This exhibition is meant to recall that atmosphere of Francis Alÿs, while at the same time critiquing the very format of the solo exhibition – in this case, a group show standing for a solo exhibition whose protagonist is only conceptually alluded to.
South African photographer Pieter Hugo, who rose to prominence in 2005 with ‘The Hyena and Other Men’, his controversial series of images of itinerant hyena tamers, has again made a series of large-scale colour portraits, this time of Nollywood actors.
The New York Times – Oct 30, 2009 – Art traded from 1951 to 2007 appreciated just a little more than 4 percent annually, much less than the Standard & Poor’s 500 average of 8.90 percent over the same period. The figure is also significantly less than figures from previous studies that pegged art’s annual returns at 8 percent or even 13 percent.
Just as most British towns have a street named after Queen Victoria, many African cities have an Avenue Patrice Lumumba, named in honour of the Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected leader. South African photographer Guy Tillim took pictures of many of these eponymous streets in Angola, Benin, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Wired UK – Aug 11, 2009 – Dutch artist Tinkebell gets lots of hate-mail, so now she’s turned the tables on the senders: by using some clever Internet sleuthing, Tinkebell uncovered the identities behind the e-mails, and compiled them in a book with their names, addresses, (naked) photographs, LinkedIn accounts, phone numbers, Facebook pages, and more.
The show is meant as a corrective to an image of rural America that’s largely dominated by clichés both good (individualistic, honest, hard-working, wholesome, pastoral, raw) and bad (closed, incurious, unsophisticated, fundamentalist). It also aims to redress the lack of attention that the art world pays to this ‘third coast’…
For nearly half a century now, Yayoi Kusama’s personal history has preceded her: the artist arrived in New York from Japan in the late 1950s, and soon became the city’s avant-It Girl, receiving praise from and exhibitions with the likes of Donald Judd, Frank Stella and Yves Klein.
The childhood nostalgia that became a popular theme in much 1990s art hasn’t yet disappeared, and many shows are still rife references to pop-culture detritus from the 1970s and ’80s. But Tim Braden pushes the nostalgia clock back even further, re-imagining a genteel 1950s boyhood consumed by daydreams of adventure, exploration and treasure hunting.
Centuries before modern-day fabulists like Jayson Blair and James Frey, there was George Psalmanazar, an ersatz historian who took creative license to a new level. When he arrived in London in 1703, Psalmanazar presented himself as a native of Formosa (now known as Taiwan) who had been kidnapped and taken to Europe by Christian missionaries.
The history of grandiloquent architecture is a long and rich one, and Berlin-based artists Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani explored this history in Amsterdam’s ‘South Axis’ development project, a playground of gleaming office towers with interchangeable names like Eurocenter, Forum and Atrium…
Amsterdam Weekly – March 29, 2007 – What role does science fiction play on actual science and design? “I think you need a certain quirkiness of temperament to be a successful science fiction writer. It’s like having a nose for news that hasn’t happened yet.”
The exhibition does have the introductory text, the book, the invitations and the events, but each component has been designed with an eye towards reinventing the form, suggesting that the ‘retrospective’ itself has become an artistic medium.
