What we're seeing this week

OPENINGS

Chitra Ganesh: Eyes of Time
12 December – 12 July
Brooklyn Museum
brooklynmuseum.org

The work of Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh frequently attends to marginal figures and lost narratives that have been buried by official histories and canons. In Eyes of Time, Ganesh brings together works from the museum’s Egyptian, Indian and Contemporary collections and exhibits them alongside her own work. Proposing new narratives of empowerment and multiplicity, she creates rich new layers of meaning, referencing Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and rebirth, as well as the language of comic books and anime.

Chitra Ganesh, Cosmic Butterflies, 2011. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum © Chitra Ganesh

Julie Verhoeven: Whiskers Between My Legs
9 December – 18 January
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
ica.org.uk

British illustrator Julie Verhoeven is renowned for her collaborations with fashion brands from Vuitton to Versace, but her illustrations have appeared far and wide, in books, magazines, and on products including Eastpak rucksacks and M.A.C. makeup bags. Her characteristic wild colours and punkish aesthetic often reference popular culture, and in this immersive installation in the Fox Reading Room, she explores female identity and its popular representation. Featuring a newly commissioned film, draped fabrics and a ‘grotto of visual excess’, the presentation promises to raise questions about gender and taste.

Julie Verhoeven, Photograph by Annie Collinge

Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014: Whorled Explorations
12 December – 29 March
Kochi Biennale Foundation, Kochi, India
kochimuzirisbiennale.org

In only its third year, and now with contemporary artist Jitish Kallat at the helm as Artistic Director and Curator, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale is not just the first and only biennial in India, but also one of the most exciting and picturesque in the world. Held in Kerala, in the modern coastal city of Kochi, the nearby ancient port of Muziris and the surrounding islands, for three months this art carnival takes over existing galleries and halls, as well as formerly disused structures, heritage buildings and public spaces. In the expanding roster of international biennials, this one is remarkable not only for its location but also for its broad education programme and positive impact on the local arts community. Under this year’s theme of Whorled Explorations, inspired by historical moments of maritime, astronomical and mathematical discovery, a number of talks, seminars, exhibitions and events will be enriched by a cultural programme across the region.

Aspinwall House, Fort Kochi

Allora & Calzadilla: Intervals
12 December – 5 April
Philadelphia Museum of Art
philamuseum.org

The Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Fabric Workshop and Museum have come together to present the largest exhibition by the artist duo in the United States. Though Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla are now based in Puerto Rico, Allora was born in Philadelphia, and this homecoming show will include new and recent projects, including films, sculpture, sound pieces and performances, many of which have never been seen in the US. In Raptor’s Rapture (2012), one of three films stemming from in-depth research into artefacts, Bernadette Käfer, a specialist in prehistoric wind instruments, plays a 35,000-year-old flute carved from the wing bone of a griffin vulture in the presence of a live vulture. In the artists’ words: ‘Intervals revels in the unknowable as essential to human experience. The exhibition bears witness to incomplete presences and resonant remainders. It finds in music a measure and a reckoning with these elusive forces and the abyss that lies between.’

Raptor’s Rapture, 2012, Single channel video projection with sound. 23:30 minutes

LAST CHANCE TO SEE

Qu Guangci: Northernmost Country
Until 13 December
Today Art Museum, Beijing
todayartmuseum.com

Beijing-based Qu Guangci has exhibited work around the world, but is perhaps best known for establishing the X+Q Sculpture Studio with his wife Xiang Jing in 2007. In sculptures that combine the traditional and contemporary, the human and divine, Qu Guangci plays with colour, parody, humour and political comment. Northernmost Country takes its titles from a place described in the Daoist text called Liezi, where people do not struggle with climate, emotion, hunger or thought, but instead just wander at leisure and sing beautiful songs. The exhibition looks back at work from the past 20 years, and is divided in two parts: the first concentrates on original works, and the second presents work from X+Q and furniture by Domus Tiandi in an ‘art living space’. An exhibition where sculpture meets life, and art meets commerce.

Qu Guangci, Endless Tower–Great Men, 2014. Courtesy Today Art Museum © Qu Guangci