Exhibitions

Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Everyone is Lonely in Kigali is still on view at Tiwani Contemporary in London, United Kingdom until June 17, 2017

Everyone Is Lonely in Kigali is a solo exhibition of work by Mimi Cherono Ng’ok, whose practice expresses what she describes as ‘an emotional cartography’. The works shown arose from a project bookmarked by two journeys to Brazil, marking a period of major emotional transformation and shifting perspective for Ng’ok. Taken in locations as varied as Dakar, Accra, Berlin, Abidjan, Kampala, Kigali, Nairobi and Johannesburg, Everyone Is Lonely in Kigali reflects a life in movement. However, the images contain no traceable markers of geographical location and their light suggests a liminal state in time of neither dawn nor dusk. While, on the one hand, the images suggest a sense of being adrift, uprooted, or away from home, their open-endedness also allows them to transcend the specificities of place and time. Cherono Ng’ok returns to visual repetitions of her own ‘obsessions’: trees, the tropics and horses. An unidentified male figure gives rise to feelings of lust, longing and loss, and becomes a metonym for a previous relationship, a current affair and a future experience: ‘a man in my life, or many, or none.’

William Kentridge: Thick Time is still on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark until June 18, 2017

South African artist William Kentridge is renowned for his animated expressionist drawings and films exploring time, the history of colonialism, and the aspirations and failures of revolutionary politics. With great humor, empathy and poetry his works show how human beings navigate the world, and how much we are marked by and subject to mappings, concepts of time and ideology. In this major exhibition of six large-scale installations by the artist, music and drama are ruptured by revolution, exile and scientific advancement. Highlights include two of the artist’s immersive audio-visual installations, The Refusal of Time (2012) and O Sentimental Machine (2003), which have never previously been exhibited in the UK. The exhibition will also feature his flip-book film, Second-hand Reading (2013), a series of mural-scale tapestries based on his opera production of Shostakovich’s The Nose and a set model which reveals his working process on the opera production Lulu (2016), which he will direct at English National Opera this November.

Jo Ractliffe: Everything Is Everything is still on view at the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg, South Africa until June 30, 2017

South African photographer Jo Ractliffe is best known for her stark images of the former battlegrounds of Angola and Namibia. In Everything Is Everything Ractliffe exhibits previously unpublished images spanning a period of almost 25 years, exploring the idea of the photograph 'without purpose' that has been separated from a specific project or body of work. Ractliffe explains such photographs as those that "might be taken for no reason other than to expose the remaining frames in a roll of film after a photographic shoot, or to test the workings of a newly acquired camera. Or it might manifest itself spontaneously, by chance, while you’re on your way looking to something else". Reflecting the fluid nature of such images, the exhibition presents photos made on a wide variety of cameras. These range from professional to plastic toy and 35mm 'point-and-shoot' cameras, as well as a Nokia cell phone.

Biennials

Whitney Biennial 2017 is still open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, United States until June 11, 2017

The 2017 Whitney Biennial arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics. Throughout the exhibition, artists challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community. The Biennial features sixty-three individuals and collectives whose work takes a wide variety of forms, from painting and installation to activism and video-game design. The Whitney Biennial is the longest-running survey of contemporary art in the United States, with a history of exhibiting the most promising and influential artists and provoking lively debate. This edition is the Museum’s seventy-eighth in a continuous series of Annual and Biennial exhibitions initiated by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932. It is the first to be held in the Whitney’s downtown home at 99 Gansevoort Street, and the largest ever in terms of gallery space.

Auctions

Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie will open at Sotheby’s in Paris, France on June 21, 2017

From its influence on modern artists in the early 20th century to its subsequent entry into museums celebrating a universal history of art, African and Oceanic art has spawned a century of manifestos. The selection for this great auction of works of art from Africa and Oceania reflects both the history of the individuals who shaped them – art theorists, critics, artists, collectors and merchants – and of the pieces themselves.