Functioning as an “exploded museum,” as curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev calls it, the hundreds of artworks of the dOCUMENTA (13) are housed in venues near and far. Beyond Kassel, Germany there are dOCUMENTA happenings in Kabul, Afghanistan, Cairo, Egypt, and in Banff, Canada. Within Kassel, the exhibitions are taking place in the Karlsaue park, at the historic Fridericianum (claiming fame to being the first public museum[.....]

Issues of under-financing, administrative inadequacy and lack of community support are some of the problems that can be found currently in multiple organizations in New Orleans. Prospect New Orleans, a nascent biennial founded in 2008 has had its share of these issues. However, new leadership and the selection of an artistic director whose passion and interests jive with many of the cultural and social issues[.....]

As part of our ongoing partnership with Flavorwire, Daily Serving is sharing Emily Temple‘s preview of Yasuaki Onishi‘s amazing invisible mountains at the Rice University Art Gallery in Houston, Texas. In his new installation at the Rice University Art Gallery, which we first spotted over at Artlog, Japanese artist Yasuaki Onishi continues his Reverse of Volume series with a gorgeous cloud-like confection suspended in the gallery space. Like the other works in the series, this[.....]

Cities are filled with innumerable details and a foreign land can be barrage of data. In Barcelona, on a walk, I drift from details of leafy building ornamentation to blank walls of flaking stucco, submerged in texture of all kinds. Man’s signs are everywhere, waiting to be decoded. Though I know nothing of graffiti, I am captivated by the drawing, the view of a flat[.....]

Walking through one of the isles of a big London supermarket last week made me realise once again how we are culturally programmed to value image over substance. The way we deal with food packaging is one of the best examples of our inclination towards superficiality and the ease with which we are swayed to buy and eat something that looks nice/tasty/healthy (when it actually isn’t)[.....]

‘It’s just too much, don’t you think?’ asks Saul Leiter as he walks around his own exhibition, on view until April 15th at Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen. The video documenting Leiter’s reaction accompanies over 400 photographs and paintings that fill the soaring spaces of this re-purposed industrial complex, now a centre for contemporary art and photography. With room after room after room of images that riff on[.....]

There are numerous contemporary works in which the artists’ choice of physical ‘matter’ contains within it their intended meaning. Xu Bing’s poignant ‘Where the Dust Itself Collects’ made from dust collected in the streets of Manhattan after the destruction of the twin towers falls into this category, as does Marc Quinn’s self-portrait made of 9 pints of the artist’s own frozen blood. Sydney artist Shoufay Derz[.....]