Video Installation
Tate Modern: No Lone Zone
‘No Lone Zone’ is a military term designating an area where, for reasons of safety and security, the presence of just one person is not allowed. The phrase can also be used metaphorically to describe a highly sensitive or unstable place, such as the vulnerable environments that proliferate in the context of postcolonial globalisation.
Mariko Mori: Cybergeishas, technonolgy and religion
The Japanese-born artist Mariko Mori, creates work featuring cybergeishas and other Manga-influenced characters. Moriko Mori has long made art characterized by a sci-fi sensibility that seems ineluctably linked to the city and the future. Her work also touches on a number of subjects like adolescent fantasy, narcissism, pop culture, religion & fashion.
Mori is fascinated by the way contemporary Japanese society balances technology, fantasy, and humanity. With an affectionate perspective on her native country, she explores the way fantasy and reality overlap in contemporary Japanese consciousness. Hers is a world where cartoon characters step out of comic books to stalk the real streets and real people withdraw from their grim routine to lose themselves in cartoon fantasies.
Anton Ginzburg’s Hyperborea at the 2011 Venice biennale
Anton Ginzburg: At the Back of the North Wind is an exhibition of new works by Anton Ginzburg, which will open to the public from June 3 to November 27, 2011 during the 54th Venice Biennale at the Palazzo Bollani. The exhibition will encompass four rooms and two floors and includes three large-scale sculptural installations, eight site-specific bas reliefs, photography, paintings, a video installation and a series of works on paper. Serving as the central narrative force for the exhibition, the film is a poetic and evocative record of the expedition to “map the void” and search for the mythological land of Hyperborea, “beyond the Boreas” (beyond the North Wind).
Anton Ginzburg uses an array of historical and cultural references as starting points for his investigations of art’s capacity to penetrate layers of the past. He constructs lines of memory and imagination, whether collective or individual, and traces them to points of intersection. The last room will contain Hyperborea, a video installation that will document the journey attempting to locate Hyperborea according to its descriptions in literature, newspaper articles and mythology. The installation takes the viewer from the primordial, virgin forest of Oregon, to St. Petersburg and its eroding palaces and haunted natural history museum, and finally to the ruins of the Gulag prisons and archeological sites on the White Sea. Present throughout the installation is a cloud of red smoke that functions both as a metaphor for the exalted self and an expression of the collective unconscious.
Nam June Paik at TATE Liverpool
17 December 2010 – 13 March 2011
Video artist, performance artist, composer and visionary: Nam June Paik (1932-2006) was one of the most innovative artists of the 20th century. Tate Liverpool, in collaboration with FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) present the first major retrospective since the artist’s death, and the first exhibition of Paik’s work in the UK since 1988.
The exhibition celebrates Paik as the inventor of media art. At a time when television was still a novelty, Paik foresaw the future popularity of this new and exciting medium. Thought provoking works like TV Buddha (1989) explore the clashing cultures of east and west, old and new, while Video Fish (1979 – 1992) considers nature versus the man made featuring both television sets and live fish in aquariums.
With artworks ranging from scores of early music performances and Paik’s involvement in the Fluxus movement to TV works, impressive robot sculptures and large-scale video installations; Tate Liverpool’s exhibition will both entertain and inspire.
The exhibition continues at FACT. Focusing on Paik’s innovative use of creative technology, FACT will showcase the major laser installation Laser Cone (1998) for the first time in the UK, along with sixteen single channel video works, including Global Groove 1973 and groundbreaking satellite videos Good Morning Mr Orwell 1984 and Bye Bye Kipling 1986
MOMA PS1: The Talent Show
Official Website: www.ps1.org
December 12, 2010 – April 4, 2011
In recent years, television’s reality shows and talent competitions have offered people a conflicted chance at fame, while various kinds of Web-based social media have pioneered new forms of communication that people increasingly use to perform their private lives as public theater. During the same period, governments worldwide have asserted vast new powers of surveillance, placing unwitting “participants” on an entirely different kind of stage.
Against this backdrop, The Talent Show examines a range of relationships between artists, audiences, and participants that model the competing desires for notoriety and privacy marking our present moment. Ranging from seemingly benevolent partnerships to those that appear to exploit their subjects, many of the works in the exhibition animate the tensions between exhibitionism and voyeurism, and raise challenging ethical questions around issues of authorship, power, and control.
Mika Rottenberg: Squeeze
SFMOMA
July 09 – October 03, 2010
Mika Rottenberg’s immersive video installations address issues of gender and labor through outrageous narratives centered around real women (not actors or models) and their bodies. With her new video entitled Squeeze, Rottenberg collapses the humorous and the unsettling to examine global production in a 20-minute narrative that screens on a continuous loop at SFMOMA. Splicing together documentary footage from a rubber plant in India and a lettuce farm in Arizona with her own narrative of women in an absurdist makeup factory, Rottenberg’s surreal video homes in on the social realities of women’s labor.
Haunted: Contemporary Photography,Video & Performance
Guggenheim Museum, New York
Part I: March 26–September 6, 2010
Part II: June 4–September 1, 2010
Much of contemporary photography and video seems haunted by the past, by the history of art, by apparitions that are reanimated in reproductive mediums, live performance, and the virtual world. By using dated, passé, or quasi-extinct stylistic devices, subject matter, and technologies, such art embodies a longing for an otherwise unrecuperable past.
Christian Boltanski
Autel de Lycee Chases, 1986-87
From March 26 to September 6, 2010, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum presents Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, an exhibition that documents this obsession, examining myriad ways photographic imagery is incorporated into recent practice. Drawn largely from the Guggenheim’s extensive photography and video collections, Haunted features some 100 works by nearly 60 artists, including many recent acquisitions that will be on view at the museum for the first time. The exhibition is installed throughout the rotunda and its spiraling ramps, with two additional galleries on view from June 4 to September 1, featuring works by two pairs of artists to complete Haunted’s presentation.
Tony Oursler at Faurschou Beijing
Tony Oursler 托尼·奥斯勒
number 7, plus or minus 2
06.02.10 – 30.05.10
www.tonyoursler.com
Faurschou Beijing presents a solo exhibition by the American video artist Tony Oursler, his first exhibition in China.
Since the mid-1970s Oursler has been a pioneer in New Media Art, and today he is one of the very biggest, most experimental and innovative artists working in the field of the video medium. The exhibition will introduce the Chinese public to a survey of projected pieces from the early 90s to the present that will give a strong impression of this great artist’s work.
Anthony McCall: Light Paintings
Installation view of “Breath: The Vertical Works” at Hangar Bicocca, Milan, Italy 2009
Anthony McCall is a key figure in the history of avant-garde cinema. He has carved a unique position in contemporary art by bridging the gaps between the cinematic, the sculptural and the pictorial by means of his extraordinary ‘solid light’ films, which manifest as immersive installations made by drawing in real space with projected light. McCall creates “solid light” works – digital videos of meticulously choreographed intersecting lines and curves which are projected in darkened haze-filled rooms, creating three-dimensional sculptural forms constructed from light. When the viewer moves in and out of the projected light beams, they are forced to reconcile their perceived sense of a three dimensional object in space with the actual reality of the mutable properties of light.
The Globe Shrinks by Barbara Kruger
On 27 March 2010 the Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location “The Globe
Shrinks”, a new video installation by Barbara Kruger.
“The Globe Shrinks” (2010) is a multiple channel video installation that continues
Kruger’s engagement with the kindness and brutality of the everyday, the collision of
declaration and doubt, the duet of pictures and words, the resonance of direct address,
and the unspoken in every conversation.
Barbara Kruger
still from The Globe Shrinks
dimensions variable
four-screen digital video installation
2010
Barbara Kruger is not just an artist who understands the manipulative power of seductive images when combined with a few pointed words. She uses them to hold a mirror to our entire culture — a hotbed of passive aggression if ever one was. At least, that’s the way it looks in “The Globe Shrinks,” an immersive new multichannel video installation that is challenging the presumptions of all who dare to enter the Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea.
Balancing self-possession with self-doubt and rage with tenderness, Kruger’s art does exactly what one of her subtitles says: it show us to ourselves. The globe may shrink for those who own it, as another phrase (borrowed from the critical theorist Homi K. Bhaba) puts it, but Kruger’s perfect calibration of life’s crueler ironies performs a kind of miracle, allowing the blind to see all.
This is the third of a series of video works with which Kruger has translated her widely copied graphic designs — superimposing red or white text over cropped images, or enlarging words into slogans the size of buildings — into propulsive action. Some of the text in “The Globe Shrinks” came out of “Between Being and Dying,” her installation last fall at Lever House, where she covered the windows, columns and floor of the lobby in phrases like “A rich man’s jokes are always funny,” speaking truth to the lords of power and ambition who build palaces like, well, Lever House.
www.maryboonegallery.com
745 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10151
Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence
www.fisher.usc.edu/exhibitions
“Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence” at USC’s Fisher Museum of Art presents the work of a dozen international artists who explore such fundamental mysteries using the substances so often associated with them: light, shadow and atmosphere.
Overall, it’s a relatively tight show — physically involving, emotionally absorbing and conceptually sound. Each artist is represented by a single work, dating from the 1980s to the present, but all have demonstrated over time a broader, deeper engagement with the issues at hand. No artistic integrity was sacrificed in the name of thematic consistency — and that’s one of the show’s most impressive absences.
Oscar Munoz
Alineto (Breath), 2002
The spectacles range in intensity from whispers to roars. One of the quietest works, the Colombian Oscar Munoz’s “Aliento (Breath),” is also one of the most poignant. Five mirrored discs hang at eye level and bear no image but the viewer’s own reflection until breathed upon. Condensation causes another face to emerge, a small photographic portrait of a deceased man or woman, there only briefly, then once again submerged within the disc’s glossy surface. The faces’ anonymity and the brevity of their appearance act as powerful metaphors for our transient condition, our lives as fleeting as a single breath.
Munoz’s delicate act of breathing life into vanished souls competes with the foggy extravaganza of a neighboring installation. Danish artist Jeppe Hein’s “Smoking Bench” blankets you with vaporous plumes when you sit on it. A nearby mirror allows you the pleasure of watching yourself momentarily vanish, a gimmicky but amusing smoke-and-mirrors illusion.
Teresa Margolles
Aire (Air), 2002
Vapors are central to several other works in the show. Five portable humidifiers in Teresa Margolles’ “Aire (Air)” emit gentle streams of air moistened, in part, by water that was used to clean corpses in a Mexican morgue. The notion is stirring, but the piece is otherwise mute.
Rosangela Renno
Experiencing Cinema, 2004
In “Experiencing Cinema,” a better use of atmospherics, Brazilian Rosangela Renno revives an early 19th century phantasmagoria practice of projecting still pictures onto veils of smoke. Photographs, gathered from found family albums, cohere briefly on the smoke screen; then both image and screen dissipate, mortality again provocatively aligned with ephemerality.
The evocative power of shadows and reflections dominates the remaining works. Christian Boltanski’s orbiting dancer, seen in shadow through a partly opened door, is mildly intriguing for its calculated elusiveness. In Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s installation, the movement of viewers triggers the brightness of a row of low-hanging incandescent bulbs, creating a play of overlapping shadows on the opposite wall, but the effort amounts to little. Regina Silveira’s perspectively distorted shadow of a reader (in vinyl, adhered to wall and floor) holding an actual book, feels slight, as if it ought to be part of a larger installation.
Jim Campbell
Library, 2004
Jim Campbell layers a photogravure over a grid of programmed LED lights to create an image of shadowy figures moving up and down the steps of the New York Public Library. Human presence appears as shifting, translucent gray washes across the fixed stone edifice, resulting in a lovely meditation on time, endurance and transience.