There is no trace of irony evident in the careful spatial doubling of the meditation room; the effect is remarkably peaceful. It appears to pay sincere homage to Hammarskjöld’s ambition: “There is an ancient saying that the sense of a vessel is not its shell but the void. So it is with this room. It is for those who come here to fill that void with what they find in their center of stillness.” Yet it is not true that the room is empty. In fact, it is full of competing symbols.
We begin this month with a text reflecting on a recreation of the “meditation room” installed at the UN headquarters by a diplomat later rumored to have been murdered for his commitment to the organization’s ideals. While we must acknowledge that even spaces of spiritual experience are implicated in structures of power, writes Natasha Marie Llorens, this work suggests that “the most violent stages” can nonetheless “be instrumentalized in service to subtle and multivalent forms of resistance.” We can only hope.
National myth-making here gives way to an astute selection of artworks that pry open the cracks in a state that defines belonging foremost through adherence to cultural and linguistic standards, evident in the language and knowledge test that immigrants must pass for naturalization. “Made in Germany?” coaxes out the tense dialectics between a nation’s openness towards outside cultures and economies, and the nationalist rejection of that same openness.
Lim’s late work distills the forms and movements of leaves, flowers, bones, starfish, and shells. River-Run (1992–93) is a horizontal stone slab with seven lines of varying lengths carved across, with their subtle curves conveying the lines in a Japanese raked garden, or the drift of a current; the squarish stone relief Syncopation I (1995) comprises a series of diagonal slashes coming in from the edges that resemble the vein pattern of a leaf. In these works, Lim sought to evoke a sense of balance, which she described as “a symmetry that is experienced rather than actual.”
The installation of La Gola at the Kunsthalle Wien, in a cavernous gallery with just a small central island of theatre seats, evokes the escapism and solitude of cinema-going, and the film presents a hermetic world of finely wrought surfaces: rarefied allusions, complicated technologies, meticulously crafted melodies and words. Its script is a web of aesthetic resemblances in which art, cuisine, and illness become entangled.
Eight years of government by the right-wing Law and Justice party, which came to an end a year ago, severely damaged Poland’s cultural sector, not least by undermining the credibility of the capital’s art institutions. In these circumstances, the responsibility of safekeeping Warsaw’s reputation as a regional hub for contemporary art fell to its commercial galleries. In spite—or perhaps because of—the political and economic climate, recent years have also seen a growing number of non-commercial and artist-led initiatives in Warsaw, gathered together by the annual FRINGE festival.
Fragments of a Breathing City
