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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.

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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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Review by Paul Hardman
Right from the first moment of entering this exhibition at the Serpentine, Spero's art makes an assertive and powerful impression. Immediately after passing through the gallery's doors, a panorama manifests itself across the whole field of vision. Disembodied heads on the end of chains radiate out of a central point in the centre of the ceiling as if from a demented hellish maypole. Each face is composed of rough distressed marks, colours bleeding into each other, surfaces pitted, expressions of horror and torment, some screaming in rage or pain, others sticking out long tongues. That this will be a visceral and uncompromising exhibition is apparent immediately.

Spero began producing the body of work that she is known for, from which a selection makes up this exhibition, relatively late in her life, in her early forties. It was through becoming politicized in the cauldron of the 1960s in New York, to the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement, that Spero found what is essentially her muse -injustice, in particular sexism and war. These subjects have provided a target for her aggression, a focus for her activism, and an anger that fuelled her intense artistic practice up until her death in 2009 at the age of 83.

In a period in which political and radical artists, particularly in New York, were tearing down the boundaries of what art could be, first through pop art, then minimalism, conceptual art, land art, performance art and so on, Spero occupies an unusual position. She was extremely political and engaged, yet exclusively used traditional mediums such as drawing, painting, collage and printmaking. She has worked with an apparent unconcern for the theoretical which, conversely, now makes her work feel extremely fresh.

Literally on the surface level, the exhibition contains a vast array of visual substance. Spero has used every method of mark making at her disposal, water colour, gouache, pencil and ink strokes, paper is scratched until holes appear, images are printed over hand made lines, large woodblock lettering with damaged surfaces serve as headline messages alongside hand typed columns of text, ripped out and fixed next to strange cut out figures and multiplied found images. Certain figures reappear throughout the pieces, drawn with simple lines, but with warped bodies and multiple legs and breasts. The marks are full of movement and violence, compositions are free form and experimental, as are the formats for the work and their installation in this gallery. One room features panoramic scrolls several metres long. In another the walls are covered on all four sides with a collection of densely packed pieces that reach up to the ceiling.

All this is not entertainment though, but a means to an end. The feminist and anti-war message here is forceful and direct but never simplistic, Spero shows these problems are deeply carved into the human psyche and takes both an epic view, globally and across time, to a specific and personal view, including typed testimonies of specific instances of abusive behaviour. In Marduk (1986) several drawings of female figures walking on all fours are interspersed with texts describing state sanctioned abduction, rape, and torture of women. Testimonies from Argentina, Turkey, El Salvador, and China amongst others demonstrate the scope of Spero's conception of the feminist struggle as a ubiquitous problem. Another combined drawing and text piece contains a pasted passage by Hélène Cixous making a psychoanalytical criticism of male domination, discussing Freudian notions of envy and conflict between the sexes. These texts serve to contextualise the images that occur elsewhere in the exhibition, when, for example in Azur (2002), repeated prints of one woman naked and bound, and another with a noose around her neck, are juxtaposed with classical and tribal statues of the body. Throughout, Spero's work always points towards a bigger picture, so that not only individual cases of sexism are the issue, but the root of the tendency itself.

The same approach is applied when she makes war her focus, the familiar symbols such as mushroom clouds and helicopters are made uncanny in a series of her drawings from 1966-67, here a helicopter has sprouted breasts, another decapitates with it's blades in Victims, in Atomic Mushroom Cloud the explosion blasts out sperm with tiny male heads. Spero attacks male chauvinism in the most direct way, by highlighting its sexual nature in monstrous imagery.

The exhibition includes a good cross-section of Spero's work, showing examples of the metaphysical drawings she would make before becoming overtly political, which are quite beautiful in themselves, to other key works in her development such as the series of drawings based on quotations from Artaud. One of which, from 1969 sums up the visceral experience of seeing her work: "this crucible of Fire and Real Meat", Spero's roughly made brush strokes depict an imperfect and troubled world, but one full of a fearsome vitality.

To read Kiki Smith's short essay on Spero on the Aesthetica Blog please click here. Nancy Spero continues until 2 May. For more information visit the Serpentine Gallery - why not pick up a copy of Aesthetica while you're there?

Installation view at Anthony Reynolds Gallery
Photograph: Dave Morgan
Courtesy of Estate of Nancy Spero and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

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Aesthetica Magazine - Nancy Spero @ the Serpentine Gallery

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Review by Paul Hardman Right from the first moment of entering this exhibition at the Serpentine, Spero's art makes an assertive and powerful impression. Immediately after passing through the gallery's doors, a panorama manifests itself across the whole field of vision.

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During the past fifteen years, New York-based artist Nicole Eisenman has created a self-aware and psychologically probing body of work that includes installations, animations, drawings, and, with increasing focus, paintings. "Coping," an exhibition of new paintings and monoprints, opens today at Galerie Barbara Weiss in Berlin and will remain on view until October 18.
I made the paintings in this exhibition throughout the past year, gravitating, as I often do, to particular images (both found and imagined). I put them in drawings and then on canvas, initially working on one at a time and then on several at once. When selecting paintings for the show and thinking about them as a group, I realized that they are all somewhat depressed or depressing and that what ties them together is their embodiment of different notions of coping. The world can be a depressing place these days. I don't think I'm depressed-though I did experience something akin to a midlife crisis recently-but the state of the world, and my opinion of it, necessarily filters into the work.

The earliest painting in the show is Coping; it depicts people trudging through muck in a town setting, which directly preceded a revelation I had in the studio that it was time to try painting interiors. That in turn led to the canvas that depicts me in a therapist's office. But the epiphany about painting interior spaces was less about the subject matter than it was about my need to push myself formally. I frequently paint vague outdoor scenes, like Coping or The Fagend, in which the figures are placed in an artificial, tableaulike environment. If you take the figures out of The Fagend, it's just a big bunch of abstract blocks with patterns on them. I liked that aspect and wanted to pursue it further. To do so, I debated taking the figures out of these canvases, but I couldn't. I'm not ready-and don't want-to make that jump.

In a way, I couldn't do it because I don't know how else to make paintings. What would I pull from? If the figures aren't included, these constructed worlds seem entirely removed from reality and rather self-indulgent. You need the figure-or, rather, I need the figure. Not necessarily for narrative, as the work ends up being as much about feeling or atmosphere as a particular story. The atmosphere of this show is one of sadness. Sadness arises from particular circumstances, but it can move from the mind into the body, from something focused into something more general-a lethargy, that pit in your stomach. I hope there is a connection between the movement of an intense emotion as it infiltrates the body, becoming less legible if no less present, and the dissolving of the figures in my works into patches of abstraction. (Perhaps viewers will be able to tell I've been looking at Edvard Munch and the Impressionists lately.) This is particularly true of the thirty prints in the exhibition depicting people "crying," where washes of ink run down and obscure their faces.

In a way, the whole show is a collection of faces. When visitors walk into the gallery, they encounter the thirty prints and then Brooklyn Biergarten II, a very busy scene-a painting of heads that are locked in space because their bodies lie on top of one another. Last year, when I painted my first beer-garden scene, I immediately wanted to keep painting them, to paint them for the rest of my life. There's a whole genre of paintings, particularly French ones, of people eating and drinking, and the beer garden seems to be the equivalent, for certain residents of twenty-first-century Brooklyn, of the grand public promenades and social spaces of the nineteenth century. It's where we go to socialize, to commiserate about how the world is a fucked-up place and about our culture's obsession with happiness. The paintings in this show hopefully present something of a ballast to that obsession. It is healthy to look at sadness in the world, and in yourself, and to dwell on it for a little while.

- As told to Brian Sholis

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Nicole Eisenman discusses her new exhibition in Berlin

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During the past fifteen years, New York-based artist Nicole Eisenman has created a self-aware and psychologically probing body of work that includes installations, animations, drawings, and, with increasing focus, paintings.

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British artist Monster Chetwynd's diverse practice encompasses performance, sculpture, installation, video, and more recently, a return to painting. She was Christened as Alalia Chetwynd, and raised as Lali; in 2006, she changed her first name to Spartacus, and in 2013 she changed it to Marvin Gaye. The artist currently goes by Monster. Chetwynd was born in London and studied Anthropology at University College London before training as a painter at the Slade School of Fine Art followed by the Royal College of Art. She is perhaps best known for her makeshift-style performance pieces, which often feature handmade costumes, sets, and props. The artist's work has been shown in numerous eminent institutions and galleries such as the Tate and Sadie Coles HQ, and she has participated in residencies at The Resilience Lab in Bristol and Monteverdi in Tuscany, among others.

Now based in Glasgow, Chetwynd first gained attention hosting whimsical and extraordinary parties in her flat, with themes ranging from Surrealist dress-ups to complete nakedness. The parties were always inspired by something she was annoyed by, such as a particular advert or something happening in the Political world, or in her everyday life. Chetwynd's handcrafted costumes, built from papier-mâché, latex, and cardboard, combined with her love of pop culture, have helped to shape a practice that is rooted in performance. Early in her career, she presented an exhibition with sculptor Jess Flood-Paddock at Malta Contemporary Art, entitled, The Grid System. Together, they questioned the benefits of parameters, routines, and regulation to creativity, fostering a general curiosity about how things are made. The critically engaged exhibition featured a variety of screenings, talks, workshops, and performances.

In 2012, Chetwynd was nominated for the Turner Prize, awarded to British artists for their recent contributions to contemporary art. She was nominated for her solo exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, entitled Odd Man Out. In this piece, Chetwynd performed a play that ran for five hours, revolving around ideas of democracy, the right to vote, and the disincentives against engaging in politics. The one-woman mime drama was a kind of punishment or purgatory, seeking to be demonstrative, pushy and preachy, much like the theatrical Christian 'Hell Houses' of the American south that persuade an individual to turn to Christianity. Odd Man Out portrayed non-conformism and aimed to promote freethinking out of its audience.

Earlier this year, Chetwynd presented a new body of work in an exhibition, entitled Ze & Per, at Sadie Coles HQ. In contrast to previous projects, where appropriated imagery spread across the surfaces of an entire gallery, Chetwynd's recent paintings condense and compress the cacophonous subject-matter of her larger installations within their borders. In the process, painting itself is envisaged as a kind of static and contained performance, but equally as a fluid entity. Most recently, the artist designed the Christmas decorations at the Tate Britain, currently on display, installing two large and illuminated sculptures of slugs outside of the museum. The sculptures are made of recyclable hessian and wicker, each slug over 10 metres long and accompanied by trails of blue and white LED lights across the building's exterior. Something Curated spoke with Chetwynd to learn more.
Something Curated: What inspired the giant slugs for this year's Christmas decorations at Tate Britain?
Monster Chetwynd: My initial idea was to paint Tate Britain with algae, as I was inspired by a futuristic aspiration/proposition of the Science centre in Glasgow announcing that ' in the Future ' all public buildings will be lit by Bioluminescence rather than beacon lighting! I asked the Tate team if we could investigate this and the result of the research was the sad state of bioluminescence as a source of lighting, not being that developed yet. As a product 'to buy' it is limited to 'saches' or small pouches of water or larva lamps. The reality of suspending all these pouches and for it to be visually stunning both during the day and night seemed unlikely.

In the next meeting with the Tate curator I showed the clip of the Slugs making Love from 'Life in the Undergrowth'. The Slugs form a radiant, glowing, blue flower shape suspended on a strand of slime from a tree branch. It was through this ecstasy that we developed the idea of the Slugs 'conveying the concept' rather than Bioluminescence itself being present. We were sure that two huge Slugs in sculptural form appearing to have smeared slime trails all over the Tate facade in fairy lights, would be more impactful and warming the soul then any currant use of actual Bioluminescence. The next meeting was how to make sure the scale of the Slugs was right and how to avoid any 'Spinal Tap - Stone Henge' failures!

SC: In your exhibition of new works at Sadie Coles HQ, Ze & Per, earlier this year, painting itself was envisaged as a kind of static and contained performance - could you expand on this idea?

MC: I love painting as a static and contained performance. I was asked by a GSA student during a movement workshop if I thought that my performances were exploded paintings and if I had ever wanted to make a painting explode off the wall. The answer is yes! I love the paintings of Picabia which were linked to events where the participants had a party and the paintings where made as a result. I love the paintings of Watteau and the extension of the theatre in the outdoors. I love the film 'Les Enfants du Paradis' (1945) where there is a mime, within a play, within a film.
SC: What is the thinking behind continually changing your first name?
MC: It is instinctive, strategic and pleasurable. I recently read a book on Hokusai and felt exonerated. (Hokusai was known by at least 30 names during his lifetime. Although the use of multiple names was a common practice of Japanese artists of the time, the numbers of names he used far exceeds that of any other major Japanese artist. Hokusai's name changes are so frequent, and so often related to changes in his artistic production and style, that they are useful for breaking his life up into periods).

Feature image via Tate

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Meet Monster Chetwynd, The Artist Behind The Tate's Giant Christmas Slugs - Something Curated

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British artist Monster Chetwynd's diverse practice encompasses performance, sculpture, installation, video, and more recently, a return to painting. She was Christened as Alalia Chetwynd, and raised as Lali; in 2006, she changed her first name to Spartacus, and in 2013 she changed it to Marvin Gaye. The artist currently goes by Monster.

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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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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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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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It has been said, with a certain amount of ire, that performance, despite its myriad forms, is often treated simply as a novelty turn by commercial galleries, who hire it in to jolly up an opening, while excluding it from day-to-day business. Although art objects enter the fluidity of the market to create a serious financial wake, the amorphousness of live and ephemeral event-based work has, to date, remained curiously immiscible. While it was often the intent of artists of the 1970s to make themselves radically unmarketable, many of today's practitioners have chosen the form of performance simply because gesture, spoken word, the presence of the body and exchange articulate their ideas more accurately than static objects and images. So the fact that one of Britain's busiest galleries is dedicating time, space and money to these practices perhaps signals a new attitude across the board. This is not to suggest that performance does not figure at other public institutions around the country - many besides Tate have been running regular live programmes for years - but the plans for the new Tate Modern Tanks spaces symbolise the broader acceptance of something previously considered marginal. In keeping with this game-changing policy, one of the three thematic strands running throughout the Tanks programme will evaluate the ongoing entanglement of art and activism. The romantic image of the artist as transgressive outsider has, through the course of the twentieth century, transmogrified into that of an integrated member of society, not only engaged in political and social systems, but also working towards their improvement.

Although a perhaps questionable universal ethical uprightness is attributed to contemporary artists, there are genuine enclaves where forceful ideological intent motivates practices that, if not actually located within communities, face out towards them from within the gallery, or invite them in to participate. In reconnoitring this terrain, the first symposium of the Tanks programme, 'The Ethics of Encounter', approaches issues of impact, aesthetics and methodologies from a number of strategic angles.

Exemplifying the more direct and urgent approach, Jelili Atiku discusses his work in Nigeria, where his sculptural and performance work confronts the government on human rights issues such as prison overpopulation and penal reform. Besides his own practice, which often features the body swathed in abject industrial materials and placed in uncomfortable situations, Atiku is co-founder and co-ordinator of Advocate for Human Rights Through Arts, evidencing an attitude that art can effect real change in Nigeria - an idea that is hotly debated in Europe. While there have been many performative practices adopting an aesthetics of politics without ever leaving the gallery, there is also, conversely, a development within left-wing political activism that looks to art for effective spectacularising or forms such as mass action and relational aesthetics.

'The Ethics of Encounter' offers an opportunity to debate the role of the institution within this political landscape. Tate, in particular, has had a variegated recent history with regards to activism. It is an ongoing direct target of critical action by the group Liberate Tate, who request that it rethink its acceptance of funding from BP on account of the oil company's track record regarding environmental responsibility, and the 2010 Turner Prize was temporarily hijacked, albeit rather contingently, by a 'teach-in' conducted by students and staff protesting against budget cuts. Through these disputes the institution is seen to be directly implicated within bio-political structures (in that it becomes instrumental in cleaning up BP's public image) and entrenched by association, as an authoritative voice and practical enabler within an establishment that is perceived by many to be divisive and elitist. And yet the gallery is also conspicuously intent on education and democratic representation, and supports many artists with political remits and ethical programmes. A debate that resolves some of these paradoxes would be timely when art is influenced by the pull of socially orientated biopolitics and of the neo-liberal markets, employing direct action and indirect referencing.

Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt 1987 is a good historical reference point for assessing the potential of art to activate tangentially by way of visibility and audibility. The piece was a tableau performed by 430 women over the age of 60 on Mother's Day at the IDS Center's Crystal Court in Minneapolis. The women were dressed in black and sat at tables arranged on a massive rug to resemble a quilt - an effect designed by painter Miriam Schapiro. As they discussed their lives, they changed the position of their arms every ten minutes so that, when viewed from above, the design of the 'quilt' would alter. While we have become perhaps over-familiar with 'relational' work, Lacy is often overlooked as one of its early formulators, and her immersion in a wider political scene in which actions were directed at US government policy on rape and equal pay, as well as more generalised attitudes to race, gender, sexual orientation and age, provides a useful model for artists wondering how they can affect lived lives now. Tania Bruguera's ongoing project Immigrant Movement International 2010-15 opens up participation further by way of what she terms 'useful art". For the artist inhabits a workshop space in which members of local communities are offered free legal advice, practical workshops, English lessons and other services that help to redress balances of power in societies where meritocratic democracy is failing those with fewer material advantages. It is important to note, though, that 'The Ethics of Encounter' is not a soapbox for self-righteous proselytising. Besides their political remit, both Lacy and Bruguera's pieces have aesthetic, conceptual and narrative concerns. The symposium line-up also evinces a consideration of interpersonal and sexual relationships as a font of empathetic sensuality, particularly for Eddie Peake, whose playful narcissism and eroticism handles gender and sexual politics with a rough exuberance.

The second theme of the Tanks programme spotlights the fragmentary, irrational, disparate and evasive histories interlaced through contemporary performance. The artform is notoriously difficult to 'capture' phenomenologically, since descriptions of an event, whether image-based or linguistic, cannot relate absolutely everything. Consequently, the established line on the live event is that it is particular to the specific time and space in which it occurred, and can never be fully represented elsewhere. While this may be the case if precise reconstitution is the aim, there are other modes of filtration and dispersal through which a live event persists, not whole and intact, but as a haunting, perhaps in the form of influence, quotation or stylistic flavouring.

Some pieces presented in the symposium ' Performance Year Zero' might be direct reconstructions or reiterations of older works by other artists, but elsewhere the processes of citation, absorption and reaction lie deeper, and these two polar positions - the overt and immanent influence of history - effectively describe a sliding scale along which works can be situated. At one extreme, in 1992 Takashi Murakami remade a number of performances by Japanese avant-garde groups such as Gutai and Hi Red Center. While Gutai originally contracted the body as an expressive tool for image making, Murakami's reconstructions considered their performances not as formal propositions, but actions defined by Japanese post-war identity. In re-presenting them now, however, they accrue a further layer of contextual significance, particularly in the light of Murakami's subsequent career in which brands and motifs are central. Rabih Mroué and Lina Sameh, meanwhile, interrogate the model of history as a series of hotspots of types of imagery or styles in Who's Afraid of Representation. Iconic Western performance images interspersed with imagery of the social and political situation in Lebanon make legible formal parities between the images of avant-garde performance and radical activism, while operational functionalities underpinning the performance image, such as intimacy, precariousness, obstruction and revelation, also become apparent.

Other artists put historical works through a subjective mangle to varying degrees. Keren Cytter reinterprets Dan Graham's Performer/Audience/ Mirror - in which Graham watched his audience in a mirror and described them to a point of discomfort - bending it across the bar of gender identity, with the surprising subsidiary product of humour. In Moments, dancer and choreographer Boris Charmatz takes as prompts performances by ten female artists, loosely spanning the 1970s, from Simone Forti's Face Tunes 1967 to Adrian Piper's Funk Lessons 1983. The outcome, a history of performance in ten acts presented to a small invited audience and later made into a publicly screened film, could be thought of as paradigmatic of live genres: it is subjectively authored and yet laterally inclusive of a historically relegated demographic.

Although not flagged as one of the main curatorial themes, dance emerges as a prevalent subject and form. A second performance by Charmatz, Flip Book, is devised from photographs published in a book on Merce Cunningham's 50 years of output, while Yvonne Rainer presents a number of works, including Trio A, a mass dance piece that can only be officially performed if learned directly from Rainer or someone she has personally taught, adhering to the oral traditions of folk. The first Focus Project in the South Tank by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker is a reworking of Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich, performed by De Keersmaeker and another female dancer, the sparseserialist music giving momentum to a series of repeating movements that, through their precision, simultaneity and duration, generate an uncanny, almost motorised effect.

Performance of Tania Bruguera's Tatlin's Whisper #5 in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern 2008
© Tania Bruguera
Photograph Tate Photography

Controlled discipline and spontaneous mayhem mark the diametric extremes of another polarisation that is particularly pronounced in live performance work. The exact nature of the live event is unknowable until it is already unfolding, and so while an artist such as De Keersmaeker may exercise control through concise choreography and rigorous rehearsal, other artists, such as Bruguera, invite the unknowable into the work by siting the piece within a social space where conditions and attitudes are less predictable and controllable. This presents another obstacle to the museum's task of representing performance, as such risky outcomes are often off-putting and their historical contexts and narratives confusingly esoteric or simply lost. Consequently, performance art histories are not as monolithic as, say, painting's; the roots are more entangled and their consolidation into a singular discipline more equivocal. Besides dance and activism, provenance has been variously cited as including action painting, popular theatrical forms such as Commedia dell'Arte, music hall and the contemporary burlesque scene, anti-art movements such as Dada, Fluxus and autodestructive art, as well as popular forms of music and cinema. The third thematic for the Tanks examines expanded cinema - by way of a symposium and Lis Rhodes's Light Music 1975 installation - with the aim of demonstrating spatial and luminous performativity, and attributing projection with an activating impulse of more than retinal impact.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker
Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich 1982
Performance still
Photo: Herman Sorgeloos
Courtesy Rosas, Brussels

But perhaps the most potent aspect of performance is the live physical encounter and empathy born out of the universal experience of inhabiting a body. The daily disjunction of the private self in public space can be faithfully described or dramatically amplified in the critical relationship between audience and performer, participant and situation. There are those who extrude this from the particularities of their own bodies, as Peake does, and others who, like Haegue Yang, use everyday objects to invoke the every person. Yang's Dress Vehicles 2011 takes a theatrical cue from Oskar Schlemmer's triadic ballet, her anthropomorphised Venetian blinds attached to elaborate metal armatures on casters bearing handles that invite interaction and movement. When activated, the Dress Vehicles have a comically limited range of physical motion, while mental associations ripple outwards through the furniture and architecture of commercial and domestic realms, evoking the bizarre atmospherics produced by the banal and prized objects we keep about us in day-to-day life. And it is this retooling of relations, between individuals, bodies, objects and social contexts, which is pivotal to the Tanks programme, as it stretches the ritual cultural form of viewing art in a museum into uncommon configurations to incorporate art that just will not stay still.

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actions speak louder: the programme in the tate tanks

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Actions speak louder: The programme in the Tate Tanks - Tate Etc | Tate

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It has been said, with a certain amount of ire, that performance, despite its myriad forms, is often treated simply as a novelty turn by commercial galleries, who hire it in to jolly up an opening, while excluding it from day-to-day business.

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American photographer Catherine Opie is best known for her documentation of American life. She rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with portraits capturing the West Coast leather community.

Here, the artist visits Tate Britain to discuss the influence of painting on her photography. In particular, European old master paintings have been a strong influence on her 2017 body of work, Portraits and Landscapes. Her sitters, which include fellow artists and friends David Hockney, Gillian Wearing, Duro Olowu, Thelma Golden and Isaac Julien, are theatrically lit against a black drop cloth.

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Catherine Opie: Photography, painting and portraiture - TateShots | Tate

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American photographer Catherine Opie is best known for her documentation of American life. She rose to prominence in the mid-1990s with portraits capturing the West Coast leather community. Here, the artist visits Tate Britain to discuss the influence of painting on her photography.

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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 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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Overwhelm your senses with Babel, Meireles' 2001 artwork, which explores information overload and failed communication

Cildo Meireles refers to Babel as a ' tower of incomprehension '. Comprising hundreds of radios, each tuned to a different station, the sculpture relates to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to reach the heavens. God was offended by this structure, and caused the builders to speak in different languages. No longer able to understand one another, they became divided and scattered across the earth, and so began all mankind's conflicts.

Babel consists of analogue radios of varying ages, from large valve radios dating from the 1920s, which make up the bottom tiers of the tower, to the smaller mass-produced electronic radios of more recent years, which form its summit. By using radios of decreasing size from the floor to the ceiling, Meireles enhances the sense of the tower's height.

'The quantity and diversity of radios and all the different types of sound objects' that he saw in the bargain shops of New York's Canal Street inspired the Brazilian artist's choice of material.

Meireles has commented. Likewise, the noise produced by Babel is constant, but the precise mix of broadcast voices and music is always changing, so that no two experiences of this work are ever the same.

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Cildo Meireles - Display at Tate Modern | Tate

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Overwhelm your senses with Babel, Meireles' 2001 artwork, which explores information overload and failed communication Cildo Meireles refers to Babel as a ' tower of incomprehension '. Comprising hundreds of radios, each tuned to a different station, the sculpture relates to the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, a tower tall enough to reach the heavens.

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Check out these publications from Whitechapel Art Gallery

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Shop Whitechapel Gallery Books - Documents of Contemporary Art

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Buy Documents of Contemporary Art, the Whitechapel Gallery's acclaimed series of critical readers dedicated to key themes in contemporary art.

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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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The artist best-known for her parodic portraits of celebrities talks about taking a year of from painting, exploring social media and satirising identity politics

by HATTY NESTOR

Dawn Mellor (b1970, Manchester, UK) is predominantly a painter. Her work - which mainly takes the form of portraiture - often deals with sexuality and violence: her parodic paintings of celebrities and iconic figures demonstrate the intricacies of fame, identity and politics. Of note is her Dorothy Cycle (2007-2008), a series of paintings depicting Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz. In this series, Mellor constructs a confrontational reality in which Dorothy is reimagined as a lesbian terrorist and activist, in cycles in which she switches between victim and perpetrator or both in parallel. She seems absent and lost - much like in the story itself - yet often in the presence of other figures and characters, blurring the boundaries of the fictional story.

Mellor's most recent show, , at New York's Team Gallery in 2017, was a new body of paintings, each depicting a British actress portraying a police officer. The title was a reference to the sound made by police cars, the vernacular term for a sexually provocative actress and the deadly seductresses of Greek mythology). Her newest project, a book of the same name (to be published by Montez Press later this year), takes the form of a collection of writings on the theme of identity and politically related concerns. Through theorising current trends on Instagram and social media, Mellor's writing asks us to consider our own subjective position within sociopolitical situations. She uses two different accounts to explore social media - Tippy Rampage and Dawn Mellor. What is particularly interesting about the book is its ability to use form and subject to weave different structural prose and identities. The writing lures us in with its uncanny meditation on the human form, and its dislocation from normative representations.

Mellor is consistently interested in what constitutes fractures in our lives, and she often depicts multiples voices and characters. I have been struck by the intricacies in her work - the uncharted territories of society she seeks to uncover through the faces of others. I talked to Mellor about the intricacies of her work, the interweaving of identities and language, her shift from painting to writing, and the relationship between these two forms. She explained how using two separate Instagram accounts would inform her new book. And we discussed her work as an art tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and LGBTQ politics.
Hatty Nestor: The text in your forthcoming book, Sirens, is lifted from different Instagram performances, documented under two different accounts named Dawn Mellor and Tippy Rampage. How has this recent move towards using social media as a means to construct different identities informed your work?
Dawn Mellor: I was very suspicious of social media before I started using these accounts, due to these platforms contributing to the poor mental health of young people, particularly minority groups or self-identifying feminists. I began to see how the accounts could become a site of discovery during my own attempts at resistance to this echo chamber. Dawn Mellor was the echo-chamber character that emerged, who started as one person, then "transformed" to Tippy Rampage. Tippy became a collective of 69 people. It became apparent that social media was a platform that most of my students, artists and peers were using. Instagram became addictive as I began using it.

At the time, I had decided to take a year off painting - in a sense a painting strike. I did this to explore what it would be like not to paint, and, instead, inhabiting social media as a site for contradictory positions and personas. I would block and unfollow people with or without reason. The identity I created for both accounts was sometimes toxic and unpleasant, which was both exhilarating and stressful, and I understood it could be distressing and hurtful for others as both characters were extremely irritating. The posts can be perceived as satirical, critical and contradictory by those that carried on engaging. I was aware they might impact on real-life relationships, whether professional or social. The publication Sirens presents a collection of edited texts culled from that online writing from both accounts.
HN: Your painting is consistently created from the perspective of various alter egos, sadists, celebrity stalkers. Can you describe these alter egos in more detail? Do they switch gender or sexuality? And, if so, is this important to your work?
DM: There are parallels between the former identities in my painting and those online. The characters are often developed during the painting process, where the application of paint allows for shifting positions to present themselves simultaneously. For example, at the 2001 show Madame X and the Party Tricks, at Victoria Miro gallery , I participated in an interview as Madame X, and the character wasn't named until writing the press release. Which relates back to growing up on a predominantly white council estate, full of homophobia, racism, sexism and working-class resentment. As a teenager, I enjoyed drawing famous people and was totally seduced by the glamour of old 40s, 50s and 60s Hollywood movies, American comedy and African-American icons, particularly Michael Jackson.

In the 90s, I focused on some of the cliched stereotypes of class, gender and sexuality. I was influenced by the 1976 TV film Sybil, which is based on a true story, in which Sally Field plays a severely traumatised woman splitting into multiple personalities of various ages and genders, in endless conversation with her older female therapist. I found the relationship between the therapist and Sybil's characters sexy - a form of lesbian role play which is funny and depressing - which reflected the lack of attention given to women in mass media. It is impossible for me to paint mainstream famous women without considering historical representations in terms of class, gender, race or sexuality. Some of the gender switching that occurs in the exhibition Sirens seeks to disrupt assumptions about what the paintings are doing. It also explores how mass-media figures are depicted, and the way they are received, which ranges from ambivalence, resentment, hostility and adoration to stalking fans.
HN: Does your work, through narrative, the rupturing of identity and mass-media image, seek to create an anti-authoritative commentary on the police, government and capitalist structures of control?
DM: I prefer not to make concrete statements about all my intentions, because intentions often transform through the construction of the work and don't always match up to the end result. I want to make discoveries and think through working, guiding viewers towards specific issues. This is the same for painting and writing processes. I think it is possible to read the work the way you suggest, as it certainly engages with these themes in part. Television was one of the few areas where I could access information when I was growing up, which was before the internet, and I believe made me vulnerable to manipulation as a child. I was seduced in my early years by excessive consumption of mainstream stars from various cultural fields due to a lack of access to other voices. I am interested in asking questions about which authorities are being challenged or ridiculed. It could just as much be a commentary on the tendency of people to self-police in discursive environments, or what roles actresses from working-class backgrounds might get offered on television. Your question is also one I think the work asks.
HN: We are often told to perform in a way that isn't necessarily true to ourselves. Is this something you have undertaken in the book?
DM: Yes. For example, as a tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London, I don't always have the knowledge that is expected or desired. If the book comes from anything, it is the brilliance of some of my students and peers. As a tutor, I am often in a situation where there are a handful of students performing a certain type of politicised self. Some of the shifts in prose in the book come from those experiences, as well as both sarcastically performed and sincere accounts of how I invent and perform while making my own work. I am trying to make sure there are texts that are quite poetic, others that are quite stupid and at times angry rants, and others are wormholey. Then there are some that are instructional. Not all of them are made with tongue-in-cheek cynicism; there is also a self-awareness on my part of my own hypocrisies and contradictions.
HN: I'm interested in how you satirise contemporary fixations with identity politics in your work. Theorists such as bell hooks attribute this term to something important when understanding difference.
DM: I'm not hostile to the existence of so called "safe spaces", where people share particular concerns. Despite whatever appears as a provocation in the text, my own position is not one of simplistic hostility towards how other people choose to self-identify in conditions where we are all performing identities, or have them applied to us. I have consumed an excessive amount of lectures on identity politics during the process of this book, and I find myself being persuaded by various points in different arguments. I do watch those things and consume them, but I find if I do so a lot, I am reminded of being a child pre-university and hearing relatives, teachers and friends constantly discussing their identities, which led me to look for voices outside this demographic to form my own identity - black American celebrities and comedians, pop stars and civil rights activists and feminists. For me, it also came out of experiences of teaching, pre- and post-Brexit and later Trump, where there were resentful comments from, or on behalf of, LGBTQ artists presenting work in criticism and a reactionary resentment from others that they expressed it.

In 2018, we have a generation of young people who are fully aware they will leave college facing debt. Only a handful of them will become artists after graduating, and it is not surprising that activism and resentments due to economics, class background, racism, gender and so on, are emerging. In a world where the police, the state and the law courts fail the public due to class, nationality, gender and race, it is understandable that some kangaroo courts call out culture and moral judgments emerge from activists, groups and individuals. However, I am not interested in fighting for a world that does not engage with work that is made by a person who doesn't have an easily digestible identity or class background, which prioritises judgments of their personal character over the work itself.

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Dawn Mellor: 'It is not surprising that activism and resentments due to economics, class, racism and gender are emerging'

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by HATTY NESTOR Dawn Mellor (b1970, Manchester, UK) is predominantly a painter. Her work - which mainly takes the form of portraiture - often deals with sexuality and violence: her parodic paintings of celebrities and iconic figures demonstrate the intricacies of fame, identity and politics.

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Born
1926, Winterthur, Switzerland
Deceased
1993, Brunnen, Switzerland
Education
1942 - 1946
School for Applied Arts, Zurich, teachers Johannes Itten and Max Bill,
specialised class Fashion Design, Zurich, Switzerland
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2020
Mendes Wood, São Paulo, Brazil (forthcoming)

2019
Sublime Geometry, Alma Zevi, Venice, Italy
Die Wässer und Libellenlust, The Approach, London, United Kingdom
The Site of Memory, Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY, USA

2018

Heidi Bucher, Parasol Unit, London, UK

2017

Floors: Heidi Bucher and Gordon-Matta Clark, Alma Zevi, Venice, Italy

2014

Swiss Institute of Contemporary Art, New York, USA
Alexander Gray Associates, New York, USA
Art Basel Feature with Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Art Basel, Switzerland
Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

2013

Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris, Paris, France
Rooms are skins, are surroundings, The Approach, London, UK
Art Basel Feature, Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Art Basel, Switzerland
Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland
Collection on Display: Monica Bonvicini, Heidi Bucher, Tom Burr, Urs Fischer, Pamela Rosenkranz, Markus Schinwald, Cathy Wilkes, Migros Museum für gegen wartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland

2007

Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, Germany

2004

Heidi Bucher - Mother of Pearl, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland

1995

Kunsthaus / Barlach Halle K, Hamburg, Germany

1993

1981

Räume sind Hüllen sind Häute, Galerie Maeght, Zurich, Switzerland

1979

1977

Einbalsamierungen, Borg, Galerie Maeght, Zurich, Switzerland

1973

Bodywrappings, Esther Bear Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

1972

Bodyshells, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, USA

1971

Soft Sculptures to wear, Museum of Contemporary Crafts*, New York, USA
Rothmans Art Gallery of Stratford/Toronto*, Canada
Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montréal*, Canada
*With happenings by Carl Bucher

1958

Silkcollage, World House Galleries, New York, USA

1956

Collagen, Galerie Suzanne Feigel, Basel, Switzerland
Selected Group Exhibitions
2019

Sublimi Anatomie, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy

2018

The House of Fame, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK
Positionen, Haus für Kunst Uri, Altdorf, Switzerland
Don Quixote, Barbara Weiss, Berlin, Germany

2017-18

The Everywhere Studio, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, USA
WOMENHOUSE, la Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, USA

2017

20 Years Show, The Approach, London
Viva Arte Viva, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
The problem with having a body / is that it always needs to be somewhere, The Approach, London No Place Like Home, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Room, Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK; Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick, UK

2016

Grand Gestures, Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Basel, Switzerland
Hommage à Heidi Bucher und Carl Bucher, Kulturort Galerie Weiertal, Winterthur, Switzerland
Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 - 2016, Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles, USA
Honolulu Triennale, Honolulu Art Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
Frauenpower, Art Dock, Zurich, Switzerland

2015

Artists and Architecture, Variable Dimensions, Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris, France
wow! Woven? Entering the (sub)Textiles, KM- Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria
Heidi Bucher & Virginia Overton, Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

2014-15

2014

Artevida: corpo [body], Fundação Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
I Know Not To Know, Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria
Andrew Roth, New York, USA

2013

Repertory, One Torino, Palazzo Cavour, Torino, Italy
SLIP, The Approach, London, UK
M Sélection. La collection du Musée Migros d'art contemporain, Musée Rath, Geneva, Switzerland
Collection on Display: Heidi Bucher, Thea Djordjadze, Berta Fischer, Loredana Sperini, Katja Strunz, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland
Collection on Display: Monica Bonvicini, Heidi Bucher, Tom Burr, Urs Fischer, Pamela Rosenkranz, Markus Schinwald, Cathy Wilkes, Migros Museum für gegen wartskunst, Zurich, CH

2012

My Body is a Cage, Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

2011

Chairs, Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, Germany

2010

At Home, Galerie Giti Nourbakhsch, Berlin, Germany

2008

Disguised, Rotwand Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
Der schone Schein, Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland
abc Art Berlin Contemporary, Galerie Giti Nourbaksch, Berlin, Germany

2007

Sculpture Park, Bad Ragaz, Switzerland

2004

It's All an Illusion - A Sculpture Project, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland

1993

1992

Force Sight, Internationale Kunst der Gegenwart, Schloss Preseneck, Neuenstadt, Germany

1990

Passagen Skulptur, Bad Ragaz, Switzerland
Musée de la Peau, Bex et Arts, Fondation Szilassy, Switzerland

1989

Solitude-Echos, Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, Germany

1988

Woher-Wohin, Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland

1986

Aufgemöbeltes / Mobili, Kunstraum Palazzo, Liestal, Switzerland
Portal, Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany
Fabriksaalboden, Kammgarn, Schaffhausen, Switzerland

1985

Objekt Kunst ‑ in ausgewählten Beispielen von Dada bis heute, Kunsthaus Zug, Switzerland
Schloss Schlösser Luftschlösser / Herrenzimmer im Baum, Schloss Lenzburg, Switzerland
Muschelobjekte, Museum Bellerive, Zurich, Switzerland

1983

1981

Hautraum Ahnenhaus, Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland

1980

1979

1978

Aktualität - Vergangenheit, 3. Biennale der Schweizer Kunst, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
Berg - Bergen - Geborgenheit, Kunstmuseum Zug, Switzerland
Galerie Haus 11, Karlsruhe, Germany

1977

Kunstmuseum Winterthur

1975

Frauen sehen Frauen, Kunstkammer zum Strauhof, Zurich, Switzerland
Terre des Hommes, Montréal, Canada

1963

Galerie im Weissen Haus, Winterthur, Switzerland
Selected Bibliography
2013

Heidi Bucher, Centre Culturel Suisse de Paris, Paris, France

2008

Sammlung / Collection. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Zurich, 1978-2008, ed. Heike Munder, Zurich & JRP/Ringier

2007

Kunsthaus Zurich, Gesamtkatalog der Gemälde und Skulpturen, Zurich,
Kunstgesellschaft, Hatje Cantz Verlag

2006

Affentranger-Kirchrath, Angelika, Skulptur auf Expansionskurs, Neue Züricher Zeitung

2005

Lunn, Felicity, Heidi Bucher, Artforum International, March

2004

Heidi Bucher, ed. Heike Munder, texts by Heike Munder, Philip Ursprung, Mayo and Indigo Bucher, ed. Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich & JRP/Ringier
Bucher, Mayo, Heidi Bucher, Cinematic Biography, Art Adventures, Zurich, Switzerland (DVD)
Bänziger, Kathrin, Kunst im öffentlichen Raum in Winterthur, Stiftung Edition Winterthur, Switzerland
Affentranger-Kirchrath, Angelika, Der Libelle abgeschaut, Neue Züricher Zeitung

1993

Mise en scène. Bex & Arts, text by Nicolas Raboud, photography by Magali Koenig
Heidi Bucher, published by Markus Landert, Kunstmuseum des Kantons
Thurgau, Kartause Ittingen, Switzerland

1989

Unikat und Edition, Künstlerbücher in der Schweiz, Helmhaus Zurich, concept: Marie-Louise Lienhard and Stephan Kunz, text by Marie-Louise Lienhard
Künstlergruppe Winterthur 1989, texts by Rudolf Koella and Adrian Mebold, Winterthur, Switzerland

1985

Moderne Kunst - unsere Gegenwart. Ein Brückenschlag zur Schweizer Kunst seit 1939, Fritz Billeter, Peter Killer, Willy Rotzler, Pfäffikon

1983

Hauträume, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

1977

Heidi Bucher, ed. Galerie Maeght, Zurich, Switzerland

1972

Landings. Carl & Heidi Bucher, County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA

1971

Carl & Heidi Bucher, Musée d'Art Contemporain Montréal, Canada
Public Collections
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA
Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France and San Francisco, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, Switzerland
Musée Jenisch Vevey, Switzerland
Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland

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Born 1926, Winterthur, Switzerland Deceased 1993, Brunnen, Switzerland Education 1942 - 1946 School for Applied Arts, Zurich, teachers Johannes Itten and Max Bill, specialised class Fashion Design, Zurich, Switzerland Selected Solo Exhibitions 2020 Mendes Wood, São Paulo, Brazil (forthcoming) 2019 Sublime Geometry, Alma Zevi, Venice, Italy Die Wässer und Libellenlust,

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Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender, collections, and publishing through a practice spanning forms as varied as drawing, sculpture, performance, and moving image. Her early work took the form of 'wordscapes' or 'still films' - blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films, (whose subjects range from war to porn) or sequences of events. These pieces evolved into solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. Banner later turned her attention to the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films. Often using parts of military aircraft as the support for these descriptions, Banner juxtaposes the brutal and the sensual, performing an almost complete cycle of intimacy and alienation. With an interest in how historical events become fictionalised over time and how conflict is mythologised through popular culture, the constant power struggle between words and their meaning is central to Banner's conceptual approach that examines conflict, language, and its limitations. Whilst her current work encompasses performance, sculpture, drawing and installation, text is still at the heart of Banner's practice. In 1997 she started her own publishing imprint The Vanity Press, which has been the backbone of her work ever since. Banner toys with the snobbery inherent in the title by publishing posters, books, objects and performances that deploy a playful attitude and utilise pseudo grandeur.

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Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press - Artists - Frith Street Gallery

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Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press explores gender, collections, and publishing through a practice spanning forms as varied as drawing, sculpture, performance, and moving image. Her early work took the form of 'wordscapes' or 'still films' - blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films, (whose subjects range from war to porn) or sequences of events.

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An Entertainment is a video and sound installation composed of four synchronised recordings of scenes from traditional English 'Punch and Judy' puppet shows. These are projected onto four enclosed gallery walls and are accompanied by a four-channel soundtrack of the performances. The work was commissioned by Matt's Gallery, London, in 1990. The full projection runs for just under twenty-six minutes.

The puppet show performances were filmed by Hiller in Super 8mm film, which, when enlarged for projection, appears grainy. This 'low tech' effect is intentional and mirrors the basic sets and simplified designs of the puppet theatres featured in the recording. After filming, Hiller reworked the footage extensively, intensifying the colours and magnifying cropped portions of the miniature theatre. The expanded size of the projected footage exaggerates the characters' clichéd bickering and simultaneously exposes the violence of the theatrical pairing of husband and wife. In contrast to the quick action of the original puppet performances, in Hiller's reworking Punch and Judy often move towards each other in slow motion, an effect that transforms the comic scene into a menacing one. The protracted length of the film amplifies the ensuing violence unexpectedly, turning the familiar scene of the seaside puppet theatre into a macabre exposition of domestic abuse, masquerading as children's entertainment. The vivid colour and amplified sound also work to disorientate the viewer. The soundtrack captures both the aggressive dialogue of the performers and the amused responses of the audience. As the violence becomes more exaggerated, the laughter seems more disconnected and inappropriate.

Hiller has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s, but was born and grew up in the United States. Her manipulation of the Punch and Judy imagery reflects her own unfamiliarity with this culturally iconic motif. Art critic Alexandra Kokoli argues that An Entertainment is not a 'polemical critique of the popular spectacle but, strangely, an almost sympathetic and certainly respectful exploration of its potential for collective contemplation and lucid reverie' (Gallagher 2011, p.147). In this way, An Entertainment reflects Hiller's longstanding interest in the power of popular and often banal imagery to invoke collective memories, evident in the use of television in works such as Belshazzar's Feast, The Writing on Your Wall 1983-4 (Tate ).

Further reading
Ann Gallagher (ed.), Susan Hiller, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2011, pp.21-2, 82-3, 147.

Fiona Anderson
September 2013
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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'An Entertainment', Susan Hiller, 1990 | Tate

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An Entertainment is a video and sound installation composed of four synchronised recordings of scenes from traditional English 'Punch and Judy' puppet shows. These are projected onto four enclosed gallery walls and are accompanied by a four-channel soundtrack of the performances. The work was commissioned by Matt's Gallery, London, in 1990.

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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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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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Fred Sandback | Artists | Lisson Gallery

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Founded in 1967, Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential contemporary art galleries in the world, showing over 50 innovative and international artists

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Mary Corse has built a practice that occupies an independent space at the intersection of minimalist painting, Abstract Expressionism and scientific inquiry. First gaining recognition in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the Light and Space movement that originated in Southern California, Corse is widely recognised for her innovative painting technique using materials which both capture and refract light. Corse's paintings obsessively engage with perception and embody rather than merely represent light, experimenting with the concept of subjective experience in new and innovative ways. Corse combines a philosophical quest for the portrayal of the infinite with a highly skilled methodical and scientific rigour.

Mary Corse was born in Berkeley, California in 1945 and lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned her BFA from Chouinard Art Institute (later renamed the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts) in 1968. Recent solo presentations include A Survey in Light at the Whitney Museum of American Art (8 June - 25 November 2018), which travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (28 July - 10 November, 2019); and a three year installation at Dia:Beacon in New York, which opened in May 2018. Corse's work is in a number of public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, USA; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA, USA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, USA; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, USA; and the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, among many others. She is a past recipient of the Guggenheim's Theodoron Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Cartier Foundation Award.

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Mary Corse has built a practice that occupies an independent space at the intersection of minimalist painting, Abstract Expressionism and scientific inquiry. First gaining recognition in the mid-1960s as one of the few women associated with the Light and Space movement that originated i...

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Official website: http://www.rebecca-horn.de

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn has been creating an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings and photographs. The essence of their imagery comes out of the tremendous precision of the physical and technical functionality she uses to stage her works each time within a particular space.

In the first performances, the body-extensions, she explores the equilibrium between body and space. In later works she replaces the human body with kinetic sculptures which take on their own life. Her new works define and cut through spaces with reflections of mirrors, light and music.

The unicorn was a medieval symbol for purity, chastity and innocence. This work was designed for a performance by a friend of the artist. Horn wrote: 'the performance took place in early morning - still damp, intensely bright - the sun more challenging than any audience... her consciousness electrically impassioned; nothing could stop her trance-like journey: in competition with every tree and cloud in sight...and the blossoming wheat caressing her hips'. This account emphasises both graceful movement and the element of self-exposure that is often found in Horn's work.

White Body Fan 1972 Mechanical Body Fan, 1973‑4
Horn's machine evokes medical apparatus, though its function remains unclear. Horn says of this piece, 'the performer is tied up on top of a glass container (more an aquarium), tubes surrounding his body. Blood pumps, slowly, circulated through the glass container through the plastic tubes; enclosing his body like a pulsing garment of veins [it] forces the evolution of the motionless person into being an extension of the mechanism itself'.
Overflowing Blood Machine, 1970 Overflowing Blood Machine, 1970 Arm Extensions 1968
Her work is bound together by a consistency in logic; each new work appears to develop stringently from the preceding one. Elements may be readdressed, yet appear in totally different, divergent contexts.
Finger Gloves, 1972
Ideas of touch and sensory awareness are explored in this work. Horn has described how wearing these gloves altered her relationship with her surroundings, so that distant objects came within her reach: 'the finger gloves are light. I can move them without any effort. Feel, touch, grasp anything, but keeping a certain distance from the objects. The lever-action of the lengthened fingers intensifies the various sense-data of the hand; ...I feel me touching, I see me grasping, I control the distance between me and the objects.' Implicit in the work is the idea that touching makes possible an intimacy between our own body and those of others.
Finger Gloves, 1972 Pencil Mask, 1972
Strapped around the face, this mask transforms the wearer's head into an instrument for drawing. Horn has described wearing it: 'All pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions...I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of a white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.' The spike-like pencils make this one of Horn's more threatening works. However, it is linked to the feather masks, as feather quills were also once used for writing.
Pencil Mask, 1972
Horn has described how this mask alters her interaction with others: 'With the feathers I caress the face of a person standing close to me. The intimate space between us is filled with tactile tension. My sight is obstructed by the feathers. I can only see the face of the other when I turn my head looking with one eye like a bird.' Through her mimicry of bird movements, Horn suggests the use of plumage as a device for communication and sexual display.
Cockfeather Mask, 1973 Cockatoo Mask 1973
Horn described using this mask in a performance exploring ideas of sexual availability and intimacy: 'My face is covered by two intertwined, closed feather wings. The person standing before me touches the feathers delicately, then separates and opens the wings. The spread wings stretch like long bird wings, and softly enclose around [both] our heads. The feather-enclosure isolates our heads from the surrounding environment, and forces us to remain intimately alone, together.' The use of the mask is deliberately ambiguous and the performance implies a tension between tenderness and aggression.
Keeping Those Legs from Touching Each Other, 1974‑5 The Feathered Prison Fan, 1978
Following the physical experience of her performances with body extensions, masks and feather objects of the 1970s came the first kinetic sculptures featured in her films such as The Feathered Prison Fan in Der Eintänzer (1978), or The Peacock Machine in La Ferdinanda (1981).

The objects used and specially made for her installations such as violins, suitcases, batons, ladders, pianos, feather fans, metronomes, small metal hammers, black water basins, spiral drawing machines and huge funnels together build the elements for kinetic sculptures that are liberated from their defined materiality and continuously transposed into ever-changing metaphors touching on mythical, historical, literary and spiritual imagery.

In the 1980s and 1990s huge installations were created out of and dedicated to places charged with political and historical importance. With her kinetic sculptures, the artist releases and rediverts the weight of the past on these physical spaces: as for example in Concert in Reverse (1997) in Münster, where an old municipal tower turns out to be an execution site for the Third Reich: or in Vienna, with the Tower of the Nameless (1994), where she sets a monument to the refugees from Balkan states in the form of a tower with mechanically playing violins. In Weimar, Europe's city of culture 1999, the Concert for Buchenwald was composed on the premises of a former tram depot. The artist has layered 40 metre long walls of ashes behind glass, as archives of petrifaction. In Mirror of the Night (1998), at a derelict synagogue in Cologne, she uses the energy of writing, textured to counter historical amnesia.
Concert for Anarchy, 1990
A grand piano is suspended upside down from the ceiling by heavy wires attached to its legs. It hangs solidly yet precariously in mid-air, out of reach of a performer, high above the gallery floor.

A mechanism within the piano is timed to go off every two to three minutes, thrusting the keys out of the keyboard in a cacophonous shudder. The keys, ordinarily the point of tactile contact with the instrument, fan disarmingly out into space. At the same time, the piano's lid falls open to reveal the instrument's harp-like interior, the strings reverberating at random. This unexpected, violent act is followed between one and two minutes later by a retraction as the lid closes and the keys slide back into place, tunelessly creaking as they go. Over time, the piano repeats the cycle. A mounting tension to the moment of release is followed by a slow retreat to stasis as the piano closes itself up like a snail withdrawing into its shell.

Concert for Anarchy is one of a series of mechanised sculptures Horn began making in the late 1970s. Dancing tables, a suitcase trying in vain to climb a pole, startled hammers pecking against their reflections: machines that mimic the mechanisms of desire, they betray the longings beneath the surface of everyday things. Often erotically charged, these works express anthropomorphic anxiety and sensuality.

To work with energy in this way can also mean to set the turbulence of passion as a magnetic flow into the space as we see in High Moon (1991) in New York or in El Rio de la Luna (1992) in Barcelona.
Lenny Silver's Dream, 1990 Dreaming Stones, 2006

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Rebecca Horn: Body Art, Performance & Installations

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Official website: http://www.rebecca-horn.de Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn has been creating an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings and photographs. The essence of their imagery comes out of the tremendous precision of the physical and technical functionality she uses to stage her works each time within a particular space.

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Terms of Reference Journals - Shades Of Noir

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Tate Britain is currently closed

For more information please go to our FAQs and if you have any further queries please contact hello@tate.org.uk. We look forward to welcoming you back when we reopen.

The first major survey of one of the most important painters working today

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people. This exhibition brings together around 80 works from 2003 to the present day in the most extensive survey of the artist's career to date.

The figures in Yiadom-Boakye's paintings are not real people - she creates them from found images and her own imagination. Both familiar and mysterious, they invite viewers to project their own interpretations, and raise important questions of identity and representation.

Often painted in spontaneous and instinctive bursts, her figures seem to exist outside of a specific time or place. Her paintings are coupled with poetic titles, such as Tie the Temptress to the Trojan 2016 and To Improvise a Mountain 2018. Writing is central to Yiadom-Boakye's artistic practice, as she has explained: 'I write about the things I can't paint and paint the things I can't write about.'

Yiadom-Boakye was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize in 2018 and was the 2012 recipient of the Pinchuk Foundation Future Generation Prize. She was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013.
Exhibition organised by Tate Britain in collaboration with Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, and Mudam Luxembourg - Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean

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lynette yiadom-boakye: fly in league with the night

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night - Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate

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Tate Britain is currently closed For more information please go to our FAQs and if you have any further queries please contact hello@tate.org.uk. We look forward to welcoming you back when we reopen. The first major survey of one of the most important painters working today Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British artist and writer acclaimed for her enigmatic portraits of fictitious people.

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Richard Wright is best known for his site-specific yet transient works that unite painting with graphic and typographic elements, charging architectural spaces with a fourth dimension of subtle yet extreme optical complexity and subverting the traditionally static dynamic between painting and viewer. His paintings and applied metal-leaf schemes connote memory and ephemerality-these works are short-lived, oftentimes lasting only as long as the exhibition. Alongside works on interior surfaces such as walls and ceilings, Wright's works on paper encompass a range of handmade prints, ink drawings, gilding, and watercolors. More recently, Wright has installed leaded glass into existing window or skylight apertures, allowing the work to meld with the fabric of the building. These interventions, utilizing various mediums, serve to shift the viewer's perception of the space. As Sofia Karamani commented in her text for the Turner Prize in 2009:

"Wright's profound understanding of art and its history is reflected in his diverse imagery; minimalist patterns and baroque ornamentations to gothic iconography and typography. His wall paintings can occupy whole rooms, appearing convoluted and extensive, to create a sublime impact. Others, subtle and delicate, are awkwardly placed, claiming a modest existence on a ceiling, a cornice, the edge of a wall. As Wright invents alternative spatial arrangements, solid structures can look broken up, reconfigured, or seem transparent and fluid."

Wright was born in 1960 in London. The first solo exhibition of his work took place in 1994 at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. His work has been shown in major exhibitions worldwide since, including Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2001); Tate Liverpool, England (2001); Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland (2004); GAMeC, Bergamo, Italy (2005); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); Theseus Temple, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (2013); and Walk through British Art, Tate Britain, London (2013). In addition to permanent private commissions, Wright's public institutional commissions include the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2007); Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England (2007); Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2010); The Millbank Project at Tate Britain, London (2011-13); and Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2013).

Wright was awarded the Turner Prize in 2009 and is considered one of the key artists in the generation that emerged out of Glasgow in the 1990s, together with Martin Boyce, Douglas Gordon, and Simon Starling.In 2016 Wright was commissioned to make a vast permanent gold leaf work for the 400th anniversary of theInigo Jones-designedQueen's House (now part of the Royal Museums Greenwich), which was the first fully Classically designed building in the UK. Wright's work cloaks the whole ceiling and upper walls of the Great Hall.

Current commissions include a large-scale gold leaf work for the Crossrail in London at the new Tottenham Court Road station, opening in 2020. In spring 2019 Wright will create painted works on the interior of the landmarked storefront Gagosian space Park & 75, in New York.

Wright lives and works in Norfolk, England and Glasgow, Scotland.

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Richard Wright is best known for his site-specific yet transient works that unite painting with graphic and typographic elements, charging architectural spaces with a fourth dimension of subtle yet extreme optical complexity and subverting the traditionally static dynamic between painting and viewer.

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, happenings made New York City the happening place to be.

The term was coined by Allan Kaprow, an artist and lecturer who had studied painting with one of the key exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the 1940s. Unlike the influential critic Clement Greenberg, Kaprow was less interested in the art object than in the way they were created: he was excited by the performative possibilities of painting.

Hans Namuth's 1951 photos and film of Jackson Pollock making his paintings illustrated a new direction for Kaprow, where the artist was within the work, while making the work. After Pollock's death, Kaprow wrote an essay on the legacy of Pollock: exploring what he thought Pollock had meant for painting, art and life. He suggested that the art to come was one that incorporated everyday life, and everyday objects.

In 1957 Kaprow went on a mushroom hunt with artists, composers and founder members of the Fluxus group George Brecht and John Cage. Struggling with some of the sound elements in his own works (which he called action collages), Kaprow asked Cage's advice. Cage invited him along to his composition class at the New School for Social Research in New York and, fascinated by what he heard about recording, editing and looping tape, Kaprow asked if he could attend regularly. Cage's weekly homework was to create a piece of work and in response Kaprow began to create full-scale events that he called 'happenings'.

In 1959 he presented 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Gallery in New York - the first opportunity for a wider audience to experience this sort of event. He chose the word happening to suggest 'something spontaneous, something that just happens to happen'.

Despite their name, happenings were actually tightly planned and participative. Like the Black Mountain untitled event of 1952, the environments, actions, sound, light and the timing were all integral parts of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Rather than being passive observers, the audience were participants - invitations to the event said 'you will become part of the happenings; you will simultaneously experience them'. Once people arrived at the second floor loft space of the Reuben Gallery they were given a programme of events, and instructions on how to behave, including when to take their seats or move between the three spaces, or when applause was appropriate (at the very end only). Lasting for ninety minutes, the eighteen simultaneous performances included painters painting on canvases, a procession of performers, readings from placards, the playing of musical instruments, and ended with two performers saying single-syllable words like 'but' and 'well' as four huge scrolls fell from a horizontal bar between them. The end of the event was signalled by a bell ringing twice.

In many ways these events brought out the ideas of chance encounters, and of giving significance to everyday events. As Cage's 4' 33'' offered a found sounsdcape, and potentially changed the listeners' relationships to the 'noise' they heard after the performance, these participatory events blurred the line between what was life and what was art, what was an everyday movement and what was a performance. Kaprow said, 'The line between art and life sould be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct as possible'. No doubt some were bemused by the goings on, and what to make of them, but regardless, happenings took off.

Fashionable people attended Kaprow's events, which help to popularised the term 'happening' as a way to describe something that was cutting edge or cool. Until it was cool no longer. By 1966, it was mainstream enough for The Supremes to use it as the title for a song. In the end, Kaprow himself dropped the term.

Kaprow may have made the term, and the idea of blurring the boundary of art and life, popular but he was the first to admit that he wasn't the only one or the first working in this way.

The happening had its roots in Hugo Ball's Dada Cabaret Voltaire, Surrealist performances and the Italian Futurists in the early years of the twentieth century. Creating art out of life was first proposed as the gesamstkunstwerk (total art work) by the composer Richard Wagner in the Art-Work of the Future in 1849-50.

In Tokyo, Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), a collective of visual artists, composers, photographers, musicians, designers, writers and others were experimenting with cross-discipline presentations. Working between 1951 and 1958, Jikken Kobo members mixed dance, poetry reading, music, painting displays and architecture. From 1952, they used the term happyōkai (literally a recital), for all their events, regardless of the traditional art forms the events included.

Therefore, from their radical beginnings as forums for creative expression, to their eventual co-option by the mainstream, happenings reveal much about the wide cultural developments experienced during the 20th century, as well as the changing nature of art practice itself.

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In the late 1950s and early 1960s, happenings made New York City the happening place to be. The term was coined by Allan Kaprow, an artist and lecturer who had studied painting with one of the key exponents of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann, in the 1940s.

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The first UK solo presentation of works by Betty Woodman, one of the most important contemporary artists working in ceramics today.

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When I initially raised the notion of the feminine in abstract painting 25 years ago, it was not to construct a new universal, thus replicating monologism, or an equivalent set of signs to balance the lexicon of the masculine. Rather, it was meant to constitute a method of intervention, a way to insert into the discourse of identity and gender that had become significantly literary rather than aesthetic. I had tried to point out certain exclusionary practices inherent in abstract painting, synonymous with Modernism, and how in this pluralistic and confusing time our culture gave way to certain "other" approaches to abstract painting that now seem prevalent despite the long history in which these approaches were already present in some form or another. I termed this the "feminine." That women seemed to be making the most interesting painting at that time (and continued to in the ensuing years) needed illumination as well as interrogation and further examination. Indeed, as I thought more about the nature and language used to uphold certain dominant beliefs in the practice of abstract painting, it became more apparent to me why women in general were always excluded from this discourse. Since the world is predominantly based on a patriarchal society, the values that are attached to anything are usually masculine. As I argued in this earlier essay, those "masculine" beliefs themselves were put into question particularly as abstract painting became stagnant and "dead"-as it became synonymous with the same ideals as those inherent in the exclusionary practices of Modernism.

This essay, entitled "Painting and Its Others, In the Realm of the Feminine," was published in 1991 in Arts Magazine, whose editor at the time was Barry Schwabsky. It was a product of a conversation I had with Barry about women and painting and how I thought (and still do) that women make distinctive contributions to abstract painting with little recognition. Artists such as Mary Heilmann, Valerie Jaudon, and Shirley Jaffe (Figure 1) had been painting for a long time, but it was only in the early 1990s that their works started to exemplify the concept of the feminine which was both a way to de-stabilize the universalist notion of "quality" and insert an alternative model based on rejected or supposedly inferior notions such as the decorative or the "de-skilled" in regards to hard edge abstraction or fragmentation.[1] These artists' works were not "feminist" in that their medium of choice could not be understood as having a political content, as in the works of someone such as Judith Bernstein or Judy Chicago, but my assertion was that abstraction was no less capable of addressing concerns of gender and that it was imperative to do so in order for abstraction as a genre to evolve out of the hegemony of modernist criteria. That modernism relied on those values such as singularity, the monolithic, clarity, the authoritative, and so on as a means to distinguish what was deemed as exceptional quality and to legitimate painting most often made by men only led to stasis in abstract painting. My aim was to challenge those assumptions and create a more fluid field of criteria by affirming what were once thought of as marginal approaches.

What is the relationship between art (in this case, painting), the feminine, and feminism? From my point of view, the feminine does not stand in opposition, nor is it "other." The purpose of illuminating such a discourse was to argue that difference is not otherness, but rather it is about constructing a network of signifiers, drives, and meanings that join together and divide in an enigmatic process, consequently invalidating the diametric structure of the masculine/feminine split. The rapid assertion in terms of who is attributing this experience within sexual identity is in fact simply an evasion of its most incisive qualities.
Evidently we are in the realm of the ideological, that is, the place of desire and its rationalization. The feminine has been the property of the masculine hierarchy until the present and has been defined by and denigrated by it as such. By reasserting the feminine as a thing itself, I was attempting to rescue it and propose another set of terms for the construction of a subjecthood and female subjectivity specifically. In order to approach this project one must do this from the principle of the feminine, rather than the masculine, which represents homogeneity, singularity, and equivalence. The point is to reconstruct a dynamic built on symbiotic asymmetry rather than the notions of competitive dialectic in which a set of contradictions vie for dominance. In this sense, Freud's account of the enigma of the narcissistic woman holds greater potential for feminism than the competing theory of rivalry, which inevitably constructs woman as the object of male desire.
To take this notion further, and the reason why Freud abandoned the theme of the powerful, self-sufficient woman, was because he could not solve the enigma of woman. In his lecture, "Femininity," he aims to eradicate the opposition between men and women "in favor of bisexuality, a bisexuality that presumably constitutes the whole enigma in what men call "the riddle of femininity" (Kofman 1985). However, the notion of bisexuality is a convenient way to side step the issue of defining woman and her powers. Freud again defines women from a male perspective by using himself and men in general as a model for his theory, and by claiming that males have more bisexual tendencies.
As Walter Benjamin pointed out, the difference between Fascism and Socialism is that the Fascists aestheticised politics and the Socialists politicized aesthetics. The question that has been repeatedly asked since the confusion that has arisen from the notion of the feminine is: are we now to speak of a feminine feminism or a feminist feminine? This is not a word play, but a play of concepts: one conceals and the other reveals, "between the idea of a political identity for feminism (what women require) and that of a feminine identity for women (what women are or should be)" (Rose 2011).
If we accept the view that culture and high art in particular is the site of the ideological, or the struggle of societies' standards and values, and that there is presently a crisis in our society, a fundamental re-examination of identity for example, then we must be conscious not only of what we say, but how we say it. As I have acknowledged before, the feminine and the masculine are not gender bound. There are masculine women and feminine men and these characteristics replicate themselves in the struggle to produce a feminist art, in which there are masculine and feminine models. The problem that arises in most cases of appropriation of these readymade models is that they are used in non-reflexive modes. In these instances equality becomes reduced to a question of replacing a male figure being (beaten by a cop) with a brutalized female figure. Both are represented using the same vocabulary and the message is seemingly the same: stop brutality. There is no implicit or explicit alternative view proposed by the means of the experience in most cases and the signifier is once again charged with the value of the imagery, which is already recognizable as universal or masculine in its approach. What needs to be emphasized is that if we as women want our experiences and our cultural conditions to be recognized specifically female, then we must claim a position, not as other, but independent of the masculine world and this is to be in favor of a concept of the feminine which would take as many forms as there are women.
Constructing a definition of a feminist identity is more visible in medias other than painting, as we have witnessed in Cindy Sherman's photographs or in the works of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger to name a few. But the question remains: what is the relationship of painting to women? Veteran feminist painters such as Judith Bernstein and Lee Lozano who painted male and female sexual organs to "own" and challenge the patriarchy were marginalized for many years. They are now being recognized and "discovered" by the market's insatiability. Of late, there are women painters who deal directly with feminist issues through figurative imageries of oppression, dominance, abuse, or by appropriating known paintings by men to de-masculinize these visual imageries. Sue Williams has painted penises in the style of Jackson Pollock or Cecily Brown unabashedly paints pornographic scenes of coitus in her otherwise "abstract" paintings. They certainly make their point in the same way that the six o'clock evening news does. But what would be served by the paintings of Williams or Brown? Are we to think that we will become more conscious of gender inequality if we are to witness this in the site of painting? Does this accord a new and more viable position for women painters? Or, as I suspect, does it only tickle the fancy of those male collectors who no longer have to be ashamed in private, but can now hang these paintings proudly in public and be exonerated of their own crimes. Either way, the winner is obviously the patriarchy.
The reason once again is that it does not establish any criteria of its own. Establishing criteria of its own for a tradition as historically determined as painting is not only extremely difficult, it is nearly impossible. Recently there has been much talk and publicity about women painters. Press releases for various exhibitions freely and non-critically use the term "feminist painters" in regard to women painters making abstract paintings. Take for example two recent shows by Carrie Moyer (Figure 2) and Amy Sillman (Figure 3), whose exhibitions ran concurrently in February and March of 2016 in Chelsea. I would argue that rather than naming them as feminist paintings, they are more feminine in ways that I have explicated thus far. The feminine allows for a wide range of approaches and one that does not necessarily conform to any set of given standards. The feminine is much like the real, which is virtual and unformed.

Moyer's works eschew a decorative sensibility that may be understood as feminine, but she undermines the decorative through her clear and critical use of the history and vocabulary of abstract painting as signs, juxtaposed with hard edge shapes creating an unstable field in which contradictory parts exist together to reconcile the apparently incompatible. Here, the intellect and the sensuous, male as the mind and female as the body exist not as two qualities in a hierarchical system, but as complements within a situation in which both are predicated on one another. Rather than hinge on exclusiveness, the work's open-ended quality seeks to expand the subject instead of narrowing it down to a masculine singularity.
Sillman on the other hand is working out of Philip Guston among others, who himself was conflicted about abstraction and figuration and the absolute "mastery" evidenced by his canonical peers of abstract expressionist painters such as deKooning, Rothko, and Pollock (Figure 4). In Guston's work, one is clearly confronted with his questioning of the dichotomy or the binary split of abstraction and figuration, and/or machismo and the feminine impulse. The use of underlying pink color against the grey forms signals his desire to bring two seemingly opposing sensibilities together, at once frivolous and solemn. What is interesting is that Sillman is considered a contemporary "feminist" painter who has synthesized the very struggle that artists such as Guston had with the opposition of abstraction and figuration. The blurring of the two was unacceptable in Guston's time based on the masculine notion of singularity and its constant vying of supremacy between the two poles, which in itself has become obsolete today.

We can also see the feminine quality in the works of the abstract expressionist painter Kimber Smith (figure 5), who was very close with Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Shirley Jaffe, and who evidently was not supported by Greenberg at the time, because his works were not aggressive enough. In other words, they did not exude masculine qualities associated with certainty, stability, and mastery. Today these works can be seen as an important harbinger of things to come in abstract painting. While Smith's paintings may not have direct stylistic influence, they signal an opening for challenging and de-stabilizing those qualities that modernism championed that we can see in the works of painters as diverse as Stanley Whitney, Charlene Von Heyl, Patricia Treib, Marina Adams, Richard Aldrich, Andrea Belag, and Amy Feldman, among many others.

The question of the feminine is a male myth. It is a justification for a fear of becoming victim, and is tied to an impulse to subjugate. The conventional concept of the feminine rationalized the conflicted impulses of a patriarchal structure by suppressing all that would inhibit the drive to dominate. These impulses and characteristics have been assigned to those who are dominated. Creating a logical premise for ruthlessness, the logic of the ideology of the other is not difference, but a binary opposition. Such a way of thinking, e.g., the binary, either/or, with or without, can never realize itself, but in the most tense and false forms of formal equality, because the principle of respect and the concept of equality does not become revised. Instead it is continually negated. Rather than acknowledge that the principle of dominance and subordination is no longer constructive, there is often an impulse to reconcile the opposing forms of domination that would tolerate difference as a form of unjudgeable quality. This produces only stasis.
We are living in an increasingly conservative and dangerous world. Facts are being manipulated for the sake of dominance of world order regardless of human cost. In such an environment, the opposition between masculine and feminine and the construction of women's selfhood becomes subsumed into the larger problem of organized oppression, but we must not distract ourselves of the urgency this puts on the ongoing necessity to establish a more credible relationship to the issue of female identity and how this can impact our society.
Let us not forget that trying to solve the riddle of the enigma of women is strictly a masculine pre-occupation. Women are not concerned with Truth for we know there is no such thing as Truth. Peel one layer or remove a veil and yet another exists, there is no way to eradicate the infinite layers that continue to appear. Such is Truth.

Notes

[1] These qualities are all at present fully accepted into the lexicon of abstraction with younger painters' utilization of these approaches now bordering on conventions.

Author Bio

Shirley Kaneda is an abstract painter who lives and works in NYC. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally since the late 1980s. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Pollock Krasner Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and the Elizabeth Foundation among others. She was Professor in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute until her retirement in 2017.

References

Kaneda, Shirley. 1991. " Painting and Its Others, In the Realm of the Feminine." Arts Magazine (Summer): 58-64.

Kofman, Sarah. 1985. The Enigma of Women, Women in Freud's Writings. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Rose, Jacqueline. 2011. "Femininity and Its Discontents." In The Jacqueline Rose Reader, 31 -47. Durham: Duke University Press.

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The Feminine in Abstract Painting Reconsidered | Shirley Kaneda - Women & Performance

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When I initially raised the notion of the feminine in abstract painting 25 years ago, it was not to construct a new universal, thus replicating monologism, or an equivalent set of signs to balance the lexicon of the masculine.

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Installation view from 1998 group exhibition Lovecraft.

Curated by Martin McGowan and Toby Webster. Featured artists: Lolly Batty, Carluccio/Valledor, Marc Chaimowicz, Martin Creed, Russel Crotty, Jeremy Deller, Vincent Fecteau, Tom Friedman, Matthew Higgs, Hope, Jim Isermann, George Ives, Gareth Jones, Udomsak Krisanamis, Hilary Lloyd, Jeff Luke, Corey McCorkle, Lily van der Stokker, Cathy Wilkes

'Pop art is about liking things' Andy Warhol

'For me, folk art is about loving things' Jeremy Deller

Crafts that were once part of everyday life have fallen into hobby shop dilution. Lovecraft favours folk over pop, cottage over industry, and people over media. Esoteric or conceptually demanding, the works in Lovecraft investigate contrasting approaches to the value of craft.

The work in Lovecraft is by a range of artists with different practices and in different media, but is typified by a highly insular, quasi-devotional relationship between object and artist. The profound and contemplative attention of the maker is reflected in each piece, which makes Lovecraft an antidote to the flip attitude that some associate with popular artistic culture.

Jeremy Deller has curated The Uses of Literacy, a collection of drawings and writings by fans of Manic Street Preachers. In identifying himself closely with the subjects of his collaborative work, Deller avoids the 'cheap thrills' and truisms of popular culture to reveal the passions which drive it.

Lovecraft will also include the atlases of California-based artist Russell Crotty, whose dense and intricate biro doodlings of planetary movements are both obsessed with and distanced from elemental natural cycles.

Whether seen through the sweet pea pinks of Lily van der Stokker's wall paintings or through Martin Creed's rigidly analytical approach to the viewed object, Lovecraft revitalises the notion of a labour of love.

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Curated by Martin McGowan and Toby Webster. Featured artists: Lolly Batty, Carluccio/Valledor, Marc Chaimowicz, Martin Creed, Russel Crotty, Jeremy Deller, Vincent Fecteau, Tom Friedman, Matthew Higgs, Hope, Jim Isermann, George Ives, Gareth Jones, Udomsak Krisanamis, Hilary Lloyd, Jeff Luke, Corey McCorkle, Lily van der Stokker, Cathy Wilkes 'Pop art is about liking things' Andy Warhol [...]

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Ahead of her exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Amy Sillman talks to Imelda Barnard about the comic impulse, landline phones, and her love/hate relationship with painting
You're taking over all three gallery spaces at Camden Arts Centre for your solo show. What will the exhibition consist of?
It's an exhibition of some recent and new works from 2016-18, including paintings, drawings and an animation. It's a huge challenge to take over the whole space. I've made a new piece for Gallery 3, a large space that forced me to experiment. I'm not usually an installation artist and so I had to figure out how to approach something with a particular architecture in mind. The gallery will feature 12 or more double-sided printed and drawn works which the viewer will walk around and which are hung from a wire like a clothes line - each side has its own kind of language.

Why did you choose 'Landline' as the title of the exhibition?
It came from thinking how much I prefer talking to people on my landline. It's an obsolete technology; young people often don't have landlines. It reminds me of painting. I feel like sometimes I'm working with this form that is nearly obsolete and which has this very clear, communicative purpose but which somehow we've surpassed and altered.

Are you working against painting?
I feel like I'm working with and against it equally. The piece I'm making for Gallery 3 is structurally ambivalent, it has two sides that are printed on the same sheet of paper, like two sides of a coin. I realised that I find new ways to understand my love/hate relationship with painting. I'm always working against what I feel to be a force or a form that I deeply love. But I understand that painting has got its own structural limitations that mean that it could end. There are aspects of the painting process that don't really make sense and I can see them as antique. But painters are always proclaiming how much painting goes on and that's true too.

Your abstract paintings are often shown alongside jokes and Xeroxed zines. fHow do these elements work together?
A lot of that started while living in Berlin in 2009. I started making jokes and cartoons to amuse myself in a foreign context. I have a long relationship with humour and the comic, but I think it came to the fore because when you live in a foreign country and you're not very good at the language, you can't make jokes. I realised that these experiments were not inconsistent with my approach to painting; I started to include them in painting shows as a kind of levelling process. I liked the combination and realised that you could make an interesting move in relation to painting by displaying something alongside that seemed out of place.

Is the humour and playfulness in your work an attempt to counter the apparent seriousness of painting?
Yes. I learned to look at painting in a very serious way and I take painting really seriously; I'm not making jokes about painting. The high modernist painter is not very funny. There are, of course, many outstanding exceptions to the rule, like Ad Reinhardt or Philip Guston. The comic impulse or the satiric is seen as anti painting, in opposition to high modernism. These painters are great modernists and they're funny and yet they don't quite fit neatly into art history. There have been many funny artists in contemporary art, like Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger, Lee Lozano, and others, whose humour makes their work more difficult to get a grasp on, to categorise or pin down. I'm interested in that awkwardness.

How do you understand colour and its function in your work?
I've tried to read everything that's ever been written about colour. I don't 'think' about colour, but I understand it as an interesting force. And then all that goes out the window when I'm working - I'm a colourist. It's not like something I'm trying to achieve but something I can't get rid of. I would like to get rid of it; I go through periods every few years where I only work in black and white.

Do you think of yourself as working in an Abstract Expressionist tradition?
I was taught by old Ab-Ex guys early on when I was a freshman in college and I learned a lot in terms of process and method. I understood what it means to make work that forces you to improvise. But I've also learned a lot from other people not in my field - dancers, film-makers, poets and musicians - about what it means to work on the spur of the moment, with your nerve and your instincts. It was shocking to me to understand over the years how male Ab-Ex is supposed to be. It's a real erasure and makes invisible the efforts and achievements of a generation of women who worked within the terms of gestural painting. It's an art history problem, not a painting problem. But I've tried to really approach the field of Abstract Expressionism critically, with a negation of the negation.

How does your feminism relate to your work?
I think I'm partly a feminist and partly just a discontent, a person with a political sense of anger and suspicion and curiosity. I try to look at the gaps and not overlook the work of people who've been buried because of sexism and racism. And I don't buy into the cliché of what the artist is supposed to be doing and thinking. So I don't hibernate in my studio, I don't work in an ivory tower, and I would say that I think in a way that's queer - in a very complex, non-binary, structurally ambivalent way.

Your works seem to resist finality. How do you know when a painting is finished?
It's pure, endless overwork. I went to a lecture on Duchamp's readymades and
I realised that his insistence on hiding the amount that you work and hinging everything on a beautiful moment, or a joke, is what I've been doing for years. No one sees most of what I do because I paint it out. That's why I became interested in animation because you could see those constant changes rather than hiding them. There's no way to know when a painting is finished. I was talking to my art dealer about this and she said: 'I knew de Kooning. He also painted and painted and painted and somebody asked him how do you know when you're done? And he said, when they take it away from you!'
'Amy Sillman: Landline' is at Camden Arts Centre from 28 September-6 January 2019. From the September issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

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'I'm working with and against painting' - an interview with Amy Sillman

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Ahead of her exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, Amy Sillman talks to Imelda Barnard about the comic impulse, landline phones, and her love/hate relationship with painting You're taking over all three gallery spaces at Camden Arts Centre for your solo show. What will the exhibition consist of?

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An increasingly prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for works that, luminous in colour and often large in scale, hinge on...

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With work often taking on a biographical form, Jonathan Baldock addresses the trauma, stress, sensuality, mortality and spirituality around our relationship to the body and the space it inhabits. Baldock's work is saturated with humour and wit, as well as an uncanny, macabre quality that channels his longstanding interest in...

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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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Defying definitions of genre to reimagine the nature of what a work of art can be - and of what an art experience can achieve - Doug Aitken leads us into an arena where time, space and memory are bountifully fluid concepts.

His is a unique immersive aesthetic, characterised by a fascination with motion and velocity, that demonstrates the nature and structure of our media-saturated cultural condition. To this end, Aitken edits together frenetic and unique models of contemporary experience to create a new landscape, one in which he hopes we find points of anchor and experience a sense of connection. He employs a number of post studio artistic mediums - photography, sculpture, architecture, sound installation, and multichannel video installation. In each of his artworks, he chooses the medium or combination that amplifies and visually articulates the subject's qualities. The scale of his work can vary from a simple photograph to a complex moving sculpture of infinitely reflective automated mirrors. Quasi-narrative films create intricate mazes of open-ended stories told across reinterpreted physical architecture.

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Defying definitions of genre to reimagine the nature of what a work of art can be - and of what an art experience can achieve - Doug Aitken leads us into an arena where time, space and memory are bountifully fluid concepts.

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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…

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A journey through the ground-breaking works of this quintessential contemporary artist

Bruce Nauman is a restlessly inventive artist. Since the late 1960s he has continually tested what an artwork can be, by reshaping old forms and creating new ones. His ground-breaking works using sound, film, video and neon have influenced generations of artists.

This is the first major exhibition of his work in London in more than 20 years. It allows visitors to engage with the artist's universe through immersive installations with a strong emphasis on sound and moving image, as well as poetic sculptures and neon pieces.

Major works like Double Steel Cage Piece 1974, Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning) and Clown Torture 1987 highlights Nauman's distinctive preoccupations and how he incessantly revisits them - yet never repeats himself.
Exhibition organised by Tate Modern and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in collaboration with Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan

Bruce Nauman e 1970 Tate Purchased 1994 © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020

Bruce Nauman The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) 1967 Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel, Switzwerland) © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020

Bruce Nauman Manipulating the T-Bar 1965-1966 Courtesy of the Artist © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2020

Explore the exhibition room by room

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Bruce Nauman - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

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A journey through the ground-breaking works of this quintessential contemporary artist Bruce Nauman is a restlessly inventive artist. Since the late 1960s he has continually tested what an artwork can be, by reshaping old forms and creating new ones. His ground-breaking works using sound, film, video and neon have influenced generations of artists.

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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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Tuesday 1 December 2020: COVID-19 / CORONAVIRUS UPDATE:

Following the UK Government's latest announcement placing London in Tier 2, Saatchi Gallery will re-open from Wednesday, 9 December 2020. We will re-open with our free entry Ground Floor exhibitions ( Philip Colbert: Lobsteropolis and Antisocial Isolation) from December 9.

Our next headline exhibition, JR: Chronicles, will open across two floors of the Gallery on 28 January 2021. Also opening in January will be the 10th edition of Carmignac Photojournalism Award. You can find out more about these here.

Ticketholders for JR: Chronicles will be notified of the new dates of their purchased ticket(s) via email. If you have any further queries, you can reach us here.

Government guidelines on health and safety measures will remain in effect, including social distancing within a one-way system in our galleries, the provision of hand sanitising stations, and the wearing of face coverings by visitors and staff. All visitors are encouraged to pre-book their tickets prior to entry.

We look forward to welcoming you back soon.

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Tuesday 1 December 2020: COVID-19 / CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Following the UK Government's latest announcement placing London in Tier 2, Saatchi Gallery will re-open from Wednesday, 9 December 2020. We will re-open with our free entry Ground Floor exhibitions ( Philip Colbert: Lobsteropolis and Antisocial Isolation) from December 9.