Liu Bolin at MUDEC – Milan

Liu Bolin, Migrants, 2015, Mudec

MUDEC PHOTO hosts the second photographic exhibition since its opening and has entrusted Liu Bolin with the task of recounting his art in person, with a performance, one month before the opening of the exhibition, expressly created for the MUDEC which has, as a background, the iconic pieces of its permanent collection, and especially with a exhibition Visible Invisible.
“Visible Invisible” is an exhibition specially designed for the exhibition spaces of the MUDEC, promoted by the Municipality of Milano-Cultura, MUDEC and produced by 24 ORE Cultura, in collaboration with the Boxart Gallery, curated by Beatrice Benedetti.

Emblematic places, social issues, known and secret cultural identities: Liu Bolin endorses the poetics of hiding to become thing among things, to show that all the places, all the objects, even the smallest ones, have a soul that characterizes them and in which one can blend, vanish, identify himself into the Whole: a philosophy born in the East, but which has conquered the entire world, especially the Western one.
Contradictions between past and present, between power wielded and power endured; it is the opposite and complementary interpretation of the nature of things, documented by the images of Liu Bolin. Denunciation? Critical reflection? Political and social protest? Liu Bolin’s photographs have different levels of interpretation, besides their expressive immediacy.

City Prince/sses at PALAIS DE TOKYO – Paris

The exhibition City Prince/sses is presented as an imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed. Visual artists, creators, fashion designers, experimenters, tattooists, musicians: a good fifty artists are presented without any geographical grouping, mostly via new productions and in situ interventions.

DHAKA, LAGOS, MANILA, MEXICO CITY and TEHRAN are expressions of a tissue of contradictions, as seen in their saturated traffic which coexists with digital networks which supposedly work fluidly. Quite clearly, these megacities are very different from one another. Their cultural, political and social singularities teem with numerous narratives which are all side-tracks providing glimpses into their identities, devoid of anything that could be univocal.

Between skyscrapers and shacks, urgency and patience, megacities are undergoing a chaotic expansion, mingling transfers of capital with technological connexions in financial centres, generating urban margins with numerous inequalities. This vast, disorderly movement transforms cities into ceaseless work sites, favouring imaginary deviations. The artists which then emerge are thus the flâneurs of the 21st century, the hackers of our responses to an urban environment which is often functional and standardized.

Raw and head-spinning hangings, mysterious landscapes, luminous or opaque zones, backrooms and traps: the presentation of the show has been conceptualised by the architect Olivier Goethals, according to the rhythms of day and night, from profusion to desaturation, alternating between monographic zones and terrains for encounters. He has elaborated an architectural pathway which reveals and accentuates the lines of force in the building, which is here being envisaged as an immense common area.

Histories of women and feminist: from the 16th to the 21st century at MASP – Sao Paulo

The exhibition will be divided into two broad sections. The first, Histories of women, includes works from several regions, styles and pictorial genres, from the 16th to the late 19th century, including portraits, still lifes and landscapes, aside from historical and religious scenes. As dialogue and counterpoint, feminist histories will bring together artists from different nationalities who are working in the 21st century with feminist ideas or in response to them. The exhibition will be organized around thematic axes with works of different techniques that attempt try to cast a critical eye on the history of women and feminisms themselves, reflecting on future and imaginary projects that contemporary feminism proposes.

Tamara Henderson at RODEO – Istanbul

Tamara Henderson, Sun Spider, 2018, Rodeo Gallery

Tamara Henderson was born in 1982 in Sackville, Canada. She graduated from NSCAD University in Halifax and Städelschule in Frankfurt before completing a Masters degree at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Henderson currently lives and works in London. Tamara Henderson’s body of work draws on a diverse range of mediums including painting, sculpture, textiles, furniture and 16mm films. Henderson employs an idiosyncratic heady colour palette, reminiscent of a sun-soaked photograph from the 1970’s, or a partially remembered, non-verbal and non-linear dream.

Playing with misplaced memories, ideas of transformation, decay and ritual, Henderson’s works are often directly inspired from hypnotherapy sessions, which she uses as material to sculpt experience and create works that access deeper levels of consciousness. Working to objectify these experiences, her sculptural, anthropomorphic works intend to operate as communication vessels between alternate positions of conscious and unconscious states.

Henderson’s immersive and libidinal work draws on the canon of early avant-garde experimental theatre and performance practices of the 1960s. Surprising and unexpected events draw attention to our own bodies and the corporeal perimeter between interior and exterior. This acute awareness of bodily existence engages audiences in Henderson’s imagined worlds that refuse to settle. There is a sense to Henderson’s practice that is not familiar or lateral. Rather than alluding to an understanding of abstraction as dreamscape, however, this work is instead based in a reality that is multiplicitous and expansive. Henderson’s work presents contracting worlds that oscillate between transformation and regeneration.

Daydream Nation at CURRO – Guadalajara

Daydream Nation is a group exhibition curated by Mandujano/Cell at the gallery space CURRO. The exhibition is composed of five LA-based artists addressing identity issues and tracing an alternative sense of community through music, cinema, literature, art history, counterculture and personal experiences. The artists start from marginal narratives to construct an idea of non-fixed identity that can propagate to new models of cooperation. Mandujano/Cell is a space for contemporary art projects, a bookstore and a design studio that has collaborated with local, national and international artists. Their practice is characterized by addressing subculture and counterculture in Los Angeles and producing printed matter and text-based works.

Juan Capistran lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; ICA Boston; LACMA; MCA Denver; New Museum, New York; Kurimanzutto and Museo Tamayo; Mexico City; and the Istanbul Biennial, among others. Using strategies of conceptualism, appropriation, photography and painting, his work investigates socio-political issues. Through transdisciplinary projects, he questions notions of class, identity, existentialism, power and revolution.

You are nobody, and I might have been somebody, and the road to each of us is love is a new photographic, text-based series creating a conversation between antiheroes quotes and the introduction of graffiti slogans blended into mundane landscapes.

Rochele Gomez lives and works in Los Angeles. She has had solo exhibitions at Mandujano/Cell, LAXart, and Monte Vista Projects. Her work was part of “Caza: Rochele Gomez, Margaret Lee, and Alejandra Seeber”, curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy at the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York. Her works illuminate a perspective on the dialogue between the language of the visual arts and the experience of everyday life, inspired by the ability to convey the rawness of thought in subtle manners and the subjective positions she inhabits.

Hazel Mandujano is a LA-based interdisciplinary artist interested in intersections of art and graphic design, communication and ex-communication focusing on paper and publication as medium. In 2016 she founded Mandujano/Cell with Juan Capistrán, a collaborative art platform working with local, national and international artists on exhibitions and publishing. Mandujano/Cell is comprised of three physical spaces: design studio, bookstore and gallery space.
Based on the symbolism of triangle figure, Hazel creates a diagram of the meridian of existence and non-existence. Each drawing has a grid system with a phrase or song lyric in each square that pinpoints a moment, a rupture in her memory and psyche.

Vincent Ramos transforms archival material into new work, inspired by minimalist and process art, recovering narratives from the marginalized communities of Los Angeles and the Mexican-American experience, providing a deeper understanding of the history
we are taught. His artwork has been included in exhibitions at venues such as the Hammer Museum, LAXART, Las Cienegas Projects, and 18th Street Art Center. Ramos is a recipient of a California Community Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship and his work is included in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum. Vincent’s interactive installation deals with Mexican-American/Chicano history and larger notions of cultural assimilation, creating a presence in the physical space through Lee Trevino golf balls.

Alex Andrew Sánchez moonlights as a poet interested in painting and art history. A writer who makes paintings, Internet art, poetry, drawings, videos and sculptural assemblages. His work is inspired by the California landscape and his experiences in Los
Angeles. He cites literature and music as a major influence on his practice. He has exhibited at Garash Galería in Mexico City and had a solo shows at Museum as Retail Space (MaRS) in Los Angeles, and Last Projects in Hollywood. A publication of his work and poetry was released through Mandujano/Cell. Alex departs from an introspective exploration of the materials of painting and its memories in California to question common LA culture elements.