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Hans Rosenström “Why is the remote always so far away” at Maria Stenfors, London


Hans Rosenström, Together, 2015. C-Print. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors, London

HANS ROSENSTRÖM
WHY IS THE REMOTE ALWAYS SO FAR AWAY

11 September – 24 October 2015
Maria Stenfors, London

Text by Yasmina Reggad

With his first solo exhibition at Maria Stenfors, Finnish artist Hans Rosenström outlines themes that have punctuated his practice in the past years. The exhibition presents recent works that address the notions of liminal and transitional states and study the limits of our experience of the world from a singular perspective.

The title Why the remote is always so far away clearly points at something unattainable ahead of us and at the same time paradoxically replicates the precision of a measuring tool. Nevertheless, the very question Hans Rosenström is raising lies in the position of the body itself in relation to the remote. The body stands in the centre, in the in-betweeness surrounded by unreachable far-aways. In this exhibition, the artist investigates the multiple nature and social functions of liminal spaces. Rosenström also strives to draw and mould the contours of the inside and the outside of the body as well as reveals its faculty of resonance that gives shape to its surroundings.
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Review: The Visual Semiotics of Discourses and Theories

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© Bernadette Corporation, Hell Frozen Over (2000), in the context of D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant/Actors, Networks, Theories (2014). With the collaboration of Electronic Arts Intermix. Photo : Sara A. Tremblay

D’un discours qui ne serait du semblant/Actors, Networks, Theories
25 September – 22 November 2014
Dazibao, Montréal

Text by Cécilia Bracmort

D’un discours qui ne serait du semblant/Actors, Networks, Theories (DDSSANT) denominated Vincent Bonin’s two-part exhibition, focusing primarily on the impact of French theory in contemporary art. The Montréal based independent curator took different aims for each section of his project, with a first show at Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery (14 November 2013 – 25 January 2014), looking at French thinkers’ influence on North-American artists and writers from the 1970s onwards. Sub-divided into five rooms, this first act confronted works of art with the very texts that inspiring their creation. Alternatively, Bonin’s second program installed at Dazibao (25 September – 22 November 2014), highlighted changes after this assimilation of theory in art became reflective of wider social and cultural developments. Here the Francophile curator adapted his project to Dazibao’s open space to thus enable a perceptible connection between the actors and theories within contemporary art networks. Although the presentation of theory as creative material might have intimidated some viewers – with exhibition constituents involving tightly messed networks of aesthetic and philosophical references – the task was not impossible according to Bonin: “it is not real obscurity, it’s just a lot of homework.” Continue reading “Review: The Visual Semiotics of Discourses and Theories”

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Review: BNLMTL 2014 – An Archeology of the Future

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Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan, still from Episode 2, 2014 from 2084: A Science Fiction Show, 2012–2014. Three channel video installation. Each episode: 22 mins, total duration: 66 mins. Courtesy of the artists , produced by La Biennale de Montréal for BNL MTL 2014

BNLMTL 2014
L’avenir (looking forward)
22 October 2014 – 4 January 2015
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
and other venues

Text by Miwa Kojima

After undergoing major transformations which involved merging with the Quebec Triennial, partnering with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) and recruiting Sylvie Fortin (former editor-in-chief of Atlanta-based art magazine Art Papers) as artistic director, the Biennale de Montreal (BNLMTL) opened its eighth edition between 22 October 2014 and 04 January 2015, under the title “L’avenir (looking forward)”. Fortin teamed up with MACM in-house curators Lesley Johnston and Mark Lancot in addition to guest curators Gregory Burke and Peggy Gale to invite over 50 individual artists and collectives from 22 different countries. Among this wider range of demography, some have critiqued the Biennale’s lack of diversity since a majority of these artists are now based in Canada, USA and Europe. Yet the numerous individual projects do confront local, national and global perspectives, to relate to current issues such as the global economy, climate change, technology, along with a myriad of other approaches to envisage the possible futures yet to come, in and out of western perspectives. M-KOS offers one last opportunity to review this Biennale for ourselves, now in its final days of exhibition.
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Review: Dora Garcí­a, Of Crimes and Dreams or the infinite power of human mind


Dora Garcia, Of Crimes and Dreams, exhibition view at Darling Foundry 2014. Courtesy Darling Foundry, Montréal. Photo © Maxime Boisvert

Dora García
Of Crimes and Dreams
Darling Foundry, Montréal
21 May – 14 September 2014

Review by Cécilia Bracmort

Of Crimes and Dreams strips the threshold between reality and fantasy where the two worlds interpenetrate and nourish each other. Upon entering Dora Garcí­a’s exhibition curated by Chantal Pontbriand, one figuratively experiences a journey into the human psyche and all its complex richness, sequences of altered states and perceptions from waking life to unconsciousness, assisted by Garcí­a’s use of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s last and most experimental novel.

Three videos works projected on the walls of the gallery underline recurrent visual and structural patterns such as circle overlays and echoing effects. Indeed, all videos mirror Joyce’s narrative structure, a never-ending novel, starting and finishing through reconstituted sentences. These seemingly aim to trigger different psychological desires from sexual or voyeuristic desires to the repression of violence or even murderous pulsions.
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Review: Playlist – A Collection of Collectors at galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal

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Playlist, Exhibition view. Courtesy the artists and galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal. Photo: Caroline Cloutier

Playlist
galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal
14 June – 26 July 2014

Review by Cécilia Bracmort

On June 14th, galerie antoine ertaskiran opened its self-curated summer exhibition, Playlist, featuring five Montreal-based individual and collective artists. The show brings together a varied selection of techniques, styles and even experiences – from mid-career professionals to promising art students – to realize a striking layout of artists-collectors, using processes of collage and assemblage to accurately reflect the title of this show. Creative hybridizations such as Philippe Caron Lefebvre’s Caméléon Echinoidea mix morphologies of plants, animals and humans to produce fascinating creatures, aggressive as they are beautiful. His jelly-like chimeras parade elaborate mechanisms of defense while stylistically merging earthenware crafts, industrial techniques and new age iridescent paint, to duly note Caron Lefebvre’s proficiency as a naturalist. Continue reading “Review: Playlist – A Collection of Collectors at galerie antoine ertaskiran, Montréal”

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Review: Colleen Heslin “Ballads from the North Sea” at Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal

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Colleen Heslin, Blue Monochrome, 2014. Ink and dye on cotton. 48 x 54 inch. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Laroche / Joncas, Montréal

COLLEEN HESLIN
BALLADS FROM THE NORTH SEA
Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal
8 March to 26 April, 2014

Review by Joseph Henry

On the crowded fourth-floor of the Whitney Biennial, a floor curated this year by Stuart Comer, American artist Ken Okiishi brought painting into contact with the galleries’ propensity toward new and electronic media. For his contribution to the Biennial, a major exhibition designed to showcase recent American art, Okiishi painted over consumer-grade television monitors, obscuring their moving images with messy acrylic. If perhaps blunt in its multimedial comparison, Okiishi’s work symbolized a relatively new place for painting after its perennially announced death by Paul Delaroche in 1839, and countless others since. In a digital visual culture dominated by screen technologies and their perceptual flatness, painting has been revived as a key medium in the investigation of the surfaces and places from which images are produced and consumed. Continue reading “Review: Colleen Heslin “Ballads from the North Sea” at Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal”

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Review: Aichi Triennale 2013 “Awakening: Where Are We Standing? – Earth, Memory and Resurrection”

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Alfredo Jaar, Bringing Forth New Life / Umashimenkana (For Sadako Kurihara and the children of Ishinomaki), 2013. Black boards, video projection. Courtesy the artist and Aichi Triennale 2013. Photo: Fukuoka Sakae

Text by Miwa Kojima

The second edition of Aichi Triennale opened to the public on 10 August in the cities of Nagoya and Okazaki in Aichi prefecture, under the theme “Awakening: Where Are We Standing? – Earth, Memory and Resurrection”. 76 artists from over 25 countries are featured in various locations, spread across five different sites – Sakae; Shirakawa Park; Choja-Machi; Nayabashi (Nagoya) and Okazaki. As the title suggests, this event offers a range of reflections on the socio-political repercussions and the environmental impact of the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. While artists in the triennale ponder on the catastrophic aftermath, Japan still faces a numbers of urgent issues – many Tsunami ravaged areas are still barely re-constructed; Tens of thousands of evacuees from the area around the Fukushima nuclear plant are still unable to go home; tons of highly contaminated radioactive water are still flowing into the Pacific from Fukushima nuclear plant, and the list goes on.
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Hit and miss treasure hunt in the labyrinth – Art Souterrain 2013

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Nathalie Quagliotto, Vous êtes ici / You are here, 2013. Photo by Nathalie Quagliotto.

The Labyrinth themed fifth edition of Art Souterrain indeed furnished a dazzle of art sceneries to mark seven kilometres underground pathways with over 120 artworks. Taking the topic to heart, many works denoted either a puzzling of the visual senses or forms of bewilderment within the self, between societies or geo-political conditions. Mélodie Prégent’s installation “Warren” (2013) combined adjacent mirrors and perspective photographs of empty corridors, stairways and tunnels to create illusions of endless passages. Loren Williams whimsically faked several tunnel entrances, not only to confuse or amuse the audience but also to suggest gateways to fantastic and imaginary worlds. Continue reading “Hit and miss treasure hunt in the labyrinth – Art Souterrain 2013”

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Review: Builders, Canadian Biennial 2012 at National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa


Myfanwy MacLeod, Everything Seems Empty Without You, 2009 & Hex (I–VII), 2010. Exhibition view. Courtesy National Gallery of Canada. Photo by M-KOS

With a second edition entitled “Builders“, the Canadian Biennial staged in Ottawa’s National Gallery an exhibition that perhaps went against the grain of mega international extravaganzas, and the usually vast array of ensuing curatorial ideas and ideals. This Biennale voluntarily took a hermetic and back-to-basics approach to its program, to exclusively centre on contemporary Canadian artists selected from the Gallery’s recent acquisitions over the past two years.

Curator Jonathan Shaughnessy cites in his catalogue essay that “Artists are builders in a rudimentary sense. They combine creative ideas, materials and technology with the aim to shape an original way of seeing and interpreting the world”. In an attempt to further canonize Canadiana, Shaughnessy’s title took inspirations from Toronto’s Hockey Hall of Fame, where Builders herein point to former players that go on to become coaches, managers or executives. Just as the hockey Builders were this way inducted for their contribution to the development of the nation’s most popular sport, Shaughnessy concludes that “In art, builders and players often prove to be one and the same.”

Fresh from the vaults of the National Gallery of Canada, a string works from emerging artists such as Melanie Authier and David Ross Harper mingle with others like Marcel Dzama and Ron Terada as well as veteran figures like Lynne Cohen and Michael Snow. This cross-generational survey of the nation’s talents comprises over 100 individual pieces by 45 artists, to embrace a multitude of disciplinary practices from all geographical backgrounds. Builders constitutes such a wide-encompassing show, that it at times risks a flattening of issues and subject matters. On the other hand, the works are so respectably themed from personal narrative to urbanization, the environment, identity politics, utopia and so on, that these read as a thorough cross-examination of Canada’s cultural material.
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Yasmin Müller “Copia: Modern Disbelief” at Maria Stenfors, London


Yasmin Müller, Copia: Modern Disbelief, 2012. Installation view. Courtesy the artist and Maria Stenfors

Text by Ursula Ströbele

Copia – the name of the Roman goddess of abundance– is at the same time a term of the antique rhetoric which means pool, mass, opulence, and a wealth of knowledge and ideas.

In Alberti’s well known treatise of painting (1435), copia sits beside varietas (variety) and electio (selection) as the most important criteria for a successful composition: While copia causes “attentive consideration of the represented objects”, varietas guarantees a figurative and gestural diversity. Copia runs the risk of being “a tumultuous accumulation”, which may be averted by the electio, the deliberate action of an appropriate choice for each subject.

“Copia. Modern disbelief” – Yasmin Müller’s second solo exhibition at Maria Stenfors, presents new works in differing media, amongst them being two illuminated light boxes and an architectural installation enveloped in light projections – appearing to be a random arrangement of disparate found objects and shaped canvases.

At first glance the space seems to be streaked by a purist geometric expansive pattern, at second glance a multi-faceted net of images open up, evoking a host of associations and permitting individual interpretations.
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