and art-agenda editorial is now e-flux Criticism
Begun in the late 1970s and only published in 1989, Ričardas Gavelis’s novel Vilnius Poker presents a nightmarish vision of Lithuania under Soviet rule as a rotting corpse, riddled with resentment and shot through with conspiratorial thinking. If the book feels newly relevant today, it is because it grounds a study of the political efficacy of conspiracy theories in close observation of the humiliating effects of colonial violence upon a populace.
The Cinema Batalha in Porto was a landmark in the city’s film culture. The Batalha Film Center, which opened in December, occupies the same modernist building and responds to the rise of new, expanded approaches to cinema. Its inaugural program consisted of a retrospective of films by Claire Denis; “Politics of Sci-Fi,” a screening program curated by artistic director Guilherme Blanc and chief programmer Ana David; Premium Connect (2017), a video installation by French-Guyanese artist Tabita Rezaire; and a number of special events and discussions.
At the heart of this group exhibition curated by Jitish Kallat are reproductions of the five envelopes on which Mahatma Gandhi, under a vow of silence, wrote messages to Lord Mountbatten on the eve of the Partition of India. The first of his scribbled responses to the last Viceroy of British India reads: “I am sorry / I cannot speak.” The phrase introduces some of the paradoxes that animate this brilliantly executed show about an historical trauma that continues decades later to be felt: silence as protest, mourning as action, absence as presence.
According to Benoît Maire’s methodology, waste is not what is rejected in the making of art, but what remains and paves the path towards an idea, a sculpture, an exhibition, a paragraph. Some elements might recede into the background of the wall, the painting, or the page, and others move forward in a continuous rearrangement of parts. The grid, a viewing tool used by Maire in his “Cloud paintings,” creates a new cartography meshing formats: from prison window to Instagram frame.
“If there is no outside for us, it is not because the institution is perfectly closed,” wrote Andrea Fraser in 2008. “It is because the institution is inside of us, and we can’t get outside ourselves.” This sentiment of identity entrapment is nowhere more evident than in her latest work, This meeting is being recorded (2021), in which the shape-shifting artist portrays seven white women in a closed-door meeting about internalized racism. The ninety-nine-minute video forms the nucleus of Fraser’s first US commercial gallery show in 13 years, at Marian Goodman.
Individually and collectively [these] works recreate moments from life in Eyal’s hometown—referred to only as small farm—where he came of age amidst the violent turmoil of the US-led invasion of Iraq. The titles of the pieces underscore Eyal’s propensity for narrative along with his acute awareness of its limitations; each enigmatic label ends with “and,” indicating its incompleteness, and suggesting that every encounter is a beginning, like tugging on a loose, seemingly extraneous thread that unexpectedly unravels the entire fabric.
The subterranean rooms of artist-run space Simian, in Copenhagen’s Ørestad district, could easily be mistaken for an underground bunker after the industrial apocalypse. Ørestad itself is a curious reminder of failed human design: an eerily deserted hangover from a bold urban plan to transform this area of wetlands on the edge of a nature reserve into a metropolitan center with gleaming glass buildings and a floating metro line. In the bowels of an old bicycle lockup, it feels as if the only souvenirs of the old industrial world are artworks by Toke Flyvholm, Yuri Pattison, Naïmé Perrette, and Lucie Stahl.
The works on view in this group show, in which several contemporary artists respond to the legacy of Harlem Renaissance-era painter Aaron Douglas, are united by a Black existential affinity with literature and the natural environment. The exhibition is constructed around four works by Douglas from the museum’s Walter and Linda Evans Collection of African American Art that center two of his key interlocutors: James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes.
Boris Johnson was a lavish gift to cartoonists. So it made sense that, to mark his ousting as Britain’s Prime Minister in summer 2022, the Cartoon Museum in London should stage an exhibition laying out his extraordinary trajectory. A symptomatic as well as an eccentric figure, this record of his presence in cartoons sheds light on wider issues with ramifications beyond the United Kingdom: the symbiosis between branded politicians and cartoonists, the bodies of populist leaders, and the role of revulsion in contemporary politics.
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.
