Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

Rivane Neuenschwander, installation view of "Eu desejo o seu desejo" ("I Wish Your Wish") at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003)

October 2008 Field Guide

Firstenberg Curates California

Eugene Carchesio

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded

Dark Continents

Cildo Meireles's Dark Materials

Franz West

Open

Lois and Franziska Weinberger

Tadao Ando's Stone Hill Center

Le Futurisme a Paris

The Tropics: Views From The Middle of The Globe

Nam June Paik Art Center

Museums in the 21st Century: Concepts, Projects, Buildings

John Baldessari Rivane Neuenschwander Target Practice: Painting Under Attack 1949–78 Less Is More at This Year’s Frieze The Frieze Fringe In Museums Rocket Woman When in Venice for... the Biennale

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Dots and disks are put to magical, munificent use in Rivane Neuenschwander’s videos and installations. In the DVD projection Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue (Ash Wednesday/ Epilogue; 2006), made with Cao Guimarães, a determined troop of ants struggles to transport brightly colored circles of sugarcoated confetti (mostly larger than themselves) across a crevassed landscape. To the beat of samba music, pink, blue, and gold disks—resembling nothing so much as the vibrant graphic blobs in John Baldessari’s “Noses & Ears” series—scurry, slip, and disappear along with the ants beneath them. In Secondary Stories, an installation from the same year, tissue-paper circles in vivid hues were blown about by fans inside a false ceiling made of clear plastic. The ceiling was studded with holes, however, and the tissue circles occasionally fell to the floor like autumn leaves, where they collected around the feet of entranced viewers. This month, the Brazilian artist employs her circular motif to more austere ends in a major site-specific installation at the South London Gallery. Architectural and cinematic at once, the piece includes a single projection of a flickering spot of light from a 16 mm film dotted with perforations, and a line of drilled holes will punctuate the gallery. Circle of life? Dots of despair? What she means by the repetition of these forms is anyone’s guess, but the artworks themselves are seldom less than wonderfully, giddily engrossing.

"Rivane Neuenschwander" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.