In March, for our annual FutureGreats issue, produced in association with EFG International, we asked artists, curators and critics to highlight artists who are setting new agendas in relation to the role and social relevance of art. Four months on, ArtReview checks up on what some of those artists are up to – and where to see them.
Pia Camil with Pablo Helguera and Pedro Reyes, at Middlesborough Institute of Modern Art, through 6 August
Showing alongside two fellow Mexican artists, Pablo Helguera and Pedro Reyes, Pia Camil is presenting hand-dyed curtains and craft pieces as well as a performance from her Espectaculares series (2012–), which both explore and expose capitalist failure.
Jarbas Lopes: Elástica, at Galeria Baginski, Lisbon, through 5 September
For his second exhibition at the Lisbon gallery, Jarbas Lopes continues to explore the plastic possibilities of everyday objects and materials, diverting them from their original function and, as artist Fernanda Gomes (who selected Lopes) puts it, by ‘weaving, also literally, new relations between things’.
Rodrigo Hernández with Clare Grill and Kate Newby, Where the trees line the water that falls asleep in the afternoon, at P240 Bologna, through 19 September
At P240 in Bologna, Rodrigo Hernández is showing painting and mixed media sculptural works alongside Clare Grill and Kate Newby in an exhibition which takes its title from a line in French poet Pierre Reverdy’s, Afternoon, and is curated by Hernández’s FutureGreats selector Chris Sharp. Working at the border of drawing, painting and sculpture, the Mexican artist ‘seeks to disarm the viewer through the immediacy of the handmade, the elementary quality of what is portrayed as well as materials used to do so’.
Ma Quisha and Yan Xing both part of My Generation: Young Chinese Artists, at Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, through 11 October
Ma Quisha and Yan Xing are among the 25 artists being featured in My Generation: Young Chinese Artists at the Orange County Museum of Art, a survey of the generation of young Chinese artists that emerged in mainland China after 2000, and who were all born after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1976).
Mia Feuer: Synthetics Seasons at Esker Foundation, Calgary, AB, through 6 September
With a commitment to engage with damaged, marginalised or threatened places, Mia Feuer creates installations and sculptural works that make connections between capitalist, consumerist society and its resulting impact on the environment. Although the Canadian artist’s work is often bleak and dystopian, its greatest appeal, as Graham Harman, her FutureGreats selector puts it, is ‘its complete lack of cynicism, even in those cases where it is inspired by tear gas, polluted oceans or other dangerous scenarios’.
Asim Waqif featured in After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India 1947/1997, at Queens Museum, New York, through 13 September
Asim Waqif’s monumental installations and sculpture, made from various recycled materials ‘directly addresses the catastrophic ecological crises set off by the economic boom that has so thoroughly transformed the Indian built environment’, his selector Dieter Roelstraete observes. He features in this large-scale exhibition investigating artistic practices that regard and contest a geopolitical consciousness through modernisation and globalisation from two distinct periods of modern and contemporary Indian art, 1947 through to the 1970s and 1997 to the present. Among the other artists included are Nikhil Chopra, Atul Dodiya, Shilpa Gupta, Subodh Gupta, Jitish Kallat, Raqs Media Collective and Dayanita Singh.
Read all of our 2015 FutureGreat artists’ profiles
Online exclusive published 13 July 2015.