Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Exotourisme (néon) (2002-2013), all photos via Daphné Mookherjee for Art Observed

The work of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster often combines media, spatial arrangements and video within the prism of time to explore links and lines of intersection between literature, film, architecture and music.  For her retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, she takes over the Galerie Sud as a spatial timeline, superimposing temporal strata to create an installation that serves as both a retrospective and forward-looking journey into the body of her work, questioning the viewer on fragmented identities and fictions, notions of inside and outside or absence and presence, and even the idea of time travel. (more…)

T.1912 by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster with The Wordless Music Orchestra at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, April 14, 2011. All Photos by Enid Alvarez

On April 14th, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hosted an double feature of T. 1912, a performance by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. She conceived it as a commemorative gesture on the 99th anniversary of the famous sinking of the Titanic, the massive ship that was pronounced “unsinkable” and which struck an iceberg and sank in the Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage in 1912.

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Installation view of Liam Gillick: Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Currently on show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, through January 10, is an extensive exhibition of a size and significance previously unprecedented in an American museum, featuring British artist Liam Gillick. “Liam Gillick: Three perspectives and a short Scenario,” interestingly marks the final installment of an elaborate multi-part, multi-national project, in association with Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Zurich, and the Kunstverein in Munich, that represents this celebrated artist. Each location offered a unique, yet complementary, investigation into Gillick’s practice resulting in a rigorously comprehensive mid-career survey.

Liam Gillick, Rescinded Production, 2008. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Image courtesy of Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

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A detail view of literary texts within a dessert terrain diorama, from Gonzalez-Foerster’s exhibition at the Hispanic Society of America.  Via Dia Art Foundation.

Currently showing at the Hispanic Society of America is an exhibition by Paris and Rio de Janeiro based artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.  The show, which  functions as a kind of expansion of the society’s renowned research library,  consists of a range of twentieth-century literature installed in a series of three dioramas, by reference to their place of origin. The various texts, written by some 40 authors, hail from three distinct geographical regions: the dessert, the tropics and the North Atlantic. Entitled “chronotopes and dioramas,” the site-specific project is the third in a series of contemporary art exhibitions commissioned by the Dia Art Foundation for the Hispanic Society of America, which rests in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan. Organized by the Dia Art Foundation’s curator at large, Lynne Cooke, the exhibition marks Gonzalez-Foerster’s first major solo show in the United States.

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An installation view of one of Gonzalez-Foerster’s modeled oceanic terrains, (2009) Via Dia Foundation. “I always wanted to be a writer, but writing is very difficult for me,” the artist has said. “Slowly I accepted the idea of a kind of expanded literature, you might say.”

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Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation TH.2058 at Tate Modern in London via The Independent.

The Tate Modern, London is currently displaying its ninth Turbine Hall installation by French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. The installation is inspired by the artist’s vision of an apocalyptic London 50 years into the future. The work aptly named TH.2058 imagines the city under siege by flooding, bombing, and invasion, its residents forced to take shelter in the Tate’s Turbine Hall in order to escape the never-ending rain. Gonzalez-Foerester has filled the hall with rows of of bunk beds scattered with science-fiction novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Jack Finney’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. A literal homage to the writings that helped inspire the work. The beds are pinned beneath giant replicas of sculptures previously housed in the Tate, including a gigantic duplicate of a spider by Louise Bourgeois and a colossal copy of Alexander Calder’s pink flamingo. A screen hangs over the end of the space and displays what Gonzalez-Foerester calls The Last Film; a montage of science fiction clips from Planet of the Apes, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and Solaris among others. All of this coupled with the constant sound of rain. The piece was inspired not only by science-fiction works but also by the 2005 London subway bombings that killed 52 and the 1940-41 bombings of Britain by the Nazi’s.

Catastrophe at the Tate: new installation sees future world as a disaster shelter [Guardian UK]
Art Refuge [Financial Times]
Apocalyptic vision of London comes to Tate Modern [The Associated Press]
Tate’s vision of a London under fire [The Independent]
Bunk beds fill Tate Turbine Hall [BBC News]
Bed and bored in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s chamber of horrors [TimesOnlineUK]
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