and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Its uneven apex, long sloping flanks, and crater-ish mien, gave rise to the enduring misperception of the mountain as a volcano. Thuring seized upon it, crafting a narrative around a favorite subject, an old familiar. What emerges from Thuring’s preparatory perambulations through internet searches, archival material, vintage postcards on eBay, maps, and photographs is a disarming series of paintings that read a bit like abstract translations of the source material. These are transmissions from across time and space, queered by technology, distorted by the turning over of centuries, and infused with Thuring’s irrepressible imagination and aesthetic panache.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/_THUR033_Thuring_It_is_Faulting_2024.jpg,1600)
Born in 1986, Tung majored in lacquer painting at Ho Chi Minh Fine Arts University but has since turned his attention to multidisciplinary work—sculptures and videos predominantly—centered on the morphing ecology, beliefs, and mythology of the Central Highlands. A 2019 article on the activities of Art Labor, the Ho Chi Minh-based collective of which he is a founding member (alongside artist Thao Nguyen Phan and writer-curator Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran), points out that Tung, while growing up in the highlands province of Gia Lai, “witnessed the precariousness of coffee farmers, including his own family.”
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This final film differs from his best-known diaristic works, which document a life in exile and the New York avant-garde scene, in the near total absence of human figures. The few people who do appear in Requiem are filmed from afar and seem to be ghostly and peripheral, evoking feelings of alienation, impermanence, and mortality. The primary imagery of the film comes from footage Mekas captured over three decades, using video and digital media from an early Sony camcorder to a pocket-sized Nikon. These cut flowers, garden blooms, wildflowers, and trees in full blossom are stitched together through his signature nonlinear editing.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/FormGroup_Jonas_Mekas_00001.jpg,1600)
The globalized field of contemporary art—at least as figured at this edition of the Biennale—presents artists and curators from the Global South with two strategies regarding identity. Either to “navigate” the field, using classic postcolonial tools such as hybridity and transitivity to find one’s own way in a system premised upon multiculturalism and fluidity; or to break through to an “authentic” identity, which is constantly displaced and accessible only as the trace of multiple erasures. These two approaches are apparent in the two pavilions’ color schemes: both use blue as the key, but signifying the largely secularized tradition, performed in a smooth digital space of the blue screen for Uzbekistan and suggesting spirituality and twilight on the steppe in the case of Kazakhstan.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/AVZ_UZBEKISTAN_8503.jpg,1600)
Chantal Akerman once told an interviewer that each of her films needs hallways, doors, and rooms. “Those doors and hallways help me frame things, and they also help me work with time.” […] “Travelling” puns with the French travelling, or tracking shot. Akerman’s camera often moved right-to-left, working against the Hollywood standard of narrative progression and challenging preconceptions of what constitutes an advance. People are in transit in Akerman’s films, and the camera moves with them. Subjects exit train stations, check into hotels, ride the subway, and queue for buses.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/Anne_es_80_les_4_contact_sheet_Fondation_Akerman_Akerman_.jpg,1600)
Sanadze was born in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, in 1976, surrounded by large-scale public sculptures of Lenin. As a child she lived next door to the prominent Soviet sculptor Valentin Topuridze (1907–80) and remembers the enormous hands and head of Lenin scattered around his garden. “We kids would climb them,” she has said, adding, “all these figures would be overgrown with grapes, and it was really beautiful, that ruined aesthetic that’s sort of classical art, but not in its perfect museum form.” Many of Topuridze’s public monuments were destroyed after Georgia gained independence.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/Nina_Sanadze_at_NGV_Sean_Fennessy_4_.jpg,1600)
Wu Tsang is interested in what she calls “resistant social life,” and has said she’s attracted to stories with “messy politics.” She is often concerned with territoriality, the spaces in between; she shares with her friend and sometime “band” member Fred Moten a concern with blurring, hinterlands, and interstitial spaces both literal and figurative. Past work has explored the social and gestural codes of sailors in a reworking of themes and motifs from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. And here the theme of flamenco is one with potential.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/Wu_Tsang_Moved_by_the_Motion_Carmen_2024_._production_Schauspielhaus_Zu_rich_co_commissioned_with_Hartwig_Art_Foundation_presented_in_Amsterdam_by_Hartwig_Art_Foundation_and_Holland_Festival._Photo_Ine_s_Manai4.jpg,1600)
This awareness of the archaic nature of cinema, and its relationship to nature, is at the base of Gabriel Chaile’s memorable installation Selva Tucumana [Tucumán Jungle] (2024), which signals an important change in his artistic vocabulary away from the large-scale adobe sculptures for which he is best known. These characteristic anthropomorphic sculptures also function as wood-fired ovens around which people can gather to participate in and observe communal rituals.
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/gabriel_chaile_detail.jpg,1600)
In 1991, when she was 12, the Vlora, a hijacked cargo ship carrying some twenty thousand Albanian refugees, unexpectedly docked in the Italian port city of Bari, near where Biscotti grew up. Many of the economic refugees were housed in a disused stadium. Skirmishes with Italian authorities ensued, resulting both in the refugees being repatriated and stricter border policies being implemented. A year later, Biscotti took a black-and-white photograph of the Adriatic Sea from Bari; using pen, she later superimposed onto this photo the outline of a hill, which she labeled “Albania.”
![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/0G7A4203.jpg,1600)
Radio-Activities
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![](https://images.e-flux-systems.com/613217_e009ea3f900630dd2950de614e44f00b.jpg,1600)