SUPERFLEX, Hospital Equipment (2014) (Image: Anders Sune Berg,  courtesy the artists) — SUPERFLEX, Hospital Equipment (2014) (Image: Anders Sune Berg, courtesy the artists)

The Art Newspaper: How an art work could literally save lives in Syria

Ricardo Alessio February 19, 2017

How an art work could literally save lives in Syria by Jose Da Silva

Danish collective SUPERFLEX's hospital equipment installation will be shipped to war-torn country after exhibition

The Danish art collective SUPERFLEX will unveil today (17 February) a new installation called Hospital Equipment, which consists of functioning surgical equipment that will be shipped to a Syrian hospital once the exhibition is over. The collective describe the work as "a ready-made upside down, since we not only take a ready-made object into an art context, but we bring it back into the world again".

The surgeon's table, surgical tools and mobile lamp that form the work at the Von Bartha gallery in S-chanf, Switzerland, will be packed-up and transported to the Salamieh Hospital in Hawarti, a village in the southwestern Hama region, following the dismantling of the show on 18 March. All that will be left of the work will be three "slightly different and unique" photographs, a gallery spokeswoman says, while the rest of the piece carries out its practical functions in the hospital. But, "as much as it is an operation table in the gallery, it is an artwork inside the hospital," the artists say.

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Ana Prvački collection, estampe Shunga, 1920

Ana Prvacki: Shunga lecture-performance at the Boghossian Foundation, Brussels

Ricardo Alessio February 1, 2017

Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Brussels

Shunga, the Japanese Erotic Prints

Lecture-performance by Ana Prvački

1 February 2017, at 7 pm

In the framework of Embassy of Uncertain Shores, Ana Prvački will hold a lecture-performance on Shunga. The word Shunga means erotic art in Japanese and refers to graphic images of sexual activity. The intentions of Shunga are: stimulation, consolation, seduction, education, veneration and amusement. Their influence is profound and inspiring.

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1301PE at ALAC

Ricardo Alessio January 27, 2017

Philippe Parreno, Speech Bubbles (Gold), 2015 Photo: Andrea Rossetti

Philippe Parreno: "A Time Coloured Space" at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal

Ricardo Alessio January 27, 2017

Philippe Parreno

A Time Coloured Space

Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, Portugal

3 February 2017 – 1 May 2017

The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art presents A Time Coloured Space, a major exhibition by French artist Philippe Parreno, his first in Portugal. Curated by the Director of the museum, Suzanne Cotter, the exhibition will span thirteen rooms, across two floors, occupying the museum's entire building.

The exhibition is structured on the mathematical model of the fugue, and conceived around the idea of the counterpoint, or ritournelle, a principle whereby a particular passage is repeated at regular interludes within a musical arrangement to create compositional meaning. Governed by a similar method, A Time Coloured Space is determined not by its 'objects', but by the regularity and rhythm of their appearance, featuring some of Parreno's most emblematic work dating back to the 1990s.

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Daily practice, tuning, performance piece, Castello di Rivoli performance, 2009

Ana Prvacki: "Daily practice, tuning" performance at Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai

Ricardo Alessio December 22, 2016

Ana Prvacki, Daily practice, tuning performance

Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai

24 December 2016 - 12 February 2017

At McaM Ana Prvački will present her Wandering Band/Performing Daily Practice series. The work was performed at Castello di Rivoli (2009), Pompidou (2010), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (2010-2011) and Highline NYC (2010) and will be developed for the context of Shanghai. Prvački will invite local music makers of various and diverse training to the McaM and they will be given free reign to perform their daily practice of scales, tonal exercises, and trills while roaming through the galleries and exploring the visual and acoustic environment of the museum, transforming the museum into a lyrical set. This gesture challenges the way we as individuals (both performers and audiences) physically and aurally perceive space while demystifying the labor of practice.

Every day at the musicians will gather in an attempt to harmonize without a fixed given note. They will bring their traditional Chinese and Western classical training and intuitively work together to find their way into and out of sonic chaos while exploring the conventional time-space limitations of culture and geography, searching for a universal sound of humanity. The tuning will take place around a microphone and the 15 minute exercise will be broadcast through a speaker out onto the street.

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Ana Prvacki: "Tent quintet, bows and elbows" at Art Catalogues at LACMA

Ricardo Alessio December 22, 2016

Ana Prvacki's Tent, quintet, bows and elbows

Art Catalogues at LACMA

Sunday, 15 January 4 pm to 6 pm

The tent will activate at 4:15pm | performed by Lyris Quartet

Talk, reception and book signing to follow

Petra Cortright, royal-chat—dispatchesSCANFERLA{ROM-adventures4tattoo-gun}.resx, 2016, digital painting on Sunset Hot Press rag paper, 42 x 30". — Petra Cortright, royal-chat—dispatchesSCANFERLA{ROM-adventures4tattoo-gun}.resx,
2016, digital painting on Sunset Hot Press rag paper, 42 x 30".

Artforum critics' picks: Petra Cortright at Carl Kostyal, London

Ricardo Alessio December 16, 2016

Petra Cortright at Carl Kostyal, London by Valerie Mindlin

Carl Kostyal | London

12A Savile Row

October 5–November 19

To call Petra Cortright an internet or post-internet artist would be similar to calling Matisse and Monet paint artists. They were painters all right, but that's not really saying much, is it? There is, in Cortright's work, a mesmerizing core of formalism, a newly relevant medium specificity for the cognitive gluttonous distraction of the brazenly immaterial.

"ORANGE BLOSSOM PRINCESS FUCKING BUTTERCUP," Cortright's first solo exhibition at this gallery's London location, brings the manifold beguilements of her digital steamrolling into a tightly delightful showcase of canvases and flat-screen videos. And "flat-screen" is the operative word here. Cortright composes her pieces by layering their copious constituent files into final pancake of Photoshop "mother files." Such works flatten the layered and immersive aspects of the digital economy, simultaneously parading and exacerbating its manipulative properties. Cortright's mother files are built up from the endless iteration of what are profoundly private visual, temporal, and spatial entities. They are the wet-dream actors of adolescent sexual rehearsals, solipsistic webcam posturing, and distracted-browsing self-indulgence. Would you ever act out a real-life equivalent to an emoji in a conversation? Of course not. Cortright's works disrupt the comforting stability that would confine the digital to the servilely personal, and make a frantically gorgeous show of it.

Where Impressionism's heyday hypnotized us with its dynamic vibrancy in indulging the wondrous relish of the ordinary, Cortright's new digital formalism unmoors the cognitive comforts of the private in a seductive sumptuousness of pageantry and inexhaustible possibilities.

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View of “Ma,” 2016. From left: Fiona Connor, Ma #2 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point), 2016; Ma #1 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point), 2016. — **View of “Ma,” 2016.** From left: Fiona Connor, *Ma #2 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point)*, 2016; *Ma #1 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point)*, 2016.

ARTFORUM: Critics' Picks, Ma, Los Angeles

Brian Butler December 12, 2016

This perversity of proximity is understated, but prevalent in works by Fiona Connor, who also organized the show. In her Ma #1 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point) and Ma #2 (Bedroom window of John McLaughlin at his home in Dana Point)(both 2016) Connor inlays fragments of the titular painter’s former Southern California home in the walls of the gallery. These literal intrusions of context into the space of the exhibition complicate the internal harmonies of the abstract McLaughlin artwork they face, #13, 1964, a nearly symmetrical, black-and-white, geometric oil painting.

FIONA CONNORMa #4 – 9 (Newspaper article featuring John McLaughlin from the Los Angeles Times) 1956-87, 2016 — FIONA CONNOR
Ma #4 – 9 (Newspaper article featuring John McLaughlin from the Los Angeles Times) 1956-87, 2016

Fiona Connor: "Ma" at Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles

Ricardo Alessio December 8, 2016

December 10 - January 14

Chateau Shatto

406 W Pico Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90015

Ma is an exhibition curated by Fiona Connor at Château Shatto, sprung from the artist's encounters with the photographic archives of Frank J. Thomas.

For Ma, Connor has composed a group of works that she understands as being nourished by similar concerns that she first responded to in Frank J. Thomas' photographs, more specifically his documentation of the paintings of John McLaughlin. Ma includes works by Judy Fiskin, Sydney de Jong, John McLaughlin, Frank J. Thomas, Audrey Wollen, Bedros Yeretzian and Fiona Connor. The exhibition design has been undertaken by Sebastian Clough.

Ma is the culmination of a series of projects by Connor including a display case at the Auckland Art Gallery, a lecture at Elam School of Fine Arts at University of Auckland and an exhibition at Minerva in Sydney, Australia. This exhibition takes Connor's research back to Los Angeles, where it began.

Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Model for RT TV Boards at UNTITLED, Miami Beach (2016). Courtesy of the artists and Nathalie Karg Gallery. — Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Model for RT TV Boards at UNTITLED, Miami Beach
(2016). Courtesy of the artists and Nathalie Karg Gallery.

Artnet: In Miami, Artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Will Teach You How to Surf

Ricardo Alessio December 4, 2016

In Miami, Artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu Will Teach You How to Surf by Brian Boucher

One of the keys to surviving Art Basel week in Miami Beach is taking advantage of the Atlantic Ocean, and artists Rirkrit Tiravanija and Tomas Vu found the perfect way to bring the experience of art and surf together this year in a joint work titled DO WE DREAM UNDER THE SAME SKY. Billed as a "surf inspired participatory installation," they're offering custom-designed surfboards for UNTITLED visitors to get out into the water.

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Philippe Parreno, The Crowd, 2015 (film still) © Philippe Parreno, Courtesy Pilar Corrias, Barbara Gladstone, Esther Schipper — Philippe Parreno, The Crowd, 2015 (film still) © Philippe Parreno, Courtesy Pilar Corrias,
Barbara Gladstone, Esther Schipper

Philippe Parreno: "Thenabouts" at ACMI, Australia

Ricardo Alessio December 4, 2016

Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts

Australian Centre for the Moving Image

6 December 2016 - 13 March 2017

For his first solo exhibition in Australia, Philippe Parreno activates a singular retrospective of his filmic works as a cinematic ensemble in which the artist's films play with temporal and spatial boundaries, guiding the visitor through a complex journey of images, duration, memory, and the passage of time. Controlled live by a gallery technician, no one visit is ever the same.

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Portrait courtesy of Petra Cortright's studio.

Arteviste: An Interview with Internet Artist Petra Cortright in Los Angeles, California

Ricardo Alessio December 4, 2016

An Interview with Internet Artist Petra Cortright in Los Angeles, California by Flora Alexandra Ogilvy

FO:Was there a pivotal moment when you decided to be an artist?

PC: no its just always been an affliction that i've suffered from my whole life

FO: Can you tell us about the process of making your artwork?

PC: i troll the internet for scraps to use, and then i use some of those scraps, change some scraps around, break up some of the scraps, put some scraps back together, add my own scraps and scratches, do this all of this very quickly -- and then post it. sometimes i print it out later, sometimes i don't.

FO: What is your favourite art gallery in Los Angeles and why?

PC: and/or gallery just re-opened in pasadena after years of hiatus. originally it was in dallas, tx. i've always had a huge respect for paul slocum and the community of artists that he has supported, we have all been a tight knit group of nerds for years now. i am thrilled to be working with brian butler of 1301PE now, brian and the gallery are both so cool and for lack of a smarter word so chill and we just get on so well. 1301PE is also in an area that feels so 'LA art' to me and i just love the way that gallery is set up, i always love an upstairs/downstairs situation like that. also maybe because its by LACMA but i just have always deeply loved that area. it just seems so so so classic LA. palm tree emoji.

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*Ana Prvacki, "Various keys," 2014, gel pen on gampi paper, 10.5 x 7.25 inches*

Ana Prvacki: "A Song for Rio" at Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Rio de Janeiro

Ricardo Alessio November 24, 2016

Uma Canção para o Rio / A Song for Rio

Galeria Fortes Vilaça

Rio de Janeiro

PART I November 22, 2016 – January 19, 2017

PART II February 4 – March 18, 2017

What lives in the zone between the world of objects and the realm of music? A Song for Rio brings together a group of Brazilian and international artists who each in their own way attempt to answer this question by undertaking a poetic investigation of the intersection of art and music. A collaboration between Galeria Fortes Vilaça and Douglas Fogle & Hanneke Skerath.

Artists (part 1): Allora & Calzadilla, Ana Prvački, Anne Collier, Bárbara Wagner & Benjamin de Búrca, Bruce Conner, Cabelo, Cerith Wyn Evans, Chelpa Ferro, Christian Marclay, Dave Muller, Ernesto Neto, Jac Leirner, Kelley Walker, Los Carpinteros, Mark Leckey, Nuno Ramos, Paulo Garcez, Rivane Neuenschwander, Susan Philipsz, Vivian Caccuri

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Fiona Banner: "Au Cœur des Ténèbres" at mfc-michele didier gallery, Paris

Ricardo Alessio November 17, 2016

FIONA BANNER: Au Cœur des Ténèbres

November 18, 2016 - January 7, 2017
mfc-michèle didier

66rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth

F-75003 Paris

On this occasion, Fiona Banner - who continuously investigates the slippage between object, image and text through the prism of graphic and editorial works - has hinged the exhibition on her adaptation of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness.

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Jorge Mendez Blake, Todos los nocturnos de Villaurrutia I (Nocturno, Nocturno miedo, Nocturno grito, Nocturno de la estatua, Nocturno en que nada se oye, Nocturno sueño), 2016 — Jorge Mendez Blake, Todos los nocturnos de Villaurrutia I (Nocturno, Nocturno miedo, Nocturno
grito, Nocturno de la estatua, Nocturno en que nada se oye, Nocturno sueño), 2016

Jorge Mendez Blake: "Nocturnos" at Travesia Cuatro, Madrid

Ricardo Alessio November 17, 2016

Jorge Mendez Blake: Nocturnos

19 November 2016 - 10 February 2017

Travesia Cuatro

San Mateo 16

28004 Madrid

On this occasion, the artist has set his focus on the "nocturne", a musical genre cultivated primarily during Romanticism and Modernismo, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Spanish-American literary movement led by poets and writers such as Rubén Darío, Leopoldo Lugones, Federico García Lorca and José Asunción Silva, among others. The Nocturne, was popularized in Mexico by the group Los Contemporáneos, whose members included Salvador Novo, Antonieta Rivas Mercado, José Gorostiza and Xavier Villaurrutia. Who used it as the backbone of his book Nostalgia de la muerte, that would become a benchmark in twentieth-century Mexican poetry.

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Fiona Connor, All the doors in the walls, 2016, installation view, Minerva — Fiona Connor, *All the doors in the walls*, 2016, installation view, Minerva

Artforum critics' picks: “Fiona Connor, Sydney de Jong, Audrey Wollen” at Minerva, Sydney

Ricardo Alessio November 16, 2016

Fiona Connor, Sydney de Jong, Audrey Wollen at Minerva by Claudia Arozqueta

Minerva

4/111 Macleay Street, Potts Point

October 29–December 10

Three artists whose work seems both conceptually and materially dissimilar and five press releases with different interpretations can be found here, though the title of Fiona Connor's All the Doors in the Walls, 2016, is to be taken literally. Each door in the gallery was stripped of its function; they no longer serve as mediators or passages from one place to another but as static objects of art, disposed toward admiration for their simplicity.

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Fiona Connor, Brick, Cane and Paint, 2016, installation view: Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland — Fiona Connor, *Brick, Cane and Paint*, 2016, installation view: Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland

Fiona Connor: "Brick, Cane and Paint" at Hopkinson Mossman, Auckland, New Zealand

Ricardo Alessio November 16, 2016

Fiona Connor

Brick, Cane and Paint

12 November - 22 December 2016

For Brick, Cane and Paint, Connor presents work from three new notice board projects (quoted from three sites: a brick plant and a cane factory in Los Angeles, and a weavers guild in Auckland) alongside a new series titled Insert (Chopping Board).

Where previously Connor's work has focused on bulletin boards from public spaces (such as city parks, libraries, community centres etc.), the sculptures in Brick, Cane and Paint represent activity at specific sites of production, with content generated by a fixed group of individuals. Notice Board (Pacific Clay), the set of six boards in the small and large galleries at Hopkinson Mossman, are quoted from Pacific Clay; a brick plant frequented by the artist. The Pacific Clay boards are punctuated by a single piece from the Handweavers and Spinners Guild in Mt Eden (a community organization close to the artist's childhood home), and the boards that hang in the gallery's office spaces are from Cane and Basket Supply, a workshop near the artist's Los Angeles studio.

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SUPERFLEX: 11th Shanghai Biennale

Ricardo Alessio November 16, 2016

SUPERFLEX presents Pigs, Time and Space for the 11th Shanghai Biennale 'Why Not Ask Again?'

11th Shanghai Biennale

11 November 2016 - 12 March 2017

Pigs, Time and Space is a new film installation that addresses the exchange of pigs between Denmark and China. With a pig as the main protagonist Pigs, Time and Space is set in a dream-like universe unfolding the highlights of a historical loop from I Ching, the ancient Book on Divination, to the Schjellerup crater on the moon.

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Jack Goldstein: "Art Center Talks" Book Launch at 365 Mission, Los Angeles

Ricardo Alessio November 12, 2016

Art Center Talks: Graduate Seminar, The First Decade 1986-1995

Book launch & panel discussion on Sunday, December 11th at 365 Mission

3-5pm Panel Discussion / 5-6pm Public Reception

ArtCenter College of Design's Graduate Art MFA program announces the publication of the first of three volumes of ArtCenter Talks, a collection of transcripts of lectures given by artists, theorists and historians throughout the program's thirty-year history. For this inaugural volume, Stan Douglas, who joined the Graduate Art faculty in 2009, chose 13 lectures from among hundreds that he deemed best represented the scope and range of the first decade of the program and its guests.

To celebrate the book's publication, on December 11, Douglas will moderate a roundtable discussion at 356 Mission Rd. in Los Angeles that will include former faculty, alumni and visiting artists (Meg Cranston, Stephen Prina, Diana Thater, T.J. Wilcox) who participated in the "Graduate Seminar" during the decade covered by this first volume.

Contributions by: Beth B, Rosetta Brooks, Luis Castro Leiva, Meg Cranston, Charles Gaines, Jack Goldstein, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Susan Hiller, Roni Horn, Kellie Jones, Mike Kelley, Justen Ladda, Thomas Lawson, Sylvere Lotringer, John Miller, Constance Penley, Brian Routh, Mira Schor, Allan Sekula, Robert Storr, Lynne Tillman

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Jorge Méndez Blake. The Art of Loving, 2009. 10 ladrillos, edición de The Art of Loving de Erich Fromm / 10 bricks, edition of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, 24 x 8 x 4 cm. Courtesy of the artist. — Jorge Méndez Blake. The Art of Loving, 2009. 10 ladrillos, edición de The Art of Loving de
Erich Fromm / 10 bricks, edition of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, 24 x 8 x 4 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.

ART 21 Magazine: The Variations of its Shadows - An Interview with Jorge Méndez Blake

Ricardo Alessio November 10, 2016

The Variations of its Shadows: An Interview with Jorge Méndez Blake by Caroline Picard

Every book creates a world, a place that readers enter through language on the first page, and inhabit thereafter, as the text's unique character compounds in an individual's imagination. This happens with novels, with philosophy, mathematical treatises, and poems. How astonishing it is to consider the lush autonomous universe each spine on a bookshelf proposes. Each of those worlds has a logical structure that cajoles a reader into its unique proposition—a situation not so different, perhaps, from that of architecture. The Guadalajara-based multimedia artist, Jorge Méndez Blake, addresses this intersection directly by translating nuanced themes embedded in canonical books into art installations. In our interview, we discuss this process of translation, looking at how it differs from literary criticism, and drifting over the site of Emily Dickinson's desk.

Caroline Picard: Your installations interpret the work of different authors like Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare, and Jules Verne, by drawing out nuanced themes within a book (or poem) into a single place and time; it is almost like you draw a three-dimensional translation of the book in space. Do you see a connection between what you do and literary criticism?

Jorge Méndez Blake: My approach to books and language is more as a reader than as a critic. I like reading literary criticism, but I'm working from the side of art, and art should propose different ways of understanding literature, not the same ones as critics. Approaching a book through sculpture expands the possibilities of regular literary criticism. I believe some seminal texts of the history of literature have many possibilities of interpretation: there's nothing new under the sun, but the variations of its shadows are infinite.

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