Search results for ""Author Okwui Enwezor""

Over the course of his three-decade career, Thomas Ruff has taken up many approaches to photography in his investigation into the status of the image in contemporary culture.In Thomas Ruff, the artist presents new work that continues his ongoing probe into the history, different processes, techniques, and technology of photography. One of the most influential photographers working today, Thomas Ruff has redefined photography’s conceptual possibilities, simultaneously capturing and challenging the essence of the medium as both a means and a tool for visual experience. Over the past twenty-five years, he has investigated various photographic genres, including portraiture, the nude, and landscape and architectural photography, using both analog and digital technologies, and culling imagery from scientific archives, print media, and the internet.Presented here is a selection of Ruff’s most well-known works, as well as the newer Tripe series, begun in 2018, which draws on negatives of India and Burma taken in the 1850s by an officer in the East India Company army. Also included is a conversation between Ruff and Okwui Enwezor, which took place at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, in connection with Ruff’s retrospective then on view. The conversation, published here for the first time, has been edited for this volume and examines Ruff’s artistic practice and inspiration, serving as an engaging and dynamic introduction to the artist.Published on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition at David Zwirner, Hong Kong, in 2019, Thomas Ruff is available in both English only and bilingual English/traditional Chinese editions.

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Rather than one overarching theme, the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale is informed by a layer of intersecting filters. These filters are a constellation of parameters that circumscribe multiple ideas which will be touched upon to imagine and realize a diversity of practices. All the World's Futures employs as a filter the historical trajectory that the Biennale itself, over the course of its one hundred and twenty years existence has run over. A filter through which to reflect on both the current 'state of things' and the 'appearance of things.' At its core is the notion of the exhibition as a stage, where historical and counter-historical projects are explored. Within this framework the main aspects of the 56th Biennale Exhibition solicit and privilege new proposals and works conceived specifically by invited artists, filmmakers, choreographers, performers, composers, and writers.

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The first in-depth analysis of the stunning designs of one of the world’s most captivating and prominent architects Born in Tanzania, David Adjaye (b. 1966) is rapidly emerging as a major international figure in architecture and design—and this stunning catalogue serves only to cement his role as one of the most important architects of our time. His expanding portfolio of important civic architecture, public buildings, and urban planning commissions spans Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He transforms complex ideas and concepts into approachable and innovative structures that respond to the geographical, ecological, technological, engineering, economic, and cultural systems that shape the practice of global architecture. The publication of this compendium of work and essays coincides with the scheduled opening of Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Adjaye’s completed work in the United States includes the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, a pair of public libraries in D.C., and several private residences. He is also known for his collaborations with artists, most recently with the British painter Chris Ofili (b. 1968). Following an introduction by Zoë Ryan, Adjaye writes on his current and future work, with subsequent essays by an extraordinary cadre of architectural scholars on Adjaye’s master plans and urban planning, transnational architecture, monuments and memorials, and, finally, the forthcoming museum in D.C. Portfolios of Adjaye’s work thread throughout this comprehensive volume.Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago and Haus der KunstExhibition Schedule:Haus der Kunst, Munich (01/30/15–06/28/15)The Art Institute of Chicago (09/19/15–01/03/16)

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In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives key issues regarding modernity and postmodernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents, as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, postmodernity, globalization, and decolonization are still relevant or useful. Including twenty essays and seventy-seven images, Antinomies of Art and Culture is a wide-ranging yet incisive inquiry into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment.In the volume’s introduction the theorist Terry Smith argues that predictions that postmodernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated. Smith suggests that the various situations of decolonized Africa, post-Soviet Europe, contemporary China, the conflicted Middle East, and an uncertain United States might be better characterized in terms of their “contemporaneity,” a concept which captures the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all currently competing universalisms. Essays range from Antonio Negri’s analysis of contemporaneity in light of the concept of multitude to Okwui Enwezor’s argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss’s defense of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay’s characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume’s centerpiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard’s Analogue project. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind.Contributors: Monica Amor, Nancy Condee, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Geeta Kapur, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Zoe Leonard, Lev Manovich, James Meyer, Gao Minglu, Helen Molesworth, Antonio Negri, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Nikos Papastergiadis, Colin Richards, Suely Rolnik, Terry Smith, McKenzie Wark

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Excessive Exposure documents all the chocolate-colored portraits that Bronx-born artist Lyle Ashton Harris made with a large-format Polaroid camera over the past ten years. This sequence of approximately 200 paired front and back portraits, for which Harris has become so well known, has now come to a close, making this volume the definitive publication on the series. The portraits' subjects include Harris' family and friends, art-world personalities, noted cultural figures, celebrities and politicians. These images are further distinguished by a strategic blurring of conventional gender roles, sexual identities and racial categories, and by a refined use of light and shade. Okwui Enwezor contributes an essay analyzing Harris' portraits, situating these works in the context of the artist's work of the past 20 years, as well as in the broader history of the genre. The book also includes a conversation between Harris and artist Chuck Close that took place in 1999, when Harris was beginning the series. With a penetrating foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Excessive Exposure offers a wealth of superb portraiture and is destined to become a touchstone volume among photo-books.

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Vivan Sundaram’s eclecticism is a distinctive feature of his work and is the focus of this monograph. A pioneer of installation art in India, Sundaram started off as a painter in the late 1960s but his desire to break free of the limits imposed by the pictorial frame only came to fruition in the early 1990s, when Sundaram began making works that no longer hinged on the specificity of a medium. This change in artistic direction coincided with his interest in exploring the materiality of a range of substances, whether artisanal or industrial. Sundaram’s choice of materials has had a thematic resonance in the different bodies of work that he has made over the last twenty-five years. His practice keenly registers the civic dimension and political import of art. History, memory, and archive are the overarching concerns of his work. These themes define and structure this important publication and offer an open-ended framework for exploring the oeuvre of a highly original artist.

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Photographers played an important role in the documentation of apartheid as they stepped in to capture how the system penetrated even the most mundane aspects of life in South Africa, from housing, public amenities, and transportation to education, tourism, religion, and businesses. Included in this vivid and compelling volume are works by such photographers as Eli Weinberg, Alf Khumalo, David Goldblatt, Peter Magubane, Ian Berry, and many others. Organized chronologically, it interweaves images and thoughtful essays to explore vital issues, including the institutionalization of apartheid through the country's legal apparatus; the growing resistance in the 1950s; and the radicalization of the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa and, later, throughout the world. Finally, the book investigates the fall of apartheid, including Mandela's return from exile. Far-reaching and exhaustively researched, this important book features more than 60 years of powerful photographic material that forms part of the historical record of South Africa.

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