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Post '89

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

(b.1959, Hämeenlinna; lives and works in Helsinki)

A photographer, filmmaker and video artist, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s interest in the construction of image, narrative and language culminates in works she calls “human dramas.” Ahtila investigates memory, construction of identity, sexuality and human relationships often while she is deconstructing the means of her chosen medium, exposing elements of cinematic illusion and storytelling.

Ahtila has received numerous grants and awards, including a DAAD fellowship (1999) an honorary mention at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999), and the Artes Mundi Prize (2006). Her solo exhibitions include those at The Art Institute of Chicago (2011); K21, Düsseldorf (2008); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Tate Modern, London (2002); Museum Fridericianum, Kassel (1998). She has had works presented at Istanbul Modern (2007, 1997); Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2003); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1999, 1997) and participated in the Venice Biennale (2005, 1999, 1997) and Documenta 11, Kassel (2002).

Abdellatif Benfaidoul

(b.1974, Morocco; lives and works in Morocco and The Netherlands)

Abdellatif Benfaidoul is a video-maker, producer, curator and the founder of the Arab Media Lab project. He received his MA in Film and Video from Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he produced various short and experimental film such as Juxtaposition (2001), which was nominated for the international media art prize ZKM in 2002.

He works as program-maker of North African films for the picture Festival Amsterdam and is co-founder of the initiative Taleb Cherche Midi-Vieokaravaan where he, as producer, developed a platform for digital filmmaking in Morocco and produced over 30 short films. Benfaidoul takes what happens around him as his subject matter and believes that “talking about or showing reality is much more real than reality itself.”

Stanley Brouwn

(b.1935, Paramaribo)

Stanley Brouwn emerged as an artist in Amsterdam during a period in the 1960’s when the city’s art scene was heavily influenced by the Fluxus art movement. Brouwn remains rigorously committed to a strain of conceptualism, in particular a familiar Conceptualist obsession with the idea of measurement. Interested in the poetry of how measurement is used to represent reality, specifically measurements of his own body or the bodies of others, Brouwn often references his height, the length of his stride, or the tracing of his route while walking through a city. The artist has consciously chosen to remain discreet about his life as well as about his works, not allowing his works to be photographed and refusing any media coverage or publication for nearly forty years.

Brouwn’s works are held in the collections of various international institutions including FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He has been exhibited at MoMA, New York (2009); S.M.A.K., Ghent (2001) and Witte de With, Rotterdam (1994).

Rineke Dijkstra

(b.1959, Sittard; lives and works in Amsterdam)

Rineke Dijkstra’s photography and videos convey their subjects caught at a decisive moment of transition in their lives, usually from adolescence to incipient adulthood. Since the beginning of the 1990s Dijkstra has worked with a large format camera and concentrated on portrait-series in color. The Beaches series (1992–1996), for which she photographed adolescents in their bathing costumes on beaches from the Ukraine to the USA, in front of the ocean as a simple but highly symbolical background, gained her international attention. From this point on, people in transitional moments would be a major theme in her work.

Dijkstra’s work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Orange County Museum of Art, Aspen Museum of Art (2006-2003); Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (2004); the Art Institute of Chicago (2001) and Museum Boymansvan Beuningen in Rotterdam (1998). She has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the International Center for Photography’s Triennial of Photography and Video in New York (2003); Venice Biennale (2001, 1997); Turin’s Biennale Internationale di Fotografia (1999) and the São Paulo Biennial (1998).

Marlene Dumas

(b.1953, Cape Town; lives and works in Amsterdam)

Working mostly from photographic sources -images torn from magazines and newspapers as well as personal snapshots - Marlene Dumas employs classical modes of representation in Western art, such as the nude or the funerary portrait in her paintings. By working within and also transgressing these traditional historical antecedents, Dumas uses the human figure as a means to critique contemporary ideas of racial, sexual, and social identity. Dumas’ portraits exploit grays, blues and reds, removing subjects from their original context and striping them of any identifiable information. Through her focus on the human figure, Dumas merges socio-political themes with personal experience and art-historical antecedents to create a unique perspective on the most salient and controversial issues facing contemporary society. Her work consistently explores constructions of identity and the fluid distinctions between the public and the private.

In 2008, Marlene Dumas’ work was presented in a critically acclaimed retrospective, Measuring Your Own Grave, which was first on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and traveled to The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Menil Collection, Houston, Texas, in 2009. Marlene Dumas: Intimate Relations marked her first solo exhibition in South Africa and was held at the Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, in 2007, and the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, in 2008. Other institutions which have presented one-person exhibitions of her work include the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2008); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2007); Taidehalli, Helsinki (2005); The Art Institute of Chicago (2003); New Museum, New York (2002); De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg (2002); and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2001). She has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (2005, 2003,1995); São Paulo Biennial (1985) and Documenta IX, Kassel (1992).

Cevdet Erek

(b.1974, İstanbul; lives and works in İstanbul)

An artist and musician, Cevdet Erek composes and re-composes works that capture and reformulate spaces and situations. His works, which take the form of videos, time-based installations and performance, employ sounds, beats, borrowed and constructed architectural elements, graphic illustrations as well as readymade forms. Erek often collaborates with architects, directors, choreographers, authors and he is also co-founder of the avant-garde rock act Nekropsi.

He was awarded the Uriot Prize for the work Studio (2005), which is currently on view at SALT Beyoğlu, during his residency at Rijksakademie vbk (2005-2006, Amsterdam). His work was included in the İstanbul Biennial in 2011 and in 2003 and at Home Works V, Beirut (2010); he has exhibited at venues including Tate Modern, London (2011); MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2011); Arter, İstanbul (2010); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006). His solo exhibition Week is currently on view at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland until March 4, 2012.

İnci Eviner

(b.1956, Polatlı; lives and works in İstanbul)

In her works, which include drawings, wallpapers, video, photography and installations, İnci Eviner creates an uncanny visual universe comprising quirky beasts, the human figure, hybrid creatures, and symbolic objects loaded with subconscious associations.

Solo presentations of her work were organized by institutions including Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2011); Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne-Vitry-sur-Seine (2009); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009) and ARCO Art Fair, Madrid (2008). Eviner has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the Busan Biennial (2010) and 7th International Shanghai Biennial (2008); and at venues such as Bonnier Kunsthall, Stockholm (2010); TBA21, Vienna (2010); Philadelphia Museum of Art (2010); Palais des Beaux-Arts-Lille (2009); Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2007).

Leyla Gediz

(b.1974, İstanbul; lives and works in İstanbul)

Gediz is renowned for her narrative paintings and installations, inspired by her memories and experiences about growing up and living in İstanbul. Her first solo exhibition opened in İstanbul in 2002 followed by numerous solo exhibitions in İstanbul and abroad including those at Roberts & Tilton Gallery in L.A. and Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie in Zurich. She was the curator of several exhibitions in İstanbul between 2008 and 2009 and attended the HIAP Helsinki artist-in-residence program in 2010.

Gediz has participated in national and international exhibitions such as Last Things, Westfaelischer Kunstverein, Münster (2008); Save As, Triennale Bovisa, Milan (2008); Urban Reality: Focus İstanbul, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2005); EindhovenIstanbul, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005); Art For…, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, İstanbul (2005); Where? / Here?, Turkish Art Today, The Museum of Modern Art Saitama, Saitama (2003); and Egofugal, 7th İstanbul Biennial, İstanbul (2001).

Douglas Gordon

(b.1966, Glasgow; lives and works in Berlin and Glasgow)

Douglas Gordon’s occupation with dualisms such as imag
e and language, darkness and light, truth and fiction, good and evil; take the viewer on a never-ending journey of the examination of cognitive thought processes. Working with film, video, photography, text and installation, he subverts the reading process, disorients the viewer’s perception of time, and explores the structure of language. Gordon treats famous films or mass-media figures as readymades and time as a tangible material; tapping into the space between imagination and recollection in the viewer’s memory, his work offers a multiplicity of readings.

Gordon was the recipient of the 1996 Turner Prize, and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale the following year. He has received the 1997 Venice Biennale’s Premio 2000 award, the 1998 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the 2008 Roswitha Haftmann Prize. His work was the subject of a 2001 retrospective organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which traveled to the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. In 2006 Douglas Gordon Superhumanatural opened at the National Galleries of Scotland complex in Edinburgh, being Gordon’s first major solo exhibition in Scotland since he presented 24 Hour Psycho in 1993. His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including those at Tate Britain, London (2010); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2006); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006). Gordon’s feature-length film, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which he co-directed with artist Philippe Parreno, premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival before screenings at numerous international venues. k.364 premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2010.

Rodney Graham

(b.1959, Vancouver; lives and works in Vancouver)

Rodney Graham is recognized for a rigorously intellectual art, which ranges in media from photography, film, video and music to sculpture, painting and books. Graham’s work examines social and philosophical systems of thought, in particular those derived from the transition of the Enlightenment into Modernism. Underlying each work is a historical context, through which a complex narrative incorporates literary and philosophic references and visual puns. The work is essentially circular in structure and moves in seamless and infinite loops, such as the film trilogy Vexation Island (1997), How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999), and City Self/Country Self (2001), in all of which Graham impersonates fictional characters - respectively a castaway, a cowboy and a city dandy as well as its opposite, a country man. These characters are engaged in the endless repetition of fruitless actions and gestures, each one caught in the impossibility of reaching any meaningful conclusion. Borrowing from existing models, Graham constructs his own system of logic, which is often based on disorientation, the humorous and the absurd, to deflect rather than reveal the key to his work’s interpretation.

Rodney Graham’s solo exhibitions include those at Hauser & Wirth Zürich (2011, 2006, 2003); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (2010); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2004) and K21, Dusseldorf (2003). In 2005 he was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery that toured to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among other venues in North America. In 1997, he represented Canada at the Venice Biennale and among many group presentations he has shown work in the Liverpool Biennial (2008); Whitney Biennial (2006); Centre Pompidou Paris (2005, 2000), Tate Liverpool (2002); Dia Centre for the Arts, New York (2001, 2000); The Montreal Biennial, Canada (2000); Van Abbemuseum (1992, 1991) and De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam (1992, 1991, 1987).

Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt

(Günyol b.1977, Ankara & Kunt b.1978, Ankara; live and work in Frankfurt)

Özlem Günyol and Mustafa Kunt have been collaborating since 2005. Together they investigate the representation of individual and collective belonging, the meaning of language, symbols, and information conveyed by the media, as well as their link to culturally coded patterns of understanding. The conceptual character of their practice is always connected with the traditional visual language of avant-garde art forms.

They have participated in exhibitions including the 12th International İstanbul Biennial; Vier, Museum für Moderne Kunst - Zollamt, Frankfurt; Unerwartet/Unexpected, Art Museum Bochum; El Dorado, About the promise of Human Rights, Kunsthalle Nürnberg; Making a Scene, Fondazione Morragreco, Naples; Alman Mali, Kunstverein München and be-cause, Basis, Frankfurt.

Pierre Huyghe

(b.1962, Paris; lives and works in New York and Paris)

Pierre Huyghe is an artist and filmmaker interested in the ways that the built environment conditions human behavior, the ways in which perceptual processes function, and the new possibilities of mass culture and industry. His focus on composed scenarios and authorship result in a complex body of work that has been produced in a variety of media including film, video, installation and public interventions. Maintaining a balance between control and chance, Huyghe reactivates meaning by using existing forms. His concern with the story rather than the end disturbs the cycle of production, distribution and reception, becoming a critique of the modernist utopia of progress, and of the movement towards completion.

Huyghe was the recipient of the DAAD Artist in Residence grant in Berlin (1999-2000) and received a Special Award from the Jury of the Venice Biennale in 2001, where he represented France. He also received the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 2002. Huyghe has held numerous international solo exhibitions at venues such as Tate Modern, London (2006); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003); Dia Center for the Arts, New York (2003); Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2002); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2000) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998). He has participated in major international exhibitions including the Sydney Biennale (2008, 1998); the Venice Biennale (2007, 1999); Whitney Biennial (2006); Biennale de Lyon (2005, 2004, 2003); Documenta XI, Kassel (2002); İstanbul Biennial (2001); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999); Manifesta 2, Luxembourg (1998); 2nd Johannesburg Biennial (1997) and the Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (1995).

Mike Kelley

(b.1954, Detroit; d.2012, Los Angeles)

Mike Kelley studied at the University of Michigan (BFA, 1976) and received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1978. His work involves found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. Kelley is also a musician. He often works collaboratively and has produced projects with artists including Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler, and John Miller. Kelley’s work ranges from performance pieces to compositions of stuffed-animal sculptures, and from collages and wall-size drawings to multi-room installations. His works question value systems and power structures, and challenge the norms and attitudes that exist toward family, religion, sexuality, art history, and education.

Mike Kelley received the Skowhegan Medal in Mixed Media. Kelley’s major solo exhibitions include those at Tate Liverpool (2004); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2000); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1997); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1993); and Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (1992). He has participated in international biennials such as the Gwangju Biennale (2010); Whitney Biennial (2010, 2002, 1995, 1993, 1991, 1989, 1985); the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon (2003) and Documenta X (1995).

Atelier van Lieshout

(Rotterdam)

Founded by Joep van Lieshout in 1995, Atelier Van Lieshout (AVL) is a multidisciplinary company that operates internationally in the field of contemporary art, design and architecture. AVL’s work ranges from sculptures to furniture, from bathrooms and mobile home units to complete architectural refurbishments. AVL has attained international recognition for objects and interventions that exist on the borderline between art, architecture and design. These practical, uncomplicated and substantial proposals explore recurring themes such as power, politics, authority, life and death.

AVL has exhibited internationally at institutions such as Centre Pompidou Paris (2011); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2006, 2001, 1990); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2005, 1998); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1999, 1990); MoMA, New York (1995) and in major exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (2003) and the São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2002, 1994).

Juan Muñoz

(b.1953, Madrid; d.2001, Ibiza)

Characterized as one of the most significant artists to achieve maturity in post-Franco Spain, Juan Muñoz’s non-descript figurative sculptures and false architectural elements made out of resin, bronze or paper maché, as well as his works using sound, light and mechanical elements, create introspective spatial experiences between the illusory and the real. Muñoz, who described himself as a “storyteller,” also created compositions for the radio, collaborating with the likes of John Berger and the British composer Gavin Bryars.

Muñoz participated in numerous international exhibitions including Documenta (2002, 1992); the İstanbul Biennial (1999) and the Venice Biennial (1997, 1993, 1986). His work has been displayed internationally in institutions including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009); Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2008); Tate Modern, London (2008, 2002); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2001); the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1999, 1996); and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1991, 1985). In 2000, he was awarded Spain’s major cultural prize, the Premio Nacional des Artes Plásticas.

Gabriel Orozco

(b.1962, Veracruz; divides his time between Paris, New York and Mexico City)

Orozco’s playful and inventive body of work is not limited to any medium and he has produced videos, drawings, and installations, in addition to photographs and sculptures. He is renowned for his endless experimentation with found objects, which he subtly alters. Orozco’s works—which are often created specifically for the occasion of an exhibition—have become iconic, such as the Citroën automobile surgically reduced to two-thirds its normal width (La DS, 1993) and a human skull covered with a graphite grid (Black Kites, 1997). At his exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1993, Orozco’s Home Run featured oranges placed in the windows of adjacent apartment buildings. For the 1993 Venice Biennale, Orozco placed a shoebox on the floor of the Aperto. “What is most important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again.”

Orozco participated in the Venice Biennale (2005, 2003, and 1993); Documenta XI (2002); the Whitney Biennial (1997, 1995); Documenta X (1997) and and has shown extensively at institutions including Tate Modern, London (2011); Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2001-2000); and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995). He has received numerous awards, including the Seccio Espacios Alternativos prize from the Salon Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City (1987), a DAAD artist-in-residence grant in Berlin (1995), and the German Blue Orange prize (2006).

Allen Ruppersberg

(b.1944, Ohio; lives and works in New York and Santa Monica)

Allen Ruppersberg is a member of the first generation of Californian conceptual artists of the 1960s. While Ruppersberg’s work is often text-based, utilizing ordinary materials such as postcards, books, and magazines, he works across media in accordance with his belief that “every idea has its own form of representation.” His projects include fully but somewhat oddly functioning cafés, hotels, re-written books and even lecture-performances on the magician Houdini. Calling himself “a pulp artist,” Ruppersberg collects, replicates or appropriates existing modes and forms, playing with ideas of high and low culture, claiming that art and life should be interchangeable.

Ruppersberg has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art (2005) and the Whitney Biennial (1991, 1975, 1970). His works are in the collections of institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Foundation de Appel, Amsterdam.

Wilhelm Sasnal

(b.1972, Tarnow; lives and works in Kraków)

Since attracting international attention in the late 90s, Sasnal has consolidated his reputation as one of the most important painters of his generation. Now working with photography, film, video as well as painting, Sasnal combines references to political events, to art and cultural history with snippets of personal experience and everyday life. In his paintings, his detached stance towards his subjects shifts the responsibility of their meaning onto the viewer. This approach is similarly evident in his works’ cryptic relationship to one another, and in the eclecticism of his subject matter, which implies that even the most incongruous things are connected. In 2008, he realized his first ever feature-length film titled Swiniopas (Swineherd). Film has always been an important aspect of Sasnal’s practice, offering him qualities that differ from and complement his painting. There is a filmic quality to his canvases, their unusual cropping and slick graphic narratives suggesting a camera’s gaze.

Sasnal has had solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (2011); K21, Düsseldorf, (2009); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2006); The Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2005) and Kunsthalle Zurich (2003). He has participated in international exhibitions including the 1st Tirana Biennial (2001), Gwangju Bienniale (2002) and the Prague Biennale 2 (2005). He was the 2006 winner of the Vincent van Gogh Biennial Award for Contemporary Art in Europe 2006.

Jan Vercruysse

(b.1948, Ostend; lives and works in Western Europe)

The departure point of Jan Vercruysse’s artistic practice is poetry. He started writing poetry in the mid-1960s, which by the early 1970s would become self-reflexive: poetry about poetry. In 1973, he worked on visual poetry, which resulted in a number of publications in the magazine, De Tafelronde (Round Table). Vercruysse’s debut as a visual artist followed in 1974, at the Catherine Bouckaert Gallery in Ghent. Jan Vercruysse’s oeuvre can be divided into several series; each series is a new investigation into the place of art and the artist, and contains references to various art-historical backgrounds. The absence of immediately identifiable content confronts the viewer with many enigmas. More than just a producer of artistic and philosophical discourse, however, Vercruysse is primarily a maker of aesthetic objects.

A coming solo presentation of Vercruysse’s work is being organized by M Museum, Leuven, Belgium for 2012. His works have been shown internationally: Art Museum of China - NAMOC, Beijing (2010); Beaufort Triennale (2009); in the 1st Bienal de Valencia (2001); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1997, group exh. 1992, 1990); Kunsthalle in Bern (1989); Documenta VIII, Kassel (1987); The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1986) and Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris (1984).