International Art News

Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone 1973 © Anthony McCall, courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York - Sunday 22 July A rare poportunity to see all four 1974 cone films by Anthony McCal

The Tanks: Art in Action  – A fifteen-week festival from 18 July – 28 October 2012 – Tate Modern
What already impressed everyone about the Tate Modern when it was inaugurated was its huge size. His former electric plant has been able to offer contemporary art absolutely spectacular spaces that have ensured the public’s passion as we can see in the installations presented in the hall of the Turbines over the last ten years. While waiting for the extension carried out by Herzog and de Meuron to be concluded by 2016 (which will add 21,000 square metres i.e. 60% additional space), the museum has decided to recuperate other areas: the reservoirs where the oil used to run the plant was installed. These underground rooms with vast dimensions (30 metres long, 7 metres tall) will be inaugurated on 18 July 2012, with an original theme: they will host one of the largest concentrations in Europe of living art, happenings and performances. The list of artists includes Korean Sung Hwan Kim as well as Cuban artist Tania Bruguera or Flemish Anne Teresa de Keersmaecker.

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker - Photo: Herman Sorgeloos - Thursday 19 – Friday 20 July One of the most important choreographers of the 20th century performs widely acclaimed Fase: Four movements to the music of Steve Reich

An excellent opening to the Cultural Olympiad and to the London Festival 2012.

Tate Modern

10 June – 5 September 2010 – Irish Museum of Modern Art
Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa has been working since the early 1990s using a multidisciplinary approach that includes architecture and urbanism, narrative, history, and politics. Adopting the city of Havana as his laboratory, his works are charged with provocative commentaries on issues such as architecture’s ability to alter the course of history, the failure of modernism as a catalyst for social change and the frustration and decay of 20th-century utopias. Interested in urban planning and a city’s architectural social fabric, Garaicoa often illustrates his vision in large installations using various materials such as crystal, wax candles and rice-paper lamps.

Garaicoa’s exhibition includes new and recent works which demonstrate his varied articulations of architecture such as The Crown Jewels, 2009, in which miniature replicas of real-life torture centers, prisons and intelligence networks are cast in silver; My personal Library Grows-up Together with My Political Principles, 2008, in which books are assembled to form architectural frameworks and Bend City, 2007, a city constructed entirely from cut paper.

Cuban life—social, political, and cultural—inspires Garaicoa’s work. After the Cuban revolution in 1959, many architectural projects and buildings were left unfinished or abandoned, in Havana and in other Cuban cities. Garaicoa created a series of pop-up books depicting the decrepit turn-of-the-century buildings in Havana’s Plaza Vieja district and other cities. Garaicoa also addresses these collapsed buildings by pairing black-and-white photographs with drawings made of thread rendering the reality of the absence of these structures.

Born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967, Carlos Garaicoa studied at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba from 1989 to 1994. Recent exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, 2009; Havana Biennale, 2009; La Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro, 2008; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 2007, and the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, 2006. He lives and works in Havana and Madrid.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalogue documenting Garaicoa’s work since 2006. It includes essays by Seán Kissane; Okwui Enwezor, curator, writer and critic, and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Director of the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City.

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