June 30, 2023
Every month, Berlin Art Link shines a spotlight on international exhibitions and events with our Worldwide Hit List. We want to highlight artists, galleries, museums and new projects touching on a variety of topics, employing multiple media and featuring diverse subjects. Below are some of the stand-outs that we’ve selected for the month of July.
Pioneer Works
Xin Liu: ‘Seedlings and Offsprings’
Jenson Leonard: ‘Workflow’
Exhibitions: July 7–Sept. 10, 2023
pioneerworks.org
159 Pioneer St, Brooklyn, NY 11231, USA, click here for map
This summer, Pioneer Works in Brooklyn presents two solo exhibitions: Xin Liu’s ‘Seedlings and Offsprings’ and Jenson Leonard’s ‘Workflow.’ Inspired by Aria Dean’s 2017 essay ‘Notes on Blacceleration,’ ‘Workflow’ centers on the eponymous film that addresses the commodification of Black individuals in the labor market while connecting it to history stemming back to the transatlantic slave trade. Leonard also examines the repetitive nature of work and its embodied violence, paralleling modern workplace practices to historical methods developed during slavery. Meanwhile, ‘Seedlings and Offsprings’ features Xin Liu’s recent and ongoing projects, including sculptures, video, virtual reality and an outdoor installation. The artworks explore themes of space travel, vitality, mutation and immortality, examining humanity’s innate desire to sustain and perpetuate its species.
Xin Liu: ‘Living Distance,’ underwater performance, // Photo by Rob Chron
Perrotin Dosan Park
Xiyao Wang: ‘Allongé – Out of Reach’
Exhibition: July 4–Aug. 19, 2023
perrotin.com
10 Dosan-Daero 45-GIL, Gangnam-Gu, Seoul, Korea, click here for map
Galerie Perrotin’s Dosan Park location in Seoul presents ‘Allongé – Out of Reach,’ an exhibition by Berlin-based painter Xiyao Wang. The Chinese-born artist’s highly physical painting process creates bold gestures amid vast fields of empty space. For her second solo exhibition with the gallery, Wang has produced a series of large-scale gestural abstractions on canvas, which address ideas of temporality and mobility, form and void, substance and spirit. Working with black charcoal and oil stick, Wang creates a painted choreography that also points to her training in ballet, where the French term allongé is used to remind dancers to elongate their position by extending their arm(s) and focusing on the continuity of line that their body creates. As the gallery states: “her paintings disclose a minimal approach to mark-making that derives from the artist’s introspective exploration of subconscious states of spatial awareness, filtered through a cross-cultural lens that integrates sensible phenomena, spatial receptivity and philosophical hermeneutics.”
Xiyao Wang: ‘Allongé no. 1,’ 2023, oil stick, charcoal on canvas, 190×300 cm // Photo by Studio XW, courtesy of the artist and Perrotin
Kunsthaus Bregenz
Michael Armitage: ‘Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle’
Exhibition: July 15–Oct. 29, 2023
kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Karl-Tizian-Platz, 6900 Bregenz, Austria, click here for map
Kunsthaus Bregenz presents the work of Michael Armitage, whose paintings deal with connection. The narratives of the Kenyan-British artist’s work combine the political and personal, pop culture, history and mythology. Armitage uses Lubugo—a traditional bark cloth—as a ground for his paintings, stitching them together to form a large enough canvas. The irregularities of the material textures the paintings which, often cast in soft palettes, assume a dreamlike quality no matter the weight of subject. The exhibition title is taken from the painting ‘Pathos and the Twilight of the Idle’ (2019), created after the artist witnessed a demonstration by Kenya’s largest opposition party in Nairobi in 2017. The central figure storms forward toward the viewer, with tear gas cans hung from his clothes and sandbags grasped in each hand. Below several faces peer out, one in a pink wig, another in a fur collar, with the colours of the scene ballooning into one another with a touch of the carnivalesque.
Michael Armitage: ‘Mother’s Milk,’ 2022
ARoS Aarhus Art Museum
Susan Philipsz: ‘Study for Strings Sokol Terezín’
Exhibition: July 1–Dec. 3, 2023
aros.dk
Aros Allé 2, 8000 Aarhus, Denmark, click here for map
ARoS presents a new sound and video installation by the Scottish artist Susan Philipsz. ‘Study for Strings’ consists of the sound of two instruments—a cello and a viola—and two screens, showing footage of the hallways at the Theresienstadt concentration camp as they stand today. The composition is taken from ‘Study for String Orchestra,’ written by Czech-Jewish composer Pavel Haas. He was forced to write the piece for a Nazi propaganda film—which presented concentration camps as something altogether different from the extermination sites they were—in Theresienstadt, before being transferred to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. ‘Study of Strings’ conflates the distance of time, bringing the memory of atrocity and victims into the present day. On Philipsz’s use of sound, the artist states “it defines space and triggers memory. My intent is to adopt its psychological effect to make people aware of the place they’re in.”
Susan Philipsz: ‘Study for Strings Sokol Terezin,’ 2023, installation view at ARoS // Photo by Jens Henrik Daugaard
Deichtorhallen Hamburg & Kampnagel
Jacolby Satterwhite: ‘We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other’
Exhibition: July 28–Aug. 20, 2023
deichtorhallen.de
Deichtorstraße 1–2, 20095 Hamburg, Germany, click here for map
American artist Jacolby Satterwhite is known for fusing digital animation, personal ephemera, painting and performance in his work, referencing the pop culture of video games, social media and music videos, while evoking Afro-futurism and queer theory. His immersive installations, videos and performances create a virtual reality filled with recordings and objects, embedded in history, memory and politics. Always at the centre of these ever-changing, kaleidoscopic, utopian worlds populated by avatars is the South Carolina artist himself. Satterwhite’s artist schizophrenic mother also features heavily in his work, whether building on the domestic objects that she imagined and sketched, or through poems, pictures and vocal recordings of her. Video work ‘We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other’ will be shown in the Halle for Contemporary Art’s auditorium, alongside two more works on display at the Kampnagel International Summer Festival, with which Deichtorhallen Hamburg has collaborated on this show. Made during the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020, Satterwhite has transcribed his own body movements using digital body suits to create CGI characters that use ritual and movement as tools of resistance. The 24-minute film features autonomous Black fembot women who have complete agency within a space where they experience and overcome the constant threats being launched at them. The show is supported by a programme of healing and motion capture workshops.
Jacolby Satterwhite: ‘We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other,’ film still, 2020 // © Jacolby Satterwhite, Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Guggenheim Bilbao
Gego: ‘Measuring Infinity’
Exhibition: July 11, 2023–Apr. 2, 2024
guggenheim-bilbao.eus
Abandoibarra Etorb., 2, 48009 Bilbo, Bizkaia, Spain, click here for map
Starting this July and running until April 2024, The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao showcases a retrospective of German-Venezuelan artist Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt). Titled ‘Gego: Measuring Infinity,’ the exhibition explores the artist’s unique approach to abstraction, featuring sculptures, drawings, prints, books and textiles spanning from the 1950s to the 1990s. Initially trained as an architect and engineer in Germany, her artistic career began after she fled Nazi persecution and immigrated to Venezuela. Gego made notable contributions to modern and contemporary art, drawing influence from movements like Geometric Abstraction, Kinetic art, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. The exhibition recognizes her significance as one of Latin America’s most prominent artists of the latter half of the 20th century.
Tate Modern
Group Show: ‘A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography’
Exhibition: July 6, 2023–Jan. 14, 2024
tate.org.uk
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK, click here for map
‘A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography’—the upcoming group exhibition at London’s Tate Modern—celebrates the diverse landscape of contemporary African photography through a showcase of 36 artistic positions from different generations. It explores how photography, film and audio have been used to reimagine Africa’s rich cultures and historical narratives. Through themes of spirituality, identity, urbanism and the climate crisis, the exhibition takes viewers on a journey through vibrant cityscapes and imagined utopias. It follows artists across diverse landscapes, borders and time zones, revealing the powerful and transformative capacity of the medium of photography. Artists include Sammy Baloji, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Cristina de Middel, Santu Mofokeng, Aida Muluneh, Zohra Opoku, Khadija Saye and many others.
Aïda Muluneh: ‘Star Shine Moon Glow, Water Life,’ 2018 // Commissioned by WaterAid
Neue Nationalgalerie
Isa Genzken:
‘75/75’
Exhibition: July 13–Nov. 27, 2023
smb.museum/…/isa-genzken
Potsdamer Straße 50, 10785 Berlin, Germany, click here for map
In the aptly titled ‘Isa Genzken: 75/75,’ the Neue Nationalgalerie presents 75 sculptures by Genzken in the run up to the artist’s 75th birthday. Best known for her sculptural work, the German artist plays with a range of materials, including wood, concrete and steel, and brings together the apparently incongruous. In ‘Nofretete – Das Original’ (2012), for example, sunglasses are placed on a Nefertiti plaster bust. The face of the mannequin figure in ‘Schauspieler’ (2013) is obscured by a hockey mask and scalp massagers. Objects from the everyday and antiquity, and different realms of culture, form only part of the artist’s marriage of disparate topics to create unifying works, one that has made her a major artist in redefining assemblage. As she states in the exhibition text, “the works are meant to function more as moving images than as sculptures, with a new view seen from every angle. Nothing is fixed or two-dimensional but rather cinematic.”
Isa Genzken: ‘Nofretete – Das Original,’ 2012 // Privatsammlung Rheinland, Courtesy Galerie Buchholz/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2023, Photo by Sascha Fuis
