Willie Doherty

“Secretion” (still), 2012. Video installation, HD video projector, Blu-Ray player, stereo amplifier, two speakers, high-definition video, colour and sound, 20 minutes. © Willie Doherty.

Secretion, 2012, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art
21 May–1 September 2013

from e-flux:

IMMA presents the Irish premiere of the internationally renowned artist Willie Doherty’s film work Secretion, 2012, in the Annex at IMMA’s temporary spaces in Earlsfort Terrace. In Secretion, Doherty’s slow camerawork zooms in on fragments of a secluded landscape as well as on an abandoned building at the edge of civilization. The beautiful and sharp shots of fungus attacks, rot and decay, create contradictory visuals in this, at once, compelling and terrifying work. As in a psychological science fiction story, the voice-over describes the peculiar and concealed occurrences in the area without explanation. Shot on location in and around Kassel, Germany, and first shown as part of dOCUMENTA 13, Secretiondraws upon the possibilities of lost and forgotten narratives located somewhere between recent history and a near future.

Nominated twice for the Turner Prize (2003, 1994), Doherty’s work has been the subject of many solo museum shows, and in 2002 IMMA presented False Memory, the first major solo exhibition of Doherty’s work in Ireland. Other solo exhibitions include Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (2011); The Speed Art Museum, Kentucky (2011); Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2009); Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2009); Lenbachhaus, München (2007); Kunstverein, Hamburg (2007); Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2006); Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999) and Tate Gallery, Liverpool (1999). Doherty’s forthcoming exhibition, UNSEEN, will present a survey of photographic and video works as part of Derry – Londonderry City of Culture 2013.

The exhibition is curated by Rachael Thomas, Senior Curator, Head of Exhibitions, IMMA, assisted by Séamus McCormack, Temporary Projects, Exhibitions, IMMA.

Jack Goldstein

The Jump, 1978. 16mm film, color, silent, 26 seconds

Julieta Aranda

Julieta Aranda, What right?, 2013.
Single channel HD video (live video, 3-D object scanning, animation).

from e-flux:
If a body meet a body 

“If you cut off my arm, I say “me and my arm.” You cut off my other arm, I say “me and my two arms.” Take out my stomach, my kidneys—assuming that were possible—and I say “me and my intestines.” And now, if you cut off my head, what would I say? “Me and my head” or “me and my body”? What right has my head to call itself me? What right?”

May 9–June 30, 2013
Press preview: Thursday, May 9, 11:30–13:30h
Opening: Thursday, May 9, 18h
Museo Villa Croce
via Ruffini 3
Genova

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things

an exhibition curated by Mark Lecky, 27 April – 30 June 2013

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, 2013. Exhibition view; the Bluecoat, Liverpool 2013. Photo: Jon Barraclough.

from Nottingham Contemporary:

Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey has curated an exhibition that explores the magical world of new technology, as well as tracing its connections to the beliefs of our distant past.

Historical and contemporary works of art, videos, machines, archaeological artefacts and iconic objects, like the giant inflatable cartoon figure of Felix the Cat – the first image ever transmitted on TV – inhabit an “enchanted landscape” created in Nottingham Contemporary’s galleries, where objects seem to be communicating with each other and with us.

In Leckey’s exhibition “magic is literally in the air.” It reflects on a world where technology can bring inanimate “things” to life. Where websites predict what we want, we can ask our mobile phones for directions and smart fridges suggest recipes, count calories and even switch on the oven. By digitising objects, it can also make them “disappear” from the material world, re-emerging in any place or era.

Laika’s suit

from e-flux:

“I think of this show as a work of fiction: a non-realist, anti-realist, magic-realist, speculative, slipstream fiction, a sort of sci-fi show. An inflation or amplification of the way the world appears to me now, a shape of ‘things’ to come. As it seems to me, the further technology evolves the more our minds devolve back to the imaginings of our superstitious past. Call it an animistic future or techno-atavism. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things is a world beyond tomorrow when every ordinary, unthinking object—tinned meat, refrigerators, paving stones—becomes an active participant in the Great Connection. Now I already find objects bewitching as they endow blessings and inflict punishments on me every day. And technology seems only to be increasing their supernatural potency as I sit in front of my machine and with a touch my wishes are made manifest. The mental gets materialized.

“So let’s say that all the objects in the show have already communicated with each other and they’ve called themselves together. They’ve formed a Parliament with representatives from the Vegetable World, Animal Kingdom, Mankind and the Technological Domain. And the breadth of that assembly is contained within its two hands: a Medieval reliquary and a bionic limb. Everything from one hand to the other is equal in aspect, with no distinctions drawn between, whether it is organic or inorganic, from the past or the present, whether it’s imagined or real. The full figure of Sputnik continually girdles the earth as the Giant of Cerne Abbas stares forever up to the stars and the stars keep staring back.”
–Mark Leckey

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things is the latest in a series of acclaimed artist-curated Hayward Touring exhibitions. It includes work by the artists William Blake, Louise Bourgeois, Prunella Clough, Peter Coffin, Martin Creed, John Gerrard, Robert Gober, Richard Hamilton, Nicola Hicks, Roger Hiorns, Andy Holden, Elad Lassry, Pierre Molinier, Jonathan Monk, Mick Peter, Richard Prince, Jim Shaw and Tøyen, amongst others.

It also features marvels and artefacts such as a mummified cat and canopic jar from Pharaonic Egypt, a phallic sculpture from A Clockwork Orange, a mandrake root, a drawing by ‘Joey the Mechanical Boy,’ the helmet of a Cyberman from Dr. Who, a giant inflatable Felix the Cat, a 13th-century silver reliquary in the form of a hand and a clay concept car. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things expands on Leckey’s practice of exploring the tenuous boundaries between the virtual and real worlds by creating a network of objects that communicate with each other and the visitor. Read this way, it could also be considered his most ambitious exhibition to date.

Mark Leckey lives in London and was born in Birkenhead in 1964. He won the Turner Prize in 2008. The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things opened at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and will be presented at The De La Warr Pavlion in Bexhill-on-Sea from 13 July.