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Cornelia Parker is softly spoken and bird-like; an artist who peppers her conversation with nervous little laughs. Yet her work is all about blowing things up.

Over her career, the Turner prize-shortlisted English artist, who was appointed an Order of the British Empire in 2010, has made a name treating objects with what she terms "cartoon violence". Silver cutlery has been crushed with a steamroller. A garden shed has been blown to smithereens. Wedding rings have been stretched. And stretched. And stretched.

"I did a series of work with things meeting their end like a cartoon death: throwing silver objects off the White Cliffs of Dover or steamrolling stuff or putting money on the railway track," says Parker. When we meet, despite the heat, she is dressed in black tights and a monochrome fleece topped off with her trademark page-boy bob. "These were all cliches. I like cliches. They are a monumental thing ... [My practice asks]: why are they so universally loved?"

Now Parker, 63, is hosting her first major survey in the southern hemisphere. Cornelia Parker, showing at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, features over 40 artworks ranging from smaller pieces on paper to her epic, soul-stirring large-scale installations.

Art is just political. Full stop. Whether it's party-political is another matter

Cornelia Parker

Most famous of these is 1991's Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View. Parker enlisted the British army to detonate a purpose-built shed, stuffed with donations from friends (soft toys, gardening tools) and items found in charity stores. The blackened, broken parts were then suspended from the ceiling, as if at the moment of eruption. Casting shadows on to the walls, Cold Dark Matter looks like a giant chandelier poised - gorgeously - between destruction and creation.

But if Parker talks about the violence within her work with a Wham! Bam! Pow! joviality ("it was quite satisfying," she says of the explosion), those works also contain an eerie sense of turmoil and deep unsettlement.

"The blowing up was part of trying to disrupt something that was cosy and suburban, like the garden shed. Blowing it up was just causing havoc in a place that was really quite benign and quite peaceful." She shrugs. "It was pre-September 11, so it seemed like a childlike thing to do."

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Casting shadows on to the walls, the blown-up garden shed that is Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991) looks like a giant chandelier poised between destruction and creation. Photograph: Anna Kucera

And yet: "We had IRA bombs going off in London and you couldn't turn on the news without there being yet another explosion." The knowledge gives Cold Dark Matter a grim twist.

Sculpture, for Parker, is a nexus of change, rather than a place to build something substantial and solid. She finds herself drawn to "leaves on trees, blades of grass in the field - they are made up of lots of small things that are mobile. Those are the things I really quite enjoy rather than having big static lumps of stone, which might be a more traditional way of sculpture. I like things being ephemeral".

Takashi Murakami, Japan's rock star artist, unveils 10-metre 'stupid cat painting'

Her early 2000s work Subconscious of a Monument is, like Cold Dark Matter, about freezing a transitory moment in time and space. Engineers, tasked with preventing the Leaning Tower of Pisa from collapsing, eventually found a workable method: the extraction of soil from underneath the monument.

"They were desperate to save it but they took 10 years to find the right technique," says Parker, who was dating an Italian architect at the time (she is now married to American-born artist Jeff McMillan, with whom she has a daughter). Intrigued, she asked if she could use the excavated clay, hanging each chunk from the ceiling by an individual wire. "A lot of my work is about gravity - for me to suspend the clods of earth lain in the dark for over a thousand years, it's like the turning of the earth," she says.

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Cornelia Parker in the UK parliament: 'I really feel particular about things like climate change and Brexit - I'd rather just be verbal about it than make work about it.' Photograph: MCA

In 2015, Parker turned her attention to another world attraction: Magna Carta (An Embroidery) is a tapestry of the charter of rights' Wikipedia page as it stood on the cusp of its 800th anniversary. The twist? Many of the 4,000-plus words in the 13-metre long tapestry were embroidered by men and women with opposing political views, values or life experiences: Julian Assange and Edward Snowden contributed, as did the American ambassador to the UK and convicted murderers in state prisons. Former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger embroidered the words "political contemporary relevance", spilling, as he pricked his finger, some of his own blood.

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Magna Carta (An Embroidery) 2015, a large-scale tapestry of the Wikipedia entry on Magna Carta. Photograph: Joseph Turp/MCA

"I wanted to have good and evil, it to be left and right," says Parker. "To have the American ambassador alongside Edward Snowden - all on the same bit of fabric. I wanted to turn an embroidery into something a bit more pithy, a bit more edgy."

Today, as a staunch "remainer", Parker is keen to talk about something else altogether: the impending general election in her home country. She is looking on with wry humour, scepticism (Jeremy Corbyn is "ineffectual and vain"; Boris Johnson a "racist", "sexist" and "quite Machiavellian"), as well as relief that, unlike in 2017, she is no longer the UK's official election artist.

"Art is just political. Full stop. Whether it's party-political is another matter," she says. "I keep thinking: 'If you want to say something just open your mouth and say it.' I really feel particular about things like climate change and Brexit - I'd rather just be verbal about it than make work about it."

At heart, Parker's art speaks to the human condition above day-to-day squabbles. She has long been fascinated with The Golden Bough, anthropologist Sir James George Frazer's seminal book on mythology. Ancient religions "had to kill something off every time they wanted something to be regenerated. For every death you get a resurrection," she says. "That's what happens when I suspend [my work]. It is very like a morgue; [but] in the air they are reanimated."
* Cornelia Parker is showing at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art until 16 February 2020 Topics

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Steamrollers, explosions, and 'cartoon violence': the artistic eruptions of Cornelia Parker

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Cornelia Parker is softly spoken and bird-like; an artist who peppers her conversation with nervous little laughs. Yet her work is all about blowing things up. Over her career, the Turner prize-shortlisted English artist, who was appointed an Order of the British Empire in 2010, has made a name treating objects with what she terms "cartoon violence".

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This work is a kinetic sculpture consisting of wooden boxes arranged in a circle on the gallery floor with a tall plastic tube placed at their centre. At the bottom of the tube is a quantity of soapy liquid that is turned into foam by compressors located inside the wooden portions of the sculpture. This results in the foam being projected upwards and out of the tube, forming a jet of bubbles that extends above head-height. The plastic of the tube is clear, such that once the bubbles are released they can be seen rising up inside the tube. The bubbles are produced constantly and form cloud-like clusters at the top of the tube, and once these clusters have been propelled upwards they drop back and slide slowly down the exterior of the tube to its base, where they rejoin the bath of soapy liquid from which they came.

Cloud Canyons No. 3: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines (Auto Creative Sculptures) was made by the Filipino artist David Medalla in 1961. It is among the earliest of several 'bubble machines' that Medalla produced at the time and first exhibited in 1964 at Signals Gallery in London, a space devoted to international kinetic art that Medalla co-founded that same year. Cloud Canyons No. 3 bears the additional date of 2004, as it was recreated that year for the exhibition Art & The 60s: This Was Tomorrow at Tate Britain in London.

Although the materials and construction for Cloud Canyons No. 3 are controlled by Medalla each time it is installed, the sculpture changes constantly once it is on display due to the varying shapes formed by the foam. In an interview in 1979, Medalla noted that he had been attempting with his sculptures to give 'tangible form to invisible forces ... to find a model which would show the transformation of matter into energy' (quoted in Araeen 1997, p.11), and the words 'cloud' and 'canyon' in the work's title reflect the artist's interest in the random shapes formed by the earth's natural processes. The art critic Guy Brett has described the first installation of Cloud Canyons No. 3 in 1964 as follows:

The foam was allowed to follow its own aleatory paths, emerging and forming according to its own energies interacting with gravity, air currents, atmospheric pressure, and the shape of the containers ... the analogy with clouds was no exaggeration. It was never the same two days in a row.
(Brett 1995, p.53.)

In creating his series of Cloud Canyons, Medalla drew on a range of artistic practices as well as scientific theories that were emerging at the time. He was inspired by the 'auto-destructive' sculptures of the Polish artist Gustav Metzger, a friend of Medalla who was also involved with Signals Gallery, and by current research into relativity and cellular biology. Medalla has explained that his use of bubbles was also connected to specific childhood memories, including the clouds in tropical sunsets in Manila; watching his mother cooking; a visit to a brewery in Edinburgh; and the frothing mouth of a wounded Japanese soldier he discovered in the family garden. Although his work was inspired by personal experience, Medalla was concerned with breaking the boundary between the spectator and the artwork and intended for viewers to bring their own personal interpretations to the cloud-like forms created by the bubble machines. He said in 1968:

The most important thing is to give life to materials, so that instead of finding ourselves separate from them, we find a complete dialogue with the material.
(Quoted in Brett 1995, p.62.)

Photographs of the bubbles created by Medalla's work were reproduced in the Signals Gallery Newsbulletin in September 1964. In the accompanying text, Metzger called Medalla 'the first master of auto-creative art', implying that Medalla's practice was a variation on Metzger's own auto-destructive art. Metzger argued that the bubble machines were 'capable of achieving not only the most complex forms and motions but also an aesthetic content of the highest order', and that they were extensions of the work of earlier modernist sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi, Hans Arp, Alexander Calder and Naum Gabo. In 1968, Signals member Paul Keeler showed a copy of the September 1964 Newsbulletin to the artist Marcel Duchamp, who subsequently created an edition of one hundred sculptures entitled Medallic Object that took the form of a medal bursting with bubble-shaped forms.

Further reading
Rasheed Araeen, 'Conversation with David Medalla', Black Phoenix, no.3, Spring 1979, pp.10-19.
Guy Brett, Exploding Galaxies: The Art of David Medalla, London 1995, pp.50-65.
Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2006, pp.126-30.

Fiona Anderson
May 2014

Supported by Christie's.
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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‘cloud canyons no. 3: an ensemble of bubble machines (auto creative sculptures)’

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'Cloud Canyons No. 3: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines (Auto Creative Sculptures)', David Medalla, 1961, remade 2004 | Tate

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Artwork page for 'Cloud Canyons No. 3: An Ensemble of Bubble Machines (Auto Creative Sculptures)', David Medalla, 1961, remade 2004 Medalla has described himself as 'a poet who celebrates physics', combining science and nature with art.

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Hélio Oiticica
Grand Nucleus Grande Núcleo 1960-66

César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro

Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of the twentieth century and is now recognised as a highly significant figure in the development of contemporary art. Oiticica produced an outstanding body of work, which had its origins in the legacy of European Modernism as it developed in Brazil in the 1950s. But his unique and radical investigations led Oiticica to develop his artistic production in ever more inventive directions.

Through his work he was to challenge the traditional boundaries of art, and its relationship with life, and to undermine the separation of the art-object from the viewer, whom he turned into an active participant. Among Oiticica's most original achievements was his inventive and uncompromising use of colour.

This exhibition explores the dimension of colour as a vital focus of his work, from his early career onwards. It includes several related series of works which unfold in sequence, showing the conceptual and technical processes that led to the artist's liberation of colour from the twodimensional realm of painting out into space, to be walked around and through, looked into, manipulated, inhabited and experienced. Oiticica emerged as an artist during a period of optimism in Brazil, before the utopian dream of a modern society was thwarted by the oppressive military regime in the 1960s. In the cultural sphere this period saw many new developments: the instigation of progressive architectural projects by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and others; important innovations in the worlds of avant-garde film, music, poetry, theatre and choreography; the establishment of the international Sao Paulo Biennale; and the founding of museums of modern art in both Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.

It was at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio that Oiticica was taught painting by the influential abstract artist Ivan Serpa. He later joined the Rio-based Grupo Frente, a radical art organisation founded by Serpa that also included the innovative artists Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape. Oiticica exhibited in the group's second exhibition in 1955. His work from this period shows an affinity with the abstract idiom of the group, as well as the influence of modernist masters such as Paul Klee, Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. These early works, mature for such a young artist, contained the essence of what was to follow.

Oiticica began to disrupt the dense colouring and structure of his early paintings in a series of gouaches on board called Sécos 1956-7. These formed a transition into a major series begun in the following year, titled Metaesquemas 1957-8. In these spare compositions he sought to dissolve the two-dimensional picture plane by demolishing the suggestion of a frame, and deconstructing the grid structure with a dynamic combination of squares and rectangles in black, red, blue and white. The final pieces from this series were white abstract compositions, which eventually led to the series of white-on-white paintings, Série Branca (White Series) 1958-9. Here Oiticica explored ways of producing different tones of white, and experimented with layering and brush techniques to maximise the effect of light on the colour. He later referred to white as 'the ideal colour-light, the synthesis-light of all colours'. Meanwhile he began working on a series of irregularly shaped double-sided white paintings, Bilaterais (Bilaterals) 1959. These were designed to hang from the ceiling, compelling the spectator to walk around them. Oiticica's experimentation with the interaction between colour and light continued with a series of yellow and red monochromes, including triangular paintings, and the first in the series of Invenções (Inventions) 1959-62, painted structures composed of vertical layers of colour. Here he developed ways of experimenting with the physicality of colour that he later made use of in three-dimensional works.

In 1960 Oiticica joined the Neo-Concrete group, a Rio-based movement that broke with the principles of the Concrete movement that had originated in Sao Paulo, by reacting against its extreme rationalism and advocating an expanded creative freedom. Oiticica had by then begun the ground-breaking series of red and yellow painted hanging wood constructions, Spatial Reliefs 1960, which effectively liberated colour into three-dimensional space. He designed many maquettes for these complex forms, but few were built in full scale.

By the end of 1960 Oiticica had arrived at a synthesis of his experiments with colour. In his theoretical text Colour, Time and Structure of 1960 he referred to this integration of colour as 'a supreme order similar to the supreme order of architectural spaces'. This thinking led to the concept he called 'côr nuclear' (nuclear colour) - embodied in a group of works in which colour ascends or descends in gradual hues from its centre. This series, called Núcleos (Nuclei) 1960-6, consists of open mazes of double-sided hanging panels of varying sizes and closely related colours. The first to be made was the Pequeno Núcleo no. 01 (Small Nucleus No. 01), which includes a mirror that enhances the light and colours, and reveals the viewers to themselves as active participants in the work. Three medium nuclei were eventually combined into a large-scale hanging environment to form the Grande Núcleo (Grand Nucleus) 1960-6. This spectacular work, with panels in tones of violet at the nuclear centre unfolding into a range of luminous yellows, amplified the spatial and temporal aspects of the Spatial Reliefs. By contrast the Penetrável (Penetrable) series 1960-79 consisted of closed labyrinthine environments, as in the large scale model of Projeto Cães de Caça (Hunting Dogs Project) 1961 (its title taken from a group of stars in the constellation of Orion). Like all Oiticica's maquettes, this model was considered a work of art in its own right. Consisting of five chromatic penetrables, it was conceived as a monumental magic garden for intense aesthetic experience, and incorporated sand gardens and areas for the appreciation of music, poetry and theatre.

Oiticica continued to construct maquettes for colour environments, including the Magic Square maquettes of 1978, which were also conceived as large open-air penetrables. PN 1 Penetrável 1961 was the first free-standing penetrable, a small-scale cabin with sliding coloured panels, which the viewer was encouraged to enter and participate in the sensory experience. It was with this series that Oiticica felt that 'the sense of spectator involvement reaches its apex and its justification'.

Oiticica began to work on the first Bólides (Fireballs) in 1963, after the completion of the Invenções (Inventions) series, through which he had discovered the means of infusing colour with depth and luminosity. The Bólides, small wooden boxes, appeared to be 'inflamed' by light and charged with energy, an important evolution in Oiticica's idea of 'totalidade-côr' (total colour). They were designed to be handled, with moveable panels revealing new chromatic planes. With the introduction of glass Bólides into the series Oiticica began to incorporate loose pigment in the works and to include everyday materials such as glass vessels, plastic, earth, painted cloth, shells and foam, to expand the range of sensory experience offered through interaction with the artwork. The range of colours was extended to include pinks and blues, and ready-made objects also began to find their way into the work, including poetry and images, further encouraging the viewer's emotional and intellectual participation.

Oiticica reached a crucial point in his integration of colour, structure, time and space with the Parangolé series: banners, capes and tents constructed from a variety of materials, including fabric, plastic, mats, screens and ropes. He began to develop these flexible colour structures as a result of his involvement with the people of Mangueira Hill, a Rio de Janeiro shanty town, and they encouraged his immersion into the world of traditional Brazilian samba. The Parangolés, designed to be worn or carried while dancing to the rhythm of samba, represent the culmination of Oiticica's efforts to encourage the viewer's interaction with the artwork and to liberate colour into three-dimensional space.

Text by Ann Gallagher

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Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) was one of the most innovative Brazilian artists of the twentieth century and is now recognised as a highly significant figure in the development of contemporary art. Oiticica produced an outstanding body of work, which had its origins in the legacy of European Modernism as it developed in Brazil in the 1950s.

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This group exhibition explores our complex relationship with trees and forests, and their role in our lives and imaginations. 37 international artists draw our attention to these awe-inspiring life forms.

Featured artists

Robert Adams, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Yto Barrada, Johanna Calle, Gillian Carnegie, Tacita Dean, Peter Doig, Jimmie Durham, Kirsten Everberg, Simryn Gill, Rodney Graham, Shi Guowei, Hugh Hayden, Eva Jospin, Kazuo Kadonaga, William Kentridge, Toba Khedoori, Luisa Lambri, Myoung Ho Lee, Zoe Leonard, Robert Longo, Sally Mann, Steve McQueen, Jean-Luc Mylayne, Mariele Neudecker, Virginia Overton, Roxy Paine, Giuseppe Penone, Abel Rodríguez, Ugo Rondinone, George Shaw, Robert Smithson, Jennifer Steinkamp, Thomas Struth, Rachel Sussman, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Jeff Wall.

The exhibition is kindly supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

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This group exhibition explores our complex relationship with trees and forests, and their role in our lives and imaginations.

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Exhibition. November 23, 2013-March 10, 2014. Isa Genzken (German, b. 1948) is arguably one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years. This exhibition, the first comprehensive retrospective of her diverse body of work in an American museum, and the largest to date, encompasses Genzken's work in all mediums over the past 40 years.

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Ana Mendieta

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Ana Mendieta | Untitled: Silueta Series | The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation

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Learn about this artwork by Ana Mendieta in the Guggenheim's Collection Online.

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The O Show: Killer Conversations

Staying in? Treat yourself to two newly released hours of The O Show! My guests, the artists Phoebe Davies, Brian Lobel and Marcia Farquhar, and psychotherapist Dr. Windy Dryden offer advice to social anxiety sufferers and/or anyone who wants to strike up what might inevitably be challenging conversations (even if they can only happen remotely for the time being).
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Staying in? Treat yourself to two newly released hours of The O Show! My guests, the artists Phoebe Davies, Brian Lobel and Marcia Farquhar, and psychotherapist Dr. Windy Dryden offer advice to social anxiety sufferers and/or anyone who wants to strike up what might inevitably be challenging conversations (even if they can only happen remotely for the time being).

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I've never had this happen before, but I cannot finish this book (at least this printing of the book) due to the alarming abundance of spelling and typographical errors. Having worked in the editorial department of a publisher, I am very attuned to grammar, spelling, etc., and after having noticed mistakes on almost every other page my enjoyment as a reader has transformed to feeling as though I have become this book's copy editor. In other words, reading this book is feeling like work.

Shame,...more

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I've never had this happen before, but I cannot finish this book (at least this printing of the book) due to the alarming abundance of spelling and typographical errors.

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A work that built on Baker's experience of using autobiographical materials in performances such as My Cooking Competes, blending this with a commentary on domesticity, motherhood and art.

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A work that built on Baker's experience of using autobiographical materials in performances such as My Cooking Competes, blending this with a commentary on domesticity, motherhood and art.

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"[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life ... For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organized capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent. Mythologies finds Barthes revealing the fashioned systems of ideas that make it possible, for example, for 'Einstein's brain' to stand for, be the myth of, 'a genius so lacking in magic that one speaks about his thought as a functional labor analogous to the mechanical making of sausages.' Each of the little essays in this book wrenches a definition out of a common but constructed object, making the object speak its hidden, but ever-so-present, reservoir of manufactured sense."--Edward W. SaidThe distinguished literary critic and leading exponent of semiology, the science of signs and symbols, seeks to create a mythology of daily life.

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"[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes's progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the books and paintings of high art, but also the slogans, trivia, toys, food, and popular rituals (cruises, striptease, eating, wrestling matches) of contemporary life ...

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https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53343bb6e4b0b47198d89031/t/56be3bd2f8508222b91fe0ee/1455307732392/sarah+kent+press+Inside+the+visible.pdf

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Hito Steyerl How Not to Be Seen...MOV File 2013
Video still, Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Being fitted with an invisibility cloak and being a superhero are two of the things Hito Steyerl suggests trying if you want to be invisible. She also suggests hiding away in a house with big security gates and wearing a box over your head.

Hito Steyerl is an artist, filmmaker and writer. She is also a performer and often does 'performance-lectures', that are a cross between a talk and a performance. She was born in Germany in 1967, studied filmmaking in Japan, and now lives and works in Berlin.

Steyerl is most famous for her dazzling films and videos in which she layers lots of different themes and images. They are entertaining and funny but also really clever, (so clever they should probably be shown with a warning that they'll make your head spin and your mind boggle!)

Hito Steyerl How Not to Be Seen...MOV File 2013
Video still, Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

Her films sometimes look a bit like video games, because she uses digital recreations of settings and virtual realities as well as real places in her work. In fact in her films you can never quite tell what is real and what is pretend. She also often fakes things like news reports or government broadcasts to add more confusion! This is what one journalist said about her work:

'With Steyerl, you can't always tell fact from fabulation, where the jokes end and seriousness begins, what is truth and what is a lie'

Where do her ideas come from?

Hito Steyerl is fascinated by the amount of images that we are bombarded with every day. She is also fascinated by the digital technologies used to make and circulate these images around the world. In her work she explores what images show, why they are made, and what effect they have on the way we think and how we see the world.

Hito Steyerl's work has been described as 'an art for our times' because the themes she uses are very much about what is happening right now. She has been inspired by everything from dance moves to TV to modern architecture; and she even investigates philosophy and mathematics. She also deals with social and political issues that she feels strongly about, such as women's rights, political corruption and the horror of conflict and war.

How does he make her work?

To make her films and lecture-performances, Steyerl does lots of research, interviewing people and investigating the subjects she wants to include. She also hunts out images and bits of film from TV, the internet, from art and art history and all sorts of other places.

She then puts these together using sampling techniques, adding in her own digitally created pictures, to create dazzling film collages that sometimes look like a serious scientific documentary and sometimes look magical and to dreamlike.

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Who is Hito Steyerl? - Who Are They? | Tate Kids

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Being fitted with an invisibility cloak and being a superhero are two of the things Hito Steyerl suggests trying if you want to be invisible. She also suggests hiding away in a house with big security gates and wearing a box over your head. Hito Steyerl is an artist, filmmaker and writer.

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Installation view of Alice Channer's 2012 exhibition Out of Body in the Main Galleries. Photo: Andy Keate

For her South London Gallery exhibition, British artist Alice Channer has created an installation of entirely new sculptural works which extend her exploration of the relationship between the human body, personal adornment, materials and sculpture. In these figurative works, Channer questions established hierarchies within the history of art, objects and clothing, and offers a unique perspective on manufacturing, the hand-made and consumer culture.

Channer graduated from London's Goldsmiths College in 2006, and the Royal College of Art in 2008, and has since shown in numerous group shows as well as at The Approach, London.

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Alice Channer: Out of Body - South London Gallery

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For her South London Gallery exhibition, British artist Alice Channer has created an installation of entirely new sculptural works which extend her exploration of the relationship between the human body, personal adornment, materials and sculpture. In these figurative works, Channer questions established hierarchies within the history of art, objects and clothing, and offers a unique [...]

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Many of Mona Hatoum's installations employ just one or two materials (barbed wire, cement and rebar, steel, hair) to transform recognizable symbols and forms (maps, globes, spheres, cubes) into portentous iterations. The results can be seen as succinct metaphors for the world as it is-or as models of the future. In an exhibition at White Cube in London titled "Remains to be Seen," on view from September 11 to November 3, 2019, Hatoum is debuting several pieces that move further in the latter direction, bringing together images of the world lit up by fire, a shattered map of floating continents, and a building whose plan incorporates its own destruction.
MODERN RUINS have long interested me-urban decay, destruction, ruins of architecture affected by war. Looking at the remains of buildings makes you reflect on the impermanence of all things, even what you think of as solid. Things that are supposed to contain you can also be fragile and breakable. People often talk about the sense of threat or danger in my work, but for me the feeling of precariousness is more important, especially in the current exhibition.

For Orbital I, a work made last year, I wanted to create something that appears to have been constructed from the remains of a destroyed building. It's a globe made out of bent lengths of rebar punctuated by clumps of rubble, suggesting a world in a permanent state of destruction. I continued this idea in a new large-scale installation, in which chunks of concrete, which look like fragments of flooring, hang from the ceiling on straight sections of rebar. The work is heavy and light, ordered and chaotic, very much like my past work Impenetrable, where suspended lengths of barbed wire seem to float in space. This new installation creates a very different atmosphere, because it looks like the skeleton of a destroyed multistory building that has been left hanging by a thread. If you were to walk inside the cube, in between the hanging columns of concrete and rebar, it would feel quite threatening.

"Remains to be Seen" is a title that I've had in my head for a long, long time. I first used it in the 1980s, for a postcard-size work. I used to have a cat, and I would collect the whiskers that fell off its face and the little nails that I would find stuck in the carpet, and I made them into a collage. (My own nails will appear in a different work in this show, Nail Necklace. I also made a hair necklace many years ago.) The title seemed to be a good fit for this exhibition in part because, if you read remains as a verb, it suggests something unknown, a precarious situation, like the conditions of vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty that we are experiencing now in England, a situation that really applies to the whole world. When I couldn't find a title for the new rebar installation, I decided to call it Remains to be Seen, too. This idea of remains as a noun is important to the work, but the title does not have to refer only to the remnants of a body or building-I like to use titles with double meanings to suggest that the work is open to interpretation.

I had previously considered using this title for what I then called "Remains of the Day," a project first conceived for my Hiroshima Art Prize exhibition in 2017. I had visited Hiroshima in 2015 because I was asked to make new work for the exhibition. I decided to cover a whole set of domestic furniture with wire mesh and burn each piece to end up with ghostlike forms, where the charred remains are barely held together by the mesh. For this new exhibition, I challenged myself to make a piece that would be taller than a human, something aspiring to architecture, and I chose to work with a very tall cabinet_._ It was a challenge to destroy it but still have it stand up. It looks very much like a destroyed building. Its title is Remains (cabinet). People in London will very likely relate it to the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire. Another work in the series features a crib and children's toys and chairs. This one is called Remains (play space).

The first time I used light in my work was in 1989, with The Light at the End.It was an installation made with what you perceived from a distance as bars of light. When you got closer, you started to experience intense heat; you then realized that what you had thought were strips of light were electric heating units that could burn you. The title prompted a hopeful expectation that was dashed when you got closer to the work. It read as a situation of imprisonment, torture, or pain. It was hard to tell if you were outside or inside of it: Are you jailed or are you the jailer? Are you the oppressed or the oppressor? At the same time, it was very seductive; everybody wants to play with fire. That's when I began contemplating how a situation can be very attractive and repulsive at the same time. Beautiful, but dangerous.

Hot Spot, which I first created in 2006 and have made a different version of for this show, deals with a similar contradiction. Hot Spot (stand) is an elegant globe with delicate red neon delineating the continents. It is mesmerizing, but it also buzzes with energy that feels menacing. I wanted to suggest that hot spots, or spots of conflict, are not only restricted to certain regions. The whole world is caught up in conflicts and unrest. At the same time, the term hot spot can be read in the environmental sense, so the work could be seen as a reference to climate change.

There are a lot of different tendencies in my work: delicate, expansive, handmade, found, straightforward, uncanny. In both fabrication and installation, I always think about the viewer, their body, and how they will encounter the work-what they will see from a distance and what they will see when they get close. It is very much like a performance, but for the spectator. And much of the work has to do with trauma, where one's experience of trauma can turn a normally innocuous object into one full of dread. During times of distress or displacement, people often attach their trauma to a specific object or environment. I try to reveal an undercurrent of hostility within something that usually looks inoffensive. It's a way of making people question everything around them.

- As told to Mira Dayal

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Mona Hatoum on uncertainty and allure in "Remains to be Seen"

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Many of Mona Hatoum's installations employ just one or two materials (barbed wire, cement and rebar, steel, hair) to transform recognizable symbols and forms (maps, globes, spheres, cubes) into portentous iterations. The results can be seen as succinct metaphors for the world as it is-or as models of the future.

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Books: The Artist's Body - Contemporary Performance

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In the 1970s, Lucy R. Lippard, author of the highly original and popular Mixed Blessings, merged her art-world concerns with those of the then-fledgling women's movement. In a career that spans sixteen books and scores of articles, catalogs, and essays on art, political activism, feminism, and multiculturalism, her engaging and provocative writings have heralded a new way of thinking about art and its role in the feminist movement.

This new collection of previously published essays covers more than two decades of Lippard's thinking on the ever-evolving definitions of feminist art, the convergence of high and low art, political and activist art, and the contributions of feminist theory to the politics of identity that infuses the production and exhibition of much of today's fine and popular art.

With a new introduction from the author, The Pink Glass Swan brings together selections from two of Lippard's leading works, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Art and Get the Message?: A Decade of Art for Social Change, and numerous other articles written for newspapers, magazines, and art catalogs across the country.

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In the 1970s, Lucy R. Lippard, author of the highly original and popular Mixed Blessings, merged her art-world concerns with those of the then-fledgling women's movement. In a career that spans sixteen books and scores of articles, catalogs, and essays on art, political activism, feminism, and multiculturalism, her engaging and provocative writings have heralded a new way of thinking about art and its role in the feminist movement.

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Emma Hart does not make art that tries to make sense of the world. Rejecting the contemplative environment of the gallery space, she makes work that captures the confusion, stress and nausea of everyday experience. For Hart, there is a divide between the overwhelming chaos of reality and the way visual culture smoothes it out.

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London: Tuesday-Saturday: 10am-6pm.

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We are also closed on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays.

Admission free.

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London: Tuesday-Saturday: 10am-6pm. Venice: Tuesday-Saturday: 10am-1pm & 2-6pm. We are also closed on Sundays, Mondays and public holidays. Admission free. All general enquiries should be sent to info@victoria-miro.com Victoria Miro does not accept unsolicited artist applications. Before contacting or subscribing please read our Privacy Policy We respect the choices you make about how you would like to hear from us.

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'Cerberus' is Mark Bradford's first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London and extends across the entirety of the gallery's spaces. The exhibition of new work, including the film 'Dancing in the Street' (2019), sees Bradford return to ancient mythology, a consistent source of inspiration for the artist. Specifically, he now engages the many headed dog guarding the entryway to Hades, Cerberus. It is a particularly resonant metaphor for Bradford, who has always been fascinated by interstitial spaces and figures. In fact, of the relationship between his art and his community engagement, Bradford has often declared his imperative to have one foot firmly planted in each. 'Cerberus' is an exhibition dedicated to places difficult and in-between, where conflicts arise, but also where the hope of resolution is to be found.

Fundamental to these works is a process of layering. Just as the very fabric of each painting is formed from strata of pigmented paper which are scored, lacerated and stripped away, Bradford collides a multiplicity of references. The longer timeline of myth-making combines with events from more recent history and a trajectory of painting from the Hudson River School to Robert Rauschenberg via Asger Jorn. One of the universal themes which the artist has explored throughout his career, namely the distribution of power within societal structures and the impact on the individual, comes to the fore again in this exhibition. As Bradford explains, 'I have always been interested in pulling the world that exists beyond the studio walls, and outside the art world, into the work.' The titles 'Cerberus' and 'Gatekeeper' (2019) make metaphorical reference to notions of containment, of pressure building to an incendiary point, and also the idea of a border as a juncture or gathering place.

Bradford's distinctive vernacular eschews literal readings, yet a point of departure in developing the new works is the riots in Los Angeles known as the Watts Rebellion, which flared up in August 1965 and raged over six days. The process of mining archive material unearthed a report on the riots commissioned by the California Governor's office in 1965. Entitled 'Violence in the City - An End or a Beginning?', it reveals the subjective nature of attempts by those in positions of power to rationalise both the social injustice which was a catalyst for the riots, and the resulting police brutality inflicted on the black community. Bradford has long been interested in the ways in which populations, and particularly marginalised communities, are contained through the infrastructures of the urban environment. Map-like grid motifs, a recurrent theme in the artist's work, emerge in the monumental work 'Cerberus' (2019), creating an interplay between soaring aerial viewpoints and the pictorial space which extends out on a horizontal axis. A series of red 'hot spots' embedded into the surface of these paintings evoke the intensity of a tipping point, the ignition that occurs when a barrier is breached.

The fabric of the city of Los Angeles is central to the video installation 'Dancing in the Street' (2019), which features the iconic song penned by a trio of songwriters including Marvin Gaye, and was recorded by Martha and the Vandellas in 1964. Given the context of the civil rights movement and riots at the time the hit song was released, Dancing in the Street took on renewed significance as a call to action when many took to the streets protesting for social change. For this project, images of the three women and the audience are layered over the urban landscape to haunting effect. To create the video, black-and-white footage of the band's live performance was projected from a van onto the landmarks of the industrial area of South Los Angeles where Bradford's studio is located. 'Dancing in the Street' (2019) has a timeline which takes in more than five decades of history, and invites consideration of the civil unrest that shaped the intricacies of the city out of which the song emerged.

The topological markers of the city increasingly dissolve as Bradford continues towards resolute abstraction as seen in the painting 'A five thousand year old laugh' (2019). The works featured in the exhibition share a marked fluidity of form and composition as the artist further develops a visual language rooted in his visceral approach to his materials. The resulting surfaces are alive with webs, intersecting networks and liquid reflections which Bradford has described as 'ghosts of an interaction'. They bring to mind a language of European painting, in particular the work of the CoBrA artists that Bradford encountered during the period he lived in Amsterdam in his twenties. Here his ability to bring about a form of 'alchemy' in his works is apparent; they undergo a transformation as if subject to the searing intensity of a chemical reaction or a process of oxidation.

-

Talk: Tate Modern
Monday 30 Sept, 6.30pm

Mark Bradford will be in discussion with acclaimed curator Michael Auping (Museum of Modern Art, Fort Worth, Texas) at Tate Modern as part of the American Artist Lecture Series.

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'Cerberus' is Mark Bradford's first exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in London and extends across the entirety of the gallery's spaces. The exhibition of new work, including the film 'Dancing in the Street' (2019), sees Bradford return to ancient mythology, a consistent source of inspiration for the artist.

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What makes Barthes great-among many, many things-is his willingness and ability to allow rational thought to break down into ambiguity during moments that can't be quantified, verbalized. This is when Barthes truly shines, as he always manages to pull out a thread of insight-analytical, visceral, or otherwise-that significantly illuminates the issue at hand. It is no wonder, then, why he turned to music at the end of his life, as the abstractness and visceral nature of music requires the critic ...more

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What makes Barthes great-among many, many things-is his willingness and ability to allow rational thought to break down into ambiguity during moments that can't be quantified, verbalized. This is when Barthes truly shines, as he always manages to pull out a thread of insight-analytical, visceral, or otherwise-that significantly illuminates the issue at hand.

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A visible presence among New York painters since the mid-1960s, Jack Whitten has recently received a surge of attention. Within the past couple of years, his work has been featured in multiple solo gallery shows and major group exhibitions such as "The Encyclopedic Palace" in Venice and "Blues for Smoke" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles—not to mention on the cover of this magazine in February 2012—and a retrospective, scheduled for the fall of 2014, is currently in preparation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The theme of rediscovery continues at the Rose Art Museum's small but eye-opening show curated by Katy Siegel, where moments of acquaintance occur for both the public and the artist himself: The exhibition focuses on the years 1971-73, during which Whitten launched unprecedented investigations into the material possibilities of acrylic and pigment. Most of these works had never been exhibited, having been promptly rolled up and stored in the artist's studio for four decades, seemingly forgotten; Whitten himself had never before seen the show's two largest paintings— The Pariah Way and Asa's Palace, both 1973—stretched and hung on the wall.

In addition to this particular act of unveiling, the Rose exhibition furthers Siegel's advocacy of the early '70s as a watershed moment for, rather than a lull in, the history of painting—an argument that she developed in the 2006 exhibition "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975," which included Whitten. The Rose displays five paintings, a series of remarkable paint collages on canvas, and several works on paper, all of which testify to Whitten's oft-stated drive to overturn dominant postwar attitudes toward process and material. For his paintings from this period, the artist employed innovative devices such as rakes, combs, and, in a brash move to negate the autographic gesture of the Abstract Expressionists (Whitten has spoken of wanting to paint "faster than Bill de Kooning"), a twelve-foot-long squeegee—dubbed "the developer"—that allowed for the rapid dragging of paint across the canvas as it lay on a low, specially constructed table on the floor of his studio. In Whitten's work, Jackson Pollock's dance of dripping and slinging around and over the support turns into a single leveling, methodical movement from one end of the canvas to the other, producing the paintings' smooth yet pitted faces. The cement-like surface of Third Testing (Slab), 1972, for example, is shallow and pocked, gouged and tweaked—a result of Whitten's pouring a layer of acrylic and shaving off the top with a two-by-four.

Similar intimations of space are seen in the six works included from the series "Acrylic Collages," 1973, in which Whitten affixed curls of dry or semidry paint sliced from his other compositions to untreated linen, using acrylic as a kind of binder, creating images that loosely resemble notation or punctuation and attest to his exploratory play with the language of his medium. Acrylic also forms a thin layer onto which Whitten dropped and smeared dry pigment in two sets of works on paper, "Dispersal 'B'," 1971, and "Cut Acrylic Series," 1973, both of which suggest movement into as well as across the plane. Critics often point out that Whitten's squeegee paintings predate those of Gerhard Richter, but the variety of surface textures that Whitten achieved and his investigative mode of continual experimentation further distinguish his practice. In Asa's Palace, the most visually stunning work in the show, pink and lavender base colors stretch across the canvas but are broken up by irregular, jagged shapes where gray underpainting is glimpsed. These shallow craters also expose blobs and streaks of yellow, purple, blue, and brown, all of which pop and vibrate to counter the first impression of smoothness, compelling the viewer to look more closely, and find instances of depth.
—Gregory Williams

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A visible presence among New York painters since the mid-1960s, Jack Whitten has recently received a surge of attention.

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Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland) lives and works in New York and studied at Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1986-90). As well as several distinct groups of paintings (landscapes, mandalas, horizons, windows, stars and brick walls), and immersive installations (featuring clowns, multi-coloured windows, and monochrome-painted walls), Rondinone makes sculptures in various materials (including an ongoing series titled still.life, and a number of large-scale masks), monumental landscape drawings, intimate still life drawings, and text-based works. His works are united by a poetic quality and an enduring preoccupation with universal themes such as time, cosmic cycles, or the primordial opposition of day and night.

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Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland) lives and works in New York and studied at Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (1986-90). As well as several distinct groups of paintings and immersive installations, Rondinone makes sculptures in various materials, monumental landscape drawings, intimate still life drawings, and text-based works. His works are...

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Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present a solo exhibition by American artist Tschabalala Self. Showing for the first time in the United Kingdom it brings together works drawn from the first five years of her artistic career.

Self's expressive and dynamic works, which include painting, print, collage and sculpture, depict the human figure. The fluidity of movement and exaggerated form of her images are quick to capture the attention of viewers and elicit a vivid response. Primarily concerned with the concept of the Black female body within contemporary culture, Self examines the confluence of race, gender and sexuality through a variety of forms and narratives in which each subject - or as she prefers, character - expresses an individually powerful identity.

In her bold, confident and vibrant paintings and works on paper, Self plays inventively with figuration, deconstructing and recreating the Black female body, using various techniques, including collage. Pieces of collected fabric - sometimes African or African-inspired cloth given to her by her mother - and paper or perhaps sections of an earlier unresolved work, are sewn directly onto a work. The fractured figure so created seems to assert its own self-defined identity, and thereby fulfil the artist's intention. Working in this way with mixed-media allows Self to blend fact with fiction, reality with imagination as she explores how the Black female body functions as a social and political symbol.

Voyeurism, the act of watching and of being watched, is an important component in Self's work, which encourages a world of imagination, transformation and fantasising around a particular subject. Never imposing any vulnerability or sense of victimhood upon her characters, Self instead endows each of them with a positively pulsating confidence. At times, the unseen voyeur is made visible in her paintings: for example, through the huge, cartoonish eyes afloat in the background of Mira Mira, 2016; or the two staring brown eyes in Bodega Run, 2015. We are prompted to ask ourselves, whose eyes are they? Yet, the ever-watchful eyes seem to have no affect on the subject herself. In My Black Ass, 2016, her most recent animation work, the Black female character comes to life, displaying her buttocks and genitals in an energetic dance, clearly indifferent to any watching eye. Although based on a particular ethnicity, Self's innovative works nonetheless speak universally of all humanity and its collective concerns.

This Tschabalala Self exhibition, curated by Ziba Ardalan, is accompanied by a comprehensive publication and a full programme of educational events that aims to engage the public.

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Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present a solo exhibition by American artist Tschabalala Self. Showing for the first time in the United Kingdom it brings together works drawn from the first five years of her artistic career. Self's expressive and dynamic works, which include painting, print, collage and sculpture, depict the [...]

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Gabriel Orozco

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We use cookies to deliver our online services and to provide more personalized services to you. Details and instructions on how to disable those cookies are set out in our Privacy Policy. By clicking I Accept, you consent to our use of cookies unless you have disabled them.

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Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission and the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Hannah Black.

Some Context is structured around 20,000 copies of The Situation, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about 'the situation'. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation. The books provide the stuffing - in shredded form - for the 'transitional objects' also displayed in the space, and will be shredded at the end of the exhibition.

In this new body of work Black continues to develop her enquiry into the production of, and the gaps between, practices and theories of subjectivity and collectivity. Some Context gestures towards the various potential uses of art's uselessness - as comfort, as worship, as text and as archive.

As part of the commissioning process, a programme of has been devised in collaboration with Black. This includes a series of conversations in which participants have been invited to discuss a situation of their choice. Black, Bonaventure (Soraya Lutangu) and Ebba Fransén Waldhör also present Anxietina (The Situation), an iteration of their ongoing performance collaboration; incorporating installation, live music and spoken word.

Hannah Black (born 1981, Manchester) lives and works in New York. Most recently, Black's installation, performance and moving image works have explored the co-dependency of credit, debt and guilt, the use of analogy in biology, and the tension between biomedical and political understandings of trauma. Her works fuse dissonant materials through formal similarities: a drawn-out note in a song becomes the cry of a falling person, or the corporality of bodybuilders is conflated and contrasted with the speculative nature of finance capital as embodied in vacant luxury apartment buildings.

Previous solo exhibitions include Small Room, mumok, Vienna; Soc or Barb, Bodega, New York (all 2017); and Not You, Arcadia Missa, London (2015). Selected group exhibitions include In The Flesh (Part Two), Gallery Diet, Miami; and Welt Am Draht, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (both 2016); The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Yarat Contemporary Art Centre, Baku; and Does Not Equal, W139, Amsterdam, (both 2015). In 2017 her performance OR LIFE OR was presented at PS1 MoMA, New York. Her writing has been published in Tank, The New Inquiry, Texte zur Kunst, Artforum and frieze d/e. Her book Dark Pool Party (Dominica/Arcadia Missa) was published in 2016 and Life (Walther König/mumok), written in collaboration with Juliana Huxtable, was published in 2017.

Lead Supporter: Shane Akeroyd.

Hannah Black's exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery is supported by Fabiana Marenghi Vaselli Bond; Julia Stoschek; The Elephant Trust; and Arts Council England Grants for the Arts. With additional support from the Hannah Black Supporters Circle.

Chisenhale Gallery's Commissions Programme 2017-19 is supported by the LUMA Foundation.

Chisenhale Gallery's Curatorial Trainee Programme 2016-18 is supported by Sirine and Ahmad Abu Ghazaleh.

Chisenhale Gallery's Talks & Events Programme 2017 is supported by Helen Thorpe.

Read More

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Chisenhale Gallery presents a new commission and the first solo exhibition in a UK institution by Hannah Black. Some Context is structured around 20,000 copies of The Situation, a book made up of transcribed, edited and censored conversations between the artist and friends about 'the situation'. This theme is interpreted differently in each conversation.

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Using human interaction as his primary material, Rirkrit Tiravanija goes beyond performance to create socially-engaged conceptual works that blur the boundaries of art in novel ways and bridge the division between public and private. Whether by offering visitors free curry in Untitled (Free) (1992) or inviting strangers to drop by and drink tea together in a replica of the artist's home in Apartment 21 (Tomorrow Can Shut Up and Go Away) (2002), Tiravanija initiates ways to enable the public to be a part of the art-making process, what has been called relational aesthetics. Part social experiment, part ecological program, The Land (1999-) consists of an area of arable land in Thailand that Tiravanija and others transformed into a communally run site for participants to pursue artistic, agricultural, and social collaboration. He won a Hugo Boss Prize in 2004.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija | Rirkrit Tiravanija's cooking and demonstration drawing | Artsy

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Using human interaction as his primary material, Rirkrit Tiravanija goes beyond performance to create socially-engaged conceptual works that blur the boundaries of art in novel ways and bridge the division between public and private.

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Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

TateShots: Ellen Gallagher

Gallagher brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film and animation. The exhibition explores the themes which have emerged and recurred in her practice, from her seminal early canvases through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.

In her series of wig-map grid collages, Double Natural, POMP-BANG, and eXelento, Gallagher has appropriated and incorporated found advertisements for hair and beauty products from the 1930s to the late 1970s from publications such as Ebony, Our World and Black Stars. These advertisements fostered ideals in black beauty through wigs and hair adornments, which Gallagher has then recontextualised, collaging the Afro wig elements and embellishing them with plasticine. As she comments: 'The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the "race" magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.'

The exhibition includes other such key works as Bird in Hand 2006, a complex relief built up in layers of printed matter, plasticine, crystal, paint, gold leaf and salt. In Bird in Hand, human life and marine life converge at the bottom of the ocean in a mythical black Atlantis.

Gallagher's mysterious vision of marine life extends beyond the canvas and into other media, such as the 16 mm film installation Murmur 2003-4 (a collaboration with Edgar Cleijne), as well as the ongoing series of delicate watercolours and cut paper works entitled Watery Ecstatic. New and recent work on display for the first time at Tate Modern include Morphia, a series of two-sided drawings, which show how Gallagher combines the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical and history with the present.

Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965 and now lives and works in Rotterdam and New York. Her work is held in many major public collections, including MoMA and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Centre Pompidou, Paris.

..what will hold the visitor is the sheer fascination of the works... They are possessed of an intriguing force. You certainly won't have seen an artist who sees the world in this way before.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times ****

Other-worldly but grounded within real histories, obsessive but not dully repetitive, AxME might just be one of the most exciting contemporary art shows in London this spring.
Amy Dawson, Metro ****

Public comments from Tate's Facebook page and Twitter

@tessagillett Thoroughly enjoyed the @ Tate Ellen Gallagher exhibition. Witty and inspiring stuff.
@andrewrjw Ellen Gallagher's AxME show at Tate Modern is fantastic. Imaginative, passionate, beautiful and varied: room after room of great work.

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Ellen Gallagher: AxME - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

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Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

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Beginning with such key artists as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, this book examines a selection of the most significant players who have used their bodies to create their art - among them, in the 1960s Carolee Scheemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono; in the 1970s, Chris Burden, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic; up to the turn of the millennium, Matthew Barney, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and Mona Hatoum.

Survey Amelia Jones,among the world experts in the field, discusses performance and body art against the background of social history. She examines the breakdown of barriers between art and life, visual and sensual experience - how artists have expanded and renewed the age-old tradition of self-portraiture, moving art out of the gallery into unexpected spaces and media.

Works Each image is accompanied by an extended caption. The book is organized thematically:

'Painting Bodies', concerns work that shows the trace, stain or imprint of the artist's body in response to the paint-on-canvas tradition.
'Gesturing Bodies', examines artists who transform the body - its acts, its gesture - into art; gesture, behaviour and situations are used in place of art objects.
'Ritualistic and Transgressive Bodies', looks at work which uses the body to enact challenges to the social expecations of the body, often in rituals that perform a cathartic function. Mutilation and sacrifice are used to rupture personal and social homogeneity.
'Body Boundaries', examines boundaries between the individual body and the social environment and between the inside and outside of the body itself.
'Performing Identity', looks at issues of representation and identity.
'Absent Bodies', explores absence and the mortality of the body through photography, casting, imprints or remnants of the body.
In 'Extended and Prosthetic Bodies', the body is extended through prosthetics or technology, to explore cyberspace and alternative states of consciousness.

Documents Parallel to the illustrated works of art, this section combines texts by critics who shaped the movement, from Lucy R. Lippard to Thomas McEvilley. Alongside these are writings by philosophers and thinkers such as George Bataille and Gilles Deleuze who have contributed on a theoretical level to the discussion around the body - a prevalent theme in twentieth-century cultural theory.

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The Artist's Body by Amelia Jones, Tracey Warr | Waterstones

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Beginning with such key artists as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, this book examines a selection of the most significant players who have used their bodies to create their art - among them, in the 1960s Carolee Scheemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono; in the 1970s, Chris Burden, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic; up to the turn of the millennium, Matthew Barney, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and Mona Hatoum.

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Oscar Murillo

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After a Turbulent Couple of Years, Oscar Murillo Hits Reset in London by Going Back to His Roots

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The last three years have been a whirlwind for the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo. He graduated from London's Royal College of Art in 2012, signed to David Zwirner the following year, and subsequently became the subject of heated art world debate when his prices rocketed (in some cases by as much as 3,000 percent).

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Language - in its broadest sense - permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media installations that combine film and installation in humorous and idiosyncratic ways, Prouvost's work addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation. Playing with language as a tool for the imagination, Prouvost is interested in confounding linear narratives and expected associations among words, images and meaning. She combines existing and imagined personal memories with artistic and literary references to create complex film installations that muddy the distinction between fiction and reality. At once seductive and jarring, her approach to filmmaking employs layered storytelling, quick edits, montage and wordplay and is composed of a rich, tactile assortment of images, sounds, spoken and written phrases. The videos are often shown within immersive environments which comprise found objects, sculptures, painting and drawings, signs, furniture and architectural assemblages, that are rendered complicit within the overarching narrative of the installation.

Laure Prouvost was born in Lille, France (1978) and is currently based in Brussels. She received her BFA from Central St Martins, London in 2002 and studied towards her MFA at Goldsmiths College, London. She also took part in the LUX Associate Programme. Prouvost won the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011 and was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2013.

Recent solo exhibitions include: 'Oma-je', Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Canada (2023); 'Ohmmm age Oma je ohomma mama', Kunsthalle Wien, Wien, Austria (2023); 'Above Front Tears Oui Float' at the Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway (2022); 'Laure Prouvost: Theatergarden and A Be(a)stiary of the Anthropocene', Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China (2022); 'Deep Travel Ink', Atelier Hermès, Seoul, South Korea (2022); 'The Long Waited, Weighted, Gathering', Manchester Jewish Museum, Manchester, UK; 'Our elastic arm hold in tight through the claouds' at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021); 'Re-dit-en-un-in-learning CENTER' at Lisson Gallery London (2020); 'Melting into one another ho hot chaud it heating dip', Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, Portugal (2020); 'Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre', Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France, LAM - Lille métropole, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France (2020), and Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands (2021); 'AM-BIG-YOU-US LEGSICON', M HKA - Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium (2019); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2018); BASS Museum, Miami, FL, USA (2018); 'They Are Waiting for You', Performance for stage at the McGuire Theatre, Minneapolis, MN, USA (2018); SALT Galata, Istanbul, Turkey (2017); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Switzerland (2016); Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Italy (2016); Museum Für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt Am Main, Frankfurt, Germany (2016); Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China (2016); Haus Der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2015); New Museum, New York, NY, USA (2014); Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, Mexico (2014); Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK and Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2013); 'Laure Prouvost / Adam Chodzko' as part of 'Schwitters in Britain', Tate Britain, London, UK (2013); The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK (2012); and Flat Time House, London, UK. Prouvost represented France at the 58th International Art Biennial Venice, May-November 2019 and was included in 'NIRIN,' the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020). June 2019 saw the artist's first public commission in the UK through Transport for London's Art on the Underground.

Recent, current and forthcoming projects
'Above Front Tears Nest in South', Moody Center for the Arts (15 Sep - 14 Dec 2023) 'Oma-je', Remai Modern (30 June 2023 - 28 Jan 2024) 'Ohmmm age Oma je ohomma mama', Kunsthalle Wien (11 May - 1 Oct 2023) 'Above Front Tears Oui Float', National Museum, Oslo, Norway (5 Nov 2022 - 12 Feb 2023) 'Deep See Blue Surrounding You / Vois Ce Bleu Profond Te Fondre', LAM - Lille métropole, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France (17 Oct 2020 - 3 Oct 2021)

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Language - in its broadest sense - permeates the video, sound, installation and performance work of Laure Prouvost. Known for her immersive and mixed-media i...

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David Medalla

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About

A Stitch in Time is the first in David Medalla's series of participatory works. Since 1968, the artist has been inviting audiences around the world to collaborate in the making of the work by stitching a trace of themselves onto it. To mark its 50th anniversary, A Stitch in Time embarked on a new chapter in Singapore.

Paying homage to the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, a trio of blue, red and yellow fabrics journeyed into Singapore's heartlands. Over six weeks, members of the public embellished them with stories inspired by casual greetings, the wish to remember and be remembered, and the reciprocity and dual role of the spectator as maker. This collaborative piece is displayed at the Gallery's Coleman Street Entrance.

In the Auditorium Anteroom, a rainbow of coloured threads and needles dangles over an expansive white cloth. Audiences are similarly encouraged to sew their names, poems, images, or small keepsakes representing personal memories or impulses onto the cloth.

A Stitch in Time embodies the ongoing dialogue between the artist and his participants, specific to the different places that it has travelled to. While the artistic process has been the same over the past five decades, every stitched memento is unique, creating new stories wherever the work is exhibited.

The work was inspired by Medalla's serendipitous encounter with a handkerchief at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, many years after he had given it away to an ex-lover at Heathrow Airport in London. Like the artist, A Stich in Time has continued its adventures in love, life and art around the world, travelling to cities from London to Utrecht, Kassel, Edinburgh, Texas, Berlin, Paris, Lisbon, Tokyo, Barcelona, Johannesburg, Kiev, Sao Paolo, Venice, and Rome. It represents the beauty and spirit of chance, fluidity, spontaneity, and randomness.

About David Medalla

David Medalla (b. 1938, Philippines) is an internationally-acclaimed artist living and working in London and Berlin. His unpredictable and playful approach to art-making has made him difficult to categorise, but Medalla is increasingly recognised as a significant figure in the development of installation, kinetic and participatory art. His practice deconstructs the idea of sculpture as solid, timeless and monumental by creating objects and situations that can never be repeated and are continually changing form.

David Medalla
Philippines
1968-Present
Mixed media
Adapted for National Gallery Singapore's Light to Night Festival

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A Stitch In Time by David Medalla | National Gallery Singapore

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About A Stitch in Time is the first in David Medalla's series of participatory works. Since 1968, the artist has been inviting audiences around the world to collaborate in the making of the work by stitching a trace of themselves onto it. To mark its 50th anniversary, A Stitch in Time embarked on a new chapter in Singapore.

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Martha Rosler - Semiotics of the Kitchen  1975

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All four artists shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize have been named joint winners after they collectively argued that the judges should recognise the causes of "commonality, multiplicity and solidarity".

The award ceremony in Margate on Tuesday 3rd December made history as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani were named the collective winners after they jointly wrote to the judges. Helen Cammock read out a joint statement on stage. The artists, who had not met before being shortlisted, will get an equal share of the £40,000 prize.

The artists' statement referred to the significance of the Turner prize, which is for a British artist working in Britain, seeking to "expand what it means to be British", and said their work sought to take a stand against isolation and exclusion in a hostile environment with a "symbolic gesture of cohesion". They explained that with their works taking on themes of migration, patriarchy, torture and civil rights, the subjects should not be pitted against each other by the judges.

Polarised

Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain, said the artists had given judges a lot to think about, and both the nature of the work and the timing made it the correct decision. "To state the obvious these are very polarised times, in this country and across the world" he said.

See also: Peter Harrington Contemporary Prints Catalogue Features Dali, Banksy and Picasso

The prize has never before been won collectively in its 35-year history, and Alex Farquharson said it may never be again. "This is the result of a confluence of different issues.

"I don't think we've had a shortlist where all four artists work in a participatory manner and all with deep and pressing political concerns and that it comes at a time that it does."

The four artists said they formed the plan at their first meeting at Turner Contemporary, forming a WhatsApp group called "the winners" as a joke.

Abu Hamdan said this year was a "specific" event because all the artists were on a similar social and political track. "This time it seemed to be that there was a cohesion around a political approach more than an aesthetic practice," he said.

Propaganda

But former Guardian art critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote: "The use of the Turner as a propaganda vehicle for ultra-Londony evening-class lectures has become seriously off-putting. People don't go to art to be turned into better citizens. They go to art to have their eyes pleasured and their hearts touched."

Helen Cammock presented a 99-minute documentary film examining the overlooked role of women in the Northern Irish civil rights struggle, Oscar Murillo installed papier-mache worker figures on pews looking out at a sea view obscured by a black curtain, Abu Hamdan made audio works on Syria's torture of prisoners, and Tai Shani created a surreal fantasy installation representing a post-patriarchal city built by women (seen at top of page).

The Turner prize show is in the Turner Contemporary Margate until 12th January 2020.

See also: London Art Fair 2019 showcases exceptional contemporary and modern art

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Turner Prize Sensation As All Four Artists Share Joint Award - Arts & Collections

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All four artists shortlisted for the 2019 Turner Prize have been named joint winners after they collectively argued that the judges should recognise the causes of "commonality, multiplicity and solidarity". The award ceremony in Margate on Tuesday 3rd December made history as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani were named the collective winners after they jointly wrote to the judges.

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Angela de la Cruz's practice is elegantly situated between painting and sculpture. Her work engages with the very discourse of painting by targeting its basic anatomy - the stretcher, normally left to its job of keeping the canvas smooth and pliant - often twisted and bent out of shape. By breaking its form, de la Cruz breaks convention, quite literally, by mangling the stretcher and piercing the flat edifice of the canvas to unleash it into three-dimensional space. Slashed, twisted and reformed into something approaching sculpture, there is a dark humour at play: "The moment I cut through the canvas I get rid of the grandiosity of painting", she says. Convention punctured, her works seem to mimic aspects of both the human body and behaviour - cowering, cringing, surviving - and, more recently, this sense of human scale has been bolstered by works incorporating items of domestic furniture, such as chairs, tables and filing cabinets. Prostrate on the floor or hanging on the wall like trophies or window dressings, they are evidence of a passionate and complicated process.

Angela de la Cruz was born in A Coruña in Galicia, northwest Spain in 1965 and lives and works in London. She studied Philosophy at the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain (1987) before moving to London, where she obtained a BA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London, UK (1994) and an MA in Sculpture and Critical Theory from the Slade, London, UK (1996). Solo exhibitions include Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao, Spain (2018); Peer, London, UK (2016); Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2016); Fundacion Luis Seoane, A Coruña, Spain (2015); Carreras Mugica, Bilbao, Spain (2014); Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden (2013); Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (2010); Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (2005); Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo and Annex Space MARCO, Spain (2004). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010 and is the recipient of the 2017 Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Spain.

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Angela de la Cruz's practice is elegantly situated between painting and sculpture. Her work engages with the very discourse of painting by targeting its basic anatomy - the stretcher, normally left to its job of keeping the canvas smooth and pliant - often twisted and bent out of shape....

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Beginning with such key artists as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, this book examines a selection of the most significant players who have used their bodies to create their art - among them, in the 1960s Carolee Scheemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono; in the 1970s, Chris Burden, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic; up to the turn of the millennium, Matthew Barney, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and Mona Hatoum.

Survey Amelia Jones,among the world experts in the field, discusses performance and body art against the background of social history. She examines the breakdown of barriers between art and life, visual and sensual experience - how artists have expanded and renewed the age-old tradition of self-portraiture, moving art out of the gallery into unexpected spaces and media.

Works Each image is accompanied by an extended caption. The book is organized thematically:

'Painting Bodies', concerns work that shows the trace, stain or imprint of the artist's body in response to the paint-on-canvas tradition.
'Gesturing Bodies', examines artists who transform the body - its acts, its gesture - into art; gesture, behaviour and situations are used in place of art objects.
'Ritualistic and Transgressive Bodies', looks at work which uses the body to enact challenges to the social expecations of the body, often in rituals that perform a cathartic function. Mutilation and sacrifice are used to rupture personal and social homogeneity.
'Body Boundaries', examines boundaries between the individual body and the social environment and between the inside and outside of the body itself.
'Performing Identity', looks at issues of representation and identity.
'Absent Bodies', explores absence and the mortality of the body through photography, casting, imprints or remnants of the body.
In 'Extended and Prosthetic Bodies', the body is extended through prosthetics or technology, to explore cyberspace and alternative states of consciousness.

Documents Parallel to the illustrated works of art, this section combines texts by critics who shaped the movement, from Lucy R. Lippard to Thomas McEvilley. Alongside these are writings by philosophers and thinkers such as George Bataille and Gilles Deleuze who have contributed on a theoretical level to the discussion around the body - a prevalent theme in twentieth-century cultural theory.

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The Artist's Body by Amelia Jones, Tracey Warr | Waterstones

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Beginning with such key artists as Marcel Duchamp and Jackson Pollock, this book examines a selection of the most significant players who have used their bodies to create their art - among them, in the 1960s Carolee Scheemann, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Yoko Ono; in the 1970s, Chris Burden, Ana Mendieta, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic; up to the turn of the millennium, Matthew Barney, Marc Quinn, Tracey Emin and Mona Hatoum.

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"I would like to see Abe Lincoln about this equality bullshit." That brassy line was uttered in 1970 by comedian Godfrey Cambridge, who played an average-white-guy-turned-black-dude in Melvin Van Peebles' dramedy Watermelon Man-a picture inspired, in part, by Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Forty-six years later, the spirit of that complaint lives on. Michelle Obama invoked it in her electrifying Democratic Convention speech by acknowledging that- surprise -the White House was built with slave labor. Also chiming in over the years: black artists of every stripe and discipline.

Prominent among visually oriented folks within a much larger group of remonstrating artistes -think everyone from Beyoncé to Ta-Nehisi Coates-is collagist, sculptor and installation maven Rashid Johnson. Part of the original "post-black" crew rounded up by curator Thelma Golden for the Studio Museum's landmark 2001 "Freestyle" exhibition, Johnson at once embraced and rejected the Civil Rights-era expectations attached to becoming that rare unicorn-the successful African American artist.

From the Studio Museum to his current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth's cavernous 18 th Street space, Johnson has consistently used his work to confront the nation's legacy of racism head on. Together with other members of his historical cohort, he has also helped rewrite the script for how to become a 21 st century African American artist. Among that script's evolving guidelines are a marked preference for complexity over uplift, a penchant for contradiction over authenticity, and, most recently, a newfound willingness to tackle urgent political causes and prominent social movements. On the evidence, post-black art today is far more attuned to the Black Lives Matter movement than to Cornel West's 1994 bestseller Race Matters.

Though Johnson has long sought to redefine and reinterpret changing notions of blackness-i.e., the most cussed version of Americanness-his messily poignant works retain the tendency to use individual and family history as jumping off points to examine the black experience. Recently, though, the artist's efforts have taken a more communal turn. Where previous shows have highlighted questions of selfhood and individual anxiety as artistic themes (cue last year's aptly titled "Anxious Men" at the Drawing Center), his current exhibition-which consists of nine "paintings," three wall-mounted sculptures, a freestanding volumetric arrangement and a large installation-doesn't merely reference America's racial dilemma, it takes as its explicit subject timely yet universal ideas of fear and escape.

Made with the artist's signature "Afrocentric" materials, among them black soap, shea butter, ceramic tile, mirror, and burnt wood, Johnson's artworks manage an unlikely feat inside Hauser & Wirth's XXXL-sized gallery. Thanks to the artist's own exhibition design-he admitted to me to having scrapped 20 maquettes to get to the current layout-the display survives a space that has vanquished a number of other art world veterans like Dieter Roth, Paul McCarthy, and Matthew Day Jackson.

The solution to an ex-roller rink with massive ceilings and no columns, Johnson figured, were some well-placed 25-foot walls. These, in turn, divide the open architecture into a single large installation area and three discrete painting galleries. The result is akin to bug jiu-jitsu on "Animal Planet": The artist has taken control of a stadium-like space that, like the wolf spider, has been known to eat its own.

The first room in Johnson's well-appointed exhibition-it's titled "Fly Away" in honor of the world's most recorded gospel song-contains six large rectangular panels made from white ceramic tiles that the artist has covered with rows of expressionistic black soap and wax figures. Rendered as a series of roughly drawn blockheads, Johnson's bug-eyed visages invoke a multipage Google search's worth of visual antecedents. These include, among others, Sponge Bob Square Pants, Alberto Giacometti's Falling Man, Jean Dubuffet's homunculi, and, of course, "pickaninny" caricatures. Titled Untitled Anxious Audience, these works present, at once, a literal depiction of crowds, and also-to paraphrase the artist-a figurative but personal and artistic transition from I to We.

A few rooms away, Johnson echoes, in inverted fashion, the figures depicted among his anxious audiences. Single portraits of upended stick men on wood and mirror backgrounds, these collaged forms mimic video game characters, flying (or plummeting) superheroes, and chalk outlines that are familiar from fictional cable and TV crime scenes. Whether encased in singed redwood or soap-stained mirror, the artist's tumbling ciphers appear literally framed by their circumstances. Like Giacometti, Johnson also calls his figures "Falling Men."

The largest space in "Fly Away" is given over to a large cube of scaffolding that contains "signifying objects": plants, books, video screens, mounds of shea butter, ceramic pots, and a piano, which is to be played periodically by the musician and music producer Antoine Baldwin during the run of the show. Despite the scale of this installation, it's more modest work in another purpose-built gallery that impresses as Johnson's biggest advance on his blustery, sometimes uneven oeuvre. These are, quite simply, three color-saturated "paintings" made from white and colored tile, black soap, spray paint and large diamond-shaped snatches of tropical-themed wallpaper that would not be out of place in your local Dominican greasy spoon.

The artist calls these works his "Escape Collages." Rude, fresh, fantastical, complex and as culturally contradictory as anything in the post-black art pantheon, they suggest both the idea of modern-day dystopia and its radical possibilities of escape. It's Bronx graffiti on a Jamaican subway train, hurtling toward a lushly gritty someplace that is, also, anyplace but here.

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Rashid Johnson's Pleasure Town at Hauser & Wirth | artnet News

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"I would like to see Abe Lincoln about this equality bullshit." That brassy line was uttered in 1970 by comedian Godfrey Cambridge, who played an average-white-guy-turned-black-dude in Melvin Van Peebles' dramedy Watermelon Man-a picture inspired, in part, by Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis. Forty-six years later, the spirit of that complaint lives on.

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Anthea Hamilton transforms the heart of Tate Britain with sculpture and performance

A solo performer in a squash-like costume inhabits the Duveen Galleries every day for more than six months for the Tate Britain Commission 2018. Each element of The Squash has evolved from Hamilton's interest in a photograph she found in a book several years ago when looking at improvisational theatre and participatory art practices in the 1960s and 1970s. It showed a person dressed as what looks like a vegetable lying among vines. The original photograph dated from 1960 and depicted a scene from a dance by American choreographer Erick Hawkins. Hawkins was interested in Native American philosophies and he took the form of this costume from the Squash Kachina of the Hopi culture.

As Hamilton had lost the original source of this image, she was not able to discover its origins and was left to imagine its context from the image alone. The artist has brought together tiles, structures, sculptures and costume, inviting a performer to explore their own interpretation of the image and how it might feel to imagine life as other, as vegetable.

The performer selects their outfit for the day from a collection of seven elaborate costumes. Each one is inspired by the original image and by different kinds of squash or pumpkin. The length of the galleries' terrazzo floor has been tiled in domestic-scale white tiles to create a new environment within Tate Britain's neoclassical architecture.

Anthea Hamilton works across sculpture, installation and performance. She is interested in the complexity of ways we read and respond to images. Hamilton was born in 1978 in London where she lives and works.

The performer is in the gallery from 10am to 6pm every day but in that time they choose when they take their breaks, meaning they might not always be present in the space.

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Anthea Hamilton: The Squash - Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate

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Anthea Hamilton transforms the heart of Tate Britain with sculpture and performance A solo performer in a squash-like costume inhabits the Duveen Galleries every day for more than six months for the Tate Britain Commission 2018.

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In most media - from film and theatre to music, TV and fashion - creative collaboration is the norm. In the art world, however, prestige tends to cling to the individual. A new tome by by Ellen Mara De Wachter, Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration, seeks to unpick this attitude and, drawing from an inexhaustive pool of examples, highlights the arbitrary differences between single and multiple entity artists. Themes of anonymity, security and identity guide the course of the book, while love - that of friendship, romance or familial relationships - emerges as a driving force for creative works. From symbiotic duos to amorphous collectives, it seems that great work can come from sharing.

1. Guerrilla Girls (above)

Brought together by outrage at the lack of diversity in MoMA's International Survey of Painting and Sculpture in 1984, this group of anonymous radical feminists conjoined in a bid to protest. Creating propaganda-esque posters that now hang in galleries worldwide - Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into The Met. Museum? (1989) is their most famous - this gang of gorilla-masked artists eschew individual applause in favour of the liberation granted by divorcing your 'self' from your work. As one of the group professes: "you wouldn't believe what comes out of your mouth when you're wearing a gorilla mask". Besides the liberation offered by this collaborative approach, their work offers a comment on the art market itself too: "The concept of the individual genius artist is outdated, anyway, kept alive by an art market that needs super expensive art objects made by 'geniuses'."

2. Elmgreen & Dragset

Having met in a nightclub in Copenhagen and started a romantic relationship, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's union gradually developed into a collaborative artistic practice. The pair began to create mise en scene installations and the homogeneity of their same sex relationship inspired themes of gay identity and mirroring in their work. Marriage (2004), a pair of matching sinks linked by wildly contorting pipes, exemplified this, as did Boy Scout (2008), an installation of bunk beds with mattresses that face each other. "There are certainly a lot of male artists who have been heavily supported by their female spouses, but it is never even mentioned that they are part of the whole production and planning. Artists who run studios also use their assistants for more than practical stuff, packing, crating and putting screws into works [...] I would say that working together as an 'artist duo' is just a formalised collaboration - a working process without lying about your inspirational sources, somehow."

In 2009, the pair curated both of their national pavilions - Elmgreen is Danish and Dragset Nordic - at the 53rd Venice Biennale. "Our names were shortened in biennials and big group shows because we occupied too much space with our full names," explains Elmgreen. "And galleries suddenly left out our first names, so we simply became this corporate sounding brand name, 'Elmgreen and Dragset'. And we thought, 'Okay. Whatever.'" "The Italians called us Bang & Olufsen for years, the only other Scandinavian collaborators they knew!" Dragset adds.

3. Jane Wilson and Louise Wilson

Studying almost 200 miles apart, sisters Louise and Jane Wilson used their work to challenge the art world institutions from the outset of their careers. Submitting duplications of their joint project (subjecting themselves to hypnosis) for their respective BA shows, the siblings confounded their school syllabuses. "It meant that our tutors had to collaborate," Jane explains. "They had to talk to each other on the phone because they were assessing what was effectively the same work, and if they'd passed one and failed the other..." As such their submissions challenged the subjectivity of art assessment.

A further confrontation to the academic rulebook, the pair went on to make a joint application for their MA. A credit to its progressive tutorship, Goldsmiths College was one of the only universities to be flexible enough to let this happen. While undertaking the MA course they shared a studio and each contributed on a part-time basis (the sisters took LSD for their graduation show video work) and joined the throngs of YBAs to emerge from the famed university. In 1999, the sisters were nominated for the Turner Prize in an acknowledgement of the Wilsons' impact on these often staid institutions.

4. Assemble

Assemble began as a small group of architecture students at Cambridge University. Having expanded to an amorphous group of approximately 20 people - "that's how many are on the lunch rota" - the art-craft-design-building-collective maintains a group anonymity, refusing to publish a list of names or members. They made their name with the creation of The Cineroleum (2010): the reclamation of a disused petrol station on Clerkenwell Road that became an outdoor cinema. The collective went on to win the Turner Prize in 2015 for its project Granby Four Streets, which saw it redevelop an area in Liverpool that had been subject to "managed decline" since the 1990s - a deliberate disinvestment from public services. These projects embody their communal ethos, both outwards and in. Their methods engaging a communal spirit of creativity in order to realise community-engaging projects.

"We were really just having fun and experimenting for ourselves," Assemble explains. "So to be able to say that you authored something individually would have gone against the way in which the work had come about. I suppose it has got something to do with the hierarchy of the broader architectural world, because we were all indoctrinated to believe that we couldn't have a voice because we were, at that time, too inexperienced. So there was a clear feeling that we were still students and because of that, we had a freedom to do what we wanted. When we launched the project and people came to see it, it became clear what we were doing had implications within a wider discourse, and that discourse itself had value, and we realised inadvertently that we did have a voice."

5. Broomberg and Chanarin

Documentary photographers and artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin were awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for their book War Primer 2, described as a "book that physically inhabits the pages of Bertolt Brecht's remarkable 1955 publication War Primer". They were awarded the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for their publication, Holy Bible.

The artist duo's work explores photography as a medium usually associated with a single author since, as Co-Art' s author Ellen Mara de Wachter explains, the mechanics of the modern camera is intended for one person's eye. To address this notion, they used a medium format camera with a ground glass viewing plate, which enabled them to crowd under a black cloth together to view the subject. "The whole history of photography is premised on the idea of somebody looking with one eye through a lens and with one finger clicking a button," says Chanarin. "That's the mythology. So immediately to be two destroys the foundations of the history of photography."

Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration is out now, published by Phaidon.

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Five Artist Collectives on the Art of Collaboration

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In most media - from film and theatre to music, TV and fashion - creative collaboration is the norm. In the art world, however, prestige tends to cling to the individual. A new tome by by Ellen Mara De Wachter, Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration, seeks to unpick this attitude and, drawing from an inexhaustive pool of examples, highlights the arbitrary differences between single and multiple entity artists.

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Shades of Noir

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Terms of Reference Journals - Shades Of Noir

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This year's Annual Commission is the first UK exhibition of American artist Trulee Hall, following her sold-out operatic performance at Zabludowicz Collection in March 2020. Debuting her newly commissioned project alongside works from the Collection and a number of videos, paintings and sculptures, the exhibition presents work made over the past two years.

The space of the gallery is transformed by a series of Hall's self-contained, elaborate vignettes - the viewer moves through discordant scenes, each presenting a tangled meta-narrative. Installations comprising video, sculpture, paintings, composed soundtracks, and kinetic mechanisms create dense environments that invite the visitor to step around, peep through, and settle in, allowing a fractured and faceted perspective. Reappearing tropes populate the exhibition; stylised female nudes with mouths agape, rendered in gold and primary colours; bodies of many ages, genders and sizes relishing their physicality; and often repeated phallic serpents and corncobs.

At the heart of Hall's practice is a humorous and unabashed 'erotic grotesque', a fun-house panopticon of cyclical looking - where glory holes, peeping toms, nightmare monsters and sexy bodies jostle for attention. Not one to pass judgement or be constrained by binaries, Hall prods the oppositions of real and fake, gender and sexuality, object and subject, dominant and submissive, good and bad, silly and serious. Her multi-layered works topple in on themselves like so many wobbly movie set backdrops, burying the viewer in unorthodox representations, requiring them to assimilate and synthesise a unique experience.

At the centre of the exhibition is Tongues Duel the Corn Whores, An Opera, a commission that began as a performance of the same name, realised in the space. An exploration of ritual and sexuality, the work weaves together Hall's original score, libretto and choreography with an elaborate set, costumes, and props, rendered in her often used trifecta of CGI, clay animation and live footage. The opera revolves around two female archetypes: the conservative and spiritual 'Madonna' and the hedonistic and provocative 'Whore'. As usual in Hall's work, live footage begets CGI, begets claymation, begets live footage - there is no hierarchy of reality or rendering.

Trulee Hall's work is informed by her childhood growing up in the Southern state of Georgia, her current home of Los Angeles, and a background working on film sets, in artist studios and as a tech for major theme parks. This informs the alchemy of her practice, fuelling her embrace of lavish simulacra; her objects and characters are stand-ins for larger propositions or archetypes. The worlds Hall creates are enchanting and enticing, yet retain an underlying uneasy seediness that permeates their experience - inviting the viewer to question if the discomfort they feel is warranted or is a result of their own internalised prudishness. A show of this breadth firmly places Hall and her work in the legacy of LA-based artists whose sense of the theatrical teeters towards revelling in the darker underbelly of our pop-culture psyches; with roots in Edward Kienholz, through Paul McCarthy and Kaari Upson.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of live and online events, and the launch of Hall's first monograph publication.
Biography
Trulee Hall (b. 1976) received her BFA from Atlanta College of Art in 1999 and her MFA from CalArts in 2006. Hall's first gallery solo exhibition, The Other and Otherwise, was held at Maccarone, Los Angeles in 2019. Other recent projects include All of Them Witches at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles, Infestation, a video and sculptural installation at Paramount Studios for Frieze Projects (curated by Ali Subotnick), as part of the inaugural Frieze Los Angeles (2019). Exhibitions and screenings of her work have been held at the Rubell Family Collection, Hammer Museum, Redcat, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Human Resources LA, Barrick Museum of Art, Michael Benevento Gallery, OUTFEST LA, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Billy Wilder Theater, Yale Union and Los Angeles' Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) among other numerous exhibitions and screenings internationally. She is represented by Maccarone, Los Angeles.

Zabludowicz Collection Annual Commission: Trulee Hall, Tongues Duel The Corn Whores, An Opera (2020). Supported by Maccarone Gallery Los Angeles. Opera performance curated and produced by Antonia Blocker, with Production Assistant Lara Monro. Exhibition curated by Antonia Blocker and Elizabeth Neilson.

Two Heads, Two Ways (Video), (2020), commissioned by Daata and available on daata.art.

We have partnered with The Net Gallery to produce a virtual walkthrough of Trulee Hall's annual commission. Click here.

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Trulee Hall - Exhibitions - Zabludowicz Collection

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Booking recommended, please familiarise yourself with our guidelines before your visit. This year's Annual Commission is the first UK exhibition of American artist Trulee Hall, following her sold-out operatic performance at Zabludowicz Collection in March 2020. Debuting her newly commissioned project alongside works from the Collection and a number of videos, paintings and sculptures, the exhibition presents work made over the past two years.

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1975, 6:09 min, b&w, sound

Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, "An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated 'meaning' of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration." In this performance-based work, a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen. On a counter before her are a variety of utensils, each of which she picks up, names and proceeds to demonstrate, but with gestures that depart from the normal uses of the tool. In an ironic grammatology of sound and gesture, the woman and her implements enter and transgress the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings - the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production erupt into anger and violence. In this alphabet of kitchen implements, states Rosler, "when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression." -- EAI

This title is available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials.

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UbuWeb Film & Video: Martha Rosler - Semotics of the Kitchen (1975)

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1975, 6:09 min, b&w, sound Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, "An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated 'meaning' of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration." In this performance-based work, a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen.

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Materials: Camera obscura in fabric and cast iron, paper trees, fan; negative photographs (cross-processed cibachromes), VHS projection and VHS monitor work, two headed dummy with electronics.
Excerpt from: gallery booklet. Author: Lindsay Seers.

"The whole difficulty of the problem that occupies us comes from the fact that we imagine perception to be a kind of photographic view of things, taken from a fixed point by that special apparatus which is called an organ of perception - a photograph which would then be developed in the brain matter by some unknown chemical and physical process of elaboration. But is it not obvious that the photograph, if photograph there be, is already taken, already developed in the very heart of things and at all parts of space." Henri Bergson

It is hard to know where the pictures that seem to stay inside of us exist, or why they surface. Suddenly, these images emerge from the darkness, unexpected and intense; a lost moment unearthed and written into another context, double-exposed on the present. These seemingly random revelations imply that the brain is like a storehouse, packed with a trillion images; collected as if a strobe-light has flashed over the whole of our lives. The frozen, staccato blips, amputated from the flow of time, establish the patterns of our associations, the shape of our thoughts, the path of our movements, what we become. Yet often, we can not, as if it were a library, draw on this collection
by choice.

Within our collection of perceptions, however, the present is of a completely different nature. This point now, the present, is the only moment that is both perceived and felt. The skin is the interface for this affect, the body the threshold of this transformation. 'Now', is the space where the body is charged with the sensuality of its occupation of the world from within and without, simultaneously. Here we stand, as if at the centre of a kaleidoscope, in which the relation of all things reforms itself within our perception in a constantly mutating pattern-each of us separately and individually at the centre of this pattern, the moments collating and congealing as we forge forwards. Hence photography can be more like our past than it ever can our present; in that it is a representation, a pictorial representation, emptied out of the web of sensual information that binds our bodies and the present inextricably together.

Our perception is never halted and separated as it is within the artifice of the photograph (an act of visual ventriloquism). Photography has the guise of becoming memory itself, solidifying the intangible imagery inside of us and spitting it out, where we can scrutinise it in a way that we never can when it sits inside of us. The dumb force of its imagery overwrites the sensuality of our memory image, replacing it. Our relationship to the world is of a completely different kind to that of our relation to the images from a camera. For example, I may remember in a broad sense the house from my childhood, yet if I try and turn my mind to the pattern of the carpet I cannot scrutinise that memory in that way, like I can the flat minutiae of a photograph. I know that house in a total sense; it is a physical memory, I know my relation to it in space. I am fused with it. There is no separation between me and it. This is the photograph that Bergson speaks of as being written in the heart of things.

It seems impossible to think about photography without thinking about perception. In thinking about perception it seems impossible to move away from the body as the limit of this. The work in this exhibition addresses these thoughts. At its core is a series of photographs using the mouth as a camera. They are made by putting colour photographic paper inside the mouth and exposing it. This is like a kiss; like an act of ventriloquism; or like an act of vampirism. The 'mouth camera' works sometimes stand alongside images from other cameras, that are evidently not human. These have another, more objective language; whereas the images formed inside the head are blood red with the light passing through the skin of the cheeks, framed by teeth and blurred with body movement; from the remote black box of the camera to the warm sensuality of the mouth cavity.

This means of making photographs cancels the usual separation of the act of photographing from the photographer. It joins the body and the act of seeing into the image. The strange ritual of making the work, which requires the artist to cover herself in a black sack to insert and remove the photographic paper from her mouth, is, in itself, an extraordinary act that defines being in a place in a completely other way to the rapid shot of the camera. From this work all the rest has evolved, the vampire, the ventriloquist, the possessed, all refer in some senses to the problematic relationship between subject and object, the fusion and confusion of them.

Lindsay Seers
Gallery notes: Gallery One
'You said that without moving your lips'
Lindsay Seers
The red photographs in this gallery were made by turning the mouth into a camera (a technique developed by Lindsay initially in 1995). This process involves the artist covering herself in a black sack, putting a small piece of photographic paper (covered in plastic) in her mouth; removing the sack, and then opening her lips to take a photograph. On returning to the dark sack, she spits the paper/image out and stores it in a light-proof box for later development in a makeshift darkroom. The images are exposed directly onto colour paper. They are red because of the light passing through the translucent skin of the face, making them literally blood-coloured. The black and white photographs, mounted alongside the red mouth photos in the Black Bag series, picture the artist in the act of taking the photograph in her mouth. These works show an inside and an outside point of view of the scene. They touch on a Victorian idea that the image seen at the point of death is etched on the retina - implying that photographs are written permanently inside of us.

In works such as Fallen the distinction between looking out of a body and into it, become blurred, as the trees in the image begin to look like nerve endings, or the image of a retina.
Gallery notes: Gallery Two
'You said that without moving your lips'
Lindsay Seers
Continuing with the mouth camera ideas, this set of images was made during a residency in South America (funded by Triangle Arts Trust and the Arts Council of England). These works are concerned with ideas about memory. Photography can be an aid to stop us forgetting; in this case, a place that is known briefly, probably never to be seen again. Yet photographs are very different from the images that are embedded in us, directly from our experiences, and often overwrite the subtlety of our image memory. In these works the artist tries to keep a memory of the place, as much through the act of photographing as the results. Philosopher Henri Bergson claims that we retain memory through our bodies and most significantly through action. In these works the artist ingests images of the insignificant minutiae of a place that she knows will fade fast. The white crosses in the black and white photographs indicate the points at which the mouth photographs were taken.

The works deal with different layers of inside and outside space; they picture the relationship between the artist and a house in Paraguay; both her and its interior and exterior.
Gallery notes: Gallery Three
'You said that without moving your lips'
Lindsay Seers
In the way that other works in the show draw on ideas about early photography and television this work uses early film as a subject matter and process For the Dead Travel Fast involves a camera obscura/carriage, which looks out onto a constructed landscape of black and white paper trees. These vary in size, and are repetitions of the same tree image, suspended from the gallery ceiling. The title of the work refers to Bram Stoker's Dracula and to Murnau's early silent black and white film, Nosferatu, in which the film maker uses a negative image of a forest to create a haunting atmosphere. (In vampirism the blood is sucked from a subject and she/he becomes undead, i.e. seemingly present but absent. This is a metaphor for the translation of an object into an image, whereby a thing caught in the flow of time is like a spectre when passed through the lens - it is suddenly without substance, in the world but no longer of it. In other works by the artist there is an underlying reference to vampirism; in using her mouth as the camera, her blood red photographs are like an ingestion/devouring of her subject).

In this work the viewer is given two very different versions of a scene, depending whether they are inside or outside the carriage. The image, on a ground glass screen inside the black carriage, is inverted and faint, transformed by its translation via the lens. The projected image is evidently quite different from the scene which we can also see in reality; contrasting what is real with what is constructed. Like all the works in the exhibition there is a blurring between boundaries, between inside and outside, between what is real and what is not.
Gallery notes: Gallery Four
'You said that without moving your lips'
Lindsay Seers
This video work investigates three different memories of a house, all of which have a distinct character and are different in kind: the first type of memory is a picture memory based on what has been seen, it is about trying to retain memory images of the detail of the interior of a house (prone to fading fast); the second memory is of a dream/fantasy about a ventriloquist's dummy that has become associated with the house, as it manifested itself there. This memory seems as lucid as the other memories of the place. The third is the memory of an action (a memory of an action is quite distinct from the memory of an object, as it is a memory felt from within the body, rather than solely as visual stimulus from without). The action remembered is of becoming a camera in an attempt to better record the memory of the house and the relationship of the body/subject to that particular time and place. (Henri Bergson suggests that we will retain a memory of an action far more lucidly than we will objects, particularly as memory fails - hence nouns/proper names become more and more difficult to retain than actions. It seems then that the act of photographing could take precedence over the results).

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'without moving your lips' | Limerick City Gallery, Ireland | Lindsay Seers

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Materials: Camera obscura in fabric and cast iron, paper trees, fan; negative photographs (cross-processed cibachromes), VHS projection and VHS monitor work, two headed dummy with electronics. Excerpt from: gallery booklet. Author: Lindsay Seers.

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Ann Veronica Janssens at the South London Gallery

Installation view of Bikes, 2001 and Phosphènes, 1997-2018 (left to right) by Ann Veronica Janssens

Photo: Andy Stagg

Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens (b. 1956)  has created an extensive body of work over four decades spanning installations, projections, immersive environments and sculptures. At the core of her practice is an interest in light and its impact on our perception and experience.

This exhibition is the first major presentation of Janssens' work in London.

Janssens' Untitled (Blue Glitter), an expanse of reflective, blue glitter scattered across the floor of the gallery, occupied the Main Space for the first half of the show.

It has now been replaced by Janssens' reflective wheeled Bikes, 2001. Visitors are invited to cycle round the Main Gallery on one of five custom-made bicycles with mirrored wheels, which reflect light on the surrounding gallery walls and floor as the wheels turn.

Across three floors of the Fire Station, sculptures, projections, light works and installations continue Janssens' exploration of perception and ephemerality.

VISITOR INFORMATION REGARDING BIKES

Booking a visit to the SLG does not reserve a timeslot for riding Ann Veronica Janssens' , and you may have to queue

Visitors must use the hand sanitiser provided before riding a bike

Before riding, visitors are required to read and sign an injury waiver

A face mask covering your nose and mouth must be worn at all times

A protective helmet, provided by the SLG, must be worn while riding

Only two bikes will be in use at any one time to ensure social distancing is maintained

Unaccompanied children under the age of 18 are not permitted to ride a bike

Edition

Janssens has created a new edition to accompany Hot Pink Turquoise at the SLG. Click here to visit our online shop for more details.

Catalogue

Click here to visit our online shop to purchase Hot Pink Turquoise, the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

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Ann Veronica Janssens: Hot Pink Turquoise - South London Gallery

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Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens (b. 1956)  has created an extensive body of work over four decades spanning installations, projections, immersive environments and sculptures. At the core of her practice is an interest in light and its impact on our perception and experience. This exhibition is the first major presentation of Janssens' work in London.

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Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the jury of the cancelled 2020 Turner Prize has selected 10 artists to receive £10,000 bursaries. The artists were chosen for their significant contributions to new developments in British contemporary art.

'Following a lively and rigorous virtual debate, the jury has settled on a list of ten fantastic artists who reflect the exceptional talent found in contemporary British art. From ceramics to film, performance to photography, they represent the many exciting and interdisciplinary ways that artists work today. These bursaries represent a vote of confidence in that work and offer some much-deserved support in challenging times.'
- Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain

The Turner Bursaries are generously supported by John Booth, Catherine Petitgas and The Ampersand Foundation.

Arika

Arika is a political arts organisation based in Edinburgh who since 2001 have organised projects supporting connections between art and social change. Arika was selected by the jury for their innovative project Episode 10: A Means Without End presented at Tramway, Glasgow. The project was a 5-day programme of performances, discussions, screenings and study sessions exploring ideas in maths and physics as analogies for the desires and struggles of social life and existence.

Liz Johnson Artur

Liz Johnson Artur is a Ghanaian-Russian photographer based in London. For over thirty years she has been photographing the lives of people from the African diaspora in an ongoing project titled the Black Balloon Archive. The jury praised this body of work, in particular the exhibition at the South London Gallery If you know the beginning, the end is no trouble, which focused on her photographs of Black British life including Black-majority churches and non-binary club nights, presented in a series of installations.

Oreet Ashery

Oreet Ashery is a London-based artist whose projects include moving image, performance, photography, workshops, writing and assemblages. Ashery's work explores issues of gender, autoethnography, fiction, biopolitics and community. She was selected for her contribution to Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery at the Wellcome Collection, which explored lived experiences of care and chronic illness. The jury were particularly moved by her new film Dying Under Your Eyes and the innovative web series Revisiting Genesis following two nurses who assist people actively preparing for death to create biographical slideshows serving as their posthumous digital legacy.

Shawanda Corbett

Shawanda Corbett is an Oxford-based artist whose expansive practice combines ceramics, paintings and performance to question the idea of the 'complete' body. Each of her hand-thrown ceramic vessels are inspired by real people and are frequently incorporated into politically charged performances in which Corbett's own body leaves traces on the pottery vessels and surfaces. The jury commended the power of her performance Blackbird Mississippi at the Serpentine Gallery in which the artist drew parallels between a slave's voyages on the underground railroad to the artist's own journey towards rehabilitation. The jury also noted the current exhibition of jazz-inspired paintings and hand-thrown ceramics Neighbourhood Garden at Corvi-Mora, London.

Jamie Crewe

Glasgow-based artist and singer Jamie Crewe uses video, sculpture, drawing and text to probe ideas of identity, power, desire, community and history. Crewe was selected for their 'sister' exhibitions at the Grand Union in Birmingham and the Humber Street Gallery in Hull. These were inspired by Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel The Well of Loneliness and its lasting impressions on generations of LGBTQIA+ people. The jury particularly praised Crewe's dynamic and poetic retellings of mythology and literature while exploring contemporary notions of gender.

Sean Edwards

Sean Edwards, Undo Things Done (Wales in Venice), 2019 in parallel with the past i-iv, 2019, UV curable ink printed direct to medium density fibreboard substrate, perforated hardboard, plywood, hardboard, automotive spray paint, graphite, colouring pencil, household emulsion, plywood, wood glue and steel. Photograph: Jamie Woodley. Image Courtesy the Artist and Tanya Leighton gallery, Berlin.

Sean Edwards is a Cardiff-based artist who intertwines simple sculptural objects and mixed media installations with personal family histories. Edwards was selected for his installation Undo Things Done for the Welsh Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, which addressed austerity, class, shame and loss. Responding to his own experiences of growing up on a council estate, the work included a live radio play spoken by his mother from Cardiff and a video of shuffling dominoes evoking memories of his father.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

London-based artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen investigates the ways in which virtual, robotic and human bodies are manufactured and manipulated in today's technology-driven, capitalist society. With particular attention to the pharmaceutical, pornographic, gaming and tech industries, Meineche Hansen explores how these different bodies relate to human labour. The jury noted the innovative use of VR and AR in her work and praised her exhibitions Welcome to End-Used City at Chisenhale Gallery and An Artist's Guide to Stop Being An Artist, at the National Gallery of Denmark.

Ima-Abasi Okon

Ima-Abasi Okon,
Infinite Slippage: nonRepugnant Insolvencies T!-a!-r!-r!-y!-i!-n!-g! as Hand Claps of M's Hard'Loved'Flesh [I'M irreducibly-undone because] -Quantum Leanage-Complex-Dub (2019)
Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, 2019. Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.

Ima-Abasi Okon is a London and Amsterdam-based artist who works with sculpture, video, sound and installation. Okon was selected for her exhibition Infinite Slippage: nonRepugnant Insolvencies T!-a!-r!-r!-y!-i!-n!-g! as Hand Claps of M's Hard'Loved'Flesh [I'M irreducibly-undone because] -Quantum Leanage-Complex-Dub at Chisenhale Gallery. The jury praised this highly accomplished installation, which included industrial air conditioners adapted to become hosts for a multi-channel sound piece.

Imran Perretta

Imran Perretta, the destructors (2019). I
Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, 2020. the destructors is produced by Chisenhale Gallery and Spike Island, Bristol, and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery; Spike Island; the Whitworth, The University of Manchester; and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Courtesy of the artist.
Photo: Andy Keate.

Imran Perretta examines marginality and cultural histories through film, performance, sound and poetry. The London-based artist was commended by the jury for his powerful recent film, the destructors 2019, which reflects on his experiences as a young man of Bangladeshi heritage. It addresses the complexities of 'coming of age' for south Asian men from Muslim backgrounds in the UK and explores the uncomfortable relationship between austerity and the War on Terror. The destructors was commissioned by and exhibited at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; the Whitworth, The University of Manchester; and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead.

Alberta Whittle

Alberta Whittle lives and works between Barbados, Scotland and South Africa. Rooted in the experiences of the diaspora, Whittle's work incorporates performance, video, photography, collage and sculpture to tackle anti-blackness and the trauma, memory and ecological concerns which come in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism. The jury were moved by Whittle's exhibition How Flexible Can We Make the Mouth at Dundee Contemporary Arts which thoughtfully focused on healing, writing and speech as means of self-liberation.

The 2020 jury

The members of the 2020 jury were: Richard Birkett, Curator at Large at the Institute of Contemporary Arts; Sarah Munro, Director of BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Duro Olowu, designer and curator; and Fatoş Üstek, Director of Liverpool Biennial. The jury is chaired by Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain.

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Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the jury of the cancelled 2020 Turner Prize has selected 10 artists to receive £10,000 bursaries. The artists were chosen for their significant contributions to new developments in British contemporary art. 'Following a lively and rigorous virtual debate, the jury has settled on a list of ten fantastic artists who reflect the exceptional talent found in contemporary British art.

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Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me? - Whitechapel Gallery

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Nalini Malani’s first UK commission, immersviely explores themes of violence, feminism, politics, racial tensions and social inequality.

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"Shape is the distance colour goes securely"-William Gass

An exploration of the cultural meanings, and motives given to a basic element of visual perception: color. Color as biblical fall, as acid trip, as intoxicant, as eve-in-need-of-a-rein, color as return to the unconscious, the savage, the exotic, the feminine, the dangerous; whether white-cube-dwelling chromophobe or kaleidoscopic chromophile, color is never mere surface. Short and teeming with ideas to digest.

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"Shape is the distance colour goes securely"-William Gass An exploration of the cultural meanings, and motives given to a basic element of visual perception: color. Color as biblical fall, as acid trip, as intoxicant, as eve-in-need-of-a-rein, color as return to the unconscious, the savage, the exotic, the feminine, the dangerous; whether white-cube-dwelling chromophobe or kaleidoscopic chromophile, color is never mere surface.

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Installation view of "Bad Girls (Part 1)," 1994, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.FRED SCRUTON/COURTESY NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NEW YORK

In my new book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson), I devoted a chapter to exhibitions that have lingered in the historical record for their commitment to "Resisting Masculinism and Sexism." As what constitutes sexual prejudice continues to evolve, it's imperative that curators continually query and challenge the gender norms by which we are all confined. "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon," a recent exhibition at the New Museum in New York, did just that-and within a lineage worth revisiting as the present adjusts for oversights of the past.

Though most commonly associated with a notorious run at the New Museum in 1994-in a tradition that would directly influence "Trigger" decades later-the first iteration of a series of shows titled "Bad Girls" was organized separately the year before for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (followed by a presentation at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow). Curated by Kate Bush, Emma Dexter, and Nicola White, the exhibition celebrated a new spirit of playfulness, tactility, and perverse humor in the work of six British and American women artists: Helen Chadwick, Dorothy Cross, Nicole Eisenman, Rachel Evans, Nan Goldin, and Sue Williams -each of whom was represented by several works.

The term "bad girls" was defined in the London catalogue as "sly, in-your-face, disturbing, provocative, haunting, subtle, sensual, shocking, sexy." The exhibition sought to celebrate the multiplicity of feminisms in the 1990s, undermining tendencies toward the essentialist and didactic voices of early feminist work. "Irreverent, personal, shocking, funny, and fey," the curators explained, the show "dares to attack on two fronts at once: offending proscriptive feminism as well as the reactionary forces of patriarchy." The curators' aim was not to present work in the lineage of 1980s artists such as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer-whose works, they argued, "put a feminist gloss upon the power and manipulations of the media, movies, and advertising"-but rather to harken back to "the surrealist traditions of Louise Bourgeois and Meret Oppenheim as well as the aggressive camp of Judy Chicago's Dinner Party." It did not purport to be a definitive survey of current trends within feminist art, but rather a "sympathetic grouping" that allowed for "intriguing and provocative correspondences" between the works.

Highlights of the London exhibition included Eisenman's drawing Betty Gets It (1992), which parodies the happy heterosexuality of the characters Betty and Wilma-from the 1960s animated television series The Flintstones-as a lesbian couple, and Williams's A Funny Thing Happened (1992), which depicts a series of rape scenes in stark black acrylic on white canvas with scrawled texts reading, "We don't know if she enjoyed it or not." Also featured were Chadwick's sculpture Glossolalia (1993)-a circular table on which several golden pelts are arranged like a trophy below a cone centerpiece with lapping lambs' tongues cast in glistening bronze-as well as photographic portraits by Goldin of drag queens and those living with AIDS. And then there were images of Amazons castrating pirates (Eisenman), platonic romance (Evans), and surrealist juxtapositions (Cross). In all, it was a selection of powerful works exemplifying what one critic called "the very highest fuck-you-fem Mae West tradition."

The London exhibition received mixed reviews. Brian Sewell, writing in the London Evening Standard, complained that the works on view demonstrated "anti-male prejudice at its silliest and most obsessive-hysterical and violent propaganda utterly contemptible as art." Laura Cottingham, writing in Frieze magazine-but who, ironically, also wrote for the ICA catalogue-was fiercely critical of the exhibition, taking particular issue with the title itself, as did Iwona Blazwick, who noted that it stressed an "infantile, naughty, rebellious posture whereas there was actually a very serious and powerful thrust to a lot of the work in the show." Cottingham argued that the exhibition presented some of "the artistic products of feminism's partial success in the form of an apology, a laugh." The curators, she said, attempted to appeal to "the tritest cliché of male chauvinist charges-that feminists have no sense of humor." The "girlie giggle," she continued, "an unconscious social signifier women deliver as a sign that you (men) need not take us seriously, is put forward as the controlling rhetoric. This 'It's So Funny!' curatorial posture betrays both feminism and art: none of the artists included in this exhibition is either a failed or an aspiring comedian and all are undeservedly trivialized by this mockery."

Others were more forgiving. Ekow Eshun wrote in Elle magazine, for example, that while the images were disturbing and confrontational, they also challenged a history of art in which women are merely passive subjects: "And bleak as their subject matter is, the cumulative effect of the new generation's work is liberating rather than depressing."

Deborah Kass, 4 Barbras (The Jewish Jackie Series), 1992, which appeared in "Bad Girls West," 1994, at the Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles.©DEBORAH KASS/COURTESY ARTIST RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

A year later, in 1994, curator Marcia Tucker organized a two-part "Bad Girls" exhibition at the New Museum in New York, and Marcia Tanner curated "Bad Girls West" at the Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, as a "sister exhibition" to Tucker's. Although the two curators inspired and assisted each other, and shared the same catalogue, the two exhibitions were organized independently. Both examined a phenomenon they had observed in the early 1990s: "a new wave of female artists who were using humor (often bawdy, raucous 'unladylike' humor) in their work as a strategy to engage viewers with feminist issues." Tanner explained that what distinguished this new wave from earlier feminist work was its use of humor as a subversive strategy operating outside the bounds of feminine propriety. In both curators' catalogue essays, laughter is presented as "an antidote to being silenced, defined, and objectified," and as these artists' "most transgressive strategy." Tucker's concept for the exhibition called for art that is "funny, really funny," and that goes "too far"; Tanner's was to showcase work that is "irreverent, anti-ideological, non-doctrinaire, non-didactic, un-polemical and thoroughly un-ladylike."

Subversive humor was the connecting force between the more than 100 artists, performers, and filmmakers-women and men-featured in "Bad Girls" and "Bad Girls West." The works ranged from sculptures to wall texts to photographs, and videos to comics, and addressed such issues as marriage, child-rearing, food, genitalia, lesbianism, motherhood, gender identity, role reversal, aging, sex, race, class, and violence. Standouts from the New York presentation included Xenobia Bailey's Sistah Paradise's Revival Tent (1993), a tent of brightly colored, beautifully patterned knitted wool that is part shelter, part headdress, part woman's head, and Renée Cox's larger-than-life photograph Mother and Child (1993), a nude self-portrait of the artist holding her son. Jacqueline Hayden's images of heavyset elderly women in the nude pointed up the obsession with beauty and youth, while Portia Munson's Pink Project: Table (1994), reinforced femininity by way of a large table laden with an orderly, densely packed array of some 2,000 pink objects-from combs, brushes, and hair slides to children's toys, dildos, and a garbage can. The stripper/photographer Cammie Toloui's Lusty Lady Series (1992) presented a slideshow of patrons masturbating, snapped in her place of business, "The Pleasure Palace," which viewers could ogle through a set of peepholes. And Yasumasa Morimura showed Portrait (Futago), 1988, a photographic self-portrait of the artist playing the role of both maid and model in a scrupulously reconstructed image of Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863).

West Coast highlights included Lutz Bacher's 1993 work titled Feminist Movement ("Sure I'm for the feminist movement. In fact, I'm pretty good at it."), which was based on the sensual, large-breasted, and blithely smiling pinups by illustrator Antonio Vargas that appeared in Playboy in the 1960s and 1970s, and Deborah Kass's 4 Barbras (1992), a Warhol spoof with a Jewish twist. Rona Pondick showed a wacky sculpture, titled Double Bed (1989), comprising a mattress, pillows, and dozens of baby bottles, and Sue Williams presented Manly Footwear (1992), which featured a series of squashed-in faces made of silicone rubber, referring to violence against women.

THAMES & HUDSON

The "Bad Girls" exhibitions in the United States drew mixed reactions from critics. Most took aim at the title, arguing that it was "trendy," "angry," "a cheap hook," and that it "eclipsed any real debate around the work." Some claimed that the exhibitions were based on a weak idea and actually trivialized the work of women artists. Others stated that the concept was backward, or like "a byline for a fashion magazine." As Jan Avgikos explained in Artforum, "Once feminist-oriented art has been disparagingly categorized as the work of 'bad girls' it can be laughed off, crated up, and shipped out to sea." She continued, "This curatorial misadventure . . . is particularly egregious, given that the show's organizers happen to be women."

And while some praised the quality of the work on view, others claimed that it was "not 'bad' enough." Benjamin Weissman from Artforum agreed: "The badness is elegant, safe, conventional, and, most important, museum-ready." Roberta Smith of the New York Times was disappointed by Part I of the New York City exhibition. She had hoped for a "reasonably accurate view of the new, angrily ironic feminist art . . . that has been percolating up through the galleries and alternative spaces in the last few years." She argued that this third generation of feminist artists to emerge since the 1970s "built on the attitudes of the photo-appropriation feminists of the 1980s (Barbara Kruger, for example), confidently branching out into painting and sculpture and installation art. It's a good time to assess their efforts and consider the issues they raise." She believed the exhibition fell short of doing so. Yet, a critic from the New York Observer argued that "Bad Girls' satirical sendup of feminism is refreshing . . . excess and outrageousness is the rule." And Elizabeth Hess of the Village Voice declared, "Tucker should be congratulated for staking her territory smack in the middle of current feminist debates."

It is too soon to know how "Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon," which closed this past January after a four-month run, will be regarded by history, particularly within its lineage of other gender- and identity-probing New Museum shows that included "Bad Girls" as well as "Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art" (1982), "Difference: On Representation and Sexuality" (1984-85), and "HOMO VIDEO: Where We Are Now" (1986-87). But it will be intriguing to see how its conception of gender as malleable, variable, and nonconforming comes to age. In the catalogue assembled in advance of the exhibition's run, the show's curator, Johanna Burton, explained that "Trigger" and its devotion to work by trans and queer artists "synthesizes channels that take up the instability of gender and the forms that gender might temporarily coalesce into-or refuse altogether. If there is a shared impulse among the practices included," Burton wrote, "it is toward this idea of the impossible as a space of potential, and a place of other futures."

Adapted from Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, by Maura Reilly. Text: ©2018 Maura Reilly. Reprinted with permission from Thames & Hudson Inc., www.thamesandhudsonusa.com.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of ARTnews on page 32 under the title "Bad Girls to the Rescue."

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'Bad Girls' to the Rescue: An Exhibition of Feminist Art from the 1990s Has Much to Teach Us Today

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In my new book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson), I devoted a chapter to exhibitions that have lingered in the historical record for their commitment to "Resisting Masculinism and Sexism." As what constitutes sexual prejudice continues to evolve, it's imperative that curators continually query and challenge the gender norms by which we are all confined.

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The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree - Camden Art Centre

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The Botanical Mind brought together work by over 60 visionary, surrealist, modern, outsider, indigenous Amazonian and contemporary artists to reveal the on…