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Memorable Exhibitions 2015

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See below for image credits.

As we reach the end of 2015, M-KOS again invited a selection of art professionals for our fifth annual survey to share their most memorable exhibitions, art works, performances, events and other moments of this past year. All these were memorable from the perspectives of our invited reviewers, yet surely some entries can be debated by our readers joining us in the comments section below. All are welcome to suggest any other must see art moment in this year’s art listings.

This year’s participants include: Jonathan Shaughnessy (Associate curator, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa); Cheryl Sim (Curator, DHC/ART, Montreal); Thomas Kneubühler (Artist, Montreal/Switzerland); Dominique Fontaine (Independent curator/Founding director of aPOSteRIORI, Montreal); Guy Sangster Adams (Editor, Plectrum – The Cultural Pick, London, UK); Maria Ezcurra (Artist/Art educator, Montreal/Mexico); Romeo Gongora (Artist, Montreal); Karen Tam (Artist, Montreal); Stephen Connolly (Film maker, London, UK); Oli Sorenson (Artist/Editor, M-KOS, Montreal); Miwa Kojima (Managing editor, M-KOS, Montreal)
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Kind of like an Accident: Interview with Cory Arcangel

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Cory Arcangel, Power Points, exhibition view. Courtesy the artist and DHC/ART, Montréal. Photo by Vincent Toi

Cory Arcangel is a Brooklyn based artist working in diverse media, including video, music, modified videogames, performances and the Internet. Arcangel often makes use of appropriation as a strategy to draw attention to source materials ranging from best-selling albums, Photoshop gradients and UGG boots. While bridging the gap between the highbrow and lowbrow culture, his work explores the nature of cultural production and consumption in a media and technology saturated world. On the occasion of his solo exhibition at the DHC/ART in Montréal, Arcangel talked to M-KOS about his art, his diverse influences and the role of artists as archivists.

MKOS: You started out as a musician, right? How did you make the transition to visual art?

Cory Arcangel [CA]: Its hard for me to explain, it just happened backwards, when I was in high school I was always making videos and you couldn’t go to art school to make video in 1996, so I went to music school. But I also feel in love with the history of music, so when I got out of school I was composing and I was making videos and I just put my work wherever I thought it would be cool and it’s just the gallery people who kept asking for it. So it happened kind of like an accident.
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Cory Arcangel “Power Points” at DHC/ART, Montréal

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Research in Motion (Kinetic Sculpture #6), 2011. (Installation view, Pro Tools, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011; Photo: Sheldan Collins). Modified silver dancing stands. © Cory Arcangel, Courtesy of Cory Arcangel.

Cory Arcangel
Power Points
21 June – 24 November 2013
at DHC/ART, Montréal

DHC/ART presents the first major Canadian exhibition of Brooklyn based artist Cory Arcangel. Trained initially in classical guitar and music technology at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Cory Arcangel is now recognized as a major exponent of a pop-tinged, computer-centred art.

Arcangel embraces the Internet’s anarchic potential and its Utopian open source culture, making works that question authorship, the status, and value of the art object. Exploring both the promises and deceptions of software, electronic gadgets, games and other devices—with an emphasis on how they become old and quickly out-dated—Arcangel’s art eulogizes technology’s built-in obsolescence while also wittily celebrating its noise, mindless repetitions, and inevitable failures.
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Thomas Demand “Animations” at DHC/ART, Montréal


Thomas Demand, Pacific Sun, 2012. Production still © Thomas Demand/SODRAC (2012) Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York/Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London/Esther Schipper, Berlin

Thomas Demand
Animations
19 January – 12 May 2013
at DHC/ART, Montréal

Curator: John Zeppetelli

A philosophical commentator on the authenticity of the “real” and the slippages of memory, Thomas Demand is a well-known German photographer who began as a sculptor, but is now widely acclaimed for photographic and moving image works.

Demand’s work interlaces photography, architecture and sculpture. His method usually begins with an image culled from the media, which is meticulously re-fabricated, by hand, into a life-size, three-dimensional paper and cardboard sculpture, to ultimately end up as a photograph. The resulting images are both very recognizable and strangely out of reach. Crucial to the context are photography’s long-debated truth claims, and the photograph’s indexical quality.
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Interview: Alain Thibault, artistic director of the International Digital Arts Biennale


Alain Thibault (Right) with artist Robert Lepage at the opening of BIAN. Courtesy of BIAN 2012. Photo: Conception

Alain Thibault is the founder and artistic director of the International Digital Arts Biennale (BIAN), inaugurating its first edition in April 2012. Unlike his sister electronic music event Elektra, BIAN focuses on digital forms of contemporary art, hosted in numerous museums, art galleries, artist-run centres and other venues throughout the city of Montreal. BIAN invited artists from Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, Austria, The Netherlands, Turkey, USA as well as Quebec and Canada, including renowned names such as Carsten Nicolai and Ryoji Ikeda. Thibault talked to M-KOS about his motivation to take digital arts to the next level, while he enjoys the taste of success of the first edition of his biennale.

M-KOS [MKOS]: As founder for the International Digital Arts Biennale (BIAN), how would you describe your motivation to do such a festival?

Alain Thibault [AT]: In fact I started out with Elektra in 1999, which is also an international festival of digital arts. The focus with Elektra was mainly about concerts and performances, but still with a mandate of blending experimental electronic music with visuals. This could be audiovisual performance, robotic performance, but there was always a central axis on experimental electronic music combined with a visual element. So that began in ’99, and gradually we evolved out of Usine C which is our main headquarters and quite an extraordinary venue for presenting this type of show. By 2005 we started adding more and more installations to the usual performance program, and these slowly spread to other venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal and the Cinémathèque. In 2009 the installation program exceeded the allocated duration of the whole [Elektra] festival and that was when I said to myself I should make another event out of this, entirely devoted to the installation component. This is more or less how BIAN was born. And also this was about highlighting the idea that we arrived at a point in time where major artists were doing major works [in a digital format] and for me it was important to mark that moment.
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Review: Berlinde De Bruyckere – The poetic beauty of ephemeral existence

Currently on view: Montréal
Berlinde De Bruyckere
at DHC/ART, Montréal
30 June – 13 November 2011

“Les Deux” (2007) Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin

The air is somber and solemn at DHC/ART gallery, where life-size sculptures of human and equestrian carcasses are lugubriously arranged in a clinically white exhibition. An unsettling sense of disquiet has taken over the space, as if we have just witnessed the inexorable reality of a public execution. Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere uses the physical body as a vessel, a receptacle to endure violence, pain, suffering and ultimately death, the body as a theater that lays bare the trials of our human condition.

“Les Deux” (2001) displaces the gallery into a veterinary morgue, in laying out two sculptures of full-grown horses on a purpose-built scaffold. These ostensibly simulate real animals, such that one expects the stench of fresh road-kill to arise. Not quite real, however these were cast from actual corpses and subsequently covered with genuine hides and manes, hand stitched together. The equine faces are featureless, eyes, nostrils and mouth have been sown shut, to accentuate our perception of an enormous lifeless mass. Throughout the ages, horses have symbolized power, glory, strength and freedom, the noble beast long ago domesticated by humans has served in as many campaigns for civilization, as for pillage and war. Now channeled through De Bruyckere’s vision, the horse has become an emblem for the aftermath of powerlessness and desolation.
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Review: John Currin – Controversial ambitions of a master painter

Currently on view: Montréal
John Currin
at DHC/ART, Montréal
30 June – 13 November 2011

“Sno-bo” (1999) © John Currin. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

DHC/ART premiered John Currin with a first retrospective exhibition in Montréal for the American painter. Looking back at the last two decades of his works, displayed chronologically from the lowest level up to the top forth floor of the DHC/ART building, Currin has evolved from somewhat naïve painterly techniques to more recent attempts to rival old-master virtuosities, via provocative erotic themes. Willingly putting high and low brow genres into conflict, he is well known for painting women with disproportionally large breasts, tiny feet and padded bottoms. Currin appropriates kitsch and other popular forms of imagery from mass media consumer culture, to entangle their mercantile origins with satire, caricature, fiction and fantasy. These surprisingly modest-sized canvases also overflow with art historical reference that somehow add gravitas to evermore prodigal pictorial effects, in high contrast to his deliberate choice of shallow subject matter, trespassing on ideas beauty and desire.
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