Artist Aram Bartholl will present a Speed Show in Los Angeles, the first of the series to be held in the City on the evening of February 18.
In 2010Bartholl initiated the series of Speed Showsin Berlin. Its set up is an exhibition that can take place anywhere in an internet cafe displaying for a moment (or evening) works that already exist online, leaving the job of the curator simply to find a good harmony of things to channel into the cafe space.
“A lot has happened since 2010”, as Bartholl, who aqnbinterviewed in 2013, states in the press release. He talks about how manifestos work and interestingly seems to be writing one as a press release that undoes a worded relationship between screens, the internet and artists.
Despite the dated format, the show’s premise is a moment pulled together in a room, and it kind of works to see and feel what it all looks like now, in one place -especially in a city like LA.
Brand New Gallery in Milan presents group exhibition, Grey, opening January 14 and running to February 20.
The exhibition title can be spoken about in many terms, and the press release for this show makes a list. As a colour it contains both black and white. It is neutral – and not white. If an object is at first grey, the human eye can apparently recognise it in many different colours thereafter. It is objective. The brain is grey matter. Grey is the colour of Kansas and Dorothy’s red shoes in the Wizard of Oz. Actually, grey is pretty open.
Milan-based artistic production label, Siliqoon curated and produced Pure Disclosure at Marsèlleria permanent exhibition, a group show of new works by artists Alessandro Agudio, Daniel Keller, Andrea Magnani, and Timur Si-Qinthat ran May 10 to April 10. The four artists were selected based on their individual research and aesthetic approach to work alongside thirteen Italian companies dedicated to artisan excellence. Hosted by Casa Natali/MAMbo, and Spazio RAUM in a residence in Bologna, the artists set out to create post-capitalist works –or products –that follow “commercial promotional logics, thus creating a friction with their spiritual, critical, [and] ironic nature”. The outcomes were produced by companies such as Aida Bertozzi, Bikun, BIOTEX, Euromec di Archenti Mauro, and Fabric Division.
Daniel Keller + Ella Plevin, Seastead, ‘Figures (Polypool)’ (2015). Install view. Courtesy Marsèlleria.
The exhibition is filled with a disorienting consideration to visual and marketing culture. Timur Si-Qin’s new work, ‘Display (Peace)’ (2015) is a backlit digital print of a mountain top with the word “peace” written on the bottom right-hand corner, just underneath a spherical yin-yang symbol as teh artist’s logo. Mimicking sleek advertising displays, the work is made of UV coating on micro-perforated mesh, anodized steel tube, and plexiglass.
Agudio turns a shower base into a delicate yet desolate landscape in ‘FOREVER – Dead in the Bathroom (feat. Summer Katie Fox)’ (2015) using ceramic sculptures, micro shot peening on stainless steel, wood, plastic laminate, plant, and a short sound piece that loops on speakers. A large installation entitled ‘In the Vast Infinity of Life, All is Perfect, Whole, and Complete’ (2015), made by Magnani, attunes itself to the water bottle and water as a nourishing element that perpetuates life. As the title suggests, three silk-screened prints on ice packs filled with gel surround a water bottle that entertains notions of ‘oneness’ by labelling it with an infinity symbol. A second container is showcased in a small refrigerator, resting on top of carefully produced icicles.
The works in the exhibition elegantly present a crossover between artistic and consumer production, giving consumer goods and the language they’re spoken in, a more soulful, or perhaps slick, new identity. **
Living In the Future magazine is releasing their third issue, themed “New Lands”, at London’s Tenderbooks this Saturday, Jul 4.
The science fiction journal focusing on future-oriented art and writing comes out with its third issue, asking What worlds might we inhabit in the future? and taking the reader Beyond the Fields We Know.
This issue launches at 5pm at Tenderbooks in London with some free drinks, a first look at the new edition, and readings from some of the close to thirty contributors, which include Holly Childs, Daniel Keller, and Julia Tcharfas.
Even without initial comprehension of the words rendered on a wall, the internet aesthetic Daniel Kelleremploys in Kai ♥Dalston Bushwick is instantly clear. In the solo exhibition, running from May 1 to July 4, the warped curves of a hung sculptural piece called ‘Composite Career Captcha (Betterneties)’ (2015) are sampled from a captcha compound of ‘better’ and ‘eternities’. Captchas are online security devices meant to distinguish between human and machine users. In this sense, they isolate a specifically human capacity for visual perception while divorcing it from meaning. This vague sensation of recognition separate from understanding seems continuously generated throughout the show.
Daniel Keller, Kai ♥ Dalston Bushwick (2015). Exhibition view. Courtesy KraupaTuskany Zeidler, Berlin.
In the first room, grey hoses lead out of a tank of water, green bubbles consistently bursting on its murky surface. One hose trails into the adjoining room and another disappears through a hole drilled into the wall. The tanks of ‘Onanet Spirulina 1’ (2015) are three in total and each contain the rapidly reproducing Spirulina algae. Currently considered a superfood, the organism is harvested and distributed on the health food market in powdered and pill form. Although these hoses circulate the water from tank to tank, this process is meanwhile superfluous for the production of the algae. Rather, the web formed here appears to delve deeper into the idea of connection in general. With the ever growing increase of (particularly technical) global interconnection, a question arises: is it really necessary?
In plastic sleeves on the sill of the gallery window is an excerpt from the play iDRIVE, co-written by Keller and Ella Plevin. Acting in a sense as the basis for the rest of the show, the play follows a romance between the fictional daughter of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the offspring siblings of Ashton Kutcher: Kai, Dalston, and Bushwick, respectively. In the sections provided, the former two drive along an exaggerated future-scape of hyper-technologized North America. Inspired by Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, the conversations of iDRIVE span the potentials of leaving or staying within the techno-political economy via the vessels of Kai and Dalston.
Having walked through the two rooms once, I return to do another round, feeling the pieces fall together in the context of the play. For example, the three ‘Stack Relief’ (2015) structures resembling rock sculptures hanging on the walls are now extended in their meaning. On the one hand they allude to a past of basic environmental alteration and interactive creation. On the other, they are composed of complex assortments of materials (plywood, MDF, patinated brass, acrylic, aluminum, and sandstone, to name a few) and are incredibly artificial. From a distance, you note the diverse elements making up the patterned shapes of the object. Close up, they seem bound again, as though the entirety is made of plastic and stickered with design. The list detailing the pieces reconfirms the initial impression of diversity. Simple, complex, unified, divided – the past, the present, the past taken up by a present drawn into rapid future developments – it’s dizzying.
Like the ultimately unnecessary placement of the tubes connecting the tanks through the space, the assortment of works subsist within an internal, possibly also needless, logic. Although this logic is not immediately or inevitably understandable, it is simultaneously familiar in a rudimentary sense – perhaps acting in function similar to captchas, or the stone sculpture designs. You enter and you recognize, even if you cannot pin the meaning or extended complexity down to something that provides a deeper satisfaction. And at this stage, maybe there is a choice: you can go with it unwittingly, or comment, or leave. **
