Hou Hanru on the 5th Auckland Triennial: If you were to live here...

The 5th Auckland Triennial, If you were to live here... opens on 10 May. Curator Hou Hanru spoke to  the New Zealand Herald's Adam Gifford about his triennial as a platform for socially-engaged art and imagineering. "The Triennial is a space for producing new aesthetic forms and social spaces," he says. "It is not only an occasion to see art, but an interaction between artists, people and the city to envisage possible futures." Read more...
Image: Do-Ho Suh, A Perfect Home: The Bridge Project (2010), synchronised four-monitor animated slide presentation, 5th Auckland Triennial, If you were to live here...

Final week for Whitney Bedford's THIS for THAT exhibition

Whitney Bedford's THIS for THAT exhibition enters its final week at Starkwhite, closing Friday 3 May at 6pm. You can read an exhibition review here.

Image; Whitney Bedford, Bogeyman Landscape (smaller), ink and oil on panel, 22 x 26 inches, 2013. Photo: Evan Bedford

Director of 2014 Gwangju Biennale announced

Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan has been named as the director of the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. Morgan was appointed as The Daskalopoulos Curator by the London museum in 2010 and has specialised in international art focusing on non-Western regions such as the Middle East and South America.
Image: Jessica Morgan

Turner Prize shortlist announced

David Shrigley, Tino Sehgal, Laure Prouvost and Lynnette Yiadom-Boakye are the contenders for this year's Turner Prize. Read more...
Image: David Shrigley's I'm Dead, 2010

Signing on for team Australasia

IMA director Robert Leonard has announced that he will step down at the end of the year to take up the position of Senior Curator at City Gallery Wellington. A self-confessed promiscuous collaborator, Leonard has given the IMA increased visibility by touring and co-producing exhibitions. "The IMA is a small gallery but we have achieved great things by working with others by pooling resources," he says. "I have developed great working relationships with other players throughout New Zealand and Australia. I now see myself as an Australasian-based curator. I want to maintain and mine these relationships in the future."

Back on the radar

We slipped off the radar during a visit to Shanghai where we ran into the great firewall of China. But we'll resume regular posts tomorrow.

A season of Cambodian art in New York

In April and May New York will host over 125 artists for Season of Cambodia, a citywide celebration of the country's arts and culture. The event includes IN RESIDENCE, a visual arts program inviting New York audiences to engage with the work of 10 artists and a curator. Anchored around two-month residencies for each of the participating artists, IN RESIDENCE also includes installations, screenings and open studios at institutions including MOMA, the Guggenheim and The Asia Society Museum.

Recently, the organisers of IN RESIDENCE, Leeza Ahmady and Erin Gleeson, spoke to Art Radar about the vision behind their program and their hopes for the legacy of the event back in Cambodia. Read more...
Image: Svay Sareth, Mon Boulet, 2012, performance documentation

Shigeru Ban's cardboard cathedral takes shape in Christchurch

The temporary cardboard cathedral designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban for the city of Christchurch should be completed this month. Made of cardboard tubes and covered with polycarbonate sheets to keep it watertight and allow daylight into the building, Ban's 9700-square feet, A-frame sanctuary will seat 700 worshippers providing a home for Anglicans while their quake-damaged cathedral is demolished and replaced. 

Three design options for a new cathedral have been released for public feedback: rebuilding the original cathedral, building a traditional timber construction or constructing a contemporary structure. Two public forums will be held this month and views on the designs will will be sought until early May when Church Property Trustees will select their preferred option.
Images: Construction of Shigeru Ban's cardboard cathedral underway in Christchurch (top); model of the temporary cathedral (bottom)

This week at Starkwhite

This for That by Los Angeles-based artist Whitney Bedford continues this week at Starkwhite to 4 May. You can read our press release here.

Image: Whitney Bedford, Orpheus towards Manukau, ink and oil on panel, 18 x 24 in., 2013. Photo credit: Evan Bedford

Sydney's symbolic gift to Christchurch sits in storage while site negotiations continue

Eight years after Neil Dawson's Fanfare (dubbed the disco ball) was suspended from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to celebrate the arrival of the 2005 New Year, it will be reinstalled in Christchurch - that is when the location has been agreed upon. SCAPE Biennale director Deborah McCormick, says it should be sited beside a freeway at the Northern entrance to the city as it requires an expansive space and would create a striking welcome to the city. Dawson also favours the freeway site where he hopes it will "become a celebration and an icon of the dynamic, cultural city we are building," but the Christchurch City Council says other sites should be investigated, including the city centre and the airport.

Fanfare was gifted to Christchurch by the city of Sydney in 2007, but has remained in storage as the search for a site began. "The Council had no idea this gift would be so symbolic," said Sydney's Lord Mayor Clover Moore. "It feels appropriate that this centerpiece of our celebrations should return to New Zealand to help inspire the people of Christchurch as they rebuild."  
Image: Neil Daswon's Fanfare (2004), Sydney Harbour Bridge. Photo: Russell Hoore

The Guggenheim Museum turns to Asia with a new initiative

In partnership with the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation (and with a USD10 million Foundation grant), the Guggenheim Museum has launched a project to commission works by contemporary artists born in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, to feature in three exhibitions between 2014 and 2017. The project follows two previous collaborations between the Guggenheim and the Robert H. N. Ho Foundation  - the exhibitions Cai Guo-Chiang:  I want to Believe (2008) and The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1869.
Image: Cai Guo-Qiang, I want to Believe, installation view, Guggenheim Museum, 2008

American art museums follow the money trail to Asia

The makeup of trustees on the boards of many high-profile American museums is changing as they search the globe for patrons with deeps pockets. The addition of Russian and Latin American billionaires like Leohnid Mikhelson, Vladmir Potanin (or their associates like Roman Abramovich's partner Dasha Zhukova), Alejando Santo Domingo, Eugenio Lopez is a fairly commonplace, but these days the money trail is also leading them to Asia with New York's Asia Society leading the way. Twelve of the Society's forty-five trustees are non-American, hailing from China, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, and in 2011 it named Hong Kong property billionaire Ronnie Chan as co-chair of the board, which also includes Indian billionaire Jamshyd N Godrej.

Image: Ronnie Chan

Whitney Bedford presents her second solo show at Starkwhite

This for That by Los Angeles-based artist Whitney Bedford, begins today at Starkwhite and runs to 4 May. You can read our press release here.

Image: Whitney Bedford, The Californian, ink and oil on panel, 28 x 37 in., 2013. Photo credit: Evan Bedford

A Kaldor exhibition where the sculptures go home at night

John Kaldor, the art patron/collector renowned for bringing art superstars to Australia, says his latest exhibition, 13 Rooms, will be "the most exciting exhibition of the decade." Described by Hans Ulrich Obrist as an exhibition like a sculpture gallery where all the sculptures go home at night, Kaldor Public Art Project #27 brings together 13 international artists in a group exhibition of living sculpture within 13 purpose-built rooms in Sydney's historic Pier 2/3.

However, the show won't offer the artists themselves. They are using over 100 local actors, artists and dancers, working in shifts around the clock, to stage their works. Obrist compares this approach to contemporary performance art to opera or ballet where work can live on into the future as repertoire, liberating the artist in the process. "In developing time-based art which is not necessarily dependent on [the artists] performing, it's not really a performance, it's more like time-based sculpture."
Image: Simon Fujiwara's Future/Perfect 2012 in 13 Rooms

MOMA amps up its program with sound art

MOMA is planning its first big show devoted to sound art. Soundings: A Contemporary Score will feature the work of 16 artists including Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz who has taken the score of a symphony composed by Pavel Haas in 1943, while he was in a Nazi concentration camp, and re-imagined it with just one cello and one viola playing their intermittent parts. Melbourne artist Marco Fusinato is also in the lineup with 5 abstract drawings based on an orchestral score by Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer and theorist who died in 2001. Read more...
Image: Richard Garet's sound installation Before Me (2012)

Sonic art through an act of destruction

Three percussionists are tearing up LA's Gallery 303 in piece choreographed by artist Doug Aitken, who is known for his fascination with the interplay of sound and architecture. The tear-down coincides with the planned demolition of the gallery, but it is also intended to work as a sonic universe that passers by would stumble across, causing them to question the nature of an exhibition and the role of a gallery, an uncertainty embraced by Aitken. Read more...
Image: two men percussively deconstruct Gallery 303 in Doug Aitken's 100 YRS, PART 2

Director of the National Gallery of Singapore named

Eugene Tan has been named as the director of the National Gallery of Singapore, which opens in 2015. He is currently program director of special projects at Singapore's Economic Development Board where he is leading the conversion of the old Gillman Barracks into a new art hub. Tan has extensive curatorial experience, including as curator of Singapore's Venice pavilion in 2005 and co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006.
Image: Eugene Tan

Hans Ulrich Obrist's latest house-museum project in Sao Paulo's Glass House

Thirty artists and architects including Tamar Guimaraes, Isaac Julien, Olafur Eliasson and Norman Foster have created new works for an exhibition in Sao Paulo's Glass House in a homage to Brazilian Modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. Staged in the architect's former home, The insides are on the outside is the latest "house-museum" project organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist. He has previously staged exhibitions in the homes of architect Luis Barragan in Mexico City, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria, Switzerland and poet Frederico Garcia Lorca in Granada, Spain. "I started my career as a curator in a kitchen," he says. "Artists do different kinds of work than they would in a museum or bigger space. That sense of intimacy is important" Read more...
Image: Lino Bo Bardi's former home the Casa de Vitro (Glass House), Sao Paulo

Udo Kittelmann questions Ai Weiwei's inclusion in the lineup of artists for the German pavilion at Venice

Udo Kittelmann, director of the Nationalgalerie State Museums of Berlin, says the other artists chosen to represent Germany at this year's Venice Biennale will be overshadowed by Ai Weiwei, one of four artists selected by curator of the German pavilion Susanne Gaenshimer.

Kittelmann says: If one invites Ai Weiwei, the international media is a given, Ai is increasingly used by some art world figures to put their own politics in a populist way. The other artists could be overshadowed by his presence. It is my belief that one must make the playing field level."

Gaensheimer has responded saying: "The German pavilion is precisely about moving away from simple truisms and rankings and about questioning the assumption  that there are unambiguous levels and identities." Read more...
Image: Udo Kittelmann

Whitney Bedford at Starkwhite

Our next exhibition, This for That by Los Angeles-based artist Whitney Bedford, runs from 9 April to 4 May. You can read our press release here.

Image: Whitney Bedford, The Californian, ink and oil on panel, 28 x 37 in., 2013. Photo credit: Evan Bedford

Blair French appointed to new position at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art

Blair French is stepping down from his current position as director of Sydney's Artspace to become the Assistant Director, Curatorial and Digital at the MCA Australia.
Image: Blair French

Prada Foundation to re-stage Harald Szeemann's legendary '69 show during the Venice Biennale

The Prada Foundation will re-stage Harald Szeemann's Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form at this year's Venice Biennale. The legendary exhibition of conceptual art, arte povera, and land art was originally curated by Szeemann for the Bern Kunstjhalle in 1969. The recreated version will be curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas and artist Thomas Demand.
Image: catalogue cover for Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form

UCCA surveys a generation of young Chinese artists born after the end of the Cultural Revolution

Beijing's Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art has opened up its entire space for its current show On / Off: China's Young Artists in Theory and Practice. Curated by Bao Dong and Sun Dongdong, the exhibition brings together commissioned works from 50 artists born after 1975. This generation  of artists emerged while Chinese contemporary art practice was shifting from the underground scene of the 1990s to the more commercial and institutionalised art world seen today. Read more...
Image:  Yang Jian, Sooner or Later, Lightning Will Strike us all, 2011-2012, video installation

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature draws to an end

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature enters its final week at Starkwhite, closing on Wednesday at 6pm. [The gallery is closed over Easter, reopening tomorrow.]

Image: Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection Rules of Nature is presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival 2013