Fresh Art International

Turkish curator Basak Senova, and Macedonian artists Yane Calovski and Hristina Ivanoska talk about their project for the  Pavilion of the Republic of Macedonia  at the 56th Venice Biennale. Exploring the value of knowledge, faith, and art, their installation evokes an anonymous 12th century fresco in the historic  Church of St. George in Kurbinovo, Macedonia .

Buskerfest Miami 's Justin Trieger and Amy San Pedro have joined other local musicians to begin creating aconnected, thriving urban core for Miami. They stage street performances along the stops of the city's  Metromover , a free downtown transit system. Listen to our conversation and hear a selection of live music from the annual festival and other Buskerfest events. We recorded this conversation...

Ralph Rugoff , London-based curator of the 13th  Lyon Biennial , talks about  La Vie Moderne , this year's biennial exhibition. The show in Lyon, France, brings together 60 artists from around the world. Their projects investigate how history informs contemporary life. Featured in our conversation:  TJ Wilcox,   Kader Attia , and  Marinella Senatore . We'll be there for the press preview, so stay...

In Berlin, contemporary art collector  Erika Hoffmann  talks about her love for artists who question traditional forms and take the risk of inventing new genres. For this conversation, we take you inside the famous  Sammlung Hoffmann  (Hoffmann Collection) to learn what compelled her to collect the work of  Marcel Broodthaers ,  John Cage , and  Katharina Grosse . Sound Editor: Kris McConnachie |...

Artist Binelde Hyrcan is participating in the  Venice Art Bienniale  for the first time this year. He's showing a poignant short video in the  Angola Pavilion 's featured group exhibition  On Ways of Traveling . In the work titled  Cambeck , four boys imagine themselves touring the world in a limousine. They transcend their reality...if only for a moment. Sound Editor: Kris McConnachie | Sound Eff...

Miami-born artist  Ana Mendez  talks about  Liminal Being , her action-based performance project inspired by Maya Deren's 1940s surrealist film  Meshes of the Afternoon . In this new work, Mendez repeatedly enacted a fall up and down a flight of stairs inside Giant Motors, a former car repair shop during the  Auto Body  video and performance event presented during Miami Art Week 2014. Sound Editor...

American-born artist  Camille Norment  lives and works in Norway. We recorded the episode inside the  Nordic Pavilion  at the 56th Venice Art Biennale. Norment's project animates a  space  designed to converse with the surrounding topography, weather, and natural light. Titled  Rapture , her elegant, immersive sonic environment evokes both harmony and dissonance. Sound Editor: Kris McConnachie | L...

Presidents of Cuba and the U.S. recently announced a rapprochement, but is the island country ready for free expression in the form of contemporary art activism? Recorded in Havana, this  Fresh Talk  episode features Cuban artist  Tania Bruguera  and her recent launch of a new initiative:  the Hannah Arendt Institute for Artivism . Bruguera is moving ahead with her project despite the fact that sh...

Cuban artist  Alexandre Arrechea  and American art collectors Patricia and Howard Farber talk about the first-ever international  Cuban Art Awards  sponsored by the  Farber Foundation . We recorded this conversation at the  Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center  during the opening event of the  12th Havana Biennial  art exhibition.   Sound Editor: Kris McConnachie | Music: Septeto Habanero

Nigerian-born curator  Okwui Enwezor , director of the  56th Venice Art Biennale , sparked this conversation about the expanded black presence in the global contemporary art scene. Recording in Venice, during preview days the international exhibition, Cathy Byrd connects with Canadian curators  Camille Turner ,  Andrea Fatona ,  Sally Frater , and  Pamela Edmonds  to speak about this new developme...

Argentinean artist  Agustina Woodgate  is based in Miami, Florida, and Buenos Aires. In a recent project, she and her team produced Radio Espacio Estacion (Radio EE), a 4-day  online radio show  for  Auto Body , a performance-based exhibition featuring the work of more than 30 women artists. Our conversation—and Woodgate's temporal Auto Body broadcast—took place on Miami Beach, during Miami Art We...

Chicago-based artist  Cheryl Pope  tells the back story of UpAgainst, a performance she presented on Miami Beach in late2014. Pope used only her head to box down 700transparent water-filled balloons that were suspended from the ceiling ina former auto body shop. The context for UpAgainst was  AUTO BODY , afour-day video and performance project that took place during Miami Art Week 2014. Sound Edit...

From El Salvador, Cuba, and Israel,  Simón Vega ,  Candelario , and  Gil Yefman  talk about their experiences as artists-in-residence at the  Fountainhead Residency  in Miami, Florida. Launched in 2008 by Kathryn and Dan Mikesell, Fountainhead is one of the local efforts to build a sustainable art scene in Miami. Our conversation takes place in the house and garden where the artists live and work....

Tameka Norris  just produced her first feature-length film. She plays herself in Meka Jean: How She Got Good. The narrative has a lot in common with  The Moviegover , a novel by Walker Percy. Like Walker Percy, Norris grew up in the Deep South, and went away to seek her fortune. Like Binx Bolling, the book’s protagonist, Meka Jean reveals what it means when New Orleans is the city you call home. W...

New York-based artist  Lynda Benglis  has been pouring, dripping, and splattering her way through unexpected media, color, and texture for decades. Her work sometimes shocks, and always surprises. Forty years after posing nude with a dildo for the photo that appeared in a full-page  ArtForum  advertisement, Lynda is at last being recognized for her significant impact on contemporary art. In this e...

Prospect New Orleans , a city-wide international art exhibition in its third iteration, is starting to feel at home. This episode features two project sites where we found a deep connection between art and community. In the order of their appearance,  Timothy Levitch ,  Tavares Strachan ,  Margaret Thomas , and  Gary Simmons  reveal why Prospect makes perfect sense for the Crescent City. Sound Edi...

Miami-based artist  Jillian Mayer  introduces  400 Nudes , a revealing found photo project to debut at the  Montreal Biennial . Mayer's work examines the nude selfie phenom on the Internet to comment on information sharing, privacy, the manipulation of identity, and the body politics of revenge porn. Sound Editor: Kris McConnachie

We meet Andrea Bowers, an artist from Ohio who's based in Los Angeles, to talk about her passion for addressing social and political issues. Curators of two international biennials in North America selected her work for their 2014 exhibitions. Her  Courtroom Drawings  appear in l'Avenir, the inaugural  Montreal Biennial . Two of Bowers's projects concerning  environmental activism  are on view in ...

Surinamese-Dutch artist  Remy Jungerman  talks about how European modernism and Afro-religious aesthetics influence his art, and describes the recent  public art project  he created back in Morengo, his home town in Suriname. Selected for inclusion in  Prospect.3 , the 2014 contemporary art biennial in New Orleans, Remy's work will be on view in an exhibition at the  Contemporary Arts Center  from...

This episode takes place at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico. We arrived just before the opening of SITE's 2014 international biennial  Unsettled Landscapes  to record the voices of these five artists from across the Americas:  Glenda León ,  Jason Middlebrook ,  Melanie Smith ,  Jamison Chas Banks , and  Gianfranco Foschino . Sound Editor: Kris McConnachie | Episode sound effects, in order of appearance...

The remote landscape and native culture of the American Southwest has long inspired artists and writers. Before the 1995, traditional landscape painting, pottery, weaving, and silver jewelry were perhaps the best-known regional aesthetics. And then came the nonprofit art space SITE Santa Fe, the first official outpost of contemporary art in New Mexico, and home to one of the first international bi...

This Fresh Talk episode features Cathy Byrd in conversation with  Sylvie Fortin , Executive and Artistic Director of the 2014  Montreal Biennial . Czech artist  Klara Hobza 's Diving Through Europe project is emblematic of the possible futures envisioned in  L’avenir  or What Is To Come. Presented in partnership with the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the multi-venue exhibition reinvents th...

This Fresh Talk episode features  A Subtlety , American artist  Kara Walker’ s first ever public art installation.  Creative Time , an organization that produces public art projects internationally, invited the artist to respond to the history of the abandoned  Domino sugar refinery  in Brooklyn. A Subtlety, also known as The Marvelous Sugar Baby, references the intricate sugar sculptures once mad...

We recorded this episode on  Randall’s Island , in front of a small tented performance space on the great green lawn outside the North entrance of  Frieze New York . We’ve come to meet Israeli artist  Naama Tsabar  and Tom Tom magazine publisher  Mindy Abovitz  to learn about their collaboration. Theirs is literally an outsider project:  Without  is a free 4-day outdoor  music festival  featuring...

To record this episode, we headed to  Frieze New York  's tented art fair on  Randall's Island . We were looking for Japanese artist  Koki Tanaka  to learn more about his interest in the island’s invisible communities. An array of picnic tables from a nearby park defined the space where Koki told a different Randall’s Island story each day, introducing communities and histories that lay outside th...