Best of 2014 #art

In our selection of the best art stories of 2014, fifteen installations, exhibitions and provocative projects.

– Leandro Erlich, Dalston House: in Hackney, a temporary installation by the Argentinian artist is comprising a life-size house façade lying face-up on the ground with a mirrored surface positioned overhead at a 45-degree angle.

– July 22 Memorial: chosen for the July 22 Memorial sites to remember victims of the 2011 Utøya massacre, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg proposed a wound within the landscape itself.

– #NotABugSplat: an artist collective installed a massive portrait facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur.

– Disobedience Archive: artistic practice in relation to political action: the videos at SALT Beyoğlu survey forms of “disobedience” from the 1970s Parco Lambro uprising in Italy to the Gezi Resistance in Istanbul.

– The Permanent Revolution: the Permanent Revolution, an original play by Mexican artist Pedro Reyes presented at Museo Jumex, explores the tensions between socialism and capitalism.

– Kara Walker in New York: Kara Walker’s big sculpture made of white sugar will stand vigil over the Domino Sugar Refinery’s final days, as it prepares to undergo gentrification’s own refining process, via the wrecking ball.

– The strange city: "L’étrange cité", a monumental artwork created by the Kabakovs at Paris' Grand Palais, is an utopian city summing up the philosophy of the artist's pair.

– The Phaistos Disc’s Secret: invited by Dakis Joannou Polish artist Pawel Althamer turned the Hydra slaughterhouse into an interactive space, in which communication and creativity merge to construct a tangle of intimate relationships reminiscent of those formed within the family nucleus.

– Avec motifs apparents: “Avec motifs apparents” at Centquatre (Paris) is above all an invitation to five artists to create or recreate a monumental in situ installation symbolising their work.

– Les Rencontres de la Photographie: “Les Rencontres de la Photographie” has Arles buzzing with a whole range of venues, attracting a host of visitors, each one in search of a different light – personal or that of others – to contemplate.

– Transplantation: German artist Uli Westphal transformed Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam into a greenhouse, where over sixty remarkable tomato varieties are cultivated.

– Invisible Violence: the exhibition coproduced by Artium, Vitoria, and the MoCAB, explores the so-called invisible violence as it is discernible in everyday ordinary life.

– This is not a love song: in response to Natalie Seroussi’s invitation Didier Faustino implements an explosive architectural installation in the setting of the amazing villa designed in the 1950s by André Bloc.

– My dreams: Gian Maria Tosatti’s work at Castel Sant’Elmo, My dreams, they’ll never surrender, is devoted to all those people who have spent their lives in prison because of their ideas.

– Joan Jonas’ narrative season: more than installations, the many works arranged in the dark nave of the HangarBicocca are complex relational machines, chasing each other on before coming together in a bouquet worthy of a queen.

– Maria Lai, Ricucire il mondo: a year after her death, Cagliari, Nuoro and Ulassai are holding a retrospective on this Sardinian artists, able to interpret her homeland without ever being local.

Top: Leandro Erlich, Dalston House. Photo Gar Powell-Evans. Barbican Art Gallery 2013