The Los Angeles based artist Shannon Ebner extends her exploration of photography, sculpture and language in this remarkable book, The Sun as Error. In collaboration with Dexter Sinister (design duo David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey), The Sun as Error re-investigates the meaning and language of photographs, creating both an open-ended reading of her practice and also rethinking the idea of an artist’s monograph. Far from straightforward, the book interweaves her bodies of work, previously unseen one-off pieces, with the language of technical diagrams, optical illusions, and graphic design. One of the persistent motifs through the book’s sequence is an asterisk and, specifically, one imbued with the legacy of the graphic designer Muriel Cooper. As the first design director for MIT Press and the cofounder of the Visible Language Workshop, Cooper’s legacy for reorienting and repositioning the direction of an artist’s monograph is imaginatively explored in the creative partnership of Dexter Sinister and Shannon Ebner.

Thea Djordjadze mainly works with sculpture although she has also realized performances and been involved in music projects. In her sculptures, she often uses perishable, fragile, everyday materials that are derived from the vocabulary of domesticity and may hint at femininity, such as plaster, ceramic, silicon, sponge, cardboard, textiles and soap. The shelves, railings, walls and boxes that support or encase the sculptural objects, are simple but delicate architectural structures of wood and metal. Their expression stands in stark contrast to the organic shapes and “unfinished” surfaces of modestly scaled sculptures propped against walls, resting on shelves or hanging from railings. These passive-aggressive configurations of conflicting but mutually dependent objects make cryptic and elliptical reference to the sculpture of classical modernism. The artist’s drawings and watercolours are often part of installations, doubling and heightening their expressive impact and also underlining the fragmentary, unfinished state of the work. They are neither preliminary sketches for future three-dimensional works nor are they studies of already existing sculptures or autonomous pieces. It is as if the sculptures were living bodies that have assumed a definitive shape and became motionless only for a moment—and the drawings have taken note of their temporary appearance.

With texts from Oksana Bulgakowa and Adam Szymczyk.

The work of Sanja Iveković has been seen only rarely in museums and art spaces in the Netherlands. This two-part exhibition aims to introduce a new audience to Iveković’s work, and seeks to provide an understanding of the artist’s practice by connecting her feminist voice to the social, political, and historical developments in general, and specifically to such realities in Croatia, her country of residence. Iveković’s body of work performs a crucial role in understanding how European art has developed over the past thirty-five years. This exhibition presents a selection of key works from Iveković’s oeuvre from the 1970s to today.

The exhibition at the Van Abbemuseum focuses on more historical work from before 1989, consisting primarily of photographic series, collages, and filmed performances. The works are installed around the large vertical space of the museum tower, where a newer monumental sculpture, realized originally as a public art project in Luxemburg in 2001, Lady Rosa of Luxembourg, is reconstructed.

At BAK, a selection of more recent work is shown, including three new productions, amongst which a new version of the well-known Women’s House, a collective portrait of women from a local shelter for abused women. The exhibition is also planned to extend into the public realm with Iveković’s proposal to rename a city street in Utrecht after the Unknown Heroine.