#ArtGuide – Art Tour: Elena Filipovic at Fondation Beyeler

Oh Art-Lovers!

Cannot tell you how excited I am to be attending this event today, i.e. a guided tour at Fondation Beyeler led by Elena Filipovic. If you are wondering who she is, I shall simply share this extract from Art Review:

With a PhD on Marcel Duchamp, two substantial tomes on the history of biennials and the codirection of the 5th Berlin Biennale (with Adam Szymczyk) already under her belt, Elena Filipovic has begun to make a steady, lasting influence felt with her programme at WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art, in Brussels.

With ambitious exhibitions that place the artist at the centre of the work, LA-born Filipovic has a proven ability to send ripples through the artworld from the Belgian capital. Her exemplary handling of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s subtle, antiauthoritarian work, part of which included getting other artists to dismantle the retrospective she had curated, is a case in point: a rash of exhibitions employing the late Cuban-American as a centrepiece (the Istanbul Biennial, for instance) have since appeared. Filipovic has also proved two steps ahead in programming one of the first Alina Szapocznikow retrospectives outside Poland, as well as the first survey of Yto Barrada.

On top of this, Elena’s dissertation, “The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp,” supervised by Professor Hal Foster (basically a legend!), focused on a series of fugitive operations (or “activities” as her title calls them) that Marcel Duchamp incited between 1913 and 1969. She traces how these ostensibly non-“artistic” roles—among them, administrator, archivist, art adviser, curator, publicist, reproduction-maker, and salesman—were deployed by Duchamp in order to test, theorize, position, and even constitute his work as such.

Since 2014, Elena is director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Basel, one of the most active artistic spaces in Switzerland.

Roni Horn, “The Selected Gifts, 1974-2015” at Fondation Beyeler, Basel

For today’s tour, the LA-born art historian will concentrate on Roni Horn‘s photographic installation The Selected Gifts, (1974–2015). This event will be held in English. More info about the exhibition and the tour click here.
Museum entry + CHF 7.-