Sculpture (Sculpture)

The sculpture shores shored (Working Title) makes reference to the human form. The two sides of the sculpture are distinctively different, with the rear showing an anamorphic-corrugated structure, the front suggesting the human form, making perhaps an unconscious reference to Giacometti or Barnett Newman. But whereas their work suggests immanence, Michael Dean refuses any notion of transcendence, remaining rooted in presentness .

Installation (Installation)

NO POSITIONS AVAILABLE is composed of panels covering the entire wall of the gallery exemplifying one of the tendencies of the artist. The “billboard sign,” like a ready-made, plays with the different meanings of the title, literally and abstractly. The repetition of the sign, as it has used in Minimal and Conceptual art, fills the space.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The work consists of a work inside a work. The spectator is presented with a commissioned documentary on a flat-screen Tv on the subject of the production of the making of an artwork that doesn’t exist entitled The magic and the meaning (2008). The imaginary film, The magic and the meaning , is described only within the documentary, which follows parts of the making of the film, extracts from interviews with the writer and film maker Dan Fox and the artist and maker of the work Ryan Gander; as well as showing short slow-motion sections of the film that does not exist.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

“BC/AD” (Before Cancer, After Diagnoses) is a video of photographs of the artist’s face dating from early childhood to the month before he died, accompanied by the last diary entries he wrote from April 2004 to July 2005 (entitled “50 Reasons for Getting Out of Bed”), from the period from when he lost his voice, thinking he had laryngitis, through the moment he was diagnosed with lung cancer and the subsequent treatment that was ultimately, ineffective. The diary entries are at once poignant, ironic, laced with gallows of humor, with his continued eye for the little incidents in life, interweaving the past with his experience of the present. The morphing of the portraits—the eyes and sight remaining leveled—is haunting, beginning with very blurry images of childhood and ending with a pin-sharp photograph of Breakwell the month before he died.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio. It isn’t just any object, but an iconic sculpture of the end of the 20th century: Jeff Koons’ Bunny. One key question in this work is of course the construction of images, but there is also the question of sculpture, of the passage from two-dimensionality to three-dimensionality.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Beyond the White Walls , with a commentary written and spoken by Jeremy Deller, is often wryly amusing. The artist narrates the many projects he has completed or which are in progress beyond the gallery walls. It is beyond the gallery where Deller is at his most effective and where his art reaches out to and into people’s lives.

H.2. N. Y Skeleton of the Dump revolves entirely around the performance “Homage to New York” (1960), of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), during which the machine built by the artist in the gardens of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) had to self-destruct itself in 27 minutes, but, in the end, it had to be finished off by firemenbeing called in after it erupted in flames. Since the discovery of Jean tinguely’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London, in 1982, Michael Landy spent two years researching and sketching (charcoal, oil, glue, ink) from his previous research carried out at Museum Tinguely in Basel, and at the MOMA in New York.

Installation (Installation)

Epiphany…learnt through hardship is composed of a bronze sculpture depicting the model of the little dancer of Degas, in the pose of a female nude photographed by Edward Weston (Nude, 1936) accompanied by a blue cube. The work refers to the positive occupations of space and the absence of form and structure, to the relationship between the visible and the invisible, to memory, and to the relationship we have to images and to our history. The work refers to childhood, biography and learning to question how meaning is made and how history is remembered and performed.

Installation (Installation)

You see without light is a group of photographs around the theme of Bauhaus. This includes a reference to one of Gander’s works which is the Bauhaus manifesto without dots on the letter ‘i’, as well as drawings of his ideal art school.

Installation (Installation)

This work is meditative and fragile. These abstract forms are projected slides belonging to another lecture, Travelogue , where the images have been removed. What is left is the hole of the frame of the slide that light draws upon and projects on the wall.

Photography (Photography)

Ryan Gander is a collector. He keeps all sorts of documents to create from. His studio is full of found images, personal images, documents copied from internet or cutout of newspapers.

Installation (Installation)

A vehicle without light is a group of more personal photographs. This includes an image of a pirate radio in the 1960s, a story from the BBC website and the photo of Mary Aurore. Mary Aurore, is in fact a character he invented whose identity is impossible to determine but who appears in various works.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits. The monumental and unnatural aspect of the baobabs turns them into strange and anthropomorphic personalities. Adding to the descriptive aspect of the film, the sound is a recording of the environment, of sounds made by animals, and participates in this peaceful contemplation.

Installation (Installation)

Milton Friedman on the wonder of the free market pencil is an installation based on 42 blank pages. On the first page, one can read the original version in English of the liberal speech by Milton Friedman on “The Story of the pencil”. On the other pages, the same text has been translated into 41 different languages by using Google Translate, before coming back to English.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Four knives appearing as if thrown at the wall to alleviate frustration and boredom, form rhythmic shadows and markings of time above a translated phrase boldly printed in simplified Chinese and English. While the English reads “But Now I Manufacture Hate, Every Single Day,” the Chinese, resultant from Google Translate in 2011, reads awkwardly to something meaning “now I manufacture black special.” The term “black special” is derived from a transliteration of the word “hate” into the sound “heite”, where the corresponding written characters literally denote “black special”. The rigidity of the machine translation also preserved the syntax of English, forcing the Chinese to crudely abide by English grammar.

Installation (Installation)

In this installation, you are standing at the heart of a bicephalous space reflecting Goldin+Senneby’s main research led during their residency in Paris. Here, two historical events from the late 1930’s and early 50’s are confronted. In one of these spaces, you find yourself reading a map of the Marly forest where Georges Bataille’s secret society, « Acéphale », was meeting around 1937 and notably celebrating Louis XVI’s regicide.

Performance (Performance)

In Fiction on Auction , the site of the auction is used to stage a fiction where the right to appear as character in Looking for Headless is offered to the highest bidder: the name of the successful biddder as registered for the auction will form the name or identity of the character appearing in the novel. Looking for Headless is written by the fictitious author K. D and tells the story of two artists Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby who collaborate with an author, John Barlow. Goldin and Senneby investigate an offshore company on the Bahamas called Headless Ltd whilst Barlow writes a docu-fictional murder-mystery, also called Headless, based on these investigations.

Installation (Installation)

Referencing psychology, philosophy, and spiritualism, A series of personal questions addressed to a Hikimawashi kappa traveling coat by James Webb is an ongoing series in which the artist poses spoken questions to objects via a speaker installed near the object on display. The questions are addressed to the objects as if they were sentient beings able to respond. Each question is left hanging, unanswered for approximately 10 seconds before the next question is posed.

Painting (Painting)

ChinaCapital: Dream, Hot Land, Interstellar Colonization by Pu Yingwei addresses a complicated phenomena of intertwined influences from different political powers, capital forces, and ideologies in the reality of China. The background of this painting is taken from an image of a Russian stamp featuring a space odyssey during the Cold War with the US. The composition juxtaposes colors from the Chinese national flag (red and yellow) and the US national flag (blue and red), echoing the current “cold war” between China and the U. S. Usually found surrounding a big star on the Chinese national flag, the 4 stars are here rearranged into a single line, symbolizing the artist’s wish for a decentralised and equal society.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

In Onde quer que voce esteja (2011) Accinelli sets up a row of cardboard shipping tubes of varying heights and inscribes on them in black ink the words of the title, which translates in English as “Wherever you may be.” The words, while legible, seem like fragmented lines and shapes—almost but not quite a deconstruction of the text. Accinelli explores the relationship between objects as metaphors of their own materiality and as tools for conveying ideas.