What is at stake when images are used to construct realities conducive to power? How, as political subjects with our own biases, can we make informed judgements of images that support multiple interpretations, or are of uncertain provenance, or refuse altogether to be read? And how do we respond to the tendency to build dangerous conspiracies out of images that are, like the grainy shapes in Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation, essentially ambiguous? No one writing about images today can be indifferent to this crisis, and so it’s hardly surprising that it is a feature of this month’s—of every month’s—program.
In the opening pages of Working Girl, Sophia Giovannitti—artist, writer, sex worker—makes a case for her choice of “pleasure work” over the drudgery of a day job. “When I say make pleasure work, I mean to sell sex and art,” she writes, “not because doing what you love makes work more bearable, but because the particular economic conditions in these industries facilitate maneuvers and scams that allow people to work less and do what you love more.”
Everyone deals with future-dysphoria differently, but a recent group exhibition at the Uppsala Art Museum, “A Posthumous Journey Into the Future,” is a rich study of the alternatives to escapism. It presents the work of nine artists whose works consider the intractability of the future. Curator Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson justifies the ensemble as an example of archipelagic thinking, a notion proposed by Franco-Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant to think about the future without relying on monolithic or coherent concepts of territory and self.
The annual gathering of filmmakers and cinephiles at Oberhausen offers the latest opportunity to reconsider questions that have shadowed the festival almost since its inception: what do we mean by short film, and how does it relate to the wider fields of cinema and contemporary art? As the classification has been subsumed into “moving image” and migrated online and into the gallery, should we now think of it as a testing ground for approaches that might percolate into mainstream film-making, another channel through which artists might express ideas not confined to a single medium, or a discrete art form with its own histories and non-transferable stylistic characteristics?
Curated by Lesley Lokko, the 18th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale offers a firm and timely challenge to those who would dodge architecture's ecological responsibilities by appeal to some yet-to-be-invented technology. Typically understood as a global state of the union for the profession and broader spatial practices, this edition is largely unflinching and rigorous in its selection of projects which reject techno-solutionist “sustainability,” opting instead for a showcase of architecture for “decolonization and decarbonization.”
Prismatic Ground is one manifestation of what one might optimistically describe, to the surprise of jaded experimental film wonks like yours truly, as a new community centered around experimental work. Founded as an online program by curator Inney Prakash in 2021, the festival has evolved into a hybrid in-person and internet affair, suggesting something of the seamlessness between these domains. Where the avant-garde period was marked, as much as anything, by its ability to cultivate localized (if hermetic) scenes, today’s emergent experimental film communities offer an alternative to the tediously circular discourse around franchise products that is fan “culture.”
Visitors wander through eleven distinct capsules, each of which is grounded in a specific post-socialist geography (Ukraine, East Germany, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Moscow, Slovenia, and Croatia are all represented). Each capsule includes a mix of design artefacts, architectural representations, and artworks dating from the 1950s to the 1980s, and each addresses both public and private space.
Makeshift infrastructures evoke motion and traffic as well as incidents and happenings that are furtive, off-ledger, or premised on informal networks. These unmoored objects—available to touch and vulnerable to pilfering—are presented in ways that resist easy attribution to the contributing artists, attesting to a different logic of exhibition-making. This reluctance to discretize the works further manifests in the illustration of weather patterns that substitutes for a labelled floor plan, indicating a merging of indistinct “atmospheres.”
Nalini Malani’s first solo exhibition in Canada encompasses the conceptual approaches for which she is best known: strong feminist and activist perspectives on issues related to gender, race, bodily autonomy, and democratic rights; highly charged source material drawn from current or historic events; diverse literary references combined with shadowy, impressionistic figuration to produce immersive video environments; and an ongoing concern with erasure as both aesthetic device and political gesture.
Unlike literature or art, music appears to be nonrepresentational, at least at first. “But music also is a place of sorts,” says musicologist Holly Watkins, “replete with its own metaphorical locations, types of motion, departures, arrivals, and returns.” Songs articulate distance, texture, and intent. They respond to the acoustics of landscapes and social structures; they are amplified in some spaces and dampened in others. By listening to sounds—and the way they have been transcribed, adapted, and memorialized—we can trace otherwise invisible political interventions into landscapes and soundscapes and, in return, understand these interventions as documents, instructions, or scores.
