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THE GREAT M.I.A

http://vimeo.com/11219730

Really great VIDEO form M.I.A-BORN FREE

we CAN`T wait for the album!

Director : Romain Gavras
Director of Photography : André Chemetoff
Producer : Mourad Belkeddar
Production company : elnino.tv
Executive Production : Gaetan Rousseau / Paradoxal
Special thanks to Lana & Melissa from The Director's Bureau

8th Shanghai Biennale, 2010

http://www.shanghaibiennale.org

In the framework of the Shanghai Biennale 2010, curating is not about reaching conclusions, investigation or representation, but about organizing rehearsals. As long as a rehearsal is going on, the theatre of exhibition will remain open to the future. Today, the productivity of the art system far outstrips individual creativity.

For the Shanghai Biennale 2010, rehearsing is not a metaphor for a form of exhibition, but a way of thinking and operating strategy. What the Biennale aims to achieve is to invite a wide range of participants: artists, curators, critics, collectors, museum directors and members of the audience to rehearse in the Biennale, a fertile theatre to reflect on the relations between artistic experimentation and the art system, between individual creativity and the public domain.

This biennale defines itself as a rehearsal, as a reflective space of performance. As Brecht has noted, "Actors in rehearsal do not wish to 'realize' an idea. Their task is to awaken and organize the creativity of the other. Rehearsals are experiments, aiming to explore the possibilities of the here and now. The rehearser's task is to expose all stereotyped, clichéd and habitual solutions." The rehearsal of the 8th Shanghai Biennale is a self-performative act of the art world, a constant attempt at self-reminder and self-liberation. Rehearsal is wielded against performance, production and discursive practice. The responsibility of the curators is to differentiate, organize and then mobilize.

Rehearsal as a theme accentuates the sense of presence and action and aptly divides the curatorial work of the Shanghai Biennale 2010 into two parts: Exposition and Recapitulation. Exposition refers to the rehearsal tournaments scheduled to be consecutively opened between July and October 2010. AndRecapitulation is to return the rehearsal tournaments back to the main body of the exhibition in Shanghai, with the tournaments comprising its core content and groundwork. The two steps, Expositionand Recapitulation are part of the processes of trial and experimentation of the theme of the Shanghai Biennale on the international stage and it can also be viewed as the Biennale's emulation of and feedback to the international art scene.

The rehearsal tournaments are scheduled to start in July 2010 and close in October of the same year. The Biennale plans to invite around twenty influential thinkers, curators and artists from across the world to participate in the rehearsal tournaments. An Acting Committee will be formed at the executive level to assist the curators in academic research and organization of the tournaments.

The rehearsal tournaments will bring together thinkers, artists and curators in an attempt to accentuate the convergence of discourse and visual production. Each rehearsal will last a week and be housed in different artistic institutions, with works in progress by local artists as its basic plot and the artists' investigatory document and sensory materials as props. The black box of artistic creation will be revealed by the exposition of the whole creative process, so that it may become a rehearsal ground. Thinkers and curators are invited to play a role in the rehearsal by participating via various means ranging from debates to public speaking to writing. The aim is to unleash the manifold possibilities previously sealed in individual creativity. As a creative laboratory, the rehearsal tournaments will manage to integrate the resources of artistic creation, artists' ideas, art history, restrictions on the art system, critical discourse as well as the public by juxtaposing them on the stage for a rehearsal.

LYKKE LI

LYKKE LI - POSSIBILITY

Damien Hirst

http://www.oceano.mc

Damien Hirst


The Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, which this year celebrates its centenary, opens its galleries to contemporary art for the first time, to present a major exhibition of works by celebrated British artist Damien Hirst.

CORNUCOPIA is the title of the exhibition, which spans the last 15 years of the artist's career and comprises over 60 key works, including early paintings and sculptures. The exhibition is presented with the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

Gathering together an exceptional ensemble of works, displayed throughout the museum in the company of the existing and remarkable collection of sea creatures and marine fauna, the exhibition stages a conversation between the past and the present, between art and science.

The dialogue between the museum's collection of specimens and aquariums and the artist's work allows the viewer to consider each discipline in a new light. Art and science here become mutually enlightening.

The display brings together seminal early works such as Away from the Flock, Divided, 1995, in which the artist suspended a sheep in formaldehyde in a glass tank, with the more recent After The Flood, 2008, featuring a dove in flight suspended in formaldehyde and The Forgiveness, 2008, a nine-metre-long stainless steel cabinet with 3,502 butterflies and other insects displayed along the shelves.

From the exquisitely composed butterfly wing paintings, the Psalms, 2008, to the monumental sculptures such as Sensation, 2003, and The Virgin Mother, 2005, the exhibition reveals the breadth of the artist's creative output over the last decade and a half.


Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, UK. He lives and works in London and Devon. Solo exhibitions include 'No Love Lost', The Wallace Collection, London (2009), 'Requiem', Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev (2009), 'For the Love of God', Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2008), Astrup Fearnley Museet fur Moderne Kunst, Oslo (2005), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005) and Archaeological Museum, Naples (2004). He received the DAAD fellowship in Berlin in 1994 and the Turner Prize in 1995. An exhibition of the artist's private collection, 'Murderme', was held at Serpentine Gallery, London in 2006.

Michael Johansson

http://www.michaeljohansson.com/

Michael Johansson

NICK VAN WOERT

NICK VAN WOERT

New York based sculptor Nick van Woert coats and spreads classical plaster busts with liquid plastic, insulation foam and other hardening materials, giving the perfectionist and fragile portraits a bold contrast of colour and randomness, and a physical dynamic frozen in time.

Carlos Cruz-Diez

http://www.miamiartmuseum.org

Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color marks the artist's first exhibition to focus solely on sensory chromatic environments and interactive projects.

Internationally known as a leading practitioner of kinetic art in the 1950s, Carlos Cruz-Diez began experimenting with color, perception and sensation during the 1960s and 1970s. His pioneering work from those decades proposed a dematerialization of the art object in favor of immersive environments incorporating the viewer's body, senses and subjectivity, and changing the audience from passive spectators into active participants.

Along with other artists engaged in experimental practices during the 1960s and 1970s, Cruz-Diez, sought to establish a new understanding of art's audience. His environmental works from this time can be considered completed only by a direct exchange with the viewer-participant. They reject the idea of the autonomous artwork and reassert the viewer's role as a constitutive part of the aesthetic experience. By incorporating time and motion, they propose a fluid exchange between art and its audience. In the process, they offer spectators the possibility of experiencing art as a potentially useful vehicle in the production of subjectivity.

Carlos Cruz-Diez: The Embodied Experience of Color reconstructs three of the artist's seminal works from the late 1960s and early 1970s, three-dimensional, traversable spaces that shift with the viewer's movement, engendering a heightened awareness of motion and time, and ultimately, a sensory-perceptual metamorphosis. Expanding upon the idea of interactivity by totally immersing the viewer in the corporeal experience of color through space and in time, the works assembled in this exhibition mark an important moment in Cruz-Diez's career. They represent an early and groundbreaking shift towards the articulation of the kind of relational and participatory practices that remain critical aspects of contemporary art.

The exhibition is curated by MAM adjunct curator Rina Carvajal and organized by Miami Art Museum. It is supported by SaludArte Foundation, Fundación Bancoro, Davos Financial Group and Fundación Mercantil.

TUNNG

TUNNG - HUSTLE

SHE & HIM

SHE AND HIM - IN THE SUN

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE - DOG DAYS ARE OVER

Sur le dandysme aujourd'hui lecture series at CGAC

http://www.cgac.org

What is dandyism? It cannot be defined, as attitudes are always difficult to describe. Who is a dandy? Nowadays the term dandy has been so overused that it has almost lost its meaning. Dandies were not just handsome and eccentric men who lived in a particular historical moment, they have in fact become part of the black on white of the page, they have turned into text, becoming protagonists of novels and plays or cases of study of dissertations or essays. Hence, Dandyism may only be described when someone or some feat, represents it: a historical, or not so much, character (Brummell in Honoré de Balzac's Treatise on Elegant Living, Barbey d'Aurevilly's The Anatomy of Dandyism, Count Robert of Montesquiou, Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Jean Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas); a work of art and artist (Guys' drawings, Baudelaire's writings or Manet's paintings); the protagonist of a novel (so many, but above all, Huysmans' Against Nature); or a thespian actor (Wilde).

In this peculiar history of dandies, each one of its protagonists contributed with a new concept or developed a strategy already conceived by a predecessor; concepts and strategies that have come together and have been assimilated by several contemporary artists. Dandyism may have been the basis for some of the innovations of the avant-gardes and other artistic trends of the twentieth century and for the construction of the artist as an idea.

Taking Sur le dandysm aujourd'hui. From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star as starting point, these lectures strive to create a space for reflecting, questioning and debating over some of this concepts and stances, taking on the experience from two of the artists featured in the exhibition—Ignasi Aballí and Juan Luis Moraza—as well as from two exhibition curators— Jean-Yves Jouannais and Jeremy Millar—whose work has dealt at some point with this topic. On dandyism, ways of doing and ways of seeing.

http://www.sharjahart.org


The Sharjah Art Foundation announces the appointment of Suzanne Cotter and Rasha Salti as joint curators of the 10th edition of the Sharjah Biennial.

Plot for a Biennial is the title for the 10th Sharjah Biennial curated by Suzanne Cotter and Rasha Salti. Opening on March 16, 2011, the Biennial will present new and specially commissioned works by contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers and performers from across the region and internationally. Developing on the geographic reach and the focus on new production of previous Biennials, Plot for a Biennial merges what have traditionally been parallel formats of exhibition, film and performance into a multivalent sequence of encounters in sites across the Sharjah Cultural Quarter. In its visual, spatial and temporal dimensions, Plot for a Biennial attempts to reflect the hybrid nature of contemporary artistic practice, and the singularity of artistic positions as part of a set of shared concerns and consequences.

Curatorial Statement: Plot for a Biennial will consider the production of art as subversive act; the location of the artist within a web of etymological tracings that intersect at the notion of treason, that shares Latin roots with trade and translation, activities central to the political economy, history and culture of Sharjah; and the city as a space of singularities and encounter form a matrix through which the Biennial's storyline unfolds.

Tailored to the idea of a treatment for film, replete with a plot and characters, it is conceived according to a constellation of keywords or motifs: Treason, Necessity, Insurrection, Affiliation, Corruption, Devotion, Disclosure, Translation, which serve to frame explorations in subject matter and form. The assertion of individual subjectivity within the realms of culture, religion and statehood, the aesthetics of art as seduction and formal dissidence, and the production of art and its communicability as both dubious and potentially transformative are central themes. Within this lexical framework, artists, filmmakers, performers and writers constitute a cast of players that include The Traitor, The Traducer, The Collaborator and The Experientialist.

Proposing the Biennial as a script to be followed and improvised allows for a rethinking of conventions of the showcase, use of spaces, modes of display, and the rhythms of the city, inviting interaction from visitors and inhabitants of Sharjah. In borrowing the structure of a film narrative, the Biennial will function as a series of intersecting chapters, or reels, to be broken and reconstituted by the individual visitor at different moments and over the course of its unravelling.

THE DRUMS

THE DRUMS - LETS GO SURFFING

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE

ANIMAL COLLECTIVE - MY GIRLS

WE ARE BACK!

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STARTING THIS WEEK...

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Euan Macdonald

http://www.westernbridge.org

Scotland-born, LA-based artist Euan Macdonald presents A Little Ramble, a solo exhibition at Western Bridge. The exhibition features video, drawings, photographs, and new two newly commissioned works. "The idea of landscape is a thread that runs through all the work," says Macdonald, not as a scene but as "a changing space to move through in time."

The show's centerpiece, A Little Ramble (2010), brings a full scale replica of a mountaintop into Western Bridge. Realistically rendered by a local scene shop, the mountain is surmounted by a pair of taxidermied mountain goats, frozen in circulation on a looped path around the summit. The work takes its title from a short prose piece by Robert Walser (1878-1956) recounting a trek in the mountains, most likely in Switzerland but unspecified, easily projected onto the landscape around Seattle. "I walked through the mountains today," the account begins. "The weather was damp, and the entire region was gray." The narrator limits himself to the observable, giving little indication of his interior state. The ending asserts the power of the mundane: "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much."

A mountain encountered inside a gallery is clearly out of the ordinary, but the piece asserts itself as a commonplace despite its uncanniness. The extraordinary is expressed as if ordinary.

Upstairs, in Western Bridge's connected apartment, a smaller sculptural work gives a long view of the same scene. In 98134, (2009) Western Bridge itself is set, as a scale model, atop a large mountain. Drawing from a trope of science fiction, the work shows the building "at the mercy of geological change," in the artist's words, a vision out of J.G. Ballard or Planet of the Apes.

Landscape appears in both the imagery and structure of Selected Standards (2007), an installation of 84 diptychs pairing found sheet music covers with drawings and photographs made or appropriated by the artist. Macdonald came across a box of sheet music for pop standards in a second-hand shop in Los Angeles. The song titles, arranged more or less in the order in which the artist found them, read as a loose narrative. "The narrative is about someone moving to a new place, finding enchantment and then disillusion," says Macdonald. "It's also a narrative about someone falling in love, but it's ambiguous whether it's with a person or with a city."

This narrative connects to the journey taken by the sheet music, mostly published in New York and dispersed around the nation via commerce or migration before arriving in Los Angeles. The titles' narrative connects to the artist's own life in direct ways, and the drawings and photographs draw on a range of themes and subjects that have been significant in his practice, but the work is not autobiographical. Instead, it operates as a pop standard does, as a subjective experience that a mass audience can experience personally, relating to the song's tale (verse) and its emotions (chorus), identifying with the singer or protagonist. "Any of those songs can relate to any number of people," says Macdonald. "Not only are the songs standard but the experience can be standard as well."

The exhibition offers the viewer a series of little rambles, encounters with the familiar--reminders of how much we already see.

FotoFest 2010 Biennial

http://www.fotofest.org/biennial2010

FotoFest 2010 Biennial
Program and Special Events Announced

FotoFest announces the programs for the United States' largest citywide celebration of photography, the FotoFest 2010 Biennial. Focusing for the first time on the theme ofContemporary U.S. Photography, the Biennial highlights four exhibitions on Contemporary U.S. Photography by invited curators from different regions of the country. These principal exhibitions feature the work of 45 U.S. artists, and are accompanied by a fifth, non-thematic exhibition, Discoveries of the Meeting Place, spotlighting ten artists who presented work in the previous Biennial's portfolio review. FotoFest's exhibitions are joined by more than 80 independently organized photographic exhibitions citywide; forums on contemporary curating; the world's largest portfolio review for artists; an International Fine Print Auction; programs for art collectors; Workshops on online multimedia and social media technologies; films; and public Evenings with the Artists. The full program is available online at http://www.fotofest.org/biennial2010.

FOTOFEST 2010 BIENNIAL GRAND OPENING
The FotoFest 2010 Biennial Grand Opening is a free public celebration Friday, March 12, 2010 at FotoFest headquarters and gallery – the site of Whatever was Splendid, one of the four principal exhibitions on Contemporary U.S. Photography at the FotoFest 2010 Biennial. Guests at the Grand Opening will include the FotoFest 2010 Biennial curators: Natasha Egan, Aaron Schuman, Edward Robinson and Gilbert Vicario; many of the 45 exhibiting artists; refreshments and music. Opening Receptions for the other three principal FotoFest Biennial exhibitions occur over the course of the following weeks and will be attended by featured artists and curators.

FOTOFEST CURATORIAL DIALOGUES
Examining the role of the art curator is an important part of FotoFest 2010 Biennial programming. The professionals commissioned to conceive the principal exhibitions for the 2010 Biennial are part of a new generation of curators redefining the role of museums and art spaces in terms of their relationship to art audiences, the general public, and other social institutions. FotoFest presents four of the Biennial curators in a series of free Curatorial Dialogues about their roles as interlocutors between art makers and the public, how they see the future of art in institutions, what influences their curatorial choices, who they see as their audiences, and how they and their institutions are using online platforms.

In addition to the four Curatorial Dialogues, FotoFest is sponsoring a Symposium on Contemporary Curatorial Practice with Anne Wilkes Tucker, Charlotte Cotton, Gilbert Vicario and Daniel Joseph Martinez at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, March 28, 2010

Sunday, March 14, 2010 - Aaron Schuman, curator of the Whatever was Splendid exhibition at Vine Street Studios, with Madeline Yale, Adjunct Curator, Houston Center for Photography

Friday, March 19, 2010 - Edward Robinson, curator of the Assembly: Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern California exhibition at Williams Tower, with Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator of Photography, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Friday, March 26, 2010 - Natasha Egan, curator of the Road to Nowhere? exhibition at Winter Street Studios, with Clint Willour, Curator, Galveston Arts Center

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 - Gilbert Vicario, curator of the Medianation exhibition at various locations, with Fernando Castro, Independent Curator and Collector

The Curatorial Dialogues are scheduled to connect with the four Evenings with the Artists Open Portfolio Nights.

FOTOFEST EVENINGS WITH THE ARTISTS
FotoFest's Evenings with the Artists Open Portfolio Nights connect the public with the hundreds of artists, curators, and other art professionals visiting Houston for the acclaimed Meeting Place Portfolio Review. The Evenings with the Artists Open Portfolio Nights invite the public to see the work of artists in a festive atmosphere that fosters discussion, exchange and sales.

FOTOFEST FINE PRINT AUCTION
Prints from eighty contemporary international and U.S. artists are featured in the FotoFest Fine Print Auction, Tuesday March 23, 2010 at the Doubletree Hotel Houston Downtown. Conducted byDenise Bethel, Sotheby's Senior Vice President and Director of Photographs Department, the auction provides a rare opportunity to encounter and acquire high quality contemporary fine art photography from five continents. The Preview Exhibition is March 3-20, 2010 at Gremillion & Co. Fine Art Inc. and is free and open to the public. There are two additional days of previews at the Auction site, Doubletree Hotel Houston Downtown, March 21-22, 2010. Images, artist biographies and information about the works will be posted on the FotoFest 2010 website athttp://www.fotofest.org/biennial2010/auction. Absentee bid forms are available.

FOTOFEST 2010 BIENNIAL WORKSHOPS
FotoFest is sponsoring two Workshops on online multimedia, social media and web-based technologies. The workshops, at the Doubletree Hotel Houston Downtown, bring media and art marketing experts, artists, curators and editors together to share their expertise and experience in art, the internet, social media networks, and multimedia platforms.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 | BEYOND PRINT: Creative Communication in the Digital Age
Presenters Mary Virginia Swanson and artist Katrina d'Autremont
Focusing on how the use of interactive, online marketing tools, and technologies is changing the way artists and arts professionals present their work to the world.

Sunday, March 21, 2010 | MEDIASTORM: Building Multimedia Platforms
Presenter Brian Storm, MediaStorm (http://www.mediastorm.com)
Shows how top photographers are redefining their work to incorporate audio, animation, and video for distribution across new marketing and art platforms, including broadcast, internet, and mobile media.

FotoFest Workshops connect with the Meeting Place Portfolio Reviews at the Doubletree Hotel Downtown Houston. Forms are available for download athttp://www.fotofest.org/biennial2010/workshops.

FOTOFEST 2010 BIENNIAL CATALOGUE
FotoFest is co-publishing the 2010 Biennial Catalogue, with European publisher Schilt Publishing (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The 500 page, two-volume 2010 Biennial catalogue features more than 300 full-color images and five essays by Biennial curators on Contemporary U.S. Photography. The FotoFest 2010 Biennial Catalogue is available late February 2010 at http://www.fotofest.org.


INSTITUTIONAL SPONSORS (as of January 14, 2010)
The Houston Endowment, Inc; Roma; The Brown Foundation, Inc; National Endowment for the Arts; JPMorgan Chase; The Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation; City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance; Doubletree Hotel Houston Downtown; Texas Commission on the Arts; The Clayton Fund; Trust for Mutual Understanding; Continental Airlines The Official Airline of the FotoFest 2010 Biennial; The Wortham Foundation; American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP); Iland Internet Solutions; HexaGroup; Vine Street Studios; The Anchorage Foundation.

Yayoi Kusama site-specific public artwork

http://www.citygallery.org.nz

Dots for Love and Peace (2009), one of only three temporary public art projects worldwide designed by iconic Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama, is currently installed on the exterior architecture of City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand.

While City Gallery Wellington regularly showcases contemporary artworks by some of New Zealand and the world's leading artists, this is the first time the Gallery's art deco heritage listed building has become the site for a temporary site-specific public artwork.

Yayoi Kusama is widely respected as an extraordinarily innovative and singular artist, one whose prolific work over the last five decades has influenced generations of artists and designers worldwide. Her signature dots are forever inscribed on the face of contemporary art.

"Dots for Love and Peace (2009) is an intense and unexpected public artwork, and reflects Kusama's obsessive interest in repetition, pattern and colour" says Gallery director Paula Savage. "Blue, yellow, orange, pink, red and green dots in a range of different sizes animate the facade of the building, adding a sense of drama and playfulness to Civic Square. Wellingtonians and visitors to the city alike are intrigued by this joyful work, and each day many passing through the city's public Square stop to capture photographs of themselves posing against the dots."

The scale of the work is immense, covering the entire 52 metre frontage of City Gallery Wellington. Working from the 1930's architectural drawings of the Gallery façade, Ms Kusama created a detailed plan for the public artwork, with exact specifications of colour, size and placement of each individual dot.

"This work has provided a remarkable opportunity for City Gallery Wellington to reach out and connect with a general public beyond the usual Gallery going public," said Gallery director Paula Savage. "I first met with Ms Kusama at Kusama Studio, Tokyo in 2004, beginning the process of negotiating to present her work in New Zealand. We were very excited when the artist agreed to design a new public artwork specifically for the Gallery as well as two new site-specific installations Dots Obsession Day 2009 andDots Obsession Night 2009.

While Ms Savage's relationship with Ms Kusama was the genesis of the work, it was the generous investment and support of sponsors in New Zealand that enabled the Gallery to realize Dots for Love and Peace (2009). Paula Savage says, "The final artwork continues to amaze and captivate all who pass by. Kusama's signature dots will be sorely missed at the close of the exhibition."

The public artwork coincides with the major three-venue exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Mirrored Years which closes at City Gallery Wellington on 7 February 2010. Instigated by the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam and Le Consortium, Dijon, it has travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and City Gallery Wellington, and has been shaped and augmented for each venue. For City Gallery Wellington three new works have been added, thanks to the generosity of the artist and Yayoi Kusama Studio, Tokyo and Ota Fine Art Tokyo.

The exhibition has been curated by Jaap Guldemond (MBvB), Franck Gautherot and Seungduk Kim (Le Consortium), with additional works added for Australasia by Judith Blackall (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) and Paula Savage (City Gallery Wellington).

James Turrell

http://www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de

In collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the American light artist James Turrell has created his largest-ever walk-in light installation in a museum context: an 11-metre-high, "space within a space" structure that covers a floor area of 700 square metres and reaches up to the glass roof of the museum. One of Turrell's Ganzfeld Pieces, it is a hollow construction divided into two parts. The two interconnecting chambers – the Viewing Space and the Sensing Space – are both completely empty and – a new feature of this type of work – flooded with slowly changing coloured light. The Kunstmuseum is showing The Wolfsburg Project along with a number of Turrell's other works in the most extensive exhibition by the artist in Germany to date.

Visitors can enter the piece via a steep ramp that leads down from the upper floor into the Viewing Space; immersing themselves in a "sublime bath of light", they can experience with all their senses how the architectural elements of the space dissolve in this homogeneous visual field, creating a sense of perceptual disorientation. While the light reveals and refers to nothing beyond itself, surface qualities interact with those of colour and space to create an atmosphere that completely envelops the spectator and stimulates the senses. Viewers become submerged in a mysterious, painterly world of pure light. Turrell describes this as "feeling with your eyes", an experience he regards as not just aesthetic but also spiritual.

This exhibition is supported by Volkswagen Financial Services. Zumtobel's innovative lighting solutions enable James Turrell's artistic vision to become reality.

Gordon Matta-Clark

http://www.pulitzerarts.org

The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts announces the exhibition, Urban Alchemy/Gordon Matta-Clark, on view October 30, 2009 - June 5, 2010.

The artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) used neglected structures slated for demolition as his raw material. He carved out sections of buildings with a power saw in order to reveal their hidden construction, to provide new ways of perceiving space, and to create metaphors for the human condition. He spoke of his work as an activity that attempted "to transform place into a state of mind by opening walls." When wrecking balls knocked down his sculpted buildings, little remained. He took photographs and films of his interventions and kept a few of the building segments, known as "cuts." They include a section of an apartment floor (Bronx Floors: Double Doors), three parts of a house near Love Canal (Bingo), a window from an abandoned warehouse on a pier in New York City (Pier In/Out), and the rooftop corners of a house in New Jersey (Splitting: Four Corners). For this exhibition, the Pulitzer has borrowed these very cuts from The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and from the private collection of Thomas and John Solomon. The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York, also lent nearly fifty photographs, while the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, provided numerous works on paper, including eleven drawings. Two of Matta-Clark's films, Fire Child and Conical Intersect, are also on view, offering a means to understand better the performance aspect of his art.

The placement of Matta-Clark's work in the exhibition spaces designed by Tadao Ando at the Pulitzer encourages new ways of looking at art, architecture, and the urban environment. Ando's pristine building not only heightens the roughness of Matta-Clark's cuts, but it will also recall the artist's lost interventions. Both he and Ando sought to break the visual and metaphorical boundaries normally associated with the architectural "box" by allowing light to penetrate spaces in unexpected ways.

A web catalogue featuring installation views of the exhibition will be located athttp://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org

Reminiscent of an alchemist, Matta-Clark pursued the transmutation of a discarded object into something filled with "hope and fantasy." He was deeply concerned with the abandonment of buildings and the fate of urban communities. He became socially and politically active during the 1970s and wrote that he focused on buildings, "for these comprise both a miniature cultural evolution and a model of prevailing social structures. Consequently, what I do to buildings is what some do with languages and others with groups of people: I organize them in order to explain and defend the need for change."

The exhibition programming, entitled Transformation, connects the artist's social activism to present-day St. Louis. The Pulitzer, in collaboration with the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, has organized programs that build upon Matta-Clark's desire to imbue abandoned objects, buildings, and parcels of land with new meaning. The Pulitzer hopes to help carry Matta-Clark's legacy into the 21st century and to inspire a new generation of social activism through creative acts. An interactive web presence will reflect this community-driven programming athttp://mattaclark.pulitzerarts.org/transformation

Through art exhibitions, programs, collaborations, and exchanges with other institutions, the Pulitzer aims to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of art and architecture and is a resource for artists, architects, scholars, students and the general public.

Teresita Fernandez and Drawn Toward Light

http://www.blantonmuseum.org

The Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape, a survey of new and recent works by this internationally acclaimed artist. The exhibition is organized by and premiered at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) and was curated by David Louis Norr, chief curator, USF Institute for Research in Art, in close collaboration with the artist. Accompanying Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape, Drawn Toward Light is an exhibition featuring works from the Blanton's collections that use light as a medium. Both exhibitions will be on view November 1, 2009 to January 3, 2010.

American artist Teresita Fernández (born in Miami, lives and works in Brooklyn) is widely known for her immersive installations and evocative large-scale sculptures that explore the cultural fabrication of nature. Characterized by her deft ability to transform common materials like steel, graphite and glass into forms and images reminiscent of the natural world, Fernández' works bring idea and experience into poetic tension. Meticulous, subtle, and always surprising, her sculptural scenarios offer viewers unique opportunities for contemplation and discovery.

"Investigating the act of looking is central to Teresita Fernández' work," says Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, the Blanton's curator of American and contemporary art and director of curatorial affairs. "Her works address our experiences of light and space as they evolve moment-to-moment and respond to sensation, memory, and the process of perception."

The Austin presentation of the exhibition includes five recent large-scale sculptures, a series of six wall works, and a new, monumental drawing made on site. Featured among the large-scale works is Vertigo (sotto en su) from 2007, comprised of layers of precision-cut, highly polished metal woven into a reflective and intricate arboreal pattern suspended high above the viewer, not unlike an immense, cascading tree branch. "The multiple planes of space through which the viewer looks become visible simultaneously, vacillating between object and optical phenomena, continuously disassembling and reassembling," writes curator Norr.

The Blanton's presentation also features Stacked Waters, 2009—a two-story, site-specific work commissioned for the museum's Rapoport Atrium earlier this year. Stacked Waters consists of 3,100 square feet of custom–cast acrylic that covers the cavernous atrium walls in a striped swirl pattern resembling water. Horizontal bands of saturated color shift and fade from deep blue to white, creating what the artist calls "a colored abstraction" from which the visitor emerges at the top of the Museum's grand stair. Titled in a nod to Donald Judd's boxes, the work suggests that the space is a container, in this case of light and communal activity. Visitors move within its volume, lured by the image yet fully aware of its fabrication.

Major support for Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape at The Blanton is provided by Jeanne and Michael Klein and the Linda Pace Foundation. Funding also is provided by Julie and John Thornton and by Lora Reynolds and Quincy Lee in honor of Jeanne and Michael Klein.

Drawn Toward Light
Light is an essential element of visual experience and the means by which we see and begin to perceive the world around us. A special complement to Teresita Fernández: Blind Landscape, Drawn Toward Light is an exhibition of works from the Blanton's holdings that use light as a medium. Stephen Antonakos, Paul Chan, James Turrell and Leo Villarreal focus light into elemental geometric shapes to give it physical presence and sculptural form.

Adrian Ghenie

http://www.mnac.ro

The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest presents the first survey exhibition of paintings by Adrian Ghenie (born 1977), the well-known Romanian artist who lives and works in Cluj and Berlin. The exhibition underscores the way in which Ghenie has been developing a consistent engagement with issues such as memory and history, by subjecting his artistic practice to a process of continuous renewal and experimentation.

Ghenie is an ardent researcher of the history of the 20th century, being preoccupied with unearthing forgotten narratives, marginal events and seemingly insignificant details in order to compose a visual vocabulary that is both compelling and uncanny. The subject matter does not revolve around a single set of concerns, and yet the different themes of Ghenie's paintings seem to connect. Spectral presences of Hitler and Lenin, collective bodies of anonymous, defaced people – are all there to reveal the feebleness and inconsistency of our memory. The failure of modernity brought about by the catastrophes of the Second World War is seen in conjunction with the rise of modern forms of entertainment such as cinema, another major topic for Ghenie.

From the strong effects of chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio to the frieze-like compositions that bring to mind David Hockney's alignment of disconnected elements alluding to a theatre set; from an indebtedness to the tradition of Renaissance painting, visible in the rigorous construction of the picture space, to the uninhibited handling of paint that recalls the gestural freedom of abstract expressionism – Ghenie incorporates a multitude of references and idioms that do not result in a gratuitous postmodern game, but rather evince his commitment to investigate the possibilities of painting, while at the same time problematizing it. Although his work displays a belief in the contemporary relevance of painting, Ghenie seeks to delve into the conceptual tenets that have undermined the legitimacy of the medium. The artist revisits key moments in the history of modernism that prompted the declaration of the death of painting. He invokes the figure of Duchamp – the foremost enemy of paint and colour who rendered the painting obsolete through the introduction of the readymade into the field of art – as well as the first International Dada exhibition in Berlin which exhibited signs declaring that art was dead.

Rebecca Horn

http://www.mot-art-museum.jp

The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is pleased to announce a solo exhibition this fall of the work of Rebecca Horn, a major representative of the contemporary German art world. This will be the first large-scale exhibition of her work in Japan.

Horn has been known for her performance works involving the wearing of feathers, horns, and mirrors.

Since her participation in the 1972 Documenta show in her 20s, she has energetically pursued a range of artistic activity that continues to tackle new territories of art, one after the other—beginning with kinetic sculpture as well as film, and continuing on to capture the fascination of a great number of people—audiences with an interest not only in visual art, but that include film and dance enthusiasts as well.

Her performances, which began in the late 1960s, sought to expand the functions of the human body, improve communications with others, and develop a rapport with mythical animals and nature. The devices that attached to the body and enhanced its physical perceptions were first used in performance, and then eventually developed into independent, kinetic-mechanical sculptural works.

Later, in what amounted to over ten years of life in New York, Horn undertook the production of highly narrative, full-length films, and incorporated the sculptures and movements from her earlier work into this new context of film, transforming their significance. Since the 1980s, after moving back to her home country of Germany, Horn's work that directly confronts modern historical issues has been acclaimed for its ability to tie together personal experience and social memory. One early example of this work involves the conversion of the interior of an abandoned tower in the city of Münster into a piece that utilizes its history as the subject matter.

In recent years, Horn has been working on large-scale installations and stage designs using music composed by Hayden Chisholm. She has also made, without the use of tools, a series of unrestrained drawings that emphasize direct human movement, developing a completely free mode of creation.

This exhibition is a full-scale presentation of Horn's work. With all representative film footage, which includes the performance records from the 1970s and the full-length narrative films from the 1990s, as well as installations and two- and three-dimensional works that she has been producing since the 1990s.

An approximate total of thirty exhibits allows one to trace the development of relationships between the various media in which Horn works. The flow of various invisible energies of humans and nature are transformed into visible form via movement, light, and the traces of such. Moreover, we present Horn's new work, The Raven Tree, which was made especially for the exhibition at MOT. Her visit to Kyoto in 1984 inspired her to make this sculpture, which represents the concept for this exhibition. The exhibition promises to be an unparalleled opportunity to experience this highly original, creative trajectory in MOT's vast space.