Art Photos mixed

Life's Foolish Promise
Photo by Timothy Poulton

Life
Photo by Vincent Favre

The White Desert, Farafra, Egypt

The inaugural London Design Biennale opened this week at Somerset House (until 27 September), with installations, prototypes, virtual reality renderings and designs from 37 countries on show. These range from Pakistan and Portugal to Saudi Arabia and Tunisia—the ambitious system of national representation brings to mind the Venice Biennale. Each exhibit examines the theme of Utopia by Design, encompassing issues such as sustainability, migration and pollution. The principal sponsor is Jaguar.



The Russian stand at London Design Biennial (Photo: Bradley Lloyd Barnes)

RussiaThe Russian presentation throws new light on the workshops and designers behind a state-sanctioned design system that was truly Utopian in its aspirations. The exhibition Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design explores the realised, and unrealised, projects created by the All-Union Soviet Institute of Technical Aesthetics from the 1960s to the 1990s. Light boxes with digitised images display these forgotten projects, from the experimental 1980-E Snowmobile to a Saigak portable tape recorder from 1987.
Alexandra Sankova, the director of the Moscow Design Museum which is overseeing the installation, says: “Soviet designers were idealists who hoped to create perfect material environments. The installation acts as a type of time machine that will transport the visitor into a different graphic, political and economic reality.” The exhibit is supported by The Art Newspaper Russia.

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Soaking in rainbow light, sun and salt water

Visitors to Frieze New York this year might recall the saturated blue of a calcified American flag displayed on the stand of Emmanuel Perrotin—the first colourful work ever shown by the artist Daniel Arsham, who has a form of colourblindness which leaves him with what he describes as a “drastically reduced” range of colour vision. “For audiences who know my work, it was a bit jarring… they never really considered that the work was lacking colour,” explains the artist, whose characteristic palette of neutrals has largely been dictated by his choice of materials, such as the grey of volcanic ash in cast pieces. Next week, Perrotin’s New York branch is due to open Arsham’s first solo show in the city—where he has lived and worked since 1999—which will also be his first show of works in colour, Daniel Arsham: Circa 2345 (15 September-22 October).This change is due to what Arsham calls a “kind of life-altering experience”: getting to perceive a broader range of colour thanks to glasses by the company EnChroma that resemble “regular sunglasses” but are able to artificially separate the wavelengths of colours in the spectrum that he has trouble seeing. “When can you have a moment in your life when this new thing that’s always been there is revealed to you?” he recalls about the experience, which will be explored in an upcoming documentary by the filmmaker Megan Raney Aarons.

Arsham received a pair of the glasses last autumn, around the time he began working on the foundation for this new exhibition. “Originally the work [in the show] was not going to be in colour,” he says. In the end, “still trying to create a sense of reduction in the work”, Arsham chose only two colours for the show—related, like his previous work, to materials—and separated by floor: blue calcite, for the works on the ground floor of the exhibition, and amethyst, for the basement level.



Daniel Arsham, Blue Calcite Bulls Jacket, 2016 (Blue calcite and hydrostone). Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Arsham Studios



Daniel Arsham, Blue Calcite Jersey, 2016 (Blue calcite and hydrostone). Photo: Courtesy of Daniel Arsham Studios

All of the works in the show—a continuation of the artist’s “fictional archaeological world”—are of sports-related objects, such as the “Brancusi-esque” columns of basketballs and American footballs and a Miami Heat jacket in blue on the ground level. On the basement level is a large amethyst installation that Arsham calls a “cavern of sorts”, made of thousands of individually cast balls of various sports, including basketball, golf and tennis. He says it looks as if the objects were dumped in a site and calcified over thousands of years, or that an obsessive-compulsive person in the future assembled a cavern out of relics from the past.

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Artists Space Book & Talks in New York will be “transformed into a self-regulated commons” for Decolonize This Place, an active three-month series of community events, workshops and campaigns due to launch this weekend (17 September-17 December) that aims to “challenge the white supremacy that continues to characterise the economies and institutions of art”, according to a press release.

The project has been organised by the politically-engaged arts collective MTL+ and is based on five central themes: indigenous struggle, Black liberation, free Palestine, global wage workers and de-gentrification. Groups slated to participate include the arts publication Hyperallergic, the Black Poets Speak Out group, the Bronx Not For Sale organisation and the Queens Anti-Gentrification Network.


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Modern art by Arab artists will take over the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) this November. The Sea Suspended: Arab Modernism from the Barjeel Collection (8 November to 23 December) will include around 40 works made between the 1940s and the 1990s from across the Arab world. The works are drawn from the extensive collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, which is based in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. It will be the first time a show of modern Arab art has taken place in Iran, according to the foundation.Given the political tensions in the region, the exhibition marks a significant moment of cultural diplomacy between Tehran and Sharjah. “Art is important in that it allows experiences to be shared, even across the boundaries of language or culture,” said the director of TMoCA, Majid Mollanorouzi, in a statement. “This is of even more importance when we work together with organisations from the region.”

The title of the show, The Sea Suspended, is taken from a poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. “The image of a temporarily suspended sea as a way to bridge everyday boundaries that are difficult to cross seemed appropriate,” said Karim Sultan, a curator at the Barjeel Art Foundation. A publication on the exhibition containing discussions on the similarities and distinctions between Arab and Iranian modern art will be released during Art Dubai in March 2017.







The exhibition is the result of extended negotiations between a small network of individuals and galleries working between Iran and other countries in the region. Discussions began between the Barjeel Art Foundation and Sanaz Askari, the Iranian founder of The Mine Gallery in Dubai. She put the foundation in touch with Ehsan Rasoulof, the founder of Mohsen Gallery, who had recently exhibited contemporary Arab artists in Tehran. Together they helped facilitate the exhibition at TMoCA.

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Royals can be creative—that’s the message behind Convergence, a new show at the Ritz Carlton DIFC in Dubai (29-30 November) which will feature works by 15 of the “world’s sovereign artists” including HE Sheikh Dr Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani of Qatar, HRH Princess Sibylle of Prussia, and HRH The Princess Sophie from Romania (the latter takes photographs of the natural world). The organisation behind the show, Royal Bridges, was founded by Sheikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, a member of the Bahraini royal family. He says (rather regally): “Royal Bridges steps in to fill in the gap and contend the stereotype of royal patronage with the dearth of artistic talent, which is often associated with ruling houses.” Christie’s will auction the works, with proceeds going towards the World Food Programme.

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A Caiman Wearing a Crown of Butterflies Photographed by Mark Cowan