Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month, from Los Angeles to Seoul.
Los Angeles
Several Eternities in a Day: Form in the Age of Living Materials
Several Eternities in a Day showcases installations, paintings, works on paper and sculptures by twenty-two artists putting ‘living materials’ – stone, clay, natural dyes, avocado, cacao and more – to use in practices rooted in Brown and Indigenous thinking. The exhibition will include a gallery filled with soil and ceramic vessels by Maya-Kaqchikel artist Edgar Calel; a sculpture composed of two large gongs buttressed by tentacular loofahs that Salvadoran American artist Guadalupe Maravilla collected while retracing the path of his personal migration (in 1984, at age eight, he fled the Salvadoran Civil War as an unaccompanied minor); and an ambient-toned video by Ho-Chunk artist Sky Hopinka depicting a road trip through an otherworldly landscape, where desert mountains are inverted and views are mediated through pale afterimages of human figures. These contemporary artists will exhibit alongside progenitors from past generations like the late Yankton Dakota artist Mary Sully, represented by an intricate work of geometric abstraction made with coloured pencil and ink on paper. Memory, the exhibition implies, is stored in matter, and as the materials artists use in their studios and integrate into their research continuously transform and decay, their artworks keep the score.
Hammer Museum, 5 April – 23 August