Migration A to Z is included in Migration, Human Odyssey, Musée de l'Homme, Paris, 27th November 2024 to 8th June 2025

MIGRATIONS, HUMAN ODYSSEY
Musée de l'Homme, Paris, France

Curated by: Sylvie Mazzella, sociologist, director of research at the CNRS, Aix Marseille University and Christine Verna, palaeoanthropologist, CNRS research fellow - Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Mathilde Beaujean, Exhibition Project Manager  and Éléonore Gros, Exhibition Project Manager. 

Artists: Angelica Dass, Christina de Middel, Lamyne M., Marco Godinho, Ruben de Lucas, Reena Kallat, Emeka Ogboh, Fabien Clerc, Julie Polidoro, Filipe Vilas Boas, Mathieu Pernot, Pietro Ruffo, Séverine Sajous, Tom Kiefer, Zac Langdon Pole

On view from 27th November 2024 to 8th June 2025

Far from being a new phenomenon, migration has shaped our very humanity. It is an integral part of our past, present and future, not to mention all living things. A vast topic to be explored through this new exhibition!

In the public debate, the issue of migration is largely treated as a threat, a danger or a crisis. ‘Invasion’, ‘intrusion’, ‘replacement’, ‘wave’, ‘submersion’... These terms, used to describe migration, fuel a whole range of prejudices. They contribute to constructing a certain perception of people who migrate, and to the impression that the phenomenon is massive and sudden.

When we look back to the origins of humankind, however, we see that migration has always existed. The human species has been shaped by contact, exchange, encounters, and gene flow.

In the age of globalisation, human mobility has never been so widespread. At the same time it reveals the social, economic and environmental inequalities that exist within contemporary societies.

For some of the world's population, such movement is disparaged, while for others it is encouraged. Yet it could be seen as an opportunity for cultural exchange between populations and individuals.

At the level of living organisms, migration is also essential to the development and survival of species: there can be no life without movement!

THE EXHIBITION

Drawing on a number of scientific disciplines (anthropology, archaeology, demography, genetics, sociology, linguistics, etc.), this 600-square-metre exhibition aims to take a step back and deconstruct preconceived notions about migration. It provides the keys you need to understand how such commonplaces are forged.

How has migration evolved? What has changed since the last century? What are the main patterns today? How many people live outside their country of birth? How can we understand the often complex data?

A dynamic exhibition design and a host of interactive features will introduce you to some of the concepts associated with this subject. The testimonies of people who have migrated reveal a broad range of profiles, causes and trajectories. Through objects steeped in personal history and works of art, most of them created by migrant artists, you'll discover a range of unique perspectives on this particular life experience.

Movement is an integral part of our heritage as a human species, and the exhibition takes us back in time to discover prehistoric migration and gene flow.

In a world in perpetual motion, humans never move alone, but with a certain environment: other animals, plants, micro-organisms, as well as their language, their cuisine, indeed a whole culture! All travelling, mingling and mixing. We are heirs to thousands of years of migration, and this can be seen in our current societies, so richly diverse.

What would a world be without movement? And if we had to migrate tomorrow, what means would be available to us? Taking a contemporary look at migration and its recent developments, the exhibition provides

MIGRATION A TO Z
ALINA AND JEFF BLIUMIS
2010-2011, 195 postcards, 5.5 x 4.25 inches each, Edition of 3
Ed 1 in the collection of Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, France

Migration A to Z is a collection of 195 uniquely designed postcards, one for each independent country, arranged in alphabetical order. For each postcard, we used relevant landscapes to replicate generic postcards. In the middle of each, we placed an insert selected from government immigration websites, visa services, travel agencies, immigration-lawyer ads, news articles, online forums, Facebook or YouTube. 

Migration is presumed to be a problem of only well-off countries overwhelmed by renegade immigrants and transient populations, but today all countries confront some such form of trespassing. In our research, we found a news headline from May 19, 2009 that reads, "Two Tajik Families Illegally Crossed Border Into Afghanistan To Live In Islamic Country," and on May 11, 2010, we encountered a Yahoo forum user inquiring how to move to North Korea to teach English. Each country develops a unique set of immigration policies. They have slogans like "Australia is Looking for You," "Ghana Immigration Service: Friendship with Vigilance" or "Romania Office for Immigration: Legality, Transparency, Respect." They secure borders, complicate visa processes and contribute to the global immigration bureaucracy and business. 

The installation encompasses the often-homogeneous promotional ephemera of tourism and immigration. The countries so whimsically promoted both feed the global immigration business and create stricter conditions for those willing (or needing) to relocate. These generic representations carve singular national identities, but the subtext unites each government in the dilemma of both attracting and controlling newcomers.

Plant Parenthood is included in A Garden of Promise and Dissent, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT, USA, October 31, 2024 to March 16, 2025

A Garden of Promise and Dissent

A Garden of Promise and Dissent inaugurates The Aldrich’s newly renovated campus and Sculpture Garden. This intergenerational group exhibition of twenty-one artists explores the animation of the “garden” as a site of private expression (poetics) and public action (praxis). Gardens offer solace, community, nutrition, and well-being; they provide safe spaces for rebellion and empowerment; they alleviate climate change, revitalize, and widen access to land use–providing localized food resources and alternative medicine. Gardens symbolize growth, death, and regeneration as well as represent care, resilience, and hope. Gardens can be highly ordered and aestheticized or anarchic indicators of aspiration and failure. The artists in this exhibition radicalize the garden as a theme to tackle moral, social, economic, and ecological afflictions that trouble our planet. Spanning the galleries and grounds, works will be sited within the natural world and against the built environment, unsettling the gulf that exists between the two.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.

Artists participating in the exhibition include Terry Adkins, Kelly Akashi, Teresa Baker, Alina Bliumis, Carolina Caycedo, Carl Cheng, Rachelle Dang, Anders Hamilton, Maren Hassinger, Hugh Hayden, Max Hooper Schneider, Athena LaTocha, Gracelee Lawrence, Cathy Lu, Jill Magid, Suchitra Mattai, Mary Mattingly, Brandon Ndife, Meg Webster, Faith Wilding, and Rachel Youn.

A Garden of Promise and Dissent is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.

Alina Bliumis, Plant Parenthood, Fertility, October 13 - November 23, 2024 SITUATIONS CHELSEA. New York, NY 10011

SITUATIONS is pleased to a selection of works from Alina Bliumis’ Plant Parenthood (Fertility) series at SITUATIONS CHELSEA in the front viewing room. Concurrently, NEW DISCRETIONS presents Cary Leibowitz's solo exhibition, You Really Let Yourself Go, in the main gallery space.

Bliumis’ work can also be seen in the group exhibition, A Garden of Promise and Dissent at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator, on view through March 16, 2025.

In her Plant Parenthood (Fertility) series, Bliumis renders various plants which have been used as folk remedies throughout history to aid in pregnancy, such as red clover and maca, in watercolor pencil and washes on wood panels and held within artist-made velvet frames. The artist portrays her subjects in a manner that emphasizes and exaggerates their inherent sensuality, drawing parallels between human and botanical reproductive anatomy. 

While the flora depicted in her initial Plant Parenthood series are known to have been used in various folk medicines to terminate pregnancies, in this chapter, Bliumis continues her research into the history of women using herbal medicine aimed at increasing fertility. Both series underscore that, regardless of legal restrictions and social pressures, women across cultures have and will continue to find methods to maintain agency over their bodies and reproductive decisions.

The desire for motherhood and abortion may initially seem like opposing concepts, yet the core principle shared in both Fertility and Plant Parenthood is the belief in a person’s choice over their own body and health.   Before the professionalization of medicine transferred power over pregnancy, labor, contraception, and abortion care from pregnant people and midwives to male doctors, natural fertility aids and herbal abortifacients were widely used as family planning methods. In large part, these herbal rituals have been shielded from the gaze of patriarchal eyes. Bliumis’ paintings mirror the work of our foremothers who used botanicals as medicine. Without context, a viewer might only see flowers, but with knowledge, the viewer begins to understand the power and self-determination preserved by these plants.   

ALINA BLIUMIS (b. Minsk, Belarus) is New York-based artist who received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 1999 and a diploma from the Advanced Course in Visual Arts in Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy in 2005. She has exhibited at SITUATIONS, NYC; the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, France; the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Busan Biennale, South Korea; Tokyo Biennial, JP; Assab One, Milan, Italy; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris; Centre d’art Contemporain, Meymac, France; The James Gallery, The Graduate Center CUNY, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH; Museums of Bat Yam, Israel; The Jewish Museum, NYC; The Saatchi Gallery, London; Botanique Museum, Brussels; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and MAC VAL/Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France. Her works are in various private and public collections, including MAC VAL - Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, France; Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; Bat Yam Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel; The Saatchi Collection, UK; The Harvard Business School, USA; The National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia; and Missoni Collection, Italy. Bliumis work has been reviewed in Artforum, ART - Das Kunstmagazin, ARTNews, and Hyperallergic.

Alina Bliumis, Florephemeral, Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery, NYC, March 21 - April 27, 2024

“In the first, microbial, stages of evolution, all species had the same life. They shared the same body and the same experiences. Everything we are now – whether we are an elephant or an oak, a lion or a mushroom – was concentrated in that same life which first detached itself from silent matter. For billions of years, this life has been transmitted from body to body, from individual to individual, from species to species, from kingdom to kingdom.” Emanuele Coccia, All Species Have the Same Life, GRANTA Magazine 151, April 2020

Ceysson & Bénétière is pleased to present Florephemeral, a solo exhibition with New York based artist Alina Bliumis opening March 21st 2024. The exhibition will be on view through April 27th and is the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist.

Humans have spent all of history seeking what, if anything, defines us—what separates us from the rest of the natural world. First it was the soul, then intelligence, then sentience, among many other hypotheses; each one murkier than the last. One by one, philosophers have unraveled these distinctions until the only one left standing was the quest of exceptionalism itself. The stubborn idea that we are apart seems to be the only thing that actually sets us apart. 

In her Endangered series, Alina Bliumis joins a discourse which challenges this impulse all together and asserts that the fundamental quality of life and the history and evolution of humanity is intrinsically linked and intertwined with the fate of the natural world. This series of watercolor drawings, which the artist began in 2022 features sixteen portraits of endangered and extinct flowering plants in custom, hand carved wooden frames. The series will be accompanied in the show by a group of small painted floral portrait studies made by the artist for the exhibition. The term ‘portrait’ here is used in earnest, as the works—which initially may appear to be botanical drawings—actually reveal hidden faces and anthropomorphic features. By turning the flowers into figures, Bliumis subjectifies the plants and asserts the individuality of their stories. 

The stories, which often come from indigenous folktales from the plants’ countries of origins, frequently center around mystical or healing properties of the plants. These properties have made them particularly subjected to over-harvesting by humans. In combination with the perilous effects of climate change and the destruction of native wildlife habitats, the overuse of these plants has led to their endangerment and extinction. At first, this news hits differently than, say, the news of the extinction of an animal species; however this is only a function of our perceived distance from the plants. Our empathy wanes the further we are on the tree of life. This is where Bliumis’s imperative comes into play. If we can bring these plants closer, make them more familiar, and tell their stories, can we internalize our shared fate? Can we potentially correct the courses of their species or pay proper respects to those we have already lost?

The assertion of the plants’ subjectivity and their demand for respect is also emphasized in the individualized hand carved frames surrounding each piece. While traditional botanical drawings have typically been kept in folios or appeared as plates in books, carved wood frames are associated with royalty and portraiture. The frames themselves often include details that emphasize the characteristics and personalities of each flower. The rippling fabric-like texture of the Corpse Flower is mimicked in the folds carved into the wood. The delicately windswept Turquoise Ixia is surrounded by fluid waves. The Queen’s Lady’s Slipper’s frame seems to crown the flower in forms that follow the shape of her petals. With extreme care, the artist draws each frame’s design exactly to scale before sending the designs to made by hand by master wood carvers. There is a poetry also in insistence on keeping dying art forms like hand carving alive. Again, the future of the flower and our own futures become intrinsically linked.

Florephemeral is an invitation to see ourselves in creatures so othered that they feel totally apart from us. It is an invitation to invest in their, and our own, protection. If in these flowers we can see humor, grief, history and play, then we may finally understand how very closely we are tied to nature and how—in writer Emanuele Coccia’s words— “everything we are now…was concentrated in that same life which first detached itself from silent matter”.

Francesca Pessarelli, February 2024

Wonderland, Aicon Gallery, NYC, curated by Elizabeth Denny and Katie Alice Fitz Gerald, February 29 - April 6, 2024.

Aicon is pleased to announce Wonderland, a group exhibition including work by artists: Alina Bliumis, Jennifer Coates, Azadeh Gholizadeh, Lizzie Gill, Anna Ortiz, Dana Sherwood and Stephen Thorpe, curated by Elizabeth Denny and Katie Alice Fitz Gerald. The exhibition will be on view in the ground floor gallery from February 29 through April 6, 2024. 

A wonderland is a fantastical landscape, a place whose beauty or bounty is beyond reality. It is rarely possible to enter a wonderland, but when it is, one enters it through a magical portal and finds oneself in a liminal space; an alternate reality where the rules are all different. The artists in the exhibition, Wonderland, show us what it would be like to enter their particular worlds, whether that means being born from the belly of an animal, passing through to another reimagined time and culture, or transforming humanity’s relationship with nature. 

The artists Azadeh Gholizadeh, Anna Ortiz and Alina Bliumis deploy the liminal space of the wonderland to examine the global and political forces at play in the real world. They draw on both personal and collective histories about how natural environments have been reconstructed through human interference and political intervention. Alina Bliumis reimagines pre-industrial idyllic landscapes as Zoo Paintings, luscious scenes of natural beauty encased in steel artist frames. These frames evoke borders, fencing, and prisons, which are more recently associated with postcolonial displacement of people. Azadeh Gholizadeh, who was born in Tehran, Iran, and now lives in Chicago, creates woven scenes that speak to both her past and present homes. Her work synthesizes her memories and experiences into a single, subjective, imagined world. Anna Ortiz‘s landscapes allow an immediacy to her Mexican heritage by reimagining pre-colonial Aztec and Mayan archeological sites. She draws our attention to the displacement of second generation immigrants, which creates ruptures in personal histories and culture. Her surrealist scenes highlight the chasm and perceived hierarchy between her two cultural reference points - contemporary painting and Precolumbian sculpture. These artists reimagine political and subjective boundaries, fomenting a new vision for belonging and culture.  

In the wonderland, time can be experienced as repetitive or cyclical in nature and in some cases, look backwards and forwards simultaneously. With his work, Stephen Thorpe brings us into a futurescape combining the digital and natural worlds. The commentary is dystopian where the digital relic resides in a wonderland along with flora and fauna. In his work, the human figure is replaced with an alternative protagonist: along with arcades, birds are symbols of the past as well as harbingers of the future. The seductive paintings full of color and movement draw the viewer in, however, as we remain outside of these worlds, unsure of whether we are looking at an interior or outdoor space, the paintings become omens for a post-anthropocene world. 

The disruption of time and the power of objects acting as gateways into alternative histories is emphasized in Lizzie Gill’s work. Gill uses imagery of classical vessels alongside domestic objects as vehicles to overturn our understanding of such items, which has been shaped by museums. Gill’s paintings speak to a gendered perspective of domestic environments, inviting the viewer to consider the still life scene as a surreal landscape. She reconsiders connoisseurship and collection of such objects and their histories.

In the work of Jennifer Coates and Dana Sherwood, we see questions of social order disrupted through the interaction of humans and animals within quasi-mythological landscapes. Coates paints the classical Greek goddess Diana immersed in an electric landscape of otherworldly beauty, alongside her hunting dogs and other woodland creatures, such as wolves and deer. Coates draws from classical mythology to show how animals and humans coexist, sometimes sharing forms. She destabilizes the hierarchy which we as humans have imposed on the natural order of living things. Dana Sherwood pushes the relationship between human and animal further into the surreal in her ongoing series where a female figure is secreted in the belly of an animal. There she may indulge and rest, protected from the outside world. Sherwood paints her figures surrounded by feasts of cakes and treats, thereby attaching human fulfillment and pleasure to the sustenance of nature.

Image:

Alina Bliumia, Pleasant Island, 2023, Watercolor and watercolor pencil on wood, artist’s steel frame, 16.5 x 20.5 x 3 in

Holding: Kates-Ferrii projects, curated by Anna Khimasia / Abrons Arts Center 2023–24 Curatorial AIRspace Resident, 2–24 February 2024

Holding: Curatorial AIRspace Resident Exhibition 2023–24
2–24 February 2024
Artists: Jumana Emil Abboud, Alina Bliumis, Oji Haynes, Giancarlo Norese, Kambui Olujimi, Nyugen E. Smith, Guillermo Trejo, Arleene Correa Valencia

Each year, the Curatorial AIRspace Residency supports one New York curator or curatorial collective to develop a proposal-based exhibition. This year, 2023–24 Curatorial AIRspace Resident Anna Khimasia organizes an exhibition around sanctuary, focusing on those for whom sanctuary is not always in view. Featuring works by Jumana Emil Abboud, Alina Bliumis, Oji Haynes, Giancarlo Norese, Kambui Olujimi, Nyugen E. Smith, Guillermo Trejo, and Arleene Correa Valencia.

Holding is hosted by KATES-FERRI PROJECTS (561 Grand Street New York, NY 10002), open Thursday-Saturday 12–6pm and Sunday 12–5pm or by appointment.

Opening Reception: February 2, 6–8pm.

IMAGE
Bruise #174, 2020-2021, watercolor on linen, 40 x 30 in ( *174 countries are at war in some form or another)

The Stone Age, Bienvenu Steinberg & J, January 13 - February 3, 2024

Are we traveling from the rational to the emotional, from artificial intelligence to the Stone Age? 2024: a year to pay attention and to think everything over. Bienvenu Steinberg & J is pleased to present The Stone Age. The fifteen international artists document a moment where articulated thought seems to fade away, where binary thinking replaces nuance, where opinion replaces concept. The exhibition is an imaginary dig into a crystallized landscape almost devoid of human presence.

Women’s March by Jim Campbell depicts the 2019 protest with pixels abstracted and blurred to the brink of near-illegibility. His work reflects our primal ability to discern patterns and objects, translating them into coherent significance despite a paucity of information. Campbell’s work probes intrinsic questions relating to the human mind, digital memory, and the transmutation of data into knowledge. His work echoes an archaic allegory, prompting us to consider: are we prisoners within a cave, only capable of making sense of flickering lights and shadows? In Canary II and Canary Red I by Daniella Dooling, a bird is captured frozen in isolation, flight halted and embalmed in resin casts of natural crystal formations. Historically, canaries were brought into coal mines as whistleblowers, they could discern carbon dioxide long before it registered for the miners. In Dooling’s works, the canaries are displayed within medical hardware armatures. The crystals reminiscent of vanishing glaciers are warning signals of an impending catastrophe that has already happened.

Stefana McClure’s Protest Stones embody the ambiguous relation between language and violence, between protesting and protecting. The hanging sculptures, lassos awaiting to be thrown, remind us that poetry is not auxiliary to history, but also creates it. Encrusted, almost like lichen on the surface of the stones, are selected poems by feminist Persian writer Forough Farrokhzad. Each stone is intricately nested in twine, suggesting both a timeless weapon and tool for catharsis. Alina Bliumis’ text-based sculptural works, Concrete Poems, are reminiscent of passersby marking their existence on drying concrete, graffiti and absurdist poetry. Imagination/Nation, Same/Me, Chimera/Era: associative threads often lead to playful semiotic interrogations. Marco Maggi also turns abstraction into cultural criticism, his visual language refers to the way information is processed in a global yet myopic era. Cornerstone has the structure of an open book. The left side

is a ream of paper with tiny incisions, the right side is a stone of the same dimensions sprinkled with paper cut outs extracted from the page. The diminutive fragments disseminated on the stone surface follow the rules and syntax of any accumulation of sediments; language left without context. Using Blender and 3d printing as tools, Adriana Furlong hacks architectural symbologies into domestic spaces, crafting traces of working lives and transforming desire into concrete form. Working with bas-reliefs found around New York City, Furlong reorganizes the architectural fragments, creating a nuanced and fictional archaeology.

In Flotsam and Rubble, Martí Cormand navigates the intersections of the found and the constructed. Utilizing oil paint and architectural-style renderings, Cormand explores objects that exist at the crossroads of authenticity and artifice, creating a visual language that transcends the linear constraints of time. The objects are displayed side by side like ancient artifacts, meticulously crafted fragments of history. Fernanda Fragateiro’s Demolition Notes edges out precariously from the wall. Adopting a leftover masonry fragment from a renovation project in the center of Lisbon, Fragateiro propagates an alter-archive for a “non-valuable” fragment of the city. Kenji Fujita presents two rocks from his Excavations Series. Incorporating his studio refuse, he amalgamates disparate found elements to create sculptures that resemble geological cuts into a rock filled with multicolored elements.

Julianne Swartz examines the primal and the innate. Anthropomorphic in form, Invocation Speaker #8, hovers in space between recognition and the abject, suggesting at once the curve of a body part and a remnant of some burnt mechanical relic. Jane Yang D’Haene’s ceramics also stand in for the body. She incorporates glazing techniques to conjure diverse textures, hues, and gestures. A translucent paste leaks from a cavity, irregular openings resemble the crater of a volcano: a constant state of transformation is articulated through. In a new body of work exhibited for the first time, Adam Fuss incorporates burning as a medium, to create ambiguous and stunning objects. A large rectangle is filled with what appears to be a multitude of fragments of burnt documents. From afar, the image reads as a textural abstraction in a gradation of monochrome, a collage in three dimensions. The fragments of ashes are captured on the verge of turning to dust. "Is there a spiritual element to being alive?” The question is at the heart of all Fuss' work. Peter Kim’s painting of amorphous forms resembling monumental stones looming across the composition seems that it could collect flown away fragment’s from Adam Fuss photographs.

In the intricate process of carving, sandblasting, and etching, Jane Rosen conjures contemplative tableaus of suspended time—three bottles that seem to have escaped from a Morandi painting or fossilized models one might stumble on if his studio had been in Pompeii. Djamal Tatah's Untitled portrays two hooded figures—one with eyes cast downwards, the other resting his brow resignedly upon his palm; an updated version of Rodin’s The Thinker. The dark purple background imposes a dead air between the characters, hedging in a space to step back and examine one's relationship to others.

Zoo Paintings, SITUATIONS, Booth A107, NADA Miami December 5-9, 2023

Zoo Paintings Series
SITUATIONS

BOOTH A107
NADA, ICE PALACE, MIAMI
December 5-9, 2023

Image:
Alina Bliumis
Zoo Paintings Series
2023, watercolor and watercolor pencil on wood panel, artist’s steel frame, dimensions variable

"The Flowers of Evil - Les Fleurs du Mal " : Oct. 18 - Nov. 13. 2023 - Group show, GUERLAIN, 68 av. des Champs-Elysées Paris 08

In partnership with PARIS+ART BASEL, "Les fleurs du mal" is the theme of Maison Guerlain's 16th exhibition, celebrating Charles Baudelaire's collection of poems of the same name. This exhibition is the major themes that return to the most fundamental issues of humanity: beauty and fragility of the planet, the report of man to nature, decadence and debauchery, love and passion. Hervé Mikaeloff aimed to bring together 26 artists of different backgrounds and ages to illustrate these themes on the three levels of the Maison Guerlain.

Artists:
Anna Aagaard Jensen // Pauline D’Andigné // Joël Andrianomerisoa //  Jean-Marie Appriou // Nobuyoshi Araki // Marcella Barceló // Alvaro Barrington //  Alina Bliumis // Francesco Clemente // Johan Creten // Jean-Philippe Delhomme // Mimosa Echard // Laurent Grasso // Oda Jaune // Anselm Kiefer //  Roni Landa //  Robert Mapplethorpe // Yan Pei-Ming // Thandiwe Muriu // Duy Anh Nhan Duc // Not Vital // Ghizlane Sahli // Jennifer Steinkamp //  Lise Stoufflet // Mykola Tolmachev // Jiang Zhi

IMAGE: PLANT PARENTHOOD

PRESS RELEASE

PRESS:
Arts In The City

Studio Visit at SpringBreak Art Show 2023, Artist Spotlight curated by Ambre Kelly + Andrew Gori

Watercolor on paper, selected works in velvet artist’s frames

Plant Parenthood, Fertility Flowers at Hofudstodin Art Center, Reykjavík, Iceland, August 20-September 20, 2023

Alina Bliumis

“First, there is the old truth that “In the beginning is the body,” with its desires, its powers, its manifold forms of resistance to exploitation. As is often recognized, there is no social change, no cultural or political innovation that is not expressed through the body, no economic practice that is not applied to it.’ 

- Beyond the Periphery of the Skin,Silvia Federici, 2020

Alina Bliumis’ Fertility series, opening at Hofudstodin in Reykjavík, Iceland on August 20th, forms the second chapter to Bliumis’ Plant Parenthood paintings, which premiered in a solo exhibition held at SITUATIONS, NYC (2023), and were subsequently included in a group exhibition titled Supra Nature at Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris.

For this exhibition, Bliumis renders various plants which have been used as folk remedies throughout history to aid in pregnancy, such as Red Clover and Maca, in watercolor pencil and washes on wood panels and held within artist-made velvet frames. The artist portrays her subjects in a manner that emphasizes and exaggerates their inherent sensuality, drawing parallels between human and botanical reproductive anatomy. 

While the flora depicted in her previous Plant Parenthood series are known to have been used in various folk medicines to terminate pregnancies, in this chapter, Bliumis continues her research into the history of women using herbal medicine aimed at increasing fertility. Both series underscore that, regardless of legal restrictions and social pressures, women across cultures have and will continue to find methods to maintain agency over their bodies and reproductive decisions. The desire for motherhood and abortion may initially seem like opposing concepts, yet the core principle shared in both Fertility and Plant Parenthood is the belief in a person’s choice over their own body and health. 

Before the professionalization of medicine transferred power over pregnancy, labor, contraception, and abortion care from pregnant people and midwives to male doctors, natural fertility aids and herbal abortifacients were widely used as family planning methods. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, for example, fetuses were regarded as part of women’s bodies, and their nourishment or disposal therefore was the prerogative of the pregnant person. In large part, these herbal rituals have been shielded from the gaze of patriarchal eyes. 

Bliumis’ paintings mirror the work of our foremothers who used botanicals as medicine. Without context, a viewer might only see flowers, but with knowledge, the viewer begins to understand the power and self-determination preserved by these plants. 

images:
Plant Parenthood, Fertility Flowers series, 2023
watercolor of wood panel, artist’s velvet frame
17.5x13.5x1.5 In
Each

Tryfon Art Residency, Lesbos, Greece, August 2023

Upon my arrival to the island I was taken away by the lavish beauty of Molyvos trees spreading in a row along the beach. I set up my temporary studio in the shadow of one of the trees, coming back every day to the same spot for the duration of the residency (2 weeks+) and studying the trees in front of me;  tracing their patterns with watercolor and soaking the paper in the sea, almost like “photo developing technique” repeating the process over and over till a contour of their feminine beauty, faces or bodies, will appear in color paddles of sea washes.

Gathering at The Corner Gallery, Andes, NY Organized by: Anne Couillaud July-August 2023

Organized by: Anne Couillaud

Artists: Juliette Agnel, Nicoletta Agostini, Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes, Ok Hyun Ahn, Fabienne Audeoud, Hemali Bhuta, Mireille Blanc, Alina Bliumis, Jeff Bliumis, Nancy Brooks Brody, Dawn Cerny, Florence Chevallier, Isami Ching, Tyler Coburn, Anne-Lise Coste, Arko Datto, Jeanette Doyle, Xavier Drong, Mario d’Souza, Joy Episalla, Ben Elliot, Nihaal Faizal, Sasha Ferre, Thomas Fougeirol, Julien Gardair, David Gilbert, Philippe Goron, Andre Guenoun, Elana Herzog, Daniel Horowitz, David Horvitz, Shreyas Karle, Fabienne Lasserre, Alexander Lee, Guillaume Leingre, Zoe Leonard, Charlene Liu, Francesca Lohmann, Ariane Lopez-Huici, Myriam Mechita, Rohit Mehndiratta, Matthew Offenbacher, Amarnath Praful, Jessica Rankin, Rob Rhee, Alejandra Seeber, Aude Simone, Stephanie Snider, Mary Temple, Agnes Thurnauer, Tam Van Tran, Raphael de Villers, Melanie Vote, Carrie Yamaoka

The feeling of summer… To me, it implies friends and flowers. Leaning solely on this impression, we are presenting Gathering at the Corner Gallery in Andes, New York. Summer is the unhurried season of long utopic days spent with friends. Gathering after months of being apart in a moment of convergence, this exhibition is a reinvigorating circle of friends in the countryside. Guided by love and kinship, an economy of scale, and our interest in this way of connecting, we invited a group of artists to send us a work on paper representing the summer wildflower of their choice via postal mail.
In many cultures, flowers, real or represented, are used to express feelings. These phenomena of nature become the carriers of appreciation, love, joy, sympathy, friendship and care, while also often conveying or awakening the poetic. With the efflorescence of each bloom, there is also the idea of absolute — non transactional — generosity. In this Catskills space, a meadow of humble blooms is chorally formed and offered. A singular herbarium appears from the plurality of voices and locations gathered.

An herbarium that conveys time, observation and connection. An herbarium that embodies the idea of interrelatedness. A network, as a form of being, comes through. An archipelago of friendship appears. Friendship, a place of flourishing — and sometimes even reinvention — of the self, can also be a place where life can be transformed, even socially and politically. Friendship as a way of life: with love as matrix, it becomes a place of tangible and accessible utopia.

Plant Parenthood is part of SUPRA NATURE group exhibition at Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris May 25-July 31, 2023

SUPRA NATURE

Rita Alaoui, Annette Barcelo, Souleimane Barry, Alina Bliumis, Hicham Berrada, Fabrice Hyber, Franck Lundangi, Sam Samore, Uman

« At a time when the crisis of ecosystems and the climate is fuelling all the scientific scenarios in the form of crash tests of our planet's infinitesimal chances of survival in the face of the announced ecological catastrophe, a number of artists, far from sacrificing themselves to the seriousness of the ambient pessimism or to any kind of melancholic resignation, seem to emanate from this critical moment a strange creative euphoria, reminiscent of the airy and playful lightness of the Shakespearean character Ariel at the heart of The Tempest. This is notably the case of those presented by the Anne de Villepoix gallery, on the occasion of the "Supra Nature" exhibition, of whom one cannot say that they are gentle dreamers unaware of the urgency of environmental issues, following the example of Fabrice Hyber who strives to make reforestation within a garden art, one of his major sources of inspiration.

Most of his drawings are made as a sort of "storyboard" where he pastes in a jumble of sketches and annotations, like his watercolour enhanced with charcoal, which is part of a project in the form of a prototype created in 1999 in response to a public commission for the passage to the year 2000. The artist, who had just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, had planned to surround the Arc de Triomphe with a hundred birch trees, a species of tree that can withstand global warming. The creator, who has made a point of multiplying improbable alliances between the most advanced technologies and all sorts of biological phylums, imagined grafting a website onto this birch tree plantation, allowing spectators to ask all the questions as "unknown" as the identity of the soldier under the famous monument. The recurring figure of the tree in Fabrice Hyber's work serves as a paradigm for a creation based on the principles of ramification, rhizomatic proliferation, self-generation, arborescence and networks, far removed from the epinal image of a naive, pastoral nature.

Is it not another aesthetic reverie that Hicham Berrada's emblematic installation, Bloom, proposes by mixing the simplest poetic experience with the rigour of a genuine scientific protocol? The creator likes to present himself as a "regulator of energies" helping nature to accomplish phenomena in which it seems to free itself from temporal constraints. Thus, by accelerating the blossoming of a dandelion with the help of a tungsten lamp, this device makes it possible to offer a condensed spectacle in a few minutes. The artist records this in a video, of which we can see here a photograph of the starry dandelions in the dark. In the moment suspended by his installation, Hicham Berrada captures in close-up the spectacular blossoming of one of the most trivial plants, as its flower head slowly releases its delicate, cottony sphere. Half sorcerer, half scientist, he gives us the unprecedented sensation of an accelerated phenomenon that is not perceptible in real time, and is essentially magical. By linking the banal to the extraordinary, the natural to the supernatural, the simplicity of life to the sophistication of artifice, is this not a way for this Franco- Moroccan artist, recent winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize, to bring back the most "contemporary" art to its ancestral magic background?

And isn't there a similar fascination for the prodigality of nature, that of "small things", leaves, flowers, stones, in the work of the French-Moroccan artist Rita Alaoui, whose two paintings are devoted to magnifying the plastic beauty of the most ordinary plant motifs? By trying to capture the effects of transparency and opacity of a plant as common as the orpini, the painter pursues her quest for an aesthetic of the "transfiguration of the banal" at the very heart of these natural objects, organic or mineral, which populate our environments without our knowledge. This approach is reminiscent of that of a landscape gardener like Gilles Clément, who is attentive to the survival of vagrant plants in the city.

Through her pictorial gesture of transforming these "little things" of nature that she collects and transforms into so many rare and singular pieces, Rita Alaoui undoubtedly invites us to remain on the lookout for this simple life at the edge of the earth, the meaning of which we have lost. Doesn't she thus summon the wisdom dear to the philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch, which consists in knowing how to recognise in the "almost nothing" impalpable phenomena, among the most important things of existence, such as the modulation of the colours of a plant, the crevices of a stone, the brilliance and folds of a flower?

Rita Alaoui's approach is also in line with the current practice of ecological art, which aims to collect and preserve within works or installations, in order to leave a quasi-museum memory, forms of life that are likely to disappear under the effect of the degradation of ecosystems.

Such a concern can be found in the work of Alina Bliumis, whose recent Plant Parenthood series of watercolours on wood panel, framed in velvet, can be seen here. The Belarusian-born artist, who lives in New York, had already endeavoured with Portraits of Flowers to preserve the memory of flowers threatened with disappearing forever, in a sort of "vanity squares".

In addition to the aesthetic qualities of the American artist's florarium, there are also surprising feminist and curative concerns. The Plant Parenthood series alludes to the more or less hidden ancient practice of clandestine abortion. These flowers have all been used for abortions in various countries throughout history. After the questioning of the legal and medical practice of abortion in many American states recently, the artist-activist also testifies to the possibility for women to regain control of their bodies, by rediscovering these ancestral popular medicines that allow pregnancies to be interrupted naturally. Asarums, for example, are perennials that grow in mountain undergrowth with heart-shaped leaves. They appear alongside several other abortifacients in the 12th century medical writings of the German nun Hildegard von Bingen, who herself advised abortions.

Before the professionalisation of medicine transferred power over contraception and abortion care from pregnant women and midwives to male doctors, herbal abortifacients were widely used as family planning methods. But scientists have systematically avoided studying these herbal remedies, so that there is a notorious oversight of the history of this practice. These 'rituals' have even been frequently outlawed by many patriarchal authorities. The paintings of Alina Bliumis save the memory of the grandmothers who used these medicinal plants from this phallocentric recovery process.

Moreover, they re-evaluate, by giving them an aesthetic dignity, the supposedly inferior forms of ancestral and vernacular knowledge that Western science has rejected in the contemptuous order of delusion or erroneous belief. These belonged to those modes of thought of which Philippe Descolat drew up an inventory, grouping together, alongside animism and totemism in particular, the analogism that underlies this use of medicinal plants. Mostly present in Indian, Chinese and partly African cultures, they corresponded to what Michel Foucault called 'the prose of the world' in 16th century Europe, as a set of ways of understanding the world before the advent of modern scientific rationality. Analogism made it possible to read reality by deciphering it through the recognition of a multiplicity of signs and similarities.

Franck Lundangi's paintings, in which animals, totems and colours are intermingled with floral motifs, are a perfect example of this poetics of passage and lightness. The Angolan-born artist, who has lived in France since the 1990s, offers several works that combine the subtle alchemy of watercolour and wash with acrylic pigments, the interlacing of flowers and faces.

The works of Franck Lundangi, Annette Barcelo, Souleimane Barry and those of Uman often resemble, by their spontaneity as much in their workmanship as in their personal mythology, a sort of outsider art navigating between figuration and abstraction. The lyrical universe of the painting of Souleimane Barry from Burkina Faso seems to be matched by the singular world of the Swiss artist Anette Barcelo and her strange carnival parade mixing witches, priestesses, chimeras and totems with a whole bestiary of uncertain outlines.

For all these painters, the motifs appear during the elaboration of the painting, according to its plastic hazards and the gestures that compose it, following the example of Souleimane Barry's canvas, Regeneration 3, where a cloud of bees, leaves and fruit spontaneously escapes from the skull of a character, in a real sleight of hand, symbolising the magical fertility of the painter's creative imagination.

For her part, Uman, a self-taught transgender artist, born in Somalia and raised in Kenya in a Muslim family, has been improvising a form of informal art brut since she arrived in the United States, like this large painting on wood in an unusual format, ostensibly abstract, directly inspired by seasonal changes. Like a childhood of art, his resolutely elusive "selfie" photograph carries his self-portrait in the starburst of dandelion seeds scattered by the wind; and subtly replicates Hicham Berrada's installation.

Through the works of these nine creators, true "Magicians of the Earth", and new Don Quixotes of a chivalry in search of future subjectivities, the Supra Nature exhibition thus testifies to the vitality of a diversified art-world, and freed from the borders drawn up between cultures and artistic genres, contemporary and raw, figurative and abstract, etc. It offers the viewer an ecology of the resilient gaze in a sort of happy remake of the Garden of Delights, which we can hope will not be a simple "happy ending" in the age of the Anthropocene.»

Philippe Godin May 2023

TOWARD AND AWAY, Bushel, May 20 – June 11, 2023

Toward and Away
Alina Bliumis, Jeff Bliumis, and Jakob S. Boeskov

May 20 – June 11, 2023
Opening reception: Saturday, May 20, 4-6 pm

On view during Open Hours, Bushel programs, by chance, and by appointment
(for appointments, email info@bushelcollective.org)

—

Approach, retreat, repeat. In Toward and Away, alumni curating artists Alina and Jeff Bliumis present selections from serial projects which, while different in medium and aesthetic, each deal with modes of relation that hinge on conflict—enacted, anticipated, or evaded.

In Dance as a Weapon, a drawing-based transnational study of war dances from more than two dozen sources, Alina Bliumis considers dance as a social and political tool “which has the power, at once, to bolster the status quo or to resist the damaging effects of repression”; a new video created for this exhibition adds kaleidoscopic evidence of dance-as-protest, collaging clips from recent videos posted to youtube from all over the world. Zooming in both culturally and pictorially, her “Bruise Series” paintings employ abstraction and magnification to amplify the message of their source: images of state harm posted to social media by protesters who faced suppression and detainment after uprisings against the 2020 election in the artist’s native Belarus.

Jeff Bliumis’s oversize paintings of individuals hiding behind their hair evoke the outsized emotion of a familiar invisible (and sometimes unconscious) inner conflict: when being visible and invisible both seem impossible, and even identifying which of the two warring desires is strongest can elude us. His loose term for this subset of paintings, “ear in/ear out,” suggests the small gestures we might make to adjust our vulnerability to the world of others, when neither a committed approach nor a full retreat can quite answer our needs. Another ambivalence is explored with his series of miniature bronze sculptures depicting magic carpets—vehicles for flights of fancy, for freedom and escape, that are prevented from real flight by the facts of physics and gravity at work on their material substance.

The Bliumis’s guest artist, Jakob S Boeskov, contributes artifacts from his infamous “art hoax” ID Sniper, in which he infiltrated a Chinese weapons fair to present a fake GPS tracking techno-rifle with a realistic prototype and fictional sales materials that generated real interest—including orders from weapons dealers and security agencies worldwide. Bringing the interactive element of each artist’s work into the space at Bushel, a chess set, open for any gallery-goer who wants to take a turn, reminds us of how rules, strategy, manipulation, play, conflict and collaboration are figured and refigured each time we attempt to face one another across the table.

Toward and Away is part of our ongoing series of Alumni shows—exhibitions and happenings proposed by artists who have exhibited at Bushel in the past, and who agree to invite or engage at least one other artist or maker who has not yet been exhibited at Bushel. Alina Bliumis and Jeff Bliumis had a two-person exhibition in 2016 at Bushel’s former location.

TREASURES FROM HELL, Snow Gallery, April 14th - May 21, 2023

TREASURES FROM HELL

April 14th - May 21, 2023

Abundance Agbomah | Kenneth Anger | Arthur | Agatha Blois | Alina Bliumis | Jennifer Calandra | Christeene | Scott Covert | Ry Fyan | Christopher Garrett | Raina Hamner | Sabrina Mansouri | Peter McGough | Maricela Nodar | Genesis P-Orridge | Rafael Sanchez | Derrick Snodgrass | Dash Snow

Sound by Brian Butler | Vampiros Kosmos

A descent into the underworld is a theme found in the diverse religions of our world. The nature of these quests can range from rescuing a loved one to obtaining knowledge or secret revelations. The artists chosen for this show depict a myriad view of such explorations, as well as their personal connections to the gallery.

Curated by Caroline Snow and Frank Haines

Image #1:
Alina Bliumis, Zoo Paintings, after Nauru and Beyond… Bliss
2023
Watercolor and watercolor pencil on wood, steel frame
17 x 21 x 2.5 inches framed

Installation images by Lance Brewer

NADA Curated: AFTER THE END Curated by Catherine Taft March 27 – May 5, 2023

“It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.”                   

–Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986

Endings are always beginnings. As an ending begins, it nudges our sense of “now” toward some hazy, perpetual future. It’s a future with soft edges. The future rarely arrives abruptly. It’s a slow burn. We are carried into it fluidly while the shades and shapes of reality are altered around us.

This exhibition was an invitation for artists to speculate about the future and the potential worlds that are imagined through present-tense-endings. Artists were asked to think beyond any notion of the apocalyptic and instead reflect on how life will adapt to experiences of a new now, be that political, industrial, ecological, terrestrial, and so on. The response was overwhelmingly vast and varied. That so many artists are toying with these ideas should make us take notice. They are among our most important world-builders.

This selection of artwork reflects inventive themes ranging from hybridity, utopian ideals, AI abstractions, virtual reality, culturally specific futurisms, animal collaboration, science fiction, ancestral technologies, transcendence, and green experimentation. It’s a diverse group of makers that begin to imagine a new human order. And through this sort of speculation, we can make way for ideas that carry us and the ideas that get carried forward by us.

– Catherine Taft, Deputy Director & Curator at LAXART

NADA CURATED

Alina Bliumis: Plant Parenthood at SITUATIONS NYC, OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY, FEB 24, 6-8 PM EXHIBITION DATES: FEB 24 - APR 2, 2023

Images: Alina Bliumis, Plant Parenthood, 2022-2023, Watercolor, watercolor pencil on wood panel, artist’s velvet frame, 13.5 x 10.5 x 1.5 inches each

SITUATIONS presents Alina Bliumis first solo exhibition with the gallery, titled “Plant Parenthood.” In this series, Bliumis composes flowers that have been used to induce abortion in various countries throughout history. Using watercolor and watercolor pencil on wood panels, the artist portrays the flowers in sexualized gestures as subtle odes to reproductive organs. Bliumis’ exhibition brings attention to the fact that the removal of safe, legal, medical abortions does not eliminate the means or will of women to find ways to regain control of their bodies. 
 

Each of the flowers portrayed in the series is known to have been used in various folk medicines to terminate pregnancies. Asarum, for example, appears alongside several other abortifacients in the 12th-century medical writings of the sainted German nun Hildegard von Bingen, who advised abortions herself. The peacock flower was deployed as a form of anti-slavery resistance in 17th-century Suriname, by enslaved women “who used it to abort offspring who would otherwise be born into bondage,” as historian Londa Schiebinger wrote in her monograph Plants and Empire. These herbal remedies have always, however, been dangerous: In 2018, an Argentinian woman died after attempting to induce a miscarriage with parsley, an emmenagogue widely popularized in the 19th century. The series thus hints at long and tenuous histories of the abortion underground. 

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution of the United States does not protect the right to have an abortion. The Dobbs decision overturned the precedent set almost fifty years ago by Roe v. Wade, which protected this right on the legally precarious basis of a pregnant person’s Fourteenth-Amendment “right to privacy.” Justice Alito’s opinion outlined an originalist interpretation of the nation’s founding document, noting that it “makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion.” It was also ratified when white male property owners alone possessed the right to vote for their representatives, apportioned by a calculus including three-fifths of the population of enslaved persons. The vote would remain restricted by sex for another 130 years.The U.S. Constitution is not the only legal basis for a modern polity that lacks express protections for reproductive rights—nor is the United States the only country in which reproductive freedom is so severely under threat. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 91 million people who can become pregnant live in countries where abortion is criminalized in all instances. Three hundred fifty-eight million more may only terminate their pregnancies if carrying to term would threaten their life. Around the world, people of marginalized genders are fighting for the right to control their bodies against the legal incursions of the state, which seeks to restrict access not only to abortions but to all forms of reproductive healthcare. Before the professionalization of medicine transferred power over contraception and abortion care from pregnant people and midwives, to male doctors, herbal abortifacients were widely used as family planning methods. In ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, for example, fetuses were conceived of as part of women’s bodies and their nourishment or disposal, therefore, was the prerogative of the pregnant person. But scientists and other researchers have been slow to systematically study the use of herbal medicines to induce abortion, so a dearth of specifics exists detailing the history and contours of the practice. In large part, these rituals have been shielded from the gaze of patriarchal eyes. Bliumis’ paintings mirror the work of our foremothers who used botanicals as medicine. Without context, a viewer might only see flowers, but with knowledge, the viewer begins to understand the power and self-determination preserved by these plants.

SITUATIONS is located at 127 Henry Street in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan. Our hours are Wednesday - Sunday, 12 - 6pm. For inquiries, please visit our website, www.situations.us or write to info@situations.us
 
PRESS:

HYPERALLERGIC
Painting the Terrifying Beauty of Abortion-Inducing Flowers
In Plant Parenthood, Alina Bliumis portrays the plants that have been used to terminate pregnancies for hundreds and thousands of years. By Elaine Velie, March 7, 2023

ARTNews
5 Shows to See That Explore the Complexities of Womanhood
By Tessa Solomon, March 8, 2023

ARTFORUM
Must See
Bliumis renders flowers used as folk medicine to induce abortion in various countries throughout history. Using watercolors and pencils on boards, the artist figures the flowers in sexualized gestures as subtle odes to reproductive organs.

Alina Bliumis A:rray and D:isplay at A:D: Curatorial, Berlin, curated by Irena Popiashvilli, February 11th - April 9th, 2023

A:D:Curatorial is pleased to present Alina Bliumis’s exhibion. The title refers to Bliumis’s creative method that functions like her personal algorithm: the artist researches and finds a pattern in subject matter that interests her, ergo arrays and displays it.  What makes this series of works special is Bliumis’s viewpoint. She is a research-based artist who approaches historical and political moments through the lens of the natural world. There are three series presented in the exhibition: The Masses (2019-20), Endangered (portraits of extinct and endangered flowers), (2022) and In The Center of Europe (2020). 

The exhibition opens with eight posters of In The Center of Europe (2020) displayed on a bright yellow wall; these photos of various centers of Europe display the shifting perception of ‘center’ starting from 1775 up to 2000. At different periods in human history people representing different disciplines and criteria declared all these eight spots to be the center of Europe and erected memorial landmarks. This inevitably brings to mind Pierro Manzoni’s Magic Base where once you step on it you become a living sculpture;  In The Center of Europe you declare a place to be the center, put the monument up and it becomes the center of Europe.

In Masses, black and white floating cotton fabric pieces depict closeups of crowds and combine digital print and watercolor. From front-page news images of protest, civil unrest and soldiers to mass celebrations of Dionysian excess in the rock concert or erotic entanglements of an orgy, Masses make one experience loss of self in crowds. Physically maneuvering the space to view the suspended floating Masses, the lightness of displayed works resembles the full body physical experience of social media scrolling. 

If in Masses it’s impossible to identify individual characters, Endangeredflowers have very distinct and unique faces. In other words, all the personhood lost in Masses can be found in these anthropocentric, amusing portraits of endangered or extinct flowers. The undeniable calamity implied in the title of these series (Endangered: portraits of extinct and endangered flowers) while paired with gaiety of flowers is whimsical.

Whimsical is the adjective best used to describe the rationale behind the array and display of Bliumis’s works: images of long extinct flowers are turned into portraiture, images of crowds loose the context and reason of their gathering, and there are eight monuments in various parts of Europe claiming to be its center. 

The exhibition is made possible by the generous support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

Alina Bliumis is New York-based artist, born in Minsk, Belarus. Alina received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 1999 and a diploma from the Advanced Course in Visual Arts in Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy in 2005. 

Alina has exhibited internationally at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, France, the First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia), Busan Biennale (Busan, South Korea), Assab One (Milan, Italy), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, US), Galerie Anne de Villepoix (Paris, France), Centre d’art Contemporain (Meymac, France), the James Gallery, The Graduate Center CUNY (New York, US), Museum of Contemporary Art (Cleveland, US), Museums of Bat Yam (Bat-Yam, Israel), the Jewish Museum (New York, US), the Saatchi Gallery (London, UK), Botanique Museum (Brussels, Belgium), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK), MAC VAL - Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne (France). 

Her works are in various private and public collections, including Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration, Paris, France; The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia; Bat Yam Museum for Contemporary Art, Israel; 21c Museum Hotels, USA; The Saatchi Collection, UK; The Harvard Business School, USA; The National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia, USA, Missoni Collection, Italy and MAC VAL - Musée d’art contemporain du Val- de-Marne, France. 

Irena Popiashvili is Dean and Founder of Visual Arts, Architecture & Design School, VA[A}DS, at the Free University of Tbilisi. She also established the contemporary art space Kunsthalle Tbilsi. Previously she co-owned Newman Popiashvili Gallery in New York (2005-2012) and served as a director of the State Academy of Arts in Tbilisi in 2012. Ms. Popiashvili
has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe (notably, the Georgian Pavilion in Venice Biennale in 1999). She received a BA from Tbilisi State University and University of Lodz, Poland and an MA in art history from University of Georgia in Athens, GA (USA). 

photos by: Davood Madadpoor

COLLECTIVE BRAIN Curated by Sozita Goudouna The Opening Gallery 42 Walker St. NYC October 4th - November 27, 2022

Installation view: JELLYFISH VS. NUCLEAR SHIP and Other Animal Strike Tales, 2022, series of 8, watercolor and watercolor pencil on wood panel, artist’s wooden frame

Opening Gallery is pleased to announce Collective Brain, a group exhibition of works by Alina Bliumis, Jeff Bliumis, Veronique Bourgoin, Alexandros Georgiou, Mat Chivers, Raúl Cordero, Yioula Hadjigeorgiou, Steven C. Harvey, Peggy Kliafa, Artemis Kotioni, Jessica Mitrani, Paula Meninato, Eleni Mylonas, Margarita Myrogianni, Warren Neidich, Alexander Polzin, Dan Reisner, Juli Susin, Dimitris Tragkas, Adonis Volanakis, Hans Weigant, Vasilis Zarifopoulos curated by Dr. Sozita Goudouna. Installed across the first floor of 42 Walker St, Collective Brain attempts to challenge our perception of mental processes with an arrangement of corporeally provoking art pieces, connecting artists who work in divergent media and are convening from diverse localities. 

Contemplating the notion of the mind as a mechanism – a brain system responsible for spatial memory and navigation – Collective Brain offers different viewpoints about the brain and its million neurons by centering neurodiversity as the fundamental concept about how we can understand the physical and biological origins of human emotion in the brain, as well as the conception, exhibition, and reception of the artworks. A section of the exhibition also attempts to comprehend and challenge perceptions about the operations of the non-human brain. 

The revolutionary field of optogenetics allows us to decipher the brain's inner workings using light, however, we still seem to know little about the human mind and certain theorists argue that it is much too complicated to be controlled, while brain and electrostimulation experiments of the 60s and 70s were often unable to clarify which parts of the brain are stimulated by stimoceivers or electro-magnetic radiation.  

Further to the notion of mind control, current scientific research attempts to illuminate the biological nature of our inner worlds and our “projections” namely the ways aspects of the self are experienced by the individual as residing outside the self (Deisseroth K.). Drawing from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the founder of modern neuroscience, and his claim that “knowledge of the physicochemical basis of memory, feelings, and reason would make humans the true masters of creation, that their most transcendental accomplishment would be the conquering of their own brain,” the exhibition attempts to trace the visualization of the brain's inner circuitry with a deep empathy for mental illness. 

Cajal ventured into science as both an artist and a pathologist, while he became the first person to see a neuron. The scientist visualized the inner workings of the mind with thousands of stunning pen-and-ink diagrams and his exquisite, meticulous drawings of neurons in the brain and spinal cord proved that every neuron in the brain is separate and that neurons communicate across synapses. 

There is an on-going parallel between the ‘visualization of the brain’ in the scientific and in the artistic domains and a fascination with the visualization of the neurons, but how can this visualization help us understand the invisible synapses of the collective brain and especially the ways human societies can resist mind control with actual free will.