolongation of the desire to consume images, that gives “Poor Monuments” its special value. If you look up the contemporary images on the Internet after returning home, you are confronted with bizarre scenes ranging from Donald Rumsfeld on a unicycle to five dark fingers lying jauntily side by side in the sand—blown off in a bombing.

Delayed visual gratification again plays a role in the artists’ second and most recent series of work, also titled “Portable Monuments.” The photographs show blocks of various colors, which—through grouping, arrangement, and coding—represent news stories. The connection between image and meaning is even more tenuous here, but Broomberg and Chanarin’s creative choices (with strong allusions to modernism) do pull you out of the everyday flow of visual consumption. As far-fetched as its connections may seen, the exhibition makes it abundantly clear that the assignment of meaning, whether to images, photographs, or monuments, is a never-ending process.

Translated from Dutch by David McKay.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

“Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Sculpture”

DE VLEESHAL
Markt, Zusterstraat 7
October 22–December 11

View of “Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Sculpture,” 2011.

This group show poses a few significant questions for contemporary sculpture such as: What is the relationship between volume and surface? Is there a dialectic that can be forged between a figure and its physical support? The exhibition’s title is borrowed from Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 thriller Don’t Look Now, in which a fictitious book called Beyond the Fragile Geometry of Space makes a quick cameo. The protagonist of the film is an art conservator who specializes in mosaics, a medium that entails a detailed involvement with materials and alchemies for the production of images.

Eva Berendes’s large hanging curtain with geometric designs (The Middelburg Curtain, 2011) dominates the show and seems to hover between two and three dimensions—that is, between painting and sculpture. Michael Dean presents a photograph of a folded photograph of a sculpture (Success [Working Title], 2011), while David Jablonowski combines tools for the production of old and new images. The works of Koenraad Dedobbeleer and Italo Zuffi play on the boundaries between appearance and reality, form and function, sculpture and pedestal. The duo Astali/Peirce have placed a shiny, crackled polyester rectangle on the floor; the polygon appears as a gigantic black mirror, shattered to smithereens (Untitled [Capture], 2011). Finally, all that that remains of Guillaume Leblon’s melted ice sculpture (Punishment, 2008–11) is photographic documentation and a coin on the floor.

This show is well assembled, with its only limitation being that it leaves the viewer with the desire to see its themes explored more extensively and systematically than the De Vleeshal’s space permits. Still, the gathering should probably be seen as one stage along a larger path; many of the exhibitions chosen by the museum’s director, Lorenzo Benedetti, during the three years he has been in charge (Rob Johannesma’s 2010 solo show, for instance) more or less address the same questions that this one dwells upon.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Simone Menegoi

“Sound Spill”

WEST
Groenewegje 136
January 7–February 11

View of “Sound Spill,” 2012.

In the work of British artist Haroon Mirza, sounds are at least as important as images. For the past few years Mirza has been making installations out of a diverse array of objects (such as bouncing nuggets of gold and wobbly record players) and instruments (often electronic), using them to create tones and notes that give every part of the work new meaning, both visual and auditory. The exhibition “Sound Spill,” cocurated by Mirza, veers in a surprising new direction. Here, Mirza and the other two artist-curators, Thom O’Nions and Richard Sides, compose with the work of multiple other artists, and the pieces they have included were obviously selected more for their sonic appeal than for their visual qualities.

There are two sets of work in the gallery. The first brings together two videos by Guy Sherwin and Nina Canell and two installation pieces by Sides and Torsten Lauschmann. It is immediately clear what Mirza and his cocurators have in mind; the images seem disconnected but are linked by their sound tracks, which merge to form a driving, pulsing composition. This effect is even more striking in the second part, in which Gary Hill’s Around and About, 1980, is combined with Sherwin’s Railings, 1977, and Alex Heim’s Untitled (Dog), 2006. They form a weirdly perfect ensemble: With Sherwin as the rhythm section, Heim on organ, and Hill providing the voice, the result is a riveting composition, the perfect accompaniment to the unsettling imagery in the videos. Taken as a whole, the exhibition is above all a first-class Haroon Mirza creation; he uses the videos of his fellow artists to produce an original work that far exceeds the sum of its parts.

Translated from Dutch by David McKay.

— Hans den Hartog Jager

Jorge Peris

LA CONSERVERA
Avenida de Lorqui
September 17–January 8

View of “Aladas Almas,” 2011.

In Jorge Peris’s earliest childhood memory, which until recently he believed to be a dream, lies the uncanny presence of salt. For his latest exhibition, “Aladas Almas” (Winged Souls), he traveled to the salt flats of San Pedro del Pinatar, Spain, to experience being surrounded by salt. This journey assisted him in creating the show’s mood, which consists of 170 tons of salt sculpted into an architectural structure resembling an ancient tower and mythological ruin. Salt also surrounds the structure, which contrasts with the gallery’s black walls. Installed nearby one finds a silo, an accelerated saline ecosystem, and a video, Oriens, 2011, featuring the Bolivian desert landscape of Uyuni seen through the artist’s eyes during his journey. The exhibition is not immediately visible from the building’s entrance; one accesses the work by walking around a high wall to view the contrast of salt against the dark space, an experience that invites profound feelings of independence and discovery, in part due to the installation’s magnitude.

Peris often uses salt to preserve his projects that employ organic materials; in addition, he spread the substance in a circle around his body to protect against insects as he was conducting research for the current exhibition. By watching these insects, he became fascinated with organisms that live in the harsh conditions of saline environments. The ecosystem he has created here supports an algae culture, which feeds a brine shrimp colony. As part of the process, their eggs are sprayed onto the white tower; the sculptural material will be returned to San Pedro del Pinatar at the show’s end, allowing eggs to hatch in their natural habitat. Once a material used to exclude living creatures from a zone, salt here becomes a way to promote marginalized entities. The ecosystem serves as a metaphor for life: Beauty—and even meaning—can be found in supporting forces at odds with the world. “Winged Souls” is empowering, persuading us to take a second look at any given situation.

— Jacquelyn Davis

“De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde”

ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS
Fredsgatan 12/Jakobsgatan 27c
September 30–November 13

Ulf Linde, scale model of Étant donnés, 1994, mixed media, dimensions variable.

A long-awaited and recently completed text by the writer Ulf Linde, examining Marcel Duchamp’s intrinsic implementation of mathematics and geometry in his works, lies at the heart of the exhibition “De ou par Marcel Duchamp par Ulf Linde” (Of or by Marcel Duchamp by Ulf Linde), which is coorganized by Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts and Moderna Museet. With his essay, Linde, who enjoyed an enduring amity with the artist, surpasses most art-historical insights by explicitly declaring that Duchamp’s oeuvre coheres through its repetitious use of a twenty-two-and-a-half-degree angle and the numbers 1, 2, 3, 7, and 8.

The anticipated interpretation has been published in this show’s accompanying catalogue and spiritedly transmuted by the curators into a meandering and peculiar display. The exhibition includes several arrangements at a twenty-two-and-a-half-degree angle, a length of string that forms the golden ratio, long corridors displaying Linde’s prolific archive of notes and computations, and, within a green painted room that references Duchamp’s Green Box, a re-creation of the famed “Duchamp Room” that Linde curated in 1987 when Moderna Museet celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Duchamp’s birth. The room offers, among other pieces, Linde’s sanctioned replicas of Duchamp’s Large Glass, Fountain, and Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy. In addition, the show marks the debut of Linde’s 1:10 scale model of Étant donnés, which Linde finished in 1994 and which reveals the original’s “confidential” inner workings.

Ultimately, Linde’s study elucidates a distinct geometric and numeric relation between Coffee Mill, 1911, the inconspicuous painting Duchamp made for his brother’s kitchen, and his final piece, Étant donnés, 1946–66, explicating how the two mathematically correspond. And despite the risk of such a pronounced conclusion’s seeming contrived and perhaps even a mare’s nest, this disarming exhibition succeeds in making the mathematical approach appear, if not integral, at least plausible.

— Theodor Ringborg

Lina Selander

INDEX
Kungsbro Strand 19
November 2–December 18

View of “Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut,” 2011.

Index, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, has of late mounted several consecutive exhibitions largely influenced by eastern European topics, almost to the point of developing a distinct style, and the most recent exhibition by Lina Selander is no exception. Its title, “Lenin’s Lamp Glows in the Peasant’s Hut,” cites Dziga Vertov’s 1928 montage film Odinnadtsatyy (The Eleventh Year)—made to commemorate the eleventh anniversary of the October Revolution. Vertov’s film foremost details the construction of a hydroelectric power plant planned to generate power for the region surrounding the Dnieper River in the Soviet Union, in accord with Lenin’s slogan “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” The production of energy in this area, which eventually developed nuclear power, predicates Selander’s three-part installation comprising twenty-two photographic works, an engraved mirror, and a film.

By placing stones radiating uranium onto photo paper in hermetically sealed containers, Selander creates curious phantom images that visualize the stones’ emissions, much in the style of the photographic plates that led to Henri Becquerel’s unintentional discovery of radioactivity. The mirror, hung between two rooms and literally reflecting the installation’s two other parts, is engraved with crisscrossing phrases such as “Model Reactor 4”—referencing Selander’s accompanying film, which in turn appropriates Vertov’s work. Here the artist has coupled her own footage from Pripet, located near the Dnieper River, with scenes from Vertov’s film, along with images of plant fossils and evacuated hospitals.

All parts of the installation ultimately concern present-day repercussions of what we see in Vertov’s celebration, and although such collocations could be considered trite, the exhibition is quite enticing, especially for those with special interest in radiation. The photographic works are technically fascinating in this regard, but most poignant is the film—in particular, the part where Vertov’s workers are paired with their more recent counterparts, who in the late 1980s decontaminated rather than developed the area. A clip taken of one of these latter-day laborers documents the sanitation process, and we are reminded that all these workers, including the cameraman, passed away soon after being filmed—lest we forget that the Dnieper River region was eviscerated by the Chernobyl disaster.

— Theodor Ringborg

Goldin+Senneby

CRYSTAL CONTEMPORARY ART
Hudiksvallsgatan 4B
January 12–February 11

Goldin+Senneby, Money Will Be like Dross, 2012. Performance view.

The sole object exhibited in Goldin+Senneby’s current show is an eighteenth-century furnace once owned by the alchemist August Nordenskiöld, designed to make gold. But it only serves as garnish for the more compelling works related to the exhibition. On the night of the opening, buses departed from the gallery for Drottningholm Theatre—a majestic playhouse. It was an evening of prestidigitation that announced the duo’s new investment fund, reportedly designed by an anonymous programmer and systems architect: the Nordenskiöld Model Trading Fund.

En route in my bus, an actor playing Senneby introduced the occasion. He read aloud a letter by a playwright named Pamela Carter, which outlined a forthcoming play. This was apparently an open rehearsal, and the goal of the ride was to get passengers up to speed on Nordenskiöld’s alchemy, particularly his experiments on the grounds of Drottningholm. Remarkably, Nordenskiöld never sought alchemy’s riches but rather secretively aimed at making such immense quantities of gold as to expunge its worth—releasing man from monetary tyranny. Once seated in the theater, a magician performed acts evoking issues of duplication. Repeatedly stating, “You need gold to make gold,” she did one stunt that had audience members’ wedding bands disappear and reappear; another trick replicated bottles.

The magic and Nordenskiöld were key elements, of course, in the work. The bus ride was mere necessity and the guided tour was simple, pedagogical filler. And indeed, as was made clear on the bus, this is one part of an extensive project with more to come. But the work on this occasion, which was essentially the debut of their intricately structured fund, made Goldin+Senneby appear as tricksters pulling the strings, as it were, backstage—puppet masters with a fund as real as their fictitious selves that lectured on the busses. However, while the market is extremely volatile and professional money managers seem perplexed about what’s currently happening, Goldin+Senneby’s experiments with finance by way of Nordenskiöld’s utopian ideals might, after all, be exactly what’s needed, even though their fund could very well be double or nothing.

— Theodor Ringborg