Claudia Arozqueta

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  picks May 25, 2015

  Ignas Krunglevičius

  Ignas Krunglevičius’s work focuses on unmasking how language is marshaled into the service of power, from political rhetoric and demagogy to psychological persuasion. Interrogation, 2009, for instance, is a two-channel video installation based on an interview transcript from a 2004 murder investigation in the United States in which a woman was suspected of killing her husband with a shotgun. Similar to the way an interrogation room generates a power dynamic and tension from the moment a person steps inside, the layout of the installation is designed to maximize viewers’ discomfort.

  Upon entering

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  picks April 25, 2015

  Billy Apple

  When the young New Zealand artist Barrie Bates bleached his hair and eyebrows in 1962, he became a living brand: Billy Apple®. Encompassing more than five decades of Apple’s interdisciplinary practice, this show features documentation of his reinvention, alongside more than 150 works in which the boundaries of art and life, subject and object, are constantly tested. Particularly outstanding are Apple’s actions from the 1960s and ’70s, created in London and New York, where he was a key figure in the Pop and Conceptual art scenes. Through subtle or radical strategies, the works of this period

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  picks December 19, 2014

  “Teoría del color”

  “Teoría del color” (Color Theory) investigates social systems steeped in exclusion, racial differentiation, and discrimination, through the work of fifteen international artists in a variety of media, including posters, video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. These works reveal that there is no better testament to the racism deeply rooted in our time than the visual clues embedded in supposedly postracial societies. Take for example Daniela Ortiz’s 97 Empleadas domésticas (97 Domestic Employees) , 2010, a compelling photo album of snapshots documenting social and family

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  picks May 27, 2014

  James Beckett

  Dowsing, or divining, is a practice that stems from ancient times, in which one uses rods or sticks to find a diversity of hidden objects, such as metals, oil, archeological remains, or even missing persons, under surfaces. In 2013, Netherlands-based Zimbabwean artist James Beckett, whose practice centers on revealing the nature of found objects and historical narratives, invited two dowsers from the United Kingdom to explore the grounds of various educational institutions in Amsterdam.

  In this didactic exhibition, the results of the project are configured into an installation that investigates

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  picks April 18, 2014

  Simon Starling

  Simon Starling’s latest exhibition, “In Speculum,” brings together a selection of six projects—incorporating film, photography, installation, and texts—that orbit the themes of process and materiality as well as of artist and industrial workshops. Each individual work intricately connects to different historical events, tempos, and places. Take, for example, two eponymously titled recent works from 2013, a film and a series of photographs, which were inspired by the nineteenth-century’s Great Melbourne Telescope. Like the majority of Starling’s works, the black-and-white circular film, realized

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  picks November 21, 2013

  John Panting

  When the London-based New Zealand artist John Panting tragically died in a motorcycle accident in 1974 at the age of thirty-four, he left behind a vast number of sculptures in a variety of styles and materials that qualify him as an obsessive and experimental creator. His survey in Wellington titled “Spatial Constructions” brings together three abstract human-scale sculptures and seven smaller works in steel and aluminum—all made between 1972 and 1974—that evince his late interest in the nature of spatial relationships. 6.08 (Untitled VIII), 1973–74, was created by assembling red oxidized steel

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  picks September 05, 2013

  Shane Cotton

  Shane Cotton’s latest exhibition, “The Hanging Sky,” is a wily representation of Aotearoa’s hybrid culture. The thirty paintings and drawings on view—all made over the past six years—illustrate recent developments in the Kiwi painter’s practice. He has notably decamped from painting landscapes to vast vaults of sky and his palette has shifted from earth tones to rich blacks, blues, and reds. Within each, these darkened firmaments act as screens onto which a diverse mix of cultural-historical imagery is projected: Examples include toi moko (Māori preserved tattooed heads that were highly

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  picks May 17, 2013

  Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra

  For almost a decade, Indian artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra have been using different media—product design, graphics, sculpture, installation, and video—to explore identity and social problems that affect their homeland. For their first solo exhibition in Singapore, the artists have created a series of paintings and a site-specific installation that reflect on the diaspora in Punjab, a state located in northwestern India where more than twenty thousand immigrate illegally every year. This move is predicated on the widespread belief that living in the west (which in India is connotative to

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  picks December 12, 2012

  Teresa Margolles

  The 2012 recipient of the Artes Mundi award, Mexican artist Teresa Margolles is known for her poignant works that center around drug-related violence in her homeland. Her past work has explored the failures, victims, and unseen consequences of organized crime and its antagonist forces embodied by state security services. Her current exhibition, “La promesa” (The Promise), features a site-specific, eponymously titled 115-foot-wide mound of debris, which is shaped like a mass grave and consists of what once was a low-income house in the suburbs of the border city Ciudad Juárez. In the past decade,

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  picks September 12, 2012

  “True Stories/Scripted Realities”

  This group exhibition curated by Mercedes Vicente brings together five compelling video installations that use scripted narratives to question the dichotomy between fiction and documentary, as well as illusion and veracity. Criminal Case 40/61: Reverb, 2009, by Andrea Geyer, restages the 1961 trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann based on transcripts and other historical sources. This six-channel immersive installation features six characters, all played by a single performer, and can be viewed from six different stools located at the center of the gallery. Geyer’s work explores the configuration of

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  picks January 30, 2012

  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

  Visitors are welcomed to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s exhibition by a conveyor belt with a computerized scanner where they are invited to place all sorts of small objects that they can find in their pockets. Once these pass under the scanner, images of the items are then projected on the conveyor belt alongside objects of other participants. Please Empty Your Pockets, 2010, is one of the thirteen artworks in this first solo exhibition of Lozano-Hemmer in Australia, throughout which the artist uses records and repetition of data such as sound and images captured by means of advanced surveillance or

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  picks September 26, 2011

  “Crystal City: Contemporary Asian Artists”