art-agenda summer Round up
Over the past few months, art-agenda has expanded and evolved to accommodate more voices, different places, and new features.
art-agenda is focused on covering a greater variety of exhibitions from across the world, building a wide network of authors and locations to complement our reviews from major art centers. Recently, during the opening days of the Havana Biennale, Luis Camnitzer offered a unique account of Tania Bruguera’s role in the proceedings, questioning whether “enlightened negotiation” could be the best way to address Cuba’s current political climate. Ovul O. Durmusoglu wrote about “Daily Business,” a group show that combined sound and sculpture, presented at the recently opened LamdbaLambdaLambda gallery in Pristina; Minoru Shimizu reflected on the legacy of Relational Aesthetics in Gaku Nakano’s “Somehow the mosaic looks nice” at Kyoto’s Kodama Gallery; and from Cape Town, Morgan Quaintance reviewed “Speaking Back,” “an exhibition as social interstice, a locus in which marginal and muted subject positions are given voice, the innovative and often startling works of 13 predominantly black African and African American women (…) installed as possible contributions to a notional forum.” In Lisbon, Ricardo Matos Cabo couldn’t “help feeling amazed by the marvels and horrors of magnification” of Alexandre Estrela’s exhibition at the newly opened Galeria Pedro Alfacinha, and, writing from Puerto Rico, Carla Acevedo-Yates observed Ad Minoliti’s “revised modernity” at her show “CSH#14_utopía” at San Juan’s Galería Agustina Ferreyra.
At the same time, art-agenda presented a detailed coverage of this season’s major art events. Three of our contributors saw the 56th Venice Biennale, “a maze where one’s attention drifts away from what is on view and instead toward anxiously looking for what’s missing,” as noted by Kevin McGarry; Sabrina Tarasoff found it “ironic, really, that a project aiming to consider our futurity in an ‘age of anxieties’ would present no alternatives, no future, no escape;” and Chris Sharp challenged us to imagine if it’s “possible to make a biennial that does not look like a biennial? If so, what would that look like?” Days before, Kirsty Bell went through a wide selection of exhibitions that opened during Gallery Weekend Berlin, visiting Haegue Yang’s “endearing jingle bell sculptures at Wien Lukatsch,” Tino Sehgal’s “songstress ensconced in a flower garden at Johnen Galerie,” and Cyprien Gaillard’s “nighttime forays in seductive 3D splendor at Sprüth Magers.” Soon after, and borrowing Olav Velthuis’s concept of “the Venice Effect,” Andrew Weiner reflected on “the Frieze Effect” while reviewing Frieze New York 2015 and “its canny application of the biennial formula.” In Switzerland, during Art Basel, Stefan Kobel gave an account of the fair’s three elephants in the room, while Ingo Niermann grounded his quasi-anthropological remarks on a single artwork, Anna Gaskell’s film Echo Morris (2014), and Barbara Casavecchia detailed a dizzying tour of the city’s exhibitions, performances, and projects outside the fair grounds.
We’ve also introduced two new features: the new Dossier section—launched this spring with two new commissions, by W.A.G.E. and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané—and the new SPACES section, which offers a thematic examination of galleries based on their physical and spatial configurations. It was inaugurated with a text by Chris Sharp, in which he proposed a taxonomy of four phyla to classify the apartment gallery, and included a series of rarely seen images of historical and present-day apartment galleries. Pursuing our existing columns, in The Gallerist, Luca Cerizza presented a historical survey of the work of Kazuko Miyamoto, a member of A.I.R., and the initiator of the Onetwentyeight Gallery, New York. The account combined Miyamoto’s own recollections with archival research, providing a nostalgic yet positive portrait of this exceptional artist and gallerist.
art-agenda will have a summer break in August, resuming publication in September with a new Rearview feature; reports from the upcoming 14th Istanbul Biennale, “La vie moderne,” and the 13th Biennale de Lyon; reviews of Martha Rosler and Hito Steyerl’s solo shows in Berlin, and plenty more.
