Sharjah
“Sharjah Biennial 9”
Sharjah Art Museum & Various Locations
By November Paynter

Spelled out in flowers on a grass bank along an entry road leading into Sharjah is the welcoming phrase: “Smile You Are in Sharjah.” Such a generic proposal should be plausible anywhere, but here it feels incongruous, at odds with the complex social composition of the city to which it refers. [more]

Sydney
Simryn Gill
Museum of Contemporary Art & Breenspace
By George Alexander

Good artists have a way of taking over your psychic space. Exiting Simryn Gill’s solo survey exhibition “Gathering,” at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), I started to comb through material layers in downtown Sydney with the kind of ardent attention Gill instigates. With Gill-colored glasses, even squashed cans and discarded ring-pulls take on the glamour of millefiori paperweights and Limoges pill-boxes; the jack-hammered section of a building revealed the roots of a palm tree and made me wonder: is it or isn’t it art? [more]

Tokyo
Ryoji Ikeda
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
By Kenichi Kondo

Paris-based Ryoji Ikeda is a leading Japanese electronic-music composer and visual artist who produces music albums, sound and video installations, and composes music for theater performances and other artists’ projects internationally. His interdisciplinary career includes collaboration with Berlin-based artist Carsten Nicolai, experimental performance group Dumb Type and Japanese architect Toyo Ito. He has explored the intricacies of sound’s fundamental nature through his music and in this exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), Ikeda switches gears and views numbers and mathematics through a similar micro lens. [more]

New Delhi
Subba Ghosh
Anant Art Gallery
By Deeksha Nath

The New Delhi-based painter, animator, installation and video artist Subba Ghosh is a mercurial figure in India’s art scene. Defining himself primarily as a painter, Ghosh trained at the College of Art, New Delhi, the Surikov Institute of Fine Arts, Moscow, and Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he began experimenting with video. Exhibiting since 1989, he declines to participate in group shows, thus maintaining a certain exclusivity around his work. [more]