Kunsthalle Bielefeld
Apr
29
10:30 PM22:30
Solo Exhibitions

Kunsthalle Bielefeld

Everyone should keep someone else’s diary. —Oscar Wilde

Dennis Adams has been commissioned by Kunsthalle Bielefeld to create a permanent public artwork for its 50th anniversary. Sited near the front entrance of the museum on an existing city bus stop, Bus Shelter 12: Shattered Glass/The Confessions of Philip Johnson addresses the Kunsthalle’s controversial American architect—as a Zeitgeist of twentieth century aesthetic transformations, as they intersected with cultural, historical ,and political forces.

Functioning as both a shelter/seating pavilion for waiting bus passengers, and as a platform for a text-based video written by Adams from the first-person perspective of Philip Johnson, the structure is bisected by a shattered plate glass wall that divides its interior space into two waiting zones, each of which, houses a video monitor that loops through 496 text fragments, one at a time—at 12 seconds intervals. One video monitor is in German and the other in English. The exterior walls of the bus shelter display two identical back-illuminated photographic portraits of Johnson, taken by Satoshi Saikusa at Johnson’s Glass House in 1998.

Photograph: Philipp Aottendoerfer

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Le Palais Fesch: Musee des Beaux Arts et le FRAC Corsica
Jan
23
to Apr 30
Group Exhibitions

Le Palais Fesch: Musee des Beaux Arts et le FRAC Corsica

On view in the exhibition, Black Belmondo is a reworking of the last shot of Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, where Jean Seberg traces the outline of her lips with her thumb. Seberg's gesture was appropriated from Jean-Paul Belmondo who has just died from gunshot wounds in front of her on the streets of Paris. Belmondo himself had appropriated the gesture from Humprey Bogart in one of Godard's playful references to Hollywood cinema. Adams extends the evolution of this borrowed gesture, by transforming it into a make-up application of traditional Black Face, suggesting a link to Seberg's real life identification with the Black Panthers.

IMAGE: Dennis Adams, Black Belmondo, 2008, Single Channel Video [152 Seconds, Loop], No. 1 from an edition of 3

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Art Lesson
Nov
7
to Feb 18

Art Lesson

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The museum will be completing the exhibition programme organised to mark its 25th Anniversary by inviting visitors to reflect on the educational role of museums in society today through an innovative project curated by the Education Department. “Art Lesson” will consist of various activities that will take place during the time the exhibition is open to the public and will occupy different spaces in the museum. The project has been conceived as an organic entity which will take shape over time and will make the museum particularly dynamic while it is taking place.

An exhibition featuring the work of contemporary artists such as Antoni Muntadas, Cinthia Marcelle, Dennis Adams, Eva Kot’átková, Dora Garcia, Pavel Kogan, Erwin Wurm, Rineke Djikstra and Pipilotti Rist will look at the issues of where knowledge lies and the museum as a personal experience, aiming to transform the spectator’s experience and place within the museum. For the first time, the museum will also become a space for creation through three artist’s residence grants that will allow the recipients to work alongside the Education Department team during both the preparatory stage and the exhibition itself. This initiative aims to establish links between cutting-edge artistic creation and the museum and between its works and the activities of its educators. 

The wide-ranging educational programme that accompanies the exhibition will allow the visiting public to become an active agent, forming part of this process of experimentation and investigation. 

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