International Art News

From  February 25th to March 27th, 2012 – The Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia
As part of the official 2011 Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival visual arts program, CACSA presents two solo exhibitions from renowned Asian artist/filmmakers: Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Yang Fudong.

Loosely based on a text published in 1983 by the abbot of a Buddhist temple in Apichatpong’s home town of Khon Kaen, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee tells the reportedly true story of a man who claimed that he could remember his past lives while meditating. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee functions as a personal letter from the filmmaker to Uncle Boonmee. “Uncle… I have been here for a while. I would like to see a movie about your life. So I proposed a project about reincarnation.” A camera glides through deserted houses. The voices of three men are heard telling Boonmee about an abandoned village. The wind blows fiercely through the buildings, bringing a swarm of bugs. As evening approaches, the sky turns dark, the bugs scatter and the men are silent.

A Letter to Uncle Boonmee is part of a larger project called Primitive which includes six other video works, two short films and his acclaimed feature film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives—winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2010. The project deals with themes of memories, transformation and extinction, and touches on a violent 1965 Thai army crack down on communist sympathisers in the village Nabua in Nakhon Phanom, just by the border to Laos.
Apichatpong Weerasthakul was born in Bangkok and grew up in Khon Kaen in north-eastern Thailand. He began making film and video shorts in 1994, exhibiting installation work internationally since 1998, and completed his first feature in 2000. A Letter to Uncle Boonmee, commissioned by Animate Projects, Haus der Kunst, Munich and FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) Liverpool, and was awarded the following prizes: Grand Prize of the City of Oberhausen and Prize of the Jury, 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; and Best Film, Prize of the Jury of the Pernambuco Association of Filmmakers, Janela Internacional de Cinema do Recife, Brasil. In 2010 Apichatpong was also a nominee for the Hugo Boss Award.

Yang Fudong’s five part series Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest is concerned with a group of young urban intellectuals in their 20s and 30s coming to terms with their ambiguous position in contemporary China, and their desire for individual freedom in the shifting context of an emerging capitalist economy. His works investigate the structure and formation of identity through myth, personal memory and lived experience and as such present a dramatic existential experience for the viewer.

Seven Intellectuals focuses on a group of rebellious scholars and artists based on the history of seven talented intellectuals from the ancient Chinese Wei and Jin Dynasties. Open and unruly, they used to gather and drink in the bamboo forest, singing songs and playing traditional Chinese musical instruments, in the hope of escaping from earthly life. They rejected the lessons of Confucianism, which taught that public commitment brought virtue and instead pursued individuality, freedom, and liberty.

Yang Fudong was born in 1971 in Beijing and graduated from the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou. Yang has featured in the following biennales: Documenta XI in 2002; Venice Biennale, 2003 and 2007; 1st Prague Biennale 2003; 5th Shanghai Biennale 2004; Carnegie International 2005; 1st Sharjah Biennale 2005; and the Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery) in 2006. Yang’s institutional projects include exhibitions at: ARC/Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris 2003; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2005; Castello di Rivoli, Torino 2005. Yang Fudong is represented by ShangART Gallery, Shanghai and Marian Goodman Gallery New York.

Art Center Hours

Autoportrait 1929 Claude Cahun Tirage gélatino-argentique 14 x 9 cm Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris © Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / Parisienne de Photographie

From 24 May 2011 until 25 September 2011 – Musee du Jeu de Paume
This exhibition at Jeu de Paume, the first one on such scale to be held in France for sixteen years, brings together a broad ensemble of major works, some of which are little known or have seldom been exhibited. It highlights both the diversity and the unity of the photographic work of Claude Cahun (1894-1954).
Without a doubt, it is her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest among theoreticians of contemporary culture. Here the artist uses her own image to expose, one by one, the clichés of feminine and masculine identity. Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) reinvented herself through photography (just as she did in her writing), posing for the lens with an acute sense of “performance,” whether dressed as a woman or as a man, with her hair short, long or shaven (which was extremely incongruous for women at this time). However, to speak of identity is also to speak, indirectly, of the body, and by the same token of the self-image that one projects and that becomes social as soon as it is shared. Unlike other artists – mainly men – who made portraits but never or very rarely exposed their own person to the lens (Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész), Claude Cahun was at once the object and the subject of her artistic experiments. This is borne out by the care with which she chose her poses and expressions, the backgrounds she used (fabric, bedspreads, sheets, hangings), and her use of specific props (masks, capes, overgarments, glass balls, etc.) – even if the real focus of the image was still the face.
Some of these propositions can be found in the photographs of objects that she began in the mid-1920s and developed throughout the 1930s. The exhibition emphasises the highly innovative quality of these experiments in which she explores questions and visual and symbolic procedures (staging, superposition of photos, photomontage) that continue her speculations on self-metamorphosis.

Museum Hours

From 13 January to 3 April 2011 – Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
The drawings and videos of the committed feminist Turkish artist Inci Eviner, approach the subject of women torn between two cultures, East and West by witnessing rapid changes that are transforming our societies. The seductive ambiguity of these images is revealed in the subjects she explores, creating a strange universe, tinted by dreams and nightmares, where the unconscious takes over reality.
Inci Eviner was born in Polatlı (Turkey) in 1956, lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. Holds a Bachelors and Masters degree from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Conducted several artists residencies on several prestigious institutions including the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio (2000); The International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York (2004), Group Program LEUBE for artists in residence in Salzburgo (2005), and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2008). Has exhibited her work at the Nev Gallery (Istanbul), Monique Goldstrom Gallery (New York), Mizuma (Tokyo), and the Deutche Museum in Berlin. Participated in the Biennales of Shangai, Istanbul and Venice.

Museum Hours

Jean-Michel Basquiat dans son atelier de Great Jones Street, New York, 1985 devant Sans titre, 1985, Acrylique et pastel gras sur bois, 217 x 275,5 x 30,5 cm (détail) Collection particulière Photo : © Lizzie Himmel © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat © ADAGP, Paris 2010

15 October 2010 and 30 January 2011 – The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is devoting an enormous retrospective to American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Marking the fiftieth anniversary of his birth, this is the first Basquiat exhibition ever on this scale in France. Of mixed Puerto Rican and Haitian descent, Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960 and died of a drug overdose in New York in 1988, aged twenty-seven. He was part of the generation of graffiti artists who burst onto the New York scene in the late 1970s.

In 1977, he began signing his graffiti “SAMO” – for “Same Old Shit” – with the addition of a crown and the copyright symbol ©. In the course of a dazzling career, his work moved from street art to painting, offering a mix of Voodoo and Biblical mythologies, comic strips, advertising and the media, African-American music and boxing heroes and assertion of his negritude. Thus he defined an underground urban counterculture at once violently anarchistic and seething with liberty and vitality. In 1982, Basquiat was invited to Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, and in the following year he became the youngest artist – and the first black one – ever to show at the Whitney Biennial in New York. In 1984, he began co-creating paintings with Andy Warhol, continuing until the latter’s death in 1987.

At the time, Conceptualism and Minimalism were the austerely dominant avant-garde currents in American art. Basquiat’s coming brought a break with this trend and saw him become the star of the “Neo-Expressionist” wave. This unexpected revival of a painting espousing innocence and spontaneity, deliberate lack of skill and unrestrained use of violent figuration lasted until the early 1980s.

Basquiat had always described himself as influenced by his everyday urban environment, and the roots of his “primitivist expressionist” practice are to be found in the postwar European painting of Jean Dubuffet – refractory to “stifling culture” – and Cobra, as well as the great American tradition extending from Robert Rauschenberg to Cy Twombly. His premature death in 1988 left behind it a substantial oeuvre pervaded by death, racism and his personal fate. With its mix of star-system and revolt, his explosive, incendiary life was the inspiration for Basquiat, directed by filmmaker-painter Julian Schnabel in 1996.

In 1984, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris presented Jean-Michel Basquiat in the group exhibition “Free Figuration France/USA”, in which his work appeared alongside of that of Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa and Keith Haring.

Comprising a hundred major pieces – paintings, drawings, objects – from numerous museums and private collections in the United States and Europe, this retrospective will allow the viewer a chronological overview of the career and the chance to assess Basquiat’s importance to art and art history in the post-80s years.

Museum Hours