previews May 2015

Loretta Fahrenholz

The half-dozen films Loretta Fahrenholz has made to date employ the filmic forms of a wide range of genres as they engage with particular social coteries (from art students sharing a flat in Leipzig to New York street dancers) whose group dynamics, codes, and visual markers Fahrenholz abstracts and extrapolates into highly aestheticized portraits. Staging systems rather than story lines, vocabularies rather than dialogue, and bodies rather than subjects, her films bring a merciless perspective to the language games and body languages through which power relations are

print November 2014

INTERIORITY COMPLEX: THE ART OF PETER WÄCHTLER

GERMAN ARTIST Peter Wächtler’s first solo exhibition sold out before its opening, thanks to the enthusiasm of a single buyer: the famous liquor manufacturer Sterkert, which sweetened the deal by giving the artist a lifetime supply of eggnog. At the time, Wächtler was twelve years old. He was already a printmaking prodigy several times over, having played a leading role in the comeback of drypoint and woodcut techniques in West Germany while setting new standards of excellence in lithography and silk screen. He was obliged by long-standing tradition to join the army at a tender age—Wächtler is

previews September 2014

Josef Strau

While running Galerie Meerrettich in Berlin from 2002 to 2008, the artist Josef Strau became interested in making again, distancing himself from what he retrospectively termed the “non-productive attitude” of the early-1990s Cologne scene. Yet motifs of bohemian life, laziness, hesitation, and struggles with productivity are written into Strau’s work quite literally, even if—glued to lampshades or on posters replete with typographic diversions—his diaristic stream of consciousness is difficult to read. When asked a few years back whether he still did lamps,

previews September 2014

Florine Stettheimer

An original member of the Société Anonyme Inc. and the hostess of an illustrious salon, Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) helped form New York’s infrastructure for modern art. Her own work, however, proved anything but readily assimilable—not that she showed much desire to integrate. Stettheimer rejected Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, preferring instead her own highly stylized studio, where she would host her friends—a circle that included the likes of Marcel Duchamp. Rendered in a flamboyant faux-naïf style suffused with elements of decor and

print November 2012

digital labor

“IMAGINE A WORLD WITHOUT FREE KNOWLEDGE.” To help the public envision such a scenario, Wikipedia went black for twenty-four hours on January 18, 2012, emblazoning its front page with that ominous slogan. In support of this action, protesters took to the streets in New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, and 4.5 million people signed an online petition initiated by Google. Even fresh-faced Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted his first tweet since 2009, linking to a post that stated: “We can’t let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet’s development.” The point of contention: the

previews October 2012

“The New Public: From a New Public Dimension to New Users”

Europe is currently being shaken by a socioeconomic crisis—one that is both the product of and the justification for privatization on a massive scale.

Europe is currently being shaken by a socioeconomic crisis—one that is both the product of and the justification for privatization on a massive scale. The European public’s reaction—or the almost complete lack thereof—suggests that their sense of the res publica has greatly diminished. Against this, curator Rein Wolfs posits the emergence of a “New Public,” expressions of which he identifies in recent work by fourteen artists, including Juliette Blightman, Christian Jankowski, Erik van Lieshout, Helen Marten, Danh Vo, and the Dutch research studio Metahaven.

print Summer 2012

the 7th Berlin Biennale

“THIS IS NOT OUR MUSEUM / THIS IS YOUR ACTION SPACE,” reads a banner greeting visitors to KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Berlin Biennale’s main venue and traditional host. Its authors, members of Occupy Berlin and affiliated groups invited to set up shop there by the biennial’s curator, the artist Artur Żmijewski, are the exhibition’s main attraction and set its tone. They paradigmatically stand for the concept of art to which Żmijewski has dedicated his “biennale for contemporary politics”: “Art that actually works, makes its mark on reality.”

Żmijewski, who organized the biennial with

Jakob Schillinger