New shows from Berlin's Alicja Kwade, legend Martin Kippenberger and 3D artist Trisha Baga
EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK: Trisha Baga at Societe Berlin
Greeted with a table of 3D glasses expectation is high, and Baga doesn't disappoint. Stereoscopic projections sit behind, or on, artist detritus on the floor – beers, paint tins, plastic sheeting – and several cardboard structures. Baga's exhibition is immersive, enthralling and considered. Vignettes including floating 3D colours overlaid over a crude painting of feet at the end of a bathtub, or a little dog grappling with a blow up foot spa, compliment the larger, longer videos. One particularly intricate composition with equally complex soundtrack touches on graphic software and Carl Sagan amongst other influences and provides the cornerstone in a show that prompts questions of surface, depth, materiality painting, and pop media/tech culture.
27/4/13 – 1/6/13
ARTIST OF THE WEEK: Alicja Kwade
The highlight of gallery weekend Berlin was unwaveringly pitch perfect artist Alicja Kwade's pendulum lightbulb, suspended from the ceiling of St. Agnes' church it swung back and forth with an accompanying real-time soundtrack. As the several-stories-high thick black cord of the pendulum swings slowly, the lightbulb attached to the end catches shadows in the blacked out church hall, adding movement to stillness as the dark and light exchange places. This sombre hypnosis is underscored by a deep fluctuating tone caused by a contact mic recording the pendulum's progress and amplifying it. Instead of choosing to fill Werner Düttmann’s brutalist concrete megalith recently procured by Berlin gallerist Johann König with items or assemblage Kwade makes a subtle yet universal gesture based on Foucault's pendulum to create a space of contemplation uniting celestial body and spiritual mind.
27.04.13 – 26.05.13
ART LEGEND OF THE WEEK: Martin Kippenberger
A legend in and after his own lifetime – the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Berlin has taken its time in dedicating a retrospective to the rock-star appeal of the German born enfant terrible. He spent the years 1978 – 81 in the German capital in which time he appointed himself co-owner of iconic punk bar SO36 (still going strong). His death in 1997 after a hedonistic and prolific 44 years is ignored in this exhibition in favour of his life – he would have been 60 this year. The huge old train station exhibition space is dedicated to the extensive work and text-5biography of kind of artist that only comes along rarely but makes an impression. The large collection of posters, graphics and drawings are particularly mesmerising. The apt title for such a good exhibition is taken from a magazine Kippenberger self-published in 1978: "sehr gut. very good."
Until 18 August 2013
EVENT OF THE WEEK: Oreet Ashery - Party for Freedom
Taking as a starting point Vladimir Mayakovsky's 1921 play Mystery-Bouffe and ideas around political nakedness and liberation, this pan-London festival takes in London landmarks including The Swedenborg Society in Bloomsbury, Millbank Media Centre at Millbank Tower and a workers cooperative on the edge of the Lea Valley. Live performance, self-organised gatherings, moving image come together in a festival which touches on trash aesthetics, lefty sentiments, the hippy movement and as far as the disclaimer goes includes nudity, flashing lights and sexual content. Newly commissioned punk, experimental and contemporary classical music come courtesy of Finnish composer Timo-Juhani Kyllönen, all-girl post-punk band Woolf and London-based musician Morgan Quaintance.
1 May–22 June 2013 at Various London venues
FESTIVAL OF THE WEEK: Brighton Festival / House Festival
Guest director poet Michael Rosen puts together a line-up of talks, music, performances and outdoor occurrences including one of Dazed favourite James Bridle's Drone Shadow drawings. In particular the visual arts festival HOUSE has co-commissioned Mariele Neudecker's Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes at the Regency Townhouse and several satellite works by artists including Emma Critchley and Andrew Kotting. Then there's always The Adventures of Don Quixote by Bicycle...either way it's a good excuse to escape to the Great British seaside.