Homebodies presents work by contemporary artists who examine the space of the home, both literally and metaphorically, as an integral site for making art. Featuring an expansive range of artworks, some made of materials found in the domestic sphere and others that represent or re-create a sense of domesticity, Homebodies demonstrates a new understanding of how the domestic context has influenced the creation and interpretation of contemporary art. The exhibition incorporates various media, including paintings by Hurvin Anderson; sculptures by George Segal and Rachel Whiteread; installations by Alexandre da Cunha and Do Ho Suh; photography by Marina Abramović, Barbara Kruger, Doug Aitken, and Adrian Piper; video by Martha Rosler, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Guy Ben-Ner; and a living-room environment by Dzine that doubles as a nail salon. The exhibition is likewise international in its reach, drawing from six continents to include more than forty artists at various stages in their careers.

The domestic setting has been a crucial site (and recurring subject) of artistic production-a parallel track and occasionally a counterpoint to more commonly celebrated contexts such as the artist's studio and the public sphere. In fact, many artists, for personal or financial reasons, work at home, and for those artists the home often becomes the subject and source of their artwork. Although this exhibition focuses on artists working from the late 1960s to the present, there are notable precedents in art history dating back as early modernism. Major artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse, frequently depicted domestic interiors as sites of psychological reflection and a potent metaphor for social or historical concerns. Later, in the 1970s, the feminist movement exposed the home as a site of identity production and interrogation, putting pressure on the presumably male cliché of the heroic artist creating alone in his studio. In recent years, as commerce and communication have become increasingly globalized, artists have paradoxically turned inward, examining the idea of "home" in more localized contexts, recognizing it as an arena of social development and an indicator of economic trends, especially as more and more artists confront the recent crises in housing and urban development in their work.

The exhibition is organized in three sections. The first, Architectonics, includes works that represent interiors, use fragments of private homes, or are produced on a small scale, often using humble, domestic materials. The second section, Division of Labor, presents artworks that replicate a "cottage industry" scale of production or refigure activities such as care and cleaning, and demonstrates the lasting impact of the feminist movement on artists of any gender expression. Finally, the third section, Psychogeographies, considers how private interiors can become a metaphor for interior mental spaces, oftentimes fraught with anxiety and upheaval.

This exhibition is organized by Naomi Beckwith, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Homebodies presents work by contemporary artists who examine the space of the home, both literally and metaphorically, as an integral site for making art. Featuring an expansive range of artworks, some made of materials found in the domestic sphere and others that represent or re-create a sense of domesticity, Homebodies demonstrates a new understanding of how the domestic context has influenced the creation and interpretation of contemporary art. The exhibition incorporates various media, including paintings by Hurvin Anderson; sculptures by George Segal and Rachel Whiteread; installations by Alexandre da Cunha and Do Ho Suh; photography by Marina Abramović, Barbara Kruger, Doug Aitken, and Adrian Piper; video by Martha Rosler, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Guy Ben-Ner; and a living-room environment by Dzine that doubles as a nail salon. The exhibition is likewise international in its reach, drawing from six continents to include more than forty artists at various stages in their careers.

The domestic setting has been a crucial site (and recurring subject) of artistic production-a parallel track and occasionally a counterpoint to more commonly celebrated contexts such as the artist's studio and the public sphere. In fact, many artists, for personal or financial reasons, work at home, and for those artists the home often becomes the subject and source of their artwork. Although this exhibition focuses on artists working from the late 1960s to the present, there are notable precedents in art history dating back as early modernism. Major artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse, frequently depicted domestic interiors as sites of psychological reflection and a potent metaphor for social or historical concerns. Later, in the 1970s, the feminist movement exposed the home as a site of identity production and interrogation, putting pressure on the presumably male cliché of the heroic artist creating alone in his studio. In recent years, as commerce and communication have become increasingly globalized, artists have paradoxically turned inward, examining the idea of "home" in more localized contexts, recognizing it as an arena of social development and an indicator of economic trends, especially as more and more artists confront the recent crises in housing and urban development in their work.

The exhibition is organized in three sections. The first, Architectonics, includes works that represent interiors, use fragments of private homes, or are produced on a small scale, often using humble, domestic materials. The second section, Division of Labor, presents artworks that replicate a "cottage industry" scale of production or refigure activities such as care and cleaning, and demonstrates the lasting impact of the feminist movement on artists of any gender expression. Finally, the third section, Psychogeographies, considers how private interiors can become a metaphor for interior mental spaces, oftentimes fraught with anxiety and upheaval.

This exhibition is organized by Naomi Beckwith, Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

CAM is proud to present the first American solo museum exhibition of Los Angeles-based artist Lari Pittman in more than 15 years.

Over the past three decades, Pittman has developed a body of work that is internationally celebrated for its exuberant use of color and painstakingly rendered detail to address such contentious subjects as sexuality, desire, and violence.

His multilayered depictions of images and signs-ranging from human figures and body parts to animals, plants, furniture, text, and even credit cards-meditates on the overwhelming richness and sadness of everyday life. Pittman's primarily large-scale paintings combine a visual breathlessness with a highly acute and sophisticated formal logic.

In recent years, his work has expanded in palette and also become more thematically oblique, exchanging the signature graphic imagery of his earlier paintings for greater visual density and a renewed concern for issues ranging from art history to the domestic sphere. Embracing the critical potential of figurative painting, Pittman provides incisive commentary on the medium's ability to intertwine the personal with the political.

CAM's exhibition will feature a selection of paintings and works on paper from the last 20 years and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog.

Lari Pittman: A Decorated Chronology  is organized by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and curated by Kelly Shindler, Assistant Curator.

Akram Zaatari
'Letter to a Refusing Pilot'

June 1-November 24, 2013

Press conference: May 29, 2:30pm, Arsenale, Calle della Tana 2169/f
Professional preview: May 29-31

www.lebanonatvenice.com

Akram Zaatari will be presenting a major new work, titled Letter to a Refusing Pilot, in the Lebanese Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the exhibition marks the debut of Zaatari's most aesthetically ambitious and politically nuanced project to date, and creates a dialogue between two works, a new 45-minute video and a looping 16mm film, in an immersive environment conceived as a stage awaiting an actor, or a cinema awaiting a spectator.

In the summer of 1982, a rumor made the rounds of a small city in South Lebanon, which was under Israeli occupation at the time. It was said that a fighter pilot in the Israeli air force had been ordered to bomb a target on the outskirts of Saida, but knowing the building was a school, he refused to destroy it. Instead of carrying out his commanders' orders, the pilot veered off course and dropped his bombs in the sea. It was said that he knew the school because he had been a student there, because his family had lived in the city for generations, because he was born into Saida's Jewish community before it disappeared. As a boy, Akram Zaatari grew up hearing ever more elaborate versions of this story, as his father had been the director of the school for twenty years. Decades later, Zaatari discovered it wasn't a rumor. The pilot was real.

Pulling together all of the different strands of Zaatari's practice for the first time in a single work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot reflects on the complexities, ambiguities, and consequences of refusal as a decisive and generative act. Taking as its title a nod to Albert Camus' four-part epistolary essay "Letters to a German Friend," the work not only extends Zaatari's interest in excavated narratives and the circulation of images in times of war, it also raises crucial questions about national representation and perpetual crisis by reviving Camus's plea: "I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice."

Akram Zaatari
Akram Zaatari is an artist whose work is tied to collecting and exploring photographic practices in the making of social codes and aesthetic forms. Regarding the present through a wealth of photographic records from the past, Zaatari co-founded the Beirut-based Arab Image Foundation in 1997, and he has been working on the extensive archive of Hashem el Madani's Studio Shehrazade, in the Lebanese port city of Saida, since 1999. The author of more than 40 films and videos-including The End of Time(2013), Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright (2010), Nature Morte (2008), In This House (2005), This Day (2003) and All Is Well on the Border (1997).

Zaatari investigates notions of desire, pursuit, resistance, memory, surveillance, the shifting nature of political borders and the production and circulation of images in times of war. His works have been featured in dOCUMENTA (13) (2012), the Istanbul Biennial (2011), and the Venice Biennale (2007), among others, and he has shown his films, videos, photographs and other documents in institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Kunstverein and Haus der Kunst in Munich, Le Magasin in Grenoble, MUSAC in Leon, MUAC in Mexico City and Videobrasil in Sao Paulo.

Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath
Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath co-founded Art Reoriented, a multi-disciplinary curatorial platform operating from Munich and New York in 2009. Their past and ongoing exhibition, research and publication projects include collaborations with several museums and cultural institutions such as MoMA in New York, Mathaf in Doha, INHA and IMA in Paris, IVAM in Valencia, the Gwangju Museum of Art and the Today Art Museum in Beijing.

Integral to Bardaouil and Fellrath's practice is the critique of institutionalized exhibition structures. Through their work, they question the way artworks have been appropriated by reductionist narratives and politicized modes of representation. They excavate art historical materials for the purpose of repositioning them in the more dynamic framework of contemporary artistic production.

Akram Zaatari was selected by the curators of the Pavilion Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath, the cofounders of Art Reoriented, the multi-disciplinary curatorial platform based in Munich and New York.

Akram Zaatari's work combines radio, television, and photographic archival material with his own personal narrative to examine the ideological circulation and geographic production of images in the context of the Middle East.

With a degree in architecture from the American University of Beirut (Lebanon) and a master's degree in media studies from the New School for Social Research, New York, USA, Zaatari explored the documental possibilities of video before making it his preferred medium of expression. He took his research into photography and collectionism as an artistic practice to new depths in the Arab Image Foundation, in Beirut, of which he is cofounder.

The Beirut-based artist has exhibited at such institutions as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), Grey Art Gallery (New York), Munich Kunstverein (Munich, Germany), and MUSAC (León, Spain), as well as at the Turin Triennial (Italy) and the biennials of Venice (Italy), Sydney (Australia), and São Paulo.

Akram Zaatari has received widespread recognition in major institutions and exhibitions like Documenta 13 and has won the 2011 Yanghyun Prize and the 2011 Grand Prize Videobrasil.

On the banks of the Randselva in Norway sits the now disused paper pulping factory of Kistefos. Its paper pulping machine has lain dormant since paper production was transferred to the far east in the 1950s. The factory and its grounds is now the site of Kistefos Museet, an celebrated museum and sculpture park and now the site of John Gerrard's (b. Dublin 1974)  latest and most ambitious work to date.

'Pulp Press (Kistefos)' consists of a hyper-realistic, large-scale projected 3D rendering of the original pulping machine, painstakingly remade in a virtual world and reanimated to be once again producing paper. The work is housed in a dedicated poured concrete pavilion (designed in collaboration with Dublin-based architects A2) which sits along the edge of the river that originally powered the press  and now powers the projection itself. The virtual paper produced in the work, each piece structurally unique, is preserved purely as data in an ever-expanding store of hard drives also housed within the pavilion.

A series of large-scale kinetic sculptures bring a contemporary twist to the lives of the saints.

Saints are more often associated with traditional sacred art than with contemporary work, but Michael Landy, current Rootstein Hopkins Associate Artist in residence at the National Gallery, has been inspired to revisit the subject for this exhibition.

Landy's large-scale sculptures consist of fragments of National Gallery paintings cast in three dimensions and assembled with one of his artistic hallmarks - refuse. He has scoured car boot sales and flea markets accumulating old machinery, cogs and wheels to construct the works. Visitors can crank the works into life with a foot pedal mechanism.

Towering over you, the seven sculptures swivel and turn, in movements that evoke the drama of each saint's life. Saints Apollonia, Catherine, Francis, Jerome, Thomas - and an additional sculpture that takes a number of saints as its inspiration - fill the Sunley Room alongside paper collages.

The works by artists of the early Renaissance were particularly inspiring to Landy and you can see them, including Carlo Crivelli's Saint Jerome (about 1476), Lucas Cranach the Elder's Saints Genevieve and Apollonia (1506), Sassetta's The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis (1437-44) and Cosimo Tura's Saint Jerome (probably about 1470), displayed in the Gallery's Sainsbury Wing.

About the artist:

Born in London in 1963, Landy attended Goldsmiths College and is part of the generation of artists who became known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). He is best known for his 2001 installation, 'Break Down', where he catalogued and then destroyed all of his possessions in a former department store in London. 

Working in photography, film, video, installation, and performance, Beirut-based artist Akram Zaatari has built a complex, compelling body of work that explores the state of image-making today. One of the founders of the Arab Image Foundation, which aims to track down and preserve photos from North Africa, the Middle East, and Arabic communities around the world, Zaatari collects, examines, and recontextualizes a wide range of documents-from found audiotapes to family photographs to videos found on YouTube-that testify to the cultural and political conditions of Lebanon's postwar society. His artistic practice involves the study and investigation of the way these documents straddle, conflate, or confuse notions of history and memory.

Projects 100 features the American premiere of two video installations: Dance to the End of Love (2011) and On Photography, People and Modern Times (2010). Comprised of found YouTube clips made by Arab youth and shared freely online, Dance to the End of Love examines the role of social media as a space that is both intimate and public. On Photography, People and Modern Times, which tracks photographic records that Zaatari researched and collected for the Arab Image Foundation in the late 1990s, is a meditation on intimate past moments evoked by photographs and a present environment that secures their preservation. Cutting across temporal and geographic borders, these two video installations probe the nature of time and assert the permeability of memory.

This exhibition is organized by Ana Janevski, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, and Eva Respini, Associate Curator, Department of Photography, with Katerina Stathopoulou, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography.

The Elaine Dannheisser Projects Series is made possible in part by the Elaine Dannheisser Foundation and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

Awarded for the first time in 1996, the annual Medal Award of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (SMFA) is a prize rewarding exceptional artists and important art supporters for their involvement and influence in the art world. This year, the SMFA will award contemporary artist Glenn Ligon during a ceremony scheduled for 20 May 2013.

The artist is known for his works using different media, namely painting, neon lights, installations, videos and printing that explore the topics of sexuality, depiction, race or language. He uses suggestive texts, quotations issued from culturally and historically important publications of artists such as James Baldwin, Jean Genet and Zora Neale Hurston. Through his work, Ligon explores the cultural heritage of America and replaces it with the context of contemporary life.

Born in 1960 in Bronx, Glenn Ligon currently lives and works in New York. He graduated from the Wesleyan University in 1982. He had solo shows, namely at the Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington (1993), at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (1996), at the St. Louis Art Museum (2000), at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2001), at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York (2003) and at the Power Plant in Toronto (2005). He has also exhibited internationally on the occasion of big group events.