Kasper Akhøj

OVERGADEN - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Overgaden Neden Vandet 17
April 24–June 13

Kasper Akhøj, Abstracta, 2007–, steel and glass, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Kasper Akhøj’s ongoing project Abstracta, 2007–, comprises a modular sculpture made of steel and glass that hangs from the ceiling in this exhibition like a free-floating primary structure of Minimalist stock. The work refers to an eponymous elegant display system the artist found during his journey along the so-called Highway of Brotherhood and Unity (a road that unites the various republics in former Yugoslavia). While traveling, the artist discovered this structure in a variety of contexts––from a shoe shop in Skopje to a museum in Ljubljana. Akhøj set about investigating its history and learned that the Danish architect Poul Cadovius originally designed the system in the 1960s as an exhibition display for a world’s fair; that it was subsequently produced in China in the ’70s; and that it was manufactured in Yugoslavia in the ’80s and then widely distributed across Eastern Europe. Recently an American company bought the patent for the system.

Akhøj’s poetic handling of the original Abstracta units in his work underscores his research, which has taken him on a nearly endless journey through different cultures and historical periods. Likewise, the piece conveys a slowness that stands in contrast to an art world that is often short of breath. Indeed, the work points to a particular kind of unhurried resolution, as befits a spatial intervention in the air.

— Pernille Albrethsen

"I’m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs”

DE APPEL
Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat 59
April 17–June 6

Wilfredo Prieto, One, 2008, twenty-eight million fake diamonds, one real diamond, dimensions variable.

This group exhibition, organized by current participants in the de Appel Curatorial Program, features fourteen artists whose work captures the spirit of Francis Alÿs’s practice by confronting us with enigmatic objects and situations that prompt the viewer to fill in the gaps. In addition, it serves as an analytic examination of the solo show format. In a 2005 interview, Alÿs stated, "Maybe you don’t need to see the work, you just need to hear about it.” Accordingly, the exhibition riffs on Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There (2007), wherein six actors portray varying aspects of Bob Dylan’s life, without Dylan himself appearing in the film.

In Wilfredo Prieto’s One, 2008, a single genuine diamond is hidden amid a pile of twenty-eight million fakes, thus raising questions about the importance of truthfulness in art. The work also speaks to the elusiveness of Alÿs’s performances, which many have seen only through documentation; but does one have to see it to believe it? As with some of Chris Burden’s early performances, we rely solely on the privileged few who witnessed them or a photograph to confirm their existence. Likewise, viewers who encounter Gustav Metzger’s Historic Photographs: Fireman with Child, Oklahoma, 1995, 1998–2010, are obliged to visualize from memory a much-publicized photograph from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, since the original image here remains hidden behind a wall of cement blocks. Easy to miss in a vacant corridor is Noa Giniger’s audio intervention Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime, 2008, an edited version of Frank Sinatra’s song with only the main phrase repeated three times. Perhaps most pertinent to the overall theme is David Sherry’s Just Popped Out Back in Two Hours, 2008/2010, in which a man sits in a folding chair, oblivious to passersby, with a Post-it note on his forehead bearing the title of the work. Sherry was scheduled to carry out the action at the opening, but he had to hire an actor to replace him when he was delayed due to the volcanic ash from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökul volcano. This iteration, while still humorous, made for an even stronger argument for its inclusion in a show about absence.

— Chris Bors

A. K. Dolven

TULLINLØKKA
Kristian Augusts gate and Roald Amundsens gate
February 6–May 31

A. K. Dolven, Untuned Bell, 2010, wooden poles, wire, bell, dimensions variable. Installation view.

According to rumors in the Oslo art scene, A. K. Dolven’s Untuned Bell, 2010, was scheduled to have extended its stay in Tullinløkka, an open public space next to the National Gallery in central Oslo. But in spite of its heavy, permanent appearance, the work can only be experienced––i.e., seen, played, and heard––until the end of May. The outdoor installation comprises a giant bell suspended high in the air between two wooden poles. On the ground below, there is a foot pedal so that visitors can play the one-and-a-half-ton instrument.

Until recently, the bell was stored under the care of the foundry that manufactured it. Because it had fallen out of tune with the forty-eight others in Oslo’s city hall, it was exiled as part of the nation’s preparations for the millennium celebration. Dolven has not only rescued it but also staged an afterlife: The bell appears as the protagonist in a work concerning social norms as well as deviation and the regulating forces of all things public on the individual.

Tullinløkka is contested ground; some have even called it "cursed.” Since the 1970s, several attempts have been made to incorporate it into the museum. Many failures later, the new National Museum is finally planned to open in a different location, the Vestbanen. Dolven’s work picks up on the more constructive past functions of Tullinløkka––it was once a parking lot, but through the years it has offered a skating rink, park, and playground. Here, Dolven also underscores the more communal history of the grounds. Adjacent to the work is a wall where visitors are encouraged to write their own "untuned” messages, and where lectures about the meanings of public space are taking place.

— Johanne Nordby Wernø

"Always Other Art”

MOSCOW MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
Petrovka Street, 25/1
April 13–May 30

Eric Bulatov, A Photograph to Remember, 1994–95, oil on canvas, 48 x 71”.

Widely recognized as one of the most important contemporary collectors of Russian icons, Victor Bondarenko has also amassed an extensive collection of "Other Art”––the "nonconformist” and underground art of the Soviet period. Bridging several generations (from the 1970s to now), the one hundred works on display in this group exhibition constitute approximately one-third of Bondarenko’s contemporary collection. Curator Sergey Popov has opted not to indulge too heavily in the "underground” imperative (the too-popular sleight of playing up the social conditions around the work’s creation, rather than the work itself, which, in the case of "Other Art,” is often dull, drab and remarkably unradical). Instead, he adopts a user-friendly thematic format ("Still-Lives,” "Portraits,” and "Landscapes,” to name a few), which forges continuities between rarely seen album pages by Ilya Kabakov; paintings by nonconformist masters Evgeny Rukhin, Mikhail Roginsky, and Erik Bulatov; one-liner Sots art standards by Aleksander Kosolapov and Leonid Sokov; and well-traveled works from post-perestroika kings Oleg Kulik and Anatoly Osmolovsky, as well as the collaborative team Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov. In addition, there are slick new offerings from AES+F and photographer Oleg Dou. The result is a refreshingly accessible primer on contemporary art in Russia, with a focus on substance over story line.

— Kate Sutton

Pierre Huyghe

MUSEO NACIONAL CENTRO DE ARTE REINA SOFÍA
Santa Isabel, 52
March 18–May 31

Pierre Huyghe, La Saison des fêtes (The holiday season), 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view.

In Pierre Huyghe’s latest exhibition, nature and artifice converse lovingly yet are underscored by an implicit social critique. At the museum’s Palacio de Cristal, the artist alludes to the flora of the Philippines, which was also the focus of an 1887 colonialist exhibition at the same venue, an exhibition that inaugurated the palace and marked Spain’s international importance. Here, having removed overt commentary on the Spanish conquest of an exotic Other, Huyge questions Western culture’s communal routines and celebrations.

Huyghe has invented a calendar of variegated plantings for Madrid’s intimate conservatory space, a building that emulates London’s Crystal Palace. The show’s vegetation includes cross-seasonal competing species such as pumpkins, bamboo stalks, cherry tree saplings, and pine trees. There are café seats for adults (some bearing the Amstel beer logo); in another bay are artificially colored plastic miniature seats for children. This vernacular seating references a pair of ceremonial chairs in the nineteenth-century Philippines installation.

This overly comfortable oasis could have threatened a work such as this, that seeks to trouble determined behaviors. After all, Huyghe prefers spontaneity and unpredictable natural-world encounters like the surprise of singing, swooping birds. He resists conventions and seems to wink at those marigolds and petunias in the colors of the Spanish flag that are found in plantings on pedestrian plazas throughout the country. However, when compared with other extravagant social and ecological projects, the work’s impact is immediate and penetrating. Following Voltaire, one is reminded of the ongoing importance of cultivating one’s own garden.

— Judith Tolnick Champa