Silver Stammer

BEST SHOW:

Trisha Donnelly at MAMBO Bologna

Curated by Andrea Viliani

The guiding principle behind Trisha Donnelly’s new project for MAMbo is the desire to render both the museum and the visitor’s experience of art captivating. The spatial and temporal elements of the exhibition are enlivened by evocative dilations and juxtapositions of architectural, visual and audio elements designed to create a narrative that operates on several semantic levels. The first work in the show is a small, black and white photograph (all works untitled; all 2009) of a female face partly obscured on one side by a soap bubble: the delicacy of this unfocused photo looks like a Donnelly’s invitation to the viewer to approach the exhibition with an inquisitive mind.

Ex-aequo:

Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-garde
Presented by Casey Kaplan
June 25, 2009- July 31, 2009
Reception: June 25, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm [Add to Google Calendar]




Curated by Daniel Baumann and AIRL

Fantastic Tavern: The Tbilisi Avant-garde is an exhibition as a book. It presents an introduction into Georgian Modernism, a highly significant yet overlooked period in art history. Since 2004, Swiss curator and art historian, Daniel Baumann, has collaborated with the Arts Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory (AIRL), a group of Georgian art historians and artists, on an annual celebration of international contemporary art and culture in Tbilisi. Here, Casey Kaplan is pleased to introduce their newest collaboration to New York.

From 1918-1921, Georgia declared its short independence as the Democratic Republic of Georgia, and Tbilisi became the “Paris” of the East, where an inspired community of artists not only developed unprecedented creative practices but also collaborated to produce astonishing works of art. During this time, members of the avant-garde in Russia fled Moscow and several key figures from this group made their way to Tbilisi. Their union with the Tbilisi avant-garde along with others from the International community marks a short but crucial period in Georgia’s rich history that eventually led to the development of films, stage designs, theatrical performances, musical compositions, literature, sound poetry, magazines, books, paintings and sculptures, all of which form what is referred to today as “Georgian Modernism”.