English
TISHAN HSU: LIQUID CIRCUIT
In the mid-1980s Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) began a series of works that considered the implications of the accelerated use of technology and artificial intelligence and their impact on the body and human condition. His prescient artistic practice has been probing the cognitive as well as physical effects of transformative technological advances on our lives. An artist-intellectual ahead of his time, Hsu worked quietly for many years, largely overlooked or forgotten by the art world –until now.
THE BOTANICAL MIND. ART, MYSTICISM AND THE COSMIC TREE
Drawing on indigenous traditions from the Amazon rainforest; alternative perspectives on Western scientific rationalism; and new thinking around plant intelligence, philosophy and cultural theory, the online exhibition »The Botanical Mind» investigates the significance of the plant kingdom to human life, consciousness and spirituality across cultures and through time. It explores ideas of plant sentience, indigenous cosmologies, radical botany, Gaia theory, quantum biology, and the influence of psychoactive plant medicines.
A SELECTION OF WORKS FROM THE OUTSIDER ART FAIR –PARIS
The Outsider Art Fair, the premier fair dedicated to exhibit self-taught Art, Art Brut and Outsider Art, celebrates its 8th Paris edition between October 21-30. In tandem with the online fair is a special exhibition organized by former Pompidou curator Alison M. Gingeras. Entitled «Sexual Personae», the show examines archetypes of womanhood that are deeply embedded in Western culture
EDDIE RODOLFO APARICIO: ESPINAS AMOROSAS
For Aparicio, rubber itself exudes the symmetry between the commodification of indigenous material culture and the exploitation of Latin American countries for labor and resources. Restored to its natural function, it also suggests a salve: dressing the wound, repairing the broken, displaced, and dispossessed. Throughout «Espinas Amorosas/Loving Thorns», entwined threads lead back and forth between El Salvador and Los Angeles, relays along which Aparicio is a spore.
GINA BEAVERS: WORLD WAR ME
Drawing on images taken from Instagram, YouTube, image databases, and other online sources, Gina Beavers creates thick, tactile paintings that capture, in deeply visceral ways, the curated and often superficial nature of our digital lives. Her recent series of sculptural paintings are based on body painting, social media snapshots of food, make-up tutorials, memes, and bodybuilder selfies.
WILL FREDO: SEXUAL HEALERS TV
Mouches Volantes presents «Sexual Healers TV», a solo exhibition by Will Fredo about sex work, created as a proheaux art channel dedicated to body politics. Through the artist’s research on the sex industry in the Americas and interviews and performances with two sexual healers, the semi-sci-fi video installation addresses an intersection of topics, including sex workers’ subjectivities and rights, technology as a tool for democratizing pleasure, Black trans body politics, decolonizing sexuality, among others. Thanks to Will Fredo for sharing his thoughts about this work with us
WEIGHTLESS FURNISHING: ABOUT AN EXHIBITION BY RYAN BROWN
In Ryan Brown’s allegorical proceedings, the void and not the profusion of elements; the realism and not the collection of symbols, are the ones that, through estrangement tactics, produce weightlessness and at the same time, distancing, in the face of a constellation of aesthetics that modernism, at the time, treasured, as a flight into the future.
JOIRI MINAYA: I’M HERE TO ENTERTAIN YOU, BUT ONLY DURING MY SHIFT
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York (CCNY) presents a solo exhibition by Joiri Minaya (Dominican Republic/United States,1990), a multi-disciplinary artist whose recent works focus on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity through an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.
ABY WARBURG: BILDERATLAS MNEMOSYNE – THE ORIGINAL
In the 1920s, the scholar of art and culture Aby Warburg (1866-1929) created his «Bilderatlas Mnemosyne» tracing recurring visual themes, gestures and patterns across time, from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond to contemporary culture. Viewing pictures in this nonlinear way, with no accompanying text and outside of a museum, was radical 100 years ago. This is what makes this Atlas so relevant over time, even more so today. HKW, in Berlin, presents an exhibition where all 63 panels of the Atlas are reconstituted for the first time from Warburg’s original, multi-colored images.
ESVIN ALARCÓN LAM: INVERTED HISTORIES
For Esvin Alarcón Lam, a young artist coming of age in present-day Guatemala, both his country’s and his own social, geographical and historical vantage points serve as the same points of departure for his creative practice. In the digital, ever-connected present, these perspectives serve Alarcón Lam as an impetus to mine both the physical and intangible traces of the past, its vestiges increasingly being covered over. This is not only to prevent a loss of history, but also a way to write his story, and the story of those who didn’t have a voice, within it.