In June 2017 Whitechapel Gallery presents A Handful of Dust.

Created and organized by writer and curator David Campany, A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction and natural disasters to urban decay, domestic dirt and forensics.

The starting point of the exhibition is a 1920 photograph taken by American artist Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp’s work in progress The Large Glass (1915–23) deliberately left to gather dust in his New York studio. First published in André Breton’s seminal Surrealist journal, Littérature in 1922 and captioned as a ‘view from an aeroplane’ by Man Ray, the photograph went on to appear in various journals, books and magazines, cropped and  contextualized differently each time, before the image was formally titled Élevage de poussière (Dust Breeding) (1920) in 1964.

A Handful of Dust was originally conceived for Le Bal, Paris  in 2015. A version was presented at the Pratt Institute, New York in 2016 and it will travel on to Moderna Museet, Stockholm in September-December 2018.  David Campany is a curator and writer. His books include The Open Road: photography and the American Road Trip (Aperture, 2014), Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (Afterall, 2012) and Art and Photography (Phaidon 2003).  He teaches at the University of Westminster.

List of artists

Artists and photographers featured: Laure Albin Guillot, Rut Bees Luxemburg, Jacques-André Boiffard, Brassai, Robert Burley, John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Robert Filliou, John Gerrard, Mona Kuhn, Bruce Nauman, Louise Oates, Kirk Palmer, Man Ray, Jeff Mermelstein,  Alan Resnais, Xavier Ribas, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelheuber, Edward Ruscha, Aaron Siskind, Giorgio Sommer, Eva Stenram, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, Nick Waplington, Wols, Tereza Zelenkova.

Visitor Information

Opening times: Tuesday – Sunday, 11am – 6pm; Thursdays, 11am – 9pm.
Contact: T + 44 (0) 20 7522 7888, info@whitechapelgallery.org, whitechapelgallery.org
Price: Free

Hockney’s Portraits: It’s hard to know where I end, and they begin.

Yes, David Hockney has gone back to painting portraits. And, according to the master, there is as much of him in the painting as there is of the subject. His statement ‘It’s hard to know where I end, and they begin’ is the leitmotif of the exhibit.

In the Ca’ Pesaro Museum in Venice, Italy, the exhibition ‘82 portraits and 1 still life’ by David Hockney is showing. Over the course of the last four years or so, he has painted portraits of mainly people who mean something in his life. There are friends, assistants, dealers, housekeepers, and – some of – their children depicted.

With some of the portraits Hockney gives some more information as to the circumstances of the ‘sit’ and what his relationship is to the subject. These are the more interesting portraits, because they come alive more than the others.

For instance, in one of the portraits there is a lady depicted who had just lost her father. Looking at the painting, you already think she is not looking happy. Giving the background information, explains that. And he goes on to explain that they rescheduled their ‘sitting’ and that he in the meantime painted the 1 still life that is part of the exhibit. A bench with fruits.

It’s therefore a pity that with a number of them, he only states ‘long time friend’. But from the faces, and to some extend the body posture, you do get a peek at the person behind it anyway. Or inside it. And that even though he doesn’t paint much detail. His style is somewhere in between impressionist, or expressionist considering the color palette, and realist.

Apart from the subject, he kept the rest of the painting ‘the same’. The wall, the floor and the chair are constants in the pictures. Ok, he changes the colors of the wall and floor around sometimes, or they are a slightly different hue, minor detail, but that same background focusses your attention to the person in the middle. And that is of course what it’s all about.

And the postures that people came up with to be painted in, are somehow more varied than you would expect. These are also giving you clues about the person depicted, of course. As well as the clothes they choose to be painted in. Some of them really took this seriously and came in a gala outfit. They came to be ‘immortalized’. Others just sat in their everyday attire, kind of smiling away. Very telling about the person, of course.

At the back of the exhibition, there is a wall with visitor’s own versions of a Hockney’s portrait. The backdrop and chair are also there. It’s part of the program for visiting school classes. To involve them in the show. They can ‘put themselves in the picture’, so to speak. And that is a great way of raising interest in modern art with young people, I think.

The exhibition runs until 22 October 2017, after which it will go on to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where it will show from 10 November 2017 until 25 February 2018, and the LA County Museum of Art, USA, showing there from 1 April to 29 July 2018.

Inside Christian Boltanski

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be in someone’s mind? Well, here’s your chance! Christian Boltanski is showing in Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, Italy, and it’s as if you’re walking through his mind. The exhibition is called: Anime. Di luogo in luogo, or in English: Soul. Of place in place.

The exhibition design has something to do with this experience too, I must say. You enter the exhibition through a door that closes off a darkened room. In it, there is only one lightbulb hanging from an electrical cord in the middle, lighting-up on the pulse of a beat, surrounded by black mirrors of different sizes on all four walls. Anime. At the back of the room there is a curtain of beaded strings that you walk through to the main room of the exhibit. All the beads on all the strings together show a black-and-white picture of a face.

The main room is divided into squares by white, half see-through curtains hanging high up, reaching down to your waist, repeating the picture of the walk-through curtain. I think. It’s a face anyway and what you can see mostly of it, is the eyes. These ‘curtains’ are hung up throughout the room. You have to brush them aside to continue your way and find the side rooms of the exhibition.

In the different side rooms, there are – among other things – black-and-white photographs of people, mostly women, attached with a thread to a drawer beneath, shrine-like structures with again photographs of people, drawer cabinets with pictures on the drawers, video-projections, flowers, and carts with clothes. They come across as memories of sorts.

In the middle of the big room there is a big, gold-toned, cone-shaped structure. Upon touch (yes, I touched it, guilty as charged!), it turns out to be covered in golden survival blankets, as if it is fragile, offsetting its size, shape and overall appearance, or precious, denying its potato-like surface of imperfection. Is it a representation of the artist’s anime? Or is it life itself?

It’s hard to imagine that the exhibition has been put together. It is made up of works that have been made in different times, ranging from the eighties of the last century up to this year, 2017. But they go so well together, that the totality of it makes it look very much like one art work. That’s why it is so good to present them in this way!

All the questions the exhibition raises, all ideas the exhibit causes to spring up in your mind! This is what truly good art does: inspire! I hope you take away from it as much as I did. In this exhibition, I found my anime, di luogo in luogo!

Christian Boltanski (1944) is a French artist and one of the most prominent examples of French conceptual art to date. He is most well-known for his photography installations, but also works as a sculptor, painter, and film maker.