Azoulay selected 25 photographs from the 600 she had been shown, and made pencil drawings of them. They appear to have been lightly traced, the outlines of people, suitcases, and carts clear but not firmly insistent, the shading sometimes more so, events thrown into stark relief under an unforgiving sun. Below these “unshowable photographs,” and held also in window mounts, she added her own rather more interrogative captions, which ask questions of what is shown and not shown, and which the “truth” of the archive omit wholly.
Marx wants the reader to feel the full brutality of what capitalism does to laboring bodies. He wants to reveal the horror beneath the social codes by which the bourgeois protect themselves from the gory facts of the capitalist mode of production sustaining their existence. The bourgeois family home is built upon the jellied gore of the slaughterhouse. Marx wants to force the reader to look.
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.”