This week's art highlights from the new show from John Hill (LuckyPDF) and Laure Prouvost's art book
FESTIVAL OF THE WEEK: SPILL
The annual festival of live art, performance and theatre returns programmed by artist Robert Pacitti in collaboration with the Barbican. If the opportunity to dress up and attend an 18th century French salon complete with full regalia isn't enough, there's the Famous Lauren Barri Holstein performing her poppy blend of fun, thought-provoking and uncompromising work (last time I saw her it involved ping pong balls, ketchup and her vagina) and a journey to outer space with the Empress Stah. The full programme spans genres from spectacular through durational to the resolutely corporeal.
3-14th April
ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Emily Wardill
Emily Wardill's intricately edited films weave together in constellations of subtext, motif, image and intrigue. Shot in such a way as to expertly play on the tropes of narrative filmmaking Wardill makes them feel at home in the gallery context with the glimpses of process, rehearsal techniques and workshop elements often visible beneath the compelling surface. Last chance to catch her new work 'The Third Person' in Berlin this weekend.
9th March – 13th April
ART LEGEND OF THE WEEK: Lynn Hershman Leeson
Stemming from the 2001-2 project commissioned for SFMOMA, the California-based artist produced 'Agent Ruby' for the gallery's pioneering online platform e.space. Conceived as a type of expanded cinema (agent Ruby was played by Tilda Swinton), this exhibition documents the decade of the AI web character's interactions and evolving memory, knowledge and moods.
Lynn Hershman Leeson: The Agent Ruby Files. Surfaces ten years of virtual character's conversations with real people.
March 30–June 2, 2013 - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK: YOU SCREEN I SCREEN / UN SCREEN SUN SCREEN
An exhibition organised by the ever-active art collective LuckyPDF's John Hill featuring some of London's finest ones-to-watch including Nicole Morris, Richard Sides, Hania Stella Sawicka and Holly White. Expect digital dalliances and...screens
9th – 21 April; Library + Albion St. London, SE16 7HY
ART BOOK OF THE WEEK: Laure Prouvost
Winner of MaxMara Prize for Women, the young French Artist has collaborated with graphic design legend Fraser Muggeridge on a new book launched last week at the Whitechapel Gallery. The paperback combines self referential, occasionally tautological musings on art, artists and fragmentary characters and political thought. Script excerpts, paintings, photos and drawings take us on an associative journey though the artist(s) mind.
Main image credit: Installation view, Mot International, London. Laure Prouvost, 2012.
The Artist Book: Book Works
EVENT OF THE WEEK: Eastside Projects 'Wild Things Are Going To Happen' launch Bar Barbette Berlin
Henrik Schrat has published 'Wild Things Are Going To Happen', a psychedelic trip through the life and eyes of the legendary (Rock My Religion) Dan Graham. The trippy journey explores the Digbeth and Eastside areas of Birmingham as past, present and future are conflated and 'Jaques Lacan sells the group tickets to the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles!'. A sci-fi vision with some non-fiction thrown in and some Dan Flavin to boot. The graphic novel engenders a kind of publishing that is more than welcome in the tomes of hardback and hard-to-be-entertained-by art literature.
10th April 2013. Henrik Schrat: Wild Things Are Going To Happen: Dialogues with Dan Graham on Art, Architecture & Shopping Malls. Published by Eastside Projects 2013.