Liutauras Psibilskis

• 

  previews September 2009

  10th Baltic Triennial

  This year, as Lithuania celebrates its millennial anniversary, the metropolis serves as a European Capital of Culture—an official title, tied to a PR agenda whose limits the curators intend to test with “Urban Stories,” the triennial’s multifarious tenth iteration.

  With at least five culturally distinct histories—from Jewish to Tartar Muslim—scribed in as many languages, Vilnius has long been considered one of Europe’s most enigmatic cities. This year, as Lithuania celebrates its millennial anniversary, the metropolis serves as a European Capital of Culture—an official title, tied to a PR agenda whose limits the curators intend to test with “Urban Stories,” the triennial’s multifarious tenth iteration. Comprising sixty works, including thirty-five site-specific installations and performances by such international

• 

  picks May 31, 2007

  Jen DeNike and Marianne Vitale

  Since the transformation of this space into a “Leopard Cube” one year ago (every surface was painted with a leopard print), the venue itself has become a unique ongoing installation project. Any artistic intervention into this environment becomes an extension of this visually and conceptually brazen infrastructure. Jen DeNike’s Next Door and Marianne Vitale’s Missing Book of Spurs (both 2007) are the exhibitions currently plugged into this context. DeNike built a freestanding house, complete with an installation and screening environment, in the middle of the hall. The piece examines, among

• 

  print February 2006

  IX Baltic Triennial of International Art

  With each edition the Baltic Triennial in Vilnius secures greater international visibility and interest. This year’s curators, Sofia Hernández Chong Cuy, Raimundas Malašauskas, and Alexis Vaillant, chose a subjectivity-driven method and pulled off an interesting and complex show, somewhat mystifyingly entitled “BMW, The IX Baltic Triennial of International Art,” whose intentionally disorienting mix of works was underscored by the hanging sheets of black plastic that evoked a “shadow” wall structure for the Vilnius CAC (developed in collaboration with the architect/artist Valdas Ozarinskas) and

• 

  print January 2006

  Gothenburg Biennial

  This year’s Gothenburg Biennial, the third installment, was not as expansive an exhibition as the biennial format might suggest. The curator, Sara Arrhenius, chose to develop close collaborations with a select group of artists and to focus on new productions or co-productions rather than present a mass of works. The exhibition didn’t involve much explicit interaction with the city, nor did it have a strongly pronounced theme, and the title, “More Than This!: Negotiating Realities,” could be read in more than one way. In her introductory essay, Arrhenius explains that her idea was to “bring

• 

  print September 2005

  Reykjavík Arts Festival

  Requisitioning nearly every art venue in the capital and across Iceland, the Reykjavík Arts Festival turned the whole island into an art gallery featuring mostly new work by thirty-four artists, including Carsten Höller, Lawrence Weiner, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Olafur Eliasson. The focal point of the project, its link to other places and other times, was the work of Dieter Roth. The German/Swiss artist who made Iceland his home from the mid-’50s on was extensively presented in several Reykjavík venues under the title “Dieter Roth—Train.” In addition to Roth’s well-known studio environments,

• 

  print Summer 2005

  Matts Leiderstam

  Matts Leiderstam’s exhibition at Magasin 3 contains many levels and subsets. Grand Tour, 1996–, first presented at the Venice Biennale in 1997, provides a unified setting for many of Leiderstam’s key projects and models them into one consistent body of work. The exhibition, which fits into a single spacious room, takes us through years of activity and dispatches us to several countries in different time zones. The display has the look of a library or classical art research center, right down to paintings that would appear to be from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. There are reading

• 

  print March 2005

  Juan-Pedro Fabra

  Juan-Pedro Fabra has been exploring the image of the Swedish military since 2002—making photographs and films that investigate the representation of this hidden side of peaceful Sweden, a side unknown to the international marketplace of images. Fabra’s new video, Untitled, 2004, presents a typical Scandinavian landscape, in which almost nothing seems to be happening except for the change of light as dusk falls and night approaches. There is something profoundly meditative about this straightforward view of the environment, as one is drawn into the slow rhythm of change. Is this how professional

• 

  print December 2004

  Momentum 2004

  The third edition of Momentum, the biannual Nordic festival of contemporary art in the southern Norwegian town of Moss, had to be postponed a few years. The announcement that it was back on track was therefore welcome news. Momentum has become an important showcase for new developments in Nordic art, and at the moment there is no other festival, institution, or journal that could provide such an overview. The long period of preparation for this year’s exhibition both raised and lowered expectations. The curators, Caroline Corbetta from Italy and Per Gunnar Tverbakk from Norway, wanted Momentum

• 

  print September 2004

  Arturas Raila

  “Roll Over Museum” was a series of exhibitions by Lithuanian artist Arturas Raila in the three Baltic capitals of Vilnius, Tallinn, and Riga, organized after he was awarded the Hansabank art award, the largest of its kind in the region. While the other two exhibitions featured most of his video works to date, the presentation at CAC Vilnius offered a live interaction between segments of society that seem to be completely detached from one another. Raila has often directed his gaze at subcultures far from the contemporary-art establishment. In 1998 the artist invited members of the tiniest, least

• 

  print February 2004

  Annika von Hausswolff

  Annika von Hausswolff’s exhibition “The Memory of My Mother’s Underwear Transformed into a Flameproof Drape & Other Works,” part of a series of presentations of work by Swedish artists who have shown abroad with funding from IASPIS, referred to spaces beyond the gallery in more ways than one. In the most literal sense, it joined work from her earlier project at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen and works borrowed from the collection of Magasin 3 in Stockholm. Other levels of outward reference had to do with the substance of the work itself: Hausswolff’s installation and pictures opened

• 

  print December 2003

  Henrik Håkansson

  These two exhibitions amounted to the first substantial showing in Stockholm by one of Sweden’s best-known younger artists. Henrik Håkansson’s exhibition at the Riddarhuset was part of a series organized by Moderna Museet in various venues throughout Sweden while the museum building on Stockholm’s Skeppsholmen Island is temporarily closed. Index, continuing its process-oriented approach, showed Håkansson’s recent audio piece Nightingale Love Two Times, 2002, next to a new work developed in collaboration with local ornithologists.

  Both presentations were experimental, but in different ways.

• 

  picks October 07, 2003

  “24/7: Wilno–Nueva York”

  “. . . To interact with myriad flows and actions happening simultaneously, a continuous invention of new ways of living and difference-friendly environments“—this exhibition's introductory text isn’t just another blurb. ”24/7,“ which has generated enough ideas and brought together enough artwork to fill a one-year program at a good-size museum, takes you in with a vibrant and well-conceived grouping of contributions from both sides of the Atlantic and is both visually seductive and politically discursive. Under curators Kestutis Kuizinas and Raimundas Malasauskas’s open-ended umbrella concept,