Exhibitions at the New Museum

"Museum as Hub: Antikhana" Jul 10, 2008–Sep 21, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:32:55 -0500

Guest curator William Wells, Director, Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo

The concept of neighborhood in Cairo stretches far beyond a simple geographical designation on the city map. Cairo’s neighborhoods are urban structures that have incorporated the specific characteristics of their inhabitants in their identities. Nestled in the heart of downtown Cairo, the Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art shares its most immediate surroundings with the neglected nineteenth-century Said Halim’s Palace, numerous car mechanics’ garages, coffee shops, greengrocers, and carpenters. Downtown Cairo amalgamates architectural patterns of various eras, modifying and sometimes obscuring their original characteristics. Despite the urban disorder, this incongruity of styles and histories pave the way for an unusual and intriguing mixture of identity. Throughout the years, this neighborhood called Antikhana has experienced a symbiotic coexistence between artists, writers, intellectuals, and conservative male workers from the “lanes,” the streets surrounding the Townhouse Gallery.

In their works, artists Susan Hefuna, Ayman Ramadan, Jan Rothuizen, and Tarek Zaki capture this fusion of different historical eras, architectures, and inhabitants by using physical objects and the actual surroundings of the neighborhood. They integrate individuals, research different aspects of the social structure, and reload the trivial situations of everyday life with deeper meanings. The artists look at the neighborhood as a symbol, a microcosm of Egyptian society with its inherent contradictions. They act consciously as mediators between the obvious and subliminal perceptions of more profound social meanings.

A partnership of five international arts organizations, Museum as Hub is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration established to enhance our understanding of contemporary art. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events. Initiated by the New Museum in 2006, the partnership includes Insa Art Space (Seoul, South Korea); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico); Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo, Egypt); and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).

Banner image:
Antikhana, Cairo
Courtesy Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo

Thursday, July 10, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"After Nature" Jul 17, 2008–Sep 21, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:37:17 -0500

"After Nature" surveys a landscape of wilderness and ruins, darkened by uncertain catastrophe. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an epic of humanity and nature coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters. Bringing together an international and multigenerational group of artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, the exhibition depicts a universe in which humankind is being eclipsed and new ecological systems struggle to find a precarious balance.

The artists in "After Nature" share an interest in archaic traditions and a fascination for personal cosmologies and visionary languages. It is a peculiar form of magic realism that emerges from the works on view, coupled with a renewed belief in art as a tool for mythmaking.

Departing from the fictional documentaries of filmmaker Werner Herzog, "After Nature" assembles a collection of prophetic images and outlandish forms—a cabinet of curiosities that pieces together a fragmented and unreliable encyclopedia. In his 1999 manifesto, Herzog described a truth liberated from fact: a poetic, ecstatic truth that "is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination." The works in "After Nature" aspire to such: folding fact into fiction, the exhibition brings together artworks that can be interpreted as relics, idols, and documents. Temporally detached from any point of orientation, the exhibition emerges as a study of the present from a place in the future. A requiem for a vanishing planet, "After Nature" is a feverish examination of an extinct world that strangely resembles our own.

The exhibition includes work by Allora and Calzadilla, Paweł Althamer, Micol Assaël, Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Roberto Cuoghi, Bill Daniel, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Nathalie Djurberg, Reverend Howard Finster, Nancy Graves, Werner Herzog, Robert Kusmirowski, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Erik van Lieshout, Diego Perrone, Thomas Schütte, Dana Schutz, Tino Sehgal, August Strindberg, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Artur Żmijewski.

Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over ninety works.

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Thursday, July 17, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"2008 Altoids Award" Jun 25, 2008–Oct 12, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:01:39 -0500

The 2008 Altoids Award is made possible by Altoids, The Curiously Strong Mints.

An innovative exploration of American emerging art, the Altoids Award is granted biennially to four artists nominated and selected by a panel comprised entirely of other artists. Winners in 2008 are each given a $25,000 prize as well as the opportunity to collaborate on this exhibition at the New Museum, providing their earliest exposure to a broad, international audience.

The unique selection process recognizes the role artists have in the development and support of one another’s careers. In 2007, ten artists were asked to each nominate up to five emerging artists. The forty-six nominees were reviewed by a jury comprised of Paul McCarthy, Cindy Sherman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, all well known for their own groundbreaking artwork and commitment to encouraging new talent. They selected Ei Arakawa, Lauren Kelley, Michael Patterson-Carver, and Michael Stickrod as the winners of the first Altoids Award.

These artists are storytellers; they explore human relationships and the ways in which people convene based on identity, collaboration, family ties, and politics. From Ei Arakawa’s energized and unkempt performances to Michael Patterson-Carver’s humanizing protest drawings, and from Lauren Kelley’s socially conscious stop-motion animations to Michael Stickrod’s intimate edits of family footage, the pieces on view capture an openness that calls for engagement. The four artists produce work that is disparate, but when exhibited together it composes a vivid picture of American art today, and a complex, unsettling view of America itself.

This exhibition is organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, and Jarrett Gregory, Curatorial Assistant.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008 | 12:00 AM

"Jeffrey Inaba" Dec 01, 2007–Nov 09, 2008

NewMuseum.org — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 11:42:55 -0600

Jeffrey Inaba uses a radical approach to research and design to make opaque information come alive. Inaba has created Donor Hall for the New Museum’s lower-level hallway, a bold, immersive graphic environment that identifies and quantifies public and private philanthropy around the world. The presentation is based on research on dozens of organizations—from sports, media, politics, education, religion, finance, paramilitary, and non-governmental organizations—and tracks the amounts of money various organizations donate to culture.

INABA and C-Lab have culled publicly available information about contributions to arts and culture around the world from the past three years, drawn from sources such as tax filings, corporate annual reports, newspapers, and research papers, indicating the contours of global generosity. Donor Hall covers the walls along the path leading to the Museum’s theater. The graphics convey information via traditional pie charts, in addition to images of actual pies, as well as pie-shaped foodstuffs, including hamburgers, sushi rolls, cheese wheels, and pizza. Superimposed on the charts are international pictograph-style depictions of animals associated with prosperity. Also imbedded in the imagery is hypertext drawn from classical American literature. By organizing allusive, disparate, and incongruous bits of data into legible interfaces, Inaba makes a world driven by such data and sustenance more open to understanding and change.

Banner image:
Jeffrey Inaba / INABA / C-Lab, Donor Hall (detail), 2007
Digital print on vinyl
Dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist

Saturday, December 1, 2007 | 12:00 AM