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Contemporary Art.
Contemporary means of the same time. Museums usually count from around the 1960s or 1970s to now. There is no shared style. A video in a dark room. A room full of soil. A person sitting still for weeks.
Many works here deal with what is hard to keep: dust on a wall, the sound of a room, a land held in memory. Penta reads them with the question it asks of a scent. Where did this thing come from. What does it carry.
Start with: What is contemporary art.
Mire Lee. Open Wound.
Mire Lee turned the Turbine Hall into a living factory: a slow turbine, dripping liquid, fabric skins wetted, dried and hauled up to the ceiling.
El Anatsui. Behind the Red Moon.
From afar, a sail, a red moon, a black wall. Up close, thousands of liquor bottle tops, each with a label and a trade route behind it.
Cecilia Vicuña. Brain Forest Quipu.
Andean peoples did not write; they knotted cords. Cecilia Vicuña hung two cords of memory 27 metres high in the Turbine Hall to remember a vanishing forest.
Refik Anadol. Unsupervised: Machine Hallucinations, MoMA.
Refik Anadol let a machine view almost the whole of MoMA's digital archive, then let it dream on a large screen in the museum for nearly a year.
Kara Walker. Fons Americanus.
Kara Walker built a four tiered fountain on the model of the Victoria Memorial and let its water retell the transatlantic slave trade.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen. The Specter of Ancestors Becoming.
After Dien Bien Phu, hundreds of Vietnamese women followed Senegalese soldier husbands to Africa. Their descendants now write conversations that never happened.
Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Walled Unwalled.
Twenty minutes of monologue in an old Berlin studio, about things that crossed walls and became evidence.
teamLab Borderless: MORI Building DIGITAL ART MUSEUM.
At teamLab Borderless, the works do not stay in their rooms. They wander, touch, and change with the viewer. Visitors must find their own way.
J.P. Sniadecki, Joshua Bonnetta. El Mar La Mar.
Three years, 16mm film, a desert with a border running through it. Sniadecki and Bonnetta did not film the border. They filmed what the desert keeps.
SUPERFLEX. One Two Three Swing!
An orange line, swings with three seats. One person swings. Three in rhythm fly.
Arthur Jafa. Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.
About seven minutes, hundreds of fragments, one song. Joy and violence follow each other without a pause.
Jorge Otero-Pailos. The Ethics of Dust.
Latex sprayed onto the oldest wall of the British Parliament, then peeled away with centuries of dust. The sheet was hung beside the wall it came from.
Robert Irwin. untitled (dawn to dusk).
A C shaped concrete building, rows of windows, two scrims in black and white. Nothing on the walls. The work is the light passing through a day.
Abraham Cruzvillegas. Empty Lot.
Soil from parks across London, lamps, daily water, and not a single seed sown. Empty Lot lets the earth decide what will grow.
Hito Steyerl. Factory of the Sun.
In a blue grid studio, workers are forced to dance. Every move they make is turned into artificial sunshine.
John Akomfrah. Vertigo Sea.
Whales, waves, migrant boats, slave ships. John Akomfrah sets them side by side on three screens and lets the sea tell the story.
Julian Rosefeldt. Manifesto.
Thirteen screens, one performer, old art manifestos spoken in the middle of everyday life. The words stay; the room changes.
Nguyen Trinh Thi. Letters from Panduranga.
A woman in Ninh Thuan, a man travelling through central Vietnam. They write to each other, and wonder whether they have the right to film the Cham.
Rachel Rose. Everything and More.
Rachel Rose sets an astronaut's words against water and drifting liquids to ask what remains of the body when gravity disappears.
Susan Philipsz. War Damaged Musical Instruments.
Fourteen wind instruments damaged in war try to play a farewell call once more. What you hear most is breath.
Taryn Simon. Paperwork and the Will of Capital.
36 bouquets rebuilt from photographs of international signings, over 4,000 specimens from the Aalsmeer flower auction, 12 concrete presses.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Fireworks (Archives).
Night in a sculpture park in Isan. Fireworks flare, lighting concrete animals for an instant, then go dark.
Bill Viola, Kira Perov. Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water).
Four people, four elements, four vertical screens at the end of an aisle in St Paul's. Martyrs is not about sacrifice. It shows a person holding steady.
Kara Walker. A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.
A sphinx woman coated in white sugar, lying in a warehouse with molasses on its walls. Sweetness set back in front of its history.
Phyllida Barlow. dock.
Seven sculptures of cheap materials block a hundred metre neoclassical hall. Visitors must walk around, duck, look up.
Pierre Huyghe. Untitled (Human Mask).
A monkey in a mask and wig moves through a bar with no customers left. The habits carry on after the people have gone.
The Propeller Group. The Living Need Light, the Dead Need Music.
A funeral in the Mekong Delta has a brass band, hired mourners, street performers. Grief and joy walk in the same procession.
Camille Henrot. Grosse Fatigue.
A hand opens window after window, a voice recites the birth of the world. Camille Henrot shows how exhausting it is to try to gather all knowledge.
Hito Steyerl. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File.
Hito Steyerl made a video lecture on how not to be seen. It is funny, then frightening, then funny again.
James Turrell. Aten Reign.
The Guggenheim rotunda became a volume of nested light, changing colour too slowly to catch. The work is what was always there: the air between the walls.
Laure Prouvost. Wantee.
The title comes from one woman's habitual question: want tea? Laure Prouvost built a fictional family around it and won the Turner Prize.
Wolfgang Laib. Pollen from Hazelnut.
Nearly twenty years of hazelnut pollen, laid out as a yellow rectangle on MoMA's floor. No frame, no plinth.
Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Mirrored Room: The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away.
The door closes. Mirrors all around, water underfoot, lights flickering overhead. About 45 seconds later the door opens onto a finite room again.
Harun Farocki. Parallel I-IV.
Four videos on video game graphics, from crude lines to worlds that look almost real. Farocki asks what is still missing.
Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors.
Nine musicians, each in a room of an old estate, sing one short song over and over for more than an hour.
Random International. Rain Room.
Walk into rain without getting wet. Rain Room uses cameras to make the rain withdraw around each person, and asks whether we are in control or being watched.
Lee Ufan. Relatum.
The stone is not carved. The steel is not bent. Lee Ufan only sets them side by side and lets the space between do the rest.
Tacita Dean. FILM.
Eleven silent minutes on a loop, standing upright like a monument. Tacita Dean did not film about film. She let film stand as its own witness.
Yayoi Kusama. Infinity Mirrored Room: Filled with the Brilliance of Life.
A narrow path crosses dark water. Around the visitor, hundreds of points of light change colour and multiply in mirrors. There is only one path, and it leads back to the door.
Ai Weiwei. Sunflower Seeds.
From afar, a grey field. Up close, every porcelain seed was shaped and painted on its own. Sunflower Seeds sets the one beside the many.
Christian Marclay. The Clock.
Twenty four hours of film, each minute on screen matching the minute outside. Watching the film is watching the time.
Danh Vo. We The People.
A full scale copy of the Statue of Liberty, split into about 250 pieces of copper as thin as two stacked coins. Never assembled.
Do Ho Suh. Staircase-III.
A staircase of thin red fabric, hanging above the viewer. No one can climb it. Do Ho Suh sews part of a home again so it can be carried as a memory.
Isaac Julien. Ten Thousand Waves.
Twenty three cockle pickers drowned in one night tide. Isaac Julien brings them back through nine screens, a goddess and a city.
Mariko Mori. Tom Na H-iu.
In a pond inside a bamboo grove, a tall glass form stands still. It glows only when, far away, a star dies and sends here a particle almost invisible.
Rei Naito, Ryue Nishizawa. Matrix.
No paintings, no statues. Only water seeping from the floor, wind through two openings, and people sitting to watch.
Rosa Barba. The Hidden Conference.
Rosa Barba took a 35mm camera into museum stores in Berlin, Rome and London. Paintings and sculptures waiting to be hung became the cast of a film.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Primitive.
In Nabua, the elders say little about the years the army held the village. Apichatpong came to live with the young, and together they built a spaceship.
Bharti Kher. confess.
Outside, dark wood and small windows. Inside, hundreds of bindis whirl into patterns, and a single bulb hangs from the ceiling.
Haegue Yang. Series of Vulnerable Arrangements, Voice and Wind.
Aluminium blinds, electric fans and six industrial scents named after places. Haegue Yang asks why anyone would bottle a temple or a sea mist.
Lieko Shiga. Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Shore).
A photographer settles in a seaside village and shoots its people with harsh flash and colour. Then the tsunami comes, and she gathers the pictures the sea returns.
Mona Hatoum. Impenetrable.
From afar, a hazy floating cube. Up close, hundreds of barbed wire rods. No one can step inside.
Richard Long. Cornish Slate Ellipse.
Quarried slate from Cornwall, set on edge inside an ellipse marked with string. Every time it is shown, the work is laid out from the start.
Sheela Gowda. Behold.
In Karnataka, a few strands of hair are tied to car bumpers against accidents. Sheela Gowda unpicked that hair, braided four kilometres of rope, and hung the bumpers from it.
Christian Boltanski. Les Archives du Cœur.
An archive with no words and no pictures. Only the heartbeats of those who once passed through.
Olafur Eliasson. The New York City Waterfalls.
Four artificial waterfalls, nearly ten storeys high, returning river water to the river. Olafur Eliasson added nothing to the East River except attention.
Roger Hiorns. Seizure.
A small flat in Elephant & Castle, flooded and then drained. What remained was a cave of blue crystal, and a bath.
Zoe Leonard. You see I am here after all.
One waterfall, nearly four thousand postcards, one horizon along the wall. Zoe Leonard shows how often a place has been looked at.
Cao Fei. RMB City: A Second Life City Planning by China Tracy.
Through her avatar China Tracy, Cao Fei planned a city that exists only in a virtual world. The six minute video is its first sketch.
Roni Horn. Vatnasafn / Library of Water.
A library with no books. Instead, water from Iceland's glaciers, standing in 24 glass columns over a floor of weather words.
Trevor Paglen. The Other Night Sky.
Among familiar constellations is a thin streak of light: a spy satellite no government lists. Paglen worked out when it would pass.
Anish Kapoor. Sky Mirror.
A concave steel mirror in the middle of New York. It does not ask to be seen. It shows the sky, upside down.
Cai Guo-Qiang. Head On.
The leader hits the wall. The pack keeps coming. In Berlin in 2006, Cai Guo-Qiang staged a collision that never ends.
Carsten Höller. Test Site.
Five spiral tubes, one letting go, a few seconds of vertigo. Test Site asks what happens when the body is allowed to go before thought.
Gerhard Richter. Cage.
Six square canvases almost three metres wide, painted while Richter listened to John Cage. Barely a brushstroke. The squeegee pulls paint away, and older colours show through.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Pulse Room.
Hold the sensor and a bulb flashes to your heartbeat. Let go, and your pulse joins the grid, pushing earlier ones further away.
Bruce Nauman. Raw Materials.
A vast hall with nothing to look at. Only voices, near and far, overlapping as people walk through.
Sol LeWitt. Wall Drawing #1136.
A wall drawing can be painted over, then drawn again elsewhere by other hands. What is kept is a diagram, a letter and a certificate.
Anish Kapoor. Ishi's Light.
Outside, a stone coloured shell. Inside, a red close to black that returns the person standing there as someone else.
Anri Sala. Dammi i colori.
A post communist city, grey walls painted in new colours. Anri Sala films Tirana at night and asks what colour can do.
Dinh Q. Lê. From Vietnam to Hollywood.
Dinh Q. Lê cut photographs into strips and wove them like a mat. Hollywood film frames and anonymous Vietnamese faces share one sheet.
Olafur Eliasson. The weather project.
A half circle of yellow lamps, a vast mirrored ceiling, a drifting mist. People lay on the floor and watched themselves overhead.
Olafur Eliasson. Yellow versus Purple.
A glass disc, a lamp, a small motor. A yellow shadow shifts on the wall, a purple trace circles the room, and the viewer steps between them.
Anish Kapoor. Marsyas.
Three steel rings, one dark red membrane stretched across the Turbine Hall. Nowhere to stand and see it all. Viewers assemble the work from partial encounters.
Omer Fast. CNN Concatenated.
Each word comes from a different face, a different bulletin. Joined together, they say something none of them ever said.
Rirkrit Tiravanija. untitled (he promised).
A gleaming house frame inside a museum. Little to look at for long. The work begins only when people step in and do something together.
Tribute in Light.
One night a year, 88 bulbs rebuild two towers in light. At dawn they go dark. The empty space returns.
Cildo Meireles. Babel.
A tower made of radios. All speaking, softly, at once. No one can understand it, and that is what the work asks us to hear.
Jeremy Deller. The Battle of Orgreave.
Seventeen years after pickets and police clashed at Orgreave, Jeremy Deller brought it back to the field, with many of the people who had been there.
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba. Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam.
On the seabed off Nha Trang, fishermen drag cyclos through the sand, surface for air, then dive to pull again. Thirteen minutes of a memorial that moves.
Michael Landy. Break Down.
Fourteen days, a 100 metre conveyor belt, 7,227 items. When it was over, Michael Landy owned nothing.
Rachel Whiteread. Untitled (Stairs).
A staircase with three landings, cast solid and turned ninety degrees. Rachel Whiteread kept her new home exactly as she had found it.
Martin Creed. Work No. 227: The lights going on and off.
Nothing in the room. Only lights, going on and off. And the viewer, noticing for the first time that they are standing in a room.
Mike Nelson. The Coral Reef.
One door leads to another room, then another. The chairs are there, the papers are there, the people are not. Visitors lose themselves among absent lives.
Tony Oursler. The Influence Machine.
Faces on smoke, hands knocking on walls, voices drifting through a dark park. Tony Oursler tells the history of machines that speak for us.
Janet Cardiff. The Missing Voice (Case Study B).
Put on headphones, press play, follow a woman's voice. Janet Cardiff turns a walk through East London into a story about a missing woman.
Louise Bourgeois. Maman.
Eight slender legs, a sac of marble eggs, a name that means mother. Maman shelters and unsettles at once.
Mark Leckey. Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.
Bodies spinning under dance floor lights from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. Mark Leckey gathered them before the internet did it for everyone.
Doris Salcedo. Untitled.
A piece of household furniture, its inside filled with cement. No drawer opens. Nothing can be held any more.
Fujiko Nakaya. Fog Sculpture #08025 (F.O.G.).
Once an hour, fog rises from the pool beside the museum, covers everything, then clears. Wind, humidity and temperature decide the shape of the work.
Jenny Holzer. Installation for Bilbao.
Nine columns of running light stand in a curving gallery at the Guggenheim Bilbao. The words never stop, speaking of someone lost, in three languages.
Pipilotti Rist. Ever Is Over All.
A woman in a blue dress walks down the street, smiling, and breaks car windows with a flower. Beside her, a field of flowers drifts slowly.
Bill Viola. The Crossing.
A man walks slowly out of darkness. On one side, water falls until it erases him. On the other, fire rises. Then it all begins again.
Dan Flavin. untitled (Marfa project).
Six U shaped buildings, two corridors each, a barrier of light in every corridor. The colours shift from building to building until all four meet.
Mona Hatoum. Present Tense.
Two thousand two hundred bars of Nablus soap on the floor. Tiny red beads draw a border across them. Soap dissolves; its smell is known at once.
Nam June Paik. Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii.
Each state a neon outline, each outline a stream of images. Nam June Paik drew America in televisions just as the internet was coming home.
Richard Serra. The Matter of Time.
Eight steel forms, one long gallery, and corridors that narrow and widen. Richard Serra does not show time. He lets you walk through it.
Zhang Huan. 12 Square Meters.
A man sits still in a public latrine, his body covered in honey and fish oil. Flies swarm him. An hour later he walks into a pond.
Douglas Gordon. 24 Hour Psycho.
A film of under two hours, slowed into a day and a night. No one watches it all. Perhaps that is exactly what Gordon wanted.
Rachel Whiteread. House.
A house stripped of its walls, leaving only the concrete cast of its inner space. House stood in East London for less than three months, then vanished.
Steve McQueen. Bear.
No sound. Only two bodies, a shaft of light, the looks between them. In the silence, viewers begin to hear their own breathing.
Jeff Koons. Puppy.
Steel, soil and flowering plants. A giant puppy that never stands still, because its coat is alive.
Anya Gallaccio. preserve 'beauty'.
Fresh flowers pressed behind large sheets of glass, then left alone to wither. The work is not the flower. It is the weeks in which colour and smell change.
Cornelia Parker. Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View.
A wooden shed, things no one could throw away, an explosion. Then each charred piece hung around a single bulb, its shadow covering the walls.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.).
A pile of colourfully wrapped candy in a gallery corner. Each visitor takes one. The portrait grows smaller, then is replenished.
Susan Hiller. From the Freud Museum.
Fifty cardboard boxes in a glass case. In each, a few small things and a label. Ordinary alone, together they form a map of memory.
Christian Boltanski. The Reserve of Dead Swiss.
Forty two photographs of the dead, with no names and no stories. Each has a lamp bending over it. Boltanski called it a reserve.
Ilya Kabakov. Labyrinth (My Mother's Album).
A narrow corridor, seventy six frames along the walls: pictures of a cheerful town, and a mother's words telling otherwise.
Rebecca Horn. Concert for Anarchy.
An upside down piano, silent for a long time. Then the lid bursts open, the keys spill out, a broken chord sounds. Then it all pulls back as if nothing happened.
Louise Bourgeois. Cell (Eyes and Mirrors).
A cage of iron mesh and glass panes. Inside, black stone eyes look out and mirrors reflect mirrors. The viewer stays outside, let in only by sight.
Robert Gober. Untitled.
In a corner, a human leg comes out of the wall: trousers, wool sock, leather shoe, a patch of hairy skin. It is wax. It looks so real that viewers step back.
Anselm Kiefer. Lilith.
A city seen from above, covered in grey ash, with strands of copper wire on the canvas. Kiefer names it after a demon of ruin from Jewish legend.
Gretchen Bender. Dumping Core.
Thirteen screens flash logos, advertisements and war news at once. Gretchen Bender runs television too fast so we can see it more clearly.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Touch Sanitation Show.
An exhibition inside a garbage transfer station, after years of shaking the hands of those who keep the city clean.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Equilibres (Quiet Afternoon).
A ladle, a chair, a bottle standing on each other for a few seconds. Then they fall. Only the photograph remains.
Joseph Beuys. The End of the Twentieth Century.
Thirty one basalt blocks lie scattered on the floor. Each has a conical hollow lined with felt and clay, its stone plug set back in place.
Tunga. Trança.
Hair is light, lead is heavy. Tunga braided lead into a long plait and left the viewer between two sensations that refuse to yield.
Antony Gormley. Bed.
A layered block of bread soaked in wax. In the middle, two hollows shaped like lying bodies, made by eating. Bed is a portrait drawn in absence.
Donald Judd. 15 untitled works in concrete.
Hollow concrete boxes of one size, set in a line across the grass. Each hour of the day, the shadows draw them again.
Giuseppe Penone. Tree of 12 Metres.
A squared, sawn beam. Penone peels away its rings, following the knots, until the young tree appears inside the timber.
Roni Horn. Gold Field.
A sheet of pure gold, almost without thickness, set directly on the floor. No plinth, no frame, no story.
Tehching Hsieh. One Year Performance.
A punch every hour, a photograph with each punch, for a year. Growing hair is the second clock.
Dara Birnbaum. Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman.
An explosion, a spin, a superhero. Birnbaum takes a few seconds of television and repeats them until the magic shows its frame.
Mario Merz. Igloo, Do We Go Around Houses, or Do Houses Go Around Us?
Sixty five slate slabs spiral around a steel frame. Seventy four panes of dirty broken glass that must not be cleaned. And a question: do we go around houses, or do houses go around us?
Martha Rosler. Semiotics of the Kitchen.
Rosler picks up each kitchen tool, names it, then uses it wrong. Six minutes of black and white video, and the kitchen is no longer a safe place.
Marina Abramović. Rhythm 0.
A table, seventy two objects, a woman standing still for six hours. Rhythm 0 does not measure the artist's endurance. It measures the people watching.
Nam June Paik. TV Garden.
Real plants, real leaves, real soil. Among them, screens of every size flicker with the same tape. A garden where what blooms is light.
Nancy Holt. Sun Tunnels.
Four concrete tubes set in an X in the desert. On the solstices, the sun rises and sets inside them. On other days, light falls through small holes.
Robert Smithson. Spiral Jetty.
In April 1970 Robert Smithson had over six thousand tons of black basalt pushed into a Utah salt lake, forming a counterclockwise spiral. Since then water, salt and time have done the rest.
Dan Flavin. 'monument' for V. Tatlin.
White tubes of the kind used in offices, stepping up to a peak like a tower. Dan Flavin called it a monument, in quotation marks.
Joseph Kosuth. Clock (One and Five), English/Latin Version.
A wall clock, a photograph of it, and definitions in English and Latin. Kosuth hangs them in a line and lets the viewer ask where the real object is.
Gustav Metzger. Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art.
A nylon sheet stretched on a frame. Acid touches it and the fabric begins to open. The form is made by the material disappearing.
Arthur Jafa. APEX.
Decades of clipping pictures from magazines and newspapers, pressed into eight minutes of video. APEX is where Arthur Jafa lets images overlap.
What Is Contemporary Art.
Contemporary art has no single definition. It is painting, video, a room, a person sitting still. What they share is that they ask more than they answer.
Rael San Fratello. Teeter Totter Wall.
An idea drawn on paper became, ten years later, three pink teeter totters through the border wall. For less than an hour, children on both sides played together.