A sequence of ink on paper compositions from the mid-1960s tracks a seismic shift in Mohamedi’s practice. A work from circa 1965 shows a web of abstracted dandelion and dried leaf–like forms moving across the page like neurons seeking connections, demonstrating a shift towards minimalism. As does the one beside it, where fluid strokes give way to exuberant, overlapping nemaline scratches, whose cumulative shape is echoed in the next painting, where leaves are etched into black-ink shrubs on a smudged grey ground.

The Twofold Commitment revisits Trinh T. Minh-ha’s time-dipping Forgetting Vietnam (2015), a documentary feature about the mythical origins of Vietnam. Which is to say, it’s a book about a film which reflects on what the name of a country evokes of the history, people, and cultures associated with it. Seven interviews conducted between Trinh and eight media scholars and critics compose half of the book. Each approaches the filmmaker and writer’s work from a different tack, focusing on aspects of Forgetting Vietnam that are representative of her multi-hyphenate career.

Tongue in the Mind emerges out of almost ten years of collaborations between artist Juliana Huxtable and multi-instrumentalist Joe Heffernan, also known as Jealous Orgasm, who are joined by DJ and producer Via App on electronics. Huxtable’s art practice spans creative registers, and muses on themes including furry fandom and the psychedelic edges of queer desire. An acclaimed DJ, her inventive sets defy genre and expectations, whether she’s playing Berghain or the basement of a bar. Tongue in the Mind synthesizes these pursuits, and evidences the trio’s musical and artistic maturation.

Paglen's photographs often document an image’s refusal to disclose the stable proof that is expected from them. This does not mean that information about locations and practices is unimportant. The subjects of Paglen’s countersurveillance are not to be taken lightly. There is an earnest desire and a lot of work, technological expertise, and time put into locating and describing these objects as accurately as possible, even if that description turns out to be a repeated demonstration of the failure of evidence. It is worth emphasizing that confronting and acknowledging obstructions is not the same as resigning oneself to a lack of answers.

Developed collaboratively by Fundación Proa, the Americas Society, and Museo Amparo to explore the myth of El Dorado, its multivalence, and its contemporary resonances through the work of Latin American artists, the project comprises three distinct exhibitions. This serial form reflects, according to the organizers, the concept’s core elusiveness and its diverse manifestations around Latin America since 1492. It also refutes the very idea of Latin America—a geopolitics imagined by colonial capitalism and sustained by neoliberalism—by presenting three locally-specific approaches to the myth.

What is at stake when images are used to construct realities conducive to power? How, as political subjects with our own biases, can we make informed judgements of images that support multiple interpretations, or are of uncertain provenance, or refuse altogether to be read? And how do we respond to the tendency to build dangerous conspiracies out of images that are, like the grainy shapes in Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation, essentially ambiguous? No one writing about images today can be indifferent to this crisis, and so it’s hardly surprising that it is a feature of this month’s—of every month’s—program.

In the opening pages of Working Girl, Sophia Giovannitti—artist, writer, sex worker—makes a case for her choice of “pleasure work” over the drudgery of a day job. “When I say make pleasure work, I mean to sell sex and art,” she writes, “not because doing what you love makes work more bearable, but because the particular economic conditions in these industries facilitate maneuvers and scams that allow people to work less and do what you love more.” 

Everyone deals with future-dysphoria differently, but a recent group exhibition at the Uppsala Art Museum, “A Posthumous Journey Into the Future,” is a rich study of the alternatives to escapism. It presents the work of nine artists whose works consider the intractability of the future. Curator Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson justifies the ensemble as an example of archipelagic thinking, a notion proposed by Franco-Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant to think about the future without relying on monolithic or coherent concepts of territory and self.

The annual gathering of filmmakers and cinephiles at Oberhausen offers the latest opportunity to reconsider questions that have shadowed the festival almost since its inception: what do we mean by short film, and how does it relate to the wider fields of cinema and contemporary art? As the classification has been subsumed into “moving image” and migrated online and into the gallery, should we now think of it as a testing ground for approaches that might percolate into mainstream film-making, another channel through which artists might express ideas not confined to a single medium, or a discrete art form with its own histories and non-transferable stylistic characteristics?