The Impermanent Display II

Maja Hoffmann

Etel Adnan (1925-2021) was a Lebanese-American artist, poet and essayist, writing in French and English. Born in Beirut, she moved to Paris after a long period of residence in California. She began painting in the 1960s and her work has received international recognition since DOCUMENTA(13), in 2012. In 2014, she was invited to the biennial of the Whitney Museum (New York) and the Qatar museum of modern art, the Mathaf, which dedicated a retrospective to her, organized by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Since then, numerous museums (Bern, Luxembourg, San Francisco, Aspen, Lille, etc.) and art centres have devoted exhibitions to her. Adnan’s works appear in numerous collections, including the MNAM-Center Pompidou, Paris; Mathaf, Doha, Qatar; MoMA, New York; M +, Hong Kong; Royal Jordanian Museum, Amman; the Museum of Modern Art, Tunis; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Institute of the Arab World, Paris; British Museum, London; Tate Gallery, London; World Bank Collection, Washington D.C.; National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; as well as in many private collections. Photo credit: Courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co. Paris

Judy Chicago is an artist, author, feminist, and educator whose career spans nearly six decades. Her work has been the subject of major retrospectives at Serpentine Galleries, London (2024), the New Museum, New York (2023), and the De Young Museum, San Francisco (2021), and is in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago; The Brooklyn Museum; The British Museum; the De Young Museum; The Getty Trust; The Hammer Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Moderna Museet; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Tate; and more than twenty-five university art museums. She is the author of sixteen books, including The Flowering: The Autobiography of Judy Chicago and Revelations published by Thames & Hudson. The retrospective exhibition Judy Chicago: Herstory at LUMA Arles in Summer 2024 will be her first retrospective in Europe. The exhibition is conceived in partnership with the New Museum, New York. 

Tacita Dean is a pioneering filmmaker and multimedia artist. Traversing through the varied states and iconographies outlined in Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Dean combines media in a manner that seems to parallel the sights and scenes of Dante’s literary masterpiece.

Trisha Donnelly’s work is based on conceptual strategies and uses a diverse array of media and processes. She is known for her poetic, unconventional, often enigmatic works. Ghostly, mysterious projections of eventless narratives and overlapping images are characteristic of her videos.

Visual artist Ólafur Elíasson (b. 1967) grew up in Iceland and Denmark. In 1995, he founded Studio Ólafur Elíasson in Berlin, which today comprises a team of craftsmen, architects, archivists, researchers, administrators, cooks, art historians, and specialised technicians. Natural phenomena—such as water, light, ice, fog, and reflections—feature prominently in Elíasson’s often large-scale artworks. His practice is driven by interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and the sense of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large, considering art a crucial means of turning thinking into doing in the world. Elíasson’s work spans sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum or gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and the climate crisis.

He is internationally renowned for works such as The Weather Project (2003), an indoor sun shrouded in mist installed in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, seen by more than two million people, and The New York City Waterfalls(2008), a public art project commissioned by the Public Art Fund with the support of former mayor Michael Bloomberg, for which he installed four artificial waterfalls along the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines. Another acclaimed project in public space is Ice Watch, a public installation for which Elíasson and geologist Minik Rosing transported twelve massive blocks of glacial ice from Greenland to Copenhagen’s City Hall Square in 2014, to coincide with the publication of the Fifth Assessment Report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The project was reiterated in Paris (2015) and London (2018).

In 2012, he founded the social business Little Sun, and in 2014, he and Sebastian Behmann founded Studio Other Spaces, an office for art and architecture.

Carsten Höller uses his training as a scientist in his work as an artist, concentrating particularly on the nature of human relationships. Born in Brussels in 1961, he now lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden and Biriwa, Ghana. His major installations include Test Site, a series of giant slides for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2006); Amusement Park, an installation of full-size funfair rides turning and moving at very slow speed at MASS MoCA, North Adams, USA (2006); Flying Machine (1996), a work which hoists the viewer through the air; Upside-Down Goggles, an experiment with goggles which modify vision; and the famous The Double Club (2008-2009) in London, which opened in November 2008 and closed in July 2009, that took the form of a bar, restaurant and nightclub designed to create a dialogue between Congolese and Western culture.

His Revolving Hotel Room (2008), a rotating art installation that becomes a fully operational hotel room at night, was shown as part of theanyspacewhatever exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2009. For his 2015 exhibition Decision at the Hayward Gallery, he turned the whole building into an experimental parcours with two entrances and four exits, two of them being slides. His works have been shown internationally over the last two decades, including solo exhibitions at Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), the ICA Boston (2003), Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille (2004), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2008), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010), Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2011), New Museum, New York (2011) Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna (2014), Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2016), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway (2017), The Florence Experiment at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (2018), Sunday at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2019) and most recently the exhibitions Behaviour at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg (2019) and Reproduction at Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen (2019). 

Joan Jonas is a pioneer of performance and video art. Her work combines installation, sculpture, and drawing, often in collaboration with musicians and dancers to realize improvisational performances. Drawing on mythic stories from various cultures, Jonas injects texts from the past with the politics of the present. By wearing masks and drawing while performing on stage, she disrupts the conventions of theatrical storytelling to emphasize potent symbols and critical self-awareness. She experiments with various tools to draw; her depictions of animal forms seem almost accidental, yet they are the result of extensive practice. Jonas creates new narratives to address contemporary issues such as alienation from nature and climate change.

Mike Kelley is widely considered one of the most influential artists of our time. Originally from a suburb outside of Detroit, Kelley attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, before moving to Southern California in 1976 to study at California Institute of the Arts from which he received an MFA in 1978. The city of Los Angeles became his adopted home and the site of his prolific art practice. In much of his work, Kelley drew from a wide spectrum of high and low culture, and was known to scour flea markets for America’s cast-offs and leftovers. Mining the banal objects of everyday life, Kelley elevated these materials to question and dismantle Western conceptions of contemporary art and culture. Starting out in the late 1970s, Kelley became known for performance and installation based works; he came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of common craft materials and stuffed animals. His work later widened in scope and physical scale, exemplified by ‘Educational Complex’ (1995), the ‘Kandors’ series (1999 – 2011), ‘Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction’ series (2000 – 2011), and the posthumously completed public work ‘Mobile Homestead’ (2006 – 2013). These projects invoked a vast range of media and forms, illustrating the artist’s versatility and underscored a number of Kelley’s recurrent themes, such as repressed memory, sexuality, adolescence, class, and Americana, which were central to his artistic praxis. Throughout his career, Kelley also worked on curatorial projects, collaborated with many artists and musicians, and produced a formidable body of critical and creative writing.

Paul McCarthy is widely considered to be one of the most influential and groundbreaking contemporary American artists. Born in 1945, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, he first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums – from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting. During the 1990s, he extended his practice into installations and stand-alone sculptural figures, utilizing a range of materials such as fiberglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. Playing on popular illusions and cultural myths, fantasy and reality collide in a delirious yet poignant exploration of the subconscious, in works that simultaneously challenge the viewer’s phenomenological expectations. Whether absent or present, the human figure has been a constant in his work, either through the artist‘s own performances or the array of characters he creates to mix high and low culture, and provoke an analysis of our fundamental beliefs. These playfully oversized characters and objects critique the worlds from which they are drawn: Hollywood, politics, philosophy, science, art, literature, and television. McCarthy’s work, thus, locates the traumas lurking behind the stage set of the American Dream and identifies their counterparts in the art historical canon. McCarthy earned a BFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1969, and an MFA in multimedia, film and art from USC in 1973. For 18 years, he taught performance, video, installation, and art history in the New Genres Department at UCLA, where he influenced future generations of west coast artists and he has exhibited extensively worldwide. McCarthy’s work comprises collaborations with artist- friends such as Mike Kelley and Jason Rhoades, as well as his son Damon McCarthy.

Precious Okoyomon was in residence at LUMA Arles from october to december 2020.

Precious Okoyomon (b. 1993) is a Nigerian-American poet and artist. Their work considers the natural world, histories of migration and racialization, and the pure pleasures of everyday life.

They have had one-person exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau, Zurich; the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Performance Space New York, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid Foundation, Madrid; The Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Ithaca; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz. They were included in the Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn; the 58th Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade; the 59th Venice Biennale, Venice; the 2022 Okayama Art Summit, Okayama; the 11th Sequences Biennial, Reykjavik; the 2023 Thailand Biennial, Chiang Rai, as well as in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; LUMA Westbau, Zurich; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; LUMA Arles, Arles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Nigerian Pavillion, 60th Venice Biennale, Venice; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz. Okoyomon’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and LUMA Arles. Okoyomon was the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award, as well as the 2021 Chanel Next Art Prize. In 2024, But Did You Die?, their second book of poetry, was co-published by the Serpentine and Wonder Press.

Laura Owens is best known for her painting practice that transforms the history of the medium in uncanny ways. Often combining depictions of landscapes with geometrical patterns, her work reveals an astute awareness of the evolution of painting and its importance in contemporary society. Her work combines bold colors, conceptual thinking and a unique depth of vision, and is best understood in relation to Owens’s interest in rethinking key moments from art history.

Philippe Parreno studied at École des Beaux-Arts, Grenoble, and Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques, Palais de Tokyo, Paris. He lives and works in Paris, France. Parreno is a French artist who rose to prominence in the 1990s, earning critical acclaim for his work that spans a diversity of media, including film, sculpture, drawing, and text. Parreno radically redefined the exhibition experience by taking the exhibition itself as a medium and placing its construction at the heart of his process. Exploring the possibilities of the exhibition as a coherent “object” rather than as a collection of individual works makes it into a true open space, a format that differs on each occasion, and a frame for things to appear and disappear. Parreno conceives his exhibitions as a scripted space where a series of events unfolds. He seeks to transform the exhibition visit into a singular experience that plays with spatial and temporal boundaries and the sensory experience of the visitor, who is guided through the space by the orchestration of sound and image. For the artist, the exhibition is less a total work of art than a necessary interdependence that offers an ongoing series of open possibilities.

Sigmar Polke (b. 1941, Oels, Silesia — d. 2010, Cologne, Germany) is one of the most influential painters of the postwar era. He founded the movement “Kapitalistischer Realismus” (“Capitalist realism”) with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer, a reaction to “Socialist Realism”, the art doctrine from the Soviet Union.Sigmar Polke experimentally renewed painting, photography, and printmaking. By emphasizing the material aspect of the media, he set free their own life. A constant in his painting is the halftone dot of offset printing, which he meticulously reproduces by hand, while at the same time pouring varnish, pigments and chemicals onto the image carrier. And behind humor and postmodern openness hides erudition.His work was presented as solo exhibitions in major venues internationally, including Musée d’Art Moderne Paris, Tate Modern London, MoMA New York, MCA Chicago, Carré d’Art Nîmes, Museum Ludwig Cologne and Palazzo Grassi Venice. He participated in three documenta in Kassel and several Venice Biennale.

Tavares Strachan’s work is based on scientific developments used to express invisible, physical and metaphorical displacement, and the capacity of people and matter to withstand inhospitable environments. Central to his practice is the emphasis on the migratory, cross-cultural nature of knowledge production in the contemporary world, through the prism of artistic practices.

Sturtevant’s practice explores the boundaries between fact and fiction, reproduction of images and reappropriation. She often used the iconic images or artworks of her generation as a source and catalyst for her own explorations of originality, authorship, and the structures that define art and image culture.

A major figure of the Viennese art scene, Franz West developed a sculptural and installation-based practice from the early 1970s onward that challenges the boundaries between everyday functional objects and works of art. Chairs, tables, armchairs, sofas, beds, carpets, and even upholstery fabrics become, in turn, vehicles for a critical, provocative, and often deliberately irreverent reflection on the nature and scope of the artistic gesture.

Influenced by performance art and Viennese Actionism, West took an early interest in the role of the body in art and argued for a radical merging of art and life. Beginning in the 1970s, he created portable papier-mâché sculptures known as Paßstücke (Adaptives), inviting the public to interact with them and to perform.

Playful in spirit, his works challenge traditional frameworks of art. By the late 1980s, Franz West was creating installations that sit at the intersection of sculpture and furniture—objects designed to be used, altered, and activated by the public. Everyday objects and furnishings thus became a central motif in his work.