Temple Church, site of this fall’s Theaster Gates project, Sanctum.
“The hope is that Bristol will hear itself.” For his first public project in the UK, Chicago-based artist Theaster Gates will fill Bristol’s Temple Church—a 14th-century structure bombed in 1940—with performers continuously for 576 hours. Presented October 29 through November 24 as part of Bristol 2015 European Green Capital, Sanctum will feature an array of bands, poets, choirs, and other sound-makers within a temporary structure constructed by Gates from “discarded and dormant materials from former places of labour and religious devotion across Bristol.”
- In the same week that saw MoMA acquire a work by Tania Bruguera, the Cuban artist was appointed artist-in-residence for the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs, where she’ll be working to recruit undocumented immigrants to the city’s IDNYC program.
- “This simply should not be tolerated in a democracy.” Academy Award–winning director Laura Poitras (Citizenfour) is suing the US government for the release of documents related to more 50 than instances in which she was searched, questioned, and/or detained at airports between 2006 and 2012. Poitras says she filed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint on her own behalf and for others who’ve endured similar “Kafkaesque harassment at the borders.” She was first hassled by airport security during her work on My Country, My Country (2006), a view of the Iraq war from the perspective of a Baghdad-based physician. A 2012 Glenn Greenwald article on Poitras’s treatment, followed by a petition by prominent filmmakers, reportedly brought an end to the intimidation. According to the Columbia Journalism Review‘s Jack Murtha, the suit highlights a bigger issue than the plight of one filmmaker: “Delayed responses, silence, and rejected FOIA requests are problems US journalists encounter far more often than government bullying in airports, as chilling as the latter may be.”
- Showing “solidarity with the people in Greece and all other places suffering from austerity,” Hito Steyerl and other German artists have replaced the “Germania” inscription at their country’s Venice Biennale pavilion with a flag marked “Germoney.”
- Ballooning costs and criticisms of its bike-helmet-like design have sunk Japan’s plans to build a $2-billion, Zaha Hadid–designed stadium for the 2020 Olympics, prime minister Shinzo Abe has announced.
- Dushko Petrovich—founding editor of Paper Monument and a Brooklyn-based adjunct professor who teaches in New Haven, Providence, and Boston—has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new magazine, Adjunct Commuter Weekly. The “first magazine to address the lifestyle needs and shared interests of a rapidly growing and increasingly influential demographic,” it promises to share “news, opinion, interviews, features, recipes, syllabi, poetry, fiction, personal memoir, and advertisements for products that will be of interest to the adjunct commuter.”
- To resolve a particularly ugly lawsuit by collector Bert Kreuk, Danh Vo proposes to make, in exchange for $350,000, a work that carries on themes in his recent art: Vo’s father will write out a select line from The Exorcist, delivered by the demon. It begins: “Shove it…”
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