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Dates: 12 Nov 09 - 17 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present)
Address: Niederkirchnerstrasse, 7 Berlin D-10963
Tel: +49 (0)30 254 860 Website

This exhibition is part of a series of three celebrating the 20th anniversary of the twinning of Istanbul and Berlin. The series, which continues at the Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, and the Akademie Pariser Platz, presents a comprehensive presentation of work from a variety of Turkish contemporary artists. Artists included in the Martin Gropius Bau show include sculptor and abstract modernist Kemal Önsoy, the figurative and painterly Temür Köran, Aydan Murtezaoglu, who makes films, photographs and installations, and the abstract painter Ekrem Yalcindag. Curated by Çetin Güzelhan, Beral Madra, Levent Çalikoglu and Johannes Odenthal, this section of the series consists of work dating from 1928 to the present day. The Akademie Pariser Platz shows work by female artists, and the Akademie Hanseatenweg shows work by artists engaging with the socio-political issues of modern Turkey. Included in the Martin Gropius show is a six-minute film by Sener Özmen, who lives and works in the south-east of Turkey, entitled The Road to Tate Modern, 2003, in which two men ride horses through a bleak mountainous landscape asking farmers for directions to Tate Modern. Rob Curran

Dates: 16 Sep 09 - 3 Jan 10
Categories: Contemporary (1970-present) Biennials
Address: Various Venues Lyon
Tel: Website

For the tenth Biennale de Lyon the Paris and San Francisco-based curator and critic Hou Hanru has focused on the opposing notions of spectacle and the everyday in our society, a theme, he feels, that has a particular resonance at this time. “This biennale happens at a time of financial and economic crisis, but it’s also about questioning the profound roots of the social system that we are in,” he told The Art Newspaper. “I was looking how to put these two opposing notions together to create new energy and new dynamics.” Hou, who is director of exhibitions and public programmes and chair of exhibition and museum studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, curated the 2007 Istanbul Biennale, and lived in France for 16 years before moving to the US in 1990. The works of nearly 60 international artists (see below) are on display in a variety of venues across the city of Lyons and surrounding areas, and arranged in four main chapters across four museums and public spaces in an interactive way to create what Hou describes as an “urban experience” that reflects the dynamism of the themes of spectacle and everyday. “ You go into a space and it’s like you walk through a city. You will bump into the work of artists who are working on different chapters that somehow try to transform everyday objects.” “The Magic of Things” focuses on artists who transform such objects, situations and environments, “Celebrating the Drift” explores urban spaces inspired by the situationist strategy of “drifting” (dérive), and “Another World” is Possible” consists of works that envision new social orders and alternative models of living in an age of globalisation. The fourth section, “Living Together”, which is mainly housed within the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, “reactivates” works from the collection, or which have been exhibited in the museum in the past, to create a platform for discussion within different communities. “I feel a museum is not only a place for conservation and display,” says Hou. “It is about opening its memory up to the public.” For instance, the Paris-based Turkish artist Sarkis is reshowing, with new elements, the central part of his 2002 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, L’Ouverture, in which air is blown into the gallery through a ventilation system scattering pieces of newspapers from around the world. A series of conferences, happenings, readings and dance and musical events will then take place in this space while the ventilation system is closed down. Linked to “Living Together” is a related section, “Veduta”, in which three artists or groups of artists have been invited to take residence in the Lyons suburbs to make new works with the involvement of the largely immigrant inhabitants that will be shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art. Eko Nogroho will create puppet shows with local youths, collective Bik Van der Pol builds a floating platform over a lake for discussions and leisure activities, and French artist Robert Milin, who is making ten light boxes featuring sentences from inhabitants talking about their dreams and desires. About half of the works are new commissions, including a film by Maria Thereza Alves, an installation by Jimmie Durham, two large site specific installations by Pedro Cabrita Reis, a performance piece by Istanbul artist Ha Za Vu Zu and wall drawings by Dan Perjovschi. Michael Lin’s What a Difference a Day Made, shown in the Shanghai Gallery of Art last year, is a reconstruction of a Shanghai shop of everyday household objects. The artist has invited magicians and acrobats to perform with the objects, which are then reclassified and stored within the shop. The four main strands of the biennale are shown in two converted warehouses—La Sucriére, the flagship venue of the biennale since 2003, and the Bichat Warehouse, an 800 sq. m former arsenal that is being used for the first time, which houses a single work, a neon drawing by Pedro Cabrita Reis—and the Bullukian Foundation, as well as the city’s Renzo Piano-designed Museum of Contemporary Art. But the city as a whole embraces the event; interventions planned for the city’s streets include a whole series of large-scale murals by San Francisco-based Rigo 23. The biennale is not just the tenth in Lyons, but the first after a trio of themed trilogies, so was there pressure on Hou to mark this edition in some way? “The number is not that important but it’s a conjunction of different elements: the number, the timing and the momentum of now,” he said. “I don’t pretend to have the ambition to say this [biennale] will be a revolution...but I think that it is an interesting opportunity for us to think what a biennial, or even in the wider sense a cultural institution, should do in our times” explains the Chinese curator. James Hobbs

Sarkis, Le Monde est Illisible, Mon Coeur Si, installation view at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyons in 2002