“The Marks We Make”

GOODMAN GALLERY
176 Sir Lowry Road, 3rd Floor,
January 23–February 11

William Kentridge, Construction for Return (Conductor), 2008, paper, india ink, printed pages, collage, wooden sticks, wooden board, adhesive tape, glue, dimensions variable.

In “The Marks We Make,” the drawn line is out for a walk. This group exhibition catches the mobile medium in an exploded field, framing the mark expansively as a cognitive and spatial mapping, as well as wrinkles of the self or furrows in the landscape. Having decisively wandered off the sheet of paper, drawing now dribbles down walls and flies through space. Belinda Blignaut’s Cinderella Is Pissed, 2010, performs the former operation in a projectile spew of pink chewing gum and spit, while William Kentridge’s sculptural maquette, Construction for Return (Conductor), 2008, has evicted part of the letter R onto a nearby wall. The viewer is left to “draw” the fragmented and dispersed image together: first by circling the sculpture predatorily in order to find the point where the mass of torn paper coheres into the word RETURN, then by imaginatively peeling the exiled letter off the wall and “returning” it to its base for legibility.

If Kentridge’s piece forces the viewer to stitch two dimensions into three, pulling drawing into sculpture, washy paintings on paper by Robert Hodgins, Moshekwa Langa, and Marlene Dumas, as well as Claire Gavronsky’s calligraphic pastel-on-paper drawing, all tread the tissue-thin terrain between drawing and painting. Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s remarkable series “Red House,” 2006, particularly succeeds in embedding a formal engagement with the slippages of media in a forceful poetics of content: The elegaic tracings and desperate scratches depicted in their photographs are the residues left by Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish prisoners on the walls of the notorious Ba’athist prison. These last images embody the show’s intermedia aesthetics most potently, marrying the mechanical finality of the camera with the drawn-out process of drawing, and underscoring the latter as a gouging out of surface that is always ringed with the aura of the body.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

“Permanent Migrants”

INHERITANCE: SHENZHEN
104 Block 10, Hetang Community, Huaxia Rd., Nanshan District,
December 7–February 15

View of “Permanent Migrants,” 2009.

Located between a village and a shopping mall, “Permanent Migrants,” the inaugural exhibition in this pop-up alternative space, appropriately reflects the conditions of contemporary art production in Shenzhen throughout its brief history. A retrospective of an entire city should be a daunting task, and indeed this project is far from complete. Nevertheless, the artists who made Shenzhen their home, however briefly, seem to share a particular sensibility, veering between the public and the private in an attempt to define and intervene in the urban condition.

Work exhibited by many of the best-known artists in the exhibition will be familiar to international audiences: Yang Yong’s portraits of prostitutes and construction workers, Jiang Zhi’s light-based photography, Liu Chuang’s social sculpture bought from new immigrants, and Christian Jankowski’s plastic-guitar-as-stereo project. The exhibition excels most where it rediscovers early and marginal work by artists known for their outsider status, as with Bai Xiaoci’s slide show of local domestic spaces or Chu Yun’s light boxes consisting of his own possessions photographed with the visual rhetoric of billboard advertisements. This project marks a necessary rehabilitation of southern China as a distinct cultural territory; though the majority of artists in the exhibition have since moved to Beijing or back to their home cities, the work they produced in Shenzhen maintains a pioneering character within the context of this disturbingly mobile region.

— Robin Peckham

Dor Guez

PETACH TIKVA MUSEUM
Museum Complex, Yad Labanim, 30 Arlozorov St., Pob 1,
November 11–February 20

Dor Guez, Lydd Ruins 10 (Market Square), 2009, color photograph, 47 1/4 x 59".

The ruins of history and the repression of memory—both personal recollections and collective experience—inform this solo exhibition by Dor Guez. Curated by Drorit Gur Arie, the show takes its title, “Georgiopolis,” from the ancient Christian name for the Israeli city of Lod (or Lydd). The main hall of the museum contains a highly evocative photographic series: silent images from which emerge fragments of an ancient city seemingly suspended outside time. The photographs are characterized by evanescent colors and by the theatrical use of a twilight luminosity that makes them extremely pictorial, magnifying their dramatic nature and encouraging the dimension of memory. The visual focus of the installation is a monumental projection of the Church of Saint George’s iconostasis, which emphasizes the general sense of alienation and, with the skillful lighting, imbues the entire space with a certain hieratic quality that brings to mind the sheer volume of a church interior.

The iconography of the dilapidated city landscape becomes a metaphor for the artist’s anxieties and desires and, at the same time, mirrors a society intent on confronting the abysses of its own consciousness, vividly explicated in the remainder of the exhibition. In a destabilizing synthesis of art and life, Guez exposes the Arab-Christian history of his own family, tied to the events of the city, from the 1948 Israeli occupation to the present. Four video interviews reveal a tale across three generations. The medium, shorn of any symbolic character—even in the intimacy of the autobiographical, sometimes confessional story—becomes documentary and political. It is an aesthetic strategy suitable for pointing out the “uncomfortable” situation of the Arab-Christian community, now Israeli although Palestinian in origin, a “minority within the minority” of the Muslim Arab community. The agonizing mosaic of diverse experiences torn from the private realm prompts reflection as it speaks of intolerance, of injustices large and small, of microhistories located at the intersection of multiple cultural, religious, and ethnic references.

Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.

— Eugenio Viola

Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

QUEENSLAND ART GALLERY
Melbourne Street (south end of the Victoria Bridge)
December 5–April 5

Choe Yong Sun, The Construction Site, 2005, linocut on paper, 26 x 21".

When Queensland Art Gallery’s fifth Asia Pacific Triennial opened in 2005, it could not help but play second fiddle to the vast new Gallery of Modern Art it inaugurated, where it complemented QAG’s remarkable collection of contemporary work from the region. Its successor seems much more up for the game, occupying the entirety of the space (and then some) to provide a more concentrated and coherent installation that lives up to the event’s reputation for breaking new ground.

In this edition, established superstars like Subodh Gupta, Runa Islam, and Yoshitomo Nara sit alongside lesser-known contributors from countries making their first appearance in the triennial, most notably Iran, Myanmar, Tibet, and North Korea. This formula is repeated in the event’s extensive cinematheque program, where the work of Ang Lee and Takeshi Kitano is reconsidered amid a laudable retrospective of Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh and a historical survey of Iranian animation, while the cross-media approach extends to a performance program, listening post, and CD compilation of Pacific reggae artists.

For all the stunning individual pieces on offer—Islam’s gorgeous 16-mm films, say, and Kohei Nawa’s beguiling pixelated deer, and the row of Xinsheng houses salvaged by Chen Qiulin—it is collaborative production that emerges as the major theme within the exhibition. This idea of collective authorship encompasses Wit Pimkanchanapong’s cardboard fruit workshop, Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s cooperation with Laotian art students, and Nara’s collaboration with graf media as YNG; it figures in Tin Wun Aung and Wah Nu’s poignant miniatures of inoffensive contemporary art exhibitions that would be impossible to realize in their home of Myanmar; while in Mansudae Art Studio’s stylized, state-sanctioned images of daily life in North Korea, it finds easily its most complicated and thought-provoking manifestation.

— Reuben Keehan