Worldwide Exhibition Openings in October

Sept. 29, 2023

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 October.

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark and Neue Galerie Graz

Group show: ‘Ridiculously Yours! Art, Awkwardness and Enthusiasm’
Exhibition: Oct. 13, 2023–Feb. 25, 2024
halle-fuer-kunst.at
Burgring 2, 8010 Graz, Austria, click here for map
Joanneumsviertel, 8010 Graz, Austria, click here for map

Presented across two institutions, the Neue Galerie Graz and HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, the group exhibition ‘Ridiculously Yours! Art, Awkwardness and Enthusiasm’ hones in on “one of the most important attitudes underlying modern and contemporary art”—that of an “enthusiastic silliness that does not shy away from the embarrassing,” but rather perseveres through it against all odds and with humour and lightheartedness. The idea was conceived and initiated by Jörg Heiser and Cristina Ricupero, who have crafted a show that spans epochs and includes works by around 100 artists from all over the world, including seminal figures of the past and present such as—to name but a few—Marcel Duchamp, Mike Kelley, Kurt Schwitters, Isa Genzken and Cosima von Bonin. ‘Ridiculously Yours!’ flirts with the humour of disaster, bad taste, camp, B-movie culture, science fiction, horror, etc. and shines a light on “a very specific dialectic at work since the 19th century”—on one side, “bold innovations, radical negation and aesthetic dogmas” and, on the other, a laughter that undermines authority and invalidates pompous gesture.

Ashley Hans Scheirl: ‘Glamour,’ 2019 // Courtesy Amir Shariat, photo by Blaise Adilon

No.9 Cork Street

Group show: Sullivan+Strumpf present ‘Story, Place’
Exhibition: Oct. 6–21, 2023
frieze.com
9 Cork St, London W1S 3LL, United Kingdom, click here for map

The group exhibition ‘Story, Place’ is “a collective moment” orchestrated by gallery Sullivan+Strumpf that gathers Indigenous and diasporic voices into an exploration of land, ancestry and belief. The exhibition was conceived by renowned Australian artist Tony Albert and curator Jenn Ellis and takes place during Frieze London, situating these deep considerations of earth and materiality in a dynamic contemporary context. ‘Story, Place’ presents a powerful dialogue between preeminent contemporary artists from around the world with distinct yet shared experiences. Works convene around themes of creation, resilience and regenerative spirit, looking towards what these notions mean for the ongoing trajectory of Earth and humanity.

Tony Albert: ‘Story, Place,’ 2023, installation detail // Courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf

Stedelijk

Nan Goldin: ‘This Will Not End Well’
Exhibition: Oct. 7, 2023—Jan. 28, 2024
stedelijk.nl
Museumplein 10, 1071 DJ Amsterdam, Netherlands, click here for map

Pioneering photographer and activist Nan Goldin needs little introduction. Goldin has influenced generations with her raw and intimate photographs that touch on a multitude of taboo subjects such as drug use, domestic violence, the AIDS epidemic and the world of her inner circle of creative, bohemian friends. Goldin began her artistic practice at the start of the 1980s, presenting slideshows of hundreds of these photographs to live audiences in clubs and underground movie theatres—their sequences edited repeatedly to reflect Goldin’s changing view of the world. With ‘This Will Not End Well,’ the Stedelijk presents Goldin’s internationally-touring retrospective and a return to this foundational stone of Goldin’s practice—with the first solo exhibition to present Goldin’s work as she originally envisioned it. The gallery will host six filmic and experiential rooms of slideshows accompanied by music, voice-overs and archive material.

Nan Goldin: ‘Gina at Bruce’s Dinner Party, NYC,’ 1991 // © Nan Goldin

E-Werk Luckenwalde

Melanie Jame Wolf: ‘The Creep’
Exhibition: Oct. 21, 2023—Feb. 10, 2024
Performance: Oct. 21, 2023; 3pm
kunststrom.com
Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße 73, 14943 Luckenwalde, Germany, click here for map

Presented as a continuation of the artist and choreographer’s ongoing “creep studies,” Melanie Jame Wolf’s exhibition ‘The Creep’ at E-WERK Luckenwalde will include a new film installation, ceramic works, textile sculptures and performance. As an exhibition, ‘The Creep’ enacts a poetic meditation on the dynamic between violence, desire and performativity, in the form of a duet between an outlaw figure and a mountain. Wolf describes the nuances of the word “creep,” unpacking its complex etymology and its relation to movement, as well as a kind of understated violence: “To creep is to move quietly, with stealth, to avoid detection. A creep is a person who produces feelings of discomfort and fear in others. Creeps creep; their violence is experienced as affect, felt rather than seen. It is hard to quantify and therefore hard to prove, sometimes even hard to believe. People creep, so can structures, so can ideologies. Time creeps, so can pleasure, so can death.” The exhibition will open with a performance in the Turbine Hall of the former power station, E-WERK Luckenwalde, on October 21st.

Melanie Jame Wolf: ‘The Creep,’ 2023 // Photo by Evan Loxton

New Museum

Judy Chicago: ‘Herstory’
Exhibition: Oct. 12, 2023—Jan. 14, 2024
newmuseum.org
235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002, United States, click here for map

‘Judy Chicago: Herstory’ is the first comprehensive, large-scale museum retrospective in New York City to trace the entirety of the legendary artist’s practice. It encompasses Chicago’s work across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework and printmaking, while contextualizing her feminist methodology within the many coeval art movements in which she participated—from Minimalism to Earth art—and from which she frequently has been expunged. Expanding the boundaries of a traditional museum survey, the exhibition places six decades of Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women across centuries in a unique installation. Titled ‘The City of Ladies,’ this show-within-the-show features artworks and archival materials from over 80 artists, writers and thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo, Hilma af Klint and Virginia Woolf, among many others.

Judy Chicago: ‘Immolation,’ 1972, archival pigment print, 36 x 36 in (91.44 x 91.44 cm) // © Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy the artist

Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand

‘Indigenous Histories’
Exhibition: Oct. 20, 2023—Feb. 25, 2024
masp.org.br
Avenida Paulista, 1578, São Paulo-SP, 01310200, Brazil, click here for map

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and the Kode Bergen Art Museum are collaborating on an extensive group exhibition that will offer diverse narratives of indigenous experiences in the Americas, Oceania and Scandinavia. ‘Indigenous Histories’ will grace two floors of MASP from October 20th, 2023, to February 25th, 2024, before making its way to the Kode, where it will run from April 26th to August 25th, 2024. Curated by indigenous or indigenous-descendant artists and researchers, it will bring together a wide array of works spanning various media, origins, typologies and time periods, from pre-European colonization to the present day. This exhibition does not strive for an all-encompassing or encyclopedic approach. Instead, it embraces the Portuguese term “histórias,” which entails both fiction and nonfiction, public and private narratives, micro and macro perspectives, embodying a more polyphonic, speculative, open, incomplete and fragmented quality compared to the traditional notion of history.

Duhigó: ‘Nepu Arquepu [Rede Macaco] [Monkey Hammock],’ 2019, acrylic on wood, 185,5 x 275,5 cm // Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, courtesy of Fabio Ulhoa Coelho and Monica Andrigo Moreira de Ulhoa Coelho, photo by Edson Kumasaka

Kyiv Biennial

Oct. 5, 2023—tbd
2023.kyivbiennial.org
Various locations in Kyiv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Uzhhorod, Vienna, Warsaw and Berlin

Since the brutal Russian attack on Ukraine, a comprehensive biennial project in Kyiv appeared uncertain, if not impossible. But, with a cascade of openings⁠—starting in Kyiv and Vienna in October 2023, finishing in Berlin in 2024⁠—the fifth Kyiv Biennial will take place with dispersed exhibitions and public programs in a number of Ukrainian and European cities. Instead of abandoning the project and thus submitting to the logic of war, the 2023 Biennial draws upon its founding idea of being a multi-centric initiative in a European, interconnected and solidary form. Today, the experience of artists and cultural workers in Ukraine is profoundly marked by war trauma, displacement, lack of access to basic resources and, in many cases, direct involvement in armed resistance or the experience of life under military occupation. The upcoming Biennial aims at reintegrating the Ukrainian artistic community and empowering its actors to reflect on the challenges Ukraine is facing and to imagine scenarios for an emancipatory future.

Kinotron Group: ‘Data is the new gas,’ KPI Library, Black Cloud — Kyiv Biennial 2019 // Photo by Sasha Kovalenko

Barbican Centre

‘RE/SISTERS – A Lens on Gender and Ecology’
Exhibition: Oct. 5, 2023–Jan. 14, 2024
barbican.org.uk
Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS, UK, click here for map

Barbican’s major group exhibition, ‘RE/SISTERS. A Lens on Gender and Ecology,’ is set to explore the relationship between gender and ecology, highlighting the systemic links between the oppression of women and the degradation of the planet. Featuring around 50 women and gender non-conforming artists⁠, it explores how their understanding of our environment has often resisted the logic of capitalist economies, which places the exploitation of the planet at its centre. Presented alongside activist works, the exhibited photographs and films show how women are regularly at the forefront of advocating and caring for the planet. Reflecting on a range of themes⁠—from extractive industries to the politics of care⁠—‘RE/SISTERS’ explores environmental and gender justice as indivisible parts of a global struggle, seeking to address existing power structures that threaten our increasingly precarious ecosystem. Featured artists include Melanie Bonajo, Minerva Cuevas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Barbara Hammer, Ana Mendieta, Mónica de Miranda and Otobong Nkanga, among others.

Ada M. Patterson: ‘Looking for “Looking for Langston”,’ 2021 // Courtesy of Maria Korolevskaya and Copperfield

Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

‘Liquid Intelligence’
Exhibition: Oct. 10, 2023—Jan. 28, 2024
tba21.org
P.º del Prado, 8, 28014 Madrid, Spain, click here for map

Presented by TBA21 art foundation and curator Chus Martínez, the group exhibition ‘Liquid Intelligence’ at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum addresses the critical state of life in the ocean. An immersive experience designed to challenge perceptions, it aims to promote an understanding of water as a transmitter of knowledge through art. Describing the ocean as liquid intelligence, the exhibition considers it not only as a body that carries oxygen and sustains life, but also as an organ with its intelligence and consciousness, whose agency and rights must be respected. The works of eight artists⁠—Lucas Arruda, Ana Mendieta, Jumana Manna, Ann Duk Hee Jordan, Sonia Levy, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Saelia Aparicio and Inês Zenha⁠—constitute a dialogue between pieces from the TBA21 Collection and others created specifically for the exhibition. ‘Liquid Intelligence’ is complemented by an extensive public program that will bring together international curators, artists, musicians, performers, scientists, philosophers and researchers.

Ann Duk Hee Jordan: ‘Ziggy and the Starfish,’ 2018, installation view at Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden // Photo by Helene Toresdotter

Palais de Tokyo

Lili Reynaud-Dewar: ‘Hello, My Name is Lili and We Are Many’
Exhibition: Oct. 19, 2023–Jan. 7, 2024
palaisdetokyo.com
13 Av. du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris, France, click here for map

In her solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, multidisciplinary artist Lili Reynaud-Dewar questions the blurred function of the artist, both privileged and precarious, that operates between the exposure of privacy and the subjectification of public life. ‘Hello, My Name is Lili and We Are Many’ is divided into two parts. The first, open to the public, features 19 episodes of ‘Gruppo Petrolio,’ a comedy between fiction and documentary. Produced collectively and inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s book ‘Pétrole,’ it evokes the evils of the oil industry, technological progress and gentrification, all while questioning the value of artistic production in the face of political activism. The second part reads like the artist’s diary and reports, through a new body of work, what happened inside and outside of Palais de Tokyo (in Parisian hotel rooms, in the artist’s emotional and professional relationships and in local and global news) in the period between the conception and the realization of the show.