Special Features – Page 32

SPECIAL FEATURE: Selection of shows at 1857

March 22, 2017August 20, 2015

1857 is an artist-run exhibition space occupying a former lumberyard in Grønland, downtown Oslo. It was founded in 2010 by artists Steffen Håndlykken and Stian Eide Kluge, with graphic designers Eriksen / Brown as essential collaborators.

The space consists of a 280 m2 concrete factory hall, with raw concrete walls and 11 metres to a ceiling with beautiful skylights, which has been joined to an older wooden house with a storefront facing the street.

1857 aims to introduce young international artists to a Norwegian audience, and takes advantage of the high degree of freedom that comes from being an artist-run space in terms of how exhibitions are conceptualised, formulated and presented. There is an on-going conversation that runs through all of the shows about how to challenge or disregard conventions that prevail in institutional exhibition making. This approach has lead 1857 to open-ended collaborations with artists as well as characteristic exhibition designs, press releases and cocktails served on the openings.

SPECIAL FEATURE: De Appel Curatorial Programme

March 22, 2017July 5, 2015

The final project of the Curatorial Programme 2014 – 2015 at de Appel arts centre opened with two exhibitions: Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell and Your Time Is Not My Time.

Spell to Spelling ** Spelling to Spell emerges in the spaces between the linguistic and associative relations of the notions of the spell and the spelling. The exhibition investigates various facets and rituals dealing with voluntary, involuntary and removed memory of the author, the visitors and the artworks themselves. Many ways of unfolding references, sources, stories and histories behind the objects are explored within the exhibition.

Your Time Is Not My Time lays the question of blurred boundaries between viewer, author and user within the current habitual fear of missing out and hyper-circulation of images. The exhibition uncovers a thorough pace and tacit admission within the changing lexicon of the public sphere, data-driven economies and forms of usership.

SPECIAL FEATURE: Material Art Fair 2015

March 22, 2017March 18, 2015

Dates: 5-8 February, 2015

Venue: Auditorio Blackberry, Mexico City

Web: http://material-fair.com/

The second edition of Mexico City’s Material Art Fair presented a selective group of 40 galleries and artist-run project spaces — from 10 countries and over 20 cities — chosen by the fair’s 2015 selection committee, which was comprised of John Riepenhoff, artist and co-owner of Green Gallery, Milwaukee; Beatriz López, Co-Director of Instituto de Visión, Bogota; Chris Sharp, curator and co-founder of Lulu, Mexico City; and Gerardo Contreras, curator and director of Preteen Gallery.

The fair’s 2015 public program featured an engaging series of daily conversations organized by the New York City-based online publication, Triple Canopy, under the title “How Far is Near.” These included, “In Search of a Model for Life” with Felipe Ehrenberg, Waysatta Fernández, Juan Caloca, and Sofia Olascoaga; “Universal Methods of Design” with Maru Calva, José León Cerrillo, and Prem Krishnamurthy; and “How to Demand the Impossible” with John Gibler, Gabriela Jauregui, and Isaac Torres.

Anna Gritz, associate curator at South London Gallery, curated the fair’s video program, “Sand in the Vaseline,” which featured three individual programs for artists Adriana Lara, Sophia Al-Maria, and Stuart Middleton.

Mexico City-based Distrito Editorial created the fair’s bookstore, presenting an impeccable selection of artist books, books about art, and small, limited-edition works mostly by Mexican artists.

Finally, beneath the stage at the Auditorio Blackberry was the Material Exhibitors Club: an ambitious group exhibition, performance space, and pop-up mezcal bar organized by the Lower East Side art bar, Beverly’s, with complimentary mezcal provided by Gracias a Dios.

2015 Exhibitor List:

321 Gallery, Brooklyn / Adams and Ollman, Portland / American Medium, Brooklyn / Aran Cravey, Los Angeles / Beverly’s, New York City / CARNE GALLERY, Bogotá / Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago / Casa Imelda, Mexico City / Clifton Benevento, New York City / COOPER COLE, Toronto / David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis / East Hampton Shed, East Hampton / Et al., San Francisco / Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland / François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles / Grand Century, New York City / Green Gallery, Milwaukee / helper, Brooklyn / Instituto de Visión, Bogotá / Kunstverein Toronto, Toronto / Levy.Delval, Brussels / lodos, Mexico City / LOYAL, Stockholm / Lulu, México, D.F. / LVL3, Chicago / Mary Mary, Glasgow / Michael Jon Gallery, Miami+Detroit / Narwhal Contemporary, Toronto / New Galerie, Paris / Night Gallery, Los Angeles / P!, New York / Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca / Queer Thoughts, Nueva York / Regina Rex, Nueva York / Roberto Paradise, San Juan / Rolando Anselmi, Berlin / Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago / Smart Objects, Los Ángeles / What Pipeline, Detroit / The White Lodge, Córdoba / Yautepec, Mexico City

SPECIAL FEATURE: The Registry of Promise curated by Chris Sharp

March 22, 2017March 4, 2015

The Registry of Promise is a series of exhibitions that reflect on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold in store for us. These exhibitions engage with and play upon various readings of promise as simultaneously anticipating a future and its fulfillment or lack thereof, as well as a kind of inevitability, either positive or negative. Such polyvalence assumes a particular poignancy in the current historical moment. Given that the technological and scientific notions of progress inaugurated by the Enlightenment no longer have the same purchase they once did, we have long since abandoned the linear vision of the future the Enlightenment once betokened. Meanwhile, what is coming to substitute our former conception would hardly seem to be a substitute at all: the looming specter of global ecological catastrophe. From the anthropocentric promise of modernity, it would seem, we have turned to a negative faith in the post-human. And yet the future is not necessarily a closed book. Far from fatalistic, The Registry of Promise takes into consideration these varying modalities of the future while trying to conceive of possible others. In doing so, it seeks to valorize the potential polyvalence and mutability at the heart of the word promise.

Taking place over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consists of four autonomous, interrelated exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. It was inaugurated by The Promise of Melancholy and Ecology at the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, followed by The Promise of Multiple Temporalities at Parc Saint Léger, Centre d’art contemporain, Pougues-Les-Eaux and The Promise of Moving Things at Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, and will conclude with The Promise of Literature, Soothsaying and Speaking in Tongues at De Kabinetten van De Vleeshal, Middelburg.