The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first UK retrospective of American artist Christopher Williams, one of the most influential artists working with photography and the production and display of images.
 
Christopher Williams’ recent photographs reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography, and also adopts their production methods. Often working in collaboration with set designers, models and technicians, the resulting technically precise photographs recall imagery from 1960s advertising, the Cold War era, as well as the histories of art, photography and cinema. However, closer inspection reveals that flaws and aberrations which would usually be removed in production or postproduction, such as a model's dirty feet or a bruise on a ripe apple, remain in the final images. Williams also sees the photographs themselves as part of a larger system of display which includes exhibition design, walls, books, posters, videos, vitrines, and signage, and uses these elements playfully within the exhibition.
 
The Production Line of Happiness brings together over 50 photographs from Williams’ 35-year career, and is on show from 29 April 2015. Five new works never seen before in the UK go on display including a pristine image of a broken Citroen car headlight, an image influenced by British and European Pop art. The photographs are displayed in an architectural installation specially conceived by the artist and inspired by histories of display. Temporary walls come from art institutions in the Rheinland region of Germany, where Williams currently lives and works and are both a reference to and a partial reprisal of a 2009 exhibition at the Bonner Kunstverein made in collaboration with Austrian artist Mathias Poledna.

whitechapelgallery.org

Part I - Performances: 24 – 30 April, 2015, 7pm each night
Part II - Exhibition: 7 May – 20 June 2015 

Autograph ABP presents Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind, the first UK solo exhibition by Danish-Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers. 

Presented in two parts, seven evening performances in the gallery followed by a seven-week exhibition, Whip it Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind retraces the footsteps of colonialism and maps the contemporary reverberations of the triangular slave trade via a series of performances that will result in a body of new ‘action’ paintings. 

Jeannette Ehler’s practice takes the form of simple actions, which erase, enhance or animate historical spaces, raising complex questions about memory, race and colonialism. In Whip It Good, Ehlers fiercely confronts national and personal histories in an effort to critically reimagine and challenge racist systems of power and domination. 

During each performance, the artist radically transforms the whip - a potent sign and signifier of violence against the enslaved body - into a contemporary painting tool, evoking within both the spectators and the participants the physical and visceral brutality of the transatlantic slave trade. Deep black charcoal is rubbed into the whip, directed at a large-scale white canvas, and – following the artist’s initial ritual - offered to members of the audience to complete the painting. 

However, the themes that emerge from Whip It Good trace beyond those of slavery: Ehlers' actions powerfully disrupt historical relationships between agency and control in the contemporary. The ensuing ‘whipped’ canvases become transformative bearers of the historical legacy of imperial violence, and through a controversial artistic act re-awaken critical debates surrounding gender, race and power within artistic production. What the process generates for the artist, is an intensely focused space in which to make new work as part of a cathartic collaborative process. Ehlers seven newly produced paintings will then be displayed in the second part of the exhibition, Spinning from History’s Filthy Mind, from May 7 through to June 20, alongside a selection of earlier moving image works made by the artist. 

Drawing on film, photography and video, Ehler’s moving image works weave facts and images into potent triggers for forgotten memories or lived experiences. Waves (2009), a manipulated photograph and looped video projection, presents a hypnotic mediation on the trade in humans across the Atlantic. In The March (2012), Ehlers uses the portal of the past to reflect on herself the present. Inspired by one of the landmark events of the American Civil Rights Movement, namely the Right to Vote March of 1965, when 600 African Americans marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ehlers combines 3D animation scans of her brain with a haunting soundtrack of chanting voices. In so doing, she poetically references her own rise to political consciousness, with a powerful historical moment of defiant collective action. Off The Pig (2012) represents an ode to liberation struggles and the civil rights movement, and features the voices of Angela Davis, Huey Newton and the Black Panthers – here, the juxtaposition of militant voices and frantic chanting produces a rousing, hallucinogenic mini-documentary. Black Bullets (2012) is greatly influenced by the Haitian revolution led by Toussaint Louverture and shot at the Citadel in Haiti. In The Invisible Empire (2009), Ehlers provocatively places the figure of an elderly migrant (the artist’s father) as the protagonist of a sculptural video piece that highlight pertinent issues such as the plight of those caught up in human trafficking and modern day slavery. Using an archaeological approach to history, Ehler’s dreamlike eulogies to freedom and resistance force us to think about global liberation and the collective well-being of marginalised people in the world today. 

Whip It Good: Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind is guest-curated by Karen Alexander. 

‘Performing Whip It Good over seven days will be both physically and mentally challenging. For me, this act represents a personal attempt to identify with a brutal past while trying to make sense of the present.’ - Jeannette Ehlers, 2015 

‘Jeannette Ehlers fearlessly unmasks the pain and sorrow of black lives, while also celebrating occasional triumphs, as she reinterprets colonial cultural histories and reimagines them in the realm of the visual.’ – Karen Alexander, 2015 

Whip It Good was originally commissioned in 2013 by The Art Labour Archives in Berlin.

The exhibition's title 'Spinning From History’s Filthy Mind' is borrowed from the poem 'Black Bullets' by Krista Franklin.

Rivington Place London | Free Entrance (Please register here)

Chisenhale Gallery presents a major new commission by the Istanbul, Amsterdam and Berlin based Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt. For Happy Together: Collaborators Collaborating Öğüt will stage a public discussion at Chisenhale Gallery, bringing together people of various professions and nationalities with whom he has previously collaborated. The gallery will be transformed into a TV studio for the duration of the exhibition with a specially constructed set used to stage the discussion and, afterwards, to present a film documenting the event. The project opens with a performance of Reverb, a concert by the artist in collaboration with Fino Blendax, to welcome the collaborators to Chisenhale.

This is the first solo exhibition in a UK public institution by Öğüt and is commissioned as part of How to work together, a shared programme of contemporary art commissioning and research devised by Chisenhale Gallery, The Showroom and Studio Voltaire. The other commissioned artists for 2015 are Sanya Kantarovsky at Studio Voltaire (16 April – 7 June and Wendelien van Oldenborgh at The Showroom (29 April – 20 June). This second round of exhibitions builds on the success of last year’s commissions by Gerry Bibby (The Showroom), Céline Condorelli (Chisenhale Gallery) and Ella Kruglyanskaya (Studio Voltaire). 

Ahmet Öğüt, Happy Together: Collaborators Collaborating is commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery. The commission is supported by SAHA Association, Mondriaan Fund, Maya and Rasamny and Yana and Stephen Peel.   

Chisenhale Gallery's Exhibition Programme 2015-16 is supported by Nicoletta Fiorucci.   

How to work together is supported by a capacity building and match funding grant from Arts Council England through Catalyst Arts, with additional funding in the second year from Bloomberg, Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Resolution Property and Bilge & Haro Cumbusyan. For more information visit www.howtoworktogether.org.   

Reverb is commissioned and produced by Van AbbeMuseum, Eindhoven, as part of the exhibition Ahmet Öğüt: Forward (7 March – 14 June 2015).

Chisenhale Gallery

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and pastels by Lisa Yuskavage, on view at 533 West 19th Street in New York.

Yuskavage’s works merge popular culture and a deep engagement with the history of art. Widely associated with a re-emergence of the figurative in contemporary painting, she has always maintained the primacy of color, with her narratives intricately based in her use of paint. In this new selection of works, atonal and prismatic spectrums appear as personifications of themselves, and her characters become like embodiments of various tones.

The exhibition takes its conceptual and chronological point of departure in Hippies, a painting from 2013 of five intersecting nudes. Behind a pale woman, four male figures fan out from her on either side, almost like a Hindu deity, each a different hue. The rainbow-like effect is reminiscent of the cangiantismo technique advanced in the Renaissance, in which tonal variations were used to indicate the presence of the supernatural in otherwise realistic subject matter. The effect is achieved against a muted, neutral background—here a dark landscape—where grisaille, an almost monochrome color scheme, is applied.

The New York Philharmonic has a sound like few other orchestras, and continues to push boundaries and broaden the horizons of American orchestral music with director Alan Gilbert. 

Their 2015 Barbican International Associate Residency showcases the dynamism of this versatile orchestra, with cutting-edge work from their contemporary CONTACT! series, a show-stopping concert of late-Romantic showpieces with Joyce DiDonato, and a spectacular production of Petrushka with theatre company Giants Are Small.

Musicjelly: Build Your Own Orchestra
New York Philharmonic Residency
15 - 19 Apr 15 / 09:00 / Fountain Room
 info
 

Royal Philharmonic Society Lecture: Alan Gilbert
Orchestras in the 21st Century; a new paradigm
15 Apr 15 / 19:00 / Milton Court Concert Hall
 info   book

New York Philharmonic / Joyce DiDonato
Barbican International Associate Residency
17 Apr 15 / 19:30 / Hall
 info   book
 

New York Philharmonic CONTACT! concert
Barbican International Associate Residency
18 Apr 15 / 20:00 / Milton Court Concert Hall
 info   book
 

Giants Are Small and the New York Philharmonic
Young People's Concert/Petrushka
Barbican International Associate Residency
19 Apr 15 / 16:00 / Hall
 info   book
 

Giants Are Small and the New York Philharmonic / Petrushka
Barbican International Associate Residency
19 Apr 15 / 19:30 / Hall
 info   book

Musicjelly: Build Your Own Orchestra
New York Philharmonic Residency
15 - 19 Apr 15 / 09:00 / Fountain Room
 info
 

Barbican Centre

Richard Woods has built an international reputation for his signature architectural transformations, painting and sculpture that fold the history of the decorative arts, functional design and graphic language into intoxicatingly witty plays with image and surface. His architectural interventions are chiefly concerned with the re-surfacing of existing structures, proposing an absurd twist on the cult of home improvement and DIY aesthetics. 

For Chapter, Woods has created Inclosure Acts a new exhibition that is inspired by both the history of the building – sited as it is on a former cattle market – and by the Acts (1604-1914) that radically transformed open fields and common land in the countryside. Wall-based works reference the suburban in a series of monoprints. Based on hard-edged renditions of Mock Tudor decoration, the paintings are suburbia meets Neo Geo – the past made future.

In the café, Woods’ works Bad Bricks are beautifully simple sculptures made from wood and resembling cartoon bricks. Their vibrant colours, bright white mortar and thick black edges offer a joyous celebration of these most mundane of building materials.

Project for an Unidentified Political Object is an exhibition and performance of all new photographic and sculptural work by the artist Gordon Shrigley. It is our pleasure to announce that for the 2015 General Election, Shrigley is to stand as a prospective member of Parliament, under the banner of Campaign.
 
Twenty fives years ago, Capitalism basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War. However, in 2008 we all watched in amazement as the edifice of our unassailable wealth and prosperity virtually disappeared overnight.
 
Since these events the artist Gordon Shrigley has been patiently searching for radical new forms of popular ideology to make sense of the present malaise, which are not based on what he sees as either outmoded 19th century political ideas or laissez-faire forms of postmodern aporia. Failing to discover anything new, Shrigley published Without Residue, A Preliminary Introduction to a Manifesto for An Unidentified Political Object (2010). His manifesto is a clarion call for all citizens to embrace the limitless space of the imagination as a path to discovering “… a mode of space-less thinking, an oxymoronic territory of a-temporality, without horizon, that proceeds without the need to affirm on the basis of that which bounds. Simply a fugitive kind of abandon.” The questions outlined in Without Residue are to be played out through the form of a political physical theatre of everyday life that seeks to appropriate the electoral process as a frame for exposition.

Follow the Campaign on twitter and facebook, and read Shrigley's Manifesto.

Ian Stevenson takes over KK Outlet’s gallery exhibition space during April 2015 with Click Here to Unsubscribe. Ian’s a London based illustrator, quick witted, with an irreverent stance. He paints on rubbish, takes the piss and has exhibited at Tate Modern. Expect brand new, never seen before, illustrative works from this pencil wielding linear master.

Turning trash into treasure, Ian’s work is both engaging and enlightening. Influenced by his immediate surroundings, everyday life and the TV from which he reflects the reality of living in the 21st Century. Ian re-directs his twisted and joshing take on the world to create distorted characters, murals, alternative slogans, animations, sculptures, customised photographs plus anything from coffee cups to record sleeves.

A recent collaboration with Russell Brand, to promote his book Revolution, saw Ian’s artwork on the Village Underground’s wall in Shoreditch. A larger than life sized mural, jam-packed with blissful characters and hilarious, satirical slogans.

The exhibition's grand opening is going to be a blast!
The beer is free. Everybody is invited. See you there.