Created to mark the 2019 anniversary, this video profile follows the 30-year history of Esther Schipper’s contemporary art gallery: from its founding in Cologne in 1989, to its relocation and expansion to its current space in Berlin, through collaborations with dozens of artists, including Angela Bulloch, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, among many others. MONA created the video profile in collaboration with BoomEar Art Podcast for Financial Times China.

This year, Germany is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus. The exhibition series ‘Unbekannte Moderne’ at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst (BLMK) considers aesthetic and social utopias in painting, photography, printmaking and design of the 1920s and 1930s through five complementary exhibitions in Cottbus and Frankfurt (Oder). Museum Director Ulrike Kremeier spoke to us about the exhibitions – entitled ‘Bild der Stadt / Stadt im Bild,’ ‘Im Hinterland der Moderne,’ ‘Das Bauhaus in Brandenburg,’ ‘Neue Städte – Neue Menschen’ and ‘Frans Masereel’ – which reflect the BLMK’s collection and present over 80 artists.

Housing the Human took place on October 18th and 19th at radialsystem in Berlin. The two-day festival showcased five selected prototypes by participating architects, designers and industry professionals – Certain Measures, Mae-Ling Lokko, Simone C Niquille/Technoflesh, Lucia Tahan and Dasha Tsapenko – which addressed the future of human living, shared resources and collective spaces. In the video, the Art Directors of Housing the Human, Freo Majer and Jan Boelen, speak about the festival’s aims, and the designers shed light on their individual proposals for future living.

In celebration of Peaches’ 20-year stage anniversary, the Kunstverein in Hamburg and the Summer Festival at Kampnagel put up the first institutional solo exhibition of the artist, featuring new sculptural, photographic, film and text works touching on topics of sex, feminism, queerness, gender, and new millennium politics. Video by MONA for Peaches’ solo exhibition ‘Whose Jizz Is This?’ on view at Kunstverein Hamburg from August 9 to October 20, 2019.

Otobong Nkanga was recently award the prestigious new Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award, a Norwegian prize for international mid-career sculptors and painters, developed in partnership with the Lise and Arne Wilhelmsen family and the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. She is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Gropius Bau, undertaking her exploration of natural resources and economic and ecological processes as part of their ongoing ‘In House’ residency programme.

‘JR – Adrian Piper – Ray Johnson,’ brought together three artists from different generations, with different roots and strategies, who share a common focus: an appeal to the viewer to become actively involved in the artwork, allowing it to fulfill its true purpose: only this “pact” between artist and audience brings the often ephemeral artwork to its intended completion.

For the 58th Venice Biennale, Nujoom Alghanem represented the UAE pavilion, presenting her installation ‘Passage,’ that touched on themes of language and identity. The installation was a culmination of 16 years of the poet and artist’s work, weaving together writing, art, and film-making.

Video produced by Monica Salazar, filmed and edited by Peter Cairns

For the 58th Biennale in Venice, artist Indrė Šerpytytė presented a new commissioned work, ‘Territorial Symphonies’. The work seeks to outline the power dynamic between the countries represented inside and outside of the Biennale, and the notion of inclusion and exclusion. In ‘Territorial Symphonies,’ a brass band plays the national anthem of over 60 countries, who are not represented with a permanent pavilion within the Giardini.

Video produced by Monica Salazar, filmed and edited by Peter Cairns

Asia Contemporary Art Week (ACAW) Director and curator of the 2019 Field Meeting Leeza Ahmady organized a series of pop-up exhibitions, performances, lecture-performances and discussions by noted multidisciplinary artists, thinkers and creative individuals from all regions of Asia (with a focus on East Asia). The theme of the 2019 Field Meeting was ‘Thinking Collections’, and the curator offered her expanded take on what it means to be a collector. This year ACAW’s acclaimed annual art forum, Field Meeting, premiered outside of its usual host city, New York, presenting for the first time in Asia. The 2019 event, which ran from January 25–26th alongside the regional Quoz Arts Festival, was hosted at ACAW Consortium Partner, Alserkal Avenue in Dubai.

Korean artist Lee Bul’s artistic oeuvre is permeated with theoretical musings tied to a specific era of feminist thinking. While her large-scale solo exhibition from 2018, ‘Crash’ at Gropius Bau, spanned several decades of her work, beginning in the late 1980s until the present, there was an underlying attachment to a somewhat dated but nevertheless compelling strain of third wave feminism, espoused by thinkers such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, and afro-futurist author Octavia Butler.