Artipedia - Arts News

ARC / Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Cie
Expodrome
until 6 May 2007

Open daily 10am-6pm, Wednesday 10am -10pm
closed Monday

http://www.mam.paris.fr

This is ARC’s first major solo exhibition of the work of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In preference to the more conventional retrospective mode, the artist has opted for presenting an ensemble of works created in collaboration with an "exhibition team" – her version of a film crew. Embodying the notions of "shared space" and "playground", the exhibition puts the viewer at the heart of the set.

Since the early 1990s, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has been pursuing a thoroughly independent line, never hesitating to move beyond the art field, push back its frontiers and explore its relationship with such other domains as cinema, architecture, fashion, music and literature. She has built her oeuvre around "space", beginning with the intimacy of Chambres and working through films and environments to her extreme urban situations and landscapes.

In ARC’s modernist architectural setting Expodrome brings together a number of "space-times" that trigger singular experiences: Solarium, La Fée Electricité, La Jetée, Promenade, Panorama, Cosmodrome and Cinéma.

These environments – visual, sound-based, physical – make up an exploratory journey "on the edge of the exhibition". The exhibition is the medium for the artist: designing potential spaces and exploring limitations are ways of producing situations a little like staged scenes with which viewers can engage as they move through the exhibition.

The first such situation – created with Nicolas Ghesquière – is the environment/projection Solarium on the great staircase leading to the Salle Dufy.

Then, integrated into the exhibition, comes Dufy’s panoramic La Fée Électricité, accompanied by an instrumental montage by Alain Bashung.

On the ARC floor itself La Jetée, another joint creation with Nicolas Ghesquière, slows visitors’ progress down with an artificial landscape, an accumulation of sombre blocks and modules.

The large space opens out onto Promenade, created with Christophe Van Huffel: an invisible work whose cinema-inspired use of sound turns this into a radically tropicalised zone.

Panorama, created with Benoît Lalloz and Martial Galfione, presents, in the curved area, a contemporary version of 19th century panoramas, a luminously nocturnal vision of our planet’s great metropolises.

Tapis de lecture is an invitation to leaf through piles of paperbacks: these are the artist’s "reservoir of possibilities", the source material for her fictions.

Next, an outdoor walkway takes the visitor into Cosmodrome (2001), a launch pad with sound by Jay-Jay Johanson.

Lastly, Cinéma is a selection of Gonzalez-Foerster’s films – some made with Ange Leccia – since 1996. Every Sunday at 3 pm a guest will offer a special cinema programme that ties in with the exhibition.

The written and visual collaborations making up the catalogue played a large part in the genesis of Expodrome. Among the contributors are Jean-Max Colard, Nicolas Ghesquière, Francesca Grassi, Lisette Lagnado, Ange Leccia, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Rahm and Angeline Scherf.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has already shown several times at ARC, with Numéro Bleu (1991), L’hiver de l’amour (1994), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno (1998) and Voilà (2000); at many international biennials and film festivals; and more recently at the 27th São Paulo biennial (2006). She was invited at Documenta XI in Kassel (2002) and will be taking part in the next Skulptur Project in Münster this year.

Director of the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris : Fabrice Hergott
Head of ARC : Laurence Bossé

Curated by : Angeline Scherf with Emilie Renard

Contact Press & Communication : Héloïse Le Carvennec
heloise.lecarvennec@paris.fr / Tel. : 00 33 1 53 67 40 50

For more information go to: http://www.mam.paris.fr

Portikus Frankfurt am Main

Olafur Eliasson: Light Lab, 2006-2008

Portikus Frankfurt am Main

Strobo Night, Blue Moon, Deep Purple Laguna, Movementmeter for the Main, Daylight, The Heiliotropic Month, The Giant Sky Mirror Light, Green River Light, The Ultraviolet City, Water Reflection Wall, Solar Flames, Nebular Orion, Sunrise Pink, Vertical White and Blue, Reversed Full White Sun… These are some of the working titles for Olafur Eliasson’s solar experiments in the large glass roof of the Portikus in Frankfurt am Main. The project, which started in April of 2006, has become recognized far beyond the art world and has turned the Portikus into one of the most discussed architectural sites in Germany.

The glass roof is a light laboratory. Eliasson sees each chapter of the project (planned to continue until 2008) as a new test. ‘What’s getting increasingly clear,’ writes Daniel Birnbaum, ‘is the solar fascination that recurs in his work, from the artificial rainbow “Beauty” (1993) to “Your Sun Machine” (1996) and his succession of synthetic suns the most massive of which formed the centre of Eliasson’s “Weather Project” (2003) at Tate Modern. This heliocentric drive in his art seems to have little to do with recent theoretical or artistic developments but a lot with the most ancient of speculations concerning vision and the power of the mind. Philosophy as such seems to start as a kind of sun dance. Not only sunflowers, also the tropes of language turn towards the celestial light. Writing about the heliotrope as the foundation all philosophical metaphorics in “White Mythology,” Jacques Derrida spelled out the limits of what is natural in nature: “Each time there is a metaph
or, there is doubtless a sun somewhere; but each time there is sun, metaphor has begun. If the sun is metaphorical always, already, it is no longer completely natural. It is always, already, a lustre, a chandelier, one might say an artificial construction…"’

Portikus Frankfurt am Main
Alte Brücke 2 Maininsel
60594 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Telephone 49 69 962 44 54-0 Fax 49 69 962 44 54-24
http://www.portikus.de

The project is supported by

For more information go to: http://www.portikus.de

The Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum
of American Art presents
Seminars with Artists

Since its inception in the late 1960s, Seminars with Artists has provided a forum for intimate engagements with the most notable American artists of the past forty years.

http://www.whitney.org

New York Corners
Taking its cue from the exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark: "You Are the Measure," this season’s speakers explore art practices born from critical intersections with New York City.

Keith Sonnier
Thursday, February 22 at 7 pm
Developing a type of Minimalism from found objects, Keith Sonnier’s sculptural work, “no matter what its size,” notes Richard Kalina, “has the capacity to fill and activate a space.” His most recent installation, Double Monopole (2006), makes use of sixty-foot steel frames, neon, and falling water. “I think it’s my Bellagio,” Sonnier has said. “I finally got to build a big fancy waterfall.” The work serves as a gateway to the Kansas City International Airport.

Mary Heilmann
Wednesday, March 7 at 7 pm
Mary Heilmann moved to New York in 1968 and began exploring and experimenting with abstract painting’s history and materiality, and infusing her compositions with both pop and personal references. Her first retrospective, organized by the Orange County Museum of Art, opens in May 2007 and will also include her work in ceramics, decorative arts, film, and music.

Andrea Fraser
Thursday, March 22 at 7 pm
For the last twenty years, Andrea Fraser’s work has investigated art as a culture and an economy, highlighting the way museums, collectors, and artists themselves invest art-making with meaning and value. Her 2005 book, Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser, collects essays, performance scripts, and texts that are key to her practice.

Trisha Brown
Thursday, April 12 at 7 pm
Acclaimed choreographer Trisha Brown first became known in the 1960s when she showed her work with the Judson Dance Theater. In 1970, she founded Trisha Brown Dance Company among SoHo’s burgeoning alternative-space scene, and began exploring site-specific choreography (like Walking on the Wall, performed in 1971 at the Whitney). From work based on everyday actions and repetitive gestures to dance cycles, choreography for opera, and, most recently, ballet, Brown continues to find new possibilities for movement, collaboration, and postmodern dance.

Lyle Ashton Harris
Thursday, April 26 at 7 pm
Lyle Ashton Harris has incorporated installation, video, and photography in his work, often with himself as the subject. His identity-based photographs of the 1990s explored race, gender, and sexuality through strategies like masquerade, camp humor, and the family snapshot. Of his recent work, Holland Cotter wrote: "Like most really stimulating art, Mr. Harris’s eludes clean readings. It is self-portraiture that is not quite self-portraiture, based on fiction that is not quite fiction." His work was included in the Whitney’s Photography and the Self: The Legacy of F. Holland Day.

Advance ticket sales are strongly recommended, as seating is limited. Tickets may be purchased at the Museum Admissions Desk or by visiting http://www.whitney.org; inquiries at (212) 570-7715 or public_programs@whitney.org.

The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Seminars with Artists program is made possible by the support of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART
945 MADISON AVENUE
1 (800) WHITNEY

For more information go to: http://www.whitney.org