Every Beat of My Heart is the culmination of Season 1 artist Kerry James Marshall’s Wexner Center Residency Award. The work grows out of his Rythm Mastr series, an expansive sequence of narrative works that tells a tale of urban life featuring superheroes inspired by African archetypes and African-American culture (view Marshall talking about the series on his Art:21 webpage here).
Marshall’s Wexner residency began last summer with a trip to Japan to study the traditional art form of Bunraku puppetry. He then convened a group of 23 Columbus teenagers totrain as puppeteers in order to present Every Beat of My Heart as a live performance with musical accompaniment by jazz drummer Kahil El’Zabar.
The performances take place this weekend: Saturday, February 2, at 4pm and 7pm, and Sunday, February 3 at 2pm and 4pm in the Wexner Center Galleries.
After the performances, the puppets and sets will be on view as part of the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Every Beat of My Heart, through April 13. A video of the complete performance will be on view in the lower lobby during this time as well.
Tickets are extremely limited and are available only in person, first-come, first-served at the Wexner Center Ticket Office/Patron Services Desk on the day of the performance (two tickets per patron maximum). Overflow seating with a live video feed will be available in the Film/Video Theater during all performances. (The ticket office opens at 10 am on Saturday and 11 am on Sunday.)
Read more about the project here and here.
Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers gallery in London presents DETAINED, an installation by Jenny Holzer that opens tonight and runs through March 15. Beginning with her 2004 exhibition at the Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria, Holzer has made the study of declassified US government documents the content for her context-based practice.
In DETAINED, Holzer exhibits new works including a series of paintings and a large LED configuration. Each painting depicts a handprint of an American soldier accused of crimes in Iraq, including detainee abuse and assault. Culled from documents made public through the Freedom of Information Act, Holzer’s hangs the hands of the charged next to those of the wrongly accused and those whose culpability has been lost, representing the fog of war. Her LED artwork, Torso, displays in red, blue, white, and purple light the statements, investigation reports, and emails fromthe case files of the accused soldiers. The installation lays bare that it is the individual who suffers and confronts the mechanics of politics and war. DETAINED makes substantial Wislawa Szymborska’s lament and statement in her poem “Tortures” that “the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”
Read an interview with Jenny Holzer and watch a video clip in which she talks about her redaction paintings on her Art:21 webpage here.
More in artists’ talks: Teresa Hubbard & Alexander Birchler (Season 3), the internationally acclaimed video artists, will speak tonight at 7pm at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Hubbard/Birchler began their collaboration in the mid-1990s, making sculpture, installation, photography, and performance-based work. They make short films and photographs about the construction of narrative time and space without the context of a traditional story line. These open-ended works elicit multiple readings.
In their first commission for television, Art21 invited Hubbard/Birchler to create original works of video art to conclude each of the four episodes in Season 3. Each beautiful and enigmatic short film uses the same setting—the interior of a police car at night—and begins when one officer brings a cup of coffee for another. Using recurring and non-recurring characters, interrelated dialogue, and ambient sound, the suite of films evoke not only the Season 3 themes of Power, Memory, Structures and Play, but also sleep, dreams and longing. View each film on their Art:21 webpage here.
This lecture is free and open to public.
On a related note, Season 4 artist Mark Dion will be speaking as part of the same StudioVU lecture series on February 27.
Vanderbilt University
Room 103 of Wilson Hall
Nashville, TN