Reviews
Laura Watt
Valerie McKenzie Gallery - New York
By Lara Taubman
Upon entering the gallery, Laura Watt’s artistic paradigm clings to the traditional. Yes, there are paintings on the white gallery wall, canvas stretched and primed by the artist, but they distinguish themselves by being substantial - and okay with that. There is no embarrassment about being intent or [...]
PERFORMA 2009
By Jeff Edwards
Without Performa 09, the hundredth anniversary of Italian Futurism might have passed fairly quietly on the New York art scene. The coincidence of the movement’s centennial and the massive biennial performance art festival proved beneficial for both. Futurism provided Performa 09 with a perfect theme around which to organize this year’s events, while [...]
Aldo Chaparro: Vanishing Point
FIFI Projects - New York
By Bryan Barcena
In the post-financial meltdown, credit crisis or great recession era, the narrative of American greed and consumerism has become not only a cliché, but also an inescapable self-fulfilling prophecy. The American populace is, at this point, fully aware of its propensity to consume and the vilification that is thrust upon [...]
Rob Voerman
Cobra Museum - Amstelveen, Amsterdam
How to find Comfort in Discomfort
By Caridad Botella
On January 29, the Cobra Museum in Amstelveen (Amsterdam) opened the exhibition “Human Comfort,” Rob Voerman’s (Deventer 1966) first one-man show in The Netherlands. This extensive retrospective brings together large and small installations, prints and watercolors produced from 1998 to the present. We find [...]
VIBA Fest
ThisIsNotAGallery - Buenos Aires, Argentina
By María Carolina Baulo
Landing in Buenos Aires last November the Video Arte Internacional Buenos Aires (VIBA Fest) brought together sixty-six artists from all around the world, presenting more than 60 videos and short films at ThisIsNotAGallery.
This experience was led by the Argentinian Carlos Baragli, Director of ThisIsNotAGallery, artist, curator, illustrator [...]
Magnus Sigurdarson & Paul Stoppi - Operation Beefeater
Pan American Art Projects - Miami
La possibilité de vivre commence dans le regard de l’autre.
Houellebecq
By Janet Batet
We should start off by admitting that the old identity-alterity controversy is merely an eccentric illusion opportunely adopted in the past by post-colonial nationalistic politics, in which the individual was labeled as an integral part of a geographically localizable group, [...]
Urs Fischer: Marguerite de Ponty
New Museum - New York
By Jeff Edwards
On paper, Urs Fischer’s New Museum exhibition “Marguerite de Ponty” has all the hallmarks of contemporary-art greatness: polish, intelligence, scope, scale, and a grand underlying concept-that of showing how easily fake images can fool us into abandoning lived reality. Yet once one is caught within the exhibition’s three floors [...]
Lida Abdul: Body of Ruins
Anna Schwartz Gallery - Melbourne, Australia
By Victoria Lynn
Lida Abdul’s exhibition Ruins: “Stories of Awakening” at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne, features three videos made in 2005-06, and a sequence of photographs, each seen for the first time in Australia. The works are based on the artist’s continued engagement with her homeland Afghanistan, a place of ambush, [...]
Jayce Salloum: Untitled Videotape
Artspace - Sydney, Australia
Curated by Blair French
By Anneke Jaspers
Occupying only one gallery, but comprising a multitude of discreet video components, this exhibition of Salloum’s cumulative body of work untitled felt as much like a mini survey as a single installation. Collectively, the volume of content presented was overwhelming. Nevertheless, the impossibility, or at least unlikeliness, [...]
Anna Lascari - Pink
a.antonopoulou.art Gallery - Athens, Greece
By Dimitra Kollerou
One of the main characteristics and topics of today’s big cities is the emergence of various, new resident tribes. With the appearance of the urbanites, a new code of living and understanding has appeared. Since we live in big cities, we are used to being part of a large [...]
