A show that might include live animals is one of the highlights of the Contemporary Arts Center’s 2018-19 season. Also among the offerings are a new lineup of programs for the Black Box performance and events series and plans for an inaugural contemporary performance festival in April 2019.
Creatures: When Species Meet, scheduled for April 26-Aug. 18, 2019 and curated by the CAC’s Steven Matijcio, looks at the way artists collaborate with animals and insects in both allegorical and anthropomorphized settings. It will be a group exhibition that brings together artists and academics that often work with this “untamed, ‘wild’ other as partners in the production of art,” according to the CAC.
The museum’s press announcement also explains that “there have been numerous artworks and exhibitions that position animals and insects as subjects, but considerably fewer that enlist these same creatures as collaborators. What does it mean when an animal or insect has agency within the creative act?”
“This show has the most potential to get me arrested, but I’m really excited about it,” Matijcio says. He has yet to decide whether to include live animals in the exhibition, acknowledging that doing so and attracting negative attention might distract from the message of the exhibition. If he goes ahead, Matijcio says he plans on convening a panel with representatives from the Cincinnati Zoo and the SPCA, among others, to decide the most humane way to incorporate the animals.
Other exhibits in the 2018-19 season include:
• As previously reported in CityBeat, the new season begins with exhibits connected to this fall’s FotoFocus Biennial. No Two Alike: Karl Blossfeldt, Francis Bruguière, Thomas Ruff is organized by Ulrike Meyer Stump and is up Sept. 21-Jan. 13, 2019. On display Oct. 5-Feb. 10, 2019 are two additional FotoFocus-related exhibits — Mamma Andersson’s Memory Banks, curated by FotoFocus Artistic Director Kevin Moore, and Akram Zaatari’s The Fold — Space, Time and the Image, curated by Matijcio.
“This is the first time that the entire building will be devoted to FotoFocus exhibitions,” Matijcio says. “This year we wanted to embrace the biennial in a more comprehensive way.”
• Archive as Action, running Feb. 8-June 16, 2019, features Cincinnati artists Cal Cullen, Amanda Curreri and Lindsey Whittle and is curated by Matijcio.
The exhibition can be considered in many ways a response to the Open Archive theme of this year’s FotoFocus.
• Paired with Archive as Action will be the first solo exhibition for Vietnamese-born, L.A.-based painter Julien Nguyen. Highly influenced by Renaissance and Mannerist painting, Nguyen uses that lens to look at contemporary political situations, finding parallels between the way things were historicized in 15th-century Italy and contemporary Los Angeles.
• The final trio of shows for the season are solo exhibitions from artists Alicja Kwade, Saya Woolfalk and Bubi Canal. They open on July 12, 2019 and run through Nov. 3, 2019.
Kwade will be redesigning the second floor, Matijcio says, to create a site-specific installation, looking at the space itself as a sculptural material. Woolfalk’s work, which incorporates elements of Afro-Futurism and neo-tribalism, looks at the way the human form will transform in the future while still maintaining a number of different historical traditions. Matijcio is curating both these shows.
The Canal show, curated by Maria Seda-Reeder (a CityBeat arts contributor), features photographs by the Spanish-born, New York-based artist that are “very playful and almost hedonistic,” Matijcio says.
Running concurrently with the exhibitions are performances curated by Performing Arts Director Drew Klein in the CAC’s Black Box series, which began in 2011. The series this year has been pared down to just six performances instead of the usual 11 or 12, Klein says, because he will be creating a new contemporary performance festival in April 2019.
That still-unnamed festival will prominently feature local artists, giving them the full spotlight and expanded exposure. Klein says the CAC is trying to become an “even stronger place for the exchange of ideas between disciplines and between cultures, and we’ll see how that can move the dial here locally.”
The announced Black Box performances focus on national and international artists, and open Sept. 6 with Collection of Lovers. It features “collector of rare things” Raquel Andre, who gathers experiences with various individuals through photography and video. Blind Spot, presented at Memorial Hall on Oct. 6 in partnership with FotoFocus, features Jazz pianist Vijay Iyer and author/photographer Teju Cole.
The “filmic portrait” Zvizdal [Chernobyl–So Far So Close] comes from the group BERLIN and will be presented Jan. 18-19, 2019 at Lightborne Communications’ offices in Over-the-Rhine. Norwegian choreographer and performer Ingri Fiksdal returns in February 2019 after her hugely popular 2015 offsite performance Night Tripper. Her new work Diorama will occur offsite Feb. 18-19 and incorporate movement and sound. And on Feb. 21-22 she will present STATE, “part dance performance and part live concert,” that derives from research into ritual dances at different places and times.
Leeds, England-based artist Selina Thompson presents Race Cards from Feb. 25-March 2, 2019, posing (literally) 1,000 questions about race on cards and inviting attendees to leave their answers on the back. Both Thompson’s and Andre’s works will contribute to larger, individual staged productions in the future.
For more info on the Contemporary Arts Center, visit: contemporaryartscenter.org
