January 28–March 6, 2016
“On Exactitude in Science” is a remarkable project well suited to engage the creative depth and breadth being cultivated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Guest curator Dina Deitsch has brought together four artists’ practices and resulting works to draw out poetic connections and entice us with tactile experiences that negotiate the world in which we live.
Related Events JANUARY 28, 2016 5–7 PM
Opening Reception Grossman Gallery
FEBRUARY 2, 2016 6:30 PM
Jennifer Bornstein: Artist Talk Anderson Auditorium FEBRUARY 9, 2016 8:30–10 AM
Breakfast Walking Tour with Guest Curator Dina Deitsch MARCH 3, 2016 12:30 PM
Aslı Çavuşoğlu: Artist Talk B209 MARCH 5, 2016 1 PM
Performance by Aslı Çavuşoğlu: Words Dash Against the Façade Performance begins in front of the SMFA Space is limited. RSVP at smfa.edu/exactitude-science
Starting FEBRUARY 9, 2016, 5:30 PM
Bi-weekly Re-Reading Group: “On Exactitude in Science” Grossman Gallery Gallery Hours: Monday–Saturday: 10 am–5 pm Wednesday: 10 am–8 pm Closed Sundays and holidays Printer: Signature Printing Graphic Design: Siena Scarff Design Left: Elizabeth McAlpine, The Map of Exactitude (#13), 2012 Collection of Jean-Edouard van Praet
Deep respect and gratitude goes first to Dina Deitsch, who is a remarkable and committed colleague, as well as to the artists Jennifer Bornstein, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Jumana Manna, and Elizabeth McAlpine. This exhibition and publication would not have been possible without the help and support of our inspired designer, Siena Scarff, and copy editor, Kristin Swan. Special thanks to these individuals and galleries: Jean Edouard van Praet and Tappan Heher; Martha Moldovan and Curtis Glenn at Gavin Brown’s enterprise; Carla Chammas, Dina Bizri, and Kristofor Giordano at CRG Gallery; as well as Laurel Gitlen and her team, Christopher Aque and Margaret Kross. As always, I would like to thank the SMFA faculty and staff, especially David Thacker, Manager of Exhibitions and Public Programs, and our Coordinator, Whitney Davis; our allies in Communications, Brooke Daniels and Patrick Walsh; Darin Murphy, Director of Library Services and Visual Resources; as well as graduate students Isabel Beavers, Amanda Elam, Julia Kwon, and Sara Oliver. Finally, I extend my utmost appreciation to President Chris Bratton and Dean Sarah McKinnon for their enthusiasm and support of this endeavor.
Carol A. Stakenas Curator, Exhibitions and Public Programs School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Foreword
Grossman Gallery
I hope you will share my intrigue in the interplay between the objects, images, and time-based artworks that tease out hidden histories embedded in—some familiar, others not so familiar, depending on your point of origin—built environments and urban landscapes. “On Exactitude in Science” provides critical insight into experience that resists disembodied conceptual analysis and reinvests in the power of surface and materiality.
On Exactitude in Science: Surface Play
. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars;in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes,
Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 (Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” 1946)
In the above text, the great storyteller of modernity Jorge Luis Borges presents what Jean Baudrillard later described as “the most beautiful allegory of simulation.” In the guise of a historical fragment, Borges tells the story of an empire so exceedingly precise that it maps itself to a 1:1 ratio, rendering the navigation device useless, but leaving the image, the document of the state, as an inhabitable relic. As Baudrillard continued in 1981, “this fable
has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.”1 Through the notion of the simulacra, the media theorist proposed the hyperreal, in which “simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality.” The state of the hyperreal is the image without the referent, the map without the empire. If Baudrillard detected the onset of the hyperreal in the still-prevailingly analog world of the early 1980s, today we find ourselves comfortably embedded in that state. In the digital age, images are no longer physically tethered directly to the real, no longer imprints of light and shadow, but rather hinged to pixels and code. Yet they comprise a virtual universe that is immersive and impactful to our daily existence, from our social worlds to financial currency. In an image-based post-Internet reality, we are indeed surrounded by an “ocean of images.”2 And so, in this era of the hyperreal, Borges’s parable takes on a new urgency. Now, it is the potential of the 1:1 ratio capture as a material form and process that holds our interest and the depths of our imaginations. There is an archaic but also revolutionary aspect to the idea of a direct correlation between an image and a place through scale. Moving one step further, this model of mapping prompts a return to what one would call a true index—by which a subject or surface is reproduced through the physical and concrete means of a trace or impression. There is an implied slow-down and focus in this mode of mark-making, where touch and materiality become the defining conditions of rendering. A deliberately paced, haptic form of vision emerges as an mode of perception in an increasingly manic and virtual world. In her recent collection of essays on architecture, film, and art, titled “Surface,” architectural and film historian Giuliana Bruno argues for “a shift in our focus away from the optic and towards a haptic materiality.”3 Bruno considers the surface, the outer layer of an object or building, as the true site of contact with the world. It is there where the“image” lies and where architecture operates through a series of variations in transparency, texture, and weight.
In this territory, artists Jennifer Bornstein, Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Jumana Manna, and Elizabeth McAlpine locate their means and modes of representation. While they do not always frame their concerns as antithetical to the digital, they each reaffirm a material relationship to our understanding of space. These artists re-present specific localities through rubbings, veneers, castings, and even psychic readings of building façades, to create presence and possibility through the precise point of contact—the literal, 1:1 ratio surfaces of these spaces and places. They address sites that range from the interiors of the art gallery and studio to the public arenas of the streets and plazas, similarly moving from poetic processes to political critique. Their works fluctuate between abstraction and realism, utterly formed by physical conditions yet visually fragmented. In doing so, they argue for a remapping of seemingly known territory.
In her two-channel film A journey around a noise machine; A journey around a noise machine: Score, presented as part–16mm film and part–digital video, McAlpine turned her attention to the London street outside her work space. On the video monitor, a woman “plays” the sidewalk with an exaggerated record needle. In the projected portion of the film, we see an animation of the marks made by rubbing the film along the sidewalk
A rubbing, or frottage, is one of the means to capture texture or shallow dimensional space directly onto a two-dimensional surface, and is typically made by rubbing graphite or colored wax against a thin sheet of paper pressed to a surface or object. It is, like the plaster cast, a precursor to the photographic image, which itself historically relied on a direct impression of phenomena or pigment (light) on a sensitive surface (film). Max Ernst famously used the technique to create automatic drawings in his frottages (French for “rubbing”), in which he would find forms within a rubbed texture from a floor or a grouping of variable surfaces. For the surrealists, this provided the ideal interplay between fiction and reality, between the conscious and subconscious realms in which they expertly traveled.6 The rubbing, while a concrete impression, also captures ineffable qualities of an object or surface and evokes a distinctive immateriality. The subject of a rubbing can fluctuate between presence and absence, in what curator Allegra Pesenti describes as “ghostly apparitions.”7 The fact that today this technique is most commonly used to read worn-down gravestone inscriptions only reinforces the sense of loss associated with a rubbing. Jennifer Bornstein harnesses these twin references in her captures of the interior of the former building of the Dia Art Foundation (Dia: Chelsea) at 548 West
Curatorial Essay
Elizabeth McAlpine targets the loss of touch and haptic memory instigated by the digital image by using and mis-using older forms of film and photography to capture space in material form. In her 2012 series The Map of Exactitude, inspired directly by the Borges fable—and, in turn, the inspiration for this exhibition—the artist used the physical characteristics of a studio space to create pinhole cameras, in boxes cast from the deep recesses of concrete ceiling panels. She then lined the newly cast cameras with photo-paper and used them to capture the very spaces from which they took shape. In the resulting abstractions and plaster sculptures, McAlpine finds a way to re-present a space through indexical means that ultimately divulges minimal information. Instead, she offers a way to see space as a process, as an ever-unfolding action of light and touch.
cracks. In tandem, these two moving images translate an urban site as physical and audible surface.4 They are depictions of the city comprised completely through touch and the particularities of surface play. The series continues into sculptural photograms of the same sidewalks, created from graphite rubbings and then printed on two sides of single sheets of thick, photo-sensitized paper. These prints, which are then folded into sculptural from, materialize the gap between the pavement and the paper just as the works visualize the impossible gap between a subject and its representation. For McAlpine, these works do not operate as images but as slowed and physical traces of her material processes. As photographic imprints, they are skins, a thin covering layer that is, similarly, the repository of touch.5
22nd Street, itself a renovated industrial warehouse. Bornstein created rubbings in black, blue, and red from the Chelsea space’s iconic freight elevator door, its brick doorways, the building’s cracked concrete floors, and its reinforced glass barriers to present a portrait of a now defunct art space. As one of the earliest art institutions in the Manhattan neighborhood and one founded to support artist projects, the building famously housed site-specific projects by Dan Flavin, Dan Graham, and Jorge Pardo, and was a beacon of contemporary art installations and exhibitions throughout the 1990s. Vacated by Dia (now located across the street) in 2004, the building was used for events and notably the Independent Art Fair, but recently purchased for development.8 Bornstein’s rubbings—made in 2014 when the building’s full commercial renovation began—have an elegiac tone, exemplified by the softened edges of the images that melt into the paper, or the uneven tones of the brick, made by variations of the artist’s hand pressure. Installed with pins directly onto the wall in an even, if irregular, grid composition, the prints have an immediacy that one might associate with emotion, perhaps grief, or, on the flip side, with a research board. In their un-precious presentation they become informative, unmediated, and material echoes of a past space and time. Bornstein’s rubbings note not just the loss of a particular art space (where she worked as a security guard as a young artist9), but also the passing of the direct film photograph, long gone in the dominance of digital imagery. The Dia rubbings address an iconic art space through a series of very literal indexical fragments. They become a semiotic play on images and meaning by which the traces reveal little of the operations of the art institution that has since defined the space, exposing instead its earlier industrial past as a 1920s-era warehouse in the brick walls and metal doors. In these direct captures of the space’s surfaces, Bornstein reminds us of the cyclic and changing nature of buildings, of architecture as a real estate venture, and perhaps, of image-making technology itself. Whereas in common parlance surface is often interchangeable with shallow and its intellectual
associations, this exhibition argues for the “truthiness” of surface, as the manifestation, rather than antithesis, of substance. Returning to Bruno’s writings, architectural surface becomes the site at which one interacts with the world. It is the membrane where experience happens. In McAlpine’s hands, it is skin; in Bornstein’s, it is time. For Jumana Manna, architectural surface is both imbricated and implicated within a historical and political web that has created the power struggles that grip daily life in East Jerusalem (the Palestinian portion of the ancient and divided city). In a series of sculptures, Unlicensed Porches, Manna recreates limestone-clad stoops from the Silwan neighborhood. The sculptures are low, lumpy bench-like forms that simultaneously evoke post-minimalist sculpture and the squat front porches from which they are derived. While not direct impressions of the non-permitted stoops, they are made at the same scale and with the same thin, cheap limestone veneer and concrete. While Silwan is an exclusively Palestinian area, it is home to one of Israel’s oldest archeological digs, a jarring, open excavation site in the middle of a thickly-settled residential area. It is no surprise that there is deep conflict and tension between the residents and those running the archeological site, which is operated by a privately owned Israeli organization. Building—and consequently unbuilding—in Jerusalem is rarely a neutral endeavor, as historically and archeologically based claims to sovereignty have been imposed in that area for the past century.10 In 1918, the British-designed master plan for Jerusalem required that future construction in the city continue in the pale beige of limestone to preserve the city’s ancient aesthetic, hence the term Jerusalem Stone.11 Manna’s Porches sculptures do little to hide their plywood bases and stone-veneered surfaces, in critique of this material hegemony. While following the city’s visual building principles, the Silwan porches that Manna replicates are in fact unpermitted, as there has been no agreed-upon urban plan for the neighborhood since 1968. In situ, these rough, quickly built stoops overlook and ironically echo the ancient limestone, dug from the ground just feet away in the open site. For Manna, the sloppy concrete and
irregular limestone structures of both the true and replicated porches stand in defiance; they reify a community, a nation, struggling for presence.12
In addressing the notion of surface as an exemplar of cultural and political identities, Manna touches on the performativity of exterior materials, of limestone and chrome specifically. Outer surfaces or coverings, be they masks, costumes, curtains, or sets, have a long history in the theatrical tradition, one that Aslı Çavuşoğlu folds into her work of redressing similar narratives. Like the three artists
For “On Exactitude in Science,” Çavuşoğlu adapts her 2011 performance Words Dash Against the Façade, recalling an ancient fortune-telling practice of reading architecture in civilizations such as Assur, Babylon, and Greece. According to Xenocrates, the fortune-teller would interpret the general structure of the building, including its columns, façade, and the ornaments carved on it. First executed for the Performa festival in New York and now remade for this exhibition, Words Dash Against the Façade is a free adaptation of this ancient practice enacted on selected buildings here in Boston. Çavuşoğlu, with the aide of historians and musicians, “plays” these buildings—including that of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the iconic Italianate structure of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum just across the street. While based on a loose script fusing narratives about each building’s use, past, and design, each performance is ultimately improvised by the artist and her collaborators. Windows become musical notations, tambourines shake and rally at each fluted column, and brickwork paves the path for dance. Çavuşoğlu overlays intertwined factual and fictional descriptions onto the visual rhythms and structure of each building to generate performances. Accompanying this “architectural tour,” is a sound piece, installed in the galleries but accessible only from the SMFA’s outdoor courtyard. Audible from headphones protruding from the brick, Çavuşoğlu’s narration ponders the building’s artistic legacy, allowing it to seemingly “speak.” Here, the architectural façade is not the proscenium but the script and performer itself. In Words Dash Against the Façade, Çavuşoğlu approaches buildings from a poetic remove, through which she explores the interpretation of history as performance. While Manna reads architectural surfaces as indices of present political realities, Çavuşoğlu casts from them a vision for reinterpreting the past and future. In performing a façade,
Curatorial Essay
In the evening, young men gather around these porches or stoops, as there are few businesses or sanctioned areas for people to congregate. Manna features a small group of these men—apolitical, often petty criminals who spend their days grooming and body-building and waxing their muscle cars—in her 2010 video Blessed Blessed Oblivion, a contemporary take on Kenneth Anger’s 1963 film Scorpio Rising. Anger’s seminal short depicts a biker gang in its ritual of leather and metal through a clearly homoerotic gaze, overlaid with full tracks of pop songs about girls crushing on boys.13 In a brilliant twist, Manna applies a similarly off-kilter lens to a crew of tough guys, yet here, we are meant to re-read not their sexual identity but their political disposition. She depicts Muslim men who are neither terrorists nor radicals, but subjects filled with desires and frustrations. Manna focuses her camera on their trimmed facial hair, slick muscles, and candycolored cars, which they obsessively wax and clean, in scenes and camerawork modeled after Anger’s. He notably used the glossy sheen of surfaces—be they motorcycle chrome or leather-clad bodies—as an extension of the celluloid and of the desire that it embodied. Manna presents the veneer of her subjects’ lives as metaphor; their sleek cars and relentless grooming serve as both the parable of and means for these young Palestinians’ escape from the tensions of daily life—a gleaming, powerful edifice standing against the disenfranchisement they face within their homeland—even as the mobile nature of the automobile reinforces the unstable status of their dwellings.14 In Manna’s video and sculptures, material surfaces become unexpected sites for selfdetermination, a form of radical, integrated protest against a homogenous overarching political will.
above, she looks to past techniques to reengage with a haptic form of vision, located in and at the built façade. She does so to critically unpack the ways in which we read, interpret, and internalize history and to understand the problems inherent in historytelling itself.
she transforms the human-made designs and constructions into something organic and “natural,” as one would treat the chance arrangement of tea leaves. Yet the apparent absurdity of foreseeing one’s future through buildings dissipates as we delve into our intellectual frameworks of law (a system built on precedent), history, and archeology. Using the constructs of the past to portend the future, and as a result, the present, is, in fact, standard practice. Çavuşoğlu questions the means by which history is read and by whom, through the oblique angle of a group performance. Using the range of voices from textual sources and collaborators, she articulates a multivalent approach to understanding the past, while arguing against any sort of singular or monolithic truth. The four artists featured in “On Exactitude in Science” all similarly address the act of representation through fragmentary devices. They complicate the notion of an all-totalizing image of a place—whether a street, studio, or building—in favor of direct captures of the myriad details that coalesce to form a given location. By doing so, they propose the political and historical necessity of breaking homogenous viewpoints, of understanding the complexity of narratives embedded in a given site through its actual presence. Whereas Borges’s map was indeed a representational image, its 1:1 scale contained the exacting specificity of the reality it emulated. Through primarily analog and even archaic techniques, these artists engage the surfaces of spaces, performing a series of critical maneuvers that question ways in which we read the material that undergirds our environments. It is through their interactions with the outermost layers of given spaces, the very skin of architecture, that they underscore and even redirect the aesthetic and political status quo. To do so, they create forms of indexical representation that are grounded in experience, favoring touch over vision, and the detailed fragment over the completed image. Dina Deitsch Guest Curator
NOTES Epigraph: Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 325. 1. Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation” (1981), in Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166. 2. See MoMA’s 2015 exhibition on new photography: Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015, http://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1539. 3. Giuliana Bruno, Surface, Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3. 4. Laura Bartlett Gallery, Elizabeth McAlpine, Tip Toe, September 2014. 5. Ibid. 6. See Allegra Pesenti, “Seeing Behind the Scenes,” in Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with UCLA Hammer Museum and Menil Collection, 2015), 12. 7. Pesenti, “Seeing Behind the Scenes,” 18–19. 8. For a review of Dia’s history and legacy in Chelsea, see http://www.diaart.org/contents/page/info/102, and for a more recent update of the building’s real estate drama, see Sarah Cascone, “Owner of Former Dia Building Ousts Independent Fair and Zach Feuer,” Artnet News, November 7, 2014, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/owner-of-former-dia-building-oustsindependent-fair-and-zach-feuer-updated-159483. 9. Jennifer Bornstein, conversation with the author, September 2015. 10. Work at many archeological sites in the area, specifically near the historically and religiously significant Temple Mount, is driven by ideological beliefs and the aim of repatriating areas based on biblical history. 11. See The British Mandate from “Jerusalem: Life Throughout the Ages in a Holy City,” http://www.biu.ac.il/js/rennert/history_12.html. Online course material from the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel. 12. See Jumana Manna, Menace of Origins (New York: Sculpture Center, 2015). 13. On Anger’s use of the erotic gaze, see Juan. A. Suarez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 14. Manna, Menace of Origins, 4. 15. See HG Masters, “Archipelagoes of Fiction,” Aslı Çavuşoğlu: Mercury in Retrograde (Istanbul: art-ist and Revolver, 2012) 16.
Jennifer Bornstein
Aslı Çavuşoğlu
Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise
Originally commissioned by Performa 11; readapted for facades of selected buildings in Boston
All works 2014 rubbing; wax on paper
Freight Elevator 87 1/2 x 37 inches Electrical Outlet 37 x 21 inches Floor Crack 26 x 37 1/4 inches Window 59 1/8 x 38 1/2 inches Wall Panel 18 3/4 x 16 3/4 inches Wall Panel 95 x 37 inches Hallway Safety Barrier 36 3/4 x 28 inches
Words Dash Against the Façade, 2011/2016 walking tour performance and audio file
Jumana Manna
All works courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York Tombstones fragments, from Al-Kazakhani Graveyard series. Unlicensed Porch, 2010/2014 bronze casts of corroded tombstones, limestone, mortar, wood, concrete 19 x 37 1/2 x 6 3/4 in. Unlicensed Porch Wadi Hilweh, 2014 limestone, mortar, wood, concrete 14 3/4 x 62 x 36 in. Unlicensed Porch Issawiyeh, 2014 limestone, mortar, wood, concrete 14 x 67 x 18 in Unlicensed Porch Al-Bustan, 2014 limestone, mortar, wood, concrete 7 x 37 1/4 x 15 in
Floor 19 1/2 x 16 inches
Blessed Blessed Oblivion, 2010 HD video, 22 min.
Floor 60 3/4 x 37 inches
Elizabeth McAlpine
Structural Column 55 1/8 x 37 3/4 inches Floor Piece 11 x 11 3/4 inches Floor 27 x 13 inches Wall 36 x 29 inches Floor 37 3/4 x 22 1/4 inches Bricks with Electrical Outlet 37 x 25 inches Ladder 36 3/4 x 33 inches Wall 52 1/2 x 36 3/4 inches Wall Panels 114 x 36 3/4 inches
All works courtesy of the artist and Laurel Gitlen, New York, unless otherwise noted A journey around a noise machine; A journey around a noise machine: Score, 2015 16mm transferred to video; 16mm film 6 min., looping, edition of 3 plus 1 artist’s proof Pieta, 2014–15 black-and-white contact print, Somerset Tub Sized Satin paper, photographic emulsion, steel, magnets 31 x 28 x 28 1/4 inches Cornerstone (whispering), 2015 black and white contact print, photographic emulsion, Somerset paper, steel, magnets 26 x 21 3/4 x 10 inches The Map of Exactitude (#11), 2012 plaster, plywood, steel plinth 51 1/2 x 19 x 11 1/2 inches The Map of Exactitude (#13), 2012 two photographs on positive paper, framed 22 x 23 3/4 inches Collection of Jean-Edouard van Praet
Checklist
Freight Elevator 59 x 28 inches
Jennifer Bornstein (b. 1970, Seattle, WA) lives and works in Cambridge, MA, and New York, NY. She received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a Radcliffe Institute of Advance Study Fellowship, DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm fellowship, and a PollockKrasner Foundation grant. Her work has been widely exhibited at institutions in the United States and Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She is currently teaching in the VES Department at Harvard University for the 2015–16 year. Left: Jennifer Bornstein, Window, 2014 Right: Jennifer Bornstein, Freight Elevator, 2014
Elizabeth McAlpine (b. 1973, London) lives and works in London and France. She studied Fine Arts & Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and received an MFA in sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She has had solo exhibitions at the Reg Vardy Gallery at the University of Sunderland, UK; Laurel Gitlen, New York; Laura Bartlett Gallery, London; and SPACEX in Exeter. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australia, and Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Spike Island, London; The Barbican, London; Kadist Foundation, Paris, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA, and upcoming at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.
Elizabeth McAlpine, The Map of Exactitude (#11), 2012
Aslı Çavuşoğlu (b. 1982, Istanbul, Turkey) lives and works in Istanbul. She received her BA in Cinema-TV at the Marmara University, Istanbul. Recent solo shows include The Stones Talk, ARTER, Istanbul (2013), and Murder in Three Acts, Delfina Foundation, London (2013). Recent group shows include “Saltwater,” 14th Istanbul Biennial; “Surround Audience”, New Museum, NYC (2015); “The Crime Was Almost Perfect,” Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2014); “Suspicious Minds” at Galeria Vermelho in Sao Paulo (2013); “Signs Taken in Wonder” at MAK Museum in Vienna (2013); “His Masters Voice” at HMKV in Dortmund, “Soundworks” at the ICA in London (2012); Performa 11 in New York (2011); “7 Works” at Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul (2011); and “This Place You See Has No Size At All” at Kadist Art Foundation in Paris (2009).
Aslı Çavuşoğlu, Words Dash Against the Façade, 2011 Photographs by Paula Court
Top Left: Jumana Manna, Blessed Blessed Oblivion, 2010 (still) Left: Jumana Manna, Unlicensed Porch Al-Bustan, 2014 Right: Jumana Manna, Tombstones fragments, from Al-Kazakhani Graveyard series. Unlicensed Porch, 2010/2014
Jumana Manna (b. 1987, New Jersey) is an American-born Palestinian artist based in Berlin. She is a graduate of CalArts (MA) and graduate of both the National Academy of the Arts Oslo (BA) and the Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design in Jerusalem (BA). Selected solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015), “Menace of Origins” at the Sculpture Center in New York (2014), “Untitled” at CRG Gallery in New York (2013), “The Goodness Regime” at Kunsthall Oslo (2013), and “Gebrüder Israels Austellungsraum” at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2013). Selected group shows include “Fortrolighet” at the Hydrogenfabrikken kunsthall in Fredrikstad (2014), “Mixed Cities” at the Tel Aviv Museum (2013), and “The Spring Exhibition” at Kunsthal Charlottenberg in Copenhagen (2011). Her work has been screened at “Points of Departure” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2013), “Future Imperfect” at Tate Modern in London (2013), Berlinische Galerie’s 12x12 video lounge (2013), and at multiple international film festivals. She also participated in the Sharjah Biennale (2013) and the Performa 13 Biennial, New York (2013). In 2012, Manna received the Qattan Foundation’s Young Palestinian Artist Award (first prize).
Barbara and Steven Grossman Gallery School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 230 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02115 Front Cover: Elizabeth McAlpine, Cornerstone (whispering), 2015 Back Cover: Elizabeth McAlpine, A journey around a noise machine; A journey around a noise machine: Score, 2015 (detail)