picks May 22, 2014

Simone Leigh

Prominent in “Gone South,” Simone Leigh’s solo institutional debut, is my work, my dreams, must wait until after hell, 2012. The video loop, made with Chitra Ganesh under the collaborative moniker Girl, presents a woman’s back as it almost imperceptibly rises and falls with her breath, her head abbreviated beneath a mound of rocks. Unique among the works on view—which are chiefly ceramic or otherwise sculptural—the video nonetheless participates in the exhibition's emphasis on materiality, wherein human form and culture are engaged in dialogue with the raw elements of the earth.

This

print October 2013

OPENINGS: ANNE IMHOF

ANNE IMHOF’S first institutional solo exhibition, “Parade,” opened in July at Frankfurt’s Portikus with a performance of Aqua Leo, 1st of at least two, 2013. “Coded Conduct,” a group show at Pilar Corrias in London, kicked off several months prior with a presentation of Imhof’s School of the Seven Bells, 3rd of at least three, 2013. These performance works’ titles contain an indeterminate promise. The “x of at least y” formula commits to the reproduction of the work, reveals where we are in a sequence, then inserts a “maybe” that suspends us somewhere within an incomplete process. At Portikus,

picks December 22, 2010

Etienne Chambaud

“In this show objects fall, and break,” reads a line in the text authored by artist Etienne Chambaud that accompanies his “Objets rédimés” (Redeemed Objects)––an exhibition in which, to put it more accurately, fallen, already broken objects litter the floor at Bugada & Cargnel in perfectly contained circles of debris. These forms were created through a ritual plummeting of glass reproductions of everyday objects––such as a rope, a book, and an umbrella––from the gallery’s nearly thirty six-foot high ceilings. Temporary tubes were used to contain the shards upon impact but were later removed;

picks October 28, 2010

Klara Lidén

Klara Lidén’s Unheimlich Manöver (Uncanny Maneuver), 2007, one of twelve works in the Swedish artist’s first major UK exhibition, consists of “everything in the artist’s apartment”––including chairs, shoes, bicycle parts, boxes, and plumbing––removed and reinstalled into orderly stacks, intercepting the entrance to the Serpentine’s main gallery. What is truly unheimlich about Lidén’s maneuver is that it calls its own bluff: The notion of “all the contents” of any private space has little sense when its walls have been broken down and its contents released into the public sphere. As such, the

picks July 21, 2010

Ken Okiishi

“Chapter One. He adored New York City,” begins Woody Allen’s 1979 Manhattan. “To him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. The same lack of individual integrity to cause so many people to take the easy way out . . .” Allen’s line may be an allusion to suicide, but one less radical departure for New York creatives has been, traditionally, to move away. With seemingly exponential increase over the past decade, asylum seekers have turned not to Brooklyn but to Berlin, inaugurating in their wake a love-hate fantasy wherein the German capital is cast as a utopian center of artistic

Victoria Camblin