Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis
There is a very different text to be written about “America” and “paradise” in late 2024. But these works and their different perspectives on history, the city, and the universe suggest that art can be something other than a screen onto which to project contemporary anxieties, like a bad dream that returns every four years. Instead, they are reminders of the many different ways of seeing the world in which we live.
Manifesta’s fifteenth edition has been divided into three clusters—“Cure and Care,” “Imagining Futures,” and “Balancing Conflicts”—spread across twelve districts in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The narrative thread of the event itself is equally dispersed. Within the three clusters, viewers encounter works that do not connect with each other—but do, however, with those of other clusters. This curatorial incoherence is perhaps due to the fact that this edition does not, in fact, have a curator.
Taja Cheek—currently artistic director at Performance Space New York, and an artist in her own right as L’Rain—has long advocated for the inclusion of sound artists and musicians in the gallery space, as central figures rather than an entertainment vehicle to lure crowds. This year’s Whitney Biennial featured a five-part performance program, curated by Cheek, featuring an array of performances deeply rooted in sound.
Paul’s work across diverse media and disciplines calls to mind Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of an “unusual archive,” proposed as a solution to the un-representability of trauma and related emotions of love, rage, grief, and shame. Cvetkovich conceives of this archive as ephemeral, consisting of oral and video testimonies, memoirs, letters, journals, and more, just as Paul’s work over the past decade draws on both individual and collective memories. The artist’s choice to record and present people’s daily lives negotiates alternative approaches to documentation, media, and the political yet unseen acts we all perform.
Ours is the generation of the fragment, the snapshot, the caption, the info-bite: dulled post-digital distortions of the pictorial and literary chop-ups that appeared in the interwar years, via George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, and Walter Benjamin. “brecht: fragments” provides a masterclass for understanding how cropped photographs and scraps of text might amount to more than social media gruel and instead, artfully combined, result in riotous dramatic forms, crisp counterpropaganda, and pertinent anti-capitalist critique.
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.
