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Join Alicia Garza, Carrie Mae Weems, Ian MacKaye, E. Ethelbert Miller, Haneen Zoabi, Hank Willis Thomas, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jonas Staal, Liberate Tate, Raqs Media Collective, Sheldon Scott, Thomas Frank, Step Afrika, and Vaginal Davis, along with our local partners DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, GW Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Provisions Library, Transformer, and many more.

The Creative Time Summit—the world’s largest international conference on art and social change—is headed to Washington, DC! Occurring in the nation’s capital just weeks before the 2016 Presidential Election, the Creative Time Summit DC will take this important moment to collectively consider what it might mean to radically transform the current state of democracy. Around the world both the left and the right are making their dissatisfaction with the center known, setting the stage for a virulent electoral season. Shaking up the political landscape, worldwide social movements—from Arab Spring to OWS to #BlackLivesMatter—are now ingrained in popular discourse. The 2016 Summit offers a platform for citizen-led strategies and grassroots movements working within, as well as disrupting, electoral politics.

As we work to push forward the ideals of human rights in practice, what does it mean to actually occupy power in a future as yet unwritten? What does it mean for a people’s movement to wrest control? What forms of governance would that require? What role do elections play in this moment? What are the forms of self-organized power that we can learn from? These questions will shape the conversations and presentations at the Creative Time Summit DC.

The Creative Time Summit DC is curated by Nato Thompson and Sally Szwed.

Schedule

Blind Whino (October 13, 7pm)
Kick-off party co-hosted by Transformer
Performances by the Gogo Allstars featuring Michelle Blackwell, artist Martha Wilson, and more

Lincoln Theatre (October 14-15)
1215 U Street NW, Washington, DC

GW Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (October 16)
500 Seventeenth Street NW, Washington, DC

Friday and Saturday, October 14–15
Days 1 and 2 feature keynotes, short talks, and performances by over 50 participants. Thematic sections include Occupy Power, which will reevaluate and provide alternatives to current dominant power structures; Do It Yourself, which pays homage to DC’s prominent place in the history of DIY by looking at international models that share a similar ethos; and Troubled Democracy, which explores the complexities of representation, democracy, and global responsibility. Other key topics will include the construction of queerness, life in the age of the Anthropocene, and organizing in the face of systemic violence and immediate threat. The Summit will also include a special series that embraces the irrational upon the occasion of the 100th year anniversary of Dada.

Sunday, October 16 (Co-organized with Provisions Library)
Day 3 of the Summit will consist of over 30 unique hour-long breakout sessions led primarily by DC- and Baltimore-area artists, activists, educators, and community leaders selected via open call. Small group conversation sessions will address a myriad of social and political issues, as well as topics central to artists and students practicing today. Other sessions will take the form of walking tours, workshops, and games. Day three will open with with a performance by Sheldon Scott as part of his campaign for DC Minister of Culture, and will close with I Want a President…(a collective reading – DC), performed outside the White House, co-organized by Natalie Campbell & Saisha Grayson. Learn more here.

For a detailed schedule and full list of participants, click here.

For more information or to join via Livestream, visit us at creativetime.org/summit.

Follow @creativetime on Twitter and use the hashtag #CTSummit to join the conversation.

Lunds konsthall is very pleased to open two new exhibitions. One is about Staffan Nihlén and is in response to requests from many visitors. It takes place in the lower galleries. The other is an in-depth presentation of artists’ books and is shown in the upper gallery.

Nihlén’s stone sculptures appear to be both well-planned and instantaneous. It is as if the stone shapes are incubating hidden stories—ones that the artist coaxes out of the stone mass. Nihlén describes how he stopped using ready-made blocks of stone and instead sought out rocks in natural settings. In these irregular shapes he finds an appeal that is nature’s own. “It is not always obvious what already existed in the stone and what I have brought forth from its interior myself,” he says, affirming an open work process in which artistic expression and Nature’s own deposits meet in the finished work of art. A similar process is found in the earlier wood and metal sculptures that reuse remnants of the industrial age.

This exhibition focuses mainly on Nihlén’s sculptures and includes both new and older works. A separate artist’s book, produced for the parallel exhibition, presents an insight into the artist’s work with texts and drawings.

Artists’ books are an art form practised by many artists. An artist’s book can appear in many guises but its key characteristic is that it has been compiled by an artist and is sometimes completely handmade. The edition is limited and there may only be a single unique copy. An artist’s book is more than just a book with illustrations by an artist; the entire product is a cohesive work of art.

We are now exhibiting over 100 artists, a handful of whom have contributed completely new works. They are Leontine Arvidsson, Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, Ditte Ejlerskov, Sven-Åke Johansson, Marie Raffn, Cia Rinne, Trine Struwe, Sara Wallgren and Richard Årlin. The exhibition also includes historical material that stretches back to the period after World War II, when the world seriously began to regard the art of bookmaking as an artistic form of expression. The curator is Thomas Millroth.

The exhibition coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Swedish Press Act, which guaranteed freedom of the press in Sweden. In view of this we would also like to draw attention to our small book room of literature relating to the gallery’s exhibitions.

Phyllida Barlow, Sean Borodale, Michael Bracewell, Madeleine Bunting, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Alice Channer, Beth Collar, Cécile B. Evans, Orit Gat, Orit Halpern, Sir Elton John, Vincent Katz, Rachel Lichtenstein, Bernadette Mayer, Dennis Morris, Raqs Media Collective, Dylan Trigg, and many more…

Ahead of the major Robert Rauschenberg retrospective at Tate Modern, writer and poet Vincent Katz explores the pioneering artist’s lifelong spirit of collaboration.

In anticipation of British surrealist Paul Nash‘s forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Inga Fraser, Michael Bracewell and Alice Channer discuss the lesser-known sides to the artist’s work, covering his ground-breaking multidisciplinary practice across art, design and photography.

To coincide with The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam at Tate Modern, the artist’s son Eskil Lam recounts his childhood memories of visiting his father in the Italian coastal town of Albissola Marina, where the exchange of ideas with fellow artists including Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj and Lucio Fontana led to great experimentation in his art.

Other highlights include:

–A selection of modernist photography from the collection of Sir Elton John
–Phyllida Barlow, the British representative at next year’s Venice Biennale, shares inspirational memories of her art teacher, the sculptor George Fullard
–Poet Bernadette Mayer, artist Beth Collar, philosopher Dylan Trigg and writer Rachel Lichtenstein share personal reflections on works in the Tate collection
–Orit Gat on the strength of working together
–New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective respond to a sea of images encountered online
–Orit Halpern details an early experiment in machine learning (or artificial intelligence) involving a group of ill-fated Mongolian desert gerbils
–Writer Madeleine Bunting follows in J.M.W. Turner‘s footsteps, watching the clouds in the skies over the Hebridean islands
–Poet Sean Borodale unearths a poster by Joseph Beuys in the Tate archive that resonates with current events
–Christopher Turner, Director of the London Design Biennale, takes a closer look at the first piece of furniture Donald Judd made: his bed

Tate Etc.—Visiting and revisiting art, etcetera
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Meiro Koizumi: Today My Empire Sings
This fall De Hallen Haarlem presents the first museum solo exhibition of work by Meiro Koizumi (1976, Gunma) in the Netherlands. One of the most distinctive voices in contemporary art in Japan, Koizumi engages in social and historical critique in video and performance works that aim for high affective impact through subtle, sometimes provocative manipulation of his performers’ emotions. In Today My Empire Sings, he presents recent and new work.

The power relationship between authority and subject, and the tension between collective ideals and individual expression constitute major themes in Koizumi’s work. Mining various symbolic representations of Japanese national identity and culture, like the heroic figure of the kamikaze pilot, or the elusive Japanese emperor, the artist weaves complex connections between personal subjective experience and national trauma. Simultaneously transgressive and poetic, his works explore the potential of conflict, social and emotional, looking for the possibility of transformation through cathartic experience.

The exhibition includes Koizumi’s recent series of paintings, “Air,” that was the source of recent controversy in Japan. For this series Koizumi enlarged existing (news) photographs of public appearances of the emperor: on tour during a ceremonial visit, or shown with the imperial family in a traditional Japanese interior setting in the official state portrait. Koizumi subsequently meticulously retouched the photographs with oil paint, making the emperor vanish from them, and imbuing the images with a ghostly absence. Central to Today My Empire Sings is a new video installation, revisiting the imperial subject matter of “Air.” Filmed during the annual anti-emperor rally that takes place in Tokyo on August 15, Koizumi introduced actors and musicians in the volatile, heavily policed environment, directing them towards an intense climax.

The solo exhibition of Meiro Koizumi is made possible with the support of Outset Netherlands.

Cécile B. Evans: What the Heart Wants
Alongside Koizumi’s exhibition, De Hallen Haarlem presents a solo exhibition of the Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans. What the Heart Wants is her first museum exhibition in the Netherlands. For her eponymous video installation around protagonist HYPER, that premiered recently at the 9th Berlin Biennale, Evans is transforming the second floor of De Hallen Haarlem into an immersive environment. Accompanying What the Heart Wants, the installation Working on What the Heart Wants is also on view, in which Evans offers a glimpse of the work’s production process.

Following recent exhibitions at De Hallen Haarlem such as the group show Superficial Hygiene (2014), Melanie Gilligan’s The Common Sense (2015) and recently Inflected Objects, Cécile B. Evans’s What the Heart Wants offers a perspective on issues related to the human condition in an increasingly globalized and technology driven world. What influence do digital technologies have on the way in which we communicate with each other and share our feelings? What is the influence—on our integrity, our privacy, and our sense of humanity—of an ever-increasing degree of abstraction and intelligence behind the interfaces that we use every day? The implications of these developments, both positive and negative, have been an important catalyst in Evans’s artistic practice in recent years.

The universe of What the Heart Wants (2016) proposes a speculative version of what it could mean to be human in a future where a single system, which controls such aspects of our lives, has limitless power. This system—which has evolved to take the form of a woman named HYPER—endeavors to better humankind but inevitably encounters difficulties when her choices, motivated by technological progress, impact essential questions such as: who gets to be a person, an individual? Through interactions between a host of characters (a workers’ collective of disembodied ears, a memory from the past, a group of highly gifted young pupils, a trio of disbanded lovers) this question is extended to examine a variety of issues of race, sex, love, death, human rights and privilege.

The video installation What the Heart Wants has been commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale, and was co-produced by the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem, Kunsthal Aarhus and Kunsthalle Winterthur. The work has been acquired by the Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem for its collection.

The solo exhibition of Cécile B. Evans is made possible by Ammodo.

On display in the Frans Hals Museum: New & Old
Gavin Wade: Z is for Zoo
From August 27 to December 11, artist-curator Gavin Wade (1971, United Kingdom) is creating an intervention in the permanent collection presentation of the Frans Hals Museum within the scope of New & Old. Wade’s work combines, conflates and fictionalises histories and methods of exhibiting. An artwork only exists when it is in the act of displaying. In storage the artwork is nothing more than an artefact, materials, or stuff waiting to come back “to life” as art again. He believes that how you exhibit is just as important as what you exhibit. These notions constitute the point of departure for Wade’s intervention in the Frans Hals Museum. He creates sculptures that function as display units—systems on which works from the museum’s old, modern and contemporary art collections are displayed as a temporary zoological garden.

Beirut Art Center presents The Portrait is an Address, the first solo exhibition by artist Hassan Khan in Beirut, following a long and profound relationship with the city, starting with Khan’s collaboration on Akram Zaatari’s Transit Visa project in 2001 running through several editions of Home Work space Program (HWP) by Ashkal Alwan. This exhibition will also be the first to focus on the portrait as one central aspect of Khan’s practice in such depth. While recent critically acclaimed survey exhibitions of Khan’s work have had a wider focus and were on a much larger scale, this exhibition digs into one significant direction within the wider constellation that his practice encompasses. The portrait has played a pivotal role in Khan’s work starting with 100 Portraits in 2001. It deals with the complex relationship between visibility and truth. It remains one of the most intriguing elements in the emotional landscape of the human subject, whether as mimesis or fabulation; through the power of words or by visual means. The visual portrait acknowledges the human face as a space where interiority may become readable, but also as a surface where the conditions of lived experience are marked. This contiguity between the face as screen and as trace, between selfhood and identification; the recognizable and the unknowable is a space of possible reflection. This exhibition grapples with the possibility of intimacy, the gaps and losses that are necessary for us to make sense of what we see and what we know, the very possibility of making sense itself. It also simply allows the audience a chance to look at others and themselves in a direct, accessible and emotionally powerful way.

Hassan Khan is an artist, musician and writer who lives and works in Cairo. His practice encompasses a wide diversity of media and approaches informed by a longstanding engagement with popular culture, film, theater, literature and the visual arts, and drawn from personal experience, observations, memories, dreams and childhood stories. Before beginning to exhibit his artwork in the late 1990s, Khan was deeply involved in Cairo’s alternative scenes with pioneering work in the fields of experimental music and video. He lectures regularly in art schools and cultural institutions around the world and has served on several juries, including the 20th Youth Salon in Cairo which sparked critical discussions in 2009. In 2011, Khan was the president of the jury of the Venice Biennial.

Recent group and solo exhibitions include Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); Sharjah Biennial (2015); Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, (2015); Kodak Passageway, D-CAF, Cairo (2014); Secession, Vienna (2013); SALT, Istanbul (2012); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012); Paris Triennial (2012) and the 2012 New Museum Triennial, New York (2012). His recent live music performances include Sursock Gardens, Beirut (2016); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); SVNMASH Music Festival, Milan (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2015); Forget Amnesia Festival, Stromboli (2014); The Toulouse International Art Festival, Toulouse (2014), Klangzeit New Music Festival, Munster (2014); Maerz Musik Festival, Berlin (2013); Ghetto, Istanbul, (2013); Auditorium du Louvre, Paris (2012); and Teatro Fondamenta Nuove, Venice, (2012). Khan’s publications include Twelve Clues (2016), The Agreement (2011) and Nine Lessons Learned from Sherif El Azma (2009).

With the support of AFAC

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art launches its fall program on September 30, 2016 with four new projects that together reveal how artists respond to the social, cultural, and political complexities of their time. The galleries will feature the work of Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, and Robert Longo, as well as an exhibition of the Slovenian collective Neue Slowenische Kunst. Meanwhile, the atrium of the Rem Koolhaas/OMA-designed museum in Moscow’s Gorky Park will host a new installation by Yin Xiuzhen and, for the first time, the Museum’s rooftop will become a site for art, with a new commission by Boris Matrosov.

At the center of the season, Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo (through February 5) spans eras and continents to reveal how each artist renders the societal impact of politics and power in black and white, conveying the emotive and psychological aspects of revolution, war, and the follies of mankind beyond journalistic reportage. Curated by Garage chief curator Kate Fowle in collaboration with Robert Longo, Proof was developed through extensive conversations between the artist, curator, and specialists in Russia, and arose out of the influence over the decades that both Goya and Eisenstein have had on Longo. Selected works include Eisenstein’s sketches from the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art that have not been exhibited before (alongside seven of his films that will be projected in slow motion, so that each frame can be experiences as an independent image); Goya’s aquatint etchings on loan from the State Museum of Contemporary Russian History (formerly the Museum of Revolution) which were gifted on the 20th anniversary of the Russian Revolution from the Spanish government; and works by Longo produced in the last 15 years.

NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL (through December 9) is the first major survey in Russia of Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). Within the economic and sociopolitical context of the 1980s, NSK challenged the simplistic binary opposition of socialist versus capitalist ideology, developing its own principles of organization and terminology for the collective’s artistic practices. Curated by Zdenka Badovinac, director of Moderna galerija, Lubljana, the exhibition traces the group’s activities from 1980 to 1992, including concerts, exhibitions, theatrical productions, performances, guerrilla actions, and public proclamations.

In Garage Atrium is the latest in a series of site-specific commissions, Yin Xiuzhen’s Slow Release (through January 31), one of the largest sculptures the Chinese artist has ever made. Conceived as a wishful metaphor, Slow Release references a new generation of pills designed to slow the dispersal of medicine in the body in order to increase its therapeutic effect. Taking the shape of a giant medicine capsule—which visitors will be able to enter—the form is created with hundreds of kilograms of clothing donated by Muscovites.

In addition, illuminating the winter Moscow skies, Russian conceptualist Boris Matrosov has created a provocative new work especially for the Museum roof, No, She Couldn’t Have Known How It Would All… (through March 5). This unfinished sentence, writ large in the form of a neon sign visible from Garage Square, could belong to an overheard conversation between friends. Who is she, and what would actually happen?

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art is a place for people, art, and ideas to create history.
Founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich, Garage is the first philanthropic organization in Russia to create a comprehensive public mandate for contemporary art and culture. Through an extensive program of exhibitions, events, education, research, and publishing, the institution reflects on current developments in Russian and international culture, creating opportunities for public dialogue, as well as the production of new work and ideas in Moscow. At the center of all these activities is Garage Archive Collection, which is the first archive in the country related to the development of Russian contemporary art from the 1950s through to the present.

Press contact
Cultural Counsel
Adam Abdalla: adam@culturalcounsel.com
Hunter Braithwaite: hunter@culturalcounsel.com

Donald Judd Writings, co-published by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books, is the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s writings assembled to date. Available in November 2016, this timely publication includes Judd’s best-known essays, as well as little-known texts previously published in limited editions. Moreover, this new collection includes unpublished college essays and hundreds of never-before-seen notes, a critical but unknown part of Judd’s writing practice.

Judd’s earliest published writing, consisting largely of reviews for hire, defined the terms of art criticism in the 1960s, but his essays as an undergraduate at Columbia, published here for the first time, contain the seeds of his later writing, and allow readers to trace the development of his critical style. The writings that followed Judd’s early reviews are no less significant art-historically, but have been relegated to smaller publications and have remained largely unavailable until now. The largest addition of newly available material is a collection of Judd’s unpublished notes—transcribed from his handwritten accounts of and reactions to subjects ranging from the politics of his time to the literary texts he admired most. In these intimate reflections we see Judd’s thinking at his least mediated—a mind continuing to grapple with questions of its moment, thinking them through, changing positions, and demonstrating the intensity of thought that continues to make Judd such a formidable presence in contemporary art.

This fall, Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books will present a series of public programming in New York and Marfa, Texas to coincide with the release of this new publication. All events are free and open to the public.

Schedule

Tuesday, November 15, 7pm
Cooper Union, The Great Hall
New York, NY

The panel will examine Donald Judd’s relationship to the written word over the four decades contained in the new publication. The panel will include: Flavin Judd, Curator and Co-President of Judd Foundation, co-editor of Donald Judd Writings, and son of Donald Judd; Roberta Smith, Co-Chief Art Critic of The New York Times; Ann Temkin, Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art. Moderated by Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Wednesday, November 16, 6pm
101 Spring Street
New York, NY

The conversation will explore Donald Judd’s writings on ethics and philosophy in relation to his art practice, as well as his values, beliefs, and actions as an active citizen. Flavin Judd in conversation with Phong Bui, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, and Publisher of The Brooklyn Rail. Moderated by Caitlin Murray, Director of Marfa Programs at Judd Foundation and co-editor of Donald Judd Writings.

Thursday, November 17, 7pm
192 Books
New York, NY

The conversation will explore Donald Judd’s writing as a process and primary part of his daily life and artistic practice. Rainer Judd, Co-President of Judd Foundation and daughter of Donald Judd, in conversation with Ellie Meyer, Catalogue Raisonné Research Manager at Judd Foundation and former studio assistant to Judd. A reading of selections from Donald Judd Writings will initiate a discussion on the thematics visited by Judd throughout the text including environment, space, history, and time.

Saturday, December 10, 6pm
Crowley Theater
Marfa, TX

The lecture, led by Dr. Frances Colpitt, Deedie Potter Rose Chair of Art History, Texas Christian University, will examine aspects of Donald Judd’s practice as an artist and writer.

For more information please visit juddfoundation.org/programs.

Direct Drive is the first solo American museum exhibition by acclaimed multidisciplinary artist Kelley Walker. Since the early 2000s, the Georgia-born, New York-based artist has developed a multifaceted body of work that examines and indicts some of our nation’s most pervasive cultural, political, and social signifiers. Not only is Direct Drive the largest comprehensive examination of the artist’s work to date, it includes several new bodies of work made specifically for the exhibition. A flagship event for CAM, Direct Drive encompasses every space in the Museum—galleries, Project Wall, courtyard, and mezzanine, as well as the facade of the building.

Walker brings to the fore a sustained inquiry into ways in which consumer culture exploits history, authenticity, and authorship. He manipulates imagery, encouraging slippage—even in reproductions of his own artworks. With nods to artistic influences ranging from Andy Warhol to Jackson Pollock and Sigmar Polke, Walker’s work interrogates the ways a single image can migrate into a number of cultural contexts. He often uses 3-D modeling software and laser cutting in tandem with a variety of media—including painting, sculpture, and photography—to explore the manipulation and repurposing of images in order to destabilize issues of identity, race, class, sexuality, and politics.

Among the brand-new work presented in Direct Drive is a “mimic wall” sculpture—an exact replica of a Museum wall—that manifests in the physical world the digital concept of copying and pasting; a forty-foot long brick painting based on the gray concrete of the Museum; a four-foot-wide chocolate disco ball that continually turns at six rotations per minute; and an exterior projection for CAM’s “Street Views” series. In conjunction with Direct Drive, CAM will publish an exhibition catalog and Black Star Press, a publication focused on issues of race and identity in Walker’s work.

This exhibition is generously supported by Anonymous; Suzi and Andrew B. Cohen; Maurice Marciano Family Foundation; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne.

Kelley Walker: Direct Drive is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Jeffrey Uslip, Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs/Chief Curator.

Delfina Foundation announces its exhibition and residency programme in autumn 2016.

Exhibition programme
Delfina Foundation presents the first UK solo exhibition of Canadian artist, Jean-Paul Kelly. Exploring the relationship between materiality and perception, Kelly examines complex associations between found photographs, videos, and sounds from documentaries, photojournalism, and online media streams. By working through these documents, Kelly seeks to illuminate the gap between physical matter and the subjective experience of it in the world.

In this new installation, That ends that matter, Kelly questions documentary practices in UK courtrooms through a new body of work that consists of a three-channel video and works on paper.

In winter 2015, whilst in residence at Delfina Foundation, Kelly attended City of London Magistrates’ Court in Central London for eight weeks as a visitor, during which time he observed the daily events in one courtroom. The UK’s Criminal Justice Act forbids all recording and sketching in court, allowing illustrators to only take notes; Kelly employs this restricted form of recounting as both a structural and poetic device for his work. In a world of ubiquitous image production and access, these courts of law force representations to be made on the basis of abstract observation and memory. That ends that matter elaborates this sense of abstraction to explore the contradictory experiences of transparency and restriction in public institutions.

In That ends that matter, the 12-minute, three-channel video is constructed of a re-enactment of actual events which the artist witnessed in court; photographic material from online image streams used to retell the sensed experience of those events; and a visual music animation where geometric shapes copied from these re-enactments are drawn directly onto the optical soundtrack of 16mm film to produce a score.

As Jean-Paul Kelly explains: “The primary goal of my work is producing a fair account of my experience of the world. My inquiry is not related to redundant claims of indexical truth but rather to the repositioning of artifice, desire, and bias as the material source for realising the form of the work. That ends that matter is an attempt to document a certain form of subjective sense.”

Production of That ends that matter was made possible through funding support of Ontario Arts Council and The Canada Council for the Arts.

With additional research support from the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Kuzuko Trust Award and Delfina Foundation’s family of individual supporters.

Residency programme
This autumn, Delfina Foundation’s residencies are focused on open-ended artistic research with the following artists:

Arwa Al Neami (Saudi Arabia)
Supported by Delfina Foundation’s family of individual supporters

Rasel Chowdhury (Bangladesh)
​Awarded through Samdani Art Award 2016

Jungki Beak (South Korea)
Supported by SongEun Art & Cultural Foundation

Shadi Habib Allah (Palestine/USA)
Supported by Al Serkal Avenue, A. M. Qattan Foundation, Rana Sadik & Samer Younis, and Charles Asprey

Nader Koochaki (Iran/Spain)
Awarded through MOP Contemporary Art Prize 2015

Hind Mezaina (UAE)
Supported by Maraya Art Centre

Alan Poma (Peru)
Supported by MATE – Museo Mario Testino

Jasmijn Visser (Netherlands)
Supported by Mondriaan Fonds

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is pleased to announce the curatorial vision for its third edition, entitled forming in the pupil of an eye, and names further participating artists. The Biennale, opening on December 12 and running for 108 days, closing March 29, is the largest contemporary art biennial in South Asia.

The main exhibition and an ancillary programme of talks, seminars, workshops, film screenings, and music will take place across a range of venues in Kochi, Kerala, India.

The third edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is curated by acclaimed Indian artist Sudarshan Shetty. Long recognized as one of his generation’s most innovative artists, and best known for his enigmatic sculptural installations, the Biennale will be Shetty’s first curatorial project.

Shetty’s vision for the 2016 Biennale draws from mythical accounts of India as the “land of seven rivers.” The idea of streams flowing, converging and diverging underlies the curatorial questions which KMB 2016 will raise and the knowledge explored through the display and performance of the selected artworks. Looking at motifs such as tradition and community, the central question asks: what does it mean to be together in time—to be contemporary?

Curator Sudarshan Shetty explains, “My curatorial approach started as a conversation between different forms and approaches to art practice. I see the Biennale as existing in process, something which flows, and I wanted to engage artists whose practices will create works that exist not only for the duration of the Biennale, but into the time beyond.

“My core curatorial question explores what tradition means, tradition being a motif I specifically wanted to explore in this edition of the Biennale. We often talk about ‘tradition’ or ‘traditions,’ and through my curation I have aimed to address it from a fresh perspective—not as a stagnant or historical thought, but as an active concept integrated within contemporary reality. Tradition cannot be pinned down to a single set of actions or ideas, and I have enjoyed the challenge of bringing this multiplicity of perspectives to light, developing a Biennale which will be engaging to its visitors without becoming simplistic or reductive.

“Traditions develop over time within the context of a changing yet continuous community, and as Kochi-Muziris is first and foremost a ‘People’s Biennale,’ the idea of community and social engagement is also deeply embedded within the curation, with many of the participating artists presenting works motivated by political undertones.”

Artist list
Abhishek Hazra (India), Abir Karmakar (India), Achraf Touloub (Morocco/France), AES+F (Russia), Ahmet Öğüt (Turkey/Germany), Aki Sasamoto (Japan/USA), Aleksandra Ska (Poland), Aleš Šteger (Slovenia), Alicja Kwade (Poland/Germany), Anamika Haksar (India), Avinash Veeraraghavan (India), Bara Bhaskaran (India), C Bhagyanath (India), Camille Norment (USA/Norway), Carl Pruscha and Eva Schlegel (Austria), Caroline Duchatelet (France), Charles Avery (United Kingdom), Chittrovanu Mazumdar (India), Chris Mann (Australia/USA), Dana Awartani (Saudi Arabia), Daniele Galliano (Italy), Desmond Lazaro (India/United Kingdom), Dia Mehta Bhupal (India), Endri Dani (Albania), Erik van Lieshout (Netherlands), Éva Magyarósi (Hungary), Eva Schlegel (Austria), François Mazabraud (France), Gabriel Lester (Netherlands), Gauri Gill (India), Gary Hill (USA), Hanna Tuulikki (United Kingdom), Himmat Shah (India), Javier Peréz (Spain), Jonathan Owen (United Kingdom), Kabir Mohanty (India), Katarina Zdjelar (Netherlands), Katrīna Neiburga and Andris Eglītis (Latvia), Lantian Xie (UAE), Leighton Pierce (USA), Lundahl & Seitl (Sweden), Mansi Bhatt (India), Martin Walde (Austria), Mikhail Karikis (United Kingdom/Greece), Miller Puckette (USA), Naiza Khan (Pakistan/United Kingdom), Nicola Durvasula and John Tilbury (United Kingdom), Orijit Sen (India), Ouyang Jianghe (China), Padmini Chettur (India), Paweł Althamer (Poland), Pedro Gómez-Egaña (Colombia/Norway), Prabhavathi Meppayil (India), Praneet Soi (India/Holland), Rachel Maclean (United Kingdom), Ravi Agarwal (India), Raul Zurita (Chile), Remen Chopra (India), Sergio Chejfec (Argentina/USA), Sharmistha Mohanty (India), Sirous Namazi (Iran/Sweden), Sophie Dejode and Bertrand Lacombe (France), Stan Douglas (Canada), Subrat Behera (India), Sunil Padwal (India), Takayuki Yamamoto (Japan), Tom Burckhardt (USA), Tony Joseph (India), T.V. Santhosh (India), Valerie Mejer (Mexico), Voldemārs Johansons (Latvia), Yael Efrati (Israel), Yardena Kurulkar (India), Yuko Mohri (Japan), Zuleikha Chaudhari (India)

Inquiries:
Manju Sara Rajan: manju@kochimuzirisbiennale.org
Brunswick Arts: kmb2016@brunswickgroup.com