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Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

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Image courtesy of Oli Sorenson

Oli Sorenson
La Société de la Place des Spectacles

4 – 13 December 2014
at POPOP Gallery, Montréal

Vernissage: Saturday 6 December 2014, 14h – 17h
Performance: Saturday 6 December 2014, 16h

“[…] the very means of damaging these monitors in a performative context, to leave these marks will give exclusive properties to each of them: products of mass consumption will be transformed into unique objects …” (O. Sorenson)

Lodged under the signs of paradox, Oli Sorenson’s performance entitled La Société de la Place des Spectacles is presented on December 6th at 4 pm in Montreal’s Belgo Building. This performance taps right at the heart of spectacular fervor, while investing in the denial his own representation by continuing his series of “revisited works.” This corpus, triggered by a will to comment on the existing work of other creators as much as mass-produced objects, is here explored under the logic of destruction. Strangely, Sorenson’s exercise in transfiguration aspires to restore a stamp of uniqueness onto already original creations. Continue reading “Oli Sorenson: La Société de la Place des Spectacles at POPOP Gallery, Montréal”

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Emma Nourse/Chris Van Eeden/Sidy Diallo/Zina Saro-Wiwa at Brundyn+, Cape Town

cave1Brundyn_564Emma Nourse, Cave I, 2014. Wood, Brass, glass beads. Courtesy the artist and Brundyn+, Cape Town

Room 1
EMMA NOURSE
Pause
4 September – 18 October 2014

Emma Nourse’s first solo exhibition since graduating from the Michaelis School of Fine Art will be exhibited at the BRUNDYN+ gallery. Titled Pause, this body of work continues Nourse’s preoccupation with representations of environmental entropy and the deepening influence of human interference.
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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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Zachary Formwalt at VOX centre de l’image contemporaine, Montréal

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Zachary Formwalt, In Place of Capital, 2009. single-channel HD video still. Courtesy the artist.

Zachary Formwalt
2 November – 21 December 2013
at VOX centre de l’image contemporaine,
Montréal

Capital Imagery and the Traces of the Living
Johan Hartle

The Latin-derived term capital (as echoed in “capital crime” or “capital punishment”) refers to a crime for which one has to pay with one’s life, or more literally (going back to the original caput) one’s head. Also in the Marxist sense of the term and in Marx’s own metaphor, as coagulated “living labour,” or, more explicitly, “dead labour,” capital is linked to death in various ways.

Along these lines, Zachary Formwalt’s reflections on the history of photography are dealing with various forms of capital imagery as well. His materialist approach to the history of photography—embedding the successive development of the medium in the histories of finance, capital accumulation, and urban development—not only emphasizes photography’s structural analogies with the history and development of capital (the effect that the development of capitalism, economic crises, the stock market, bankers, etc. have played in it); it also points to the potential of photography as a space for that which it tends to repress: moving, acting, and productive bodies.
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Haig Aivazian “Fugere” at Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg

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Haig Aivazian, At every sunset, I think of you. Not because of some sense of beauty, but simply because I become acutely aware of how much time has passed since I last saw you, 2013. Charcoal and pastel on paper. 200 x 130 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg/Beirut

Haig Aivazian
Fugere
2 November 2013 – 5 January 2014
at Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg

Haig Aivazian (b.1980 Beirut) presents new sculptures, drawings and videos from his ongoing series Fugere, where the artist layers various histories of violence: from a highly televised rebuttal in response to racist insults on the pitch, to the occupation of inner-city neighbourhoods by police; and from the ascension onto an Olympic podium in the first post Soviet Games, to the weight of a dictator’s body as the trap door is released under his feet. History is not just entangled in sports, but also treated like a match, with freeze frames, replays and reverse angles. Here, the notion of time is malleable: the decades separating the release of two models of coveted basketball sneakers can be condensed into a frantic instant where two shoes are hurriedly thrown at an occupying president. Continue reading “Haig Aivazian “Fugere” at Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg”

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Athanasios Argianas “A Sequencer*” at On Stellar Rays, New York

On_Stellar_Rays_NY_Argianas_02_Consonants_As_Noise_(foam_consonants)_2013
Athanasios Argianas, Consonants As Noise (foam consonants), 2013 (detail). Copper plated sea sponges and steel (Installation view at Aanant & Zoo, Berlin) Photo credit: Jan Brockhaus. COurtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays, NY

Athanasios Argianas
A Sequencer*
2 November – 15 December 2013
at On Stellar Rays, New York

Athanasios Argianas’s work occupies a space between mediums: sculptures become scripts for performances, or arrangements for songwriting, or vice versa. Although his works are often based on translations — or transcriptions — of aural, visual, or textual layers, the systems he creates are open and intuitive, stemming from a genuine curiosity for experimentation rather than a predetermined, result-oriented idea. Accordingly, this exhibition is conceived as a play on indeterminacy, contingency, and the attempt to let the work be shaped by situations beyond the artist’s control.
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Nilbar GüreÅŸ “Nilbar Wien-Na” at Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

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Nilbar Güreş, Ayse loves Fatma, 2011. C-Print. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

Nilbar Güreş
Nilbar Wien-Na
7 June – 27 July 2013
at Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

Nilbar Güreş offers her observers seemingly direct access that takes on varyingly playful, poetic or even ironic characteristics. However, hidden in the background are social-political constructs that can coalesce to depict individual destinies. In her large-format photographs, Güreş investigates, for example, the meaning of homosexual love in a society dominated by patriarchal structures (Ayse loves Fatma, 2011), or the narrowly apportioned, clearly defined societal framework for women (Overhead, 2010), and focuses on gender and cultural identities. Seemingly every day events are staged to resemble cinematic stills. The use of provocative gestures and their significance only becomes apparent when the cultural background is revealed.
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Yam Lau “A World is a Model of the World” at Darling Foundry, Montréal

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Yam Lau, Between the Past and the Present: Lived Moments in Beijing (video still). Courtesy the artist and Katzman Kamen Gallery, Toronto

Yam Lau
A World is a Model of the World
6 June – 25 August 2013
at Darling Foundry, Montréal

Curated by Alice Jim

The 11th Anniversary + Opening of the exhibition: 20h00
VIP Benefit event: 18h00 – 20h00
Thursday 6 June 2013

In a corner of a city centre undergoing modernization and gentrification, fraught with conflicting economic scales of living together, a means of voluntary reclusion is on offer via a Chinese scholar’s studio and an apartment residence. The video projections, Between Past and Present: Lived Moments in Beijing (2012) and Room: An Extension (2008), are set adrift on two island pavilions connected by unobstructed garden pathways that are partly imaginary and partly evoked through deliberate landscaping and the open frame armature. Yam Lau’s recent work explores the use of real-time video footage and computer-aided design software to manifest familiar spaces in varying dimensions and perspectives.
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Adrian Paci “Lives in Transit” at Jeu de Paume, Paris

AdrianPaci_Center of temporary permanence_2007_564Adrian Paci, Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Center for Temporary Permanence) 2007. Video still. Courtesy kaufmann repetto, Milan and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zürich © Adrian Paci 2013

Adrian Paci
Lives in Transit
26 February – 12 May 2013
at Jeu de Paume, Paris

The work of Adrian Paci (born in 1969 in Albania) underlines one of the paradoxes of human intelligence, which consists of becoming aware of reality through irreality. Often inspired by subjects close to him, stories arising from his everyday life, Adrian Paci lets them slide poetically towards a fiction, which in its turn creates one or more wider realities. The exhibition at the Jeu de Paume gathers extremely diverse works (videos, installations, paintings, photographs and sculptures) made since 1997 and shows the numerous interconnections that operate between these different media and means of expression.
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Hiraki Sawa – Sculpting in Time: In Conversation

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Hiraki Sawa, Lineament, 2012. Video still. Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York

In May of 2012, London based Japanese artist Hiraki Sawa was invited for the artist-in-residence at The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto. During his stay, M-KOS attended his talk and met him at his studio at AGO. A few audio notes were recorded in the course of our visits, and from these the following texts were gathered, to encapsulate some of the highlight of this exchange, which trace his artistic journey from early work to the more recent “Lineament” (2012), currently on view at James Cohan Gallery in New York (through 27 April)
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