Ann Veronica Janssens

WIELS
Av. Van Volxemlaan 354,
September 5–December 6

Ann Veronica Janssens, Blue, Red, and Yellow, 2001/2009, transparent polycarbonate, color PVC gels, smoke machine, 100 x 83 x 82 1/2".

Following solo exhibitions by noted international artists such as Mike Kelley, Yayoi Kusama, and Dan Perjovschi, it now seems that the two-and-a-half-year-old art center in Wiels, Belgium, will focus on a series of shows devoted to the country’s most distinguished contemporary artists. Several months ago, recent works by Luc Tuymans were on display. This time, it’s Ann Veronica Janssens’s turn; her exhibition will be followed by retrospectives of Francis Alÿs and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Although Tuymans’s exhibit was somewhat disappointing, Janssens’s is an undeniable success.

Known for multimedia installations that play with the limits of sensory perception, the artist offers an almost cinematographic experience of light, color, and sound. The exhibition begins violently with Untitled (Martin Mac2000 Performance), 2009, a stroboscopic projection of a changing circle on a screen installed in the center of a large empty room, which is followed by Liquid Bar, 2009, a long metal beam with one side that has hardly been polished, and Untitled (Sons infinis), 2009, an obsessive looped sound track. These works show the viewer that physical phenomena exist outside man and offer the opposite of an anthropocentric viewpoint.

Next up, the exhibition presents a few videos and installations, including Eclipses, 2006–2009, and Jupiter, 2009. Here, the artist rethinks the relationship between humankind and the universe and questions the place of science in the human (re)conquest of time and space. In the third and final part of the exhibit, partially on view on the roof terrace, is a mobile, containerlike structure titled Blue, Red, and Yellow, 2001/2009. From the moment viewers enter this work, they are plunged into a vibrantly hued cloud, and after a few steps they are completely lost in the colors. This piece smartly rounds out the exhibition by presenting, on a metaphoric level, the phenomenon of color as physical. Moreover, it appears as a hallmark of unity between humans and their common experience of the physical environment.

Translated from French by Jane Brodie.

— Yoann Van Parys

“sk-interfaces”

CASINO LUXEMBOURG
41, rue Notre-Dame
September 26–January 10

Orlan, Manteau d’Arlequin (Harlequin Coat), 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

A renewed interest in the human body in contemporary art is interwoven with the emergence of epistemic perspectives that call into question ontological and metaphysical distinctions, both biological and machine-related. Jens Hauser, who has long studied the effects of these phenomena in art, as theoretician and curator (he previously organized “L’Art Biotech” at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes in 2003, among other shows), once again proposes crucial questions with this exhibition. Here, the body is transformed into a landscape, and the artist, a new Argonaut, becomes an explorer of his own somatic galaxy.

This terrain is a continent that remains to be discovered, a proteinic architecture open to kaleidoscopic possibilities of conjugation, as seen in the work of Eduardo Kac, an artist whose Natural History of the Enigma, 2009, is a flower modified by a fragment of his DNA. The body becomes a totality of organs that responds to new technologies rather than a preestablished plan, becoming a “peripheral-body,” as theorist Derrick De Kerckhove calls it, in the hyperhumanist perspective of Stelarc, a performance artist whose Ear on Arm, 1997–2009, is literally a prosthetic, biocompatible ear that communicates with the outside world, implanted in his forearm.

The French artist Orlan short-circuits aesthetic and genetic fascination in Manteau d’Arlequin (Harlequin Coat), 2007, which visualizes the metaphor of cultural crossbreeding, cultivating cells of the artist’s skin with that of other species and people of different ethnicities. Then there is a “theater-body,” as described by the epistemologist Roberto Marchesini, that welcomes otherness, which flares up in a network of hybridized relationships, both on the symbolic level of performance, as in inthewrongplaceness, 2005–2009, by Kira O’Reilly, and on a phenomenological level, in works like Artists’ Skin Cultures, 1996–1997, by Art Orienté Objet, who elevate the cultivation of their own skin cells to the rank of artistic medium.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

“Art or Death?”

MOSCOW MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
25, Petrovka Street
September 23–October 25

Valery Koshlyakov, The Lovers, 1990, paper, collage, photograph, 5 x 2 x 1".

“Art or death?” In perestroika-era Rostov-on-Don, the choice was indeed that stark. Staging impromptu exhibitions in basements, factories, and even a public toilet, the loosely knit Art or Death collective, formed in 1986, believed with an almost religious fervor that art could overcome Soviet life and bring real, unbridled freedom.

In this exhibition of more than two hundred artworks, group ideologue Avdei Ter-Oganyan’s series “Paintings for a Museum,” 1989, has all the unbridled ardency of the half-trained amateur. Sloppy, punkish versions of self-portraits by Rembrandt and Matisse appear not as mere copies but as personal appropriations. Depictions of Ter-Oganyan’s own eyes at times replace those of the other artists, underscoring his attempt to ignore the distant, inaccessible museums that house the original paintings and to find expression in making his own masterpieces from printed reproductions.

Yuri Shabelnikov was the first of the collective to experiment with painting on cheap materials, moving gradually from vivid, expressionistic Spanish-themed paintings to trans-avant-gardist abstractions. But it was Valery Koshlyakov who made that unabashed technical cheapness his own. Raiding an abandoned building for photographs of forgotten Soviet actors, he enlarged some of the images and doodled messy abstractions over them in Decorating the Beautiful, 1989, and glued a picture of a happy couple inside a crumpled cigarette pack in The Lovers, 1990.

As the group disbanded and trickled toward Moscow in 1991, the impossibility of its utopia led to deaths of several sorts. Some members have long since passed away, with scarcely any work from the period left to remember them by. For the others, Ilya Kabakov’s 1992 installation The Toilet––a veritable mausoleum of the Soviet everyday––seemed to confirm that life, with all its petty pains and irrelevances, had triumphed for good.

— Max Seddon

Anna Jermolaewa

XL GALLERY
Podkolokolny per. 16/2
October 20–November 22

Anna Jermolaewa, Der Weg nach oben (The Way Up), 2008, still from a color video, 7 minutes.

This solo exhibition by the Vienna-based Russian artist Anna Jermolaewa offers a single video projection: Der Weg nach oben (The Way Up), 2008, which shows a group of rats trapped inside a glass cage in an animal market in Mexico City. Restrained in this small space, the rodents ruthlessly try to climb upward and look for escape, one above and against the other, in desperation. By capturing this distressing and claustrophobic scene, Jermolaewa turns a seemingly commonplace aspect of everyday life into a revealing moment with multiple meanings. On the one hand, she makes the viewer a witness to cruelty. On the other, she draws attention to the rats’ physical and social structures and their similitude to those of humans. Perhaps the rats in this work are used to exalt aspects of our own identity, since we live in a modern society but are hardwired with an animal consciousness. The Way Up might be considered, then, as a choreography of survival attempts of the day-to-day variety in our not-so-human environment.

— Claudia Arozqueta

Sean Snyder

INDEX
Kungsbro Strand 19
September 16–October 25

Sean Snyder, Aparatna (35 mm Projection Room), Former Military Educational Facility, Kyiv, 2007, digital C-print, 23 x 31". From the series “Index,” 2007–2009.

Sean Snyder’s recent work seems to represent a moment of pause and methodological reflection in his practice. Of the two sections constituting this exhibition, this is perhaps more evident in “Index,” 2007–2009: a series of black-and-white photographs of his working tools and media-storage facilities, including digital cameras, a USB drive, a pencil, and a microscope. Here, Snyder’s project—to digitize his own archive—seems to have prompted him to carry out an archaeological investigation of the media technologies of past decades. In a sense, “Index” becomes a monument to our rapidly aging means of inscribing memory, and by extension it directs attention to the fragility and volatility of the archives and monuments from which history derives its substance.

The main work on view, however, is Snyder’s film Exhibition, 2008, based on a 1965 educational and propagandist documentary from Soviet-era Ukraine about an exhibition of Mexican art. The basic aim of Exhibition appears fairly straightforward: It is an anachronistic remontage of the found film, in which Snyder, by omitting certain sequences and adding his own intertitles, has edited out the ideological content of the original material and instead reinscribed the images into the patterns and conventions of contemporary exhibition making. The sequences are reduced, recomposed, and presented under familiar categories, such as “installation,” “exhibition,” and “seminar.” The film not only subjects the material to a critical work of distortion and reinterpretation that provokes a set of complicated questions about historiographical models and responsibility but also economically juxtaposes two historically and ideologically differing modes of displaying and communicating documents—in this case, the Mexican artworks of a 1965 exhibition, presented by Snyder as if it took place today. Thus, both Snyder’s film and photographs subtly address a fundamental problem: In what ways—and using what means, with their various inherent qualities and limitations—is history recorded and transmitted? How do the transformations of historiography’s tools over time affect the narratives that are written?

— Kim West

Haris Epaminonda

RODEO GALLERY
Tütün Deposu, Lüleci Hendek Caddesi No. 12,
October 10–December 5

View of “Haris Epaminonda,” 2009.

To the right of the entrance hangs a small, framed book page that depicts a man looking up at a towering termite mound. The unusual scale and perspective of this landscape with figure sets the tone for the formation and play of space experienced in Epaminonda’s “VOL. IV.” The exhibition follows Epaminonda’s solo presentation “VOL. I, II & III,” which took place at the Malmö Konsthall earlier this year, and here the mazelike reorganization of the space contains a series of three-dimensional collages that Epaminonda describes as “sentences. ” While the first is made up of just one found folio—the image of the man and termite mound—subsequent collages mix bought sculptures placed on pedestals with both black-and-white and colorful secondhand bookplates framed and hung or, in the densest composition, stacked against the wall. Her desire to play with traditional museum hierarchies and the usual formats of display is evident in each scene, but also in the way the presentation feels like an illustrated encyclopedia from which different images or shapes are allowed to haunt the memory, the relationships among them left open to interpretation.

What is striking is that the only objects made to measure by Epaminonda are the beautifully crafted pedestals, each one handpainted in a shade of white or eggshell gray, alongside carefully chosen palettes for the numerous frames. This attention to certain details shifts focus onto the pieces whose job it is to support the objects of display, pieces that in this exhibition also take on the more prominent role of masking and hiding selected iconography. A final statement locates the entire exhibition: A delicate wooden sculpture ensquares the gallery’s central column in a tense embrace, framing it as an implied image that ironically can never be captured in publication.

— November Paynter

Sarkis

ISTANBUL MODERN
Meclis-i Mebusan Cad. Liman Sahasi, Antrepo No:4
September 11–January 10

View of “Sarkis,” 2009.

Sarkis’s exhibition at the Istanbul Modern emphasizes the empathic relationship that the artist has always established with the locations of his shows—his constant desire to interact with the public. He invigorates the concept of site-specificity, transforming his first large-scale retrospective in Turkey into what he calls a “rendezvous exhibition”: a panorama that opens onto his life and work as he leafs through a powerful archive of memory.

“Montage-images,” as termed by Georges Didi-Huberman, which merge the temporal context of the image with that of the viewer, are resemanticized through a careful selection of approximately fifty shots. Installation views of past exhibitions, monumentalized and themselves turned into works of art on the walls of the museum, create a self-referential tautology—successful from the curatorial standpoint, spectacular in terms of the installation—and lead viewers deep into the artist’s weltanschauung.

His practice, characterized by the hybridization of languages and by unusual versatility, conjoins his own native culture—its archetypal and anthropological roots, its Volksgeist—with the demands of contemporaneity, formalized in a strongly evocative and complex standpoint. A series of echoes, memories, and references rebound throughout the exhibition path, taken from both his personal story (Genuine piano and stool, 1997–) and his professional life (12 signs for the São Paulo Biennial, 1985–), from both history (as in Sarajevo Bombed, 1998) and art history, whether Friedrich (Eight videos referencing Caspar David Friedrich paintings, 2006–2007) or Cage (Roaratorio, 1996–2000). The exhibition as a whole can be read as a single work in progress, whose layout, exhibited as a scale model, is in turn a symbol of the artist’s entire operation. Sarkis proposes a colossal rereading of his work through paradigmatic passages of his artistic-existential path. He offers multiple possibilities of interpretation, creating a bridge between the past, the present, and the future of his work, constantly in progress, marked by a continuity of choices and a plurality of orientations.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola