“Assume the Position”

TOWNHOUSE GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART
10 Nabrawy Street, off Champollion Street, Downtown
December 13–January 17

Osama Dawod, Summit #3, 2007, color photograph, 20 x 27 1/2".

For an exhibition exploring various expressions of distraction, “Assume the Position” is remarkably (and perhaps paradoxically) focused. Featuring works of seven disparate international artists and a cache of archival photographs from the collection of Amgad Naguib (whose ramshackle junk shop in downtown Cairo is as wondrous and illuminating as David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles), the show, the first by curator Nikki Columbus, is both elegant and concise in its conception and execution. It is also a serious, far-reaching, and provocative rumination on the ethical and behavioral dimensions of performance and spectatorship in the field of contemporary art.

Take the trio from Naguib’s collection, for example––photographs of bystanders crowding around car crashes in Egypt, culled from the archives of the newspaper Al-Gomhuria. Adjacent are Enrique Metinides’s similarly sensational photographs made for a newspaper in Mexico City. The show moves nimbly through a series of incongruously beautiful works, from Cyprien Gaillard’s Real Remnants of Fictive Wars I, 2003, to the Atlas Group/Walid Raad’s I Only Wish That I Could Weep, 2002, and Osama Dawod’s photographs of G8 Summit protestors in Germany taking a breather (or a leak) in a lush, tranquil landscape of wheat fields. Rounding out the exhibition are selections by Sanja Iveković, Jill Magid, and David Levine, all which deal more explicitly with performativity, power, and position.

But the crux of Columbus’s inquiry surfaced outside the gallery entirely, with a performance by Amal Kenawy that was staged only once, a few days after the exhibition opened. Kenawy is adept at crafting highly symbolic imagery. Performances have included sewing an enormous pink blanket around a crumbling structure in Sharjah and setting a white wedding dress on fire amid the ruins of a Byzantine church in Amman. Here, she enlisted around fifteen people, including a dozen day laborers hired for the occasion, to crawl on their hands and knees across a congested intersection in downtown Cairo. However simple the idea may have been in the artist’s mind, when the piece was placed in context, it was so politically charged that an explosive shouting match about dignity, humiliation, national identity, and Egypt’s image in the eyes of the world ensued. Kenawy and all but three of the performers ended up in police custody overnight. It was over-the-top melodrama, to be sure, but it also raised tough questions about the responsibilities and ramifications of such work.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

“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

Kosuke Ichikawa

FOIL GALLERY 　
1-2-11 #201, Higashi-Kanda, Chiyoda-ku
January 15–February 6

Kosuke Ichikawa, Untitled, 2009, paper, incense, 37 x 60".

Nothing in “Murmur,” Kosuke Ichikawa’s first solo exhibition at this gallery, can be taken for granted. The images, which look like high-contrast photographs when reproduced, are not only done by hand but are created through pigmenting and burning sheets of washi paper with incense sticks—a decidedly involved technique that intensifies the significance of the artist’s touch. The content is similarly illusory: Ostensibly generic depictions of woods turn out to be the imprints of Ichikawa’s memories, spontaneous flashbacks allegorically burned into his subconscious, then literally onto the paper. Even his process—Ichikawa begins from the upper right corner, descending toward the lower left, “scanning” the surface—is an affront to the conventional in-depth reconstructions of multiplanar landscapes.

This is the second generation of Ichikawa’s incense pictures. Earlier incarnations were interesting enough but lacked the spatial complexity he reaches in the current show. The artist uses about sixty varieties of incense here, all with their own footprint—some sepia toned, some charcoal black. Still, there is nothing decorative or narrative in his works, despite the fact that many of them represent the image of trees. Close up, their lacelike patterns dissolve into abstract arrangements, proving just how dispensable drawing may be in representational work.

Not surprisingly, it is the most representational, lifelike works where the clash between the subject matter (the woods) and their incinerated fragments is most apparent. This clash, of course, is inherent in Ichikawa’s larger approach: In order to create the contrasts of light and dark, he carves away from the surface, reducing instead of adding. With that, the metaphor of the flashlight cutting through the darkness of nocturnal forest comes full circle—its beam transforms into the warmth of an incense stick, re-creating the image that has been glowing in the artist’s mind: some new kind of mental rayograph.

— Julia Friedman

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

“America”

BEIRUT ART CENTER
Jisr El Wati, off Corniche an Nahr. Building 13, Street 97, Zone 66 Adlieh.
October 21–January 16

Mounir Fatmi, Out of History, 2005–2009, still from a color video, 38 minutes.

With seminal, historic works by Joseph Beuys, William Eggleston, and Martha Rosler alongside more recent efforts by Ziad Antar, Mounir Fatmi, and the duo of Julia Meltzer and David Thorne, the latest exhibition at the Beirut Art Center is eclectic almost to the point of incoherence. The title, “America,” is also totally misleading. This is neither a survey nor a statement about the art, history, or politics of the United States. The accompanying curatorial text may ape the attitude of Jean Baudrillard’s America (1989), but it articulates little in terms of tangible themes. In fact, the show seems to have come together more through a process of vague intuition and loose association than as a result of any desire to construct a clear argument or explore a singular idea. But somehow, it works—on the one hand because the sixteen selected pieces are so resonant in this particular context (sharing concerns with many artists in Beirut while diverging productively on the level of form), on the other because the show is bolstered by a truly stellar eleven-part program of related events, including an artist’s talk by Kara Walker (whose video Testimony: Narrative of a Negress Burdened by Good Intentions, 2004, is one of the exhibition’s standouts) and a workshop on political graphics led by the former Black Panther Party member Emory Douglas.

Instead of addressing an amorphous territory, “America” could have easily been staged under a title evoking agitated or excised histories, episodes of injustice and repression, or strategies of artistic subversion and creative interference. For example, Fatmi’s terrific video installation Out of History, 2005–2009, features interview footage with David Hilliard, another former Black Panther, layered under still images of declassified government documents, many of them heavily redacted. (Photocopies of those same documents are papered over the walls enclosing the room in which the video is being projected.) Coaxing Hilliard to speak on everything from dialectical materialism to the commonalities between the Black Panthers in America in the 1960s and Palestinians in Gaza today, the work sidesteps nostalgia and the romance of long-lost revolutionary moments and explores more pointedly what can be resurrected from the past and still have meaning and purpose in the present.

— Kaelen Wilson-Goldie

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

Fiona Foley

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, SYDNEY
140 George Street, The Rocks
November 12–January 31

Fiona Foley, HHH #1, 2004, color photograph, 76 x 101".

Fiona Foley is one of Australia’s leading indigenous artists, and this solo exhibition presents a selection of her output from the past fifteen years. “Native Blood” and “Badtjala Woman,” two black-and-white photographic series from 1994, are among her best-known works on view. Based on ethnographic photography, the pictures portray the artist bare-chested, adorned with simple seed necklaces, and holding a traditional woven basket. These works, along with many others in this excellent survey, subvert the way photography was used by white colonists in the early twentieth century to document the “exotic.”

Foley engages not only contemporary indigenous politics in Australia but also the formation of identity politics in a global age. For example, “HHH,” 2004, a series she developed during a residency in New York, depicts surviving members of the Hedonistic Honky Haters, a defunct secret society of African Americans founded during the 1960s. The black headpieces and brightly patterned cloaks that the members wear in these images are reminiscent of Ku Klux Klan costumes. Immediately confrontational, Foley invites us to imagine alternative political histories by presenting images that play on our assumptions of dominance.

While Foley brings race relations to the fore, she regards herself as an “educator” rather than a political artist. The exhibition includes several works that are presented in their original installation format, including “Wild Times Call,” 2001, a photographic series she developed during a residency in America, which depicts the artist dressed in Seminole regalia. Partly inspired by a fashion shoot that Foley saw in Oprah’s magazine, O, this series plays on the voyeuristic representation of indigenous people in the media. In order to see these sepia-toned photographs, viewers are invited to take off their shoes and wade through an ankle-high sea of yellow corn kernels. The sensuous feeling of the material underfoot is a simple gesture, but it allows the audience to think about the construction of images through an interrogation of the ground from which they perceive it.

— Jane Somerville

James Cousins and Simon Ingram

GOW LANGSFORD GALLERY
26 Lorne Street, PO Box 546
January 9–January 23

View of “James Cousins and Simon Ingram,” 2009. From left: James Cousins, Drought, 2010; Simon Ingram, Riser, 2009; James Cousins, Y.F. 4, 2009; Simon Ingram, Untitled, 2009.

Gow Langsford is touting its new “Initiative” exhibition series as a forum for the gallery’s artists to show what is, in the context of chiefly formalist practices, more or less experimental work. “TAG,” the project’s inaugural entry, offers abstract paintings by James Cousins and Simon Ingram. Ranged around the space in ones and twos, the diminutive panels perform a variety of material and compositional stunts, the paired artists’ contributions interacting neatly with each other to the degree that they nearly appear as products of a single hand. All the pictures make use of intense color, Cousins adding the counterpoint of allover textural effects, while Ingram relies on simple, linear brushwork.

Known for using “artificial life systems” as a governing creative principle and for constructing picture-making robots, Ingram customarily produces large-scale canvases and uses video to document the semiautomatic processes by which they come into being. Of his works on display here, two feature the staccato dabs of pigment characteristic of the artist’s machine-made works, while a third weaves a maplike composition around a tight grid. Cousins has also made previous use of partially or apparently mechanistic and schematic techniques, using complex masking to make and unmake painted surfaces. But while much of his recent work has employed stylized landscape imagery, the works here are largely cast adrift from identifiable figuration. The strain of experimentation that “TAG” presents is, then, only subtly divergent from its participants’ norms, but the dialogue it acknowledges is a rewarding one.

— Michael Wilson