Taking its title from the Elaine May’s 1987 film Ishtar, this group exhibition curated by Los Angeles-based critic Bruce Hainley touches on many of the same interests and dichotomies: a comedy that is political and analytical at the same time; an abstraction but also a representation; and a cultural production outside of much discourse. The catalogue traces the attempt to create an informed dialogue for artwork that evades easy classifications and readymade discussions of abstraction vs. representation. Featured artists include: Brian Calvin, Samara Caughey, Lecia Dole-Recio, Trisha Donnelly, Vincent Fecteau, Richard Hawkins, Larry Johnson, Patrick Hill, Cady Noland, Sturtevant.

Between 1981 and 1991 Thomas Ruff collected photographs from German newspapers and weeklies, amassing an archive of 2500 images. In 1990 and 1991 he selected 400 images from it, according to entirely subjective criteria, photographed them without captions, and had them reproduced as colour prints in twice their original size.

For this book, Thomas Ruff re-photographed the templates of the Zeitungsfotos series so they could be reproduced in black-and-white on a coloured background. Awarded Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2014.

“The images that comprise this book come from two sheets slides that I have held onto for almost thirty years now. Over that time I have projected them talks I gave here and there, although never a talk devoted solely to the person that took them.That would be Laurie Parsons, an artist who was active between 1986 and 1994, a period of about 9 years . In the first three, she focused on found objects, things she would bring back from the urban, the natural, industrial environment, or their intersection.”—Bob Nickas, 2021

Speechless, a new work by the Rotterdam-based artistic duo Bik Van der Pol (Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol), is a multilayered exploration of how we speak about the precarious state of the natural world. The work consists of a custom-built aviary, which houses four parrots taught to mimic phrases from T.S. Elliot’s seminal 1922 poem, The Waste Land, comparing landscape devastated by war to the ecological devastation of today. The aviary is furnished with a jumble of sculptural letters that spell out the terms “global warming,” “climate change,” and “sustainability.” Part poetic gesture and radical expression, Speechless addresses the power of language within political contexts, and our ability to understand and discuss environmental degradation. The work was inspired, in part, by recent debate in Florida’s state government regarding the use of controversial terms such as “climate change” and “global warming.”

You can see a video on the work here.

Pamphlet produced on the occasion of Bik van der Pol’s exhibition I’ve Got Something In My Eye at CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art. For this project, Bik Van der Pol brought together works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection, selections from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, their own works, and ephemera from the CCS Bard archive. Following Henri Bergson’s idea that perception is a function of time, the artists allowed themselves to look at how works potentially are surrounded by different sources of knowledge and how they sometimes grow from and are feed back into these connections. Objects, once acquired for specific reasons, are in a constant flux of changing meaning, both in the context and dynamics of a collection (which means continuously in the company other concepts and perceptions), as well as in time.

After exploring the museum’s collection and vast archive of history of exhibitions, books, leaflets, documents, newspaper clippings, and recorded speeches, this exhibition project by Bik Van der Pol presents a selection of more than 70 works from the collection of the Kunstmuseen Krefeld that address the landscape in art, industrialisation, climate change and the disappearance of nature. Departing from the Krefeld collection, Bik Van der Pol explore what shaped the 20th century and still shapes the present.

The title is taken from a review of the 1971 Haus-Rucker-Co exhibition in Haus Lange titled COVER. In the course of that show, Haus Lange was transformed into an artificial climate zone, at that time already calling attention to the growing problem of environmental pollution and its consequences for mankind.