Nov. 1, 2024
Every month, Berlin Art Link shines a spotlight on international exhibitions and events with our Worldwide Hit List. We want to highlight artists, galleries, museums and new projects touching on a variety of topics, employing multiple media and featuring diverse subjects. Below are some of the stand-outs that we’ve selected for the month of November.
Art Gallery of South Australia
Group Show: ‘Radical Textiles’
Exhibition: Nov. 23, 2024-Mar. 30, 2025
agsa.sa.gov.au
North Terrace, Adelaide SA 5000, Australia, click here for map
With works by more than 100 artists, designers and activists, ‘Radical Textiles’ explores how textiles have served as tools for truth-telling and community building, catalyzing social and political change through wars, pandemics and disasters. From tapestry and embroidery to quilting and tailoring, the exhibition highlights textiles’ roles in acts of resistance, remembrance and reconciliation. This major exhibition draws on AGSA’s international, Australian and First Nations collections of textiles and fashion, augmented by sculpture, painting, photography and the moving image, alongside several new commissions. Taking the work of the 19th-century artist and designer William Morris as its starting point, it celebrates the cutting-edge innovations, enduring traditions and bodies of shared knowledge over the past 150 years. ‘Radical Textiles’ also explores the way artists have reclaimed materials and techniques to revive them through feminist, queer and Black lenses.
Pierre Mukeba: ‘Ride to church,’ 2018, Adelaide, fibre-tipped pen, synthetic polymer paint and applique on canvas, 320.0 x 424.0 cm // Gift of the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors 2019, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, © Pierre Mukeba
Kunsthaus Graz
Group Show: ‘Poetics of Power’
Exhibition: Nov. 15, 2024-May 25, 2025
museum-joanneum.at
Lendkai 1, 8020 Graz, Austria, click here for map
The group exhibition ‘Poetics of Power’ reveals hidden manifestations of power embedded in symbols, gestures and entrenched systems and relationships. It highlights the complex and ambiguous nature of power, omnipresent in shaping interpersonal, cultural, national and economic dynamics. It also examines the poetic dimension of power, acknowledging its pervasive influence while also underscoring its potential for destruction. Many of the featured works engage with themes of authoritarian histories, distorted narratives, erased knowledge, cultural destruction and identity construction. The exhibition illuminates power asymmetries that often result in exploitative relationships—colonial or neo-colonial—which, in turn, give rise to conflicts and forced migration. ‘Poetics of Power’ showcases works by 18 artists, including Yael Bartana, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Grada Kilomba, Goshka Macuga, Daniela Ortiz, Ahmet Öğüt and Monira al Qadiri.
Erkan Özgen: ‘Wonderland,’ video projection // Courtesy of the artist
Estonian National Museum
Ryoji Ikeda
Exhibition: Nov. 2, 2024-Mar. 2, 2025
erm.ee
Muuseumi tee 2, 60532 Tartu, Estonia, click here for map
As part of Tartu 2024 European Capital of Culture, the Estonian National Museum presents a solo exhibition by Ryoji Ikeda. For this occasion, the artist and composer created two new artworks inspired by Estonian culture and science. The first is an audiovisual installation titled ‘the critical paths,’ developed using Estonians’ DNA data from the University of Tartu’s Institute of Genomics. The second, a sound installation called ‘vox aeterna,’ is Ikeda’s debut piece for the human voice, having previously worked primarily with electronic music. Alongside these new works, created specifically to complement the museum’s unique architecture, the show also features an earlier piece, ‘data-verse’ (2019-2020). Additionally, Ikeda has composed a choral piece for the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, which will have its world premiere on November 2nd, 2024.
Ryoji Ikead: ‘data-verse,’ 2019-20 // Photo by David Stjernholm
M+
Group Show: ‘Making It Matters’
Opening: Nov. 2, 2024
mplus.org.hk
38 Museum Dr., West Kowloon, Hong Kong, click here for map
Hong Kong’s M+ museum puts on a collection display centered on the multifaceted nature of “making” as a creative process. ‘Making it Matters’ proposes that this process concerns individual expression, but also reverberates on a societal level. Artists, designers and architects alike are featured in an experimental layout that includes historical approaches to making as well as a demonstration of its particular importance today. The exhibition includes designs and artworks of John Cage, Raffaella della Olga, Anna Ridler and Fujimori Terunobu, among others. Coinciding with the opening of the exhibition, a restored capsule from Kurokawa Kisho’s iconic Nakagin Capsule Tower (1970–1972) is on display in the East Galleries. The housing complex, which was demolished in 2022, once housed 140 self-contained units of small apartments intended for people who worked in Tokyo’s urban center, while living in the suburbs.
West facade of Nakagin Capsule Tower, 1970-72
Kurimanzutto New York
WangShui
Exhibition: Nov. 1-Dec. 20, 2024
kurimanzutto.com
516 W 20th St, New York, NY 10011, USA, click here for map
Kurimanzutto New York presents WangShui’s first North American solo exhibition, focusing on the artist’s intimate painting process and themes around desire, technology and consciousness. Since 2020, WangShui has been developing a distinct technique of painting on aluminum, using steel brushes, sand paper, chain linked gloves and dental tools. Describing AI as their “foil, muse, and psychic,” WangShui has recently been employing machine learning, 3D modeling and live simulations in their image-making process.The artist refers to their paintings as a “haptic diary,” suggesting an intimate and emotional touch against the cool and machine-like surface.
WangShui, installation view at kurimanzutto // Photo by Zach Hyman, courtesy of Kurimanzutto
Goldsmiths CCA
Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby: ‘Inner Heat’
Exhibition: Nov. 8, 2024-Jan. 12, 2025
goldsmithscca.art
St James’s, London SE14 6AD, UK, click here for map
Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby are both solo practising artists and this show at Goldsmiths CCA is their first institutional exhibition as an artist duo. Over time, their practice has evolved, from a constant exchange of found imagery, gathered to create an archive of printed and digital material, in what has become an instinctive shared language. ‘Inner Heat’ places a series of new drawings into conversation with sculptural elements of public infrastructure, examining the dynamic between private image consumption and the public realm. Central to the exhibition is their series ‘Contact,’ derived entirely from found digital images—archetypes of a collectively understood memetic internet culture—painstakingly translated into drawings. The duo has been interested and inspired by fetish and leather subcultures as well as body modification, creating collages from found erotic images. In their work, an underground activity of non-normative images occurs: images are printed and overlaid with drawings and words on greased paper. Finally, the compositions are encased in resin casts of transparent fur and leather.
Laila Majid & Louis Blue Newby: ‘Spread (The Politics of Undressing)’ // Courtesy of the artists and Goldsmiths CCA
Artizon Museum
‘Jam Session: The Ishibashi Foundation Collection × MOHRI Yuko–On Physis’
Exhibition: Nov. 2, 2024-Feb. 9, 2025
artizon.museum
1 Chome-7-2 Kyobashi, Chuo City, Tokyo 104-0031, Japan, click here for map
Since its opening in 2020, the Artizon Museum in Tokyo joins works from the Ishibashi Foundation’s collection with those of a contemporary artist during an annual exhibition. This year, that artist is Yuko Mohri, whose installations are currently also on view in Venice, at the Japanese Pavilion. ‘Jam Session’ 2024, as the initiative is called, marks Mohri’s first large-scale show in her home country and is titled ‘On Physis,’ looking back at the part of Ancient Greek philosophy that attempted to find the structuring principle of reality. The artist has a background in punk and experimental music, the central features of which still shape her practice today: error, feedback and improvisation. At Artizon, she is paired with canonic artists from the West and Japan that share those concerns, such as Paul Klee, Marchel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell and Fujishima Takeji.
Yuko Mohri: ‘Sketch for Piano Solo: Belle Île,’ 2024 // Courtesy of the artist
Art Gallery New South Wales
Cao Fei: ‘My City is Yours’
Exhibition: Nov. 30, 2024-Apr. 13, 2025
artgallery.nsw.gov.au
Art Gallery Rd, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia, click here for map
At the end of November, Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei’s largest exhibition in Australia to date opens at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. Titled ‘My City is Yours,’ the retrospective includes two newly commissioned works and is conceived as a cityscape. Both real and virtual, ‘My City’ is modelled on New York, Beijing, Sydney and Fukuoka at once. Its streets are crowded by cosplayers and dancers, while showing unmistakable signs of development and gentrification. Fei is a Beijing-based artist who, over the course of the past two decades, has gained notoriety because of her inventive and critical approach to today’s social topics, such as urban identity and the impact of online worlds on offline society.
Cao Fei: ‘Hello! Kitty,’ 2006 from the ‘Un-cosplayers’ series, inkjet print on paper, 90 × 120 cm // © Cao Fei, courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers
Yeo Workshop
Group Show: ‘Who Is Weaving the Sky Net?’
Exhibition: Nov. 2, 2024-Jan. 5, 2025
yeoworkshop.com
47 Malan Rd, #01-25, Singapore 109444, click here for map
‘Who is Weaving the Sky Net?’ gathers 18 artists using textile, fabric and weaving as means to interrogate our understanding of the universe and existence. Art’s significant role in constructing the fabric of reality is the jumping-off point for this group show at Yeo Workshop in Singapore. The gallery offers the Buddhist metaphor of Indra’s Net—which, roughly, means that each part mirrors and influences the whole—as an additional conceptual pillar. Iranian artist Leila Seyedzadeh, for example, makes landscape-like tapestries that originate in the unconscious and memory. Fragments from these disparate realms are spliced together, resulting in vistas that look at once familiar and fantastical. Featured as well is Lai Thi Dieu Ha, who is a towering figure in Hanoi’s contemporary performance scene, and expanded her practice to textile and fashion in order to delve into identity and psychology.
Woo Hannah: ‘A Smelly Ear,’ 2024 // Courtesy of the artist andd G Gallery, photo by Seungheon Lee
Qatar Museums
Group Show: ‘MANZAR: Art and Architecture from Pakistan 1940s to Today’
Exhibition: Nov. 1, 2024-Jan. 31, 2025
nmoq.org.qa
Museum Pk St, Doha, Qatar, click here for map
For the exhibition ‘MANZAR,’ the National Museum of Qatar presents an overview of Pakistani art and architecture from the 1940s to today. Over 200 artworks in varied media are mounted in an attempt to reflect the events that have marked the country in the past eight decades; from the British Raj and 1947’s Partition, to contemporary debates on regionalism and postcolonialism. ‘Manzar’ is Arabic and means scene, view, landscape or perspective in Urdu; a pliable concept that allows for various angles through which to consider the cultural and social fluctuations of modern Pakistan.
Community Centre in construction, Makli, Sindh, 2024 // Courtesy of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. Directed by Yasmeen Lari. © Qatar Museums, photo by Noorulain Ali
