Category Archives: VIDEO

KLARA LIDEN — TURN ME ON

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The city that never gets any sleep. Turn me on. Ever since Edison invented the lightbulb, big cities everywhere have been associated with lights, with sky-lines glittering far off in the distance, city lights like eyes in the night, wires cables network solutions and all kinds of pollutions to keep the whole thing going. Stank you smelly much. If they can’t make it there, they can’t make it anywhere.

All artists’ works are said to be self-portraits whether figurative or abstract or bearing any kind of likeness whatsoever to their subject and what with Klara Liden performing repetitive, minimal, and what often looks like physically quite exhaustive tasks in her own videos. I mean, it’s her alright but then performing as a kind of extra, body double or stand-in. Social climbing, it’s a lonely thing. From rags to riches and back again. Likewise oftentimes bringing attention to what’s maybe some of society’s less spot-lit sides, its non-sites and service entrances off the beaten track beneath the arches hidden in plain view not necessarily meant to be looked at. Streaming like was I dreaming pinch me punch me bring it on again to where the streets have no names and anyone’s up for anything really. Achtung baby. Human kindness is overflowing. Check the radar change the channel. Life’s a beach and then you get old, do I dare to wear my trousers rolled!!? Come on and on one and many, come true it’s up to you. Rhythm to the rhythm. You know what, just never turn me off. — Karl Holmqvist*

A new show of Liden’s sculpture and video work is on view in London. See link below.

KLARA LIDEN—TURN ME ON*

Through October 31.

Sadie Coles HQ

1 Davies Street, Mayfair, London.

Klara Liden, Turn Me On, Sadie Coles HQ, September 3, 2020–October 31, 2020, installation photographs by Robert Glowacki. Images courtesy and © the artists and Sadie Coles HQ.

PATRISSE CULLORS — MALCOLM X REVISITED

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From the Crenshaw Dairy Mart artist collective focused on trauma-induced conditions of injustice to scripting the season finale of Good Trouble on Hulu—a show about communities of color, women, queer, and trans folk living in Los Angeles—artist, organizer, BLM co-founder, and freedom fighter Patrisse Cullors thrives on speaking out through art alongside other inspiring creators.

Redcat presents the premiere of Cullors’ virtual event MALCOLM X REVISITED, a new commissioned video work recorded exclusively for the venue. The work explores the iconic historical figure Malcolm X and the current impact of the movement for Black lives.*

See link below for details.

PATRISSE CULLORS—MALCOLM X REVISITED*

Friday and Saturday, October 2 and 3.

8 pm on the West Coast; 11 pm East Coast.

Redcat

From top: Malcolm X; Patrisse Cullors on set for Malcolm Revisited, photograph by Alexandre Dorriz, image courtesy and © Cullors and the photographert; Cullors, image courtesy and © the artist; Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), courtesy and © Grove Press.

CAULEEN SMITH — MUTUALITIES

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I always think of Sojourner as being in conversation with many different objects, wallpapers, surfaces, textures, and banners. By the time viewers watch the film, they have already received so much informational groundwork from the environment that the film can focus on conveying a particular kind of imagery or feeling. When the title credits appear at the end of Sojourner, the room is completely dark, and that’s the moment when people can see the disco ball installation producing a cosmos on the ceiling. I always consider who the work is made for and what I want it to convey. It is so important that people are given an experience that cultivates their intellectual and physical well-being. That’s why I started making installations for my films, instead of simply showing them. — Cauleen Smith

MUTUALITIES—Smith’s first solo exhibition in New York City—has reopened at the Whitney. The show, which includes her 22-minute video installation Sojourner, was organized by Chrissie Iles, with Clémence White.

This week, join Smith and curator Amber Esseiva for a virtual conversation presented by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard.

See links below for information.

CAULEEN SMITH—MUTUALITIES

Through January 31, by appointment.

Whitney Museum of American Art

99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.

CAULEEN SMITH and AMBER ESSEIVA IN CONVERSATION

Thursday, September 10.

4:30 pm on the West Coast; 7:30 pm East Coast.

Cauleen Smith, Mutualities, Whitney Museum of American Art, February 17, 2020–January 31, 2021, from top: Alexis Hold Audre Lorde, 2020, from the ongoing series Firespitters, gouache, graphite, and acrylic ink on paper; Gregg Bordowitz, 2020, Firespitters series, gouache, graphite, and acrylic ink on paper; Sojourner, 2018, stills (2), video, color, sound; Pilgrim, 2017, still, video, color, sound, Whitney Museum of American Art; Natalie Holds Dionne Brand, 2020, Firespitters series, gouache, graphite, and acrylic ink on paper; Natalie Diaz, 2020, Firespitters series, gouache, graphite, and acrylic ink on paper. Artwork and video images courtesy and © the artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, and Kate Werble Gallery, New York City. Firespitters series photographs by Matthew Sherman, courtesy of the photographer and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

ELECTRONIC — FROM KRAFTWERK TO THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS

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Evoking the experience of being in a club, the exhibition ELECTRONIC—FROM KRAFTWERK TO THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS will transport you through the people, art, design, technology, and photography that have been shaping the electronic music landscape.*

See link below for details.

ELECTRONIC—FROM KRAFTWERK TO THE CHEMICAL BROTHERS

Through February 14, by appointment.

Design Museum

224–238 Kensington High Street, Kensington, London.

Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers, Design Museum, London, July 31, 2020–February 14, 2021, from top: Adam Smith and Marcus Lyall’s sensory experience for the Chemical Brothers’ track “Got to Keep On,” photograph by Guy Bell / Rex / Shutterstock; Kraftwerk, photograph by Guy Bell / Rex / Shutterstock; installation view, photograph by Felix Speller; Yuri Suzuki and Jeff Mills, The Visitor; masks from the Aphex Twin video Windowlicker (1999), photograph by Speller; Smith and Nyall’s “Got to Keep On” installation; Haçienda club designs by Ben Kelly and Peter Saville; Electronic: From Kraftwerk to the Chemical Brothers exhibition catalog; Jean-Michel Jarre’s imaginary studio, photograph by Speller; Weirdcore, Aphex Twin’s Collapse; 1024 Architecture, Core; Bruno Peinado, Untitled (The Endless Summer), 2007, photograph by Speller. Images courtesy and © the artists, the photographers, and the Design Museum.

FELIX BERNSTEIN AND GABE RUBIN

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THE TOTAL VOMITORIUM—an exhibition by Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin featuring the durational 4-channel video Vomitorium 720°—is now on view in Luma Westbau’s Schwarzescafé.

(An earlier iteration of Vomitorium—closed at the start of the pandemic—was at Queenslab, The Kitchen’s partner venue in Ridgewood, New York.)

Organized by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, the show is a “tragicomic reenactment of the history of meta-theater from religious ritual to live-streaming, Zoom, and Twitch.  The artists transition between multiple genres, genders, ages, tropes, eras, and personae, with Bernstein playing Onkos, the Greek mask of tragedy, and Rubin playing multiple versions of Eros. They play-through arcane and new modes of performance documentation from Classical diagrams to Victorian photo journals, as well as the parallel domestication of Eros into Cupid.”*

The vomitorium is traced from its origin as a passageway in amphitheaters to the current socially reflexive architecture built for Instagram selfie-stories—comparing the way audiences watch each other watching each other binging and purging media. The impossible wish for a 360-degree perspective is shown to mark both panoptic social media and counter-surveillance tactics; normative and queer gazes. Played on four unconnected screens, Vomitorium is inlaid by Baroque frames—juxtaposing maximalist convolution with the fashionable metaphysics of presence and transparency. Virtually real versions of Vomitorium will be simultaneously made available on the new media app Ortvi.*

FELIX BERNSTEIN and GABE RUBIN—THE TOTAL VOMITORIUM*

Through September 6.

Luma Westbau—Schwarzescafé

Löwenbräukunst, Limmatstrasse 270, Zürich.

Felix Bernstein and Gabe Rubin, The Total Vomitorium, Luma Westbau, Schwarzescafé, June 9, 2020–September 6, 2020, photographs by Nelly Rodriguez, images courtesy and © the artists and David Lewis, New York.