KADER ATTIA — THE VALLEY OF DREAMS

Leave a reply

The artistic language of Kader Attia takes its departure from the mixed cultures between France and Algeria that have accompanied him since his childhood. The painful history encompassed in the complex relationships of these countries, the colonizer versus the colonized, has implemented a concept he envisions in the form of a trilogy around the themes of reappropriation, reparation, and repair. His work investigates historical, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical facets and phenomenon of traditional and modern societies. Through meticulous artistic analyses, Attia breaks away from binary dynamics and introduces dialogs turned toward notions of lineage and continuity while questioning senses of beauty. 

THE VALLEY OF DREAMS—Attia’s debut solo show at Regen Projects in Los Angeles—is a continuum of his research and investigations. Taking the promised land of the American West as a point of reference, Attia draws lines and mise en abimes with Arabian landscapes such as the sea and the desert. If he uses the land as a metaphor, Attia also questions the ways traditional western cultures deal with the idea of injury—a concept he necessarily associates with one of repair. Where traditional cultures celebrate these marks with emphasis and artifacts, cultures of whiteness have been in complete denial in the face of it. However, Attia sees the trauma in these gestures of brutal erasure and buried histories.

What Attia offers through his rigorous science is an aesthetical therapy, where imagination through meaning heals the wounds. As he puts it: “Repair is an oxymoron, because ‘injury’ is its raison d’être. One cannot think about repairing something that hasn’t been injured. The state of the injured thing (the failure) and the state of the repaired thing (the repair) are forever bound in a causal layout that runs in the ethical and aesthetic loop of repair. This is true for all metaphors of repair: natural, cultural, political, immaterial, and so on…”

See link below for exhibition information.

KADER ATTIA—THE VALLEY OF DREAMS

Through December 23, by appointment.

Regen Projects

6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles.

Kader Attia, The Valley of Dreams, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, November 12, 2020–December 23, 2020, from top: Rochers Carrés, 2020, lightbox; Untitled, 2020, collage, ink, photograph, photocopy, print on paper; Untitled, 2020, Kraft paper with blue pigment framed in plexiglass box; installation view; Untitled, 2020, ceramic, terracotta, epoxy resin and steel plinth; Untitled (Skyline), 2007, refrigerators, mirror fragments; The Dead Sea (detail), 2015, floor installation made of secondhand blue clothes; Mirror Mask, 2020, wooden mask, mirror fragments, black pigment; Untitled, 2020, henna and thread on canvas. Images © Kader Attia, courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects.

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE IN CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER CHEE

Leave a reply

There’s nothing like an election to make you feel hopeless about the possibility for political change. I pick up a magazine promising America’s Essential Recipes, and open it right up to “pork schnitzel.” I’m laughing so hard that everyone at the co-op turns around to see if they can be part of my laughter. And then I’m walking through a field of dandelions. Even if it’s really just the grass between the sidewalk and street I will take this field while I can get it.

The news is always its own trauma, but when the news of the trauma echoes into our lives, past and present at once, the open door never quite closes. Trauma as a curtain that billows around us, a wall we never quite break through. I mean trauma as a weapon. How to make oppression realize its redundancy. But oppression can never realize. Anything but oppression. How saying that something is structural means we need to take it apart or else it’s a weapon we become. — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, The Freezer Door

On the occasion of the publication of her new book The Freezer Door, Sycamore will join Alexander Chee—author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel—in conversation.

See link below to register for the online discussion.

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE IN CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDER CHEE

McNally Jackson

Tuesday, November 24.

4 pm on the West Coast; 7 pm East Coast.

From top: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, photograph by Jesse Mann, courtesy and © the author and the photographer; Sycamore, The Freezer Door, cover image courtesy and © the author and Semiotext(e); Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, cover image courtesy and © the author and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Chee (foreground left) and Ggreg Taylor at an AIDS demonstration in San Francisco, October 1989, photograph by Marc Geller, courtesy and © the author and the photographer.

LE CHOC DU FUTUR

Leave a reply

The year is 1978. Punk rock has captured the imagination of the world, but another group of musicians has taken a different path into the world of machine-driven electronica. The new film LE CHOC DU FUTUR—the directorial debut of Marc Collin, co-founder of the band Nouvelle Vague—explores the birth of a scene through the eyes and ears of a young woman in Paris.

Housesitting for a producer and availing herself of the wall of synthesizers in his apartment, Ana (Alma Jodorowsky)—a commercial jinglest and budding composer—works to create a new music-sans-musicians, what she calls “a dance for oscillators,” a layering process the film considers with lovely, unhurried detail. She dreams of leaving behind the old rock venues, “stinking of beer and piss,” and communing with nature in a mass gathering.

LE CHOC DU FUTUR features music by Throbbing Gristle, Human League, Julie London, Aksak Maboul, Jean-Michel Jarre, Suicide, and Clara Luciani—who co-stars—and is dedicated to the female pioneers of electronic music, among them Clara Rockmore, Wendy Carlos, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Eliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel, Suzanne Ciani, Johanna Beyer, Charlotte “Bebe” Barron, Pauline Oliveros, Else Marie Pade, and Beatriz Ferreyra.

See link below for details.

LE CHOC DU FUTUR

A film by Marc Collin.

Cleopatra Entertainment

Marc Collin, Le choc du futur (2019), starring Alma Jodorowsky. Photographs and film poster courtesy and © Cleopatra Entertainment.

LIGIA LEWIS — DEADER THAN DEAD

Leave a reply

As the Hammer Museum, the Huntington, and an art-starved public wait for the chance to experience Made in L.A. 2020: a version in person, artist and choreographer Ligia Lewis has created a video documenting deader than dead, her work for the biennial.

Performed by Jasper Marsalis, Jasmine Orpilla, Austyn Rich, and Lewis, deader than dead “began with an intrigue-based inquiry into deadpan, an impassive mannerism deployed in comedic fashion in order to illustrate emotional distance. Utilizing this expression as a type of stasis, Lewis initially developed a choreography for ten dancers that remained expressively flat or dead, resisting any narrative or representational hold tied to a climactic build or progression. Lewis had relegated deader than dead to this corner of the gallery (a kind of ‘dead’ space) where the dance would ostensibly emerge, although deadened in its repetition, limited in its fate, as it ricocheted from wall to wall.

“[Lewis] abandoned this recursive ensemble of death due to COVID-19, reducing the cast to four performers and pivoting to a more traditionally theatrical presentation. In this new work the dancers use Macbeth’s culminating soliloquy (‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,’ a reflection on repetition and meaninglessness) as the beginning of a work that unfolds in modular parts, each one an illustration or parody of death, stasis, and the void, each one tied to its own carefully selected soundtrack or sample.”*

See link below to watch the video.

LIGIA LEWIS—DEADER THAN DEAD*

Made in L.A.: a version

Hammer Museum and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Gardens

Through March 2021.

Ligia Lewis, deader than dead (2020), Made in L.A. 2020: a version. Video images © Ligia Lewis, courtesy of the artist, the performers, the Hammer Museum, and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Gardens.

TSCHABALALA SELF — COTTON MOUTH

Leave a reply

The sewing in my work has two functions. It allows for the various elements of the painting to be held together, almost like a glue, and it’s also a way for me to draw. The sewing allows me to further articulate different parts of the body and the features of my subjects. I can create depth, and a bulging kind of sculptural effect through stitching. The details in the figures are constantly evolving throughout the making of the piece, and aren’t added at one particular point. — Tschabalala Self*

New works by Tschabalala Self—paintings, drawings, sculpture, and an audio piece—are now on view in Manhattan in COTTON MOUTH, the artist’s debut show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

See link below for details.

TSCHABALALA SELF—COTTON MOUTH

Through December 19.

Galerie Eva Presenhuber

39 Great Jones Street, New York City.

*“Tschabalala Self in Conversation with Lydia Yee,” in Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, edited by Yee, Cameron Foote, and Candy Stobbs (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2020).

Tschabalala Self, Cotton Mouth, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, New York, November 7, 2020–December 19, 2020, from top: Fast Girl, 2020, fabric, thread, charmeuse, silk, velvet, paper, pigment, acrylic, and painted canvas; Lil Mama 2, 2020, fabric, craft paper, tulle, dyed canvas, acrylic on canvas; Black Face with Streaked Wig (red and black), 2020 (detail), colored pencil, acrylic paint, gouache, charcoal, graphite on archival inkjet print; Black Face with Yellow Breasts, 2020 (detail), colored pencil, acrylic paint, gouache, charcoal, graphite on archival inkjet print; Sprewell, 2020, fabric, painted canvas, silk, jeans, painted newsprint, paper, stamp, thread, photo transfer and acrylic on canvas; Pocket Rocket, 2020, digital print on canvas, denim, fabric, thread, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on dyed canvas; Loveseat prototype 2 (Brown Hips), 2020, plaster cast and house paint; Black Face with Animated Face, 2020 (details), colored pencil, acrylic paint, gouache, charcoal, graphite on archival inkjet print; Nate the Snake, 2020, digital print on canvas, fabric, thread, stamped canvas, painted canvas, dyed canvas, acrylic and hand mixed pigments on canvas. Images © Tschabalala Self, photographed by Matt Grubb, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich and New York.