Steve McQueen: Ashes

Turner Contemporary, Margate, England

Exhibition dates: 18 May - 12 September 2021

Ashes (2002–2015) is a two-channel video installation by artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen. It is composed of footage filmed by McQueen over ten years, on two separate visits to the Caribbean island of Grenada — a former French and British colony that achieved independence in 1974.

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Alexandre da Cunha: 'Duplex,' Brighton CCA, Brighton, England

Exhbition dates: 6 August - 2 October 2021

Brighton CCA is pleased to present Duplex an exhibition of new works by Brazilian artist Alexandre da Cunha curated in collaboration with Jenni Lomax. This is the artist’s first solo presentation in a UK public institution for 10 years.

Duplex is an articulation of da Cunha’s engagement with cultures of consumption, reuse, materiality and art history. Central to da Cunha’s practice is the ready-made and specifically, how perceptions of objects are affected by place, time and the results of labour. Da Cunha’s complex and subtle process of transforming materials and images create encounters with everyday objects that disentangle the instinctive responses inherent to particular materials, endowing the works with alternative modes of understanding; so cotton becomes marble, mops become tapestry, construction tools become mysterious relics and mundane objects echo art historical precedents. The result is a vibrant dialogue about the history and function of symbols and material in society, from park benches and umbrellas to cement mixers and beach towels.

The presentation echoes the form of a processional route through the galleries, so visitors encounter objects and motifs presented and revisited much as the artist approaches objects and materials in his work. In this respect the exhibition speaks to its location; resonating with connections to a familiar past. Visible from the gallery windows is Brighton’s North Gate, a stone arch built for the royal procession to pass through at the opening of the Brighton Pavilion, while each year the Brighton Pride march – the largest in country – also passes in front of the gallery windows. Duplex engages with these histories as movements through time and culture of the city; reappropriating old signifiers and embracing a more contingent, yet confident present.

In June, as a precursor to Duplex, da Cunha will launch Brighton CCA’s inaugural Summer Commission, with a public artwork that will be on display until August. This is will be the first artwork in a series of annual temporary public commissions by invited artists to be held each summer.

Bruce Conner. Light out of Darkness

Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland 
5 May - 28 November 2021

The exhibition Light out of Darkness references a solo exhibition project of the same name for the University Art Museum at Berkeley, California, in the 1980s. By no means the least of the reasons why it never actually took place was Conner’s refusal to compromise in his dealings with institutions, whose rules for artists he would not accept. The title «Light out of Darkness» emphasizes the experimental character of Conner’s filmic output, which in his early works, especially, resembles a brilliant probing of human perception. The symbolic dualism of light and darkness stands for the artist’s propensity to think in opposites and metaphors and for his mysticism.

For almost 40 years, Catherine Opie has been documenting with psychological acuity the cultural and geographic identity of contemporary America. This unique artist monograph presents a compelling visual narrative of Opie's work since the early 1980s, pairing images across bodies of work to form a full picture of her artistic vision. With more than 300 beautiful illustrations and made in close collaboration with Opie, the book marks a turning point in the consideration of this artist's work to date.

Hurvin Anderson will be joined in converation with Michael Prokopow on Thursday 22 April at 6pm GMT (12pm CST)

Cultural historian Michael Prokopow, who is preparing a monograph about Hurvin Anderson, joins the painter in a conversation that places Anderson’s current exhibition at The Arts Club in the context of his career. Along with recent landscapes, Anderson includes in this exhibition Flat Top, 2008, a classic painting from the barbershop series that brought him international attention. By bringing together these two series, Anderson contrasts interior and exterior Jamaican spaces, while defining a throughline across his oeuvre in terms of structure, abstraction, and perception. Prokopow will draw on his deep knowledge of the artist to bring forth these and other threads in Anderson’s thinking and making.

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The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago IL

9 April - 7 August 2021

‘I have entered a new place, slightly unsure. Actually, through making paintings you engage with questions you are unsure about. My struggle with Jamaica: I don’t know it and I know it. I have this romantic vision of it and a lot of the painting is fighting that romance’
— Hurvin Anderson

The Arts Club of Chicago opens today with Anywhere but Nowhere, Hurvin Anderson’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. For more information please click here. 

On 22 April at 7 PM (CEST) Hurvin Anderson will be joined in conversation with Michael Prokopow, the writer of his upcoming monograph, to discuss the relation and contrasts between his newest works and the Barbershop series – examining interior and exterior Jamaican spaces, Anderson will talk about defining a through line across his oeuvre in terms of structure, abstraction, and perception. To register please click here. 

Amy Sillman, Rebecca Sears, lecturer in the Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences; and curator Meredith Malone will discuss Sillman’s animated video After Metamorphoses (2015–16), the artist’s response to the Roman poet Ovid’s mythic tale of transformation, desire, and power. Sillman’s five-minute video will be screened in advance of the Q&A and is available for viewing now.

To join the ZOOM conversation and live Q&A on 10 April at 11 am (CDT) register here

John Gerrard: Minds Rising Spirits Tuning
13th Gwangju Biennale

Gerrard’s latest piece, Corn Work (Corrib) (2020) is a simulation projected on a cube cast in polished mirror aluminum that features four Straw Boys, figures drawn from Celtic paganism. Still present in rural areas, these young men wear costumes made of straw and are said to visit brides in advance of weddings, recalling rituals in which anonymized human figures unleash celebratory and often ecstatic behaviors. Gerrard collaborated with contemporary dancers, aged sixteen to seventy, who “performed” and animated these figures in suits made from heirloom Irish grain types that correspond to the annual cycle: barley (spring), oat (summer), rye (autumn), and wheat (winter). Each dancer arrives and leaves in a formal exchange on seasonal solstices and equinoxes, echoing the production of flour through the circular motion of the mills as well as an early sun symbol, the solar cross. Through novel forms of technology like motion matching and neural networks, both time and space are captured as data, and a perpetual choreography is produced. In the backdrop, the landscape follows the temporal cycles of Galway, Ireland—where the work was initially presented as a site-specific commission—and the flow of the river Corrib against the rise and fall of daily and annual temperatures.

For Gerrard, these figures originate from a time when a more equitable relationship between humans and the landscape was still intact. Their movements carry the melancholic legacy of exhausted ecologies across the globe and follow a choreographic logic with a keen capacity to “learn,” respond to, and transform a landscape. The artist has described their movements as “a lament, a slow circular solar performance informed by motions of denial, pain and suffering. This is a grieving work for a nonhuman world that perishes as human populations thrive and expand.”

Renowned filmmaker and video artist, Steve McQueen will speak about his interdisciplinary practice across the art world and in mainstream cinema, focusing on the social, psychological, and political traumas thematized in his work. 

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

12:00 PM - 1:30 PM (GMT-7)

Register here to join. 

A+D Thursdays is a public lecture series embedded inside our Creative Gateway undergraduate course. The series exposes students and the public to a range of creative forms across the visual arts, performance, literature, film, and design. It introduces students and the community to our campus’s major museums, presenters, and academic departments, as well as to select Bay Area arts organizations and regional partners.

Further information