Aesthetica Magazine Issue 73 by Aesthetica Magazine

Aesthetica

THE ART & CULTURE MAGAZINE

www.aestheticamagazine.com

Issue 73 October / November 2016

CYCLICAL INSTALLATION

TOWARDS HYPER-REALITY

Interrogating geopolitics through Thomas Struth’s instinctive worlds

Tatsuo Miyajima’s numerical LEDs demonstrate existential suspension

Digital pioneer Björk introduces new dimensions for audience interaction

9 771743 271064

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DYNAMIC COMPOSITION

RIBA Stirling Prize traces 20 years of ingenuity in a new compendium

ENDURING FOUNDATIONS

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Welcome Editor’s Note

On the Cover Joshua Jordan is an American fashion photographer who executes cinematic shoots with structural consideration. The images reference dream-like flashbacks to retro culture, film-noir and Hollywood-esque characters. Natural tones are projected with subtle glamour, and contemporary models are transposed with vintage imagination. www.studiojordan.com (p. 118).

Predictability is an interesting concept. On the one hand it means that things can happen in a regular and orderly fashion, creating reliability from which systems and routines are formed. It would be pretty difficult to get through a 24-hour period with complete randomness. However, it’s also important to deviate from the ordinary. This edition pays homage to that notion. It’s only through innovation that we can move forward. In the current times – both politically and economically – I find great comfort in constant movement; semi-permanence means that change is always on the horizon. Inside this issue we look at the impact technology has on our lives; see for example Tatsuo Miyajima’s show at MCA Australia. One of Japan’s leading contemporary artists and is best known for his immersive sculptures and installations, Miyajima focuses on the passing of time and the cycle of life and death. He reminds us of our position in the universe and the temporality of life. Similarly Björk Digital is currently on at Somerset House, displaying an artist who needs no introduction as a true pioneer. This survey event comments on the crossover between art, music and electronic advancements. Meanwhile, Thomas Struth: Nature & Politics opens at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, examining how we interact with our environment and how human ambition has physically shaped the world in which we live. We also look at 20 years of the RIBA Stirling Prize, charting how all the winning buildings have encouraged new ways of living and working. The text reminds us just how much the built world influences the quotidian. In photography we present a range of seven photographic practices including Sebastian Weiss, Mária Švarbová, Natalia Evelyn Bencicova, Aurélien Villette and Ben Thomas, who negotiate the boundaries of the natural and the man-made world. Joshua Jordan, our cover photographer, captures retrospective moments. Finally, Chiharu Shiota offers the last words on the power of memory. Moving between technology, urbanisation and organic landscapes, this issue highlights what it means to live in today’s world.

Cover Image: Photography: Joshua Jordan.

Cherie Federico

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contents

News 14 Constructing Power and Identity Monica Bonvicini encodes simple structures with complex dialogues in her first UK survey at Baltic.

16 Choreography of Interior Space As recipient of this year’s Hyundai Commission, Philippe Parreno fills Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

18 Charting a Century of Perceptions An ambitious exhibition at the Whitney Museum, New York, seeks new moving image experiences.

15 Capturing the Fourth Dimension Ultra-long-exposure shots by Hiroshi Sugimoto capture ruin and the transience of human artefacts.

17 Intersecting Temporal Boundaries MCA Chicago assembles the immersive works of Diana Thater and creates panoramic landscapes.

19 Undermining Sensory Conclusions Žilvinas Kempinas confounds audiences at Ikon Gallery through shifting viewpoints and illusion.

22 Enduring Foundations A new text from Merrell Publishers compiles all winners and shortlisted buildings from the RIBA Stirling Prize, showcasing 20 years of innovation.

52 Cyclical Installation As part of the 2016-2017 Sydney International Art Series, MCA Australia hosts a major survey of conceptual performance artist Tatsuo Miyajima.

76 Modern Frameworks German-born Sebastian Weiss cuts up piercingly blue skylines with solid grey geometry, depicting an interaction of forms, materials and structures.

28 Concrete Abstraction Australian photographer Ben Thomas transposes the recognisable environments of contemporary society into artifice by using enhanced palettes.

58 Visceral Uniformity Figures within Natalia Evelyn Bencicova’s images are at once mechanistic and melancholy, evoking an unsettling world of concrete versus organic.

88 Pseudo Americana Tom Blachford’s photography fluctuates between reality and fantasy; his attention to lighting offers an uncanny atmosphere to immaculate locations.

40 Archaic Dereliction Removing architectural systems from their former prestige, Aurélien Villette revels in a new state of aestheticised corrosion and human abandonment.

70 Towards Hyper-Reality Björk pushes into new technological territories at Somerset House, London, blurring lines between art and music whilst undermining consciousness.

100 Dynamic Composition High Museum explores the investigative legacy of Thomas Struth, who interrogates the changing notions of geopolitics and fabricated landscapes.

Film

Music

131 Poignant Social Commentary Auto-biographical film from screenwriter Nick Moorcroft, Urban Hymn, uses the unforgettable events of one night to expose unguided youths.

134 Unexpected Nordic Electronica Oslo-based duo Apothek release their self-titled album that merges polar opposite ideas and, as a result, combines acoustic with mechanic styles.

135 Coming of Age Anthems Julia Jacklin’s album Don’t Let The Kids Win is an atmospheric, mid-tempo, folk-tinged debut that highlights the intimate nature of adolescence.

Performance

Last Words

Regulars

138 Ethereal Movements Returning to Sadler’s Wells in 2016, TAO Dance Theatre test the possibilities of their own bodies as existential conduits for past, present and future.

140 Chiharu Shiota Blain Southern gallery, Berlin, hosts the artist’s site-specific installation that utilises interweaving threads for both metaphor and new perspectives.

20 10 to See 128 Exhibitions 133 Films 137 Music

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Contributors: Matilda Bathurst, Ruby Beesley, Ginevra Bria, Kyle Bryony, Bryony Byrne, Grace Caffyn, Polly Checkland, Niamh Coghlan, Mira Dayal, Tony Earnshaw, Anna Feintuck, Colin Herd, Chloe Hodge, Selina Oakes, Regina Papachlimitzou, Charlotte R.A., Paul Risker, Sara Sweet, Matt Swain, Beth Webb.

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143 Live on Stage 145 Books 152 Directory 162 Last Words

Artists’ Directory Enquiries: Katherine Smira (0044) (0)844 568 2001 katherine@aestheticamagazine.com

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All work is copyrighted to the author or artist. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used or reproduced without permission from the publisher. Published by Cherie Federico and Dale Donley.

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Monica Bonvicini, Light Me Black, 2009. © VG Bild-Kunst. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Constructing Power and Identity MONICA BONVICINI The erotic aspects of architecture and the ways in which the built environment encodes a complex dialogue of power, gender and control have been a constant source of ideas for Monica Bonvicini (b. 1965). 20 years of her creative output across installation, sculpture, drawing and film, now takes over two floors at Baltic in this first UK survey of an artist drawn to examine the dualities of construction and destruction, and who takes inspiration from the worlds – and the materials – of fetishism and S&M. Exploring how the spaces we inhabit condition and control us is a concern running throughout the artist’s practice. She considers both architecture and the art world to be expressions of the ideologies of power and is determined to reveal this. Venice-born and now based in Berlin, Bonvicini is perhaps best known for her one-way mirrored glass lavatory outside the Tate Britain, Don’t Miss A Sec’. (2004) – whose construction references Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham and the design of Apple’s technology stores – and her light installation RUN in the London Olympic Park. She won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale in 1999, and the National Gallery Prize for Young Art in Berlin in 2005. Notable public works can also be seen at the Istanbul Modern Art Museum, Turkey, and the Oslo Opera House in Norway, where her steel and glass installation She Lies floats on the fjord, rising 12m above the water and moving with the tide and wind, implying

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the presence of an iceberg. Her work has featured in many “Exploring how the prominent biennials, including Berlin, Paris, Istanbul, spaces we inhabit Gwangju, New Orleans, and Venice on five occasions. control us is a concern Curated by Laurence Sillars, this exhibition presents a running throughout critical appraisal of 20 years of the artist’s multifaceted the artist’s practice. creative practice, revealing a body of work that questions She considers both the meaning of making art itself. On the first floor, Bonvicini architecture and challenges the limits of freedom and the ambiguities of the art world to be language, whilst also demonstrating the sense of humour expressions of the and ambiguity which is prominent across her entire oeuvre. ideologies of power A signature piece here is Light Me Black (2009) – a cluster of and is determined fluorescent light tubes, which sees the artist responding both to reveal this.” to modernism and to Renzo Piano’s description of buildings as “temples of light.” The second floor of the show unveils a selection of new works specially commissioned for Baltic. Dry-humoured, direct, and imbued with historical, political and social references, Bonvicini makes a critical connection with the exhibition site, through the materials that comprise it, and the roles of spectator and creator. This approach, which has been at the core of the artist‘s production since her first solo exhibition at the California Institute of the Arts in 1991, has formally evolved over the Baltic, Gateshead. years, whilst betraying neither the original analytical force 18 November - 26 February. behind it, nor the desire to challenge both the viewer’s perspective and the prevailing cultural conventions. www.balticmill.com

Capturing the Fourth Dimension HIROSHI SUGIMOTO: REMAINS TO BE SEEN

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Paramount Theater, Newark, 2015. © Hiroshi Sugimoto. Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Time – and the possibilities of capturing the most elusive Beach (1959), the post-apocalyptic film directed by Stanley “He condenses entire and enigmatic of dimensions as a single, static image – is Earl Kramer. With an exposure time of 134 minutes, each films into single the subject of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work; his trademark large- resulting image the movie is seen only as a glowing white images by using exposures that equal format, ultra-long-exposure shots evoke both the passing of rectangle that appears suspended in space. Sugimoto’s fascination with time extends to trying to the running time events and the transience of human artefacts. A life-long fascination with cinemas and film projection led imagine its ultimate limits. He recently commented: “I feel of the feature. This Sugimoto to begin his Theaters series of images featuring that I’m in a very interesting position, where I’m standing back has developed into movie houses in the 1970s. He condenses entire films into to look at this change, at this moment in history of human a pre-occupation single images by using exposures that equal the running beings … I want to witness how this big story of humans ends. with cinemas that time of the feature. Gradually this has developed into a It may keep running, or there might be a turning point. I don’t have fallen into disrepair and ruin.” pre-occupation with cinemas that have fallen into disrepair know whether the future or 2018 exists or not.” As an artist he is deeply influenced by the writings and works and ruin – the architectural surroundings now speaking eloquently of the days and years that have passed. In of Marcel Duchamp as well as the Dadaist and Surrealist these images the film projector provides the sole source of movements as a whole. Sugimoto is also an accomplished lighting; the bright screen in the centre of the composition architect, running his own practice in Tokyo. This feeds into makes hints as to the architecture of the space whilst the his involvement in planning the settings for his exhibitions. In a number of Sugimoto’s major exhibitions from the empty seats are the only other subjects that register. Now, Fraenkel Gallery presents the first exhibition focused past 10 years, such as The History of History (Japan Society, on these abandoned movie house photographs: Remains to New York and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC) Be Seen is a poetic study of neglect and ruin. When shooting and Aujourd’hui, le monde est mort [Lost Human Genetic in abandoned picture houses the artist has personally Archive] (Palais de Tokyo, Paris), the artist has placed his Fraenkel Gallery, chosen the films, often installing his own curtain on the work in a sweeping temporal context that extends from San Francisco. stage or proscenium as a surface to project the film onto ancient history to the end of time. Sugimoto’s image Boden Until 22 October. if no viable screen remains. At the Paramount Theater in Sea, Uttwil (1993) reached a new audience in 2009 when U2 Newark, New Jersey, for example, Sugimoto projected On the chose it as the cover for their album No Line On The Horizon. www.fraenkelgallery.com

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Philippe Parreno, Speech Bubbles (Black), 2009. Unique black helium balloons in mylar, variable dimensions. Installation view: Solo show at the Kunsthalle Zürich, 9 May - 16 August 2009. © Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zürich / Kunsthalle Zürich.

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Choreography of Interior Space PHILIPPE PARRENO The latest artist to take on the imposing space of the Tate ing into question the whole idea of sole authorship. Nota- “Parreno sees his role Modern Turbine Hall, and whose finished installation is to be bly, he co-directed the 2006 feature-length documentary, as creating a mise en unveiled to the public this month, brings an impressive track Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, alongside the Scottish artist scène, through which record of taking viewers on an immersive, choreographed Douglas Gordon. The film tracks French football legend Zin- a series of events journey that redefines the whole idea of the gallery exhibition. edine Zidane throughout a match, using 17 different camera unfold. By creating Philippe Parreno sees his role as creating a mise en scène, angles, whilst subtitles present the player’s thoughts, and the these kaleidoscopic through which a series of events unfold. By creating these ka- images combine with an emotive soundtrack that was written environments, he treats his exhibitions leidoscopic environments, he treats his exhibitions as one co- and performed by the Scottish post-rock band Mogwai. herent whole rather than a series of objects within a space. As Recently he presented a vast installation H{N)Y P N(Y}OSIS as one coherent the recipient of this year’s Hyundai Commission – a series of at Park Avenue Armory, New York (2015), which fused film, whole rather than site-specific installations made possible by a long-term part- light, sound and performance to create a dramatic sensory a series of objects nership between Tate and Hyundai Motor, a relationship now journey. At the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in 2013 he was the within a space.” confirmed to run until 2025 – Parreno adds to the catalogue first artist to occupy the entirety of the gallery’s expanded of artists who have reimagined the vast industrial space and space of 22,000 square metres. A recurring trademark is helped transform public perceptions of contemporary art. his series of Marquees, like those found over cinema and Chris Dercon, Director, Tate Modern notes: “Throughout his theatre entrances, whose neon displays often react to the career Parreno has sought to transform how art can work, music and video elements of the exhibition. His video works and his desire to create immersive experiences makes him include Marilyn (2012), which summons the ghost of Marilyn the perfect choice for the Turbine Hall at Tate.” Monroe in a séance in a suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in The artist, who lives and works in Paris, considers himself New York where she once lived, using techniques including a firmly in a tradition of collaborative work across cultural dis- computer reconstruction of the doomed star’s voice. ciplines. His projects, which explore the borders between realParreno is represented in major museum collections, Tate Modern, London. ity and fiction, span film, video, sound, writing, drawing and including Tate; MoMA, New York; and the Centre Pompidou. 4 October - 2 April. information technology, and emphasise working with other He has participated in multiple Venice Biennales since the artists, architects, musicians, writers and scientists, throw- early 1990s and recently exhibited at HangarBicocca, Milan. www.tate.org.uk

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Intersecting Temporal Boundaries DIANA THATER: THE SYMPATHETIC IMAGINATION sonar and sight. The intersection of film and video with “My work is a longinstallation practices in Thater’s work – allowing her creations term project. I have to break out of the video rectangle and often incorporate dedicated my life viewers’ bodies – is one of the artist’s major contributions to as an artist to the her field: one that is at the heart of this show, co-curated by examination and Lynne Cooke of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, observation of the and Christine Y Kim of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. many kinds of MCA’s comprehensive survey includes Thater’s exploration relationships of wildlife in the abandoned, post-human “Zone of humans have Alienation” around the radioactive disaster site of Chernobyl, constructed reflecting her fascination with the tension between the tamed with animals.” and the wild. Also featuring is her recent piece Life is a TimeBased Medium (2015) in which the architecture of the gallery setting converges with the pillars and pavilions of the Galtaji Temple in Jaipur, India. The temple – situated in a mountain pass – has been a Hindu pilgrimage site for many centuries, though much of the present complex of temples built in pink stone dates from the 18th century. One of the constructions has become known as the “Monkey Temple” as it is now home to a large tribe of rhesus macaques. Thater projects an immersive environment depicting the monkeys in their own architectural habitat, superimposed on the exhibition MCA Chicago. space. Early pieces are also presented here including Oo Fifi, 29 October - 8 January. Five Days in Claude Monet’s Gardens (1992), which breaks film footage down into the primary colours of video (RGB). www.mcachicago.org

Diana Thater, Untitled Videowall (Butterflies), 2008. Installation view, 1301PE, Los Angeles, 2008. © Diana Thater. Photo: © Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of 1301PE, Los Angeles.

MCA Chicago draws together a series of immersive film and video installations created by Diana Thater which imagine the subjective experiences of animals in their natural habitats by a process of pushing these media to their limits. Years of experience in filming animals, both in the wild and in captivity, have led Thater to her key themes of environmentalism and conservation. She states that “my work is a long-term project. I have dedicated my life as an artist to the examination and observation of the many kinds of relationships humans have constructed with animals.” Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including literature, mathematics, chess and sociology, the American artist makes evocative and sometimes near-abstract works that interact with their surroundings to create an intricate relationship between their temporal and spatial aspects. She frequently transforms exhibition venues into a hybrid space that lies somewhere between sculpture and architecture, using colour and light, whilst the whole experience takes reference points from panoramic landscape painting. She believes film and video are not entirely narrative media, and that abstraction can and does exist in representational moving images. Amongst the pieces presented here is Delphine (1999) in which LED lights activate the space whilst projected film and video footage of dolphins simulates the animals’ underwater environment – including the ways they perceive it through

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Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Video, color, sound; 21 min., looped; with environment, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist; courtesy of Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Installation view, German Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale, 2015. Photo: Manuel Reinartz; image courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.

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Charting a Century of Perceptions DREAMLANDS: IMMERSIVE CINEMA AND ART The Whitney mounts the most technically complex project music is created in response to colour. “Artists have Organised into three sections, the exhibition first highlights dismantled the since the move to its new building with a journey through more than a century of cinematic innovators. Inspired by pioneers from 1905 to the 1930s, whose early uses of most fundamental horror fantasy writer HP Lovecraft, the show’s title evokes sweeping shots, abstraction and kaleidoscopic colour began conventions of the idea of an alternate fictional dimension, whose terrain to reinvent the conventions of “watching” and define a cinema to create new of cities, forests, mountains and underworld can be visited distinctly cinematic space. The German innovators featured experiences of the only through dreams. The ambitious presentation will fill here include the dancing figures of Oskar Schlemmer’s moving image. The the entirety of the Whitney’s 18,000-square-feet fifth-floor Triadic Ballet (1922) and the abstract and intoxicating forms works presented use colour, touch, music, galleries and embraces techniques that range from hand- created by Oskar Fischinger for Raumlichtkunst (1926). Audiences visit an era from the 1940s to the 1980s, spectacle, light and painted film to the latest in digital image manipulation. Dreamlands focuses on the ways in which, throughout the beginning with Disney’s fusion of music and image in darkness to confound history of the medium, artists have dismantled the most Fantasia – but the mood soon shifts as the utopian hopes expectations.” fundamental conventions of cinema – screen, projection, of the post-war era are replaced by the fears of the atomic darkness – to create new experiences of the moving image. age. Bruce Conner’s Crossroads (1976) compiled from The works and installations presented use colour, touch, government footage of nuclear bomb tests, and the music, spectacle, light and darkness to confound expectations, experimental installations of Jud Yalkut and Anthony McCall, whether flattening space through animation and abstraction, demonstrate a prevailing mood that feeds into the dystopian or heightening the illusion of three dimensions. Though science fiction world developed in Blade Runner. The final section, from the 1990s to the present day, sees the primarily featuring American artists and filmmakers, the show also includes a selection of German artists of the 1920s digital and real worlds fuse, with virtual spaces, touchscreens who had a significant influence on the evolution of American and manipulation of images. In Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Whitney Museum of cinema. Visitors can walk through projection beams, explore DiNA, Tilda Swinton plays an artificial intelligence who American Art, New York. virtual reality using Oculus Rifts, see the conceptual artwork can interact with viewers, whilst in Ian Cheng’s simulations, 28 October - 5 February. for Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940) and Ridley Scott’s Blade human involvement is not even necessary as his chat bots Runner (1982), and enter a synesthetic environment wherein interact with each other to create an evolving narrative. www.whitney.org

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Undermining Sensory Conclusions ŽILVINAS KEMPINAS Alongside White Noise are seven pieces from the Illuminator “Videotape is a (2015) series. From a distance they resemble a full moon – a container of visual bright sphere in a dark sky – but are illuminated circles of information, a data the flat, rough wall. Bearings (2015) is a floor-based, black carrier, but you can box-like object with thousands of small steel bearings laid perceive it like an down in oil on its surface. At first they appear static, but abstract line. It is a when analysed in further detail it becomes apparent that the mass-produced banal bearings are slowly moving, one by one, rearranging and re- industrial material, positioning themselves into an infinite “drawing in progress.” but it can appear The idea of drawing as a record of a physical movement sensual and seductive.” through a three-dimensional space is also the subject of a new series on paper – employing traditional materials combined with a non-traditional way of drawing: using a street bicycle as the line-making device. Speed, gravity, space, equilibrium, painterly accidents, mechanical vehicle movements and the control of the artist all come in to play. The theme of movement continues in a new installation created specifically for the Ikon show. Featuring an upsidedown video projection of a ride through a forested landscape and a mass of metal rods painted white and arranged on a high-gloss black floor, the combination results in a controlled environment that is immediately disorienting. Ikon, Birmingham. However, as with the Illuminator works and White Noise, the Until 27 November. illusion is dispelled by careful scrutiny. Kempinas’s aesthetic games create a unity amongst the diverse works presented. www.ikon-gallery.org

Žilvinas Kempinas, Bearings, 2015 (steel, aluminium, mineral oil, motor, magnets) and Verticals, 2015 (magnetic tape, magnets). Installation view at Galleria Leme, Sao Paulo 2015. Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Leme, Sao Paulo and Galerija Vartai, Vilnius.

Once ubiquitous, but now on the verge of obsolescence, videotape is the signature material in the installations of Lithuanian artist Žilvinas Kempinas. The artist, who generally works with everyday materials, is drawn to the idea of this inexpensive substance both by its function as an abstraction of moving images but also by its basic physical properties. “It’s a container of visual information, a data carrier, but you can perceive it like an abstract line. It is a mass-produced banal industrial material, but it can appear sensual and seductive at the same time,” says the New York-based artist. For his show at Ikon, Kempinas presents series of installations, with the centrepiece being White Noise (2007). Comprising numerous lengths of unwound videotape which are stretched horizontally wall-to-wall and agitated by ventilator fans, it suggests the sound of static from a vast untuned television screen. The sound of the fans and fluttering tape heightens an illusion which is ultimately undermined upon closer inspection. Such tension between first impression and reality is another signature of Kempinas’s work. The exhibition as a whole makes use of elemental phenomena such as light and the circulation of air, with an emphasis on movement – whether that of the visitors or of the kinetic works on display. Again, the pieces exploit dramatic changes that can be revealed through a simple shift of viewpoint, confounding the viewers’ first impressions.

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1. Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, 2007. Image courtesy of Gagosian Gallery. 2. Viktor&Rolf, Van Gogh Girls, 2015. Haute Couture Spring/Summer. The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined. © Team Peter Stigter. 3. Lilly Reich. Women’s Fashion Exhibition, Berlin, Germany. View of the Velvet and Silk Café. 1927. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect. 4. Blow Up, 1966. © MGM / THE KOBAL COLLECTION. 5. Simon Norfolk, Burnt filing cabinets, Iraqi National Archives, Baghdad, April, 2003. © Simon Norfolk. Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery.

10 to See RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS THIS SEASON

Taryn Simon

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark 29 October - 15 January www.en.louisiana.dk

With the series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, Taryn Simon presents photographs of places inaccessible to the general public. Subjects include radioactive waste sunk in water, an issue of Playboy Magazine in Braille, the cage in which a prisoner on Death Row can move around out of doors, a living HIV virus and an inbred albino tiger. Presented as part of the Louisiana One Work series.

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The Vulgar

Barbican, London 13 October - 5 February www.barbican.org.uk

The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined addresses the controversial but compelling subject of taste, questioning notions of vulgarity, whilst revelling in its excesses. The show invites the visitor to think again about what makes something “vulgar.” With items from the Renaissance to the present day, this exhibition includes the work of Walter van Beirendonck, Manolo Blahnik, Miuccia Prada, Louis Vuitton and Vivienne Westwood.

How Should We Live?

MoMA, New York 1 October - 23 April www.moma.org

Subtitled Propositions for the Modern Interior, MoMA explores the various creative partnerships and processes that have shaped our homes and work environments. It will feature interior spaces from the 1920s to the 1950s, considering the design elements and social and political context. Noted partnerships featured include Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe, and Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier.

You Say You Want a Revolution?

Image As Question

V&A, London Until 26 February www.vam.ac.uk

Michael Hoppen Gallery, London Until 26 November michaelhoppengallery.com

In You Say You Want a Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966 –1970, the V&A considers how the upheavals of the late 1960s can still be felt today, from civil rights to environmentalism and neoliberal politics our world bears the stamp of those revolutionary years. Featured objects include a moon rock on loan from NASA and shards from Jimi Hendrix’s guitar.

Embedded within the photographic medium is the idea of evidence, of it being, on some level, documentary proof. The Michael Hoppen Gallery presents a fascinating selection of pictures, whose original context is long past, turning them into a source of new questions. The images range from the events of 9/11 to source material for the canvases of Francis Bacon.

6. Ulay, S’ he, 1973-74. 8.5 x 10.8 cm. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. Courtesy of Ulay Foundation, 2016. 7. Gillian Hyland, Look Away, 2014. Courtesy of Flux Exhibition. 8. Zhang Jingna, Motherland Chronicles – Winter’s Rose. 9. James Richards, Radio at Night, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. 10. Anna Maria Maiolino, São 8 [They Are Eight], 1993. Moulded cement with pigment. 100 x 125 x 13 cm.

Ulay

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, 13 October - 8 January www.schirn.de

Frank Uwe Laysiepen, known as Ulay, was born in 1943, and his life has been inseparable from his art. Fascinated with transformation, he constantly creates new identities, with photography as the main tool and his body as the subject. Schirn brings together a lifetime of performance photography and body art, from Polaroids to digital images, and including many works never seen in public.

F lux

The Old Truman Brewery, London 2-6 November www.fluxexhibition.com

The third edition of Flux continues the tradition of being an alternative way to encounter new creative talent, in a carefully curated showcase of emerging painters and sculptors, presented alongside sitespecific installations and live musical performances. The event is curated by Flux founder Lisa Gray and features a diverse group of 140 artists, including Gillian Hyland, Darren Baker and Tomas Harker.

Berlin Foto Biennale

Palazzo Italia, Berlin 6 October - 30 October www.berlinfotobiennale.com

This year’s Biennale is a truly global survey of modern photography featuring 1,230 images by 446 contemporary artists from 41 countries, including the USA, China, Senegal and Mexico. Celebrated Magnum photographer Steve McCurry is this year’s special guest and the 2016 Emerging Talent exhibitor is Yusuke Suzuki, with her studies of the refugee crisis on Lesbos and the chaos in the Syrian city of Aleppo.

James Richards

ICA, London Until 13 November www.ica.org.uk

Taking his video Radio at Night (2015) as a starting point, James Richards will present three new physically distinct but conceptually connected pieces, which continue his ongoing exploration of collage, installation and sound works across the ICA’s Lower and Upper Galleries. The Welsh artist, currently based in Berlin, aims to create echoes and reflections between the works, throughout the exhibition space.

Anna Maria Maiolino

Hauser &Wirth, Zürich 12 October - 23 December www.hauserwirth.com

Hauser & Wirth displays a selection of new and recent work by one of Brazil’s most significant contemporary artists, Anna Maria Maiolino. Through fragmentation and abstraction, the artist’s surfaces become rich with metaphor, alluding to and questioning language, sexuality, desire and the unconscious. Amongst the new sculptural pieces here, there is a large work in Raku ceramic from the Rolinhos Na Horizontal series.

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Enduring Foundations RIBA STIRLING PRIZE WRITTEN BY TONY CHAPMAN, A NEW TITLE INCLUDES EVERY WINNER OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS, HIGHLIGHTING HOW BUILDINGS MUST MOVE BEYOND FUNCTIONALITY.

“Uniqueness,” observes Tony Chapman, Head of Awards at an elusive concept: it’s not synonymous with innovation, the Royal Institute of British Architects, and author of The although originality and evidence of an innovative approach RIBA Stirling Prize: 20, “interests people.” Indeed, even are also core criteria for selecting the chosen works. Yet having an impact on other buildings requires more: a cursory glance over the Stirling shortlisted and prizewinning buildings from the 20 years since its inception would while Chapman is keen to point out that “architecture is a certainly reveal a smorgasbord of unique works: from those practical art” and therefore “buildings have to work”, he’s skyline-defining household names such as the iconic Shard also quick to highlight the fact that for a building to win the and the Gherkin in London to the heritage regeneration Stirling, it needs to go “beyond mere functionality.” Leafing through The RIBA Stirling Prize: 20, it’s not long success stories such as Astley Castle, or the harbingers of before you encounter a building that does just that. There are urban regeneration like the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. Winning the Stirling Prize is largely about making it some truly dramatic examples in the collection, for instance through a very long and exhaustive process of elimination the American Air Museum with its soaring displays, or the which includes the criteria of having won both the regional sweeping landscape which was created by Zaha Hadid for award and the national award. An initial longlist of roughly MAXXI. Such works attest to what the book calls “the power 500 entries (the number fluctuates considerably, Chapman of architecture to shape our experience”. By at once subtly notes, depending on the economic climate) is gradually and guiding the movement of visitors and encouraging a spirit of exploration, Stirling Prize winners integrate the functionality painstakingly whittled down to a final shortlist of six. At the inception of the prize – and for the first few years of of a space with the experience of the entire building. In the text, Chapman mentions that “the challenge of how its existence – there used to be a system of categories: but this was quickly abandoned because the organisers felt that to be resolutely of the present age whilst simultaneously it was skewing the judging process. “We couldn’t guarantee embracing the past is one of the most complex problems these were the best six buildings,” Chapman recalls, that architects have had to face throughout history.” So how adding that the decision was ultimately made to “compare does competing for the Stirling Prize encourage clients and everything them all with each other and choose the best six.” architects to not just be of the present but also to usher in One-on-one comparison of such diversity is, without a the future? “Buildings,” Chapman declares, “should last. doubt, a complex and nuanced task. The Stirling Prize being There are some specific structures that are intended to be “the culmination of the RIBA Awards” means the over-arching temporary and are therefore exempt from that exhortation, aim is to award the building that “[has] had the most influence but I think it’s really important that we do build for posterity, on architecture” in the year in question. Influence is of course where appropriate.” Preparing for future change by including

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Museum of Modern Literature, Germany. David Chipperfield Architects. Photo: Christian Richters.

“The architects chose to literalise the concept of transparency in the administering of justice, by using glass in a building that would traditionally have been built as a fortress: awe-inspiring and opaque.”

Previous Page: Accordia, Cambridge. Architect: Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Maccreanor Lavington and Alison Brooks Architects. Photo: Tim Crocker. Left: Maggie’s London, Charing Cross Hospital. Architect: Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners. Photo: Richard Bryant / Arcaid.

adaptability in the plans is one of the ways that building for the future can be achieved; and, as Chapman admits, “something that is adaptable takes a lot more thought.” Another aspect of contemporary building is to recover and breathe new life into the past. Several of the examples in the book integrate past and present, in the form of existing structures being enveloped in (or enveloping) new buildings, such as the Magna Science Adventure Centre re-purposing a former steelworks in Rotherham, Yorkshire. A dramatic example of this is the regeneration of Astley Castle to become a holiday home: a surprising but well-deserving winner. Love and care of historic architecture has long been part of the fabric of British national identity, ever since the Ancient Monuments Board for England came together in 1913 to ensure the survival and preservation of nationally important monuments, which soon extended to include the protection and conservation of all nationally important built heritage. The prevailing issue is that not all nationally important historic architecture will attract the same number of visits as Stonehenge or Tintagel. Presently there are “all sorts of listing processes and barriers to redeveloping and knocking down old buildings,” which means that finding creative ways to re-use old buildings and ruined structures is becoming of paramount importance. Whilst public opinion might often reject the idea of modernising interventions in these heritage sites, the question remains: what is the point of having unused and unvisited ruins dotted around the country? Astley Castle is an interesting case of a historic building that, as Chapman puts it, “wasn’t considered that important; it was not that well known.” Its thoughtful yet confident regeneration by Witherford Watson Mann architects has

shown the public a working way forward in the marriage of old and new, and has created huge interest. Awarding Astley Castle the Stirling Prize has gone some way towards highlighting – and changing public perceptions of – the linking of historical and contemporary architecture. This meeting of past and present is one recurring aspect of the Stirling award-winning and shortlisted architectural projects. Another aspect is the meeting of inner and outer, the opening up of space and the creating of opportunities for movement between the building itself and the world around it. “Architecture,” the judges of the 2002 Stirling Prize noted, “is about the enclosure of space” – in addition, Chapman observes that the “merging of inside and out is [also] considered important in all great architecture.” Manchester Civil Justice Centre, which was shortlisted for the 2008 prize, incorporates elements that enable transparency, apparent both from the outside in and from the inside out: it allows citizens who walk past to catch a glimpse of the workings of the civil court buildings inside it, and at the same time gives people who have presented themselves to the court a glimpse of the outside world beyond its walls. Denton Corker Marshall architects chose to literalise the concept of transparency in the administering of justice by using glass in a building that would traditionally have been built as a fortress: awe-inspiring and opaque, a structure designed to create dread in the hearts of those who choose to break the law, whilst re-affirming its seriousness as a centre of the justice system. “[Denton Corker Marshall] turn that on its head,” Chapman observes, and it was that “highly unusual [approach that] made us put it on the shortlist.” When it comes to great architecture, there should not be

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London Aquatics Centre. Architect: Zaha Hadid Architects. Photo: Hufton + Crow.

any hard and fast boundaries between inside and out: instead, aren’t I ugly?’ It’s got to say ‘Look at me, aren’t I beautiful?’” Different architectural approaches might help a building “there should be an element of the outside coming in and the inside coming out, as it were.” Maggie’s House in London and to draw attention to itself, but its beauty has to be more Lanarkshire are at the same time set apart from the outside than skin-deep. Chapman juxtaposes billboard architecture world and yet integrated in it – they are constructions in – which is just something that is attached to a building that which an element of transparency is brought into the design says “Here, look at me”, but when you look deeper you find that there’s nothing else worth looking at – with buildings in order to encourage people to enter the building. Maggie’s Centres are places of refuge and healing for like the Shard. Although it is a look-at-me building, the Shard people diagnosed with cancer. Sufferers are obviously in was designed in such a way that “the more you look at it, the a state of high anxiety and if they go to a Maggie’s Centre, more complex it is, and the more there is to see and enjoy.” There is certainly something to be said about architecture they’ve probably only recently been diagnosed with cancer. They might have heard or been recommended to go to this that doesn’t slavishly adhere to its context. If all buildings venue where they can meet therapists and other sufferers. were to seamlessly integrate with one another, our cities The aim of creating a welcoming and transparent space is would end up looking bland and boring. However, great partly to offer these new arrivals a glimpse of the cosiness architecture often brings an element of weaving together, of that awaits them in the centre: people talking over a cup of bridging the gaps, both metaphorically and literally. The RIBA Stirling Prize: 20 gorgeously illustrates the way tea, having a laugh, relaxing in each other’s presence. However, a balance must be struck: people who use that architecture spans life. “We are all aware,” Chapman Maggie’s Centres “do not want to feel that they’re on show,” muses, “as we walk around a city that some buildings interest as Chapman puts it. It is important for people who use or us and some don’t. The more people find out about why a might use them to have the opportunity for quiet reflection building is good and why a building is bad the greater our and to enjoy one’s own space and privacy. “The solution appreciation and understanding of where we live.” Encompassing the buildings in which we dwell and study; usually opted for,” Chapman notes, “is to carry out a lot of the rooms for work, enjoying music, spending our leisure planting to ensure that there’s shade from prying eyes.” For Chapman, the best examples of architecture both make time; the places in which we receive terrible news or begin to a distinctive mark on the skyline they are added to and face it; the bridges to cross; the stations to travel through, the integrate themselves into the fabric of the surrounding area. Stirling Prize carefully selects works for their achievement in Considering the fact that the Stirling Prize is awarded to one bringing the importance of architecture into the spotlight. An outstanding building, it’s not surprising that the winner does invaluable insight into the judging process, The RIBA Stirling just that: stand out. He adds: “Of course, if art is going to draw Prize: 20 celebrates the structures that have made a lasting attention to itself, it has to be good. It never says ‘Look at me, impact on architecture and the way we perceive it.

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Right: 5 Aldermanbury Square, London. Architect: Eric Parry Architects. Photo: Timothy Soar.

Words Regina Papachlimitzou

The RIBA Stirling Prize: 20. Merrell Publishers. www.merrellpublishers.com

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art

Concrete Abstraction Ben Thomas

Australian artist Ben Thomas (b. 1981) focuses on urban spaces. Having experimented in his earlier practice with techniques including tilt-shift and kaleidoscopes, the featured series Chroma I (2015) and Chroma II (2016) decode cities, highlighting colour and tonal flatness. Locations including Melbourne, New York, London and Florence are depicted within a surreal plane wherein everyday palettes are enhanced into ostensible brilliance. Block colours and smoothed shadows transpose the recognisable environments of contemporary society into artifice, whilst luminous aquamarine skies and pastel yellow concrete introduce the shapes of buildings into plastic worlds. By intensifying colours and distorting the boundaries between reality and abstraction, Thomas poses questions about how society defines the places in which we live: how far do we have to digitalise our surroundings until they are noticeably unnatural? www.benthomas.net.au.

Ben Thomas, Crown, 2016. New York.

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Ben Thomas, Youth, 2015. Florence.

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Ben Thomas, Ills, 2016. New York.

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Ben Thomas, Tones, 2016. New York.

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Ben Thomas, Yellow Cab Army, 2016. Melbourne.

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Ben Thomas, Tip, 2016. London.

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Ben Thomas, Paulâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Daughter, 2016. Coney Island.

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Archaic Dereliction Aurélien Villette

Aurélien Villette (b. 1982) is a Parisian photographer fuelled by a desire to travel. Bringing to view more than 30 countries, the works are shaped by the artist’s perception of civilisation and the indications of cultural movement through architectural construction. Extravagant and palatial buildings are captured within the context of specific lenses: the shots of dilapidated staircases and isolated, concrete networks remove them from their former prestige into a new state of aestheticised corrosion. The images find beauty in symmetry, be it in the repeated shapes of man-made superstructures or the timeless notion of degeneration and eventual renewal. Ornate bannisters and pastel-coloured walls are held within a moment, as if untouched by anyone or anything other than natural daylight. In this way Villette is at once invisible from the frames but also glaringly evident – present to immortalise a state of disrepair years on. www.adonis-photografic.com.

Aurélien Villette, Verticalité, Poland.

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AurĂŠlien Villette, VerticalitĂŠ, Hotel, Georgia.

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AurĂŠlien Villette, Structures et destructures hypostyle, Italia.

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AurĂŠlien Villette, Dogma, Soviet monument, Bulgaria.

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AurĂŠlien Villette, VerticalitĂŠ, Germany.

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AurĂŠlien Villette, Dogma, Maison du parti, Georgia.

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Cyclical Installation Tatsuo Miyajima INCLUDED IN THE 2016-2017 SYDNEY INTERNATIONAL ART SERIES, MCA AUSTRALIA LAUNCHES THE ARTIST’S FIRST MAJOR LIFE SURVEY WITHIN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE.

In Buddhist philosophy the human life cycle is interpreted as a perpetual repetition of life and death, with death not an end point but a deep sleep between one life and the next – a short period of darkness. The length of these resting periods is unique to the individual – each of us possessing our own innate rhythm. As every life is different, so is every death. One of Japan’s leading contemporary artists, Tatsuo Miyajima is fascinated by this infinite pattern, or in his words a “solemn drama performed for hundreds and thousands of years by each and every man,” which he represents through one of the most ordinary objects in contemporary life: the digital LED counter. He refers to these numerical displays as “counter gadgets” – the very same as are used in digital watches, microwave oven timers, train or bus station timetable displays, a multitude of everyday objects – and he has used them consistently in his work since the late 1980s. However, where each individual digit on your watch will flash through 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0, Miyajima’s stop short at 9 and return to 1, avoiding the finality of the number zero, which for Miyajima represents a final death. Over the past 30 years, his “counter gadgets” have been presented in grids, towers and complex circuits, even projected across the entire façade of the iconic 490-metre-high ICC building on Hong Kong’s Kowloon harbour-front, broadcasting Miyajima’s own three over-riding concepts across the whole of the cityscape: Keep Changing; Connect with Everything; Continue Forever. Opening this year at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Miyajima’s first major retrospective takes the second of these major themes as its namesake, Connect with Everything,

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with the artist explaining: “Everything interacts with each other. Nothing is independent. Therefore, art should be positively engaged with anything, and represent this in its own ways. Art has long been isolated from the real world, and spoiled within its own framework of the art world. “That was a survival guide for art. It created a tiny paradise, and protected itself from any danger by dissociating itself from the real world. However, such a closed environment would terminate art eventually, as intermarriage tends to have a less competitive result in the reproduction process. Art should interact with any kind of things. Only then can it obtain the power that is needed to give people courage.” Used in sculptural pieces, room-sized environments, drawings and paintings, performance, artist sketchbooks, LED sample models and documentary film, Miyajima’s electronic counter gadgets draw together a single conversation about the nature of time, renewal and questions of mortality. Still, he has not always communicated through this medium. MCA Chief Curator Rachel Kent has followed the artist since his survey exhibition, Big Time, at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1996 – an exhibition that she can “still visualise” – and notes that today Miyajima’s light-based pieces “perform in lieu of him” – the artist originally specialised in performance. Graduating from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, his early work was particularly influenced by the practices of seminal European artists Joseph Beuys and Allan Kaprow, with Miyajima naming his own performance pieces “actions for society” inspired by the Happenings popularised throughout the 1960s. The “Happening”

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Tatsuo Miyajima, Counter Void, 2003. White neon, film glass, aluminium, electric wire, IC, time control program. Collection of TV Asahi Corporation. Image courtesy of the artist, TV Asahi Corporation and SCAI THE BATHHOUSE. Photo: Kunihiko Katsumata.

“As the exhibition at the MCA portrays, Miyajima has come full circle and returned to performance, with his most recent works combining the symbolism of the counter with a new expression of his prevailing interest in human action.”

Previous Page: Tatsuo Miyajima, Diamond in You No. 1, 2010. LED, IC, electric wire, stainless mirror, iron. The Collection of John and Amy Phelan. Image courtesy of the artist and Buchmann Galerie. Photo: HG Gaul. Left: Tatsuo Miyajima, Pile Up Life No. 2, 2009. Waterproof LED, fibre-reinforced plastics, electric wire, transformer Image courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Ken Adlard.

continues to persist in the contemporary scene as a planned multidisciplinary action which allows room for improvisation and audience reaction. The term was first coined in 1957 by Allan Kaprow, an American painter and performance art pioneer, as “a game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.” The audience can be knowing or unknowing, with passers-by finding themselves drawn into the “game” as the Happening erases the presence of a divide between artwork and viewer. Although Kaprow first announced the concept of the Happening to key players in the American avant-garde during an art picnic at George Segal’s farm in New Jersey, several years earlier Happenings were already in full swing on the other side of the world, in Miyajima’s native Japan. With its three traditional theatrical genres – Kabuki, Noh and Banraku – Japan has a long history of dramatic, musical performance, which entered the political arena after the Second World War as Butoh or “dance of utter darkness”, devised to theatrically come to terms with Japan’s post-war devastation. This was then taken on by the Gutai – Japan’s first radical post-war artistic group – whose members performed acts such as painting with their bare feet, flailing in heaps of building clay and running through layers of paper. The Gutai’s first true Happening could be seen as their Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Burning Sun of 1955, whereby a site-specific installation was set up in a rural pine grove in Osaka, with the reactions of visitors forming part of the work. For the Gutai’s 1955 Happening, participation was voluntary and wilful; however, 25 years later Miyajima pushed performance art in Japan to another level, drawing

an unknowing audience into the avant-garde in a series of works which took the Happening to the streets, interrogating innocent bystanders. Between 1981 and 1983 Miyajima enacted a series titled NA.AR. (Voice), NA.AR (Human Stone) and NA.AR (Rain) across Japan. The first of these works saw the artist emit a scream as he walked through the crowded scramble of Tokyo’s famous Shibuya crossing; for the second, Miyajima squatted motionless in the midst of the flow of city pedestrians; and for (Rain) Miyajima would lie in the middle of a road during a downpour to leave a dry human trace. These works demonstrated the beginning of a preoccupation with human relationships at a time before the artist’s discovery of the technological counter gadget. Now, as the exhibition at the MCA portrays, Miyajima has come full circle and returned to performance, with his most recent works combining the symbolism of the counter with a new expression of his prevailing interest in human action. Exhibited at the MCA is a video recording of Miyajima’s most recent performance work Counter Voice in the Water at Fukushima (2014). Suited, with the shoreline Fukushima nuclear plant behind him and standing in front of a clear bowl filled with seawater, Miyajima aggressively counts down from 9 to 1. When he reaches 0, he inhales, holds his breath and plunges his face into the bowl. The artist repeats this time and time again until he is drenched in seawater taken directly from the site of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster; although Miyajima avoids mouthing the death number, zero, his repetitive ducking is an even more distressing sight. As MCA curator, Kent explains “death and mourning are central to the work of Miyajima”, best expressed in this new exhibition with works that include “a series of floor-based

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Tatsuo Miyajima, Moon in the Ground No. 2, 2015. LED, IC, electric wire, stainless steel. Image courtesy of the artist and SCAI THE BATHHOUSE.

sculptures studded with tiny LEDs to memorialise the natural disasters which have hit Asia over the last 20 years”, a 2008 work titled Counter Coal and Miyajima’s best-known work, Mega Death (1999). The former of these works was commissioned by the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen – a gallery set in one of Germany’s coalmining regions – and appears as a huge mound of black coal, interspersed with red diodes, which is encircled by another part of the commission – Time Train to the Holocaust (2008). Here a toy train hauls carts of tiny blue counter gadgets as it moves around the installation, which, according to Kent, serves to remind the viewer of Germany’s enormous “railway system, which was built for coal but also took a vast number of humans to their death.” This work follows a very similar thought process as Mega Death, an enormous room-scale installation of twinkling blue LEDs, each representative of one human life and set to blink at intervals, momentarily immersing the audience in complete darkness. The work was first exhibited to represent Japan at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the title deriving from Miyajima’s consideration of the 21st century as “an era of artificial Mega Death” in which he explains that “167 million human lives [have been] lost in events caused by human acts such as war, revolution and conflict.” For the artist this is an act of theft, robbing time of its role as the decider of natural events, and stealing the unique life and death rhythm of each victim. Mega Death is the only one of Miyajima’s works that sets viewers in complete darkness, portraying the “terror of suspension” between life and passing over to the next stage when the fundamental patterns are disrupted. Still, Miyajima’s LED works equally celebrate the precious potential of the human lifetime and the innate beauty of

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natural expectancy and death-time. Connect with Everything is an entirely immersive exhibition which has transformed an area of over 140,000 square feet of the MCA into a twinkling cosmos of blue, green, white and red diodes: projected onto the floor, spinning and flickering. Some galleries see children try to catch the numbers, whilst elsewhere, mirrors punctured with diodes reflect the viewer as if they have an entire solar system within their own body. Rippled like funfair mirrors or broken into shards and re-set to protrude outwards, as with Diamond In You (2013), the mirrors create symbolic associations of intricate origami or budding lotus blossoms. Kent, who has worked with Miyajima since 2012 when the artist was included in the group exhibition devised to inaugurate Sydney’s new MCA building, Marking Time, notes that “white lotus flowers are a very important flower in Buddhism, associated with wisdom and the path to enlightenment.” One of the largest pieces in the current exhibition is 100 Time Lotus (2008): a 20-metre-long pool of water containing a hundred white underwater diodes, upon the surface of which float a hundred white lotus flowers. For the curator, this piece is positioned as a moment of meditative reflection, an “antidote or calming response to the melancholic memorial works” with the significant incorporation of the lotus – a pure white flower that grows in muddy water, rising and blooming above the murk. Miyajima’s work is a fascinating coupling between technology and spirituality, making full use of the circuits that connect all of us and commenting on the natural cycles of time and human action, the minute counter gadget serving as a constant reminder that each of us is only one tiny glimmering light amongst a vast universe of others.

Right: Tatsuo Miyajima, Time Stalactite No.2, 2012. LED, IC, stainless iron shaft, aluminum plate, electric wire. 214.8 x 10 x 10 cm. Courtesy of the artist and SCAI THE BATHHOUSE.

Words Chloe Hodge

Tatsuo Miyajima: Connect with Everything. MCA Australia, 3 November - 5 March. www.mca.com.au

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art

Visceral Uniformity Natalia Evelyn Bencicova

Slovakian artist Natalia Evelyn Bencicova (b. 1992) works mostly in digital photography and is currently studying at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Having an interest in both individual and wider collective feelings, she conveys undercurrents of socialism in the featured series Asymptote. Within these fictional scenarios, anonymous figures create patterns of uniformity which allude to their own integration with architecture. Through stirring symmetry and cold, faded palettes, indistinguishable characters become part of the construction. Leaning across bannisters and draping themselves against walls, they create an emotional architecture in which arms and legs are at once mechanistic and melancholy. This unsettling world depicts jarring relationships between organic and concrete forms, and personal autonomy versus a community mentality; there is no conclusion in the hauntingly nostalgic imagery. www.evelynbencicova.com.