20.03.09 'Grin & Bear It' Ed Young in Ireland
28.03.09 Guy Tillim in 'Great Expectations - Contemporary photography looks at today's Bitter Years', Luxembourg
01.04.09 David Goldblatt, 'In the time of AIDS' in Madrid
01.05.09 Carré and Salvoldi at artSPACE berlin

20.03.09 Abrie Fourieís 'Oblique' at Vladimiro Izzo Gallery,
28.03.09 Pieter Hugo, Mikhael Subotzky and Paolo Woods - 'Three Stories' in Luxemburg

04.03.09 'Stigmata', Pieter Hugo at the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum, Geneva

05.02.09 'Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art', Stenersen Museum, Oslo

THE AMERICAS

22.02.09 Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa at UCLA
08.04.09 Dineo Bopape on 'Younger than Jesus', New Museum, New York

12.03.09 'Developing Democracy: a focus on South African photography in New York

01.04.09 Claudette Schreuders in 'Mami Wata: Arts for water spirits in Africa and its Diasporas', Washington DC
23.04.09 ITASC's ICEPAC, art and science research project exhibits results at Bienal del Fin del Mundo

29.01.09 'Johannesburg to New York', Samson Mnisi in Brooklyn
11.02.09 Pieter Hugo in 'Unbounded: New Art for a New Century', New Jersey

'Grin & Bear It' considers how artists work with humour as a tool to examine social behaviours. Poking fun at life's absurdities conceals the fine line that exists between laughter and sadness. Although there are recognisable jokes throughout the exhibition, it focuses specifically on what it is that makes us resort to humour in difficult situations. When faced with a cruel world, sometimes it's best to just grin and bear it.

The exhibition features contemporary works by artists employing video, photography and traditional media, which capture the humour in personal defeats and everyday disappointments.

Artists on show include James Beale, Stella Capes, Common Culture, Henry Coombes, Francisco Goya, Catherine Harty, William Hogarth, W. K. Haselden, Friedrich Kunath, Peter Land, Sean Landers, Nevan Lahart, Leo McCann, Harold Offeh, David Sherry, David Shrigley, Stephen Sutcliffe, Bedwyr Williams, and Ed Young.

Opens: March 20
Closes: July 5

Curated by Paul di Felice and Pierre Stiwer, 'Great Expectations' is a re-look at the concerns presented by Edward Steichen's seminal exhibition 'The Bitter Years', originally shown in 1962 at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Featuring a series of photographs commissioned in the 1930s by the US Farm Security Administration (FSA), 'The Bitter Years' documented the effects on America of the great financial crisis that followed the infamous 'Black Thursday', as the stock market crash of 1929 came to be known. Organised at the outset of the post-war economic miracle, Steichen's exhibition sounded like a warning and effectively invested photography with a moral mission in an era equally marked by the dawning of consumerism and the constant nuclear threat.

Photography can therefore no longer, as in Steichen's day, rely on its purportedly self-explanatory documentary nature to promote an ideal vision. In today's era of ubiquitous propaganda based on the manipulative potential of images, the credibility of photographic recordings is called into question, and so is the validity of its immediacy in terms of communicative impact. Compositional elements, such as those that once guided Steichen's choice of images for 'The Bitter Years', no longer play a decisive role, since arranging reality, both before and after the recording, has become common practice.

But even today art finds alternative means to represent and question the social status quo. The works in this exhibition draw loosely on Steichen's theme, shedding light, through the objective of documentary or conceptual photography, on the conflicts of modern life as they are seen by today's journalists, photographers and artists.

Artists on exhibit include Vahram Aghasyan, Eric Baudelaire, Frédéric Delangle, Martin Eder, Iván Edeza, Lukas Einsele, Patrick Galbats, Dionisio González, Guy Tillim and Kai Wiedenhöfer amongst others.

Opens: March 28
Closes: June 14

In David Goldblatt's second exhibition at the Galleria Elba BenÌtez, the artist presents his 'In the time of AIDS' suite, which features medium sized colour photographs. This selection of images could be described as landscape photography given that its stylistic subject-matter focuses on views of the city or countryside in which the human figure does appear. However, the red ribbon, symbol of the struggle against AIDS, is the central element to be found in all the images.

These photographs are, in fact, condemnatory of a psychological state which makes people blind to the multiplication of this ribbon throughout the South African landscape.

Opens: April 1
Closes: May 30

This month artSPACE berlin presents two solo shows by figurative painter Michel Carré and sculptor Cristina Salvoldi.

Michel Carré works with the traditions of the figurative and expressionistic in order to create his metaphysical explorations into painting. The artist focuses on how violence and libido create space. In a kind of dream world of stock images, allegorical characters make an appearance: Death, angels, Mary Magdalene. The artist draws imagery from the collective unconscious so that the viewer may make his own associations with represented monsters and angels.

Cristina Salvoldi was born in Windhoek/Namibia. In 2003 she moved to Cape Town where she now resides and co-runs her own sculpture studio. She recently received a 4 month scholarship to explore the art scene in Berlin from March to July 2009. Her first solo exhibition will be held in Berlin at the artSPACE berlin.

Salvoldi's solo exhibit is a series of classic, figurative sculptures portraying moments of imperfection and humour that are part of the joys and sorrows of being human.

Opens: May 1
Closes: May 30

Vladimiro Izzo Gallery launches in Berlin with the first German solo show by Abrie Fourie, 'Oblique'.

This Italian-owned space aims to promote cultural diversity in Berlin by hosting a variety of international artists whose work captures a rich political and historical moment in time, stirs consciousness and challenges societal conformity and indifference.

Fourie - who works with the images and symbols of ordinary life, creating a unique yet common cultural iconography of the contemporary world - will exhibit 'Oblique' from March to May. Living in and travelling between worlds as vastly different as Switzerland, India, South Africa, Germany and Chile, Fourie explores the familiar zones of home with the same interest and curiosity as he does the unknown, not so much defining a place, as circling the relationship between spaces, sign and self.

Opens: March 20
Closes: May 6

'Three Stories' about Africa, presented by two African photographers of the post-Apartheid generation and a Dutch-Canadian photographer, seeks to give visibility to the inhabitants and to the complexity and nuances of African culture.

Hugo presents his Hyena and Other Men, an exploration of the lives of street performers in Lagos, Nigeria, whilst Subotsky displays his small town essay Beaufort West and Woods his series Chinafrica, a recount of the conquest of the African continent by the Chinese.

Opens: March 28
Closes: May 30

'Stigmata' groups together six contemporary photographers: Gustave Germano (Argentina), Pieter Hugo (South Africa), Shai Kremer (Israel), Suzanne Opton (US), Robert Polidori (Canada) and Dana Popa (Rumania). Each of their work seeks to capture our attention through pictures of both people and places dealing with situations of crisis, be it on the frontline or behind.

Opens: March 4
Closes: July 26

Kay Hassan, Lawrence Lemoana, Athi Patra Ruga, Andries Botha, Langa Magwa, Berni Searle, Nontsikeleo Veleko, Nandipha Mntambo, Senzeni Marasela, Frances Goodman, Nicholas Hlobo and Dineo Bopape are included on 'Beauty and Pleasure in South African Contemporary Art' at Stenersen Museum, Oslo in Norway.

Work on show explores identity issues, individuality, sensuality, sexuality and gender issues through a wide variety of media - photography, installation, video, works on paper, textile works, performance and sculpture.

The selected artists share an interest in expressing provocative themes within highly tactile and formally orientated works. The works in this exhibition are not only decorative and visually appealing, but also speak on a very poetic level about the beauty that is found in everyday life not only in Africa but all over the world.

As a strong counterpoint to the socially engaged, politically entrenched art often featured in exhibitions of contemporary art from Africa, the theme of this exhibition is linked to notions of beauty and pleasure.

Opens: February 5
Closes: May 10

Five contemporary artists with deep connections to Africa present video and film works for the first time in Los Angeles.

Artists on show are Yto Barrada, Cláudia Cristóvão, Alfredo Jaar, Georgia Papageorge and Berni Searle. Each offers a visually seductive exploration of geology, geography, botany, memory, exile, or loss, especially as these areas of inquiry relate to a world that is simultaneously globalizing and fragmenting. In these works the medium is itself a bearer of meaning. Through the moving image and its ability to create relationships between past and present, space and place, memory and absence, each artist addresses lives in transition and rifts of experience.

'Continental Rifts' is curated by Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts.

Opens: February 22
Closes: June 14

'Younger than Jesus', the first edition of the triennial exhibition 'The Generational' at the New Museum, New York, includes a line up of fifty artists from twenty five countries. The exhibition aims to present a rich, intricate, multidisciplinary exploration of the work being produced by a new generation of artists born after 1976. Known to demographers, marketers, sociologists, and pundits variously as the Millennials, Generation Y, iGeneration, and Generation Me, this age group has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption. 'Younger Than Jesus' will begin to examine the visual culture this generation has created to date.

Inspired by the fact that some of the most influential and enduring gestures in art and history have been made by young people in the early stages of their lives, 'Younger Than Jesus' fills the entire New Museum's building on the Bowery with approximately 145 works by artists all of whom are under the age of thirty-three years old. Hailing from countries including Algeria, China, Colombia, Germany, India, Lebanon, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela, many are showing in a museum for the first time. The exhibition will span mediums and encompass painting, drawing, photography, film, animation, performance, installation, dance, Internet-based works, and video games.

Artists were selected for ìYounger Than Jesusî through an open curatorial model that is participatory, and inspired by the networking proclivities of the generation represented in the show. Initial research for the exhibition was conducted through an international network of correspondents and an information-sharing group of more than 150 curators, writers, teachers, artists, critics, and bloggers worldwide, who were asked to recommend artists for the exhibition. This methodology was intended to expand the curatorial process and challenge the traditional 'single-source' method of creating an exhibition. Through this process, more than 500 artists were recommended and researched.

Opens: April 8
Closes: May 7

'Developing Democracy: a New Focus on South African Photography', is a group exhibition focusing on dominant trends in South African contemporary photography currently on show at Kyle Kauffman Gallery, New York.

Included in the exhibition is recent work by David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Nontsikelelo 'Lolo' Veleko, Raymond Keeping, Senzeni Marasela and others. These artists, young and old, male and female, white and black, world-renowned and upcoming, reflect the diversity of the new South Africa. While their subject matter, aesthetic, and approaches to the medium are equally varied, they are all working to subvert earlier photographic traditions, in order to create an innovative visual language for a new post-apartheid culture.

Opens: March 12
Closes: May 30

This exhibition brings together a wide variety of cultural artefacts, from headdresses and masks to film posters, as well as artworks by contemporary practitioners who have seen Mami Wata as an inspiring muse. The contemporary component includes paintings, etchings and sculptures by artists including Alison Saar, Sonya Clark, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Twin Seven-Seven, Claudette Schreuders and Edouard Duval-Carrié.

Opens: April 1
Closes: July 26

The projects and site-specific installations at the ICEPAC, Antarctic site will be exhibited as part of the 2nd Bienal del Fin del Mundo, an exhibition curated by Alfons Hug entitled 'Intemperie' (Tempest), focusing on weather, climate and Antarctica.

The main venue of the Bienal is Ushuaia,Terra del Fuego, Argentina (April 23 - May 25) with satellite exhibitions taking place at Centro Cultural Oi Futuro, Rio de Janeiro (Jan 19 - March 1), SANAE IV, Antarctica (Feb 3 -17), and OCA, Sao Paulo (March 7 - April 12).

Opens: April 23
Closes: May 25

The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), the first and only contemporary African Diasporan Art museum in Brooklyn, New York, presents 'Johannesburg to New York'.

Curated by Kimberli E. Gant, the show is the first retrospective of the collaborative work between South African artist Samson Mnisi and New York artist Cannon Hersey.

Combining their various perspectives on the changing cultural dynamics of South Africa and its emergence onto the world stage, these artists have created mixed media imagery that is socially conscious while also being visually stimulating.

Mnisi incorporates ancient Zulu symbolism and rituals with Hersey's captivating photography to give viewers insider and outsider perspectives on contemporary South African societies.

Opens: January 29
Closes: May 17

'Unbounded: New Art for a New Century' opens at the Newark Museum, New Jersey in February. This provocative exhibition presents 50 masterworks created in the past 15 years by more than 30 contemporary artists.

The exhibition is drawn from the Museum's African, American, Native American, Asian and Decorative Arts collections and encompasses painting, sculpture, ceramics, fashion, jewellery, textiles, photography and video.

A dynamic thematic display highlights the universal concerns and ideas that inspire artistic creativity, creating unexpected connections or groupings that transcend traditional divisions based on geography, genre or media.

Opens: February 11
Closes: August 16