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This month in Artforum:
SHOW OF HANDS: as the world grapples with Trumpocracy and new waves of resistance in turn, Artforum features on its cover a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans—whose retrospective is currently on view at Tate Modern—captured during a 2014 Black Lives Matter protest, the powerful gesture it depicts both a warning and a guide.
“Today, when so many bodies are being banned—and subject to violence the world over—the most powerful thing a body can do might be to declare its opacity, its staunchness, its substance.”
—Michelle Kuo
Nasser Rabbat on art and resistance in Beirut:
“Engaged artistic practice can serve as the vanguard of broader social and cultural responses to radicalism.”
—Nasser Rabbat
Alex Kitnick on the art of General Idea:
“For General Idea, normalcy was a guise, a cover, a form of role-playing and drag.”
—Alex Kitnick
Openings: Dennis Lim on Sky Hopinka, whose work features in the forthcoming Whitney Biennial:
“In Hopinka’s videos, words are heard and seen, learned and read, translated and transcribed, their meanings by turns communicated and withheld.”
—Dennis Lim
Mario Carpo on the rise of 3-D technology:
“The cultural and technical primacy of modern, perspectival, projected images—and of images in general—is now drawing to a close.”
—Mario Carpo
James Quandt on the films of Albert Serra:
“Serra’s unremitting irony renders his religiosity impossible to parse.”
—James Quandt
Openings: Suzanne Hudson on Kelly Akashi:
“As propositions, Akashi’s works are both/and rather than either/or.”
—Suzanne Hudson
Melissa Gronlund on safeguarding cultural heritage:
“Local populations, in countless examples in Iraq, Mali, Syria, and elsewhere, have put their own lives at risk to protect art and architecture.”
—Melissa Gronlund
And: Maria Stavrinaki on Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965, Jordan Kantor on R. H. Quaytman, Jyoti Dhar on the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Maja Naef on Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Kobena Mercer on Jean Fisher.
Plus: Annette Michelson talks about her collected writings, On the Eve of the Future; David Velasco on Douglas Crimp’s Before Pictures; Brenda Wineapple on Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion; Richard Deming on Peter Voulkos; Ben Kafka on D. A. Miller’s Hidden Hitchcock; Jonathan P. Watts on This Is Grime; and artist Richard Kennedy shares his Top Ten.