Category: ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

Local Artists at the 56th Belgrade October Salon

56TH BELGRADE OCTOBER SALON, SEPTEMBER 23-NOVEMBER 6, 2016

The 56th October Salon occupied two major venues in Belgrade: a long-abandoned building on Resavska Street, which was previously the headquarters of ex-Yugoslavia’s Military Academy, and, in the very heart of the city, the Belgrade Cultural Center on Knez Mihailova Street. Entitled The Pleasure of Love: Transient Emotion in Contemporary Art, the 2016 exhibition showcased works by 67 artists from 26 countries, each of which sought to explore the human condition through the prism of love. In focusing on love, curator David Elliot characterized the Salon as taking a forthright stand against … Read more

56th Belgrade October Salon

56th Belgrade October Salon, September 23-November 6, 2016

The October Salon is the flagship event on the Belgrade contemporary art calendar, maybe the entire cultural calendar in the city. It was founded by the City of Belgrade in 1960 as an exhibition of contemporary fine arts, and by 1967 it also included applied arts. It was not until 2001 that an artistic director was engaged to create the concept of the Salon, as prior to that the Salon’s advisory board was responsible for conceiving the exhibition. Until 2005 the Salon was a representation of the Serbian art scene, after which … Read more

Aesthetics of Repair in Contemporary Georgia, Tartu Art Museum, Estonia, March 24 – May 29, 2016

Aesthetics of Repair in Contemporary Georgia, Tartu Art Museum, Estonia, March 24 – May 29, 2016

What unites the small post-socialist countries of Estonia and Georgia in the year 2016? Why organize an exhibition of contemporary Georgian art in Estonia a quarter of a century after the collapse of the Soviet Union? In the Baltics there are not that many exhibition spaces that would invest in East European contemporary art today, as the shared socialist past now seems somewhat distant, irrelevant and undesired in relation to the identity politics of these rapidly changing countries. However, when one looks at the … Read more

Femina Subtetrix: A Feminist Look at the APACA Textile Factory

Femina Subtetrix at Ivan Gallery, Bucharest, September 10 – October 3, 2015

Sonja Hornung, a Berlin-based artist, and Larisa Crunteanu, an artist from Warsaw and Bucharest and former curator at Atelier 35 in Bucharest, produced a culturally layered exhibition at Ivan Gallery, curated by Xandra Popescu, entitled Femina Subtetrix. Hornung and Crunteanu both come from a feminist background. Hornung is a sculptor who investigates the relationship between material, memory and public space; Crunteanu works in performance and video art with a strong interest in the social image of the body and performativity. In this collaborative exhibition, both share a material-driven … Read more

Staging visuality – Seaside Architecture of Socialist Romania: Around an Exhibition and Beyond

ENCHANTING VIEWS: ROMANIAN BLACK SEA TOURISM PLANNING AND ARCHITECTURE OF THE 1960s AND 1970s. Exhibition curated by Kaliopi Dimou, Sorin Istudor and Alina Serban; October 10 – November 23, 2014; the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Sala Dalles, Bucharest (Romania)

In the wake of a series of conference papers and articles dealing with seaside architecture in the former Communist bloc, two larger projects covered the subject more consistently. The first (and more extended), Holidays after the Fall: Urban and Architectural Transformation Processes of South-Eastern European Leisure Peripheries, was initiated by Michael Zinganel (Faculty of Architecture, University of Graz) in … Read more

Unrecounted: Historical Amnesia in Germany and Namibia at the Venice Biennale 2015

Unrecounted: Historical Amnesia in Germany and Namibia at the Venice Biennale 2015, May 4-9, 2015, Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello, Palazzo Pisani, Venice

After Angola won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion upon its first participation in the Venice Biennale in 2013, Okwui Enwezor’s edition of the Biennale in 2015 further emphasized the African context. With the exception of the debacle surrounding the Kenyan pavilion, which was disowned by the Kenyan government because the artists chosen to participate, grotesquely, were once again, as in 2013, mostly Chinese, Enwezor’s curatorial lead meant that artists from the margins were finally given greater visibility.(… Read more

Hommage à Malevich: Black Square Continued

HOMMAGE À MALEVICH: BLACK SQUARE CONTINUED, MESTNA GALERIA LJUBLJANA, JULY 2 – SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

Curated by Mateja Podlesnik at Ljubljana’s City Art Gallery to mark the centenary of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), Hommage à Malevich: Black Square Continued tracks artistic references to Suprematism from late-socialist Yugoslavia and its later independent former republics. The significance of this shared reference is found in two works by Vlado Martek, a Croatian poet and artist, that hang roughly at the midpoint of the exhibition’s first floor. Started in the same year that an anthology of the Suprematist’s writings appeared in translation,(Kazimir Read more

Off-Biennale Budapest: Art Beyond Government Funding?

OFF-Biennale Budapest, April 24-May 31, 2015, 136 venues in Budapest and internationally

OFF-Biennale was the inaugural edition of an art event that mobilized seemingly all of Budapest’s nongovernmental art, semi-art and entirely nonart spaces on both sides of the Danube, to present diverse works by some 200 local and international contemporary artists. Running a month-long marathon of daily exhibition openings and one-time performances in galleries, bars, a hair salon, an electricity factory and numerous outdoor public spaces (April 24 -May 31), the majority of the biennale took place in the Hungarian capital – its contextual home and a city that … Read more

Specters of Communism: Contemporary Russian Art, The James Gallery and e-flux, New York

SPECTERS OF COMMUNISM: CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN ART, THE JAMES GALLERY AND E-FLUX, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 7-MARCH 28, 2015

In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev famously announced that communism would be achieved in the Soviet Union by 1980. As a result, the nation lived in a perpetual state of the future-perfect tense, aiming for an expected or planned event that was to happen before a certain point in time. Unfortunately, Khrushchev never lived to see that day—nor did anyone else. The realization of true communism was a failure, and because it was abandoned as incomplete, its potentiality still remains, thus making it a tempting … Read more

The 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale

Fundamentals, the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, June 7 – November 23, 2014.

Fundamentals, the title of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (June 7 – November 23, 2014), experimented with new approaches. First, it ran longer than past exhibitions, for almost six months instead of three. Secondly, it was organized according to a tripartite formula, with the first section, Monditalia, highlighting Italy, and occupying one third of the conceptual component of the exhibition that also included other media, such as dance and theater. The second, Absorbing Modernity 1914-2014, was held in the Giardini’s … Read more

Paulo Bruscky & Robert Rehfeldt’s Mail Art Exchanges at Chert Gallery, Berlin

Cold War Domestics—Home Archives: Paulo Bruscky & Robert Rehfeldt’s Mail Art Exchanges from East Berlin to South America and Signs Fiction: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt at Chert gallery, Berlin, January 10 – March 28, 2015.

Over sixteen years of a committed artistic collaboration organized and almost entirely mediated by the mail, Brazilian artist Paulo Bruscky (b. 1949) and East German artist Robert Rehfeldt (1931-1993) exchanged materially modest, if conceptually bold, artworks to overcome immense physical and political obstacles. Crossing 5,000 miles and two repressive Cold War-era regimes, their mail art often trucked in slogans and icons that were at once immediately identifiable Read more

Cyberfest 2014

CYBERFEST 2014, KUNSTQUARTIER BETHANIEN, BERLIN, DECEMBER 12-15, 2014; PLATOON KUNSTHALLE, BERLIN

One evening last December, an exhibition hall of the Art Center at Kunstquartier Bethanien, a handsome 19th-century building on Berlin’s Mariannenplatz, was bustling. It was a usual opening night – with food, wine, crowds of people young and old getting together and talking about art. What could have caught a local by surprise was that most of the visitors spoke Russian. Cyberfest, a yearly festival of new media, which originated in St. Petersburg in 2007, was making its second appearance in Berlin, following its debut in the German capital … Read more

Mladen Miljanović: At the Edge

Mladen Miljanovi?: At the Edge, acb Gallery, Budapest, June 6 – July 17, 2014

At the beginning of his career, Bosnian artist Mladen Miljanovi? prepared ironically toned, but rather serious, plans of attack (Artattack series, 2007) for occupying the great museums of the world. Actually, he painted military symbols on the maps of contemporary art museums and galleries representing how he could occupy their spaces. Of his targets, ironically, Budapest was the last “captured” city, as the artist showcased works in the exhibition spaces of New York, London and Venice before showing in the contemporary art institutions of neighboring … Read more

Irina Botea: It is now a matter of learning hope, at threewalls, Chicago

Irina Botea: It is now a matter of learning hope, threewalls, Chicago, April 26-May 31, 2014

Throughout her practice that spans video, film, performance and installation, Irina Botea appropriates the instruments of mediation that shape the politics of memory to reconfigure the way history frames our contemporary consciousness. Employing strategies of role-playing, reenactment, and recitation, she recasts historical events, often from her native Romania, to remediate political traumas of the past while offering alternate views of reality than those produced by mainstream media.

For her recent exhibition at threewalls, It is now a matter of learning hope, the artist presented … Read more

Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module and Paweł Althamer: The Neighbors at The New Museum, New York

Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module, THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK, JANUARY 22, 2014 – APRIL 13, 2014

PAWE? ALTHAMER: THE NEIGHBORS, THE NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 12, 2014 – APRIL 13, 2014

Two exhibitions of Central and Eastern European art were recently on view at the New Museum in New York. The first, Report on the Construction of a Spaceship Module, was part of the Museum as Hub series, a New Museum initiative supporting exhibitions, residencies, and public programsfocused on promoting international contemporary art. It was guest curated for the New Museum by a multinational team … Read more

The 54th October Salon in Belgrade

ZEPTER EXPO, BELGRADE, 11 OCTOBER-17 NOVEMBER, 2013

The 54th installment of the October Salon in Belgrade focused on feminist and queer interventions in the dominant narratives of knowledge production within patriarchal post-socialist and neoliberal realities. It boldly introduced a variety of artistic expressions within the “Living Archive” framework proposed by the Red Min(e)d curatorial team (Danijela Dugandži? Živanovi?, Katja Kobolt, Dunja Kukovec and Jelena Petrovi?). The concept of “Living Archive” derives from theoretical elaborations of a new, feminist archive in lieu of the standard, conventional systems of archivization and of the traditional archive as a site for normative meaning production. … Read more

Cinema by Other Means at MoCA, Belgrade

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BELGRADE, JUNE 22 – SEPTEMBER 29, 2013

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade recently presented the exhibition Cinema by Other Means at the ?olakovi? Gallery, their off-site exhibition space. The gallery is named after Rodoljub ?olakovi?, a high-ranking party functionary in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and a man of letters. ?olakovi? wrote the book House of Lament in 1941 under the pen name Rudi R. Bosamac. This book was banned by the royalist authorities in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for its socially critical views and exposé on the situation of political prisoners. ?olakovi? … Read more

Monika Zawadzki at Kordegarda Gallery

Monika Zawadzki Tent and the Fireplace at Kordegarda Gallery, Warsaw, October 11– November 4, 2012

When viewers entered the gallery where the exhibition of Monika Zawadzki was installed they were confronted by a tent and fireplace, both of them easily associated with the living areas of the first societies. In this way Zawadzki, whose work was also presented in the exhibition The Biggest Delight is To Avoid Contact with Society, in Warsaw (2006), creates a situation that refers to the rituals of community creation.

Zawadzki recalls the archaic and the archetypical, bringing us closer to the questions about building the … Read more

The Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32

Graham Foundation, Chicago, October 11, 2012-February 16, 2013

The Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32 presents a small selection of British photographer Richard Pare’s massive archive of nearly 15,000 photographs of modernist Soviet architecture in Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. The exhibition, on view at the Graham Foundation’s prairie-style Madlener House, was part of an original exhibition produced by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Framing the project as a documentary enterprise, The Lost Vanguard posits that the sites captured by Pare were largely unknown, not only in the West but also within the Soviet Union, during the … Read more

The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012

MYSTETSKYI ARSENAL, KYIV, MAY 24-JULY 31, 2012

The First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art ARSENALE 2012 [http://arsenale2012.com], which took place concurrently with the Euro 2012 football championship hosted by Ukraine and Poland, had a dual aim to present high-quality artworks from all over the world in Kyiv and to display Ukrainian contemporary artists to the world on par with their international counterparts. Commissioned by Nataliia Zabolotna, the Biennale featured: Main Project “The Best of Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art” (curator David Elliott); Special Project “Double Game” (curator Oleksandr Soloviov with coordination by Fabio … Read more

Vision and Communism at The Smart Museum (Exhibition Review)

The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, September 29, 2011-January 22, 2012

Upon entering the exhibition Vision and Communism, the viewer is purposefully presented with little information about the Soviet artist and designer Viktor Koretsky (1909- 1998). The almost ninety examples of Koretsky’s work on display make up the largest show featuring this artist in America to date, and include lithographic print posters, mixed-media maquettes, and black-and-white photographs. The exhibition is framed by both its enigmatic title and in the exhibition space itself so that Koretsky’s visually arresting work makes maximum visual impact.

While the pieces are not accompanied … Read more

Eyes Looking For a Head to Inhabit in Łódź (Exhibition Review)

Eyes Looking For a Head to Inhabit, curated by Aleksandra Jach, Joanna Soko?owska, Katarzyna S?oboda and Magdalena Zió?kowska, Museum of Art ?ód?, 30 September, 2011-11 December, 2011.

The exhibition at the Museum of Art in ?ód? celebrates the 80th anniversary of the International Collection of Modern Art, which was created by members of the Polish constructivist avantgarde: Katarzyna Kobro and W?adys?aw Strzemi?ski, with the effective help of Jan Brz?kowski and Henryk Sta?ewski, who together constituted the “a.r.” (revolutionary artists) group. This historical collection, encompassing a variety of contemporary artists’ works ranging from van Doesburg, through Leger, to Arp and Ernst, … Read more

Journey to the East (Exhibition Review)

Journey to the East, Galeria Arsenal in Bia?ystok, August 5-September 30, 2011

The Journey to the East opened on August 5 (until September 30) at the Galeria Arsenal in Bia?ystok, Poland. Curated by Monika Szewczyk, along with a team of local curators from the countries featured in the exhibition – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland – the comprehensive show featured artworks filling two gallery spaces, objects in the public space of Bia?ystok, performances and a day-long conference. The project is being realized within the Cultural Program of the Polish EU Presidency in 2011, and will travel later … Read more

Yael Bartana Screening at Gene Siskel Film Center (SAIC)

Conversations at the Edge, Gene Siskel Film Center (SAIC), Chicago, March 4 – April 14, 2011.

Yael Bartana, known for her politically charged films and videos that explore Israeli culture and Jewish identity, will represent Poland at the 54th Biennale of Art in Venice, the first artist of non-Polish nationality to do so. Her project, and Europe will be stunned, co-curated by Sebastian Cichocki and Galit Eilat, “calls” for the return of Jews to Poland and the rebuilding of a multicultural society, as explored in her previous films Mary Koszmary/Nightmares (2007) and Mur I Wieza/Wall and Tower (2009). The … Read more

“ЯКЩО / ЕСЛИ / IF”, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art (Exhib. Review)

“???? / ???? / IF”, PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art, May 21 – July 10, 2010

The presentation of Ukrainian contemporary art in the exhibition ???? / ???? / IF at the PERMM Museum of Contemporary Art in Russia–the first such comprehensive display outside of Ukraine’s borders–appeared to be a political act. The initiative of the Moscow-based curator, Ekaterina Degot, raised immediate suspicions. How will a Russian curator, essentiallyan outsider, approach the task of showcasing Ukrainian art in her native country? How will the exhibition address the long and complicated shared history of the two neighboring countries? What are the … Read more

Manifesta 8 (Exhib. Review)

Manifesta 8, Murcia and Cartagena, Spain; 15 venues plus various channels of mass media, October 9, 2010–January 9, 2011
Curatorial collectives: Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF), Chamber of Public Secrets (CPS), and tranzit.org

The memorable night party scene in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita was inspired by a real life event at the birthday party of a millionaire’s fiancé in a Trastevere restaurant. Anita Ekberg, one of the invited celebrities, kicked off her shoes and with her spaghetti straps hanging loose, performed an impassioned barefoot cha-cha. The year was 1958, so the gesture came across as audacious even for … Read more

Andrzej Wróblewski at the Van Abbemuseum (Exhib. Review)

Andrzej Wróblewski, To the Margin and Back, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, April 10 – August 15, 2010.

It is difficult to discuss Polish art after 1945 without taking into account the specific political context of the time. This is especially true about Andrzej Wróblewski’s work in Poland which is discussed, primarily, from a historical perspective of the war and its brutalities, or within the specific conditions of the post-war period in Poland. The exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the first international museum solo show, was an attempt at representing a new approach to Wróblewski’s work.

In her … Read more

Yevgeniy Fiks, Ayn Rand in Illustrations (Exhib. Review)

Yevgeniy Fiks, Ayn Rand in Illustrations, Winkleman Gallery, New York, June 18 – July 30, 2010

Yevgeniy Fiks’ project Ayn Rand in Illustrations combines two divergent ideological paradigms – Western Objectivism, as it is expressed in Atlas Shrugged (1957), a lengthy novel by American author and philosopher Ayn Rand, and Socialist Realism, an aesthetic dogma formulated in Soviet Russia under Stalin. Both converge on a new hybrid counter-image of modern history. Illustrations consist of a large number of book pages (even with the page numbers), each divided in two sections: a text with a fragment from Rand’s book, and an … Read more

Encounters in Relational Geography at Open Space, Vienna (Exhib Review)

Encounters in Relational Geography – Dust, Ashes, Residua, Open Space, Vienna, 2 June – 2 July 2010

The Viennese project art centre Open Space (http://openspace-zkp.org) created a profile for itself within a few years by showing the kind of art that is best described as “in between.” On the one hand, this was a conscious, strategic choice designed to make the most of the gulf that separates the mainstream from the alternative art scene, the center (Austria, Western Europe, North America) from the periphery (Eastern Europe). On the other hand, it could be seen as a strategy for … Read more