Organising conversations about relationships with the land around a table that gathers objects created during the talking – the artist Otobong Nkanga came up with this bright idea for the 2014 São Paulo Art Biennial, which has since come to China, the Lebanon, and soon to Bangladesh. For its first edition in Brazil, Nkanga created an unprecedented [...]
Art of Change 21 - How did your relationship with the environment build up? Lionel Sabatté - It started with my desire to represent the structure of society. The subway dust I used at the beginning, for instance, to create my Pack of Wolves in 2011, first symbolises the fact we are all interconnected. It [...]
"More than humans", showing from 25 September to 1 December 2019 at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, entrusts the discovery of an exo- and eco-centered world to a mighty duo composed of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Tomás Saraceno. In this exhibition, they combine their awareness of disappearing biodiversity and appetite for unexplored worlds to forge new relationships with species, time, and [...]
Manish Nai is a leading figure in Indian contemporary art. A fan of upcycling, he seizes upon used clothing, newspapers, and other everyday consumer goods in major Indian cities to shed light on their social, demographic, environmental, and economic narratives. Presented at the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, these new works retain the artist’s personal take on minimalism and reflect his increasingly mature [...]
The sound installation "Retour aux sources" by Mouawad Laurier, a duet composed by Maya Mouawad and Cyril Laurier, has been showing since 18 September and will continue for the next ten years at Maison Ruinart in Reims. This poetic sound work, brilliantly combining artificial intelligence and nature, functions like a vital organ nestled in the chalk [...]
The Chinese contemporary artist Ren Ri bases his work on research. One living material in particular – bees – has captured his attention for some years now. Bees use wax for various construction tasks in the hive, for instance, to repair and seal nests after larvae bees have hatched. The works by Ren Ri are [...]
Art of Change 21 - What is the purpose of your first solo exhibition ‘Disidencia’, which just opened at the Mishkin Gallery, at Baruch College in New York? Minerva Cuevas - The show presents eight videos. Curated by Alaina Feldman, it is running at a time when the debate over ecological questions is intensifying [...]
In November 2018, Dubai inaugurated the Jameel Arts Center, one of its first contemporary art institutions. Since then, this centre has regularly hosted projects and exhibitions. Yet Second Hand is the first group exhibition. It seeks to explore the materiality of the work of art through a series of sculptures, installations, assemblages, drawings, photographs, paintings, and performances. Eighteen artists [...]
Is it possible to extract from the ‘Seventh Continent’, this cluster of floating plastic waste covering almost 3.4 million square kilometres in the North Pacific, fertile territory for contemporary creation? This is the challenge taken up by Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the 16th Istanbul Biennial that is hosting together Tersane Istanbul, the Pera Museum, and [...]
Backed since 2018 by Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, the project Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture after the Anthropocene continues its journey from Portugal to Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and finally England through collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts. From 23 November 2019 to 23 February 2020, the London-based institution will host this travelling [...]
