View of the exhibition Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle at S.M.A.K. Ghent, 2016-2017 (Photograph: Timo Ohler)
As part of the Garden Weekend for Visiting Friends and Artists, the Walker Art Centerpresents three new art events representing new commissions from two internationally recognized sculptors and an exhibition that brings together a diverse, multigenerational, and international group of artists from the Walker’s permanent collection.
_____________________________________________________________________
The Walker Art Center presents the first international museum exhibition of Nairy Baghramian (b. 1971, Iran; lives and works in Berlin). Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle will be on view in Galleries 4, 5, and 6 from September 7, 2017-February 4, 2018.
Over the past two decades, Baghramian has created site-responsive installations that use, dismantle, and unveil the human body and its gestures. Using such materials as curved steel, soft rubber, plastic, wax, and fabric, as well as cast or combined elements and photography, Baghramian challenges the definition of sculpture and references fashion, design, theater, and dance.
Co-organized with Stedelijk Musuem voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium, where it was presented from November 26, 2016-February 19, 2017, the exhibition is comprised of a series of new pieces that mirror or play off of the artist’s previous bodies of work, while deftly responding to each site. Taking its title from a French phrase often translated as ‘professional distortion’ or ‘job conditioning,’ the exhibition indicates the alteration of one’s worldview from being overly specialized or made expert. It also speaks to the process of taking apart one’s profession — in this case, laying bare the sculptor’s method. Through her playful take on the artist’s retrospective, Baghramian unpacks and interrogates the conceptual, physical, and social aspects of sculpture.
Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle is accompanied by a major publication, the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s work to date.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis with Victoria Sung
Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Commission
In September 2017, coinciding with the exhibition, the Walker Art Center will unveil the first permanent public artwork commission by Nairy Baghramian as part of the Walker’s campus renovation and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden Reconstruction Project. Positioned on the crest of the Wurtele Upper Garden hillside, Baghramian’s commission consists of a grouping of three sculptures from the series Privileged Points (2011). The objects claim to identify points particularly well-suited for presentation and perception in the Sculpture Garden, as Baghramian is concerned with issues of display related to place and sightlines. The lightness of the work is fictitious: appearing as if rubber, the sculptures will be rendered in bronze.
About the Artist
Nairy Baghramian was born in 1971 in Isfahan, Iran and has lived and worked in Berlin since 1985. She has exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; SculptureCenter, New York; Kunsthalle Manheim; the 2011 Venice Biennale; Serpentine Gallery, London; the 5th Berlin Biennale; and Tate Modern, London; among others. For her work, Nairy Baghramian has received the 2007 Schering Stiftung Art Award, the 2012 Hector Prize, and the 2014 Arnold Bode Prize. This year, Baghramian is participating in the Sculpture Projects Münster 17 and documenta 14 in Kassel.
Acknowledgements
Nairy Baghramian: Déformation Professionnelle is co-organized by the Walker Art Center and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), Ghent, Belgium. The Walker Art Center’s presentation is made possible by generous support from Carlo Bronzini Vender, Sonia Regina De Alvares Otero Fernandes, the Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Danniel Rangel, RBC Wealth Management, and Seda North America.
_____________________________________________________________________
Artist Portrait © Philippe Parreno, Photo: Andrea Rossetti
The Marquis and the Sisters (2016-2017) PHILIPPE PARRENO
As part of the next phase of the Walker Art Center’s commissions for the newly renovated building and Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Philippe Parreno will install his first permanent public artwork, comprised of two site-specific, living sculptures, collectively titled The Marquis and the Sisters (2016-2017), that together underscore the connection between interior and exterior spaces and transform the exhibition experience.
An important artist of his generation, Philippe Parreno works across film, installation, and sculpture, transforming the surrounding architecture, collapsing the boundaries between artistic disciplines and immersing the viewer in the process. As an early supporter of his practice, the Walker Art Center has been collecting a range of Parenno’s work since the ’90’s.
Starting in 2006, Parreno began creating a series of marquees or light sculptures derived from the traditional canopies illuminated in front of a theatre or cinema, and began to redistribute them into museum and gallery contexts. As part of his commission, Parreno is fabricating his first permanent marquee in the US, specifically designed to augment the architecture of the Cargill Lounge. A juxtaposition of natural light and artificial illumination, a glass marquee glows and dims with brass inflections, marking a boundary between the inside and outside of the Walker Art Center.
Often referring to himself as an exhibition producer rather than an artist, Parreno is staging an intervention into the view of the Wurtele Upper Garden by choreographing kinetic blinds in concert with the marquee, programmed via satellite by the artist himself to rhythmically ascend and descend as per a musical score. In The Marquis and the Sisters, Parreno transforms the museum itself into a scripted space in which a series of events unfolds during open and closed hours.
About the Artist
A French artist born in 1964 who rose to prominence in the 1990s, Philippe Parreno earned critical acclaim for his work that spans a diversity of media, including film, sculpture, drawing, and text. He attended Institut de hautes etudes en arts plastiques, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble. His work was included in the 1999 Venice Biennale. Parreno’s work is included in the public collections of: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Kanazawa Museum of the 21st Century, Japan; Beyeler Foundation, Basel; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Musée D’Art Moderne de le Ville de Paris; Musée du Luxembourg, Luxembourg; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; LACMA, Los Angeles; MoMA, New York; MUSAC, Spain; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Acknowledgements
Philippe Parreno The Marquis and the Sisters, 2016-2017, site-specific, multipart installation, was commissioned by the Walker Art Center with funds provided by the Frederick R. Weisman Collection of Art, Thea Westreich, and Ethan Wagner, 2016
_____________________________________________________________________
The Walker Art Center presents I am you, you are too, a permanent collection show that will be on view September 7, 2017-January 19, 2020 in Galleries 1, 2, 3, and D/Perlman.
In presenting a broad range of artistic approaches, I am you, you are too draws out timely questions of gender, race, sexual orientation, national identity, shifting political borders, and international and intercultural dialogue. Using works from the Walker’s collections, the exhibition explores contemporary life through themes of citizenship and belonging, borders and barriers, and ways in which everyday life informs our understanding of ourselves. Bringing together a diverse, multigenerational, and international group of artists, the exhibition questions how we memorialize the past and understand the social, geographic, and political structures that shape us. The show’s title is taken from I M U U R 2 (2013), a room-scaled installation by Danh Vo’s that brings together artist Martin Wong’s objects and examines how collected objects, such as knickknacks and souvenirs, can communicate who we are.
Curators: Vincenzo de Bellis, Adrienne Edwards, Pavel Pyś
Artists in the Exhibition
Vito Acconci, Chantal Akerman, Francis Alÿs, Giovanni Anselmo, Siah Armajani, John Baldessari, Yto Barrada, Harriet Bart, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Mark Bradford, Stanley Brouwn, James Lee Byars, Luis Camnitzer, Sarah Charlesworth, Bruce Conner, Hanne Darboven, Michael Dean, Song Dong, Stan Douglas, Lara Favaretto, Leon Ferrari, Ellen Gallagher, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dan Graham, Steven Gwon, David Hammons, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Leslie Hewitt, Douglas Huebler, Alfredo Jaar, Ronald Jones, On Kawara, Nobuaki Kojima, Tetsumi Kudo, Yayoi Kusama, Ralph Lemon, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Robert Longo, Mark Manders, Kerry James Marshall, Paul McCarthy, Dave McKenzie, Julie Mehretu, Cildo Meireles, Ana Mendieta, George Morrison, Nástio Mosquito, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, Rivane Neuenschwander, Lorraine O’Grady, Yoko Ono, Gabriel Orozco, Adam Pendleton, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Postcommodity, Walid Raad, Charles Ray, Gerhard Richter, Wilhelm Sasnal, Paul Sharits, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Robert Smithson, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kwong Chi Tseng, Oscar Tuazon, Danh Vo, Andy Warhol, Christopher Williams, Carey Young