What to See in the EU this October

Tora Schultz

Palace Enterprise, Copenhagen, Denmark

19 August – 14 October

Tora Schultz’s ‘D I R T Y’ – the artist’s first solo exhibition at Copenhagen-based Palace Enterprise – speaks to gender bias by subtly reframing the tools that shape our everyday lives. A tower of red plastic trays, encased in a steel frame, takes centre stage. They’re the kind of dishwashing racks you might find in a school canteen; yet, the highest trays of Stratification (2022) are too high for any kitchen worker, let alone a female worker, who is typically shorter than their male counterpart, to reach. In manipulating the tower’s scale and recontextualizing its humble objects, Schultz mirrors the surrealist penchant for rendering the familiar strange. — Alice Godwin

Maximiliane Baumgartner

Galerie Max Mayer, Dusseldorf, Germany

2 September – 22 October

While education may currently be a prevalent theme in contemporary art, few projects comprise more than simple social critique nor outlast the exhibition’s run. Maximiliane Baumgartner, by contrast, has long been exploring this field in works such as her mobile art-education project Der Fahrende Raum (The Driving Space, 2015–19). All the more interesting, then, to see how clearly the artist’s latest exhibition at Max Mayer, ‘Wie Du mir, so teil ich Dir (Tit for Tat)’, plays on the fact that her subject matter is now a hot topic.  – Moritz Scheper

‘I am the secret meat’

Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna, Austria

9 September – 8 October

The theme of this year’s Curated By – the cross-city curatorial project that takes place in Vienna each September – is ‘kelet’. The Hungarian word for ‘east’, it references both the current war in Ukraine, which lies to the east of Vienna, and the influence of avantgarde Hungarian journal Nyugat (West, 1908–41). Organized by Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili, the group show ‘I am the secret meat’ at Felix Gaudlitz is the most evocative interpretation of the theme, creating an eerie Tarkovskyan atmosphere that hints of isolation and abandonment. ­– Francesca Gavin

Ângela Ferreira

FRAC – Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Marseille, France

25 June 2022 – 22 January 2023

‘Friends, comrades, this is Rádio Voz da Liberdade, on behalf of the Patriotic Front for National Liberation …’ The voice of Portuguese communist broadcaster Stella Piteira Santos echoes up from the lower level of the Regional Contemporary Art Fund (FRAC) in Marseille. The space is currently host to Ângela Ferreira’s ‘Rádio Voz da Liberdade’, the Portuguese artist’s homage to the guerrilla radio station broadcast in Algeria from 1962 to 1974 by exiled Portuguese dissidents of António de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship. – Wilson Tarbox

‘Autofiction’

Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2 September – 8 October

‘Authorship is a mode; it has to do with vocalizing, naming, claiming. Does authorship only happen when it is recognized? By which I mean: is a diary-writer also an author?’ So asks Perri MacKenzie in Hot Author (2021), a text written to accompany two works – both titled The Author (2021): one in acrylic paint and the other collage – depicting a naked, recumbent woman holding a pencil. The question is a pertinent one within the context of Fons Welters’s current group show, ‘Autofiction’, curated by Melanie Bühler, which brings together works by Gina Fischli, Clémence Lollia Hilaire, Kinke Kooi, Win McCarthy, Phung-Tien Phan, Josiane M.H. Pozi, Trevor Shimizu, Lily van der Stokker, Evelyn Taocheng Wang and Bruno Zhu, in addition to MacKenzie, to explore the complex concept of authorship. – Jim van Geel

_{Main image: Kinke Kooi, Mother (detail), 2015, tempera on board, 17.5 × 35 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Photo: Gunnar Meier}