Rather than attempt a linear survey of a career that was truncated almost as it took wing, the show leads with two groundbreaking installations of the early 1990s before offering a chronologically broader presentation of Butt’s paintings and graphic works on a separate floor. The refabrication of the fly-infested noticeboard—an early example of art incorporating a kind of biotechnology—resuscitates a matter crucial to Butt’s political relevance.
In September 2019, an eight-year-old girl named Ágatha Vitória Sales Félix was shot and killed by police in Rio de Janeiro as she was riding home in a small public bus with her mother. The officers argued that they had been fired upon first, and that they were in the midst of a wider war, part of the former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s “30 bullets for every bandit” crackdown on crime, during which nearly a third of all violent deaths in Brazil’s second largest city came at the hands of the state.
In 2020, the group exhibition “OTRXS MUNDXS” offered a snapshot of Mexico City’s young artists and collectives. Whereas that first show felt overly ambitious, occupying the whole of Museo Tamayo and adopting a theoretical framework that attempted to define a generation, the latest iteration goes in the opposite direction: abbreviated to a few galleries and the central patio, and lacking any coherent sense of structure.
However frustrating it can be that criticism must trail behind the news cycle, this means that it also resists the violently unstable model of history that a hyper-accelerated media environment propounds. Criticism narrates an encounter with the past that must take place at one remove. It depends on a belief in continuities and commonalities, which is to say a commitment to the principle that the past carries meaning in the present, and that every experience of the world is connected to our own.
If Indian artists have always been considered “cosmopolitan,” it’s perhaps because we tend to think of their migration outside of India towards Europe and the Americas: Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore reading law in London in the 1870s, or the world citizenship of Vikram Seth. Looking at “The Imaginary Institution of India,” I was propelled to consider migrations and movements within India itself: the circulation across time and place of artists, their works, and their ideas.
The exhibition’s chief draw is Murni, whose works, executed in her signature style of flat, simple forms in bold outlines and bright colors, operate in the register of the squalid-sacred: dicks, vaginas, breasts, high heels and sharp nails in all manner of hybridizations, permutations, and penetrations. Sexuality can be pain or pleasure, weakness or empowerment, sordid or spiritual.
