Category: Art

Aptly named ‘UPHEAVAL’, the exhibition opens a new chapter in the history of the Kunsthalle Mannheim. “Coming as a new director, it was important to me that the direction the Kunsthalle would take would be more diverse and global, stemming from different biographical perspectives,” he explains. “Diversifying the voices that speak within such an institution entails looking in different directions; and, therefore, to tell different stories,” Holten adds. His goal was to connect the power of art to the power of the people, through a curatorial change that would reflect the turmoil outside of the Kunsthalle and the community’s concerns, while establishing a fuller understanding of art history. “This is why the exhibition includes such a vast array of artists coming from different cultural and artistic backgrounds,” he points out.

The space of the Kunsthalle Mannheim is emblematic of Holten’s revision. “It is about a new way of engaging with space,” he tells us. The change is visually supported by new exhibition architecture: scaffolding traversing the three focal sections of the show forms walls, platforms, and ramps. “They are not defining spaces but open structures where you can create exhibition architecture within. Each stands up at an angle and is an expression of the unfinished, something that is still becoming,” explains Holten. The scaffolding acts as a framework for the different works of art, a connector that unifies them conceptually. The clash of mediums—painting, video, and sculpture—displayed was a conscious choice: “my intention was to show that you may use different formats to express a direction. If you aim for diversity, you’ll find it across different eras, realities, and types of works,” Holten shares.

The Piedmont artist has displayed 18 tons of stone chippings and marble sculptures cascading from the ceiling into the floor, filling the white space of the Florentine gallery. The art installation, titled ‘Emergences’, is a transposition of the ‘Root’la’ performance carried out by the artist in the Gioia quarry of Carrara, Italy. The artwork resembles a portion of the quarry’s ‘raveneto’, an area in which inutile rubble and chippings discarded during the quarrying are traditionally cast downhill, generating a rocky slope of marble waste. As part of the ‘Root’la’ performance, Viale reproduced the process, hurling down several previously acquired and deliberately varied marble sculptures, which resulted in a cracking and mutilation of the statues and damaging of their parts. Partially shapeless, the disfigured artefacts were retrieved and utilised for the monumental display at the gallery.

In her distinctive sculptural works, Muller explores concepts of vanity, self-reflection, and the relationship between individuals and their environment. The mirrored surface is a preferred material for the artist—its reflective qualities allow the viewer to become part of the work. The mirrored surface is formed around rectangular and cubic forms. Installed in various arrangements, the complexity of arrangement is seemingly referential to the complexity of self-reflection. Muller’s work explores the finiteness of contemporary visual culture—in an ever-connected world, there is a growing desire to share, reveal, and reflect upon the notion of self. Within her sculptural works, Muller explores this as a unique shared human experience—that individuals are simultaneously isolated yet connected by the need to visualize, interpret, and analyze their identity. Often paired with light and sound installations, the pieces explore the intangible and undefinable nature of identity.

According to Giovanni Garrone: “Hey there! I made a new series called “Beyond” that represents the effects of the global quarantine that lasts a longer period. Nature is taking over artificial spaces. Let me know what do you think and stay safe!”

More: Instagram h/t: boredpanda

The creative process has long been attributed to finding a sense of self-awareness and discovery. For Suárez, illustration serves as the opportunity to explore his sense of self, creating spaces imbued with a sense of calm and contemplation. Portraying singular individuals in sparse settings, the illustrator constructs subtle narratives around his solitary subjects. Figures appear motionless, seemingly waiting, in contemplation of one another or themselves. Though the illustrations depict individual scenes, each is connected through Suárez’s choice of complementing pastel tones. For the artist, the process of creativity is both a habitual and personally investigative one—“Each illustration represents a part of me, a part of a self-portrait,” He explains. The freedom of self-reflection afforded by the creative process is inherent throughout Suárez’s work; with each scene, he studies the subtle tendency of body language and the intricate details of human interaction and emotion.

The Shanghai-based conceptual artist frequently considers socio-political themes through installation, sculpture, and mixed media. In his recent performance piece, acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Zhen considers notions of fragility, balance, and the perceived limits of possibility. In the piece, a group of performers are mysteriously suspended in air, appearing to defy gravity as they float, mid-way through an apparent collapse. Whilst they remain poised at seemingly impossible angles, the piece has both a calming and dramatic edge. The role of the audience as participants is of parallel importance here; the inevitable questions of how, and why, the performers are solidified in this symbolic freezing of time is equally significant to the impact of the piece. While audience members are free to move around the performers in their permanent state of stasis, no signs of trickery are revealed, adding to its mysterious quality. It is an enigmatic display that questions the limitations of time, space, and the materiality of the human body.

Owing its longevity to Renaissance artists such as Caravaggio, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Rembrandt, chiaroscuro—the Italian term for the use of contrasts in light and shading across a pictorial work of art—is a stylistic device used to represent shape, form, and color, and to reveal subtle details while adding a three-dimensional quality to two-dimensional images. Today, chiaroscuro has found implementation across all media types—evolving alongside advancements in art and technology. With the creation of CGI, an unprecedented artistic control over light and shadow has become possible, with opportunities for light simulations that would otherwise be challenging to convey visually. IGNANT built on digital implementations of chiaroscuro to demonstrate how drama can be evoked by transforming the techniques of chiaroscuro into methods of digital storytelling.

Each of the pairings arrests us with a sculptural still life paired with a visualization of its light source as an abstracted architectural space. The space acts as a physical force… it interacts with the objects… staging the drama of the sceneWe played with inversions in the rendered images: in classical chiaroscuro, the subject enveloped in darkness is made to glow; creating a sense of space and depth through the contrast of light and shadows. IGNANT inverted this concept—the surrounding architecture informs the chiaroscuro in the representation of the subject; a compilation of objects in this case. The space acts as a physical force within the scene, rather than a secondary element—made of light and color, it interacts with the objects and declares a rather somber mood, staging the drama of the scene and setting the tone for the viewing experience.

Beginning as a student of political science and philosophy, the work of Issa takes multiple forms, often combining sculpture, text, photography, sound, and video. Whilst the mediums may be varied, one recurring characteristic is the cryptic, investigative nature of her works which typically encounter archaeology, ethnography, and history. In ‘Material’ (2012), Issa’s sculptural works explore the presence and function of ten historic public monuments, all known to the artist from childhood. In the texts accompanying her sculptures, Issa references the monuments but deliberately withholds any visual attribution. Instead, she casts them in new forms, questioning the relationship between the original object and its meaning whilst generating a bond between the monuments of the past and the sculptures of the present.

In ‘Lexicon’ (2012-ongoing), the historical dialogue in ‘Material’ is paralleled. Here, Issa looks to her own previous artworks as the original source to the work. The sculptures of ‘Lexicon’ are the embodied versions of previous works. Accompanied by text descriptions of the source artworks, this back and forth between object and re-appropriation is a clever articulation of one informing the other. In placing the sculptures and text in the context of a gallery, both the source works of art and their secondary sculptural counterparts are present. In ‘Heritage Studies’ (2015-ongoing), Issa continues her exploration of historical artifacts in a contemporary context. Comprised of minimalist sculptures, each piece is based on a historical vestige. The sculptures are paired with text which details the title and location of the source, though visually they bare no resemblance to their ancient counterpart. This fluidity of form is not an attempt to produce a timeline of history, but rather a vehicle by which to question the relevance of cultural artifacts today.

“For ‘Fuego’, we were asked to abstractly convey the world we live in: chaotic, ever-changing, and most importantly, comprised of many different forces and actors,” explains director of Crea Studio, Bruno Canales, to IGNANT. “Some are bouncier. Some are spikier. And the whole is always more interesting and sophisticated than the sum of its parts.” Canales acknowledges that the metaphor of unpredictability points towards the media and information climate we live in with regards to consumption: “It’s very chaotic,” he cautions. “The funny thing is that no one truly understands it. Formats change at an unprecedented rate, and they’re extremely short lived. There are more players in the arena than ever before, and no one knows what will happen. We are all venturing into the unknown, with anticipation and shrewdness,” he says. The vivid images and dynamic moving footage created by Crea Studio aim to abstractly represent this experience of constant evolution. “The project was an attempt at dissecting the current state of our digital reality,” continues Canales. “We wanted to emphasize the interaction between multiple entities to show their different characteristics, and that together they would create a whole that is larger—or more confusing and complex—than the sum of its parts.”