Bridge Projects

Yesterday was Pentecost, a Christian liturgical celebration of the birth of the Church, the ascension of Christ, and broadly seen as a reversal of the events at the Tower of Babel. Babel was a place of incomprehension and fracture, while Pentecost, through miracles of the Holy Spirit, was a place and time of understanding and unity.

Cildo Meireles' "Babel 2001" is a large-scale sculptural installation that takes the form of a circular tower made from hundreds of second-hand analogue radios that the artist has stacked in layers. They compete with each other and create a cacophony of low, continuous sound, resulting in inaccessible information, voices or music.The room in which the tower is installed is bathed in an indigo blue light that, together with the sound, gives the whole structure an eerie effect and adds to the sense of phenomenological and perceptual confusion. The radios are all of different dates, the lower layers nearest the floor being composed of older radios, larger in scale and closer in kind to pieces of furniture, while the upper layers are assembled from more recent, mass-produced and smaller radios. This arrangement emphasises the sense of perspectival foreshortening and thus the impression of the tower’s height, which, like its biblical counterpart, might continue into the heavens." (Tate Modern)

Babel was included in the artist’s retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern, London, in 2008.

Featured images: Cildo Meireles, Babel, 2008. Radios, lighting and sound, overall display dimensions variable.

Two of the most internationally renowned artists of their generation: Vija Celmins and Gerhard Richter are exhibiting together for the first time at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in a show entitled "Double Vision."

Challenging the concept of pictorialism, Celmins sees her work as a form of translation (“re-description”) from one surface to another—either by looking directly at objects or on the basis of photographs. She applies hard-edged realism and rigor to soft subjects like webs, water, and the stars. Gerhard Richter’s extensive artistic oeuvre, which is characterized by a vast richness of variation and an impressive range of styles, consistently and persistently revolves around fundamental questions of seeing and representation, much like that of Celmins.

In recent years, both artists have expressed an abiding interest in the religious dimensions of artistic practice. "Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God . . . The ability to believe is our outstanding quality, and only art adequately translates it into reality," said Richter in an interview. Meanwhile, many curators and critics liken Celmins single-minded, palpable diligence as a sort of spiritual vocation, the quietude of her works religious in their earthly sanctity.

The exhibition will comprise some 60 paintings, drawings, prints and objects by the two artists, and is sure to be full of philosophical reflections on art—and other surprises.

Featured images:
Vija Celmins, Hot Plate, 1964.
Gerhard Richter, Seestueck, 1970.
Gerhard Richter, Schaerzler, 1964.
Vija Celmins, Blackboard Tableau #14, 2011-2015.

It was on this day in 1906 that African American holiness preacher William Joseph Seymour launched a 24-7 prayer room at 312, Azusa Street in downtown Los Angeles. As this multiracial group grew to crowds of over 1500 people, so did their spiritual hunger. Today, 117 years later, most of the world's 584 million Pentecostal and charismatic Christians trace their heritage directly or indirectly back to this day in 1906, to an unglamorous building on Azusa Street, and the unlikeliest of global statesmen, William J Seymour.

At its core Pentecostalism is radically culturally diverse. Those gathered at Azusa Street remembered how the Spirit had first been poured out at Pentecost to bless different cultures, and this is what they were experiencing for themselves as Africans, Latinos, Asians, and Europeans.

Bridge Projects' 2021 exhibition "Otherwise / Revival" was a group exhibition that visualized the impact of the Black Pentecostal movement on contemporary artists. Sculptures, paintings, video, and performances celebrate the significance of music, praise, breath, and community as the participating artists reflect on their traditions, heritages, passions, and talents to cultivate a space where art thrives and expresses a unifying language for all.

Featured images:
Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Love You Nephew, 2018.
Nery Gabriel Lemus, This is the Air We Breathe, 2020.
Letitia Huckaby, Barbara, 2020.
McArthur Binion, Healing Work, 2020.
Lava Thomas, Freedom Song No 5 - We Shall Not be Moved, 2019. (detail)
Caroline Kent, A Kind of Witness, 2015. (detail)
Sedrick Huckaby, Estuary, 2021.
Lezley Sarr, Never Let the Devil See You Cry, 2020. (detail)
Genesis Tramaine, Last to Get my Hair Done, 2020. (detail)
Willie Cole, Mother and Child, 2012. (detail)