ALEX FARQUHARSON is Director of Nottingham Contemporary, which opens in 2009. Throughout 2008 Nottingham Contemporary presented five international off-site projects in and around Nottingham collectively entitled Histories of the Present. www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Klaus Weber: Hauptraum at the Secession, Vienna
A car with its own rainfall. Conjoined cacti. Plant curtains with no need of soil. Huge wind chimes tuned to the Devil's scale. The everyday as a psychotropic condition.
Roger Hiorns: Seizure, commissioned by Artangel, London
Roger Hiorns was also mixing the chemicals in 2008. For 'Seizure', Hiorns encrusted a small, condemned modern flat in his trademark copper sulphate crystals - like Ludwig II on housing benefit. Nearby in south London he'd ground down a whole jet engine to form a grey dune at Corvi-Mora.
Pablo Bronstein: Horological Piazza at Franco Noero, Turin
Pablo Bronstein inaugurated Franco Noero's extraordinary new space in Turin. The building is a miniature 19th century 'skyscraper' over some half dozen tiny triangular floors. Bronstein's faux antiques and his accompanying book amplified the exquisite perversity of the house.
Mike Kelley: Educational Complex Onwards: 1995 - 2008 at Wiels, Brussels
Wiels turned its fantastic industrial deco building over to a full-scale survey of Mike Kelley's output since 1993. Kelley remains as inimitable as he is influential. Kippenberger, to whom he's often compared, seems elementary by comparison.
Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
A favourite of Kelley's, the late Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990), was the subject of an overdue retrospective at the Walker Art Center this winter. Charting his idiosyncratic course between Japanese and European avant-gardes of the 50s and 60s (Gutai, Fluxus, Nouveau Realism, Cybernetics, etc), Kudo's phosphorescent grotesques look uncannily contemporary. It's hard to believe he's not better known.
Manifesta 7, Trentino - South Tyrol region
Manifesta came back strong this year in the Trentino region. RAQs made effective use of the aluminium factory in Bolzano, but Anselm Franke's and Hila Peleg's Foucauldian take on The Soul in a wonderful early Modernist post office in Trento was this Manifesta's highlight. Fortezza, by contrast, managed to make an interesting joint-curatorial proposition dull, dull, dull in execution.
The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art at CCS Bard, Annandale-on-Hudson
The Green Room at Bard in upstate New York, curated by Maria Lind, considered documentary tendencies in recent art. On the scale of a museum survey, but more curatorially and discursively inventive than that would usually suggest, the exhibition was something of a stock-take of the many ways artists have problematised the truth claims of a culture's empirical documents over the past decade. It introduces a two-year initiative.
Catherine Opie: American Photographer at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Speaking of documenting, Catherine Opie's retrospective at the Guggenheim confirmed her reputation as one of the leading photographers since 1993, the year the Whitney Biennial ushered the politics and performance of identity into the mainstream American art world.
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