Massachusetts rock band Speedy Ortiz have dropped a video for “No Below”, the centerpiece to this summer’s Major Arcana. Directed by Boast Choan, the clip pairs the outsider ballad with faded images of the band and friends hanging out in a wooded area, performing some bizarre rituals that involve food and animal masks.
TweetFor her single “Forgiven/Forgotten”, off next year’s Burn Your Fire for No Witness, Angel Olsen has dropped a 16mm video directed by Zia Anger and shot in the suburbs of Asheville, N.C. According to the director, the clip was inspired by “Freaks and Geeks”.
TweetThe works in Disco Angola are all dated from 1974 or 1975, a pivotal moment in the history of global political economy: the Bretton Woods monetary regime had collapsed, the 1973 oil crisis was just abating, global markets were enduring the worst crash since the great Depression and the rapprochement between the US and the Soviet Union was breaking down. New York was a city on the verge of bankruptcy and the burgeoning disco scene offers Douglas’ protagonist respite from the gritty realities of day-to-day life.
The exhibition presents six works from the series, three based in Angola and three in New York. Each large-scale colour photograph is arranged in a pair that face each other on opposing walls. Douglas researched archival photographs, and meticulously reproduced period costumes and furnishings in his sets. In some images, staged scenes feature precisely choreographed gestures that hint at the relative relationships between characters. In others, props and décor provide clues to the geographic and historic context.
The photographs in the series combine the look of photojournalism with careful staging and composition. By re-imagining scenes from particular historical moments, Douglas invites the viewer to challenge assumptions about the veracity of the photographic image, and particularly to call into question documentary’s relationship to objective truth.
Exhibition runs through to December 15th, 2013
Victoria Miro
16 Wharf ROAD
London
N1 7RW
Few places in space and time can have been more fantastical and inspiring than Ibiza in the early 1980s. The island was home to three of the most important nightclubs in the world. Ku was the world’s largest outdoor discotheque, built around an Olympic sized swimming pool. Amnesia was the late night / early morning club where DJ Alfredo played Beethoven, Kate Bush and whatever he liked until the sun came up. Pacha was the boutique discotheque that became a global superbrand.
Ibiza had long been an island of freedom. It was a haven for liberal and alternative Spaniards during Franco’s rule. In the early seventies it was a key point on a global hippie trail. In the early eighties it was both a favourite destination of the Club 18-30 holidayers as well as Europe’s yachting fraternity. Ibiza was Europe’s most treasured ‘pleasure island.’
In 1987 four British DJs, including Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold, visited the island and were entranced by the Balearic beats. They were so inspired that on their return to London they launched the club nights Shoom and Spectrum, put the acid into house, and went a long way to creating the dance music industry as we now know it.
The exhibition highlights the work of two great and almost completely unheralded visual artists. Yves Uro was the freehand illustrator and graphic artist of hundreds of posters for Ku. Armin Heinemann was the owner of Paula’s Ibiza, a maverick fashion boutique based on the island. Uro and Heinemann’s work was world class but created solely for local purposes. It has rarely been exhibited before.
Exhibition runs through to January 14th, 2014
Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Mall
London
SW1Y 5AH
Dayanita Singh is internationally acclaimed for breaking away from the print-on-the-wall tradition of art photography and creating unique mass-produced artist’s books. Used as a raw material, photography is a starting point for Singh, rather than an end in itself. Go Away Closer is the first major UK retrospective of Singh’s work, which investigates and challenges the boundaries and practice of photography as an artistic medium.
The exhibition brings together Singh’s artistic oeuvre from the past decades and her portable ‘museums’, a major new body of work which has developed from her experiments in book-making. Singh’s portable ‘museums’ are large wooden structures which can be placed and opened in various configurations, each holding 70 to 140 photographs. Within what she has termed a “photo-architecture”, her images are endlessly displayed, sequenced, edited and archived within the structures.
The ‘museums’ create spaces to intimately engage with her photographs as interconnected bodies of work, rather than single images. They display stories, themes and related sequences, fashioned by Singh from her vast archive as well as from new photographs. With these objects, Singh expands photography into the realm of not only sculpture and architecture, but also of fiction and poetry.
Exhibition runs through to December 15th, 2013
Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London
SE1 8XZ
In 90 minutes, we see the GDR more sharply, more clearly: the skater subculture shows that not all was grey-on-grey and drab clouds of Trabant fumes. This Wildfremd production (Ronald Vietz & Michael Schöbel) by director Martin Persiel takes original clips of the “wheel-board-riders” – straight out of the East German scene in the 80s – and mixes it with animations and reencounters with the protagonists today. It is not just a well thought out story on its own, this film also raises the aesthetic bar.
“Skating as freedom” is one of the leitmotifs of this film. Skating “without pressure to be better than someone else,” as one of the main characters puts it, became the goal in hindsight, or, said downright harshly, “the desire for freedom turned lifestyle”. Unbelievable, if not for the simple fact that this Californian fun could find its expression in the GDR.
In theaters December 6th, 2013
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