Ai Weiwei with his Passport, via The Guardian

Artist Ai Weiwei is free once again to travel outside of China, following the return of his passport, The Guardian reports. The return caps a four year ordeal for the artist following his arrest for alleged tax evasion in 2011.  (more…)

The Cuban government has returned artist Tania Bruguera’s passport, having held it for the past six months.  Despite its return, the artist has expressed her desire to remain in the country.  “My argument has never been about leaving Cuba; my argument is about working so there is freedom of expression and public protest in Cuba,” she says.  “People should feel free to say what they think without fear of losing their jobs or university standing, of being marginalized or imprisoned.” (more…)

Ida Applebroog, The Ethics of Desire (Installation View)

The Ethics of Desire is the title of the currently running Ida Applebroog exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. In her decades long career, the New York native has frequently used her work to dismantle and reform sexual politics and its echoes in society (i.e. the women’s liberation movement, body politics and gender classification, to name a few).  Her turbulent biography, from a childhood in a Jewish Orthodox family in the Bronx to her time in Chicago and California, gained further momentum when she relocated in New York in the mid 1970’s. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has opened a series of new exhibitions in Beijing, signaling a relaxation of the capital’s ban on the showing the artist, while foreign travel is still off limits.  “The decision-making process is opaque. I can only speculate that the authorities realize that they have created a situation that, sooner or later, has to be resolved,” says John Tancock, a longtime collaborator of Ai’s and an adviser to Chambers Fine Art. (more…)

The New York Times travels to the Havana Biennial this week, and notes the arrest of artist Tania Bruguera during the event, following the artist’s live reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, an event that cast something of a pall over the first Biennial legally accessible to American visitors. (more…)

Iranian artist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for her works depicting national politicians as monkeys and goats as protest over plans to outlaw voluntary sterilisation and restrict access to contraception.  “Atena Farghadani has effectively been punished for her cartoons with a sentence that is itself a gross caricature of justice,” says Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director for  Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa. (more…)

Golden Lion for Best Pavilion amongst Rene Gabri and Ayreen Anastas, When counting loses its sense (2015), via Sophie Kitching for Art Observed

In 1915, during the clashes of WWI, the Ottoman Empire set out on a path of systemic destruction of its Armenian subjects, massacring male Armenians or forcing them into conscripted labor, while leading women, children and the infirm on arduous death marches off into the Syrian desert.  The brutal and politically contentious genocide killed, on estimate, up to 1.5 million citizens, and stands as one of the Twentieth Century’s most horrific episodes of war.  Even so, the political body of Turkey still refuses to acknowledge the term genocide in relation to these war crimes, and the historical scars of the killings run through the distributed population of the Armenian diaspora worldwide. (more…)

Jenny Holzer, I was called (2013), via Art Observed

Running in conjunction with the events of the Biennale, and fittingly tying itself to themes of political action and structural instability, Venice’s Museo Correr is opening a new exhibition of works by the artist Jenny Holzer, focusing on the artist’s recent explorations into the aesthetic underpinnings of U.S. interrogation policy, declassified military and governmental documents, and other visual devices of the political war machine.  Titled War Paintings, the exhibition is a welcome examination of the artist’s most recent body of work, a stark departure from previous practice that still feels appropriate in the context of her career. (more…)

Tania Brugera is one of the 2015 Herb Alpert Award recipients this year, but is unable to attend the awards ceremony, due to the revocation of her passport by the Cuban government.  “The Alpert Award could not come at a better moment,” the artist wrote in a statement to the organization. “The Cuban government does not like my artworks because I’m proposing that our relationship with politics is one where the script is not written for us, but is something we create with responsibility and honesty out of the desire to engage in our political destiny.” (more…)

Isa Genzken, Geldbild I (2014)

Referred to as “one of the most important and influential female artists of the past 30 years” by MoMA on the occasion of her retrospective at the museum in 2013, Isa Genzken‘s new work is the subject of Hauser &Wirth’s current solo exhibition in London. Less known in the States compared to her artistic influence and recognition in Europe, Genzken has pursued a notably progressive career in the recent decade, building new bodies of work and showing in various international venues. (more…)

For the New Museum and Rhizome’s latest iteration of the Seven on Seven Technology Conference, Ai Weiwei has teamed with Wikileaks and Tor Project activist Jacob Appelbaum for a project dealing with surveillance and international borders, with the collaboration filmed and presented by Laura Poitras, director of the Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour.  “It was important to bring together these two courageous people who are disseminating their messages using art and technology respectively, and facing similar levels of scrutiny and hardship as a result,” says Heather Corcoran, Senior Executive of Rhizome. (more…)

Following numerous set-backs and a potential cancellation, the second Kiev Biennial will open this September, the Art Newspaper reports.  The rescheduled event will be hosted at the Visual Culture Research Center, a target in the past for right-wing protests and activists.  Speaking of the Euromaidan revolution, Curator Georg Schöllhammer noted that the political upheaval in the country “spoke loudly about what the people of the Ukraine want to get rid of.  I think we have to follow that.” (more…)

The Financial Times profiles Iranian artist Shirin Neshat as she prepares to open a career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. and Baku, Azerbaijan.  “As an Iranian in exile, she has always been very articulate about the idea of a condition of diaspora and, with that, the complexity of feeling connected to a culture, but living outside it,” says Director Melissa Chiu. “It’s a very personal approach to history, through Shirin’s own eyes.” (more…)

The soon-to-open new home of the Whitney Museum was the site of a protest last night, which sought to illuminate the museum’s location above a massive fossil fuel pipeline and vault operated by Spectra Energy.  “Today we are asking: How can a museum that literally covers up the dirty fossil fuel industry be a beacon for the future of art and culture?” an open letter from the protesters read. (more…)

Taryn Simon, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar (2007), all images courtesy Jeu de Paume

On view at Jeu de Paume in Paris is a body of conceptual artwork by artist Taryn Simon, combining photography, text, and graphic design to address issues related to the production and circulation of knowledge, as well as the politics of representation.  The works on view, all produced after 2000, include The Innocents, a piece documenting cases of wrongful convictions in the United States, and underlining photography’s role and function as a both a credible witness and an oppositional agent that blurs truth and fiction.

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Hito Steyerl at Artist’s Space (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at both the Artist’s Space galleries and its bookstore at 55 Walker Street, Hito Steyerl is presenting a retrospective of recent work documenting the artist’s plotted political and economic topographies, video and sculptural works that make much of their gradual unveiling of socio-economic situations and environments. (more…)

The thieves behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum have been identified, according to a report by Breitbart.  The career criminals George Reissfelder and Lenny DiMuzio were named as the perpetrators by anonymous sources within the FBI, which had recently been reinvestigating the case.  Reissfelder had previously been represented by Senator John Kerry during his days of private defense practice for a murder conviction, which was overturned.  “I don’t know if those paintings ended up on eBay,” Kerry once joked, “but they’re not on my wall!” (more…)

Banksy recently traveled to the war-torn Gaza Strip, where the artist has created a new series of works, documented on his website.  Pieces include an immense kitten drawn on the wall of a demolished building, and a crying figure inside the doorway of another leveled site, both documented in a video made during the artist’s time in Palestine.   (more…)

Despite improved relations between the United States and Cuba, the Art Newspaper notes that the island’s government still refuses to return art seized by the government from exiles during the 1960’s.  “In most of the articles you read about missing art in Cuba, the question is—where is the piece? That’s not my issue. I know where it is, I just can’t get to it. There’s no method of my claimed ownership being adjudicated,” says Javier Garcia-Bengochea, who claims Francesco Guardi’s View of the Lagoon between the Fondamenta Nuove and Murano was seized from a family member’s home.  The painting now sits in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana, with no success in getting the Cuban government to return it. (more…)

A canvas by 17th Century French artist Claude Lorrain is the subject of a recent export ban placed by UK Minister of Culture Ed Vaizey, while the government seeks to find a buyer to keep the painting in the country.  “It is of outstanding beauty and it would be tremendous to see it permanently on display in a UK gallery where it can be appreciated by all,” Vaizey said. (more…)

The U.S. Army is searching for a new group of cultural affairs officers to supervise the securing and preservation of important cultural monuments, property and locations in conflicted areas.  The Army had long taken a more lax, reactive approach to cultural preservation, but is looking to strengthen its methods.  “The civil affairs units have always had ‘functional specialists’, but the individuals were often not qualified in any meaningful way,”said Brigadier General Hugh Van Roosen, the director of the Institute for Military Support to Governance (IMSG) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.  “At the same time, if you have one person who was just the right fit, you probably didn’t have two of them. It was just a broken system.” (more…)

The recent arrest of artist Tania Bruguera after her performance in Cuba has raised a number of questions regarding the freedom of artists in the country, the New York Times reports.  “You never know how far you can go,” says well-known novelist Leonardo Padura.  “Sometimes it seems as if spaces open and then close again.” (more…)

Artist Tania Bruguera has been detained in Cuba, following the performance of an art piece designed to test the U.S.’s resolve to renew diplomatic ties with a country known for censoring free speech.  Bruguera was arrested as she walked towards Havana’s Revolution Square, and is currently being held by the government. (more…)

Andra Ursuta at ICA Miami (Installation View)

For those following the fractious events surrounding the schism between the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami and the newly founded Institute of Contemporary Art this year, one had to wonder what the new space, located in Miami’s Design District, would bring forward for its first Miami Art Week. Without a permanent home, the ICA has taken up residence at the historic Moore Building, where it held its launch party Tuesday night. (more…)