Get an idea of what’s in store for the Ballroom courtyard following the Äppärät opening with this Mike Simonetti DJ set from Boiler Room NYC. From their site:

The last part of our Good Times partnership series with Jamie xx, Young Turks and A-1 Records back in August at the pop up shop on the Bowery was with the one and only Mike Simonetti, co-founder of Italians Do It Better and now head of his own label 2MR, and basically your favorite DJ’s favorite DJ.

Stream it on Soundcloud, or watch and/or download from Boiler Room. Simonetti’s DJ set follows the opening reception for Äppärät at Ballroom Marfa this Friday, September 25. Reception from 6-8pm, tunes start in the courtyard at 8:30p.

‪Desert Surf‬ Films weekend starts tonight here in Marfa! We’ll be screening Morning of the Earth in 16mm in the Ballroom Marfa courtyard under the waxing gibbous moon on Friday at 8:30pm. College Apparel On Saturday, it’s Crystal Voyager! Bring a blanket!

Ballroom Marfa will also be unveiling Stay Golden, a Desert Surf Films ‘zine, which features a collection of artwork, writing, poetry and other surf-informed ephemera. The ‘zine was designed and edited by Hilary duPont, Liz Janoff and Ian Lewis. It includes contributions from Joshua Edwards, Sam Falls, Rae Anna Hample, Nicki Ittner, Tim Johnson, Eileen Myles, Brandon Shimoda, and more. Stay Golden will be available for sale at the event, and in the Ballroom Marfa gallery.

Start the weekend off early with our neighbors at Marfa Book Company, who’ll be hosting the opening of two shows by our own Daniel Chamberlin from 6-8pm. Chamberlin will be DJing Cetacean-themed psychedelia before and after the screening at Ballroom.

And for more background on the program, listen to an interview with Desert Surf Films curator (and Ballroom’s executive director) Susan Sutton and filmmaker Ian Lewis on Marfa Public Radio,

Äppärät
Curated by Tom Morton
September 25, 2015 – February 14, 2016

Featured artists: Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Roger Hiorns, Sophie Jung, Lee Lozano, Marlie Mul, Damián Ortega, Charles Ray, Shimabuku, Paul Thek

Ballroom Marfa is proud to present Äppärät, a group exhibition curated by Tom Morton.
Äppärät will be on view in Marfa from September 25, 2015 – February 14, 2016, with an opening reception on Friday, September 25 from 6-8pm.

Äppärät is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the centre of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary; with things (to borrow Martin Heidegger’s formulation) “present-at” and “ready-to” hand; with compulsion and with death.

Featuring 13 artists from across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, from major art historical figures to practitioners in the early phase of their careers, the exhibition begins with a wall painting by Jessie Flood-Paddock, based on an illustration of a worker operating a loom from Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751-72), one of the first attempts to record and systematize all human knowledge in published form.

From the Stone Age to the digital age, from the pre-human to the post-human, Äppärät suggests not only a neglected history of touch, and of tools, but also how this might help us arrive at what Roland Barthes termed, in his 1964 essay The Plates of the Encyclopedia, “a certain philosophy of the object.” Visitors will encounter implements made by chimpanzees (Damián Ortega) and steel grills stuffed with spent cigarette butts (Marlie Mul), Neolithic hand-axes sitting alongside smart phones (Shimabuku) and anthropomorphic hardware (Lee Lozano), vicious shackles and traps transformed into what appear to be ritual objects (Melvin Edwards) and a meditation on the indivisibility of the holder and the held (Charles Ray).

Roger Hiorns will exhibit his Untitled (2012), a domestic freezer in which visitors are invited to chill their hands, the better to contemplate a series of paintings made with bovine brain matter. Hiorns will also make a new work for Ballroom Marfa’s courtyard, while Sophie Jung will create a new body of sculpture and performance work.

In addition to these new works, Äppärät will feature Cécile B. Evans’ film installation Hyperlinks or it didn’t happen (2014), a meditation on the physicality of data and the digital afterlife, and also Ed Atkins’ Even Pricks (2013), a film in which the human – and simian – hand operates as an index of (digital) attention, the compulsive and destructive “economy of like.”

Äppärät is organized by curator Tom Morton for Ballroom Marfa.

Tom Morton biography:

Tom Morton (b.1977, UK) is a curator, writer, and Contributing Editor of Frieze, based in Rochester, UK. He was co-curator (with Lisa Le Feuvre) of the traveling exhibition British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (2010-2011), which attracted half a million visitors and considerable media acclaim, and has worked as a curator at the Hayward Gallery, London and Cubitt Gallery, London. He co-curated the 2008 Busan Biennale, and curated the exhibition How to Endure for the 2007 Athens Biennial. His recent exhibitions include The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old: Contemporary Art & Archaeology from the Stone Age of the Present in venues across the historic city of Lincoln; the major survey British British Polish Polish – Art from Europe’s Edges in the Late 90s and Today at the CSW Ujadowski Castle, Warsaw; and Panda Sex at State of Concept, Athens. Morton’s writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, and in journals including frieze, Frog, Bidoun, and Metropolis M.

Äppärät has been made possible by the generous support of Arts Council England; The Brown Foundation, Inc.

Jana La Brasca is a graduate student at University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Art and Art History. The following is the full text of “Space, Place, Trace: The Structures of Feeling and Hubbard/Birchler’s Giant“, a paper she presented as part of a seminar on art historical methods. The film at the center of her thesis is part of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s Sound Speed Marker exhibition, which originated at Ballroom Marfa, and is now on view at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston.

The exhibition catalogue, cited throughout the following paper, is available from Ballroom Marfa, and is distributed by D.A.P.

Giant, 2014
Production still
High definition video with sound

Space, Place, Trace
Structures of Feeling and Hubbard/Birchler’s Giant

Jana La Brasca
6.1.15

————————————————————————————————————-

Images fill the new catalog of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s exhibition Sound Speed Marker, which opened at Ballroom Marfa in 2013 and returns to Texas this month with its installation at Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum. The pages of this sumptuous volume contain reproductions of archival materials informing the artists’ research, installation views of both the Ballroom show and Hubbard/Birchler exhibitions elsewhere, and production photographs. Several sections–comprised of back-to-back pages of full-bleed, uncaptioned stills—provide an uninterrupted visual flow that begins to approximate the powerfully sensual experience of the filmic installations that make up the Sound Speed Marker trilogy.

In Grand Paris, Texas (2009), Movie Mountain (Méliès) (2011), and Giant (2014), Hubbard and Birchler investigate cinema as a vocabulary of memory embedded in consciousness and landscape. Each work is projected on one more screen than the last using an increasingly disjunctive visual language, departing progressively from traditional documentary forms. At Ballroom Marfa, visitors entered a gallery that was more like a theater—cool darkness and ample seating fostered a transportatively cinematic experience that was much more than visual.

Installation View, Giant, 2014
Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
High Definition Video with Sound
Duration: 30 min.
Synchronized 3-Channel Projection
Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin
Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa
Photography © Fredrik Nilsen

To give oneself over to these works was multisensory, bodily even. Carefully orchestrated sound and overwhelmingly crisp projections generated an atmosphere of intensified presence. Simultaneously, a sustained rhythm of long, slow shots across all three works dilated time in a way that attracts immersive attention as it opens space for a viewer’s own mental activity[1].

While a printed page could never capture the body-mind resonances of experiencing these works in person, the images in the catalog capture a good deal of what they convey visually—their clarity, their chromatic opulence, their graphic strength. Yet at the same time, the pictures show the fuzzed edges of motion blur, the momentary softening among planes within a varying depth of field. Anyone who has ever attempted to grab a still from a work of moving imagery can relate to the tension these images so subtly illustrate. Even within the apparently exact moment one wishes to pause and analyze, a continuum of motion offers a nearly infinite set of possible representations. In this way, the pages of the Sound Speed Marker catalog themselves echo the trilogy’s investigation of the instability of perception, memory, and document.

Ballroom Marfa intern Irene Agnes O’Leary will have work on view this weekend here in Marfa! Irene Agnes O’Leary Drawings: Social Spaces opens this Saturday, December 20 at 7pm at The Lumberyard, 213 S Dean St (across from the Get Go).

From the artist’s statement:

By using the traditional medium of drawing and photographic sources, these portraits address the nature of human encounters and the realm of perceived social space between spectator and subject. Characterized by layers of transparency, these drawings illustrate expressive gestures as bodily, pictorial forms of consciousness, and hierarchical relationships between line and form is further used to expose a dialectic between depth and flatness within a 2-dimensional space. Pulling from historical notions of beauty in the context of art and life, I frame my portraits around the human condition with an undercurrent of desire and empathy.

Irene Agnes O’Leary is a visual artist based in Texas. In 2010, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at El Paso where she focused on painting and drawing. Irene then pursued and earned her MFA in Multidisciplinary Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013, where her paintings and drawings shifted to incorporate the realm of photography. Irene’s work focuses on portraiture as a medium to reflect on social constructions of gender, class, and self-identity formed by ideologies of visual culture. Find more on her website,

Natalia LL, Consumer Art, 1972- 1975, 16’01”. Courtesy of the artist and lokal_30 Gallery, Warsaw.

Future Ballroom Marfa curator, Tom Morton, recently curated a show entitled Panda Sex that runs from November 29 through January 2015 at State of Concept, a non-profit gallery based in Athens, Greece. Tom Morton will curate Ballroom’s Marfa’s Fall 2015 group exhibition, Äppärät.. Tom Morton is also a writer, and contributing editor of frieze magazine. His previous exhibitions include Mum & Dad Show (Cubitt Gallery London, 2007), How to Endure (1st Athens Biennial, 2007), British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (Hayward Gallery London and touring, 2010-2011, co-curated with Lisa LeFeuvre) among many others.

An excerpt from State of Concept:

Twelve notes on ‘Panda Sex’:

1) ‘Panda Sex’ is not a group show that is ‘about’ this or that.

2) ‘Panda Sex’ is group show that is.

3) A thing that is has characteristics, ways of being.

4) ‘Panda Sex’ draws its characteristics from the species Alluropoda melanoleuca – the giant panda bear.

5) ‘Panda Sex’ is composed mostly of black and white works – including paintings, sculptures, videos, photographs, performances, sounds and smells – with occasional passages of colour. (Panda bears, of course, are colorful in the hidden zones of their bodies: their tongues, their gums, their genitals).

6) ‘Panda Sex’ is composed mostly of works that pay little attention to sexuality. (Panda bears have a notoriously brief breeding season, as fleeting as three days per year, making the ongoing survival of this species a conservational miracle. The current planetary population of wild pandas is estimated at 1,600)

7) ‘Panda Sex’ has no headline theme, no explicit thesis, no apparent claim to make about the shape of art, or of the world. All that seems to connect the works it brings together are their black and white livery, a few flashes of colour, and flickers, here and there, of sexual desire. It is a show that practices extreme curatorial restraint. (Panda bears, although able to metabolize a wide range of meats and vegetation, prefer to subsist on a diet that is 99% bamboo. In her 2013 essay Radical Bears in the Forest Delicious, the nature writer Amy Leach posits that ‘Pandas have their own wisdom, unaccountable and unamendable, whose roots shoot down deeper than we can penetrate, and if they mind anyone at all it is someone more elusive than man’).

8) ‘Panda Sex’ is concerned with how, not what, an exhibition might mean. It takes it as axiomatic that the work of art will always exceed its exhibition context. This is perhaps best contemplated while chewing on a mouthful of bamboo.

Take a listen to the DJ soundtrack to our 2014 Benefit Gala,

In New York this fall, City as Living Laboratory (CaLL) continues its BROADWAY: 100 Steps project with a series of walking dialogues between artists and scientists. Join Tattfoo Tan and Mary Miss for a walking dialogues in Chinatown with Stuart Gaffin (Earth Institute, Center for Climate Systems Research). They will be exploring the ecology of
micro and macro through the lens of an artist and scientist.

CaLL is an organization founded by Mary Miss to provide a platform for artists in collaboration with scientists, urban planners, policy makers, and the public to “envision and create more environmentally aware and responsible citizens.” Both Tattfoo and Mary Miss are alumni of Marfa Dialogues/New York and Marfa Dialogues/St.Louis.

The event takes place on Saturday, November 1, 2014, at 1pm and will start at New Kam Man,

After a series of productive negotiations with the Texas Department of Transportation, Prada Marfa is officially saved. The official statement from TxDOT’s Veronica Beyer is below. More details coming from Art Production Fund,Ballroom Marfa and Elmgreen & Dragset next week!

As of February 1, 2014, the Ballroom Marfa Foundation, a domestic nonprofit corporation, has leased the property on which the building stands. The site is now an art museum site and the building is their single art exhibit. As such, associated signage on the building is now considered to be an “on-premise” sign under state rules and does not require a state permit under the Highway Beautification Act.

The lease is currently being reviewed, but with the execution of the lease,

the complaint file will be closed.

Ballroom Marfa is immensely grateful for the outpouring of support that we’ve received for Prada Marfa. To read more about Elmgreen & Dragset’s iconic sculptural installation, please visit our official Prada Marfa Explainer.

For more background on the TxDOT decision, see Juan Carlos Llorca’s story for the Associated Press.

If you’d like to support Ballroom Marfa as we continue to maintain the Prada Marfa site, and as we embark on even more inspiring and provocative public art projects, please become a member today! Click here to learn more.

Charles Bowden, visionary writer and crusading muckracker, died in Las Cruces, NM this past Saturday. Bowden joined us here in Marfa for the inaugural Marfa Dialogues, a program that looked at the culture and politics of the U.S./Mexico border which Bowden reported on in with his “surrealist fever dream” prose, capturing the sadness and madness of the drug war in equal measure. Marfa Dialogues co-founder Hamilton Fish talked to Marfa Public Radio’s Tom Michael in remembrance of this irreplaceable American hero:

He had a gruffness and he had a weathered, Western affect,

but it belied a gentleness, a tenderness, an emotional vulnerability and a sensitivity to the human condition that contributed to making him one of really great figures in American journalism in the last era. It’s a great loss.

Find more of Marfa Public Radio’s coverage of Bowden’s passing at marfapublicradio.rog.