Each month we ask the editors of ARTINFO sites around the world to tell us the most significant work of art or art happening of the month, and gather them together for our column “Planet Art.” (NB: Since we have contributions only from where we have editors, this feature does not literally represent the art of the whole planet.)
To see the art mentioned in this column, click on the slideshow.
AUSTRIA
Benjamin Hirte, “Untitled,” 2013
Galerie Emanuel Layr, Vienna
Part of a group show, “Trisha Baga & No Brow,” this work by Modern Painters’s 2013 “Artist to Watch” Benjamin Hirte places two bottles of cough syrup — one a Vicks brand and the other an herbal expectorant called Sinupret — mouth-to-mouth in such a way the contents of both mingle in the larger Vicks bottle. The simplicity of this gesture may eschew pharmacological critique in exchange for a formal interest in the two layers formed by the cocktail’s varying density, but it still brings forth a grin weeks later. —Alexander Forbes, BLOUIN ARTINFO Germany
CANADA
Wanda Koop, “My mother lives on that Island (SEEWAY),” 2012
Galerie UQAM, Université du Québec à Montréal
Wanda Koop has long been haunting Canadian landscape painting with spectral, Baldessarian sun globes. In Galerie UQAM’s ambitious survey, “Painters 60,” however, we see Koop expand her margins (the horizon lines no longer legible in inches, but meters), and eclipse her orbs. In their absence are vast and loose cloud formations dripping lasciviously, though with melancholy, over color fields of sapphire blue. She is bringing landscape to the threshold of abstraction in a manner that feels fresh, aching, and much like progress. – Sky Goodden, BLOUIN ARTINFO Canada
CHINA
MadeIn Company, “Play — (201301),” 2013
Long March Space, Beijing (at Art Basel in Hong Kong)
This leather fetish-themed gothic cathedral was bound and strung from the ceiling at Art Basel in Hong Kong within the fair’s Encounters section. Although an outwardly “blasphemous” work — whatever that means in today’s China —MadeIn’s disruption of sexual and religious taboos here is just the latest means that the collective employs to get at its broader target: the fetishization of places, cultural practices, and colonial dynamics. — Sam Gaskin, BLOUIN ARTINFO China
INDIA
Hemant Sareen, “Zoopoetics,” 2013
Aditya Pande studio, 145 Shahpur Jat, New Delhi
Art critic Hemant Sareen’s decision to hold his first solo show at the non-commercial space that is artist Aditya Pande’s studio in Shahpur Jat was a commendable one, subversively reinforcing the subtitle of his show: “A subject for the next revolution.” “Zoopoetics,” a tightly curated, intelligently conceived exhibition of Sareen’s animal-centric photographs and videos, explores the conflicting relationship between man and animal that is informed, as Sareen believes, by the layered narratives of overlapping psychological, biological, linguistic, and environmental worlds inhabited by various species, including humans. This is no saccharine show featuring cats and peacocks in photogenic poses; it is, in fact, an intense commentary on exile, inspired in part by the artist’s deep communion with the cats he has known over the years. It is also a successful exercise in artistically documenting Baudrillard’s concept of the “non event” while simultaneously extending the notion of Zoopoetics that Derrida first apprehended in “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” According to Sareen, the term could be seen as “questioning the self-proclaimed privileged position of human faculty for language among animals” that results in a misplaced sense of entitlement. — Rosalyn D’Mello, BLOUIN ARTINFO India
KOREA
Jeamin Cha, “Fog and Smoke,” 2013
Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Emerging artist Jeamin Cha takes media cues from veteran Minouk Lim to create meandering narratives that explore critical views of modern, industrial South Korea. Her latest video work intersperses clips of a lone tap dancer weaving across the deserted streets of the Songdo International Business District (a new “smart city” under construction along the reclaimed land of the Incheon waterfront, to be completed in 2015), along with interviews with locals who have observed the bleak, changing landscape. —Ines Min, BLOUIN ARTINFO Korea
MEXICO
Abraham Cruzvillegas, “Autodestrucción2,” 2013
Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City
The Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has been experimenting with destruction and its connection to creation since 2009. His series “Autoconstrucción” involves installations in which he analyzes the artistic possibility within scenes of wreckage, and takes its most recent edition at Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City. The work — made up of debris from his soon-to-be home — suggests that the possibility of creation through destruction in its process of reconstruction, and seeks to expand the definition of the conventional art object. His work, he says, appeals to the artistic sensibilities of the average citizen and applies to any object that can be modified. —Aline Cerdán, BLOUIN ARTINFO Mexico
USA
Valerie Hegarty, “Alternative Histories”
Brooklyn Museum, New York
For an artist whose whole practice is based on the visual and thematic subversion of American art and American art history — by creating replicas of historic objects and artworks that have burned, melted, rotted, decomposed, sprouted branches, or been attacked by birds — fewer spaces may be as suited for an exhibition as the Brooklyn Museum’s rich period rooms. In a trio of interventions, one in a plantation house dining room and the others in an 18th-century captain’s house, Hegarty unleashes crows, woodpeckers, and other natural forces to underline currents of oppression and natural devastation running through U.S. history. — Benjamin Sutton, BLOUIN ARTINFO U.S.