and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
This sixteenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial—curated by Natasha Ginwala, Amal Khalaf, Zeynep Öz, Alia Swastika, and Megan Tamati-Quennell—foregrounds on work that is firmly grounded in its cultural contexts and unambiguous in its ethical commitments. But it is less clear that all of them triumph on their own terms as sculptures, videos, installations, or any of the other aesthetic strategies through which it is possible “to carry”—as the exhibition’s title puts it—ideas, principles, and feelings across the borders separating people, communities, and cultures.

The first striking thing about the work in “Electric Dreams” is how much of it is solid, physically insistent, handmade or drawn, not dramatically departing, in material or form or modes of display, from mid-century conventions in painting and sculpture. In the context of this show, some of the early works can appear quaintly mechanical instead of digital. But they appeal to an idea of the programmed machine.

Radha D’Souza outlined five foundational liberal fictions: the nature-people divide; the two-faced state comprising democracy and security; the fallacy of legal personhood, by which a corporation has the same rights as a natural person; and the idea that science and technology will solve all the world’s problems. D’Souza’s fifth myth was in fact a truth: as Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels once said, good propaganda should never lie but “decide what to tell and what not to tell.”

An ongoing strand of Serapinas’s practice involves acquiring and pulling apart dilapidated log-and-shingle buildings, reconfiguring and sometimes charring the scavenged materials, then presenting them in exhibition spaces. Examples of this architectural vernacular survive from as long ago as the nineteenth century in Lithuania as well as over the border in Poland and Belarus.

Asher, who died in 2012, may seem like one of the drier conceptual artists of his generation. His work was usually temporary and survives largely through documents and writing. His most famous pieces involved removing the front wall of a gallery or rebuilding every temporary wall ever installed in a museum. Yet a current survey at Artists Space, despite comprising mostly ephemera including printed matter, notes, and schematics (such as architectural plans for the Grinstein’s modified wall), captures the humor that made Asher so influential.

The art historian Thierry de Duve has characterized Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain as a “telegram” sent out in 1917 and only properly received and understood by a later generation, among whom it inspired the artistic revolutions of the 1960s. We might think of it less as an artwork authored “by” Duchamp, de Duve proposes, and more as a communication “from” him to artists of like intelligence and temperament, the majority of whom had yet to be born. It calls to mind those “lost” early radio transmissions that, despite not having been recorded on tape, continue faintly to bounce around the earth’s atmosphere, such that they might still be retrieved—and decoded—by someone with appropriately sensitive antennae tuned to precisely the right frequency.

Conviviality
A Screening of Films by Ericka Beckman
