Latest news with #MuseumofContemporaryArt
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled
Very often, says Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibitions of his work – whether that work is a box of photographs or the huge, spiky webs of neon lights he is showing in Sydney - are shaped principally by the spaces where they are shown. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, he is particularly excited by the prospect of opening all the windows onto Circular Quay. Light will pour in, along with the sounds of the harbour. 'We are opening up the entire façade!' he enthuses. 'And because it is right on the quay, there are thousands of tourists walking up and down, boats coming and going, really a hustle and bustle outside which is extremely vital – and very unlike a museum.' Wyn Evans, 67, has represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, exhibited all over the world and is represented by galleries in seven cities, but this is his first solo show in Australia. His earliest works were in experimental film; he says he regarded them as essentially sculptures, but he has always played fast and loose with disciplinary categories. He also has a magpie's eye for influences and quotations. Having grown up speaking Welsh, he is particularly interested in forms of language reflecting specialist uses, from Morse code to dance notation, which frequently appear in his work. But he is seemingly curious about almost everything. In a single sentence, he touches on Chinese medicine, yoga, mathematics and optics. 'What I'm attempting to do is run all of that through a scrambling mill,' he says. 'If we somehow feed them all through each other, we arrive at something that is a kind of form.' This exhibition, mostly drawn from his own collection, focuses on his big neon works made over the last 10 years. Wyn Evans isn't worried about the neon being drained by all that daylight. 'It lessens the impact, which is what I'm looking for. We're not making a sci-fi movie with futuristic neons,' he says. 'It's about looking at light. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a neon in blazing white sunshine. It's so compromised it becomes almost tender: it becomes more poetic, becomes broken somehow as a force for consumerism or legibility.' I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say. The first neon signs, he says, were made as advertising. 'But artists have been working with neon since the 1930s. Then, with pop art and conceptualism, a lot of artists tried to popularise their materials so they were not working with bronze or marble, expensive rare materials, in order to somehow attach that value to the sculpted object.' Wyn Evans himself worked initially in film, he has said elsewhere, because it provided an escape route from that hierarchy of materials. In recent times, he has been making mobiles with broken car windows from wrecking yards: materials that cost nothing, but that allude both to the cracked The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp – one of his artistic beacons – and to the daily disaster of the smashed mobile phone, a real-world reference. 'We're all dealing with these sorts of screens; we're all confronting this the entire time.' There are plenty of scrambled signifiers everywhere in the exhibition, in fact, with Noh theatre as a dominant theme. Wyn Evans first went to Japan 37 years ago as a visiting professor at Kyushu University in the country's subtropical south, a tough area known for its mining and steel industries – Richard Serra, he says, has his works cast in its huge foundries – as well as palm trees and spectacularly fresh sushi. He loved it. 'It became urgent to me that whatever I did on this trip to Japan, I got to secure my next trip. And it's been like this ever since. I spend two months a year there.' During that time, he might see three Noh performances a week. For an experimental artist, Noh's prescribed rhythms and gestures are surely an ostensibly incongruous passion? 'It's not, actually,' he says. 'The aleatory aspects of Noh are vast. Nothing is rehearsed. There are no lighting cues. It's a bit like a marathon; there is an elasticity to it.' He glows as he recounts a visit to a Noh school where the master's 106-year-old mother not only made sweets but danced for the visitors. 'She's extraordinary, about this tall' – very small – 'bent over double, you have to fight off the tears, you know.' It should be added that today, as usual, he is wearing Japanese traditional dress: a snow-white kimono and trousers. Old ladies in the supermarket often ask him about it, he says. 'I say it's my workwear.' The titles of his work point towards this source of inspiration, among others, but the works themselves don't spell it out; if someone looks up Noh on the internet and ends up watching a snippet of this ancient, precise and poetic blend of theatre and dance, that would be 'absolutely great'. If not, fine. 'I don't think Cerith is a didactic artist in the slightest,' says curator Lara Strongman. 'I don't think he's thinking this is my meaning and here you are. I think he's the opposite of that, that he argues for slippage, for mutability, for the different possibilities coming in from different people, much as the work manifests the idea of fragments of things taken from here and there.' Everything slants Japanese, however, in the exhibition's design. Stepping stones like those found in traditional gardens lead the viewer, providing different angles and points of view on the works. 'You have to position yourself here, then there, to take another step,' says Strongman. 'It's a way of really grounding yourself, this sense of thinking about your own passage through time and space as you walk.' Following the path, the works loom in your way. 'So you have to stop and think about them. You get a real sense of your own bodily presence; you can see through the works to other works and your view is changing the whole time. You're aware of yourself in a way we often aren't, because we're mediating our lives through a tiny screen.' The materials may be obviously industrial but, she says, 'it's the most analogue exhibition I've ever worked on. It's a show that asks you to spend some human time with it.' Loading Words, whether it be a wall full of Marcel Proust's work rendered in Japanese or one of his elaborately flourished titles, are ostensibly central to this work. Wyn Evans particularly loves a homonym; one show he did in Britain was called Cite/Sight/Site. 'They sound the same, but you can prise them open to find a myriad of associations and construct this little model where you create these interstitial spaces between' – he fishes for two sufficiently disparate elements – 'a quote from Elizabeth Bishop and the plan of the Alhambra.' He says he thinks of language and communication as distinct materials, on a par with light, air and time, even suggesting as a title for this piece 'For want of a better word' to represent the way he chews over them. 'I'm forever, in a sense, converting thoughts into language, but I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say.' Loading It is thus not entirely surprising when he says he would prefer not to have any titles at all. 'Whatever doesn't embarrass me kind of gets through but, if it were up to me, I would call everything Untitled.' He feels no obligation to explain himself. 'They can buy you that red herring space in order to come in with something from underneath,' he says. 'But there is a certain resistance in the work also. I don't lose sleep over people not understanding it. Children are perfectly happy running around, just enjoying the awe of it. And I try not to be judgmental or to take it personally if people don't like it. Why should I play by someone else's rules? I'm not a politician, after all. I'm an artist.'
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
If it was up to this artist, all his creations would be Untitled
Very often, says Cerith Wyn Evans, exhibitions of his work – whether that work is a box of photographs or the huge, spiky webs of neon lights he is showing in Sydney - are shaped principally by the spaces where they are shown. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, he is particularly excited by the prospect of opening all the windows onto Circular Quay. Light will pour in, along with the sounds of the harbour. 'We are opening up the entire façade!' he enthuses. 'And because it is right on the quay, there are thousands of tourists walking up and down, boats coming and going, really a hustle and bustle outside which is extremely vital – and very unlike a museum.' Wyn Evans, 67, has represented Wales at the Venice Biennale, exhibited all over the world and is represented by galleries in seven cities, but this is his first solo show in Australia. His earliest works were in experimental film; he says he regarded them as essentially sculptures, but he has always played fast and loose with disciplinary categories. He also has a magpie's eye for influences and quotations. Having grown up speaking Welsh, he is particularly interested in forms of language reflecting specialist uses, from Morse code to dance notation, which frequently appear in his work. But he is seemingly curious about almost everything. In a single sentence, he touches on Chinese medicine, yoga, mathematics and optics. 'What I'm attempting to do is run all of that through a scrambling mill,' he says. 'If we somehow feed them all through each other, we arrive at something that is a kind of form.' This exhibition, mostly drawn from his own collection, focuses on his big neon works made over the last 10 years. Wyn Evans isn't worried about the neon being drained by all that daylight. 'It lessens the impact, which is what I'm looking for. We're not making a sci-fi movie with futuristic neons,' he says. 'It's about looking at light. To me, there is nothing more beautiful than seeing a neon in blazing white sunshine. It's so compromised it becomes almost tender: it becomes more poetic, becomes broken somehow as a force for consumerism or legibility.' I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say. The first neon signs, he says, were made as advertising. 'But artists have been working with neon since the 1930s. Then, with pop art and conceptualism, a lot of artists tried to popularise their materials so they were not working with bronze or marble, expensive rare materials, in order to somehow attach that value to the sculpted object.' Wyn Evans himself worked initially in film, he has said elsewhere, because it provided an escape route from that hierarchy of materials. In recent times, he has been making mobiles with broken car windows from wrecking yards: materials that cost nothing, but that allude both to the cracked The Large Glass by Marcel Duchamp – one of his artistic beacons – and to the daily disaster of the smashed mobile phone, a real-world reference. 'We're all dealing with these sorts of screens; we're all confronting this the entire time.' There are plenty of scrambled signifiers everywhere in the exhibition, in fact, with Noh theatre as a dominant theme. Wyn Evans first went to Japan 37 years ago as a visiting professor at Kyushu University in the country's subtropical south, a tough area known for its mining and steel industries – Richard Serra, he says, has his works cast in its huge foundries – as well as palm trees and spectacularly fresh sushi. He loved it. 'It became urgent to me that whatever I did on this trip to Japan, I got to secure my next trip. And it's been like this ever since. I spend two months a year there.' During that time, he might see three Noh performances a week. For an experimental artist, Noh's prescribed rhythms and gestures are surely an ostensibly incongruous passion? 'It's not, actually,' he says. 'The aleatory aspects of Noh are vast. Nothing is rehearsed. There are no lighting cues. It's a bit like a marathon; there is an elasticity to it.' He glows as he recounts a visit to a Noh school where the master's 106-year-old mother not only made sweets but danced for the visitors. 'She's extraordinary, about this tall' – very small – 'bent over double, you have to fight off the tears, you know.' It should be added that today, as usual, he is wearing Japanese traditional dress: a snow-white kimono and trousers. Old ladies in the supermarket often ask him about it, he says. 'I say it's my workwear.' The titles of his work point towards this source of inspiration, among others, but the works themselves don't spell it out; if someone looks up Noh on the internet and ends up watching a snippet of this ancient, precise and poetic blend of theatre and dance, that would be 'absolutely great'. If not, fine. 'I don't think Cerith is a didactic artist in the slightest,' says curator Lara Strongman. 'I don't think he's thinking this is my meaning and here you are. I think he's the opposite of that, that he argues for slippage, for mutability, for the different possibilities coming in from different people, much as the work manifests the idea of fragments of things taken from here and there.' Everything slants Japanese, however, in the exhibition's design. Stepping stones like those found in traditional gardens lead the viewer, providing different angles and points of view on the works. 'You have to position yourself here, then there, to take another step,' says Strongman. 'It's a way of really grounding yourself, this sense of thinking about your own passage through time and space as you walk.' Following the path, the works loom in your way. 'So you have to stop and think about them. You get a real sense of your own bodily presence; you can see through the works to other works and your view is changing the whole time. You're aware of yourself in a way we often aren't, because we're mediating our lives through a tiny screen.' The materials may be obviously industrial but, she says, 'it's the most analogue exhibition I've ever worked on. It's a show that asks you to spend some human time with it.' Loading Words, whether it be a wall full of Marcel Proust's work rendered in Japanese or one of his elaborately flourished titles, are ostensibly central to this work. Wyn Evans particularly loves a homonym; one show he did in Britain was called Cite/Sight/Site. 'They sound the same, but you can prise them open to find a myriad of associations and construct this little model where you create these interstitial spaces between' – he fishes for two sufficiently disparate elements – 'a quote from Elizabeth Bishop and the plan of the Alhambra.' He says he thinks of language and communication as distinct materials, on a par with light, air and time, even suggesting as a title for this piece 'For want of a better word' to represent the way he chews over them. 'I'm forever, in a sense, converting thoughts into language, but I'm in want of a better word to overcome latent blockages, that broad dissatisfaction that I'm unable to express what I want to say.' Loading It is thus not entirely surprising when he says he would prefer not to have any titles at all. 'Whatever doesn't embarrass me kind of gets through but, if it were up to me, I would call everything Untitled.' He feels no obligation to explain himself. 'They can buy you that red herring space in order to come in with something from underneath,' he says. 'But there is a certain resistance in the work also. I don't lose sleep over people not understanding it. Children are perfectly happy running around, just enjoying the awe of it. And I try not to be judgmental or to take it personally if people don't like it. Why should I play by someone else's rules? I'm not a politician, after all. I'm an artist.'
Hypebeast
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Nadya Tolokonnivo to Stage 10-Day Performance from Inside Prison Cell
Summary In 2012, punk rock bandPussy Riottook to Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour for a sub-minute performance of their song 'Punk Prayer.' While the piece has since beenheraldedas one of the best artworks of the 21st century, the event landedNadya Tolokonnikova, the group's co-founder, in a Russian prison for two years on the grounds of 'hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.' Now, over a decade later, Tolokonnikova is going back behind bars, but this time, it's on her own terms. For 10 days, the Russian conceptual artist will confine herself to a steel replica of a Russian jail cell as part ofPOLICE STATE, her debut durational performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. The installation, which takes part in MOCA's Wonmi WAREHOUSE Program, will transform the space into a stark, immersive panopticon, where viewers will be able to watch her via security camera feed and peepholes throughout the museum. Inside the cell, Tolokonnikova will perform a range of audio works, from haunting lullabies to abrasive soundscapes. Drawing from her own time in the penal system, the piece merges personal history with larger themes of control, surveillance and psychological endurance. 'The cell becomes a paradox: a site of confinement and liberation, despair and creativity,' the museum described. 'Through this interplay, Tolokonnikova invites the audience to grapple with the mechanisms of oppression while seeking the sparks of hope that resist it.' The performance confronts the brutal realities of confinement, and in true Pussy Riot fashion, examines the relationship between structures of authority and their impacts on the human capacity for STATEwill be on view from June 4 through Jun 15 at MOCA. Head to the museum'swebsitefor more information. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles250 S Grand Ave,Los Angeles, CA 90012
Axios
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
MCA Chicago drops new Sueños Music Fest merch
A Chicago Latina artist is marking this weekend's Sueños Music Festival with a design for the Museum of Contemporary Art. Driving the news: Esperanza Rosas, aka Runsy, has created a shirt for this weekend's festival that will be for sale exclusively at the MCA starting Tuesday. Zoom in: Runsy is also the name of the character the artist incorporates into her art — the design incorporates the playful spirit of the festival with a Ferris wheel. The character's gleeful expression represents the Chicano concept of "Smile Now, Cry Later," the artist says.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Pussy Riot Artist Is Back in Prison (This Time, by Design)
Nadya Tolokonnikova, the founder of the feminist art collective Pussy Riot, has long experienced the threat — and reality — of government surveillance. After the group's anti-Putin, balaclava-wearing, punk-inspired performance at Moscow's main Orthodox Cathedral in 2012, she spent nearly two years in Russian prison. On her release, she was tracked by the police. Since 2021, the year when she was declared a 'foreign agent' by Russia's ministry of justice, she has lived in exile, bouncing from city to city in what she calls a state of 'geo-anonymity.' Next month, the outspoken Russian activist and artist will be subject to another kind of surveillance — in a jail of her own making. From June 5 to 14, Tolokonnikova, 35, will be spending her days in a corrugated-steel replica of a decrepit Russian prison cell, installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Los Angeles. She will eat, drink and use the toilet in her 'cell,' and will perform some of her aggressive noise-music rage-screeds there. Visitors can watch her through peep holes and a security camera feed. 'It's my first durational performance,' she said, using a term for the stamina-testing genre popularized by the artist Marina Abramovic, who is a close friend. Tolokonnikova was sipping tea at a long, pink-rimmed table in the shape of a Russian Orthodox cross — her own design — in a temporary studio in Los Angeles. 'I'm used to the intensity of short outbursts of energy.' The MOCA show, 'Police State,' is in one sense a reckoning with her incarceration, during which she went on three hunger strikes and published an open letter describing 'slavery-like conditions.' She recalls how women in her penal colony were forced to work 17-hour shifts in a sewing factory at risk of injuries and even death. She has since tried TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation), anti-depressants and psychotherapy to process the experience, with mixed results. 'For me personally talk therapy didn't work — I don't love to talk about my feelings. But I'm interested in renegotiating trauma, rewriting your own personal history to bring your creativity into the mix,' she said. 'This is art therapy, basically.' At another level, the museum show is a condemnation of carceral conditions and human rights violations in her homeland and beyond. The idea came, she said, after she saw a concrete-box replica of the brutal solitary cell used to confine her friend and mentor, the Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison in 2024. Tolokonnikova called this installation, created by his younger brother, Oleg, 'one of the best works of public art and political art I've seen. 'The police state isn't a distant experience for me and those I care about,' she added in her soft-spoken cadences — the message more pointed than the delivery. 'Russia has more than a thousand political prisoners, whose only fault was to say that the emperor is naked. The best people of Russia are behind bars.' Since 'Police State' is debuting during a time of high-profile detentions and deportations by the Trump administration, it is bound to be read as a critique of this government's actions as well. 'I think she's really speaking to the current political moment,' said Alex Sloane, the associate curator of MOCA, who is developing the project. 'We can't see these things — the human rights abuses, government overreach and the targeting of specific communities — as being isolated to Russia any more.' Or as Tolokonnikova quipped at the studio: 'Authoritarianism is like a sexually transmitted disease — you have it before you know it.' She went on to describe the rise of a 'tech-bro oligarchy' in the United States and rapidly shifting international alliances, which she said could impact her safety. 'Travel has become increasingly dangerous for me, mostly because I was put on this international wanted list by Russia at the start of the year, but also because of Trump becoming more friendly with Putin.' She pulled out a bag of red foam clown noses, offered me one and popped one on herself. She broke out laughing and suddenly looked like a goofy teenager, her black plaid skirt giving strong schoolgirl vibes. 'Imagine being so serious and worrying about your safety all the time. Put the clown nose on and everything is just fine,' she said, noting that she originally used the noses to 'troll' her clown-fearing husband, John Caldwell. This tension between gravity and levity, and a razor-sharp sense of humor, infuses many of her artworks. While she continues to organize some collective street actions under the Pussy Riot rubric, she has recently been showing painting and sculpture, or more accurately objects akin to them, in gallery and museum settings under her own name. Her first solo museum show, 'RAGE,' opened at OK Linz in Austria last summer. This month, she has one exhibition at Nagel Draxler gallery in Berlin, 'Wanted,' and another at Honor Fraser in Los Angeles, 'Punk's Not Dead.' And surrounding the mock prison cell at MOCA, she is installing her artworks and sculptural elements, including a gumball machine she's filling with colorful balls marked with the names of poisons, like Polonium and Novichok, which have been used on Russian dissidents. The centerpiece of 'Punk's Not Dead' is a stainless steel slide that you might imagine on a playground if its surface did not resemble a supersized cheese grater. The show also contains several of her new 'Icons' paintings, embellished with medieval Cyrillic calligraphy, enigmatic crosses and other invented symbols of devotion. 'Punk's Not Dead' began with a January residency at Honor Fraser, where Tolokonnikova gave an earsplitting performance as part of the group Pussy Riot Siberia. Her musical instruments were aluminum riot shields that she 'played' by scratching them with brass knuckles and other tools and carving them with hearts and anarchy signs. The riot shields now hang in the gallery like a vandalized series by Donald Judd. The gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch, who gave her a pop-up show in 2023, said he is not surprised that Tolokonnikova is increasingly using galleries and museums as a media platform. 'From the very beginning she's been an artist,' he said. 'When Pussy Riot did their famous performance at the Moscow cathedral, they were not a group of trained musicians but really performance artists.' Now, he added, 'you have this integration of performance, art, activism and this charismatic persona — she wraps it all together.' Still, it hasn't been easy for Tolokonnikova to find venues for her art. 'Someone told me the art world is harder to navigate than Russian jail,' she said, smiling at the thought. But so far, she said, 'having people tell me no or ghosting me is annoying' but nothing like having 'a squad of riot police invade your exhibit.' A more substantial challenge: bringing something of the live-wire intensity of street performance into the museum world. 'It's much more explosive and abrasive to perform something for 40 seconds, when you have to deliver a message before you're dragged by the feet by the police,' she acknowledged. 'But after I got out of jail it became almost impossible for me to make work in the same way because I was under police surveillance 24-7 and my phone was tapped. 'I didn't want to get killed,' she added, 'so I was pushed into the studio work.' She said she's learning from artists like Abramovic, Valie Export and Yoko Ono, who have made provocative work within safe spaces. She also speaks admiringly of the 'total installations' of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who would go so far as to recreate grimy Soviet-era apartments in the name of art. Her first solo gallery show, at Deitch's gallery in 2023, featured the multipart project, 'Putin's Ashes.' Outraged by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, she invited women who shared her anger — Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian — to join her in the desert for a ritualistic burning of a portrait of the Russian president. At the end of the performance, documented in a short film, she deposited the ashes into glass vials. Deitch showed both the film and vials, which she had shrouded, using her prison-era sewing skills, in fake fur. The exhibition prompted the Russian government to file a new criminal charge against her for insulting religious believers; placement on a 'most wanted criminals' list and a warrant for her 'arrest in absentia' followed. 'My job for quite a while, the last 15 years of my activism, is to hurt Vladimir Putin as much as I humanly can,' she told MSNBC'S Lawrence O'Donnell, 'and the instrument of my war is my art. We know that he's incredibly superstitious, so he might actually be afraid.' When 'Putin's Ashes' traveled to a gallery in Santa Fe, she experimented with recreating some elements of a Russian prison cell and hung out there for a while on opening night, using a homemade shiv to carve some graffiti into a wooden table. As an introvert, albeit one with exhibitionist tendencies, she said she found it a convenient way to avoid small talk with the crowd. In her MOCA cell she will be installing some drawings made by Russian political prisoners, including Valeria Zotova, who is serving a six-year prison sentence after being accused of planning a terrorist attack. Tolokonnikova will also play a keyboard and other instruments, layered with audio tracks from actual prisons. 'The music is going to be at times very gentle and beautiful and reminiscent of my childhood,' she said, explaining that she will sing lullabies that remind her of her mother, who died last summer in Russia. At other times, 'there are going to be screams of pain, or screams of rage, screams of power.' She is rehearsing the music, but not training physically, for the project. 'It's not as strict as Marina's performance,' she said, referring to Abramovic's physically punishing 2010 durational work, 'The Artist Is Present,' at the Museum of Modern Art. 'It's not about putting physical constraints on my body — I've done that enough in an actual prison environment. Yes, I can go without food for 10 days,' she said. 'To repeat it in a museum environment to me would almost look like a gimmick. What's interesting to me is to be this living and breathing heart of the installation.'
