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“It’s easier to build LK-99 at home than it is to write a good internet regulation.”
Aram Bartholl’s solo exhibition “Package ready for pickup” opens at Kunsthalle Osnabrück (DE), kicking off the church-turned-gallery’s 30th anniversary celebrations. Highlighting material flows and environmental degradation, Berlin-based Bartholl presents e-waste recycling crates, QR code climate alerts, and chandeliers made from salvaged TVs. The highlight: a pop-up DHL package station will service customers for the duration of the exhibition, drawing non-art audiences to the show and its themes.
“Plastic World,” a show exploring the politics and aesthetics of the ubiquitous polymer-based material, opens at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Its 50 contributors include contemporary artists focused on ecological critique (Monira Al Qadiri, Pınar Yoldaş) as well as 20th century conceptualists (Christo & Jeanne Claude, Hans Hollein); from the latter camp, kinetic sculptor Otto Piene’s Anemones: An Air Aquarium (1976, image), has been reproduced, in all its inflatable glory.
Formafantasma’s solo exhibition “Oltre Terra. Why Wool Matters” opens at Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, offering insight into the Italian design studio’s ongoing research “on the history, ecology, and global dynamics of the production of wool.” Curated by Hanne Eide and presented in six sections featuring objects, paintings, textiles, photographs, and videos, the show unravels the complexities of co-domestication that, Formafantasma argue, “have transformed humans as much as humans have transformed sheep.”
In anticipation of the UN plastics treaty talks in Paris, Australian researchers at the Minderoo Foundation release the fist-ever plastics pollution weather forecast: Up to 48 kilograms of nylon, polyester, and car tire particles are estimated to blanket greater Paris every 24 hours. Based on 2015 studies rather than real-time data, the actual numbers are likely much higher, the researchers warn. Still, the forecast app “should sharpen the focus of negotiators,” hopes Minderoo’s Marcus Gover.
“Metaverse Landscapes” and “Uncomputables,” a pair of solo shows by New Zealander Simon Denny and Polish artist Agnieszka Kurant, open at Kunstverein Hannover (DE). The former features Denny drawing on landscape and abstract painting tropes to map the immaterial territory of crypto platforms in oil paintings (image: Metaverse Landscape 7: Somnium Space Small #138, 2023), while the latter showcases Kurant’s “quasi-alchemical transmutations” in sculpture (image: Post-Fordite 2021-22) and code.
London’s Lisson Gallery opens “Matter as Actor,” a group exhibition of 12 artists including Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Otobong Nkanga, Lucy Raven, and Zhan Wang that explore “mutable forms of matter as active agents in a more-than-human world.” Cohen Van Balen’s B/NdAlTaAu (2015), for example, reverses hard drives into precious metals, whereas Wang’s Match Openings (2023, image) reconfigures rock to “stimulate philosophical slippage between the natural and manmade worlds.”
“Grand Bal,” a retrospective of works by Ann Veronica Janssens, opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. Presenting works from the last three decades, the British artist offers a “visual and sonic choreography” of glass, fog, light, and video for visitors to traverse. Featured works include Golden Section (2009), suspended mirror foil and wrinkled PVC made with Belgian artist Michel François (image), and Blue Glass Roll 405 (2019), a series of cast glass sculptural forms (image foreground).
“NOw/here,” an exhibition foregrounding two new large format material study series by Gian Maria Tosatti, opens at Milan’s Pirelli HangarBicocca. In the first, the Italian artist presents rust and gold encrusted iron panels, using oxidation to “restore a sense of the passing of time” while evoking the gold leaf of Byzantine mosaics (image left: Portraits, 2023); the second, is austere fields composed in graphite and charcoal, which “move from the real to the imaginative dimension” (right: NOw/here, 2023).
“Holding Up The Sky,” a solo show by Caroline Monnet, opens at the Art Gallery of Burlington (AGB) in Ontario, Canada. Foregrounding her interests in indigenous geometry and the figure of the cube (image: It Cracks with Light, 2021), the Franco-Anishinaabe artist presents The Room (2023), a 3 square metre assembly of inscribed styrofoam. The installation, and another made of PVC pipes and conduits, rebukes “prescriptive colonial architecture … the urge to square and compartmentalize.“
“The Stutter of History,” a retrospective of singular German sculptor-photographer Thomas Demand, opens at Shanghai’s Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA). Known for his meticulous cardboard reconstructions of real-world scenes, the show depicts “scenarios from the margins of historical events” including a meditation on the banality of Edward Snowden’s Russian hotel room (2021), and the squalor of the Stasi offices (1995, image), after being ransacked by German citizens.
“Plastic can, in this light, be thought of as a medium, communicating with long-dead organisms to make their vital presence felt among the living.”
Featuring 12 international artists including Memo Akten, Ralf Baecker, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Anna Ridler, Tomás Saraceno, and Theresa Schubert, “New Elements” opens at Moscow’s New Tretyakov Gallery. Organized in thematic sections—Autographic World, Material Computation, and Digital Materiality—the works curated by Laboratoria Art&Science Foundation remind viewers of the physical dimension of information and “how to close the gap between data and the world.”
As California’s Salton Sea emerges as a hotspot for U.S. lithium mining, Vice’s Audrey Carleton digs into the pros and cons of turning the toxic lake into “Lithium Valley.” Whereas General Motors argues it could supply “a significant portion” of the lithium needed for its electric cars, helping curb climate change, locals fear the impacts. “I’m a huge advocate for doing things right,” states environmental justice organizer Miguel Hernandez. “Let’s assume it’s gonna be part of our communities. Then, let’s make lithium a good neighbor.”
A team of researchers led by material scientist Yoel Fink, have developed a digital fiber that can “sense, memorize, learn, and infer.” Moving beyond previous analogue fibres, it encodes discrete bits of information—the prototype (shirt) can store a “767-kilobit full-colour short movie file and a 0.48 megabyte music file.” It also tracks the body temperature of its wearer, and extrapolates what actitivies they are engaged in with high accuracy, bringing us one step closer to future ‘smart’ clothing that monitors health and vital signs.
The Chelsea branch of Dia Art Foundation reopens with newly commissioned works by American artist Lucy Raven. Two kinetic light sculptures, Casters X-2 and X-3 (2021), surveil the gallery with moving beams, while the immersive film installation Ready Mix (2021, image) documents the workings of an Idaho concrete plant. Capturing the churn of mineral aggregates and cement binders with optical and durational experiments, the 45-minute film expands on Raven’s preoccupation with resource extraction in the American West.
“I think it’s something about concrete’s heavy dumbness as a material that needs a form to be of use. There is musique concrète and concrete poetry. Why not concrete cinema, then?”
Inspired by how SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) is used to ferment kombucha, MIT and Imperial College London researchers have produced several proof of concept living materials. Drawing on the flexibility of lab-grown yeast, Timothy Lu (MIT) and Tom Ellis (Imperial College) have produced microbe cultures that detect environmental pollutants, and glow in the dark when exposed to certain hues of light. “We foresee a future where diverse materials could be grown at home or in local production facilities, using biology rather than resource-intensive centralized manufacturing,” says Lu.
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