All posts tagged: contributor

Hauser & Wirth’s Elaine Kwok Departs After Two Years

Hauser & Wirth’s Elaine Kwok Departs After Two Years

Published by skeptic

Elaine Kwok, a veteran of the Hong Kong art market, has officially left her position at Hauser & Wirth after a two-year stint. The gallery announced her departure in an email to staff. In that email, which was obtained by ARTnews, Hauser & Wirth’s leadership wrote, “Elaine’s contribution in leading our Asia activities has been invaluable. Her commitment to our artists, programs, clients, and community, along with the successful opening of our new Hong Kong space she spearheaded, has positively shaped both the region and the gallery as a whole.” Related Articles In the interim, the daily operations of the Hong Kong space will now be directly overseen by CEO Mirella Roma. Before her role at Hauser & Wirth, Kwok spent 15 years in various roles at Christie’s Hong Kong. In 2022, she joined Hauser & Wirth as the Asia Managing Partner, a newly created role focused on expanding the gallery’s client base and building institutional relationships in the region. Her leadership culminated in the expansion of the gallery’s space. Previously, Hauser & Wirth was …

5 Shows to See During Berlin Art Week

5 Shows to See During Berlin Art Week

Published by skeptic

Berlin is a city as defined by its seasons as it is by its cultural output. It’s fitting, then, that Berlin’s two major annual art events, Gallery Weekend and Art Week, are staged at periods when the weather turns—the former during April, the latter in September. Just in time to usher in this autumn, the 13th edition of Berlin Art Week will take place from September 11 to 15, uniting over 100 participants as they open their doors and transform the city into an art oasis, with museums, fairs, private collections, project spaces, and innumerable Berlin galleries set to take part. Besides having enough programming to make one wonder when they’ll find time to eat a meal between shows, this year’s Art Week promises to be unforgettable for art experts and the art curious alike. There are major reopenings (the ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics), huge fairs (Positions at Tempelhof Airport Hangar 6-7), and hidden gems (find me at the site-specific audiovisual installation SILT, by artists Ona Julija Lukas Steponaitytė, Iida Jonsson, and …

Chinese Company Places .2 B. Bid for K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong

Chinese Company Places $1.2 B. Bid for K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong

Published by skeptic

In a shock development that sparked headlines in Bloomberg, the Business Times, and Sing Tao this past week, K11 Art Mall in Hong Kong’s shopping district, Tsim Sha Tsui, received a $1.2 billion offer from CR Longdation, a state-owned Chinese company and a subsidiary of China Resources Holdings Co. K11 Art Mall is owned by Hong Kong–based property firm New World Development, which was founded by Cheng Yu-tung in 1970. His son, the billionaire Henry Cheng, is its chairman. Cheng’s grandson, Adrian Cheng, currently serves as the company’s CEO and is a familiar face on the annual ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. Related Articles Per Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the family is worth more than $20 billion. Adrian Cheng launched the K11 Group, which includes various entities such as K11 Craft and Guild Foundation and the K11 Art Foundation. The latter, an internationally renowned foundation, has staged more than 60 exhibitions across China’s major cities and beyond, showcasing works by some of the world’s leading contemporary artists, including Katharina Grosse, Guan Xiao, Neïl Beloufa, Zhang Enli, and …

Taking Over the Australian Pavilion, Archie Moore Celebrates 2,400 Generations of First Nations People

Taking Over the Australian Pavilion, Archie Moore Celebrates 2,400 Generations of First Nations People

Published by skeptic

Upon entering the box-shaped Australian Pavilion in the Giardini, the eyes slowly begin to adjust to the crepuscular light. What looks like a white mist slowly materializes on the black walls and envelops visitors. Linger a little and the “mist” crystallizes into a vast family tree going back 65,000 years, hand-written in white chalk across the four 49-by-16-foot walls. Artist Archie Moore, who is of Kamilaroi and Bigambul descent on his mother’s side and British and Scottish on his father’s, has spent four back-breaking weeks inscribing as many names as years on the Pavilion walls and ceiling in tribute to the resilience of Australia’s First Nations people, some of the world’s oldest cultures, despite white colonizers’ concerted efforts to annihilate them. “It shows survival, despite all the horrible things that happened. We’re still here and continuing our cultural practices,” Queensland-based Moore told ARTnews in an interview onsite, ahead of the 2024 Venice Biennale opening later this week. Related Articles Indigenous artists figure prominently in the national pavilion line-up at this year’s Biennale, in addition to …

Germany’s Art Scene Is Tearing Itself Apart Amid Israel’s War in Gaza

Germany’s Art Scene Is Tearing Itself Apart Amid Israel’s War in Gaza

Published by skeptic

Since October, the German cultural sector has been in turmoil. The ongoing crises in Israel and Palestine have inflamed some of Germany’s most sensitive, and urgent, political debates, sparking cancelations, defundings, boycotts, and resignations. As if overnight, cultural institutions have leapt—or been forced into—the fray of answering to the nation’s most existential questions: antisemitism and Jewish life in Germany, racism, immigration, xenophobia, and the legacy of the Holocaust. Some of the more widely publicized cancelations of the last several months have gotten attention beyond Germany, like the fracas over Masha Gessen’s receipt of the Hannah Arendt prize, the resignation of the entire Documenta 16 finding committee, and the Frankfurt Book Fair’s cancelation of an event honoring Palestinian author Adania Shibli. Related Articles In January, tensions skyrocketed when the Berlin government announced that it would implement a new “anti-Semitism clause” to funding applications in the cultural sector. According to Berlin cultural minister Joe Chialo, applicants would have to formally agree to conform to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which includes the points …

Art Collective Shifting Perceptions Around Transgender People in India

Art Collective Shifting Perceptions Around Transgender People in India

Published by skeptic

A decade ago, India’s top court ruled that transgender people should be treated as a third category of gender. While that decision would seem to indicate a progressiveness in India, the lived experience for transgender people there differs greatly. Across the country, they are often derided and disparaged. Many are often turned out onto the streets by prejudiced families who fail to understand them. In public spaces, from streets and parks to mass transit, transgender and gender nonconforming persons often face persistent discrimination and outright exclusion. A Bengaluru-based arts collective, however, has been working to remediate this history of bias and discrimination by encouraging transgender people to forge a connection with the public through art. Related Articles The Aravani Art Project, so named after a term used for the trans community in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, helps transgender people voice expressions through visual art. The seeds of the project were sown in 2014, when a filmmaker making a documentary on the transgender community approached founder Poornima Sukumar. “It took a couple of years …

How a Materials for the Arts Saves New York’s Discarded Objects

How a Materials for the Arts Saves New York’s Discarded Objects

Published by skeptic

Breezing through the 35,000-square-foot home of Materials for the Arts is about as close as you might get to touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Earlier this year, the vast warehouse in Queens was chock-full of Christmas fixings, like ornaments, pink artificial evergreens, and Lush soap cartons, alongside perennial aisles of paper and books, envelopes, archival photos, all manner of fabric, buttons, beads, and trim. There are also lab coats from hospitals, furniture from the Javits Center, and vintage typewriters and PC towers, CDs and file folders. Full of castoffs of contemporary New York City life just waiting to be plucked from obscurity, the list goes on. The majority of these wares are in pristine condition, and they are all meticulously organized and labeled. Related Articles It’s also accessible, for free, to public school students and teachers, as well as art nonprofits. As New York’s largest creative-reuse center and a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts collects a boundless array of reusable materials from businesses and individuals that are then …

How to disagree better – The Atlantic

How to disagree better – The Atlantic

Published by Sam

Our writers’ perspectives on arguing and communicating in healthier ways Damir Sagolj / Reuters February 17, 2024, 8 AM ET This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning. In the 1887 essay “Silent People as Misjudged by the Noisy,” an Atlantic contributor proposed an economical approach to talking: “As we get on in life past the period of obstreperous youth, we incline to talk less and write less, especially on the topics which we have most at heart,” the writer noted. “We are beginning to realize the uselessness of perpetually talking … If there is a thing to be said, we prefer to wait and say it only when and where it will hit something or somebody.” Many of us wish we were better at waiting to speak until we knew our words would “hit something or somebody” exactly how we want them to. But more …

Porfirio Gutiérrez Brings His Traditional Weaving Techniques to Mexico

Porfirio Gutiérrez Brings His Traditional Weaving Techniques to Mexico

Published by skeptic

In 1940, famed Mexico City architects Luis Barragán and Max Cetto collaborated on a building called Edificio para Artistas. Still considered a beacon of Mexico City modernism, the building was imagined as four live workspaces with floor-to-ceiling windows and floating spiral staircases designed for artists by artists as a place to create and exchange ideas. Today, the building remains a creative hub with tenants like architects, interior designers, and photographers. Last Wednesday, during the Zona Maco art fair, visitors were invited to the inaugural exhibition hosted by the building’s newest tenant, Veronica Fernandez, who opened the agency PARA A as an extension of her art advisory services to help Latin American artists garner US representation. The show, titled “Desde Otra Mirada,” runs through March 17 and showcases the work of Zapotec textile artist Porfirio Gutiérrez, who migrated to California from Teotitlán del Valle in Oaxaca, Mexico, where his family have been weaving for generations. Related Articles This is the first time that Gutiérrez, whose work reinterprets traditional textile techniques and motifs through a contemporary lens, …

Guillermo Bert’s Art Aims to Challenge Society’s Blind Spots

Guillermo Bert’s Art Aims to Challenge Society’s Blind Spots

Published by skeptic

The landscape of Los Angeles and the people who live there have long been central to the work of Guillermo Bert. Back in the 1990s, for a series titled “L.A. Sites,” Bert would scour downtown LA hunting for movie posters and other advertisements layered so thick that their edges curled off in slabs from the wall. Wearing workman’s gloves, Bert would rip them free and transport them back to his studio where he would strip them apart only to reassemble them into painted collages. The once-shiny pop culture images became scarred by dried adhesive, gaining a gauzy patina. “I would keep on ripping off pieces just to kind of give it more life,” Bert said of compiling this urban bricolage. “I always disliked artwork that is so finished that you bounce out of it. I like the work that is more undone and unfinished.” Related Articles That approach has guided his four-decade career, though it has manifested in various forms, from woven tapestries with QR codes (“Encoded Textiles”) to his latest series, “The Warriors,” which …