As part of the Chinati Foundation’s Made in Marfa schedule of events over Chinati Weekend, Ballroom Marfa will host a tour of Äppärät, on Friday, October 9 at 5pm.

Curated by Tom Morton, Äppärät is a show about the mammalian hand, and the tools it touches, holds and uses. Taking its title from the name of a fictional, post-iPhone device at the center of Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 near-future novel Super Sad True Love Story, Äppärät is concerned with labor, play and the uncertain zone between the two; with the extension of the body, and the self, through technologies ancient and contemporary; with things (to borrow Martin Heidegger’s formulation) “present-at” and “ready-to” hand; with compulsion and with death.

Äppärät features 13 artists from across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, from major art historical figures to practitioners in the early phase of their careers, including Ed Atkins, Trisha Donnelly, Melvin Edwards, Cécile B. Evans, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Roger Hiorns, Sophie Jung, Lee Lozano, Marlie Mul, Damián Ortega, Charles Ray, Shimabuku, and Paul Thek.

The tour will be led by Ballroom Marfa Associate Curator Laura Copelin. Complimentary champagne will be served in the Ballroom Marfa shop.

Äppärät is on view through February 14, 2016. Read curator Tom Morton’s exhibition notes here.

Ballroom Marfa and Tito’s Vodka Cocktail Reception
Friday, October 10 from 6-8pm

Ballroom Marfa invites you to join us in welcoming Executive Director Susan Sutton at a Sound Speed Marker cocktail reception this Chinati Weekend. We’ll be serving beer, wine and Tito’s vodka cocktails in the gallery to go along with the continuing Sound Speed Marker exhibition from Hubbard/Birchler.

Sutton, a regular visitor to Far West Texas, joins us here in Marfa after a four-year tenure at Houston’s Menil Collection. Read more about our new executive director here.

Sound Speed Marker documents sites of forgotten film history in Texas with photography, sculpture and three video installations in the Ballroom Marfa gallery. As Alexander Birchler told Irina Arnaut in a recent interview in Bomb Magazine,

Over the course of developing the component works for Sound Speed Marker, we considered a number of different sites around the country and even a couple of sites in Europe. The three sites we chose to commit to and explore over time were challenging and resonant for us on a number of exciting and unknown levels. They all share the potential of a curiously missed mark – we’re visiting these sites at the wrong time.

Hubbard/Birchler’s Sound Speed Marker will be on view at Ballroom Marfa until October 26. The exhibition will then travel to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in December 2014 and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston in May 2015.