JASon loEBS, By BEATRix RUF, diREcToR kUnSThAllE ZURich

chRiSTiAn FRiEdRich, By WillEm dE RooiJ, ARTiST, BERlin

nAEEm mohAiEmEn, By olivER BASciAno, ASSiSTAnT EdiToR, ARTREviEW, london

kATlEEn vERmEiR & Ronny hEiREmAnS, By nAv hAq, cURAToR oF ExhiBiTionS, ARnolFini, BRiSTol

AnAliA SABAn, By holly myERS, cRiTic, loS AnGElES

lEUnG chi Wo, By mARk RAppolT, EdiToR, ARTREviEW, london

moSiREEn, By JoAnnA WARSZA, ASSociATE cURAToR, BERlin BiEnniAl pAUl GABRiElli, By mARy hEilmAnn, ARTiST, nEW yoRk BRiAn kEnnon, x By AndREW BERARdini, cRiTic, loS AnGElES

RoSSEllA BiScoTTi, By ElEnA Filipovic, cURAToR, WiElS, BRUSSElS

AnoUk kRUiThoF, By JASon EvAnS, phoToGRAphER, ThAnET

WAEl ShAWky, By SUSAnnE pFEFFER, kW inSTiTUTE, BERlin

AlEkSAndRA domAnovic, By lAURA mclEAn-FERRiS, EdiToR AT lARGE, ARTREviEW, london

AlA yoUniS, By chRiSTinE TohmE, diREcToR, AShkAl AlWAn, BEiRUT

TAmAR GUimARAES, By AlFREdo cRAmERoTTi, diREcToR, moSTyn, llAndUdno

AndRE komATSU By iShmAEl RAndAll WEEkS, ARTiST, nEW yoRk BREndAn FoWlER, By JonAThAn T.d. nEil, EdiToR AT lARGE, ARTREviEW, nEW yoRk pETRiT hAlilAJ, By GiovAnni cARminE, diREcToR, kUnST hAllE SAnkT GAllEn

nEil BEloUFA, By BoRiS ondREickA, ARTiST, BRATiSlAvA

TAhi mooRE, By chRiS ShARp, indEpEndEnT cURAToR/cRiTic, pARiS

ASA noRBERG & JEnniE SUndEn, By mARiA lind diREcToR, TEnSTA konSThAll RUno lAGomARSino, By JAcoB FABRiciUS, diREcToR, mAlmo konSThAll

FRAnk hEATh, By TylER coBURn, cRiTic, loS AnGElES

dAvid TERoGAnyAn, By JoAnnA myTkoWSkA, diREcToR, WARSAW mUSEUm oF modERn ART

miTchEll SqUiRE, By ThEASTER GATES, ARTiST, chicAGo

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Some people spend their time predicting the future, but it takes others to make the future happen. ArtReviews Future Greats issue is our annual experiment in futurology: here, instead of reviewing exhibitions as they come and go or profiling the artists who are making waves in the present, we focus on artists who have yet to receive widespread attention, but who might become significant in the near future. Of course, by concentrating on artists who havent gained recognition from being represented by commercial galleries or exhibited widely in museums, Future Greats deliberately changes the relationship between an art magazine and the culture it reflects on. While we always stand by the artists we cover, these will typically be figures already starting to establish themselves. So Future Greats allows us to present artists outside of the complicated, often uneven process by which an art practice comes to greater attention, while sidestepping the international barriers that still exist when it comes to one part of the world finding out about whats going on in another. Its like a once-a-year virtualreality group show, and we get to curate it. (Nobody asks us otherwise.) Except that rather than curate it ourselves, we think its better to delegate the choosing to others. So Future Greats aims to be more than the usual ones to watch list of bright young things. Instead we enlist international critics, artists and curators, asking them to put their imprimatur on artists many have yet to hear of. The international reach of our selectors means that this years is perhaps the most global edition of Future Greats weve ever published. Of course, for a magazine to devote so much space to an endeavour such as Future Greats is a luxury, and were extremely grateful for the ongoing support of EFG International, which allows us and the featured artists the additional space in which to dream these futures up. But what about the art? Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of asking such a large, dispersed group of selectors is that many of the artists they have chosen share similar interests and approaches. Its uncanny, in fact, given that no one knew who anyone else had selected. Maybe our selectors are thinking in similar ways, or maybe the most innovative of tomorrows artists are heading in similar directions. Either way, this years Future Greats seems to offer a snapshot of emerging artistic perspectives that go beyond any one individual maker. Most evident is the strong focus on the power of artistic speculation and its relation to new aspects of social reality: many of these artists use forms of live performance, narrative and storytelling to reflect on the complexities of personal identity and history in the context of unstable and fast-changing political and collective histories, while being aware of the great democratic upheavals currently occurring around the world. Then there are those artists who move from the gallery and the art object into forms of architectural practice, which itself bleeds into urban intervention and social activism. Meanwhile, faced with another great upheaval that of the accelerating digitalisation of culture there are those artists who work with the vast resources of the found video and photographic image in the era of web 2.0. And almost in direct contrast, others deal with the enduring trace of the material object as a product of physical transformation, whether in sculpture or in a renewed attention to photographys tactile and material presence, as well as its image. Its perhaps a sign of the volatile mood of the current moment that the artists in this edition of Future Greats are busy rethinking how art can jump in and make its mark in a world where all the old reference points are disappearing. Nothing is certain, and theres everything to play for. The best way to predict the future is to make it happen. ArtReview
inTRo dUcTion

Paul Gabrielli combines and assembles everyday objects and presents them as sculpture with a style that seduces both with its clarity and the puzzlement that it induces. Generally, his show at InvisibleExports in New York last year, included objects such as a soap dispenser with a yellow plastic air freshener stuck on it. Gabrielli often returns to this strange doubling up of objects. The show also contained a set of found objects stripy cloth, for example that had been manipulated and packaged in clear plastic containers backed by shiny landscape photographs, as though they were meant to be sold. Gabrielli does not title his works, because to do so would be to provide too much explanation. So what happens is that one looks at the work and ruminates about the meaning. The generic objects that he uses alarms, hand dryers and air fresheners are metaphors for humanistic thoughts, because they make one think of what these devices resemble, and it is often parts of the body. They are displayed provocatively in the gallery, where they might actually be found in real life: a fire alarm high on the wall, a sculpture of a camera near the door. Yet there may be either logic or confusion about the combinations. Gabrielli
pAUl GABRiElli By mARy hEilmAnn

I first became interested in Jason Loebs when I saw a floormat sculpture of his at the Independent art fair in New York last year, but I got to know his work better after his impressive solo show at New Yorks Essex Street gallery in the autumn. All of the works in that exhibition looked very minimal and very elegant, but thats seemingly easy to do; what really interested me was his use of mise en abyme and the performativity he brought to the passing of time, which he revealed via different media and technologies. In one room was Autophantography (1-4) (2011), a series of boxes, each containing a roll of photographic paper. When the boxes are opened, the paper is exposed to light and captures the ghost of the empty exhibition space. In the back room was The Smoking Observer (2011), a ten-minute 16mm film that simply depicts a cigarette burning down in an ashtray, referring back to the photographic process via the way that the film, the cigarette and the paper all capture a moment of luminescence and extinguishing. Both works refer to the photographic process (its probably impossible to develop the photographs from those exposed rolls in Autophantography, while the colour temperature of the cigarette film was dark and reddish, like a darkroom) and contain a kind chRiSTiAn German artist Christian Friedrich studied of hidden connection in their Protestant theology and philosophy at Heidelberg FRiEdRich materiality as well: Loebs University and sculpture at the Academy of Fine By identifies a chemical used in Arts in Karlsruhe before moving to Amsterdam in WillEm dE cigarettes that is also found in 2007 for a two-year residency at De Ateliers. It was RooiJ photographic paper. I was there that Friedrich decided to take his analytical artistic methodology apart, and to make space in his intrigued by how this show revealed the sense of endurance practice for more intuitive trajectories and in technology (something that psychological themes. Without shying away from elements of kitsch has become increasingly brief in and dubious taste, his work gained complexity and depth. His recent times), and thats where sculptural works evolved to become monumental forms plaster-cast I think that Loebs really takes sofas or ceramic tableaux depicting fruits and erotic tools, reminiscent of Franz West as much as John Miller. At the same time Friedrich began things to a new level. to stage performances in his studio, using his sculptures, himself and various collaborators as props. The video documentations of these performances became, in turn, autonomous works. Friedrichs latest works are films that no longer refer to sculptural elements outside the screen. Untitled (2011) juxtaposes appropriated images of the earth as seen from a satellite with footage of a young man playing in the surf. The artists almost sculptural edit, reversing and cross-cutting both image and sound to sometimes stroboscopic effect, is as brutal as it is controlled. The viewer is touched on an emotional, an intellectual and a physical level. This year Friedrich has a solo show with Wilfried Lentz in Rotterdam, who will also show his work at Liste in Basel in June. sometimes includes videoworks within his installations too. There is one called Dark Movie (2008) in which a boy stares straight ahead expressionlessly (under Gabriellis instruction, he is thinking about his own body as he looks at the camera), which adds to the mystery and to the clarity. He is a beautiful boy, alive, human, in front of the moving sea. And it makes one think about him, and all the other things in the room around him. Paul is really a great artist: I met him when he was a student, and my friendship with him is a big part of my life. He is a great inspiration.
JASon loEBS By BEATRix RUF

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christian Friedrich The Origin of Man, 20089, DV and digital photographs transferred into digital file, sound, 8 min 53 sec. Courtesy the artist

clockwise from below: paul Gabrielli Untitled, 2011, UltraCal, plastic hairdryer, chrome hand-dryer parts, aluminium, enamel paint, 34 x 36 x 22 cm; Untitled, 2011, plastic smoke detector, plastic air freshener, archival board, electrical wire, aluminium, acrylic, oil, enamel, 13 x 15 x 8 cm; Untitled, 2011, UltraCal, basswood, gold filled chain, aluminum, plastic electrical outlet, plastic light shade, lightbulb, oil paint, 33 x 11 x 6 cm; Untitled, 2010, cloth, aluminium, c-print, archival board, plastic, staples, oil, acrylic, 33 x 28 x 1 cm. All images: courtesy the artist and Invisible-Exports, New York

Jason loebs Autophantography, 2011, Kodak Ultra Endura colour emulsion paper, cardboard box, 23 x 25 x 87 cm. Photo: Lucas Knipscher. Courtesy the artist and Essex Street, New York

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The Daily Exhaustion (2010) is a book of photographs featuring a young woman, the artist, looking thoroughly spent, wearing alternating colours that match each of the backdrops that she stands in front of fizzy yellows, bright pinks or purples. In each image she glistens with perspiration as she photographs herself over and over again. Increasing the sense of discomfort, her image, which always stretches across a double page spread, is bisected through the centre of her face by the folds in the newsprint on which the images are printed. Its a pile of effort, a spectrum of exhaustion, recorded and ready to take away. Winner of last years Hyres photography festival prize, Anouk Kruithof makes very social work. She engages with various human experiences, her own included, measured in relation to specific processes of production and dissemination. Best known for her genre-defying publications (they stood out a mile alongside the various formulaic and selfpublished efforts at the recent rash of photobook fairs), she is in fact a multidisciplinary artist making work in film, text and installation alongside her photographic, enquiry-based projects. Her outlook is generous and warm while remaining vigorous and critical. It could
AnoUk kRUiThoF By JASon EvAnS

make you laugh and it could provoke deep melancholy, often simultaneously. There is plenty of room for negotiation. Central to her work is motivating the viewer to engage: lazy looking goes unrewarded. She is far from complacent and rewards participation accordingly. In other works we find ritualised choreography in an abandoned office block various components in varying type and scale, the lifesize shadow of a dartboard arranged in a secret dialogue. Another project sees the artist transforming a wall of books into a collapsing, colourful wave by arranging the books according to the colours of their pages. In the artists work the strange and the ordinary swap coats and walk arm-in-arm, waiting to be unfolded, turned over, reassembled. Tahi Moore is arguably New Zealands best-kept secret. Having graduated with a BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland in 2005, Moore has primarily exhibited in the antipodes. He collaborated early on with his compatriot Simon Denny, and has since managed to operate with relative discretion, creating strange and idiosyncratic videos and exerting a subtle but legendary influence on the local scene. What initially bewitched me was his video Marlowe vs the Star Chamber (2011), presented in his exhibition that year at Aucklands Hopkinson Cundy gallery, Nonsuch Park. Allegedly departing from no idea, the mute, subtitled narrative follows a string of apparently random yet interrelated associations, beginning with (from the press release): a movie frame of an empty room when Jane Birkin has just left, to images of Birkin bags, to a tattoo on Birkins second daughters arm of the scrawled word Marlowe, to the murder of Christopher Marlowe by his patrons servant and the proximity to the Queen at Nonsuch Palace. These anfractuous leaps and bounds are then paired with a nervous montage, which sometimes jibes with the narrative and, at others, ostensibly has nothing to with it all of it suffused with an oddly lyrical beauty full of warm interiors and rich landscapes (a lyrical beauty, moreover, rendered tenable by how random and unsentimental it is). To paraphrase a shrewd observation made about this work by Elam School of Fine Artss Jon Bywater: what else but the Internet could engender such far-reaching and unlikely associations? Considered in the context of the equally fragmented exhibition, which featured mysterious pieces of wood, paintings, lightbox photos and a printed A4 image of the entrance to Nonsuch Park taped to the wall, such a comment inevitably underlines Moores capacity to allegorise contemporary narrative, meaning and the perfectly aleatory clues from which it might issue into an intelligible form. Elaborately imitating a search engine, the artist could be said to pull back the reality curtain on the asubjective, authorless, exquisite-corpse generator lurking behind it. What is more, Moore seems particularly preoccupied by the increasingly complicated nature of desire to whom it belongs and where it comes from in our current web 2.0 paradigm. It is just such universal preoccupations, and the spontaneous formal finesse with which he articulates them, that both merit this underexposed artist the attention he so richly deserves and promise more compelling work to come.
TAhi mooRE By chRiS ShARp

left: Anouk kruithof The Daily Exhaustion, 2010, newspaper zine, 48 pages, full colour, 20 x 28 cm. Courtesy the artist below: Anouk kruithof Playing Borders, This Contemporary State of Mind, 2009, artist publication, 28 pages, 32 x 41 cm, 14 pages colour images, five 21 x 17 cm booklets, one 17 x 17 cm booklet, one 21 x 17 cm postcard, one 68 x 88 cm poster. Courtesy the artist

Tahi moore Marlowe vs the Star Chamber, 2011, digital video on DVD, colour, silent, 7 min 26 sec. Courtesy the artist and Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland

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left: Frank heath Graffiti Report Form, 2012, HD video, 50 min. Courtesy the artist below: Frank heath Old News, 2006, photographs, text. Courtesy the artist

left: neil Beloufa Documents Are Flat, 2011 (installation view, Extracity Kunsthal, Antwerp). Courtesy the artist below: neil Beloufa Kempinski, 2007, SD video 4:3, colour, sound, 14 min. Courtesy the artist

EXT. HOUSE NIGHT. Frank Heath is a rare artist who can claim such particular working conditions, when the lawns and driveways of the American home host his fugitive broadcasts from the domestic underclass: an ornate funeral for a coathanger attended by countless brethren, for example; or the messy aftermath of a shoot-out between an IV-bag sheriff and a pineapple outlaw. Both scenes figured into an early, formative series, Night Mail (for Jon Newton) (19982003), surreptitiously directed on the lawn of Heaths eponymous friend, while similar works address unknown recipients, like select subscribers of the New Haven Register, who would rise to find supplementary copies of their daily newspaper dated in regressive order a ruse Heath kept up for four weeks until actual delivery boys intervened (Old News, 2006). In a more recent string of recorded telephone calls, a bewildered man describes awakening to a permanent midnight as the windows of his house have been replaced with slate (Fixed Window, 2011). Clearly Heath suits the role of lone trickster, though that storied figure may, in these cases, owe less to cultural than social causes. An atomised contemporary everyday gives his nocturnal eccentricities their shape and depth, and his gags a giftlike quality. Since moving to New York in 2006, Heath has gained a new landscape of habit Morningside Park, notable both as a focal point of the 1968 Columbia University protests and for its current lack of any tangible placard or record of this fact. A project entitled Graffiti Report Form (2012) assumes the guise of a I first got to know the work of Neil nEil video submission to the New York City parks Beloufa when I was cocurating BEloUFA department website with the intent of Manifesta 8, in 2010 (as part of the By documenting supposed vandalism but group from Tranzit.org), and in BoRiS abruptly shifts into essay film par excellence. particular through his fabulous video ondREickA Strewn about the park (rather appropriately) installation Kempinski (2007), which he like Beckettian tramps, pages of Krapps Last showed as part of the exhibition. Tape (1958), a Life magazine on the Columbia Kempinski is a mixed MDF structure in events and Heaths own fictional manuscript which a film was projected. Created in co-opt the video submissions female Mali, this film was a kind of science-fiction documentary voiceover and undermine the viewers featuring individuals holding fluorescent lights, who confidence that the geologic, journalistic describe their strange, dystopian existences to the camera. and historic temporalities of this site It was created using interviews that followed certain rules: could ever receive a clear and authoritative, people were asked to imagine the future and describe it in artistic form. the present tense. While creating a set of compelling visions, the film also played on viewers expectations and imaginings of Africa. For his installations, Beloufa creates complex architectonic structures which are handmade using cheap and easily available materials and techniques, apparently improvised and process-based. These sculptures are also viewing spaces dedicated to the perception of projected moving images and sound. There is a specific strategy of time in his work that seems to embrace all tenses in the same moment, which also relates to that always-disturbing aspect of the unfinished. One can get trapped in the contextual aesthetics of his spatial setups, which drive you from the form and colour of Memphis Group design through deconstructivistworkshop-like setups in the 1970s to a model vision of the 2020s. Beloufa leads us more often to peregrination than to orientation (there is, in his work, no clear specification of a hierarchy between the moving image and the architectural framework). It is all related more to the construction of an obstacle than of a comfort; it is a boundary, a problem of self-determination. The characters in his videos, too, are more phantoms than real people and yes, not that many people know that Neil is an extraordinarily keen rock n roll acrobat as well.
FRAnk hEATh By TylER coBURn

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Naeem Mohaiemen, based in Dhaka and New York, is an artist in the most expanded sense: he is as likely to produce essays and research notes as he is works destined for exhibition. For sure, he makes films (the most recent, The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army), 2011, is the first in a proposed trilogy) as well as occasional sculpture and photo works (I Have Killed Pharaoh and Im Not Afraid to Die, 2010, for example) but one gets the impression they took those forms simply because of their suitability to a particular iteration of Mohaiemens big idea. And that idea is a longstanding, evolving study of the international left (and its various, often conflicting attempts towards creating a society founded on ideals of equality) through the prism of anecdotal historical incidents. The first part of United Red Army lasting over an hour and shown at both the Sharjah and Momentum biennials last year plays out the crackly 1973 audio recordings of negotiations between a member of the Japanese Red Army onboard a hijacked Japanese Airways airplane grounded at Dhaka airport and a Bangladeshi official. Its suspenseful, addictive listening. Mohaiemen weaves this dialogue with narrative and visual tangents inspired by the details of the incident: we learn that the artist, growing up in Dhaka, watched the hijack standoff live on television as a nine-year-old
nAEEm mohAiEmEn By olivER BASciAno

when it interrupted his favourite television series (a serial about a group of ageing resistance fighters, from which we are treated to clips). We learn about the minor film career of one of the captured passengers through more filmic nuggets, collaged with contemporary local and international news reports. The overall effect is an engrossing engagement with the event both on a micro, localised level and within its dizzying historical political context. This profiling of an archival snapshot as a juncture in the progression of the history of the radical left is also present in Sartre Kommt nach Stammheim (2007), in which the artist recounts, via a text-andimage collage, the 1974 meeting between Jean-Paul Sartre, a figurehead for socialisms older incarnation, and the imprisoned, nihilistic Andreas Baader, one of the leaders of Germanys Red Army Faction. Here, as in much of Mohaiemens multifaceted practice (and despite the plotted comic moments that are raised in these films and essays), a pensive melancholia for something lost or a project that has come to ruin pervades.
moSiREEn By JoAnnA WARSZA

naeem mohaiemen The Young Man Was (Part 1: United Red Army), 2011, film, 67 min. Courtesy the artist

For those who are a part of the contemporary movements that have managed to occupy public space from Tahrir Square to Wall Street with dramatic effect, one of the first rules of belonging is that you lose your individual identity by dissolving it into the identity of the movement. A similar procedure allowed a group of Egyptian artists and filmmakers to become Mosireen. Based in Cairo, Mosireen was created with the goal of filming, collecting and broadcasting footage from the ground in Egypt. Since the beginning of the revolution, the collective sought to raise public consciousness regarding the manipulative use of protest imagery by the mainstream media and attempted to create a parallel narrative that came from the protesters. The group researches and documents cases of torture, illegal military trials and detentions; it conducts workshops in the immediate aftermath of events and live-streams footage from mobile phones, with the production of such media split and delegated among many members and supporters. Mosireen initiated, among other things, the so-called Tahrir Cinema a series of public screenings that started during the sit-ins in July as an exercise in raising awareness of media coverage and potential strategies of counterpropaganda. The groups material is available on social networks and YouTube, and is occasionally broadcast on Al Jazeera. There is an old quote from Marina Abramovi: Art without ethics is cosmetics. Although Abramovi appears to forget this sometimes, Mosireen does not. Quite the opposite.

mosireen Tahrir Cinema, 2011 (installation view). Photo: Omar Robert Hamilton (Mosireen). Courtesy the artists

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The films, installations and performative works of Wael Shawky make their mark with a compelling complexity and multiplicity in both form and content. Born in Egypt, Shawky makes works that are predominantly concerned with processes of cultural hybridisation. For decades now, there have been Tamar Guimares, a Brazilian-born artist based in Copenhagen, TAmAR signs of a new order emerging in social and appropriates and reconfigures side stories and leftovers through GUimARAES political systems in Egypt, and especially lately intimate gatherings, collective readings, small-scale public talks By these same signs have attracted the attention of and film screenings. In tandem with her source material, the AlFREdo the international community. Shawky combines resulting works are invariably presented in near-obsolete media cRAmERoTTi present-day situations with tradition and portrays such as slides, acetate or film. Guimaress film A Man Called contemporary social and political conflicts in the Love (2008) relates the story of Chico Xavier, a psychic writer context of historical events. By using the strategy famed in Brazil during the countrys military dictatorship (1964 of aesthetic and contentual displacement he blurs 85). As a medium who wrote books dictated to him from the spirit world, his visions the boundaries between documentation and of cities in the world beyond, and the working structures therein, contained within animation. Although Shawky received an award them a form of large-scale urban and social planning that was both utopian and for Frozen Nubia (1996), one of his first major conservative. Guimaress work proposes time as space: historical narratives as installations, its critical take on Egyptian history rooms from which one can speculate on the present. Rather than attempting a provoked a vehemently negative response from recovery or reconstruction of the past, perhaps with alternative ends or critical the authorities. His cement replicas of traditional views a posteriori, what interests her is how artefacts and ideologies travel through Nubian homes turned the spotlight on the time how they change, corrode, become opaque, take on new meanings, are enforced resettlement of the Nubians in the misunderstood or are perhaps understood again, anew. Put another way, hers are 1960s because of the construction of the Aswan attempts to create composite images that allude to the continuity of the presents Dam. Shawky laid bare the brutality and desires with the desires and foibles of the past. Guimares takes up the position of ignorance of the government in its treatment of the amateur: a role that, referring to the enlarging of the artists profession to its people and its attitude to a thousand years of become a dealer of several domains attempting to master the ebbing and flowing history. The installation Asphalt Quarter (2003) between the social, symbolic and economic capital associated with art production takes its lead from the novel Cities of Salt (1984) (and the concomitant necessity of speculating on the artist-as-persona, and the by Abdul Rahman Munif and his analysis of the progression towards turning oneself into a destruction of Bedouin culture on the Arabian peninsula as a consequence of the onset work of art) is somehow prescient of of oil-based industrialisation. Shawkys largest film project to date, Cabaret Crusades contemporary notions of the multifaceted The Horror Show File (2010), is partly inspired by the essay The Crusades Through artist. Her attitude is at heart political, subtly Arab Eyes (1984) by Amin Maalouf. Here, Shawky uses 200-year-old Italian questioning dominant discourse and writing marionettes to revisit central episodes in the Crusades (in the period 109699) from by reframing fragments through a process the Arab perspective. Lovingly and meticulously made stage sets and costumes, that generates poetic tales, but never a wealth of references to literary and historical sources, and astutely selected music overloaded political statements; indeed, come together to create an unusually multifaceted film, with self-evident analogies it is in the dimensions of transient microto our own time. Shawky is currently working on the second part of the project, communities and minor public events that which is planned as a trilogy. she manages to create magic.
WAEl ShAWky By SUSAnnE pFEFFER

Wael Shawky Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File, 2010, video, 30 min. Courtesy the artist

Last year in Moscow, where I was working on the project Auditorium Moscow, I made several artistic discoveries. Moscow is a dynamically developing metropolis standing at the doorstep of social and political changes, and one could feel the atmosphere of tension making its way into every field of peoples lives. Even in art despite the seemingly ordinary picture with all the usual artworld elements, such as the kitschy Art Moscow Fair, the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture (a copycat of MoMA PS1) and the Moscow Biennale, which exhibits local artists whose concerns are far removed from acute local issues there is a palpable wind of change. In particular it is discernible in artists self-organised exhibitions, and these are frequently put together by one immensely driven man David Ter-Oganyan, an artist whose work greatly reflects on the changes taking place in the city. On the one hand, as a key member of the radical Radek Community (19982008), he is fluent in the language of street protest; on the other, in his more recent works, he combines an innovative formal language with his long experience in activist art. Having tested himself in almost every classical medium, from painting and sculpture to video art and performance, his recent artistic endeavours almost exclusively use the medium of the multiple, made using a tablet and its graphic applications. In these computer drawings and paintings, he fuses subcultural gestures and avant-garde references in a postactivist art of narrative miniatures.
dAvid TER-oGAnyAn By JoAnnA myTkoWSkA

Tamar Guimares A Man Called Love, 2008, slide projection with voiceover, b/w and colour, English voiceover, 20 min. Courtesy the artist

david Ter-oganyan Peacock of International Revolution, 2011, computer aided drawing. Courtesy the artist

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above Brendan Fowler Spring 2011 (Andreas Hand Under Table), 2011, archival inkjet prints, frames, Plexiglas, 119 x 127 x 15 cm, 2011. Courtesy the artist and Untitled, New York right Brendan Fowler Summer 2011 (Pacific West Sign on West Garfield, Max in the Car on His Birthday, Torbjrn in Matt & Alexanders Talk, Joels Phones on Mei Ling Way Table, 2011, archival inkjet prints, frames, Plexiglas, 101 x 79 cm. Courtesy the artist and Untitled, New York

Why shouldnt cool be a criterion of good art? True, cool is a better qualifier of people than it is of things. Miles Davis was cool still is cool. David Byrne is cool, definitely cool. Brendan Fowler is the second coming of David Byrne. He makes art, he makes music, he writes, he edits. He even looks like David Byrne. Brendan Fowler is cool. QED. But his work is cool too. Take Fowlers website: brendanfowler.com. No tricky nickname. No obscure or knowing reference. No pretentious [dot] net. The site itself is all white with just five lines of left-justified text. One that reads Brendan Fowler at, and the next four that link to sites where Fowlers work can be found: Untitled, Fowlers gallery in New York; 100%, Just what is it that makes todays homes so different, so appealing? kATlEEn a print and multiples publisher that put out asked Richard Hamiltons iconic collage, produced in 1956 for vERmEiR & Fowlers book Cancelled (2009); 2nd Cannons, This Is Tomorrow, more a radical advertising showroom than an Ronny Brian Kennons LA-based imprint that has art exhibition, organised by the Independent Group at Londons hEiREmAnS published Fowlers prints and ISBN-10: 0Whitechapel Gallery. In light of capitalisms projections of the By 9820559-3-5 (2009), a visual account of his future new cities packed with new forms of architectures, nAv hAq 2008 foray into making art after having to lifestyles and unbound creativity Hamiltons collage offered a prescient vision of societies mobilised by personal, unobtainable cancel a music tour; and Upset the Rhythm, the London-based promoter and record label, desires. It is in the contemporary landscape that developed out where the productions of BARR, Fowlers of such desires that collaborative duo Katleen Vermeir and Ronny Heiremans have musical and performing self, are catalogued. developed a practice that considers the sheer abstraction that is the global Its all cool. Fowler began making and economy, and in particular its aesthetic manifestations in the realms of art and showing objects in earnest in 2009, and since architecture. Vermeir and Heiremans initiated their collaborative venture A.I.R. then they have grown in scale and ambition. the acronym for Artist in Residence, originally used for the pioneering scheme in Three cheaply framed inkjet prints fanned like New York offering artists loft-living in former industrial spaces as a means to a deck of cards and pierced by a fourth; arrays consider how property is visualised in marketing. Their own apartment which of similarly framed prints jacked together and they consider a kind of artwork in its own right is located in Brussels and acts as a attached face-to-face these are becoming point of departure for several works that they term mediated extensions. Each something like a riff style. Breaking the bigger extension, often an installation recorded via the medium of narrative video, offers, constructions into halves is another. The in various ways, a visualisation of the apartment space that is reflexive of the images and writing are always Fowlers own pictorial and rhetorical language of marketing for future architectural the bits and pieces of the world that are developments visualisations that aim to tap grabbed by a camera and shared in a way that makes them more affective, more into aspirational desires for luxurious weighty, than simply giving them over to the world online. Fowlers work is honest domestic space. Their most recent video in its self-consciousness, which is just another way of saying that its authentic, installation, The Residence (A Wager for the which is just another way of saying that its cool. Authenticity is the core of cool, Afterlife)(2012), offers a glimpse into the lives because others have to sense it in you and your work, which is to say that they must of the poster boys of post-Fordism creative sense not that you are trying to be cool, just that you are, and that what you make is. entrepreneurs. The film tells of an investor Thats the sense I get from Brendan Fowler. named Hilar who commissioned a Chinese architect, Ma Wen, to design a house for his afterlife. The installation also incorporates a design for an algorithm linked to the currency market that in turn generates a neverending edit of the Hilar footage. While Ma Wen regards art as an index to explore the unknown, he paradoxically considers the economy as the single measure of everything, opening uncomfortable questions about the status of creativity. Among sumptuous footage of the designed interiors, the story is a Faustian tale that is allegorical of the balancing act that is life in the creative class.
BREndAn FoWlER By JonAThAn T.d. nEil

katleen vermeir & Ronny heiremans The Residence (A Wager for the Afterlife), 2012. Photo: Kristien Daem. Courtesy the artists

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