Celebrating her pioneering “seer-like spaces and live surveillance situations,” the retrospective “Julia Scher: Maximum Security Society” opens at Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach (DE). The “essayistic survey” scans the American artist’s entire oeuvre of power and gaze-focused works, from Predictive Engineering, her live camera installations iterated at SFMOMA over the years (1993-2016), through Delta (Radio) and Planet Greyhound, both produced for her recent Kunsthalle Gießen exhibition (2022).
ZKM Karlsruhe opens “Renaissance 3.0,” a major celebration of “new alliances of art and science in the 21st century.” The last exhibition curated by ZKM’s late director Peter Weibel brings together 35 artistic positions by Tega Brain, James Bridle, Anna Dumitriu, Tomás Saraceno, and Saša Spačal that “open up multidisciplinary knowledge bases” and “new fields of research.” A visualization of such entanglements offers Wissensfeld (2023, image), Weibel’s final artistic collaboration.
”New Surroundings: Approaching the Untouchable,” an exhibition organized by Molior that delves deep into the digital sublime, opens at Montreal’s Livart. Curated by Nathalie Bachand, it features artists including Caroline Gagné, Olivia McGilchrist, François Quévillon (image: MÉTÉORES, 2017-18), and Sabrina Ratté presenting works in print, installation, video, and VR that explore extreme tensions between ”modified, reorganized, and augmented” digitality and nature.
Resurfacing fabled 18th century partially-dissected wax figures used in the study of anatomy, “Cere Anatomiche” opens at Fondazione Prada Milan, presenting four anatomical venuses and 72 drawings from the La Specola collection alongside a companion film by David Cronenberg. Entitled Four Unloved Women, Adrift on a Purposeless Sea, Experience the Ecstasy of Dissection, the Canadian director’s short dwells on how the figures’ uncanny “body language and facial expressions do not display pain or agony.”
The final instalment in a trilogy of exhibitions fixating on highrises, Jesse Colin Jackson’s “Mackenzie Place” opens at Toronto’s Pari Nadimi Gallery. Venturing to Hay River in the Northwest Territories, the Canadian artist shot a year of time-lapse photography atop Mackenzie Place—the near arctic town’s lone skyscraper. The resulting panoramic video tracks daily and seasonal flux and is bolstered by audio of oral histories about the mining town collected by anthropologist Lindsay Bell.
Foregrounding daylight and circadian rhythms in an era of deleterious screen time, “Lighten Up! On Biology and Time” opens at EPFL Pavillions in Lausanne (CH). Featured are works both evocative and therapeutic, “to remind us of the necessity of regular light exposure for a healthy life,” from artists including Kirell Benzi, Olafur Eliasson, and Anna Ridler. Helga Schmid presents a full-on sleep pod (image: Circadian Dreams, 2022), in which visitors laze and soak up LED lighting calibrated to optimize natural body phases.
Eliot Higgins, Founder and Creative Director of the investigative journalism group Bellingcat, rattles Twitter with a series of deepfakes depicting Donald Trump’s arrest. Created using the latest version of Midjourney in anticipation of the rumoured bust, the AI-generated images show dramatic (and dramatically convincing) scenes of the former U.S. president wrangling cops and being taken in. In the real world, the Manhattan grand jury investigating Trump has yet to vote on an indictment.
Generative art NFT platform fxhash announces a new feature that “enables collectors to collaborate in the creative process.” Entitled fx(params), the functionality allows artists to designate certain parameters (e.g. colour, geometry, velocity) within their code as adjustable for primary market buyers. Instead of leaving an NFT’s appearance entirely to chance, the collector can tweak the artist’s system to their liking before minting their copy (image: fx(params) interface for 1mpo$ter’s Smash, 2023).
“Thin Air,” the inaugural exhibition at The Beams London opens, featuring installations by artists 404.zero, James Clar, Robert Henke, Kimchi and Chips with Rosa Menkman, Matthew Schreiber, and S E T U P. Taking full advantage of the venue’s cavernous 5,100 square metres of high-ceilinged post-industrial space, the show presents large-scale immersive spectacle “at the boundaries of light, sound, and space” for visitors to soak up, explore, and lose themselves in (image: 404.zero 324, 2023).
