Screen Time: An Online Exhibition of Works on Paper

The drawings of primates: apes, macaques, monkeys and gorillas figure as enduring subjects for Abraham Cruzvillegas. In previous instances, their shapes have been fashioned from ink-dipped brooms applied to Kraft paper, acrylic swathes painted directly to gallery walls and stairwells, or minute pencil drawings carved behind cupboard doors. In progressive iterations, Cruzvillegas’ representation of primates has shifted from pen-drawn detail to assured, elemental monoprints.

Cruzvillegas created his series of fifteen Primate Change Denial drawings while in lockdown with his family in Burgundy. Each drawing begins with a generic, free-formed calligraphic glyph in ink, from which sprout graphite features and faces of primates holding in one instance, a lucky four-leaf clover, in another a flower. Given Cruzvillegas’ participatory and colloquial sculptural practice, the return to drawings of baboons, gibbons and chimpanzees serves a more sensitive register to defend the logic of community, sociality and solidarity with which these species are synonymous. 

Abraham Cruzvillegas was born in Mexico City in 1968, he lives and works in Paris and Mexico City. From an oeuvre which includes sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, video and the inventive improvisation characterising his ongoing series, autoconstrucción, Cruzvillegas reveals a consistent engagement with communitarian and collaborative principles. 

In 2012, Cruzvillegas was the 5th laureate of the Yanghyun Prize; in 2006 he received the Prix Altadis d' arts plastiques. He has exhibited internationally, with selected solo exhibitions including: The Ballad of etc., The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago IL (2019); Hi, how are you, Gonzo?, The Contemporary Austin, Austin TX [Travelling to: Aspen Art Museum, Aspen CO] (2019); Autorreconstrucción: Social Tissue, Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland (2018); Sensory Spaces 12: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2017); The Water Trilogy 2: Autodefensión Microtonal Obrera Campesina Estudiantil Metabolista Descalza, Ginza Maison Hermès: Le Forum, Tokyo (2017); Autoconstriction approximante vibrante rétroflexe, Carré d'Art, Nîmes, France (2016); Empty Lot, Tate Modern, London, England (2015). 

Cruzvillegas has also exhibited widely at multiple biennials including: Biennale d'Architecture d'Orléans. FRAC - Centre Val de Loire, Orleans, Francia (2019); Honolulu Biennial 2019: TO MAKE WRONG / RIGHT / NOW; 21st Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2018); X Bienal de Nicaragua - Fundación Ortíz Gurdián, Managua (2016); Sharjah Biennial 12, UAE (2015); 12 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2015); 9th Shanghai Biennale, China (2012); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); 12. İstanbul Bienali, Turkey (2011); 6th SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, South Korea (2010); 10 Bienal de la Habana, Cuba (2009); 54th Venice Biennial (2003).

With Family Ruins, Michael Landy turns his fastidious and exhaustive draughtman’s eye to watercolour studies of crofter cottage ruins found abandoned and overgrown throughout the countryside of Ireland, the artist’s ancestral home.

The series marks the beginning of Landy’s research and thinking towards his forthcoming outdoor commission at the Museum of the Home in London, planned for 2021. Unable to travel to Ireland to undertake research for the project due to the travel ban imposed by lockdown, Landy made drawings from images of derelict crofter-style cottages found online. Meticulously detailed watercolours show these abandoned former homes, standing alone with masonry rendered in great detail, or set within a verdant natural landscape. Depicted in different stages of decay, some cottages are consumed by nature with only a few stones visible, others sit proudly amidst a patch of grass. These ruins have become so embedded in the landscape that they are disregarded by people and nature alike. The watercolours, by contrast, provide a new visibility, elevating the ruins as sites deserving of notice and attention. Present throughout is a profound sense of loss both material: a longing to be in another state than the conditions in which they now exist, and immaterial: the forgotten histories and heritage of the individuals who lived there.

Michael Landy was born in London, UK in 1963, where he lives and works. He attended Goldsmith’s College, London, in 1988. Landy’s multi-disciplinary practice examines consumerism, commodification, value, ownership and labour in a body of work spanning meticulous drawings, installation, and large-scale public commissions. 

Selected solo and group shows include: Scaled-Down, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, England (2018); Open for Business at the first Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2018); DEMONSTRATION, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2017-18); Breaking News, Sperone Westwater, New York NY (2017); Breaking News – Athens, Neon/Diplarios School, Athens, Greece (2017); Out of Order, Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (2016); Saints Alive, National Gallery, London, England (2013); Michael Landy: Four Walls, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England (2013); Art World Portraits,National Portrait Gallery, London, England (2011); Art Bin, South London Gallery, London, England (2010). 

Selected public collections include: Tate Collection, London; the Arts Council England; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Royal Academy, London; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN. Landy was elected as a Royal Academician in May 2008.

Akram Zaatari’s Wrestlers (2020) were created during quarantine from video recordings and photographs of Turkish oil wrestling, an ancient sport practiced with variations in Iran, Turkey and the Balkans. In preparation for each match, opponents are soaked in oil and befitted with hand-stitched leather trousers (kisbet) which cover from the navel to the knee. The process of each match – with multiple contests occurring at once – involves a disciplined and highly controlled technique concerning balance and prolonged holds with incremental changes in position to overthrow the opponent.

In his paintings, Zaatari documents a set of classic oil wrestling stances. In various tight locks, charged embraces and instants of overturning, Zaatari locates wrestling’s essential dimension of touch from isolation, displaced from conventional viewership where spectators typically move freely among wrestling couples. In accordance with its historic legacy, the Wrestlers are painted in an expressive manner with a fresco-style palette and yet remain delimited by a technical grid. Wrestlers considers the friction generated by the observance of a controlled yet seemingly overabundant body-bonding found in wrestling during a period of enforced confinement, in which one also struggles against oneself in the desire for bodily contact. Each painting displays the dilemma of reading potent physicality from a place of inaccessibility.

Akram Zaatari was born 1966 in Saida, South Lebanon; he lives and works in Beirut. Akram Zaatari has produced more than fifty films and videos, a dozen books, and countless installations of photographic material, all sharing an interest in writing histories, pursuing a range of interconnected themes, subjects, and practices related to excavation, political resistance, the lives of former militants, the legacy of an exhausted left, the circulation of images in times of war, and the play of tenses inherent to various letters that have been lost, found, buried, discovered, or otherwise delayed in reaching their destinations. Zaatari has played a critical role in developing the formal, intellectual, and institutional infrastructure of Beirut's contemporary art scene. He was one of a handful of young artists who emerged from the delirious but short-lived era of experimentation in Lebanon's television industry, which became radically reorganized after the country's civil war. As a co-founder of the Arab Image Foundation, a ground-breaking, artist-driven organization devoted to the research and study of photography in the Arab world, he has made invaluable and uncompromising contributions to the wider discourse on preservation and archival practice. 

Recent selected solo exhibitions include: Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2019); The Script, New Art Exchange, Nottingham, England (2018); The Fold, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati OH (2018); Letter to a Refusing Pilot, Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (2018); Against Photography. An Annotated History of the Arab Image Foundation, MACBA, Barcelona, Spain; travelling to: K21, Dusseldorf, Germany; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea (2017); Double Take: Akram Zaatari and the Arab Image Foundation, National Portrait Gallery, London, England (2017); This Day at Ten, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland (2016); Unfolding, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2015). 

His work has been part of the 14^th Istanbul Biennal, Istanbul, Turkey (2015); The Yokohama Triennale, Yokohama, Japan (2014); The 55^th and 52^nd Biennle di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2013 and 2007); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany (2012); 27^th Sao Paulo Biennal, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2006); the 6^th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea (2006) and the 15^th Biennale of Sydney, Australia (2006). Zaatari’s work is included in the collections of MUSAC, León, Spain; Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, England; Tate, Modern London, England; MCA Chicago, Chicago, USA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, US.