9 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 29

Screening: Neïl Beloufa at Museum of Modern Art
Neïl Beloufa has yet to become a hit with American audiences, but it seems to be only a matter of time before the French Algerian artist, who has a MoMA project opening on March 12, will become better known to New Yorkers. Like a cross between David Douard’s oddball sculptures and Omer Fast’s truth-bending films, Beloufa’s video installations play with the line between fact and fiction, exploding open the division between the two and creating spaces that look like dysfunctional film sets. In the process, Beloufa looks at the politics inherent in film narratives and the way that technology plays tricks on us. This screening program of three Beloufa films features the U.S. premiere of Data for Desire (2014), in which French students try to map out a statistical formula for which Canadians will hook up with each other at a party. After the screening, Thomas J. Lax, an associate curator at MoMA, will discuss the films with Beloufa. —Alex Greenberger
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $12/$10/$8

TUESDAY, MARCH 1

Opening: Ibrahim El-Salahi at Salon 94
“Alhambra” will feature works by Ibrahim El-Salahi, the Sudanese painter known as the father of African and Arab Modernism. After he was exiled from his home country in 1975, El-Salahi went to live in England, where he had previously studied at the Slade School of Art in London. El-Salahi’s work, while diverse in its use of mediums, consistently relies upon line drawing to convey both structure and emotion, whether it depicts Africanized arabesque script or whether it is used to embellish traditional Sudanese crafts.
Salon 94, 243 Bowery, 11 a.m.–6 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2

Opening: Hilton Als at The Artist’s Institute
You may know Hilton Als for his politically minded theater criticism, which appears almost every week in The New Yorker, but a lesser-seen side of the New York–based writer’s oeuvre is his art. The Artist’s Institute inaugurates its new uptown digs with a retrospective of Als’s photographs, installations, and sound works. The blurb for the show describes Als’s work as being “something that has happened out there, recast as feeling from within,” and that seems fitting, given that the critic normally writes about outsiders that expose themselves to the public.
The Artist’s Institute, 132 East 65th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman Gallery
In the newest film in Tacita Dean’s latest show at Marian Goodman Gallery, the artist David Hockney smokes not one, but five cigarettes. By observing him several times over, Dean asks viewers to look closely at Hockney, investigating how and why he smokes the way he does. Dean’s films are all about detail and watching things happen over time, as in Buon Fresco (2014), which features close-ups of Giotto paintings, and Events for Stage (2015), in which the actor Stephen Dillane performs various Shakespeare monologues. Dean’s work calls attention to a central element of film itself: the passage of time, which all the images that come before the camera are naturally subject to. Also on view in this show, titled “…my English breath in foreign clouds,” will be recent photography. —Alex Greenberger
Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 3

Opening: Marcel Broodthaers at Paul Kasmin Gallery
This exhibition of work by late poet-turned-artist Marcel Broodthaers complements the artist’s first museum retrospective in New York, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. It covers the breadth of Broodthaers’s 12-year career as an artist (1964–1976), featuring multi-part canvas works, drawings, photography, installation, and his famous series of paintings on vacuum-formed plastic, including a series of vacuum-formed plastic originally created for his traveling museum Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles). Notably, a press release adds that this show marks the first time the artist’s complete editions and books have been shown together in the United States.
Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Patti Smith at Robert Miller Gallery
Patti Smith will present Eighteen Stations, a project based on her 2015 book M Train, which the artist describes as “a roadmap to my life” as told from inside various cafes and other favorite haunts around the world. The show will primarily feature photographs included in the book, along with additional works by Smith that celebrate the healing powers of art and literature as well as the process of artistic creation. Smith will be present for readings from M Train throughout the exhibition’s run, and will also participate in a discussion of her artistic practice with Omar Kholeif, Manilow senior curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday.
Robert Miller Gallery, 524 West 26 Street, 6­­–8 p.m.

Party: Tom of England at Santos Party House
White Columns, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, STD Records, and the Independent Art Fair have teamed up with Santos Party House to present a straightforward night of debauchery in honor of Armory Week, featuring the wittily named DJ Tom of England. Accompanying him in the DJ booth will be artist Spencer Sweeney, who is represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and White Columns director Matthew Higgs.
Santos Party House, 96 Lafayette Street, 11 p.m.–late. Tickets $10

FRIDAY, MARCH 4

Opening: Justin Berry at Essex Flowers
After having solo shows at Bushwick’s Interstate Projects, Justin Berry inches closer to the Manhattan scene with this solo show at the hole-in-the-wall Lower East Side gallery Essex Flowers. Wryly titled “Photographs,” this show finds Berry continuing to mess with what viewers perceive as being an image taken by a camera. Like Jon Rafman, Berry often relies on stills from video games, intricately piecing together images to create what look like ultra-real landscapes, and showing how we have, in effect, become digital flaneurs that explore the world from our desktops and televisions.
Essex Flowers, 54.5 Ludlow Street, 6–8 p.m.

Screening: Frances Stark at Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM’s highly-anticipated Migrating Forms film festival will open with a selection of video work by Frances Stark, including “decades of lo-fi cat videos and an animated chronicle of the artist’s sexual rendezvous on Chatroulette.” Specifically, the lineup includes: Osservate, leggete con me, [THIS IS NOT EXACTLY A CAT VIDEO] w/ David Bowie’s “Star Man”, etc, as well as selections from Poets on the Pyre and CAT VIDEOS. Stark will also be present for a Q&A following the screenings.
Peter Jay Sharp Building, BAM Rose Cinemas Tickets, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $14/10/7