EXHIBITION: HONG KONG
Janaina Tschäpe: Contemplating Landscape
Over the past decade, German-Brazilian artist Janaina Tschäpe has interpreted landscapes with large-scale paintings in bold colours, installations, photography and video. Contemplating Landscape showcases Tschäpe’s works for the first time in Hong Kong at the Edouard Malingue Gallery, with new works such as “Geometric Shapes” using just that – painted hexagonal sculptures – to push the viewer’s understanding of natural landscapes into some highly surreal areas. In considering the environment imaginatively, the artist illustrates that flora and fauna are the brightly coloured works surrounding us all the time, whether you’re in a Hong Kong gallery or not.
Edouard Malingue Gallery, 1/F, 8 Queen’s Road Central. Open Monday to Saturday, 10.00-19.00. Until 3 May.
edouardmalingue.com
ART SHOW: NEW YORK
Tokyo Graphic Passport
+81 is a creative global magazine that has been hosting exhibition-cum-art fair Tokyo Graphic Passport since 2009, and this year it will premiere in New York. The idea is to share Japan’s modern art and design with the world, and this weekend’s event features pieces by Shun Kawakami whose work blurs the lines between fine art and branding concepts, the stark monochrome prints of Gen Miyamura, and Syoh Yoshida whose paintings are designed to be sympathetic to the wider spaces they inhabit. Tokyo Graphic Passport also provides space for both emerging and established artists to meet and collaborate.
+81 Gallery, 167 Elizabeth Street. Open daily from 12.00-19.00. Until 25 April.
grapass.net/2014/newyork/
FILM: UK
Salvo
Salvo is an action-packed Italian film from director-duo Fabio Grassadonia and Antonia Piazza currently in cinemas across the UK. The titular character is a henchman for the Sicilian mob, played by Palestinian actor Saleh Bakri whose previous turns in 2011’s French comedy-drama The Source and 2012 Palestinian film When I Saw You have demonstrated a rare ability to translate across nationalities, not just genres. On a hit to eliminate a rival gangster, Salvo stumbles upon an innocent blind girl and together they have to navigate the dangerous backwaters of mafia life. Shot in the film noir style, Salvo won the 2013 Critics’ Week Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival before making its way across the English channel.
Salvo is out in cinemas across the UK.
peccapics.com
INSTALLATION: NEW YORK
Tony Tasset: Artists Monument
The sun is shining this weekend on the names of 392,486 modern and contemporary artists – from Pablo Picasso to Andy Warhol – at New York’s Hudson River Park. American multimedia artist Tony Tasset has etched the names alphabetically on multicolored cubes that make up his latest monolithic installation for the Whitney Biennial (under way until 25 May). The randomly arranged squares create a long horizontal monument celebrating the artistic community from the past two centuries, and is an effort to eliminate hierarchies by listing the greats unceremoniously next to up-and-comers. The Artists Monument is near the Whitney’s future home at Washington and Gansevoort Streets – where the museum will move in the spring of 2015.
Hudson River Park, 17th Street between Chelsea Piers and Pier 57. Until 25 May.
whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/TonyTasset
MUSIC: GLOBAL
Liars: Mess
Australian-American trio Liars have been pursuing pop’s darker boundaries for over a decade now, but the LA band’s relentless approach to reinvention means that every record might as well be a brand new start. Mess, their seventh album continues the band’s ongoing process of mutation that saw them first emerge in 2000 amid a flurry of angular post-punk shapes, has taken in folktale-influenced ghostly soundscapes, settled into creeping pop-noir on 2010’s excellent Sisterworld, and then threw everything in the bin again for 2012’s more dance music-flavoured WIXIW. Mess actually does the unthinkable and continues that dancier sound for a two-album run, albeit louder, stranger – messier. It won’t last.
Mess is available to buy now.
liarsliarsliars.com
