MAFF Loves Armenia: Larisa Safaryan

Ghada Amer, My body, My choice

Ghada Amer’s garden installation takes up the well-known battle cry promoted by the women’s and gender equality movement since the 1970s “my body my choice” and spells each of its letters in a red resin box filled with plants. While over the past fifty years, this tagline has been co-opted by a number of groups around the world with entirely contradictory agendas, Ghada Amer’s garden, like her art in general, reminds us of the early intent of the mantra, that of promoting women’s rights and equality. In an interview with Sahar Amer in April 2022, Ghada Amer states: “In Western societies, there is an assumption, especially among the younger generations, that the battle of the sexes has been won, that women have been liberated, and that their rights are secure. And yet, we are witnessing today a sharp regression of women’s rights and a stark rise of violence against women. However, in countries where one assumes women’s rights to be limited or absent, such as in Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan, or Mexico, women of the younger generation know they have a lot to gain from fighting for those very same rights that are eroding in the West. So they are not letting down their guard and they are continuing to fight fiercely.” The phrases that Ghada Amer sculpts for her garden architecture are similar in that regard to the sentences that she embroiders on her canvases. These sentences are taken from a number of male and female authors from different backgrounds and they are intended to remind us of central teachings and wisdom related to women’s rights. Amer says that “by reading and repeating these sentences, they will hopefully become mantras, incantations that the viewer will end up remembering.” She adds that “women’s rights can never be taken for granted. Women must continuously mobilize, fight, and never let their arduously acquired rights decline, fade away and vanish.”

Visions of Bloom, 2024 (exhibition ver.)

Duyi Han Single-channel 3D animation Music: Casey Mullen, Gilbert Cameron Evans on Erik Satie, Gnossiennes no.4 Solo exhibition, 08 Nov 2024–25 Jan 2025, Suhe Haus 苏河皓司, Shanghai Produced by: CHERUBY 樱桃瑚. Curated by: Claire Shiying Li 李石影. Art gallery support: BANK.

Zsófia Keresztes / Pavilion of Hungary at Venice Art Biennale 2022

Zsófia Keresztes’ exhibition deals with the stages in one’s search for identity. This concept reaches back to Arthur Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma but, moving on from this, it takes as its associative starting point an episode from Antal Szerb’s 1937 novel Journey by Moonlight, used by the artist as a poetic analogy. The exhibition, in four units, explores both the ambivalent relationship between past / present and future and the stages by which people map out their own identity. Liberated in each other’s reflection from the burdens of common and individual experiences, the mutually referenced body fragments – separate yet existing as one community – attempt to achieve their final form.

Esther Stewart at Heide Museum of Modern Art

Ego Speech: never enough

Tadáskía's monumental wall drawing in progress

In this timelapse, watch the artist Tadáskía produce an expansive wall drawing in response to the blank gallery space. For "Projects: Tadáskía,” the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States, she worked at MoMA over the course of several weeks, drawing directly on the wall using charcoal. She invited a team of coloring assistants to help fill in her drawing with colors chosen from her kaleidoscopic palette of dry pastels. Color is fundamentally important to the artist's practice. As Tadáskía has explained, "When I was drawing, my mother, Elenice Guarani, and my aunt, Gracilene Guarani, who are both Black, Afro-Indigenous women, told me to add more color because color is life."

To uker til åpning: Hanne Friis

Hanne Friis was born in 1972 in Oslo and studied painting and sculpture at the Trondheim Academy of Art. Her textile sculptures are created with fabrics that are often dyed by her through experimentation and slow dyeing processes that give the material for her sculptures pictorial expressions of unpredictable effect. Using a strictly manual technique, Friis transforms a soft and fluffy material into abstract and sensual works, with a solid and complex structure that seem to be engaged in an autonomous, slow but inexorable process of perennial growth and change. As metaphors of the flow of life and the succession of events and phenomena that characterize it, her works are synthesis and representation of the ambiguity between form and matter.

Marina Abramovic and Ulay - A Minute of Silence / The Artist is Present

At the MoMA 2010.. where else.

HURT EARTH by Jenny Holzer

In a new series of monumental light projections, art icon Jenny Holzer prompts urgent environmental action. Words from more than 40 global climate activists appear across the UK to coincide with COP26.

Ordinance of the Subconscious Treatment