Art Stage Singapore makes a surprising new move

At Art Basel Miami, Lorenzo Rudolf championed Latin America's contemporary art scene and helped raise its profile. Now as director of Art Stage Singapore he aims to do the same for Indonesia. The 2013 edition of his fair will include dedicated space for Indonesian galleries and an exhibition of about 30 Indonesian artists. And in an unusual move for an art fair, Art Stage Singapore will represent about two thirds of them. "We only want to show the best, but many Indonesian artists don't work with galleries," he said. "The infrastructure is not there."

But how will participating galleries feel about Art Stage Singapore competing with them for sales?

On the final day of the fair in 2012 Rudolf took a small group of collectors to artists studios in Indonesia and some galleries complained they were cut out and said the move took collectors away from the fair. Rudolf acknowledged it caused some friction, but says the Indonesian pavilion will help them this time by atrracting collectors."It is the best promotion for them," he said. "If Indonesaia is here then there is no need to go to Indonesia."
Image: Arahmaiani's Lobsangnima, A Young Tibetan Monk in Yishu (2011). He is one of the indonesian artist at Art Stage Singapore 2013

Gwangju presents a series of new follies in urban space

Previously conceived of and presented as an integral part of the Gwangju Design Biennale, the second edition of the Gwangju Folly Project will be held as an independent event this year. Nikolaus Hirsch (director), Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun (curators) have developed a curatorial approach for the event, which uses the folly as a tool of enquiry to address the potential of public space today - in contemporary Gwangju and globally.

Gwangju Folly II will commission new works from architects, artists, collectives and writers including: David Adjaye & Taiye Selasi, Ai Weiwei, Seok Hong Go & Mihee Kim, Rem Koolhaas & Ingo Niermann, Raqs Media Collective, Do-HoSuh, Superflex and Eyal Weizman.

This week at Starkwhite

Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Huggong continues this week to 17 November.

Image: Seung Yul Oh, Huggong (2012), installation view

Vatican City to have a pavilion at the Venice Biennale

The Art News Paper is reporting that Vatican City will have a pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, citing this from Italy's La Stampa paper: : "...the artists will include fewer than 10 men and women from various countries around the world, some of whom are established artists and others who are just emerging. Their subject matter will be the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis."
Image: The Swiss Guard in Vatican City 

Massimiliano Gioni announces theme for Venice Biennale

Massimiliano Gioni has selected a theme for his Biennale exhibition. It will be known as The Encyclopedic Palace, part of the title of a 136-story Futurist skyscraper imagined for Washington DC's National Mall by Marino Auriti a self-taught Italian-American artist. "It's the crazy dream, bordering between knowledge and madness, image and imagination...reflecting the grand ambition of this international exhibition," Gioni said in a recent interview. Read more...

Image: Massimiliano Gioni in Venice

Vito Acconci named designer of the year

Still hailed as one of the founders of performance art, though he broke with the movement 25 years ago, Vito Acconci has been named Designer of the Year by Design Miami, the leading commercial fair in the field. Read more...
Image: Vito Acconci

Bristol launches an international award for playful art in public space

"We need to see more playfulness in our cities and public spaces," says Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller in support of a new award launched in Bristol for an artist "who can devise an artwork that embraces openness, playfulness and technology to engage and surprise audiences." The £30,000 International Playable City Award, which is an initiative of the cross-artform venue and producer Watershed,  has been co-funded by a cluster of creative and technology companies to champion Bristol as a hub for cutting-edge creativity.
Image: Jeremy Deller on his inflatable Stonehenge work Sacrilege 

Jim Speers at the Fei Contemporary Art Centre, Shanghai

Jim Speers' exhibition Long Days is showing at Shanghai's Fei Contemporary Art Centre (FCAC) in October/November, timed to coincide with the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Long Days features recent video work by Speers including Night Barges, a new work filmed in Shanghai earlier this year.

Fei Contemporary Art Centre is a not-for-profit space run by artist/curator Li Xiaofei, one of the founders of the Zendai contemporary art museum.
Image: Jim Speer, Night Barges, 2012, three-screen video projection

Shanghai's new Power Station of Art opens with the 9th Shanghai Biennale

Curated by Qiu Zhijie, Boris Groys, Tsong-zung Chang and Jens Hoffman, the 9th Shanghai Biennale is currently showing at the city's new Power Station of Art. The new art museum, which will host post-1980 contemporary art, mainly from China, was formerly the Pavilion of the Future during the city's World Expo in 2010. You can see images of works in the Biennale on the ArtAsiaPacific blog.
Image: Shanghai's new Power Station of Art, the venue for the 9th Shanghai Biennale

Another good news story for Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art

Hobart has been christened a funky cultural hub by travel bible Lonely Planet, which has named the city one of the 10 best in the world to visit in 2013. So why was Hobart the only Australian city to make the list? Lonely Planet's Chris Zeiher said: "The Tasmanian capital's $180 million Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has proved a beacon for international attention and is largely the reason for the listing in seventh place."
Image: Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart

Shigeru Ban designs a temporary pavilion for Dasha Zhukova's Garage Centre of Contemporary Culture

Shigeru Ban is best known for his post-disaster zone design projects, such as his temporary housing project underway in Onagawa to replace homes lost in the tsuanmi and a temporary building to replace the historic cathedral in the quake-ravaged city of Christchurch.

Now he has designed a new temporary structure for the Dasha Zhukova's Garage Centre of Contemporary Culture while it transitions from its old one to a new OMA-designed space. The new 70,000-Square-foot temporary pavilion in Moscow's Gorky Park will host exhibition and education programmes until 2013, beginning with Temporary Structures in Gorky Park: From Melnikov to Ban. Using rare archival drawings, the exhibition will reveal the history of structures created in the park since it was established in 1923, before moving through the Russian avant-garde period to finish with some of the most interesting contemporary unrealised designs created by russian architects today.
Image: model of Shigeru Ban's temporary pavilion in Gorky Park

This week at Starkwhite

Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Huggong opens tomorrow and runs to 17 November.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, Huggong (2012), installation view

Final performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the Auckland Art Gallery

The Auckland Art Gallery presents the final performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance today at 3pm. The performance, including Bisons, takes place in the artist's space in the Walters Prize exhibition.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Floor Resistance, shown at Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU3, Berlin (25 June 2011)

ArtReview Power 100 list topped by Documenta curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

ArtReview has published its annual Power 100 list of the most influential people in the artworld and Documenta curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is at the top of the list followed by Larry Gagosian and Ai Wewei. You can see the full lineup of entrants here, ranked according to a combination of influence over the production of art internationally, sheer financial clout, and activity over the past 12 months.
Image: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Nicolaus Schafhausen to curate the 2014 Bucharest Biennale

Former employees of the Witte de With are making biennale news. Last week the institution's former curator, Juan A Gaitan, was selected to curate the 8th Berlin Biennale. Now the Witt de With's former director, Nicolaus Schafhausen, has been selected to curate the 2014 Bucharest Biennale.
Image: Nicolaus Schafhausen

Barbican celebrates the legacy of Marcel Duchamp

The Barbican will celebrate the legacy of the man who transformed 20th century art with Dancing Around Duchamp, a season running next year from February to June next year spanning art, dance, theatre, music and film. At its centre will be an exhibition that examines Duchamp's influence on composer John Cage, choreographer Merce Cunningham, and artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Read more...

Image: Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel

Curator of the 8th Berlin Biennale announced

The KW Institute for Contemporary Art  has selected independent curator/writer Juan A Gaitan to curate the 2014 Berlin Biennale. Gaitan, who has been curating at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art,  follows in the footsteps of high-profile curators such as Klaus Biesenbach, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nancy Spector.
Image: Juan A Gaitan

Live performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the Auckland Art Gallery

The Auckland Art Gallery will present a live performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance, including Bisons, on Friday 19 October  at 3pm. The performance takes place in the artist's space in the Walters Prize exhibition.

This week at Starkwhite

This week we are installing an exhibition by Seung Yul Oh in our downstairs space and showing works by represented artists upstairs.
Image: From Seung Yul Oh's The ability to blow themselves up series 

Political activism recognised in this year's Power 100

Last year the top spot in ArtReview magazine's Power 100 was held by Ai Weiwei. Political activism will be recognised again in this year's lineup of art-world movers and shakers with the inclusion of Pussy Riot who, according to the editor of ArtReview, are positioned "somewhere in the middle of the list". The 2012 Power 100 will be announced later this week.

Image: Pussy Riot performing at Red Square in Moscow

Winner of Creative Time's Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change announced

Creative Time's $25,000 Annenberg Prize for Art and Social Change has been awarded to artist and activist Fernando Garcia-Dory. Creative Time says: "Garcia-Dory has become a leader in the field of socially engaged art and a pioneer of a new field connecting art and agroecology. Beginning with his 2004 project The Shepherd's School in the Spanish Pyrenees, Garcia-Dory has engaged one of the world's most underrepresented and - at a population of 250 million - widespread communities: pastoralist and nomadic communities." Read more... 

Image: Fernando Garcia-Dory

Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the AAG today

You can see live performances of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the Auckland Art Gallery today at 1pm and 3pm.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Floor Resistance, shown at Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU3, Berlin (25 June 2011)

Final Day for Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever

Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever closes today at 3.00pm.

Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Blue Glacier (2012), duratrans on lightbox, 950 x 1330 mm

Pussy Riot ruling generates new tensions

The ruling that saw one member of Pussy Riot walk free from court is generating new tensions. A Russian appeals court unexpectedly ordered the release of Yekaterina Samutsevich, but upheld two-year sentences against the other members of the group fueling accusations of betrayal within social networking sites and leading the mass circulation paper Moskovsky Komsomolets to ask: "What new game have our authorities begun? Are we once again talking about the time-honoured formula of divide and rule?"

Meanwhile Samutsevich says Pussy Riot's protests will continue. "We are not finished, nor are we going to end our political protest," she said to CNN. "We have to act in such away that they do not learn about our concerts ahead of time and arrest us."
Image: Pussy Riot performing in Moscow's Red Square

Coming up at Starkwhite

Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever closes on Saturday and will be followed by a Seung Yul Oh installation opening on 23 October and running to 17 November. Oh has just returned to New Zealand after a stint in New York under the Harriet Friedlander Residency, stopping off in Seoul on the way to prepare works for ONE AND J Gallery's booth at Frieze.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, The Ability to Blow Themselves Up (Still #1), 2012

Finalists for 2012 Sovereign Asian Art Prize announced

Jae Hoon Lee has been selected as a finalist for the 2012 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. The jury for this year's US$30,000 award is David Elliott, director of the 17 Biennale of Sydney; Emi Eu, director of Singapore Tyler Print Institute; Lars Nittve, director of M+, Hong Kong; Tim Marlow, director of White Cube and Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing.  

Image: Jae Hoon's Ganga View Guesthouse (2011)

Marketers of the brand-new add old to the mix with Frieze masters

Since its founding in 2003, Frieze has established itself as a leading fair for contemporary art, but this year the 10th Frieze will change the recipe. While 175 exhibitors will show fresh works, 101 galleries will sell ancient artefacts, Old Masters and art made up to 2000 in the inaugural edition of Frieze Masters. Read more...

The jury is out on the Stedelijk's new 'bathtub' extension

Dubbed the bathtub, the new Stedelijk Museum extension is attracting mixed reviews. While there is much to like inside, the extension and the way it relates to the museumplein is drawing flak. Los Angeles Times architecture critc Christopher Hawthorne describes it as as "an overscaled monument flagrantly aloof from its surroundings." He also says it's a reminder of how slow architecture can be. "The $159 million extension is the architectural personification of of boom-time thinking. But it is making its debut in a chastened and uncertain Europe." Read more...

Image: the Stadelijk Museum's new extension designed by Dutch architect Mels Crouwel

This week at Starkwhite

Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever continues this week, closing Saturday 13 October.

Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Blue Glacier (2012), duratrans on lightbox, 950 x 1330 mm

Curating the Gwangju Biennale

Carol Yinghua Lu is one of the six co-artistic directors appointed to curate the 2012 Gwangju Biennale.In a piece published on the Frieze blog she talks about the process they went through - they discovered more differences among their curatorial approaches and intellectual positions than affinity - that led them to settle on the title Roundtable as a way to describe an approach that allowed them to articulate their respective interests and concepts through six sub-themes. Read more...

Image: The co-artistic directors of ROUNDTABLE, The 9th Gwangju Biennale, 2012

Billy Apple® celebrates his 50th anniversary with Waiheke winemakers

This year marks 50 years of the Billy Apple® brand and as part of the celebrations Apple has worked with Waiheke winemakers to produce Billy Apple®: Official Selection; premium red wines from the classic 2010 vintage in a limited edition case. The wines are from Kennedy Point, Man O'War, Miro, Obsidian, Peacock Sky and Poderi Crisci.

Billy Apple®: Official Selection is showing at the Waiheke Community Art Gallery to 15 October. The exhibition includes a survey of Apple's earlier wine works and is accompanied by a publication with a short essay by art critic and Waiheke resident Anthony Byrt.
Image: Billy Apple®: Official Selection (2012), installation view, Waiheke Community Art Gallery

Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece under threat of demolition

The spiral house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his son is under threat of demolition to allow a developer to sub-divide the plot and build two or more new houses. The move has caught preservationists on the hop, raising questions about how such a house could be at risk. Apparently David and Galdys Wright didn't want their home in a residential neighborhood to be a museum and when they died it was left, no longer in mint condition, to granddaughters who subsequently sold it to a buyer promising to fix it up and live in it. But the buyer did neither and the place went back on the market where it caught the eye of the developer because it had been uninhabited for four years and wasn't on a watch list. Read more...
Image: The 1952 house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his son David

City Within the City opens at Gertrude Contemporary

Presented initially at Artsonje in Seoul, the second iteration of City Within th City opens tonight at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne with new installation works by three of the artists, including Alicia Frankovich's Volution and Choreography I.

Image: Alicia Frankovich, Volution, 35 mm film transferred to digital video

Frieze curator to direct Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art

Freize Foundation curator Sarah McCrory, who selects artists to make projects at the Frieze Art Art Fair in London and organises other special features of the fair, like Frieze Film, is the new director of the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art.

Image: Sarah McCrory

Frankfurter Kunstverein presents Contact - Artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand

Contact - Artists from Aotearoa/New Zealand opens today at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, showcasing the work of a group of artists including, Alicia Frankovich and Dane Mitchell, many of whom feel as much at home in Melbourne, London or Berlin as they do in their homeland. Curated by Leonhard Emmerling, head of the Goethe-Institut Visual Arts Department and Aaron Kreisler, curator of contemporary art the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the exhibition has been timed to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair. Read more... 

Image: Frankfurter Kunstverein

A new art fair planned for Istanbul, timed to coincide with the biennale

Following the sale of ART HK to the MCH Group, which owns Art Basel, co-founders Tim Etchells and Sandy Angus have been busy establishing new fairs. They are launching Art13 in London's Olympia Grand Hall in March 2013 and Etchells will launch Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks in September 2013. Angus has followed suit with ArtInternational Istanbul, a new fair located in in a factory building in the Beyoglu District, and timed to coincide with the 2013 Istanbul Biennale. 

Image: The Galata Tower in Istanbul's Beyoglu District. 

The Floating Eye at the Shanghai Biennale

The City Pavilions project is a new artistic component at this year's Shanghai Biennale, which opened earlier this week. Titled The Floating Eye, the Sydney Pavilion project has been curated by 4A's Aaron Seeto, taking as its starting point the shifting, unstable references at play in Australia's oldest settler city.

Seeto says: "In a location like Sydney, Australia, with its Aboriginal history, colonisation, waves of mass migration, shifting economic bases and trade, awareness of the natural environment, natural disasters there is no single narrative and straightforward representative space of its history. As people come and go, so does the routes of its capital and ideas shift - new narratives emerge and recede."

Image: Shaun Gladwell, Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi) 2010, video still. Gladwell is one of the six artists with strong connections to Sydney selected for The Floating Eye

Monash University Museum of Art provides curatorial support for artists to develop ambitious new projects

Launched by Monash University Museum of Art, Artists' Proof #1 is the inaugural edition of a new exhibition series exploring current positions in contemporary art through commissions by nine contemporary artists. Artists' Proof has been established to provide curatorial support for contemporary artists to develop new work and ambitious projects, and to generally support innovative, experimental and research-based practices. Alicia Frankovich is in the lineup of artists selected for the first edition of the series, which runs from 4 October - 15 December 2012.

Image: Alicia Frankovich, I have slept standing up in the mountains, 2012. Super 16 mm film transferred to HD video

Chris Kraus talks about Summer of Hate

Rhizome talks to Chris Kraus about her new novel Summer of Hate and its relation to other facets of her work. Read more...

Image: Cover of Summer of Hate

Shanghai opens two massive art museums

Shanghai opens two huge art museums today, both repurposed from structures built for the city's World Expo in 2010. The China Art Museum, showing Chinese Modern art from the late Qing dynasty to 1980, occupies the Expo's scarlet-hued China Pavilion, and extends to 160,000 square meters, while the Power Station of Art will host post-1980 contemporary art, mainly from China, in over 41,000 square meters of space in the former factory-shaped Pavilion of the Future. The opening programme in the China Art Museum includes Meridian Lines: Contemporary Art from the Museum of New Zealand, an exhibition from the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa curated by Sarrah Farrar.
Image: The China Art Museum

This week at Starkwhite

Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever continues this week at Starkwhite.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Waiting for your call (2012), video still