International Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Erewhon (Denniston), 2004, color photograph on aluminum in Plexiglas box, 70 7/8 x 70 7/8".
Jane and Louise Wilson
CENTRO DE ARTE MODERNA DA FUNDAÇÃO CALOUSTE GULBENKIAN
LISBON
Through April 18
Curated by Isabel Carlos
The Wilsons possess an uncanny ability to elicit the historical and psychological reverberations of architectural space through their eerie, seductive, and hauntingly atmospheric film and video installations of sites such as the abandoned East German secret-police headquarters of Stasi City, 1997, and the ruined New Zealand hospitals of Erewhon, 2004— places that are decrepit, out of time. While the CAM exhibition focuses mainly on work produced in the past three years, “Suspending Time” will nonetheless be the largest survey of the sisters’ output to date, comprising several multichannel installations, including their most recent, Songs for My Mother, 2009, and five site-specific sculptures. Accompanied by a catalogue with texts by critic Mark Cousins, curator Isabel Carlos, and others, this show should be a primer for anyone interested in the elegant interweaving of real and depicted space by means of the moving image.
— Barry Schwabsky
Artur Barrio, SITUAÇÃO.................. ORHHHHHH..., 1969. Performance view, Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 1969. Photo: César Carneiro.
“Tropicália”
KUNSTHALLE WIEN
VIENNA
Through May 2
Curated by Thomas Mießgang
The recent fire that destroyed much of Hélio Oiticica’s oeuvre portends that even more attention will be given to an already hot area—1960s Brazil—in coming years. Reprising a 2006 survey at the Barbican in London, this show focuses on the generative effect of Oiticica’s 1967 Tropicália environment, which spawned a short-lived but fertile movement across the arts in Rio de Janeiro. As with the earlier effort, Tropicalismo is here conflated with neoconcreto (Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape) and Brazilian conceptualism (Cildo Meireles, Antonio Dias), emphasizing participation and sensory appeal, though the differences between these movements may prove equally compelling. The show brings together roughly seventy pieces, including material from contemporary artists such as Assume Vivid Astro Focus and Ernesto Neto, whose work suggests that today Tropicália is more a national tradition than an avant-garde.
— Daniel Quiles
Mark Boulos, All That Is Solid Melts into Air, 2008, still from a two-channel color video, 15 minutes.
Morality
WITTE DE WITH
ROTTERDAM
Through June 1
Curated by Juan A. Gaitán and Nicholas Schaffhausen
It seems a given among contemporary practitioners that all art is political and therefore implicitly holds an ethical position. No doubt that idea will be healthily interrogated in Witte de With’s ambitious nine-month project comprising five exhibitions, film and performance programs, a three-day symposium, a website, a culminating publication, and an intriguingly broad list of artists, ranging from Sarah Morris to Nedko Solakov to participants in the Polish punk scene of the 1980s. What needs to be taken into account is an anthropology of morals that instantiates moralities, not morality, and countermands any universalist ideal of Kant’s founding question of ethical action, “What ought I to do?” The answers offered by this hugely ambitious project will surely be kaleidoscopic, encyclopedic, and highly contestable.
— Steven Henry Madoff
Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (America), 1994, lightbulbs, waterproof extension cords, waterproof rubber sockets. Installation view, Lymington Road, London, 2000.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form
WIELS CONTEMPORARY ARTS CENTRE
BRUSSELS
Through April 25
Curated by Elena Filipovic with Danh Vo
Remember Felix Gonzalez-Torres? The question is not facetious. As the universe spins us further away from his time on earth, one of the better questions is: Whose memories, whose records, will shape the artist’s legacy in years to come? Will it be the institutions that administer his eternally mutable sculptures? The nameless viewers who set them in motion? Or the generation of artists eating cucumber sandwiches in his cool, conceptual shade? Elena Filipovic has an exquisite response: Assemble some fifty pieces of Gonzalez-Torres’s work made between 1986 and the mid-’90s, and invite a different artist to reinstall the exhibition at each of its European venues. Danh Vo will take the first turn, at Wiels, followed by Carol Bove at Fondation Beyeler in Basel (May 21–Aug. 28) and Tino Sehgal at Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt in 2011.
— Joe Scanlan
Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X (version 2) #1, 2000, vinyl paint and oil-based printed ink on canvas, 122 3/8 x 91 1/2".
“Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic”
TATE LIVERPOOL
LIVERPOOL, UK
Through April 25
Curated by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter
The anchor of this century-spanning show is Paul Gilroy’s 1993 study The Black Atlantic, which debunked the notion of a universal black racial identity and argued for the centrality of the black diaspora’s role in shaping twentieth century modernist aesthetics. With five of this exhibition’s sixty-five artists hailing from Africa, “Afro Modern” avoids a major shortcoming of Gilroy’s book: the absence of discussion of objects and ideas generated by Africans in Africa. This survey of some 150 works encompasses not only diaspora artists such as Romare Bearden and Keith Piper and African nationals such as Uche Okeke and Candice Breitz but also canonical European modernists like Picasso and Calder. This is thrilling. The accompanying catalogue contains writing by Manthia Diawara, Édouard Glissant, Thelma Golden, Kobena Mercer, and others.
— Chika Okeke-Agulu
Elizabeth Peyton, Matthew, 2008, oil on board, 12 1/2 x 9".
Elizabeth Peyton
BONNEFANTENMUSEUM
MAASTRICHT
Through March 21
Curated by Laura Hoptman
What becomes a legend most? In the 1970s, Lillian Helman clad in a Blackglama mink did the trick. Nowadays, the grandest compliment that fine art pays to glamour and celebrity might be Elizabeth Peyton's portraits. In a rather different but perhaps no less resonant way, Peyton is as much a signature artist of the '90s as Matthew Barney, the subject of a recent Peyton portrait—and, given her proclivity for skinny, languorous, seemingly lipstick-besmirched ephebi, an uncharacteristic one. Bringing together more than one hundred works, the New Museum surveys fifteen years of the artist's career. The catalogue includes essays by curator Laura Hoptman, Iwona Blazwick, and poet and superearly Warhol icon John Giorno.