Cities and Things That Matter

Lombard Freid Projects is pleased to present a groundbreaking exhibition featuring sculpture, video, photography and drawing by Haig Aivazian, Emre Huner, Wilfredo Prieto, Michael Rakowitz, Raqs Media Collective, Nasan Tur and Mai Yamashita + Naoto Kobayashi.

The exhibition explores the rhythms, structures, stories and transactions of urban life that construct cultural ideologies and shape mankind. Cities, epicenters of social and public space, become the backdrop for the collective concerns of society. Economic trade, public knowledge, free speech, political and personal diplomacy along with structural development and decay are all elements of contemporary metropolis. The artists use these fundamental cultural components to communicate the state of the present through their unique lenses. The resulting works evaluate the structure of culture today, producing an exhibition that is as much an anthropological barometer as it is a remarkable display of contemporary art.

Haig Aivazian uses performance, video, installation and sculpture to narrate personal investigations that weave through sites of personal and geopolitical importance in search for ideological loopholes. His most recent work focuses on the world's tallest man-made structure in order to reconcile the unrepresentable global network of immaterial capital. Elements from the same series have been shown at Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada, and The Pavilion, Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Emre Huner contemplates man's place within architecture, nature and industrial progression. The video Juggernaut combines found footage from General Motors, NASA and Walt Disney propaganda with original material. An intimate series of drawings accompany Juggernaut, giving the viewer a glance at the 1960s promise for a utopian future that never came. Recent exhibition include; The future of tradition, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Art Statements, Art 42 Basel, Basel, Switzerland.

Wilfredo Prieto offers an optimistic viewpoint with a minimalist vocabulary. In the large-scale piece Mountain, white plinths of varying heights graph the price of oil, poetically speaking to High Arts presence in contemporary society. Recent exhibitions include; Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial), Turkey; Terrible Beauty, Dublin Contemporary 2011, Ireland.

Michael Rakowitz uses his work to inform and empower. In his ongoing series, paraSITE, Rakowitz creates inflatable shelters for the homeless creating a whimsically addition to the harsh realities of urban life. Cities features rare concept drawings from paraSITE. Recent exhibitions include; Spoils, Creative Time at Park Avenue Autumn, New York NY; The worst condition is to pass under a sword which is not one's own, Tate Modern, London, England; Scramble For the Past, SALT Beyoglu, Istanbul, Turkey.

Raqs Media Collective, a multifaceted art collective based in New Delhi, was founded by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The selected works examine individuals within a whole, with each entity 'something more and something less than a population'. Recent exhibitions include; Medi(t)ation, 2011 Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, Taiwan; The Global Contemporary, ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Nasan Tur investigates cultural ideologies encoded in the everyday. In Istanbul Says…, a performance and video, Tur spray-paints text graffiti over a patch of gallery wall. Statements of love, angst, and violence, all pulled from the Istanbul streets, are layered a top one another. An illegible mass of urban emotion is that remains in the end. Recent exhibitions include; Nasan Tur, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany; Berliner Zimmer, Museum of Contemporary Art Bucharest, Romania.

Yamashita + Kobayashi have worked together for a decade to gently alter preexisting situations and materials. They observe natural and sociological patterns, then wittily intervene to reveal the system's inherent magic. Major League Baseball demonstrates their practice perfectly, when a trip to Yankee stadium turns a temple of modern devotion into a forum for viewing the stadium's other inhabitants, birds. Recent exhibitions include; Going Mainstream, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Things That Only and Artist can Do, MARCO, Vigo, Spain.

Lombard Freid Projects is a contemporary gallery with an international program. Founded in 1995, LFP has played a critical role in premiering works by important artists with established reputations as well as discovering and building the careers of young emerging artists.

Cities and Things That Matter

Künstler: Haig Aivazian, Emre Hüner, Wilfredo Prieto, Michael Rakowitz, Raqs Media Collective , Nasan Tur, Mai Yamashita & Naoto Kobayashi