As well as the annual summer party, the stunning Nan Goldin fim staged in the former church above Below Stone Nest, the pavilion opening and Serpentine Ecologies, this gallery has been in our diaries more than most this Summer.
The major exhibition is by trailblazer Judy Chicago, and surprisingly presents the first major interdisciplinary, immersive institutional exhibition in London of her work. As well as drawing, new and lesser-known works are on display alongside preparatory studies, and the expected audio-visual works.
Revelations, a moniker taken from an unknown illuminated manuscript by Chicago, was created in the early 1970s and now published for the first time with Thames & Hudson. The manuscript details the stories of women that have been persistently subjugated in the socio-political imaginary, in a radical retelling of human history.
With never-before-seen sketchbooks, films and slides, video interviews of participants from her iconic work The Dinner Party (1974–79), audio recordings, and a guided tour of The Dinner Party by Chicago herself, this exhibition is not to miss.
REVELATIONS is on view at Serpentine North from 23rd May to 1st September 2024
Refik Anadol, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Serpentine North. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine.
Artist, technologist, and pioneer in artificial intelligence arts, Refik Anadol presents his new exhibition of eye-candy works at London’s Serpentine Gallery.
Refik Anadol, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Serpentine North. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine.
Anadol’s collaborative generative process with AI plays here manifests to present “years-long experimentation with visual data of underwater landscapes and rainforests”. This large scale digital work features Artificial Realities: Coral (2023), which immerses viewers in an Al’s imagination of underwater landscapes. Made by training a unique AI model with approximately 135 million images of corals openly accessible online and generating abstracted coral images, “the AI then constructs new visuals and colour combinations based on the dataset.”
Refik Anadol, Echoes of the Earth: Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Serpentine North. Photo: Hugo Glendinning. Courtesy Refik Anadol Studio and Serpentine.
This is also the UK premiere of Living Archive: Large Nature Model which was first introduced at the World Economic Forum 2024 in Davos, Switzerland. To make this, Anadol worked with the data of major institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution and London’s Natural History Museum to create the model, “centred around archival images of fauna, flora and fungi, will expand over the coming years.”
As far as spectacular exhibitions go, this is a sure fire crowd-pleaser.
This weekend Megan Rooney will conjure an immersive world at the Serpentine Pavilion as part of their Park Nights series.
The performance will centre on the story about a group of female magpies who invade Mount Athos, exploring the idea of transgression within forbidden space and investigating metaphors offered by nature.
Rooney is widely known for her fluid and expansive narratives. The artist brings together a rich catalogue of expression, from painting and sculpture to spoken word performances, in order to convey her imagined worlds. And while her settings may feel apart from the everyday, her themes and topics are deeply rooted in the current political and social sphere.
This performance will include choreography by Nefeli Skarmea, and sound by Paolo Thorsen-Nagel.
Buy tickets for Megan Rooney, Park Nights at Serpentine Pavilion, 14th September, here.
The Serpentine Pavilion 2018 will be designed by the Mexican artist, Frida Escobedo – the youngest architect in the project’s 18-year history to accept the invitation. Born in 1979, the architect, who set up her Mexico City-based practice in 2006, is the first solo woman to have been awarded the commission since the project’s founding, which begin in 2000 with Zaha Hadid.
Escobedo’s Pavilion will take the form of an internal courtyard, a common characteristic of domestic Mexican architecture. A lattice of dark cement roof tiles, designed to mimic a celosia – a traditional feature in Mexican architecture that allows a breeze to flow through a building – will form the walls that enclose the courtyard and diffuse the view out into the park. The structure will equally comprise two pivoted blocks set at an angle to reference the Prime Meridian Line at London’s Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
“My design for the Serpentine Pavilion 2018 is a meeting of material and historical inspirations inseparable from the city of London itself and an idea which has been central to our practice from the beginning: the expression of time in architecture through inventive use of everyday materials and simple forms”, said Frida Escobedo.
Frida Escobedo | Photography: Ana Hop
“For the Serpentine Pavilion, we have added the materials of light and shadow, reflection and refraction, turning the building into a timepiece that charts the passage of the day.”
The combination of these materials will work in tandem to provide visitors with a heightened awareness of time spent in play, whilst conveying how the very concept of time is central to Escobedo’s design.
The pavilion will be open to the public from 15 June until 7 October and “promises to be a place of both deep reflection and dynamic encounter. With this bold interior, Frida draws history into the present and redefines the meaning of public space. We hope visitors of all ages will create their own experiences in the Pavilion this summer as we continue in our aim of bringing the urgency of art and architecture to the widest audiences” notes Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director, Hans Ulrich Obrist and CEO, Yana Peel.
Pape passed away aged 77 and her contribution has since been recognized at a major retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, a version of which is currently at the Serpentine Gallery.
Magnetized Space conveys the heat and rhythm of Pape’s life work, consisting of early drawings and poems from her Concrete period as well as later works which concentrated on the depiction of emotion and sensation and fellow artist Hélio Oiticica described as permanently open seeds.
Tonight, Guy Brett, a writer and curator who knew the artist personally, will talk through a selection of her films and her process behind them, all in the context of the Brazilian avant-garde’s history. It’s a chance to remember an often forgotten Twentieth Century revolutionary, whose work playfully and skillfully mediated the politics and aesthetics of Brazilian society.
Lygia Pape: Film Work Talk by Guy Brett Thursday 12 January 2012, 7pm at the Centre for Possible Studies, W1U 8HR Magnetized Space is at the Serpentine until 19 February 2012 serpentinegallery.org
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