Moving into May, major art fairs, group shows and solo exhibitions offer deeply conceptual approaches to photography and installation. Featured practitioners engage with timely issues including surveillance, globalisation and marginalisation.
Luigi Ghirri: The Map and the Territory, Museum Folkwang, Essen
“I didn’t want to create photography, but maps and plans that at the same time were meant to be photographs.” Spanning architecture, landscape and still life, Ghirri’s (1943-1992) oeuvre investigates the relationship between human beings and the built environment. This show focuses on the practitioner’s theoretical methodology, offering new perspectives on the everyday through an innovative use of colour, space and light. Until 22 July. Find out more here.
Frieze New York
An open-air piece by this year’s Frieze Artist Award winner, Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978), is one of the fair’s highlights. The installation explores freedom of movement and architectures of exclusion, unearthing power structures through a research-based methodology. The large-scale construction is fabricated from industrial materials, and is punctuated by holes and passageways which intentionally obstruct and invite movement. Until 6 May. Find out more here.
Edmund Clark: The Day the Music Died, International Center of Photography, New York
Clark’s (b. 1963) practice – over a decade in the making – investigates international responses to terrorism, and the means used to prevent it. As the artist notes: “The work concerns looking for new ways for photography and the arts to engage audiences with the unseen and quickly evolving nature of contemporary conflict and the representation of its narratives.” Until 6 May. Find out more here.
Endless Summer, Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver
This exhibition comprises work by Canadian photographer Joshua Jensen-Nagle (b. 1981), whose large-scale aerial images capture sites of leisure and tourism. Transforming significant crowds of people into tiny anonymous figures, Endless Summer offers an abstracted and deeply nostalgic vision of paradise. Using the medium as a “means to evoke emotion rather than document a reality”, the artist calls upon collective memory. From 5 May. Find out more here.
Wilderness, The New Art Gallery Walsall
Reflecting on the fast paced nature of contemporary life, the paintings, drawings, photographs and films on display at The New Art Gallery Walsall engage with the human desire for solitude. Pieces by Noémie Goudal, Scarlett Hooft Graafland, Richard Long and Boomoon highlight barren landscapes and open spaces, offering moments of escapism in an age defined by hyperactivity. Until 6 May. Find out more here.
Credits:
1. Luigi Ghirri, Orbetello, 1974 © Eredi Luigi Ghirri
2. Kapwani Kiwanga, A Wall is just a Wall, 2017, installation View at The Power Plant, Toronto. Courtesy: The Power Plant, Toronto
3. Edmund Clark, Redacted image of a complex of buildings where a pilot identified as having flown rendition flights lives, from Negative Publicity: Artefacts of Extraordinary Rendition, by Crofton Black and Edmund Clark
4. Joshua Jensen-Nagle, Carry Me Away, 2017
5. Seven Steps of Overlapping Beauty © Scarlett Hooft Graafland. Courtesy Flowers Gallery
