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The Importance of Things: Q+A with Sarah Sze

Sarah Sze is well known for her mesmerizing site-specific installations comprising hundreds of found and fabricated objects. In advance of representing the U.S. at next year's Venice Biennale, she has completed a major piece, Book of Parts, commissioned by the High Museum in Atlanta on the occasion of its "Fast Forward" exhibition, opening Oct. 13, a survey of 100 years of art from the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art.
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Fulya Erdemci Named Curator of 13th Istanbul Biennial

Fulya Erdemci has been appointed curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, to take place Sept. 14–Nov. 10, 2013.

A curator and writer living in Istanbul and Amsterdam, she organized the Turkish pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale. Installed in the Arsenale, it featured a room full of colorful, hissing pipes—a water purification system—by Ayse Erkmen. Since 2008 Erdemci has been director of SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte) Foundation For Art and Public Domain in Amsterdam. 
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Timothy Potts Appointed Director of the Getty Museum

Timothy Potts has been named director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, effective Sept. 1.

Potts, a native of Australia, has been head of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, since 2008. Prior to that, he was director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth for nearly 10 years. A specialist in the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, he served as director of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 1994–98.
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Lillian Bassman, Pioneering Photographer, Has Died

Lillian Bassman, postwar fashion and fine art photographer, died on Feb. 13 in Manhattan, age 94. She was noted for bringing a personal touch to her images, staging shoots in a friend's apartment and other domestic settings, and putting her models at ease by relating to them as a fellow woman, not an objectifying eye. In the 1940s and '50s, when agencies didn't allow their models' faces to be seen in lingerie ads, Bassman artfully positioned the women in settings and poses that made such obfuscations appear to be natural. Her style helped transform the public's perception of the industry, from utilitarian to glamorous. Lillian Bassman: Lingerie, a monograph of her pioneering work, will be published by Abrams in April (and is the subject of A.i.A.'s "Critical Eye" column in the March issue, which went to press before Bassman's death).
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Palais de Tokyo Reopens As Largest European Contemporary Art Center

When it opened in 2001, the Palais de Tokyo contemporary art center was a scrappy contemporary art center amidst the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris. For a time, it was a successful laboratory, hosting exhibitions by such artists as Erwin Wurm and Christoph Büchel. But following organizational discord, it lost some steam. The center occupied about a third of a 237,000-square-foot building erected for the 1937 International Exhibition of Arts and Technology. One could sometimes rattle around its cavernous spaces and hardly encounter another visitor among the spread-out installations. Even so, an expansion was deemed in order.
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DECODING IMAGES

2012, aluminum, wood, sublimation print on polyester and concrete, 71 3/4 by 122 1/2 by 135 inches overall. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New Yor

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