Since 2003, the FOR-SITE Foundation is dedicated to the creation, understanding and presentation of art about place. Its latest project is the exhibition “Home Land Security“ which takes place at Fort Winfield Scott at Langdon Court, a former military site on San Francisco Bay. It is open until December 18, 2016.
Battery Boutelle – for tourists in the San Francisco area it is best known as a location to take perfect shots of the Golden Gate Bridge. The art exhibition “Home Land Security“, which momentarily takes place at Fort Winfield Scott, a suite of decommissioned coastal batteries and buildings, focuses on a completely different subject. Occupying this former military site, it brings together 18 contemporary artists from 12 countries “to reflect on the human dimensions and increasing complexity of national security, including the physical and psychological borders we create, protect, and cross in its name“ (website for-site.org). The artworks encompass media ranging from painting and sculpture to video and performance.
“When you put art with nature and with history, then you bring the community to share that and have dialogue.“ – Kate Bickert (Director Park Initiatives and Stewardship, Golden Gate National Parks Conservatory)
For decades, the exhibition area used to serve as key sites in the US Army’s Coastal Defense System. It was built over a hundred years ago. With this exhibition, FOR-SITE has opened some of the buildings to the public for the first time. It is the foundation’s belief that art can inspire fresh thinking and start an important dialogue about our natural and cultural environment. And it is certainly not their first project of this kind. In 2014/15 they co-operated with Ai Weiwei, the internationally renowned Chinese artist and activist and turned Alcatraz Island, the notorious prison, with a series of new works into a national park. The project “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” attracted nearly 900.000 visitors.
The exhibition “Home Land Security” closes on December 18, 2016. It’s free and open from Wednesday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm.
(Picture: Flickr_Peter Kaminski)
At Tate Britain the holiday season has just begun: A Christmas tree is the eye catcher of the festive season in London, Great Britain. Hanging upside down from the glass ceiling in the Millbank entrance, the installation by Shirazeh Houshiary can be looked at from three levels of the art gallery: the tip of the tree from the lower floor, the body from the ground floor, and the glittering roots from the upper floor.
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The Christmas tree by Shirazeh Houshiary, a visual artist from Iran, was unveiled on 1 December 2016 inside the gallery’s Millbank building and is exhibited with the support from Lisson Gallery. It is the first Christmas tree at the gallery since work began on the new Tate Britain, but also a reimagination of a similar piece Houshiary created for Tate Britain over 20 years ago. The installation forms the spectacular centrepiece besides a display of works by prominent British artists such as Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Alison Wilding, and marks the start of a new series of commissions for the festive season while the work itself focuses on the pine tree’s natural qualities such as texture, colour, smell and shape.
The exhibition
The exhibition “Sculpture as Object“ is curated by Clarrie Wallis, Senior Curator of Contemporary British Art, and Elsa Coustou, Assistant Curator Contemporary British Art. After the presentation of the Turner Prize on 5 December at Tate Britain, the exhibition will reopen in full to show works by Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Jacqui Poncelet, Richard Wentworth and Bill Woodrow.
Find out more about the installation!
Green Air is the second installation of a play in two acts by Nomad Studio at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis. It creates a dialogue with Green Varnish in form, material, time and space.
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Green Varnish was carefully de-constructed and re-purposed to create Green Air. Life works as an everlasting closed cycle of re-purposing materials. Green Air is calling attention towards all the open cycles within our life-style.
Green Varnish was the first act, a green fabric made up of thousands of plants symbolically covering the inconvenient facts of society. For the second act, the space has been modeled as a negative of the floating green carpet. What was hidden is now exposed and hovering overhead. The space has been inverted, as well as the intention.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5EVVM4Aer8
Green Air once again occupies the 200 square meters of the courtyard. However, the spatial experience is completely different. Green Air is a space itself, an aerial garden of Tillandsias hanging from thousands of slices of re-purposed wood suspended from the courtyard’s steel canopy.
