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Tomás Saraceno On Space Time Foam

Tomás Saraceno is an artist and architect internationally known for his visionary and surprising installations accessible to the public and able to modify the perception of architectural spaces. His oeuvre, inspired by the tradition of 20th-century utopian architecture, stems from the desire to create aerial structures that can be inhabited by people, are self-sufficient and have a low environmental impact.

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Rebecca Horn: Body Art, Performance & Installations

Since the beginning of the 1970s, Rebecca Horn has been creating an oeuvre which constitutes an ever-growing flow of performances, films, sculptures, spatial installations, drawings and photographs

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Color Jam by Jessica Stockholder

Jessica Stockholder’s latest work, “Color Jam,” begins a summer-long occupation of an intersection in the Loop in downtown Chicago. By wrapping the four corners of State and Adams Streets (and parts of buildings there) in swaths of burnt orange, lime green and turquoise

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Tomás Saraceno: Cloud City

Artist Tomás Saraceno (born in Tucumán, Argentina, in 1973) will create a constellation of large, interconnected modules constructed with transparent and reflective materials for the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden

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Underwater Pool by Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich is known for installations that seem to defy the basic laws of physics and befuddle the viewer, who is introduced into jarring environments that momentarily threaten a sense of balance or space. For this exhibition, Erlich presents one of his most well-known and critically acclaimed pieces, Swimming Pool.

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Cindy Sherman’s Retrospective At MOMA

Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting.

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Talk to Me: Design and Technology

July 24–November 7, 2011
MOMA NY

The purpose of design began to shift in the late 20th century from utility toward a more holistic combination of purpose and meaning. Contemporary designers do not just provide function, form, and meaning, but also must draft the scripts that allow people and things to develop and improvise a dialogue.

New branches of design practice have emerged in the past decades that combine design’s old-fashioned preoccupations—with form, function, and meaning—with a focus on the exchange of information and even emotion. Communication design deals with the delivery of messages, encompassing graphic design, wayfinding, and communicative objects of all kinds, from printed materials to three-dimensional and digital projects. Interface and interaction design delineate the behavior of products and systems as well as the experiences that people will have with them. Information and visualization design deal with the maps, diagrams, and tools that filter and make sense of information. In critical design, conceptual scenarios are built around hypothetical objects to comment on the social, political, and cultural consequences of new technologies and behaviors.

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Carsten Höller: Experience at The New Museum

October 26, 2011–January 15, 2012
www.newmuseum.org

Carsten Höller was born in 1961 in Brussels, Belgium, to German parents. He studied agricultural entomology at the University of Kiel where he received his doctorate in 1988. By the 1990s, he began to make artworks and eventually abandoned science as profession to pursue a career as an artist.

Höller is frequently inspired by research and experiments from scientific history and deploys these studies in works that alter the audience’s physical and psychological sensations, inspiring doubt and uncertainty about the world around them. His work often draws on social spaces outside of the museum such as the amusement park, zoo, or playground, but the experiences they provide are always far from our usual expectations of these activities.

Giant Triple Mushrooms, 2010

Höller’s art takes the form of proposals for radical, new ways of living by creating sculptures and diagrams for visionary architecture as well as transportation alternatives, such as his renowned slide installations. These concepts may seem impossible in the present day, but suggest new models for the future.

Each floor of the exhibition explores a different general theme within Höller’s work to provide a carefully choreographed journey through the building and the artist’s oeuvre.

Mirror Carousel (2005)

The fourth floor focuses on the theme of movement—featuring the artist’s spectacular Mirror Carousel (2005), which provides riders with a notably different physical experience than the traditional fairground merry-go-round, while at the same time reflecting and illuminating the space surrounding it.

The third floor gathers together works that seek to provide an altered or utopian experience of architectural space. For example, his Giant Psycho Tank (2000) invites viewers to float weightlessly in the water of a sensory deprivation pool, providing a tenebrous, out-of-body experience.

Giant Psycho Tank, 1999

Over the years, the artist has employed psychotropic drugs, flashing lights, and other stimuli to potentially alter the viewer’s mental state. His new site-specific installation on the second floor, Double Light Corner, flickers back and forth on a central axis, creating an immersive, hallucinatory experience.

Light Room, 2008

The work is paired with a recreation of Höller’s Experience Corridor in which the viewer is given the choice to undertake a number of self-experiments.

Functioning as an alternative transportation system within the Museum, one of Holler’s signature slide installations will run from the fourth floor to the second, perforating ceilings and floors, to shuttle viewers through the exhibition as a giant 102-foot-long pneumatic mailing system.

Untitled (Slide), 2011

The sculptures, Giant Triple Mushrooms (2010), icons of the kind of personal exploratory journey that his work has always centered on, will also be on view.

Giant Triple Mushrooms, 2010

Taken as a whole, Höller’s work is an invitation to re-imagine the way in which we move through the world and the relationships we build as he asks us to reconsider what we think we know about ourselves.

Monumenta 2011: Leviathan by Anish Kapoor

Monumenta 2011
May 11- June 23

Each year MONUMENTA invites an internationally renowned contemporary artist to appropriate the 13,500 m² of the Grand Palais Nave with an artwork specially created for the event. This year the Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor was invited to create “Leviathan”, an aesthetic and physical shock, an experience of colour that is simultaneously poetic, thoughtful and formidable, one on a scale with the verticality and light of the Nave.

Like the Biblical sea-monster of the same name, Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan embodies a sense of extraordinary, dark power. Leviathan is emblematic of death by drowning in the depths of the ocean, and a force capable of summoning giant waves and tempests. The great beast became synonymous with political metaphor following the publication of Thomas Hobbes’s classic text Leviathan in 1651, presenting the ‘war of every man against every man’ that inevitably prevails in humankind’s primordial ‘state of nature’.

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Laurie Simmons: Love Doll

The Love Doll: Days 1-30
Feb 15 – Mar 26
http://salon94.com

In the fall of 2009, Simmons ordered a customized, high end Love Doll from Japan. The doll, designed as a surrogate sex partner, arrived in a crate, clothed in a transparent slip and accompanied by a separate box containing an engagement ring and female genitalia. Simmons began to document her photographic relationship with this human scale ‘girl’. The resulting photographs depict the lifelike, latex doll in an ongoing series of ‘actions’, shown and titled chronologically from the day Simmons received the doll, through to the present.

The photos reveal the relationship Simmons develops with her model. The first days depict a somewhat formal and shy series of poses with an ever increasing familiarity and comfort level unveiled as time passes. A second doll arrived one year later. This new character, and the interaction between the two, reveal yet another dynamic in composition – both formally and psychologically.

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Performance 9: Allora & Calzadilla at MOMA

Official Website: www.moma.org
December 8, 2010–January 10, 2011
Performances take place hourly starting at 11:30 a.m. every day the Museum is open.

For the ninth installment of the Performance Exhibition Series, the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla present Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a Prepared Piano (2008).

For this piece, the artists carved a hole in the center of a grand piano, through which a pianist plays the famous Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, usually referred to as “Ode to Joy.” The performer leans over the keyboard and plays upside down and backwards, while moving with the piano across the vast atrium.

Performance 9

The result is a structurally incomplete version of the ode—the hole in the piano renders two octaves inoperative—that fundamentally transforms both the player/instrument dynamic and the signature melody, underlining the contradictions and ambiguities of a song that has long been invoked as a symbol of humanist values and national pride.