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Why New Forms?

The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) has announced Why New Forms?, a Curatorial Conference organized on the occasion of CCS Bard’s 20th anniversary year, taking place Friday, June 22 and Saturday, June 23, 2012, at the Bertelsmann Campus Center at Bard College. The Conference has been organized by CCS Bard alumni/ae Dan Byers,The Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, and Ruba Katrib, Curator of the SculptureCenter in New York City.

Michelangelo Pistoletto at Neue Galerie Graz

Michelangelo Pistoletto is considered one of the most influential contemporary artists in Europe today. Like almost no other, he has tackled in his art the epoch-making changes in today's world and our society in modern democracy. Bringing art into society and connecting it to everyday life lie at the centre of his work. The retrospective in the Neue Galerie Graz focuses on Pistoletto's early works, which were groundbreaking at their time and to be seen in context with movements such as Pop Art, Minimalism, or Conceptual Art, as well as socio-cultural changes in Italy.

David Claerbout, the time that remains

Dedicated to the filmic works of Belgian artist David Claerbout, this exhibition features pieces he has made since the year 2000. It is Claerbout's first solo show in a public London gallery. As one of the most innovative and acclaimed artists of his generation working with moving image, Claerbout has created a striking body of works within which the media of film and photography appear to co-exist. Claerbout's works often depict some everyday activity or event that seems to be the subject of the work, but as time passes we as viewers face a dilemma in how to decipher the artist's intention. The works not only alter our established understanding of time and the narrative process but also our notions of reality, illusion, and the relationship between them.

Open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain, no. 23

In this time of ideological and political crises, in which people and things are increasingly thrown back on their own resources, autonomy is considered again. But how does autonomy, the wish to take matters into one's own hands and have significance independent of old structures, relate to the call for engagement and performativity? This issue, made in collaboration with Sven Lütticken, examines autonomy from the standpoints of art, art history, philosophy, political theory, and cultural criticism, and attempts to escape the limitations of thinking in terms of engagement on the one hand and autonomy on the other. Steven ten Thije delves into the background of The Autonomy Project. John Byrne argues that art must be freed from its current technocratic framework. According to John Hartle, the rightwing-populist criticism of art lacks democratic legitimacy.

Jo Spence

Jo Spence (1934–1992) emerged as a key figure in the mid 1970s from the British photographic left, crucial in debates on photography and the critique of representation. Her work engaged with a range of photographic genres, from documentary to photo therapy, and responded to the prioritisation from the late 1970s onwards of lens-based media in art-critical discourse. Rough edged, recycled, personal—in essence positively amateur, Spence’s work stands in direct opposition to numerous artistic givens. She proposed process over object, collaboration and collectivity over heroic authorship and, above all, generosity (to self and other) over the pursuit of any singular creative ambition.

Nora Schultz

Nora Schultz's work examines the genesis of pictorial representation and production as an artistic dynamic. She is less interested in the finished work than in how images and objects come into being and in the physical traces that process leaves behind. The actualities of production accordingly play a central role in her prints, printing machines, installations, and performances; process always remains legible. Nora Schultz's show is the first solo exhibition to occupy the lower as well as the temporary upper floor at Portikus.

Curators announced for LIAF 2013

Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) is a festival for contemporary art taking place in spectacular Lofoten, a cluster of islands located on the North West Coast of Norway, just above the Arctic Circle every second year. The festival presents works by international artists in a local and site-specific context and seeks to be an open, experimental, and including meeting place for artists, audience, and locals. LIAF acknowledges the complexity of place and seeks to be a discursive, engaged, and social platform for different positions creating dialogue between the local and global.

Camp Out: Finding Home in an Unstable World

Participating artists BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sébastien Giguère, Nicolas Laverdière), Oliver Bishop-Young, Cyprien Gaillard, Isabelle Hayeur, Edgar Martins, Mary Mattingly, Michael Rakowitz, Emily Speed, Dré Wapenaar, Kim Yasuda Camp Out: Finding Home in an Unstable World looks at different ways in which the dream of home has imploded over the past three decades, and how new forms of home might be fashioned in their stead. The exhibition explores our current struggles and hopes to provide alternative ways of viewing nature and landscape through the built environment using a variety of approaches including: a pot luck party for neighbors complete with eggs from a chicken coop; a vegetable allotment, a tear drop tent clamped to a tree; a livable cocoon made of plastic bags and duct tape; repurposed industrial waste receptacles; quasi-functional wearable housing; ruin porn and a massive Plexiglas fire.

Laurent Grasso

All observation is a partial way of apprehending reality. The work of Laurent Grasso explores the interstices of this partial observation, that is to say, the spaces of uncertainty or doubt aroused by any conjecture—whether in the field of science, history, perception, or belief—in order to construct parallel realities capable of testing our system of knowledge and our critical capacity. The point, for him, is not to test the truth of our suppositions, but to exploit their fractures and tensions and make them the raw material of his work. Observation, but also control, surveillance, the power or domination of science or belief, as well as the simultaneity or reversibility of time, are among the fields he explores.

Social Housing—Housing the Social

Social Housing—Housing the Social: Art, Property and Spatial Justice examines ongoing transformations in social housing and asks how these transformations are reflected in the aspirations and practices of artists. Housing provides essential shelter, but also gives form to the social. It represents and embodies the materiality of civic politics and thus demonstrates the uneven nature of spatial justice at local and global scale.