Dara Birnbaum - South London Gallery - London

through February 12th 2012

American artist Dara Birnbaum was one of the first to subvert the language of television and is internationally recognised for her pioneering video works made over the past three and a half decades. For her South London Gallery exhibition she presents the UK premiere of her recent work, Arabesque, 2011, a multi-channel video installation which reflects on the legacy of two compositions; one composed by Robert Schumann for his wife Clara, the other composed by Clara Schumann for her husband Robert. Spanning the SLG's main exhibition space and first floor galleries, the show also includes the seminal work, Attack Piece, 1975, Birnbaum's first surviving installation, and a series of her earliest single channel video works from the 1970s.

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Oliver Michaels - A Journey Between Two Fixed Points - ColeContemporary - London

through 17th December 2011

Cole is pleased to present ‘A Journey Between Two Fixed Points’, a new video work by Oliver Michaels. Michaels’ practice explores the structure and technology of film and photography, often through the prism of the tools of popular culture. In an era in which every supposed significant event of our lives is thoroughly documented, ‘A Journey Between Two Fixed Points’ focuses on moments that are mostly neglected or designated as backgrounds.

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Martin Skauen - The Blind Spot - Laura Bartlett Gallery - London

through January 21st 2012

Martin Skauen is interested in the suspension of reason and the seeking of sense and meaning within the irrational. Skauen’s work can be read in terms of the Surrealist strategy of rupture and discord; Skauen’s subjects are located directly between ordinary experience and pure chaotic contingency.

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Cloud - group show - Foxy Production - NYC

through December 23rd 2011

Foxy Production presents CLOUD,a group exhibition curated by London-based artist Gabriel Hartley. Cloud revisits and expands upon Surrealism, focusing on how its formal and aesthetic themes have been appropriated by a range of artists. The exhibition includes work by Sascha Braunig, Talia Chetrit, Vincent Fecteau, György Kepes, and Daniel Sinsel.

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Adam McEwen - A Real Slow Drag - Mariane Boesky Gallery - NYC

through Decemer 17th 2011

McEwen’s work resides somewhere between the celebratory and the funereal. It identifies strands of European melancholy in the Pop object, and the scuffs of history and consumerism on the sheened surfaces of minimalism. His obituaries of living subjects highlight the blurred line between history and fiction. His repurposing of the over-familiar creates momentary ruptures which, in the words of one writer, “jolt us temporarily out of our indifference, owing to over-exposure, toward the signs that dominate our daily lives.”

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Ksenia Pedan & Ben Burgis - BOTIQ - BRICKHOUSE 7 at N/V_PROJECTS - London

PRIVATE VIEW: THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8th / 6 - 8 PM

Cats, Shoes, Sculpture in `BOTIQ´ by Ben Burgis & Ksenia Pedan

BRICKHOUSE is a curatorial project organised by Thomas Bush and Guy GormleyThe artists are hosting a live performance of ECTOPIA (Jack Brennan, Adam Christensen, Vicky Steiri) followed by DJ's Jana P & Jack Phrost at the PECKHAM HOTEL. (Performance starts 9:30 PM)

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www.brckhs.co.uk
www.nvprojects.co.uk
www.peckhamhotel.com
www.thenullandvoid.blogspot.com

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ANDREW BIRK - 'YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT AND ALL YOU EAT IS PUSSY' - Preeteen Gallery - Mexico City

through February 1st 2012

ONE EXTREME IS THE IDEA OF AN OBJECTIVE WORLD, PURSUING ITS REGULAR COURSE IN SPACE AND TIME, INDEPENDENTLY OF ANY KIND OF OBSERVING SUBJECT; THIS HAS BEEN THE GUIDING MESSAGE FROM MADONNA.

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Rodney McMillian - Studio Museum Harlem - NYC

November 10, 2011–January 15, 2012

Rodney McMillian’s (b. 1969) Untitled (futon)—shot in one static take, using lo-fi equipment—depicts the artist repeatedly stabbing a futon with a knife, reducing the mattress to a pile of cotton, which he subsequently discards. In the video, McMillian uses performance as a strategy, both acting before a camera to make a recording for an audience, and performing the discrete task of destroying a mattress. Through a simple, repetitive gesture, the artist makes reference to the history of painting, substituting futon and knife-jab for canvas and brushstroke.

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Ida Ekblad - Low Tide Bring Da Ruckus - West London Projects - London

through December 10th 2011

Through paintings and sculptures Ida creates combinations of forms that are both symbolic and aesthetic. Works have an energy and distinction, a bold lyricism and a vibrancy relating to the city. This urban context is perhaps most apparent in her sculptural works, which incorporate items found by chance from the street or skip and usually taken from around the cities in which she is making the artwork. Scavenged and salvaged parts have a seeming need to retain or extract the essential, from the discarded remnants of contemporary culture. They retain a sharpness to them, even a violence, as they are left in their original forms, found by Ida on her rummages through piles of demolished and industrial detritus. Once taken back to the studio they become incorporated together within vibrant and visually inventive compositions, creating free-associations and suggestions between each other. Once exhibited, these sculptural forms often simply rest on the gallery floor almost suggesting our own finding of remnants of the everyday.

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Seth Pick - Clarence Mews - London

by appointment only

The opening exhibition presents a series of small-scale and intimate paintings by Frankfurt based painter Seth Pick. These paintings are at once figurative and abstract, elegant and economic in their construction. They are the culmination of Pick's recent aesthetic and conceptual endeavors. Pick sets the tone for the projects that follow. His paintings are ambiguous, their narratives inconclusive and open-ended.

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Klara Lidén - Galerie Neu - Berlin

through December 12th 2011

(Re-)using common materials which can be salvaged from urban space or sourced from outmoded stock, Klara Lidén’s practice involves a notion of practical recycling. There is no ‘aura’ of past times, no sense of nostalgia in the vintage system of pump and hoses she retools to construct a closed circuit of water running through the central installation in her first solo exhibition at Neu, which is also her first solo exhibition in Berlin. Rather, this equipment somewhat pragmatically serves to set up a compact temporary structure, to claim space inside the gallery space. It is ‘animated’ by an internal dynamic, the flow of the water that guarantees volume and stability, suggesting a strong sense of presence, which is heightened by the sound that fills the rooms.

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Ray Johnson - Scheibler Mitte - Berlin

through January 28th 2012

Ray Johnson (1927–1995) needed but a few simple forms to create his icons - the bunny heads, snakes and stylized skulls that are among the characters peopling his collages. They represent him but also at times people, objects and themes that interested him and functioned in his work as a kind of label. Dubbed the “most famous unknown artist in New York” by The New York Times, Johnson is considered the founder of Mail Art and the initiator of the New York Correspondance [sic] School. His collages, which he began distributing worldwide in the 1950s, were seminal for Pop Art. His performances have been referred to as the first informal happenings; he called him “nothings”. He staged his suicide on a Friday the 13th in January 1995, which resulted in numerous speculations and a downright Johnson cult.

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