Busan Biennale 2020 examines the city and tries to expand the various spectrums of a metropolitan through artistic expressions. At Busan Biennale 2020, ten fiction writers and one poet were invited to write on the characteristics of the city of Busan as a conceptual basis for selecting the artists, each responding through new commissions and existing works within the context of the exhibition. The authors—which represent different generations, genres, and writing styles—have each created and written fictional layers around and about the city, some with direct reference to Busan, others through indirect and ephemeral urban tales involving the locale. Mixing past, present, and future, the artists and writers involved in Words at an Exhibition — an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems use Busan as a backdrop in ways that create a narrative that simultaneously combines reality, history, and imagination through experiences of contemporary fiction, a focus on soundscapes and film works, as well as paintings, photographs, sculptures, and site-specific installations.

On the occasion of Marnie Weber and Justin John Greene’s exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery New York, we are pleased to invite you to a Hallowe’en walkthrough with your docents for the evening: writer Dean Kissick and artist and writer Paige K. Bradley.

Too many shows these days are allowed to pass into that good night, sans recognition or echo from the chorus. We say no more! Journey uptown for an evening of deep iconographic contemplation and excavation of the clues and crumbs in these paintings, which may guide us towards the new folklore, pagan rituals, and ghosts—among other specters—that haunt us, but perhaps more importantly haunt Los Angeles, a city at the dark heart of the 21st-century American gothic. And really what is art about, if not worship of powers we can’t control, a chilling sense of unease, and the conspiracy that hides in plain sight as we recklessly speed by it?

Image: Justin John Greene, The Righteous, 2019

In September 2019, about fifteen artists from Los Angeles will be invited to exhibit at the former Conservatory of music and dramatic art conservatory of Sète. The projects exhibited will be inspired by the city as much as by their meetings with artists from Sète that they met in February 2019 in LA. Similar to LA, there will be an art exhibition at the MIAM (the Museum created by Herve di Rosa) along with performances and concerts in the regional center of contemporary art, the Paul Valéry museum, and the Theatre of the Sea.

For more information, please click here. 

Film Still: Marnie Weber, Songs That Never Die, 2005 

Marnie Weber emerged in Los Angeles’s punk music and performance art scene of the 1980s, and has since become known for installations in which sculpture, film, music, costuming, and collage come together to form whole, fantastical worlds. Weber’s homespun, haunted-house aesthetic evokes the gothic side of American folkloric traditions, imparting a sense of old-time magic to narratives of lost innocence. Her dream-like films feature a cast of motley characters, including animals, monsters, trees, and clowns, with supernatural female protagonists at their centers. In the artist’s macabre fairy tales, these figures navigate uncanny landscapes on journeys of transformation.

For more information, please click here.

Film still: © Marnie Weber, The Campfire Song, 2008 / Courtesy of Simon Lee Gallery

Marnie Weber’s centralizing embrace of the societal fringe mimics our globalized reassessment of the dominant point of view, debunking the old norm for a new model where the previously peripheral moves to center stage. Her world of freaky side-show circus characters, runaway waifs and mobile home denizens are counter-culture oddities recast as empowered models of defiantly capable heroes, or at least battered survivors.

For more information, please click here. 

Film still: © Marnie Weber, A Western Song, 2007