Feb. 28, 2023
Berlin Art Link is highlighting not only Berlin’s most worthwhile art exhibitions, but presentations and events happening all over the world. Every month, a new Worldwide Hit List will be bringing to the limelight 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 March.
New Museum
Wangechi Mutu: ‘Intertwined’
Exhibition: Mar. 2–June 4, 2023
newmuseum.org
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002, United States, click here for map
In the early days of March, New York’s New Museum is hosting a major solo exhibition of work by Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu. Spanning 25 years of Mutu’s practice and more than 100 of her works, the presentation will encompass a variety of media including painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film and performance. At the beginning stages of her career Mutu experimented with collage, and explored techniques of camouflage and transformation. To this day, the artist still employs these strategies in her multimedial work while developing hybrid forms that fuse mythical and folklore narratives embedded in socio-historical references. ‘Intertwined’ connects Mutu’s sculptural practice together with her study of the legacies of colonialism, globalisation and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational, her art deals with contemporary realities, and envisions radical models for the future informed by her reflections on feminism and gender, Afrofuturism, race, colonialism and interspecies symbiosis.
Wangechi Mutu: ‘In Two Canoe,’ 2022, bronze, 180 × 68 × 72 in // Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery
mumok – museum moderner kunst stiftung ludwig wien
Adam Pendleton: ‘Blackness, White, and Light’
Exhibition: Mar. 31–Sep. 3, 2023
mumok.at
Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna, Austria, click here for map
Opening at the end of the month at Vienna museum mumok is New York artist Adam Pendleton’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Europe. Pendleton’s conceptual and multi-disciplinary practice includes painting, silkscreen, collage, video, performance and word art. His work often delves into the investigation of language and the recontextualization of history, his painting constituting a platform for gestures to be recorded, transposed and overwritten. Since 2008, Pendleton has been conducting an inquiry into the relationship between Blackness, abstraction and avant-garde through the concept of “Black Dada.” As a result, a visual philosophy has emerged from his research blurring the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange. The exhibit is curated by Marianne Dobner and runs through September 2023.
Adam Pendleton: ‘Untitled (WE ARE NOT),’ 2022, silkscreen ink on canvas 304.8 x 594.4 cm // Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Hammer Museum
Rita McBride: ‘Particulates’
Exhibition: Mar. 26–Nov. 5, 2023
hammer.ucla.edu
10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, click here for map
Towards the end of the month, the Hammer Museum will inaugurate its renovated bank gallery with the presentation of Rita McBride’s installation ‘Particulates.’ Inspired by time travel, the principles of light and space, and quantum physics, McBride’s sculpture is a mix of water molecules, surfactant compounds and beams of high intensity lasers that materialise as they interact with molecules of mist emitted into the gallery space. The American artist has been exploring architectural and sculptural art since the 1990s, both in small scale objects and large public commissions. ‘Particulates’ is a synthesis of both: an hyperboloid structure that, though monumental, is ephemeral and only visible when ambient dust and water particulates encounter the laser beam. Visible at night from Wilshire Boulevard, the sculpture can also be experienced by visitors during the museum’s regular hours.
Rita McBride: ‘Particulates,’ 2017, water molecules, surfactant compounds, and high intensity lasers // Photo by Joerg Lohse, courtesy of the artist and Dia Art Foundation
‘Hammer Projects: Chiharu Shiota’
Mar. 26–Aug. 27, 2023
hammer-projects.ucla.edu
10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, click here for map
Ongoing since 1999, Hammer Projects is a signature series within the Hammer’s exhibition programme, consisting of single-gallery exhibitions aimed at highlighting the work of contemporary artists from around the globe. This March, the space will be taken over by Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota. Shiota is a Berlin-based practitioner whose installations, sculptures and performance art invoke psycho-geographic spaces of memory, emotions and the cyclical nature of life and death. Using red, black or white yarn as starting material, she creates webbed environments that envelop entire galleries, and mimic organic forms such as cobwebs, veins and fractals. Shiota also includes a range of found objects in her work such as wooden chairs, abandoned shoes, rusted keys and used dresses so as to involve the viewer in the artist’s personal narratives, that may result in universal experiences too.
Chiharu Shiota: ‘Uncertain Journeys,’ 2019, metal frame, red wool, installation view in ‘The Soul Trembles’ // Photo by Sunhi Mang, courtesy of the artist and Mori Art Museum
Kunsthal Charlottenborg
Jeremy Deller: ‘Welcome to the Shitshow’
Exhibition: Mar. 17–Aug. 6, 2023
kunsthalcharlottenborg.dk
Nyhavn 2, 1051 Copenhagen, Denmark, click here for map
This spring, Kunsthal Charlottenborg is presenting a solo exhibition featuring British artist Jeremy Deller. The presentation coincides with CPH:DOX, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, one of the biggest documentary film festivals in the world. Taking place in various local theatres as well as at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the festival will help highlight the documentary flair of Deller’s practice. His show comprises a wide range of works created over the course of the last 15 years that explore many aspects of English culture across different eras. One of his films displays Depeche Mode fans from around the world, another shows protesters fighting for or against Brexit. Other works go further back in history, up to archaeological finds from prehistoric times. Through film, photography, graphic works and sculptural installations, Deller draws a multifaceted and even humorous portrait of English culture, examining a range of different communities and the motives that brought them together.
Jeremy Deller: ‘Our Hoppy is Depeche Mode,’ 2006, production still // Photo by Jeremy Deller, courtesy of the artist and Concept Paris and The Modern Institute
Gropius Bau
Daniel Boyd: ‘RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION)
Exhibition: Mar. 24–July 9, 2023
gropiusbau.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map
Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal and Carolin Köchling, Gropius Bau is hosting ‘RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION),’ the most comprehensive exhibition of Daniel Boyd’s artistic practice in Europe to date. The presentation consists in an overview of Boyd’s process of image-making and its tropes: postcolonial narratives, transnational networks of resistance, Indigenous knowledge production and personal family histories. These will be translated and contextualised within the walls of Berlin’s Gropius Bau through a non-linear approach that attests to the artist’s interest in narrative construction, fragmentation, and his resistance to fixed categorisations. In addition, the exhibition will include a public programme that, recreating an experience similar to a theatre, plays out on the atrium floor of the building.
Daniel Boyd: ‘Untitled (CPC),’ 2015, oil, charcoal and archival glue on polyester, 137.5 x 183 cm // Photo by Ivan Buljan, courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery
Fonderie Darling
Amélie Laurence Fortin: ‘Yarn of a Short Night’
Exhibition: Mar. 3, 2023–May 14, 2023
fonderiedarling.org
745 Ottawa St., Montreal, QC H3C 1R8, Canada, click here for map
‘Yarn of a Short Night’ marks the end of a cycle of work by Canadian visual artist Amélie Laurence Fortin, and consists of a triad of immersive and site-specific works created for Fonderie Darling’s Main Hall. Fortin’s interdisciplinary practice reflects on the recurrence of signs and motifs interwoven in grand narratives, legends, literature, science, philosophy and it enquires into varied fields such as naval architecture, hot air balloon manufacturing, design and engineering. This way, the artist explores the potential of industrial techniques and that of materials historically used to achieve technological innovation. Opening on March 3, ‘Yarn of a Short Night’ offers a play of perspective between a distant past and future, and a profound experience of the immeasurable rooted in a vast, literary and epic imagination.
Amélie Laurence Fortin: ‘Yarn of a Short Night,’ 2023 // Courtesy of the artist and Martyna Wyrzykowska
Focal Point Gallery
Liz Magor: ‘The Rise and the Fall’
Exhibition: Mar. 8–June 10, 2023
fpg.org.uk
Elmer Ave, Southend-on-Sea SS1 1NB, United Kingdom, click here for map
Canadian visual artist Liz Magor’s practice draws attention to discarded and seemingly mundane objects to stir a conversation revolving around the economy of things and our relationship with the material in social, political and psychological circumstances. Her upcoming exhibition, ‘The Rise and the Fall,’ opens this March at Focal Point Gallery in the UK, and presents a selection of her works from the last five years. Working with ubiquitous and domestic items, such as blankets, containers, clothing and toys that go unnoticed and are often taken for granted, Magor employs sculptural techniques to transform them into still life or uncanny objects. Thereby, the artist investigates agency and emotional attachment to inanimate and material objects. On view until June 10, 2023.
Liz Magor: ‘The Rise and the Fall,’ 2023 // Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery
Concrete
Rana Begum: ‘Dappled Light’
Exhibition: Feb. 26–Mar. 23, 2023
alserkal.online
Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, click here for map
Alserkal Art Week takes place twice a year at Alserkal Avenue, Dubai’s most-loved arts and culture district, and is returning on February 26th through March 5th. This spring’s iteration will see more than 15 contemporary art galleries showcase some of the most compelling and influential contemporary artists from the region and beyond. Among these, multidisciplinary space Concrete will host ‘Dappled Light’ by visual artist Rana Begum. As the artist’s largest solo exhibition in the region to date, ‘Dappled Light’ explores the interaction of light, colour and form, while entertaining a dialogue with Concrete’s minimalist architecture. Curated by Dr. Cliff Lauson, the exhibition features exclusive works as well as older pieces from ‘No. 694 Hyetal’ and ‘Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained,’ which was presented alongside last year’s Venice Biennale. In addition, Begum’s show will also include an outdoor commission in the yard, the latest development of the artist’s sculptural compositions of colourful tessellated mesh panels.
Rana Begum: ‘Dappled Light,’ 2023 // Photo by Mohamed Somji, courtesy of Alserkal Avenue
