Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin

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

picks January 26, 2012

“Sound Spill”

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,