Medalla’s first comprehensive survey in the United States also focuses on the queer, erotic sensibility that permeates his work; an aspect of Medalla’s art which, the exhibition’s interpretative materials note, most evaluations have “repressed.” Entering the exhibition, viewers are greeted by one of Medalla’s exuberant, early self-portraits of 1956–57, which he signed “Gaybriel,” along with ink drawings: muscular men in courtly poses; boys in symmetrical embrace.
The past few years have seen more disability-themed art exhibitions staged worldwide. The majority of these exhibitions, most notably “Crip Time” (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main), included both disabled and non-disabled artists and were curated by non-disabled curators, resulting in a medicalized focus with a lack of historical context. It seems a recent emphasis on exhibits focusing on “the body,” first prompted by an academic interest in transhumanism, and then perhaps primed by Covid-19, have led to a co-opting, of sorts, of disability for disability or disability-adjacent exhibitions.
Farocki’s lifelong project was one of pedagogical clarity by way of a methodology of comparison in which the viewer is able to understand the relation between images and between those images and the actual world. Each of the works in this show invites us to understand this relation […] To understand how we become inured to atrocity, how we become blind to the ways in which we are complicit in violence, and how violence and destruction are intertwined with our own labor and production—yes, even that of artists, filmmakers, academics, and art galleries.
The removal of the work from the studio also removes it from the networks of relation that might lend it meaning. Anyone who has witnessed the transformation of an object that has been kicked around a studio for two years into something to be handled with kid gloves when it leaves for the gallery will be sympathetic to the idea that it is precisely this abstraction from contexts that establishes the object as a “work of art,” with all of the implications of value and status connoted by the term.
Archival documents “are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present,” writes Ariella Azoulay. As e-flux Criticism takes a break from publishing new material in August, the editors have selected a few pieces from our free-to-access archive of more than 1,700 articles that might relate in new and unexpected ways to the moment. These articles—on subjects ranging from feminist video collectives in France to a Moroccan school of painters working against Eurocentric histories of modernism—offer reminders that to illuminate the present often requires that we look to, and reimagine, the past.
Yi’s photographs of urban life, captured mostly outside and on the move, were inspired in part by Jackson Pollock’s action painting. He took these pictures not just intuitively but almost at random, moving the camera, his body, or both, sometimes mounted on his arm or hung around his neck, and often without looking through the viewfinder first. The mostly black-and-white photographs that result are as blurry, claustrophobic, and raw as you’d expect. They suggest the adrenalized mood of a country disoriented by breakneck change and uneasy about the relationship between the individual and the collective.
We write you this public letter as professionals working in museums, arts organisations and universities, as well as supporters of Slovak art and culture. We urge you to reconsider your decision to dismiss the Director General (DG) of the Slovak National Gallery (SNG), Alexandra Kusá, following the dismissal of the Director of the Slovak National Theatre, Matej Drlička. This decision has undermined the independence of the cultural field in your country and damaged the trust in and reputation of Slovak culture internationally.
