5 to See This Weekend
This weekend’s exhibition round-up traverses the divide between art and politics, appearance and reality to explore fresh perspectives of history and human experience and to challenge the narratives which shape our lives, our sense of self, and our perceptions of the world around us according to these paradigms. From New York to London, Madrid to Dublin, we reflect on some of this season’s most innovative and enticing displays taking place across the world. Beginning with 20th century post-war photography in The Modern Eye at Edwynn Houk Gallery and moving onto fascinations with the American South at ICA Boston, our 5 to See features a fantastic selection of exhibitions to discover.
1. The Modern Eye, Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York
Edwynn Houk Gallery presents The Modern Eye, an exhibition of rare and important photographs documenting the European and American experience in between the World Wars. Works by 20th century icons Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Alexander Rodchenko, Edward Weston, and 25 others, combine to capture the technological, architectural, and psychological forces at play throughout the age to bridge the experiential gap between the post-war era and our modern day visceral experiences. The Modern Eye runs until 16 May, coinciding with exhibitions of a similar ilk: Modern Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection, 1909-1949 at the Museum of Modern Art and Reimagining Modernism, 1900-1950 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
2. João Penalva, Simon Lee Gallery, London
Portuguese-born London-based visual artist João Penalva rejoins Simon Lee London for his third exhibition at the gallery with a body of work focused on his preferred medium, the still image. Fascinated by an ambiguous relationship between the photograph and objective truth, Penalva questions the medium, its impartiality, and our reliance on the still image, and media more generally as a source of historic record. The artist’s installations, the way he interplays stills, with film and haphazard annotations, mimics multimedia’s stalwart of objectivity, the documentary. Penalva’s exhibition bombards visitors with contradictory images, fictional tokens, and conflicting narratives in a bid to crystallise a sense of the fragility and malleability of truth when viewed through a lens. The artist presents the image as a form of weapon, disinformation, or tool for coercion beyond our notions of artistic merit.
3. Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler: Sound Speed Marker, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s collaborative practice in video, photography and sculpture spans three decades and explores conceptions of memory, place and cinema. Sound Speed Marker features a trilogy of projects that delineate layers of cinema history. Grand Paris Texas (2009) considers simultaneously the physical and social space of a dead cinema, a forgotten song and the inhabitants of a small town. Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011), explores the residue of cinema and social terrain around the site of Movie Mountain in West Texas, whilst Giant (2014) interweaves signs of life and vistas of a decaying movie set built outside of Marfa: the Reata mansion from the 1956 Warner Bros. Hubbard and Birchler’s work is featured in numerous public collections, including the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Hirshhorn Museum.
4. When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South, ICA Boston
ICA Boston’s latest show brings together artists who traverse the generational gap and work in a variety of mediums, united in their fascination with the American South as both a real and an imagined place. When the Stars Begin to Fall features work by self-taught artists with histories of political repression and incarceration alongside projects by prominent contemporary practitioners such as David Hammons, Kara Walker and Theaster Gates. Curated by Thomas J. Lax for The Studio Museum, Harlem, the exhibition includes projects depicting a spectrum of experience underpinned by an adherence to a sense of place: drawings and paintings, performances and sculptures tell stories – good, bad and ugly – about life as experienced in the sprawling expanse of America’s southern territories over time.
5. Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism. Essays and Documents (1972-1991), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
Not Yet picks up where the Worker-photography movement of the 1920s and 1930s left off, reinvigorating documentary film in a modern social and intellectual context to address contemporary urban struggles. The exhibition, organised in conjunction with PhotoEspaña, is based around the unfulfilled historical promise of documentary as an art form which, it is argued, should parallel the pursuit of social justice rather than mask or ignore it in favour of ‘safer’ depoliticised subject matter. Inspired by Allan Sekula’s seminal 1978 essay Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary, which calls for the reshaping of documentary filmmaking and a generational response to post-war depoliticised and institutionalised photographic modernism, Not Yet conveys historical temporality through image-based, film and video works.
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Credits
1. Ilse Bing, Dancer, Willem Van Loon, Paris, 1932. Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery.
