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The Newark Museum

India: Public Places, Private Spaces —
Contemporary Photography and Video Art
On view now through January 6, 2008

The Newark Museum
49 Washington Street
Newark, NJ 07102-3176

http://www.NewarkMuseum.org

A major exhibition of India’s contemporary photography and video art, the first of its kind in North America, India: Public Places, Private Spaces — Contemporary Photography and Video Art includes more than 100 works that vividly reflect the interior and exterior realities of contemporary India, as captured by 28 photographers and video artists. Among the featured artists are internationally-renowned photographers Raghu Rai and the late Raghubir Singh, as well as emerging talents Tejal Shah and Shilpa Gupta. The exhibition,which was designed to heighten awareness and appreciation for the artists and art beingcreated in India today, focuses on works produced since 1984; they will be on view through January 6, 2008.

Each artist has used his or her medium to provide rich insight into the dynamics shaping the contemporary Indian psyche. This revealing exhibition explores the artistic vitality that arises from extreme economic and political shifts, the pervasive influence of the media, and the cultural traditions competing with globalization. Some of the artists have bent the strong tradition of photojournalism to explore more subjective modes of photography that still include socially and politically engaged street photography. Some treat photography and video as overtly interpretive media that extend into social analysis. Others construct elaborate fictions with self-portraiture and performance to create deeply personal, often enigmatic narrative histories.

The exhibition is the culmination of several years of research and coordination by cocurators Gayatri Sinha, an independent curator and art critic in India, and Paul Sternberger, Associate Professor Art History at Rutgers — The State University, Newark, New Jersey. The curators also contributed to the exhibition catalog, as did award-winning author Suketu Mehta and Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Media, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Zette Emmons, The Newark Museum’s Manager of Traveling Exhibitions, serves as the project director. This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of The Provident Bank and The Provident Bank Foundation.

The 15-week run of India: Public Places, Private Spaces will be enhanced by a series of public programs including an evening with writers, filmmakers and artists; gallery tours and talks with special emphasis on the Museum’s large and distinguished collection of Indian art covering two millennia, with particular strengths in stone images and textiles; and a workshop introducing adults to artistic photographic and video techniques. Among the many public programs offered by The Newark Museum will be a two-day symposium Saturday, October 27, 10:30-4:00 pm and Sunday, October 28, 2:00-5:00 pm INDIA: Changing the Way We See. Included will be performances, screenings and readings by a select group of internationally renowned artists, scholars and writers explore the impact of a rapidly changing India on the global art scene. This program is being co-sponsored by Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, Newark; South Asian Studies Program, Rutgers University, New Brunsw
ick; William Paterson University; SAJA South Asian Journalist Association and the Indo American Arts Council. Members and students with current ID. Free. Registration required;
call 973-596-6613.

Indian arts and culture will be the central theme of The Newark Museum’s Thanksgiving Family Festival on Friday, November 23. The Festival, a museum-wide celebration, will feature live musical entertainment, dance performances, craft workshops, guided galler tours, guest lecturers and cooking demonstrations. Art Workshops will be offered Saturday, November 17, 10:00 am- 4:00 pm with guest artist, Anuu Palakunnathu Matthew, whose work is featured in the exhibition, India: Public Places, Private Spaces. Registration required; call 973-596-6607.

Individual Gallery Tours and reserved tours for groups are available during this exhibition Wednesdays-Sundays through January 6, 2008. For information: call : 973-596-6613 or visit http://www.NewarkMuseum.org

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

The Institute of Contemporary Arts

Enrico David
27 September - 11 November 2007

The Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London SW1Y 5AH

Box Office: + 44 (0)20 7930 3647
Press Office: + 44 (0)20 7766 1404

Galleries open daily 12pm - 7.30pm
Late night Thursdays until 9pm

http://www.ica.org.uk

This autumn, the Institute of Contemporary Arts is staging the first major public exhibition by artist Enrico David. David is presenting work from the last five years, including paintings, works on paper, sculptures and assemblages as well as two large-scale installations — one of which has been made especially for the ICA.

Over the last decade, Enrico David, Italian by birth but based in London, has quietly established a reputation as one of Britain’s most original artists. This is the first exhibition that demonstrates ongoing strands within his work, which often features stylised figures staged within erotic or tragic-comic scenarios.

David’s work borrows from craft techniques and modern design, and in the past the artist has employed textiles and embroidery in his work, as well as drawing on interior decoration. However in his practice craft and design are subject to both distortion and degradation. David’s interest in the languages of design (as well as those of painting and sculpture) reflects a broader dynamic in his work, such languages giving him "an opportunity to explore discontinuity, disruption and misuse — as part of my interest in personal adaptation."

David’s exhibition at the ICA is in two distinct parts. The lower gallery features a themed selection of painting and sculpture from the last five years, specifically chosen by the artist. The sculptures include Sodulater (2005), a totem or fetish made from copper and wood, as well as a new sculpture made from a draughtsman’s doll. These dolls and effigies are a recurring feature in David’s work, and some of the figures introduced here reappear elsewhere in the exhibition: the artist considers the group of works in the lower gallery as a kind of "casting session".

The lower gallery also features a large painting, The history of the fracturing of hope (2004) and a group of twenty-two gouaches, Shitty Tantrum (2006-07), works which depict an array of characters in a series of tableaux. David has often worked with performance and text, and his art can be interpreted as a form of theatre, re-enactment or psychodrama: centring on episodes of trauma; shot through with desire, guilt and secrecy; and ultimately promoting the transformations of masquerade as an elaborate survival strategy. However, the work resists simple biographical readings, hovering instead between the specific and the archetypal.

The two upper galleries each contain a single autonomous installation. The first of these is Spring Session Men (2007), originally created for the Project Arts Centre in Dublin. Running down one wall is a seven-metre long multi-panel painting, mimicking a piece of Art Deco marquetry and featuring a frieze or chorus line of twelve sharply-tailored men. Framed embroideries on canvas and a hanging medallion complete the scene, together with a large conference table covered in memos — the latter featuring the logo of a fictional company. The work is a kind of boardroom, but one shot through with a suppressed, hysterical homoeroticism.

The second installation, created for the ICA, is in the form of a diorama. This scene, achieved through trompe-l’œil effects, is based in part on a Surrealist photo-collage from 1935 by Dora Maar. The latter image features a panelled room, mud strewn across its floor, inhabited by a matronly figure and a young boy who appears to rub himself against her. In David’s version this image is combined with more personal material, as the room is crossed with a bedroom designed for the young David by his father in the early 1970s, and the figures are replaced by cut out images of a doll and of the artist himself.

Enrico David was born in Ancona, Italy, in 1966. He moved to London in the late 1980s, and studied fine art at Central St Martin’s in the early 1990s. Solo exhibitions include projects at Cabinet Gallery, London, and Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, as well as David, Project Art Centre, Dublin (2003), Douchethatdwarf, Transmission, Glasgow (2003) and Chicken Man Gong, Tate Britain, London and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005 and 2007 respectively). His group exhibitions include The best book about pessimism I ever read, Kunstverein Braunschweig (2002), Clandestine, Venice Biennale (2003), Flesh at War with Enigma, Kunsthalle Basel (2004), British Art Show 6, Hayward Gallery, London and tour (2005), Tate Triennial 2006, Tate Britain, London (2006) and The Subversive Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Van Abbe Museum, Einhoven (2006).

A programme of events will accompany the exhibition, including gallery talks by writers Dan Fox and Christabel Stewart and artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz. See website for full details.

Supported by:

The Elephant Trust has contributed to the artist’s fee

For more information go to: http://www.ica.org.uk

MUSAC

Existencias
21 September, 2007 -
January 8th, 2008

MUSAC
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo
de Castilla y León
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24
24008 León
(T) +34 987 09 00 00
(F) +34 987 09 11 11

http://www.musac.org.es

MUSAC PRESENTS EXISTENCIAS, A MAJOR EXHIBITION INCLUDING HUNDREDS OF WORKS HELD IN THE MUSEUM COLLECTION

Existencias/ Project overview

On 21 September MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León, is to present Existencias, its third major project drawn from the MUSAC Collection after Emergencias, the museum’s opening exhibition that began on 1 April, 2005 and Fusion, Aspects of Asian Culture in the MUSAC Collection, that took place between December, 2005 and April, 2006. The show will take over the museum’s entire exhibition space (5 halls, Laboratorio 987 and the Showcase Project: over 4,000 sq m in total), introducing the work of over 200 Spanish and international artists held in the MUSAC Collection. Existencias does not follow a specific theme. On the contrary, it goes with the flow of art collecting’s inherent tendency towards accumulation and selection. Through this cumulative presentation, reminiscent of the Baroque salons and cabinets, the intention is, on the one hand, to underline certain concepts inherent to generating an institutional collection (accumulation, a diversity and bl
ending of disciplines), and on the other to reappraise our ways of seeing as determined by this cumulative use of space.

The MUSAC’s architectural space will be treated as a warehouse, where the works will be displayed in a way that is different from the usual manner in contemporary museography. We have resorted to the idea of the Baroque cabinet that defined the great salons until the early 20th century and was recovered to a certain extent by some avant-garde movements, in order to display works without the element of "blank space", today so broadly accepted as the only possible context for reading a work of art. At the same time, by pre-empting any possibility of a dogmatic or linear reading of the exhibition, the aim of the exhibition is to leave the viewer entirely free to find his or her own path and approach to experiencing an exhibition such as this.

The artists

Though the viewing experience is suggested as an immersion into a multifarious galaxy, there will be a core spatial progression defined by certain works that speak for themselves on the issues we intend to raise. The course sets out from Montserrat Soto’s installation Paisaje secreto (Secret Landscape). Doors leading onto different private collections are a first step into our own. Likewise, Alicia Martín’s wall of exploding books, Contemporáneos, draws our attention to a universe where accumulation will be the guiding thread, leading into an oversized cabinet crammed with works, not unlike Candida Höfer’s vision of a hall at the Louvre, or the vast landscape of paintings created by Perejaume. We are facing the cumulative excess of Western history itself. Beyond this point, a massive cabinet nearly 80 m long will display an array of the Collection’s paintings and photographs in different media and on different themes. In parallel to this space, Julian Rosef
eldt’s piece Asylum will be shown as a metaphor of a diverse world governed by work where unity cannot be. Other installations and sculptures by Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge, Christian Jankowski, Tobias Rehberger, Hussein Chalayan and Paul Pfeiffer, amongst others, will lead the way to MUSAC’s main hall, which will be hung with most of the collection’s two-dimensional work shown in previous exhibitions. Here we will see the deposit in deposit. The path will continue through works revolving around light and direct experience of it, with pieces by Daniel Canogar, Jennifer Steinkamp, Atom Egoyan, Juliao Sarmento and Charles Sandison. Finally, a large hall with works by Wolfgang Tillmans, MP & MP Rosado, Maximo Vitali, Francesc Ruiz and Barry McGee, all loaded with an excess of visual noise, will complete the course, which will however be left open through its extensions in the Showcase, displaying a selection of drawings, and Laboratorio 987, with Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s work Zidane: A 21st century portrait.

Volume II: The Publication

In line with the exhibition, the museum will publish Volume II; a progress report on the collection since 2005. The book covers a number of works by a total of 122 artists, focusing on those that have been shown in the museum’s exhibitions to date. The book will also include essays and the works’ cataloguing details.

For more information go to: http://www.musac.org.es