The Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011
2 April – 30 April 2011
Amibka P3, University of Westminster
London, UK
www.photonet.org.uk

The exhibition for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2011 is being presented at a new venue this year while The Photographers’ Gallery is being renovated. Now in its fifteenth year, the prize awards £30,000 to a living photographer, of any nationality, who has made the most significant contribution, in exhibition or publication format, to the medium of photography in Europe between 1 October 2009 and 30 September 2010. The four shortlisted artists are Thomas Demand, Roe Ethridge, Jim Goldberg, and Elad Lassry. The winner will be announced on 26 April 2011.

Mari Eastman: Objects, Decorative and Functional
2 April – 7 May 2011
Cherry and Martin
Los Angeles, US
www.cherryandmartin.com

Mari Eastman’s paintings, drawings, installations, and sculptures willfully engage the fictions of the world around us. Culling from such varied sources as textiles, Chinese art and design, high fashion magazines, contemporary culture, and art history, Eastman’s art takes us down a logical albeit disturbing path that easily segues from images of cute animals to images of the appartniks of money and power, the destructions of the Iraq war and nightmare of Hurricane Katrina. Thrilling and amorous, sickening and depressing, her works are rooted in traditional subject matter and technique turned upside-down with punked-out additions in glitter, sewing, jewelry, and cut canvas.

Folkert de Jong: Operation Harmony
1 April  – 7 May 2011
James Cohan Gallery
New York,  US
www.jamescohan.com

Dutch sculptor Folkert de Jong employs the contemporary industrial materials Styrofoam and polyurethane foam, well understood for their inherent contradictory properties of cheapness and indestructibility, to create sculptural tableaux of anti-monuments that conflate the past and the present.  There are two central works in the exhibition: Operation Harmony, 2008, measuring 23 feet long and inspired by both Jan de Baen’s painting of the strung up bodies of two brothers executed for their political beliefs, and Mondrian’s harmonius modernist paintings; and The Balance II, 2010, which depicts Dutch traders swindling the Native Americans out of the island of Manhattan for beads and whiskey.

Phil Collins: the world won’t listen
19 March – 29 May 2011
Marabouparken
Sundbyberg, Sweden
www.marabouparken.se

Phil Collins often works in socially and politically contested regions, employing elements of popular culture, low-budget television and reportage-style documentary to articulate a form of critical proximity to contemporary media – both a fascination with and wariness of the ways in which they structure the lived experience itself. For this exhibition Collins presents his acclaimed three-part video installation ‘the world won’t listen’. Filmed in Colombia, Turkey and Indonesia, the trilogy features fans of the influential indie-rock band The Smiths performing karaoke versions of tracks from their 1987 compilation album of the same name.

Michail Pirgelis
6 April – 7 May 2011
Sprueth Magers
London, UK

German-born artist Michail Pirgelis, a graduate of the prestigious Düsseldorf Academy and former Master student of Rosemarie Trockel, explores the sculptural possibilities of decommissioned airplane parts in his first London show. Since 2003, Pirgelis has made frequent visits to the ‘boneyards’ of Arizona and California, the now legendary resting places and holding facilities of scores of obsolete aircraft and flight-related paraphernalia. Pirgelis’ sculptures are often carefully hybridised amalgams of these incongruous aircraft components that continue to have a use-value in the multi-billion dollar aviation industry. The sculptures, regardless of modification, have the potential to resume their previous ‘life’ once again, and some have on occasion been reintegrated back into functioning aircraft.

That which doesn’t kill us is often made of foam
2 April – 7 May 2011
Chert
Berlin, Germany
http://www.chert-berlin.com

This group show presents five international artists: Jonathan Binet, Kasia Fudakowski, Heike Kabisch, Siôn Parkinson and Erik van der Weijde. The pieces in the exhibition vary between installation, sculpture, painting, video and photography. Through different media and formal approaches, a sense of contradiction is explored within the work; camouflage, celebration, resignation and failure are all addressed. Look out for the clay sculptures by Kasia Fudakowski which are small, quick, lo-fi and uncomfortably perch on enormously elaborate plinths.

Jonathan Podwil: The Golden Age of Cinema
7 April – 6 May 2011
443 PAS @ Kevin M. Absec Designs, Inc
New York, US
http://443pas.com

Podwil employs film stills (from his own films, newsreels, and from such cinematic classics as Fassbinder’s The American Soldier) as the source material for his work. He uses these images to conjure ambiguous, sometimes ominous narratives in restrained yet sensuous paintings. With flickering brushwork and murky atmospherics suggesting both the tenebrism of 17th century painting and the dark allure of 20th century cinema, Podwil’s work investigates contemporary painting’s fascination with film.

5th Triennial of Photography Hamburg
1-6 April 2011
Hamburg, Germany
www.phototriennale.de

Every three years, the international photography festival focuses on current topics and issues in photographic discourse. This year’s theme is ‘Crossing Boundaries: Photo-Film-Photo’. Through exhibitions, screenings and film series on the photographic film, cinematic portrait of photographers, photography and photographers in films as well as films that were directed by photographers, the international photography event responds to changes from the silent to the moving image.

Daniel Firman
26 February – 30 April 2011
Galerie Perrotin
Paris, France
http://www.perrotin.com

Through the use of everyday objects and moulded bodies, Daniel Firman expresses visions of reversal, inversion and attraction. In the image of a backflip, a complex freestyle figure that involves jumping backwards over oneself, the exhibition brings together works whose original subject is reversed, where the inside is brought outside and vice versa. Firman develops his interest in the body by exploring the laws of physics with a kind of logic that is identical to the backflip, the first acrobatic figure that was performed in weightlessness.

John Cage: Every Day is a Good Day
16 April – 15 June 2011
De La Warr Pavilion
Bexhill on Sea, UK
www.dlwp.com

‘Every Day is a Good Day’ consists of a selection of lesser known prints and drawings by John Cage, curated by a randomizing computer programme that selects and positions each piece of work. Alongside the exhibition is a rolling programme of artists’ projects that respond to Cage’s work. The internationally renowned pianist and Cage collaborator, Margaret Leng Tang will be making a special appearance at the De La Warr Pavilion on 16 April to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.