picks September 11, 2019

Marianne Keating

“The Ocean Between”—the Atlantic—connects Ireland and the Caribbean, two territories here explored by Marianne Keating in a group of films. Keating built Landlessness, 2017, the exhibition’s key work, out of archival materials sourced from the National Archives in England, Ireland, and Jamaica. In this two-channel video projection, she excavates the social conditions that generated a wave of emigration from Ireland to Jamaica between 1835 and 1842, in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in colonial Jamaica in 1834.

One screen depicts the Irish landscape overlaid with subtitles drawn from

previews January 2016

“Campo Cerrado: Spanish Art of the Postwar Period”

“Campo cerrado” (Closed Field) surveys Spanish cultural production from 1939—a date that marks not only the commencement of World War II but also the end of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of Franco’s dictatorial rule—to the mid-1950s. Work from this period has, for the most part, been critically disregarded until recently, thanks to its conservative strain and its association with the fascist Francoist regime. This exhibition promises to shed new light on the epoch, highlighting the emergence of a modern Spanish sensibility. The show

previews September 2015

Helena Almeida

This major survey promises to assure Helena Almeida’s stature as a significant post-Minimalist artist. Featuring roughly seventy-five works made between 1966 and 2015, the exhibition focuses on Almeida’s take on the relationship between representation and performance, underscoring the role of the body in her output. It will highlight the painted black-and-white photographic self-portraits depicting movement sequences for which the artist is recognized but will also explore lesser-known aspects of her practice, including early paintings, drawings,

picks May 08, 2015

Maria Thereza Alves

This survey of Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves’s practice intelligently includes her seminal work Seeds of Change: A Floating Ballast Seed Garden, 1999–. Here, panels with pictures, maps, and texts dedicated to European port cities document her scrutiny of the connection between trade, the scattering of ships’ ballast flora, and landscape. Alves’s interest in ecology is her trademark, but this exhibition addresses her range through a selection of works focused on colonial themes, including the subaltern condition of native peoples across history. Take for example NoWhere, 1991, which combines

picks April 06, 2015

Marcos Ávila Forero

A key characteristic of French-Colombian artist Marcos Ávila Forero’s practice is an ethnographic engagement with political subjects and contexts. In this exhibition, the installation Zuratoque, 2013, is exemplary of that method. Zuratoque is a shantytown in the Santander region of Colombia, mostly occupied by peasants who fled the countryside due to the ongoing warfare between the Colombian government, revolutionary guerrilla movements, and conservative paramilitary groups. Forero collaborated with them to produce this work, wherein the refugees wrote testimonies to their experiences on jute

picks March 24, 2015

Simon Ling

In this survey of British painter Simon Ling’s output from the past half decade, Untitled, 2011, is part of a series that depicts a concrete foundation overgrown with patches of moss and grass, somewhere in the English countryside. The painting is a minute close-up of its subject, and such a scale suggests Ling’s interaction with it, both intellectually and physically. Fittingly, it was also featured in this venue’s previous exhibition “The Noing Uv It,” which speculated about the dynamics between objects, their portrayal, and the world.

The artist often examines urban landscapes, particularly

picks March 19, 2015

“Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie”

The exhibition’s curator, Catalina Lozano, addresses the changing status of objects from a social perspective, considering how items encapsulate subaltern narratives, particularly from colonialism. Take, for instance, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s contribution: five rods made from ten melted copper Katanga crosses. In the past, populations of central Africa utilized these articles as currency, and the metal’s abundance in the Katanga region attracted Belgian colonizers. Today, the pieces resemble Minimalist sculpture. In both cases, value is of significance.

Elsewhere, Jorge Satorre’s Matar vasijas

picks March 09, 2015

“Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society, 1915-2015”

The spectre of Kazimir Malevich haunts this exhibition. Black Quadrilateral, c. 1915—one of his compositions of shapes, including the square, painted against a white background—is the first of a long, dense display that surveys the twentieth-century developments and current trends of geometric abstraction across time and place. Malevich’s way of making art explored spirituality, and various artists followed him in this. Josef Albers, for example, created the series “Homage to the Square,” 1950-75, which emphasized an experience of the transcendental. But Malevich was also a pioneer of a

picks February 16, 2015

Carlos Garaicoa

Proyecto frágil (Santander) (Fragile Project [Santander]), 2014, is the key work of Madrid-based artist Carlos Garaicoa’s latest survey. The installation consists of several thin curved layers of glass, united by magnets at various heights, representing a port town. The piece intelligently explicates Santander’s shipping economy as symptomatic of capitalism’s association of modernity with industrialization and its organization of globalization and trade.

Architecture is a key theme of Garaicoa’s output, and here he presents various photographs of streets and buildings from his native Cuba,

print February 2015

Asier Mendizabal

Asier Mendizabal has always been concerned with the political realm, particularly both the problem of collective action as the motor of society’s transformation. In this respect, he initially considers power through symbols, inquiring into ideology and agency in the public sphere, then turns them into form. In the recent past, his interest has been the representation of the masses across history and media. In the series in “Figures and Prefigurations (Divers),” 2009–11, for instance, he draws from crowd scenes culled from the imagery of the post–World War I avant-garde to create black-and-white

picks January 27, 2015

“Really Useful Knowledge”

This exhibition’s title, “Really Useful Knowledge,” refers to a provocative nineteenth-century expression that emerged within British blue-collar communities to denote competence in intellectual realms such as philosophy, as opposed to the “useful knowledge,” or technical know-how that industrialists envisaged for their employees in order to increase productivity. The show’s curators, the collective What, How & for Whom, intelligently selected works that examine alternative pedagogical initiatives throughout history and across the globe.

Many of the featured works consider the potential for both

picks January 25, 2015

“The SAAL Process: Architecture and Participation, 1974–1976”

A presentation of archival materials—from paintings informed by muralism to a slide projection of rallies—collected by Alexandre Alves Costa evokes the April 25, 1974, uprising, or Carnation Revolution, which inaugurated the democratic era in Portugal. The display sets up historical background for an examination of the SAAL (Serviço Ambulatório de Apoio Local [Local Ambulatory Support Service]), a Portuguese architectural enterprise that was organized in the wake of the event to address housing issues, particularly those within urban underprivileged areas, that characterized Portugal. It brought

Miguel Amado