Jakarta Biennale 2024, “50 Tahun Jakarta Biennale 1974–2024”
Innas Tsuroiya
Every so often in its fifty-year history, the Jakarta Biennale has catalyzed a shift (the 1974 Indonesian New Art Movement started as a protest against its conservatism) or sparked a nationwide discourse about the state of Indonesian art (as with the experimental mid-nineties iterations). More recently, changes of format and structure—the cancellation of the 2000 edition due to insufficient funds, the 2009 “internationalization” in which other countries were invited to participate, the establishment of the Jakarta Biennale Foundation in 2014, the “pandemic edition” of 2021—have reflected developments in the way that contemporary art is made and understood. This anniversary edition of the Jakarta Biennale is presented as a celebration of its history, but the question remains of what is at stake.
At the main exhibition space in the Taman Ismail Marzuki complex—one of four venues alongside Gudskul, Komunitas Salihara, and Subo—a wall text and timeline is dedicated to the artists and art workers committed to the thankless work of biennial organizing. Yet beyond the attempt to historicize the exhibition and celebrate its continued existence, little information is provided about the curatorial framework of this iteration beyond that it has been organized according to a system resembling the “lumbung” practice of …
Nástio Mosquito’s “King of Klowns”
Jörg Heiser
This survey of Nástio Mosquito’s work from the early 2000s to the present begins, before it begins, before it begins. This cascade of overtures starts in the entrance hall of M HKA, which doubles as a reading room. In front of one of the bookshelves, a small cubicle monitor sits on a plinth: it shows Mosquito delivering a speech in the Senaat, one of the two chambers of the Federal Parliament of Belgium.
Partly because he is wearing a dark gray shirt and Malcolm X glasses, but mainly because of his charismatic voice and comportment, Mosquito evokes a long line of great Black orators from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin, as he switches between booming and almost whispering. It’s as if different registers of speech—the serious and the comical, the authoritative and the offensive—have been chopped up and mixed into a salad of address. He offers casual salutations that range from the N-word to “Ladies and Gentlemen.” After discussing the temptation to cite John F. Kennedy, he does so. Performative self-contradiction is the foundation of his act.
It becomes clear that Mosquito is also tapping into a long line of great Black tricksters, from Anansi to Richard Pryor. His puns …
Olivia Erlanger’s “Fan Fiction”
Caroline Elbaor
Four sculptures in the form of ceiling fans hang suspended in an otherwise empty gallery. These works—all dated 2024 and presented against the fluorescent lighting, bright-white walls, and cement flooring of a traditional white cube—are fully enmeshed in the architecture, resulting in an exhibition with all the hallmarks of aesthetic minimalism arranged for the sake of affect. The intended sense is of monotony. This is achieved by the simplistic setup and, more importantly, evokes the mundanity of domesticity that defines much of Erlanger’s practice across plays, films, installations, and sculptures.
Here, each sculpture is partially comprised of various home appliances—shower curtain rods, kitchen utensil holders, lamp cords, and wastepaper bins—that make up the ostensible fans, the blades of which are moulded into the shape of butterfly wings. These appliances reference her most recent short video, Appliance (2024), which debuted earlier this year in the American artist’s first extensive institutional solo exhibition in the US, at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. It is also screening here, in the gallery’s adjacent viewing room. Consistent with Erlanger’s use of science fiction and horror in earlier works to explore the psychology underpinning the idea of home, she here depicts absurd situations—the arm of a contractor …
Emily Jacir and Michael Rakowitz’s “That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star”
Cathryn Drake
In the San Paolo quarter of Rome, artists Emily Jacir and Michael Rakowitz staged a “performative” dinner to commemorate the life of Palestinian poet and translator Wael Zuaiter, executed by Mossad agents at his home in the city fifty-two years earlier. Organized by curatorial collective Locales, it was the final event in a public program focusing on the body as an artistic medium for learning and transformation. Nearly one hundred guests gathered at long tables on the terrace of Città dell’Utopia, an international social laboratory dedicated to communitarian activism located in an eighteenth-century farmhouse that was a trattoria and antifascist hub founded by Augusto Volpi in 1907 and later a refuge for resistance fighters during World War II. Now an anachronistic apparition surrounded by apartment blocks, it is still a welcoming, convivial hive.
The poignant title, evoking the far-reaching repercussions of every action, is taken from a poem by Francis Thompson that Zuaiter quoted in an article published in L’Espresso shortly before his assassination. Zuaiter was the first victim of the Israeli operation Wrath of God, ostensibly targeting those held responsible for the massacre carried out by Black September at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. In 1980, several Israeli …
Bassem Saad’s “Century Bingo”
Lua Vollaard
This overview of the past five years of Bassem Saad’s “world-historical” practice engages with different forms of mourning the victims of “the American Century.” The term, coined by Henry R. Luce in 1941 and which the Marxist scholar David Harvey has argued “disguised the territoriality of empire in the conceptual fog of a ‘century’,” finds its antidote here: Saad’s latest exhibition is grounded in events, people, and sites, merging documentary history with acid aesthetics and revolutionary zeal.
Commissioned for this exhibition is the film Permanent Trespass, made together with Sanja Grozdanić and staged as a theater performance in a previous iteration. Here, it is installed on a large screen showing a fictional narrative and a small screen intermittently showing archival footage: pop stars from the referenced eras juxtaposed with burning Kuwaiti oil fields. The main film is set in a Belgian art nouveau mansion, its furnishings haphazardly wrapped away for an impending sale. Professional eulogists lead this clearance of colonial-era assets, the dense script delivered deadpan by the artists themselves. They reflect on their job alongside the work of eulogizing—but what they’re eulogizing (the human cost of the American Century?) remains unclear.
In doing so, they face off with institutional …
Glenn Ligon’s “All Over The Place”
Novuyo Moyo
Glenn Ligon’s takeover of the Fitzwilliam Museum is so “all over the place” that I had to come back for a second visit to see things I’d missed the first time around. It is relevant to his nuanced but pervasive intervention that the museum was founded in 1816 when Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam left his collection of art and cultural artifacts to the University of Cambridge with a bequest to construct a museum of art and antiquities. This leaves it with twinned affiliation: both to an esteemed educational institution and to a landowner whose fortune derived in part—as recent research by the museum has unearthed—from his grandfather’s investment in the transatlantic slave trade.
Ligon’s multimedia work often interrogates race, even if it cannot be reduced to that subject, and his subtle interventions into the museum’s collection are consistent with his multilayered practice. On the ground floor, Ligon has selected objects from the museum’s collection of porcelain from Europe and Japan, showing them alongside his take on Korean Moon jars, painted a blackish hue instead of the traditional white. On the floor above, Ligon has rehung flower paintings from the collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch still lifes, rearranging them to form …
Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2024, “Correct Mistakes”
Océane Ragoucy
Barely twenty-four hours after it was declared that Georgia’s parliamentary elections had been won by Georgian Dream—a party founded by a pro-Russian billionaire—the country’s president, Salome Zourabichvili, denounced a “total falsification” of the vote and called on her fellow citizens to protest. It feels apt, therefore, that artistic directors Tinatin Gurgenidze, Otar Nemsadze, and Gigi Shukakidze should have chosen the theme of “Correct Mistakes” for the fourth Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, with its multiple meanings, from useful errors to their possible rectification. This edition focuses on the seizure of natural resources, landscapes exploited for profit, forgotten ecological histories and—more generally, as the biennial’s statement puts it—the “disregard for climate change.” Their radical, resolutely provocative approach points to the urgent role and responsibility of architects, urban actors, and activists in preserving the commons.
The biennial unfolds as a vibrant, multifaceted structure: exhibitions, screenings, workshops, symposia, off-the-beaten-track site visits, and “toxic tours” of polluted and damaged places in different parts of the city. The selected projects thus provide multiple access points to the complex connections between climate, resources, their extraction and appropriation, starting from Georgia but not restricted to it. National borders are never directly invoked. Rather, it is a matter of the …
62nd New York Film Festival, “Currents”
Almudena Escobar López
Days before the New York Film Festival opened, dozens of filmmakers—many from the “Currents” section—published a petition urging the festival to cut ties with Bloomberg Philanthropies due to concerns over its implication “in facilitating settlement infrastructure in the West Bank and denying Palestinians their basic rights.” During the fortnight, anti-war demonstrators interrupted Q&As and screenings, and a parallel Counter Film Festival was organized. How do we approach film-making after a year of live-streamed genocide in Gaza? This question lingered over the “Currents” shorts programs, curated by Aily Nash and Tyler Wilson, which seek to foreground “new and innovative forms and voices.” A select group of films from the programs challenged how images influence our perception of reality, particularly in contexts of violence, prompting critical reflection on our roles as viewers.
Two films in “The Will to Change” program reveal the limits of observation, turning the horror of witnessing war into an act of self-reflection. Black Glass (2024) by Adam Piron conjures the ghosts of the past (and the present) by speaking about the intrinsic relationship between early image-making technologies and the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. Piron examines Eadweard Muybridge’s early photographic work, commissioned by the US Army to capture …
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s “The Call”
George Kafka
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have in recent years been better known as spokespeople for the artistic possibilities of AI than as demonstrators of its uses. Numerous media profiles, their Interdependence podcast, and Dryhurst’s busy X account mean it has been easier to learn their opinions on AI than to engage with—and sometimes understand—the various tools, songs, images, and other experiments that the music/artist/research duo have produced.
Herndon and Dryhurst are both eloquent advocates for open-minded but certainly not uncritical engagements with AI for artistic practices and, by extension, its broader sociocultural impacts. They confidently tread the (admittedly very broad) ground between AI doomers, denialists, and Big Tech-boosters, with a particular focus on the ethical use of artists’ work to produce AI models—as seen in projects such as the website Have I been Trained?, which allows artists and photographers to find out if their work has been used to train AI models. And yet, approaching “The Call,” the duo’s first solo exhibition, at London’s Serpentine Gallery, I had little sense of what “art” awaited me and, I must admit, feared diagrams of neural networks were ahead.
Greeting visitors to Serpentine North is The Hearth (all works 2024), a wall-mounted instrument …
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s “Until we became fire and fire us”
Oliver Basciano
The deep boom of a subwoofer meets you on the stairs to the small gallery. Inside, a two-channel video projected across opposite walls shows barren landscapes with figures moving through them, close-ups of plants and foliage, and more besides, the imagery by turns sped up, slowed down, color-adjusted, and layered. One half is framed to the dimensions of the space; the second is projected at an angle, so the pictures invade the ceiling and floor. It is a hypnotic, unnerving assemblage.
On the gallery floor, between the two projections of Until we became fire and fire us (2023–ongoing), stand metal barricades, like sections of a security border, on which printed frames from the film are attached. Above, sheer fabric banners hang, printed from further images culled from the video. To one side, copies of a newspaper—the New York War Crimes, mimicking the design of the New York Times—are piled up on a pair of bricks and available for the visitor to take away. It tells a century-old story of Palestinian struggle and Israeli aggression through a succession of commissioned texts.
The materiality of all this stuff is in stark contrast to the subject of the thirty-two-minute, mixed-media work that lends …
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay”s “Unshowable Photographs”
Jeremy Millar
In 2009, the curator, filmmaker, and writer on visual culture Ariella Aïsha Azoulay visited the archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross (CICR) in Geneva to look at photographs taken in Palestine during the years 1947–50. Azoulay had already worked extensively in the Israeli state archives, creating from these another archive which she called Constituent Violence 1947–1950 (first published in book form in 2009), and hoped that the photographs held by the CICR would be somewhat different from those she had, in her words, “been able to view in Zionist archives.”
These are the years of the establishing of the state of Israel, of course, and of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” the violent displacement of approximately half the Arab population in Palestine—around 750,000 people. While the CICR had been present “at places in Palestine where massacre, expulsion, and destruction had taken place,” they had relatively few photographs, and most of these were not taken during the Nakba. Indeed, many of them were similar, though not identical, to those seen by Azoulay in Israeli archives—the same people, the same place, the same ongoing event, but just shown from a slightly different angle, a slightly different point of view.
But …
“Meditation Room: Sacred Spaces Program”
Natasha Marie Llorens
The tiled floor of Konsthall C has seen hard use, both in the twenty years it has functioned as an experimental art space and, before that, as the common laundry room for the rental apartments in this suburb of Stockholm. Time and traffic have eroded the diagonal pattern of beige and dark-gray squares, and now the floor looks clean and utilitarian. This kind of straightforward durability is the appropriately mundane ground for the inaugural exhibition of Mariam Elnozahy’s first program as Konsthall C’s artistic director. Her two-year thematic proposition “Sacred Spaces” is balanced between a positivist understanding of the sacred as someplace metaphysically safe and an idea that the contemporary art institution might offer “a place to discuss religious pluralism.” The intervention arises in a febrile context: a long-running debate in Swedish courts over whether burning the Koran could be seen as a form of political protest; an extreme rise in gang-related gun violence—Sweden is now second only to Albania in Europe—with attendant media coverage often emphasizing immigration and ethnic identity, with overtones of politico-religious affiliation.
It would have been easy to open a program along these thematic lines with something confrontational, but instead Elnozahy reproduced, inside the gallery, the …
“Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation”
Luise Mörke
On the Harvard campus, relics of Germanic high culture are never far away: a bronze replica of a medieval lion sculpture from Lower Saxony graces the courtyard of Adolphus Busch Hall, named for an émigré who made his fortune selling—what else?—beer and diesel engines. A counterpoint to that building’s historicist opulence can be found in the sober Modernism of the Law School’s graduate dorms designed by a team led by Walter Gropius during his tenure at the university. As ciphers for rigor, perfection, and intellectual prowess, mythical versions of Germany are deployed as fodder for the Harvard myth itself.
“Made in Germany? Art and Identity in a Global Nation,” at the university’s Busch-Reisinger Museum, adds a further chapter to this transatlantic double vision, focusing on art since 1980 from the GDR and the Federal Republic (FRG). However, national myth-making here gives way to an astute selection of artworks that pry open the cracks in a state that defines belonging foremost through adherence to cultural and linguistic standards, evident in the language and knowledge test that immigrants must pass for naturalization. “Made in Germany?” coaxes out the tense dialectics between a nation’s openness towards outside cultures and economies, and the nationalist …
Kim Lim’s “The Space Between. A Retrospective”
Adeline Chia
Kim Lim’s dark wood sculpture Pegasus (1962) is an earthbound, stiff-backed version of the mythical flying horse. Shaped like a totem, it has no discernible head or legs, only a central column to which two slim semi-circular pieces of wood (the “wings”) are hinged. Pegasus, steed of the muses and symbol of the unbridled imagination, is portrayed here with a certain restraint. In fact, the sculpture reminds me of a practitioner of another disciplined art—a straight-backed ballerina moving between first and second positions, arms opening and closing gracefully.
Subtlety and economy define Kim Lim’s practice, which includes abstract wooden and stone-carved sculptures, often inspired by nature, as well as prints that were developed in tandem. Only in the past two decades has Lim received attention in her two home contexts: Singapore, where she was born in 1936, and England, where she attended art school, started a family, and lived until her death from cancer at the age of sixty-one. Major shows at Tate Britain and Hepworth Wakefield have situated her in British postwar art history alongside Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Lim’s husband William Turnbull. The Singapore Tyler Print Institute staged a retrospective of her prints in 2018, establishing her …
Diego Marcon’s “La Gola”
Michael Kurtz
Diego Marcon’s short films pair idiosyncratic approaches to animation with painful and provocative subject matter. In Monelle (2017) sleeping girls are tormented by ghoulish CGI figures amid the darkness of the old Fascist headquarters in Como. In The Parents’ Room (2021), a father, played by an actor wearing an emotionless mask, performs an opera about how he murdered his family. And in Fritz (2024) a computer-animated boy hangs from a noose, half-dead but still yodelling.
His new film, La Gola (2024), dramatizes an epistolary exchange between Gianni and Rossana, who are represented by hyper-realistic mannequins. The two characters appear in a series of close-ups, every time in a new outfit and location, as their letters are read in a voiceover backed by organ music. Gianni recounts the details of a recent feast, from a medieval soup served in an eggshell to Torta Fedora, a Sicilian cake covered in “mischievous ruffles” of “whipped ricotta,” which he calls “the bakeable Baroque!” Meanwhile, Rossana sends updates on her mother’s declining health, reporting an assortment of gruesome ailments including “flaccid little blisters” that ooze “syrupy fluid” and “diarrhoea accompanied by mucus.”
In this caricature of traditional gender dynamics, he indulges in unchecked consumption while …
Sam Ashby’s “Sanctuary”
Dylan Huw
Sam Ashby’s film Sanctuary (2024), which forms the centerpiece of this solo exhibition, examines the architectural and psychic remains—and perhaps under-explored potential—of a queer spiritual community founded, in the seventies, by onetime film director Christopher Larkin. When Larkin’s 1974 directorial debut, the gay romantic drama A Very Natural Thing, met a lukewarm critical and audience reception, he reacted in the way gay men throughout history have confronted such disappointments: by packing his bags and fashioning himself a new identity. Larkin lived nomadically for much of the remaining decade, sustained by family money and the liberating atmospheres of Fire Island and San Diego, before re-emerging as the sexual guru Peter Christopher Purusha Androgyne Larkin.
The pursuit of all-consuming spiritual ecstasy by means of fisting, and other anally focused activities, formed the basis of his teachings. These were inflected equally by New Age pop psychology and, more improbably (or not), by his experiences as a young Catholic monk. The prophet set forth his doctrine in his book The Divine Androgyne According to Purusha (1981), a remarkable document of then-nascent fetish culture which documents his quest for “cosmic erotic ecstasy in an Androgyne bodyconscious,” seeking extreme sexual pleasure as a method of obliterating …
Art Labor’s “Cloud Chamber”
Stephanie Bailey
Referring to the cà phê võng providing rest and refreshment to drivers on Vietnam’s provincial highways, this first institutional survey of Art Labor’s activities, curated by Celia Ho, opens with an invitation: to sit (or lie) on a hammock and drink Vietnamese coffee brewed from robusta beans grown in the country’s Central Highlands. The staging of this vernacular rest-stop performs a spatial reconfiguration. No longer are we in Hong Kong, but somewhere in Tây Nguyên, located within the Southeast Asian Massif known as Zomia, its complex textures expressed by a chorus of sculptures, installations, and instruments created by Art Labor—founded in 2012 by artists Thao Nguyen Phan, Truong Cong Tung, and Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran—and collaborators from the Indigenous Jarai community, with whom Art Labor have been working since 2016, alongside invited artists. Among them is musician and artist R Cham Tih, whose standing bamboo instruments in the gallery embody the recuperation of lost Jarai musical traditions through restorative innovation. While K’loong Put (2024) is a traditional xylophone, albeit with additional notes, Klek Klok (2024) is a new design drawing on traditional bamboo gongs used to deter wild birds from the fields.
A dialectics of loss and recovery infuses this exhibition, …
Gregg Bordowitz’s “Dort: ein Gefühl”
Kirsty Bell
Gregg Bordowitz has been writing, publishing, performing, and teaching consistently and prolifically since the early nineties in New York, making “agitprop” videos as an AIDS activist and member of ACT UP. Though his material output is slim, his wordcount is substantial. Rather than focus on the early activist works for which he is best known, this exhibition concentrates on writing as the core of his artistic practice, but also as a daily habit—“writing as an activity of thought,” as Kunstverein Director Fatima Hellberg puts it—that becomes material testament to his ongoing presence, as a long-time survivor of HIV.
To create an exhibition from this ephemeral practice is audacious, particularly in the Kunstverein’s cavernous former flower market hall, but Hellberg has a track record of conjuring shows from unruly or nebulous bodies of work (David Medalla’s 2021 retrospective, for example, or the large-scale solo exhibition of Georgian artist Tolia Astakhishvili in 2023). In the absence of discrete objects, the exhibition relies on subtle gestures, the first of which is a narrow red line affixed to the wall, three inches from the floor, that follows the entire perimeter of the exhibition space. It establishes intention and constructs a kind of “holding environment,” …
Jenna Bliss’s “Basic Cable”
Chris Murtha
The idea of “Wall Street,” a metonym for global capitalism measured against whatever remains of “Main Street,” has far outgrown its connection to the New York thoroughfare that traces the path of the city’s seventeenth-century border wall. Today, the home of the New York Stock Exchange is heavily secured by bollards, fences, and barricades that regulate and restrict public access. Armed with her camera, native-New Yorker Jenna Bliss roams the narrow canyons of Lower Manhattan. Her unsteady lens lingers on passersby and commercial storefronts; gazes skyward to scale gleaming towers; and hovers, from afar, on the skyline’s iconic, yet ever-morphing silhouette. With the September 11 attacks, the 2008 financial crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic as inflection points, Bliss blends fact with fiction, past and present, to probe our collective perception of Wall Street as a place and an idea—from the ground up.
To produce the Super 8 films and photographic lightboxes on view at Amant, Bliss splices and recombines her material so that her subjects are neither fully revealed nor entirely obscured, but rather held in disorienting tension. Conspiracy and Spectacle (both 2021 and under two minutes long) loop continuously on box monitors mounted atop tall pedestals arranged to mimic …
Gustav Metzger’s “And Then Came the Environment”
Rob Goyanes
Gustav Metzger hated cars. Not only for the pollution and noise, but because of their association with the hermetically sealed “gas vans” that Nazis used as mobile extermination chambers, diverting exhaust fumes into the vehicles’ interiors. Conceived but not realized for the United Nation’s first world conference on the environment in 1972, Metzger’s installation Project Stockholm, June (Phase 1)—finally executed for the Sharjah Biennial in 2007—included 120 cars, parked around a clear rectangular structure, their motors running constantly and filling the space with gas. The resonances with the United Arab Emirates (one of the world’s largest oil economies), and Los Angeles itself, site of this exhibition, are clear.
Metzger died in 2017, at the age of 90. When Hauser & Wirth started representing his estate three years later, it marked the first time that his work had been shown in one of the commercial galleries that he memorably described as “Capitalist institutions. Boxes of deceit.” “And Then Came the Environment” is one of more than seventy exhibitions and events in the Getty’s Southern California–wide PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative. Featuring works made between 1961 and 2014, the show positions the artist in its press materials as an advocate …
15th Gwangju Biennale, “PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century”
Ben Eastham
The main exhibition of the 15th Gwangju Biennale is entered via a gloomy “sound tunnel” filled with dissonant noise and leading into a silent room resembling an abandoned office space. The ceiling tiles of Cinthia Marcelle’s installation There Is No More Place in This Place (2019–24) are disarrayed as if by some natural disaster, and the scrambling of the senses effected by these two environments marks a promising start to an exhibition that pledges to “reflect our new spatial conditions and the upheavals of the Anthropocene.”
The central show at Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Hall is spread across five floors that the visitor ascends from ground level. The atmosphere in its lower reaches is apocalyptic, exhausted, and dystopian, an aesthetic of broken wires and fragmentary ruins gathered under a dismal light and typified by an impressive series of monumental sculptures by Peter Buggenhout resembling John Chamberlain’s junked cars. Yet where the American artist conjured both the joy of the open road and the horror of the high-speed crash, Buggenhout’s crumpled architectures set the tone for the opening’s relatively narrow—and notably dour—emotional register.
Their collective title, “The Blind Leading the Blind,” neatly captures the impression that visitors to an exhibition curated by …
Steirischer Herbst ’24, “Horror Patriae”
Jörg Heiser
A hard rain had been falling the week before the opening of Steirischer Herbst, the annual art festival in the Austrian city of Graz. The river running through the Styrian capital was wild with uprooted trees after floods that, in northern Austria, left five dead. The catastrophe took on greater significance given that it coincided with the run-up to the general election on September 29, the polls for which are led by the far-right populist Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ.) and its brazen climate change denialism. Riffing on the Lord’s Prayer, their billboard address to the electorate—Euer Wille geschehe (Your will be done)—looked less enticing submerged in brown floodwater.
And so the billboard project by Vienna-based Yoshinori Niwa got off to a perfect start, having appeared two days before the opening in the center of town. As I walked by, I observed a police officer on her walkie-talkie, anxiously awaiting instructions. The nervousness was caused by Niwa’s parody of a FPÖ. election poster, in which an “EPÖ.” party announces Jedem das Unsere (To Each Our Own, playing on the infamous slogan at the entrance to Buchenwald concentration camp) and candidate “Dr. Steinapfel” holds a bratwurst to his ear. The poster …
Survival Kit 15, “Measures”
Xenia Benivolski
Can belief bring things into being? There’s a theory that the word “Riga” derives from the ancient Livonian word “Ringa,” which implies a closed loop or ring—a shared reference to its circular harbor and the cyclical history that animates it. This explanation has been widely accepted, despite being disproven; it’s an urban myth which has—perhaps due to its lyrical charm—become a kind of truth. Many works in this year’s edition of Survival Kit, curated by Jussi Koitela, playfully straddle the line between fact and fiction, exploring degrees of constructed truths that hold special meaning to the city residents. Based in a former civic legislation building where bureaucrats once made decisions, and in a local hub across the river, the exhibition forms a bridge between Riga’s different hemispheres, timelines, and generations.
Survival Kit is a festival born out of necessity in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, when people began leaving Latvia to find work elsewhere, shrinking Riga’s population by about a third. Its mission was to animate the empty spaces left behind by people and industry, preserving local history and potentiality through the creation and layering of new meanings. Not all of them are here to stay. Linda Boļšakova’s installation …
Jenny Holzer’s “WORDS”
R.H. Lossin
Jenny Holzer began making her ongoing series of “Truisms” in 1977. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, truism indicates “a self-evident truth, esp. one of minor importance; a statement so obviously true as not to require or deserve discussion. Also: a proposition that states nothing beyond what is implied in any of its terms.” The word “truism” means more or less the same thing as “platitude” or “cliché”—unremarkable, banal observations—but the fact of its orthography nudges it, just slightly, toward a charged moral terrain of reality and deception.
Today the word’s appearance, unlike its synonyms, reminds us how contentious such a notion of obvious and easy truth has become. The same statement is either widely repeated nonsense or unquestionable fact depending on who you ask. This has always been the point of Holzer’s text-based works. “Truism” underscores the tension produced by common sense and capital T truth that animates her scrolling digital billboards, engraved park benches, projections, and painting of redacted documents.
Making strange claims in the form of a brief declarative statement or maxim draws attention to the ways that sense becomes common (or doesn’t) and underscores how difficult, if not impossible, it is to produce …
Busan Biennale 2024, “Seeing in the Dark”
Harry Burke
In his posthumously published book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia (2023), David Graeber traces the impact that stories of Madagascar’s self-governing pirate settlements had upon the invention of Enlightenment reason in the seventeenth century, to make the point that much of what’s thought of as European or “western” thought in fact originates elsewhere. The late anthropologist’s concept of “pirate enlightenment” is a point of departure for “Seeing in the Dark,” on view at four venues in the South Korean port city of Busan.
What does it mean to see in the dark? Our pupils dilate in darkness, letting more light into our eyes. If we still can’t see, we turn to other senses: we listen, we feel. Many works in this biennial explore expanded ideas of visuality, or probe other strategies of multisensory perception. At Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Sorawit Songsataya’s installation Two Bridges with 7 Notes and 42 Strings (2024) incorporates piles of dried fish and cuttlebone, gathered from Busan’s shorelines and busy markets, to evoke the scents of their granduncle’s fish sauce factory, associating their native Thailand with their family’s diasporic home in Aotearoa. Songsataya has put onyx crystals and dried plants on the sculpture Ranad …
Manifesta 15
Juan José Santos
The defining model of European architecture in the twentieth century is not Bauhaus, Brutalism, Expressionism, or Functionalism; it is the detention camp. This idea is proposed by Domènec’s installation A Century of European Architecture (2024). Displayed in the old Mataró prison, it shows floor plans of spaces built to imprison people without charge from a World War I-era internment camp in Great Britain to the Moria refugee camp on Lesbos. The installation reflects Manifesta’s broader remit of framing engagements with European history with contemporary art, and helping audiences position themselves in relation to its social and political present. The impact of Domènec’s work is greatly enhanced by the space in which it is shown: Mataró was the first panopticon-style prison in Spain. Unfortunately, not every piece in this biennial is as substantial or shown in contexts as apt or as focused as this.
Manifesta’s fifteenth edition has been divided into three clusters—“Cure and Care,” “Imagining Futures,” and “Balancing Conflicts”—spread across twelve districts in the Barcelona metropolitan area. The narrative thread of the event itself is equally atomized and dispersed. Within the three clusters, viewers encounter works that do not connect with each other—but do, however, with the curatorial approach of …
Whitney Biennial Performance Program
Sanna Almajedi
Taja Cheek—currently artistic director at Performance Space New York, and an artist in her own right as L’Rain—has long advocated for the inclusion of sound artists and musicians in the gallery space, as central figures rather than an entertainment vehicle to lure crowds. This year’s Whitney Biennial featured a five-part performance program, curated by Cheek, featuring an array of performances deeply rooted in sound. Artists Debit, Sarah Hennies, Holland Andrews, Alex Tatarsky, and JJJJJerome Ellis presented electronic music, improvised sounds, an experimental music ensemble, and a sonic exploration of language.
The program began with Debit, playing music from her album The Long Count (2022), which imagines the music of the Mayan civilization through a theatrical and fantastical three-act performance, using intense drone sounds and samples of precious and eerie wind instrumentation. The stage consisted of a mountain made out of a pile of dirt/wood, spot lights and a curtain that was lifted at the end of the show to unveil the Whitney’s majestic view of the Hudson River, alluding perhaps to a call for the land. Debit used synthesizers which, according to the press release, “have sampled and processed the sounds of Late Postclassic Maya wind instruments. Using tones from …
“brecht: fragments”
Isobel Harbison
If each generation gets the drug it deserves, it also deals its own communicative form. Ours is the generation of the fragment, the snapshot, the caption, the info-bite: dulled post-digital distortions of the pictorial and literary chop-ups that appeared in the interwar years, via George Grosz, Hannah Hoch, and Walter Benjamin. Bertolt Brecht explored the form in a dramaturgy that poked at a public unresponsive to the rise of totalitarianism. Featuring material that is now a century old, “brecht: fragments” provides a masterclass for understanding how cropped photographs and scraps of text might amount to more than social media gruel and instead, artfully combined, result in riotous dramatic forms, crisp counterpropaganda, and pertinent anti-capitalist critique.
The exhibition is divided into two parts. The first includes a selection of paper elements from the Bertolt Brecht Archive (of its total of 200,000 folios) at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, displayed in climate-controlled vitrines or copied and pasted across the walls and other props. A set of never-displayed collages (BBA 1198, 1941-47) shows how Brecht clipped original German press photographs and stuck them to paper in pairs and trios to explore images of social formations, urban gatherings, couplings and trysts, and the male …
David Medalla’s “In Conversation with the Cosmos”
Debra Lennard
In David Medalla’s kinetic, adventuresome world, the smallest of gestures can have far-reaching effects. So goes the origin story of his well-known work, A Stitch in Time, first initiated in 1968. The artist had arranged to meet two of his former lovers, who were passing through London, at Heathrow airport, where he gifted them each a handkerchief, needle, and thread, to help them alleviate the tedium of transit. Years later, in Schiphol airport, he saw a handsome young backpacker shouldering an unusual-looking object: a hefty roll of patchworked fabric, studded with adornments. At the base of the patchwork, in Medalla’s raconteur telling, was one of the original, gifted handkerchiefs. Off went the backpacker and, with him, the fabric creation. After that, Medalla said, “I started to make different versions of A Stitch in Time in different places.”
A Stitch in Time—a participatory artwork, typically displayed as a long sheet of cotton onto which audiences are invited to sew whatever they choose, using thread provided—is at the Hammer Museum in archival form only: Medalla’s handwritten account of the work’s origin and list of its installations from 1968 onward, together with two small boxes of thread used in previous displays. It’s an …
“Crip Arte Spazio: The Disability Arts Movement in Venice”
Kenny Fries
The past few years have seen more disability-themed art exhibitions staged worldwide. The majority of these exhibitions, most notably “Crip Time” (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main), included both disabled and non-disabled artists and were curated by non-disabled curators, resulting in a medicalized focus with a lack of historical context. It seems a recent emphasis on exhibits focusing on “the body,” first prompted by an academic interest in transhumanism, and then perhaps primed by Covid-19, have led to a co-opting, of sorts, of disability for disability or disability-adjacent exhibitions.
Now, “Crip Arte Spazio: The Disability Arts Movement in Venice“ changes this trajectory. The exhibit focuses on the UK Disability Arts Movement (DAM)—its history and its contemporary progeny. The exhibit is curated by David Hevey, the CEO of Shape Arts, the UK disability-led arts organization and producer of “DAM in Venice.”
This transformation of perspective is clear even before entering the exhibit. Parked outside—and lifted front first to a forty-five degree angle—is Gold Lamé (2014), sculptor Tony Heaton’s refashioned National Health Service (NHS) Invacar. Heaton, perhaps the best known of the DAM artists, encases in gold what was a blue vehicle given by the state health service to disabled drivers, …
Harun Farocki’s “Inextinguishable Fire”
Leo Goldsmith
Greene Naftali’s new exhibition of works by Harun Farocki derives its title from perhaps the German filmmaker’s most famous work, a gently excoriating and laser-sharp 1969 film about the complicity shared amongst politicians, Dow Chemical executives, and ordinary workers in the production of the chemical weapon napalm. Inextinguishable Fire remains utterly devastating, a frightening but cogent delineation of the phases of dissociation we experience as we gaze at media images of atrocity, and a methodical examination of how the abstraction of labor makes us unconscious of our complicity in the violence of war.
Here, however, the specificity of Farocki’s title is, along with its definite article, lost. This lends it a more nebulous quality. Perhaps the “inextinguishable fire” in question refers not to a chemical weapon, the slightest drop of which—the film’s voiceover narration tells us—burns for half an hour at a temperature of 3,000 degrees Celsius. In the context of a show that marks a decade since the filmmaker’s death, the title almost sounds like a tone-deaf tribute to Farocki’s burning legacy. It loses its precision as a catch-all for a group of works that branches two different phases of the filmmaker’s career (the 1960s and the 2000s) and …
“Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s”
Ksenya Gurshtein
Walking through this exhibition of some 250 works by nearly a hundred artists working in the former Eastern Bloc, I was forced at one point to turn back and re-enter it through the exit so that a mess left by a “service” dog could be cleaned up. Doubling back to go forward was an apt metaphor, I thought, for the frequent adjustments to circumstances that these artists working either unofficially or within the “second public sphere” had to perform throughout the period covered by this major historical overview.
Indeed, one of the biggest accomplishments of a show covering six former countries that constitute nine present-day ones (Poland, Romania, Hungary, the former East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia) is that it conveys the complex lived reality of artists who, while making work for the same multifaceted reasons as their peers elsewhere in the world, were constrained by various degrees of state hostility during a series of asynchronous national “thaws” and “freezes” imposed by the Soviet “brother.”
The exhibition is noteworthy for how much it tries to accomplish and the possibilities for discovery it offers, with works ranging from heartbreaking to whimsical. Organized into four large sections, it covers the themes of “Public …
Caragh Thuring
Fanny Singer
As a kid growing up in Berkeley, I oriented myself by the silhouette of Mount Tamalpais, crisscrossed its slopes on foot in every season, even touched fingers to a rare flocking of snow at its peak. That an artist living 5,500 miles away might pay homage to this local landmark without ever having seen it in person—as the London-based painter Caragh Thuring has done—was a compellingly fantastical proposition.
My mind, of course, went to Etel Adnan, whose vivid, Platonic paintings of the mountain are among her most iconic. From the time the Lebanese-American artist and writer moved to Sausalito in the late 1970s—where it was in plain and constant view—and well after her move to Paris in later years, Adnan painted hundreds of views of Mount Tamalpais, which she described as “the very center of my being.” You cannot look at Thuring’s string of small canvases (smaller than she has worked on for years), and not think of Adnan’s intimate, lapidary portraits of the same landmark.
Yet Thuring swiftly and assertively makes the subject her own. The painting opening the exhibition, Given Enough Goading (all works 2024), transforms Mount Tamalpais into one of the artist’s recurring subjects: a volcano, replete …
Truong Cong Tung’s “The Disoriented Garden… A Breath of Dream”
Max Crosbie-Jones
Across the highlands of Vietnam, gourds have stored water, made music, and inspired legends for centuries. In his travelling solo show, Truong Cong Tung finds yet another use for these sinuous plants. The state of absence… Voice from outside (2020–ongoing) is an installation of soil boxes upon which dried, lacquered gourds of miscellaneous shapes and sizes appear to pump liquid through tangles of clear PVC piping. The illusion created by these crudely networked calabashes, a few of which overflow with seeds, burbling fluid or slowly expanding plumes of iridescent foam, is of a brittle, delicately balanced biosphere or microcosmos. Listening to its clicks and murmurs, I sense it’s one that is operational yet tilting towards decline: the larger of Jim Thompson Art Center’s two galleries also houses a video-projection screen wreathed with foraged detritus (twigs, a satellite dish, lengths of gauzy fabric, curtains of threaded wood beads, et cetera). Meanwhile, a dusky ochre glow and strong shadows evoke a state of autumnal decay.
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 …
Jonas Mekas’s “Requiem”
Lukas Brasiskis
Flowers were important to Jonas Mekas throughout his life and work, serving as a recurrent visual and thematic motif. Starting from the early 1950s, after his arrival in New York, the great avant-garde filmmaker would record his daily life, later revisiting and editing it into cohesive yet nonlinear stories. Among the best-known of these films is Lost, Lost, Lost (1976), which contains a memorable scene in which the artist, referring to himself as a “monk of the order of cinema,” captures close-ups of a grassy field in the early dawn. This almost ritualistic act illustrates perfectly how Mekas connected to nature through the medium of film.
Not only did he credit his early mentor, Marie Menken, with teaching him how to film these delicate subjects (Menken’s 1957 Glimpse of the Garden uses rapid edits to capture their ephemeral beauty), but they are frequently referenced in his poetry: “Flowers die / and return to the earth, / with the same scent / touching faces,” he wrote in 1966. Given his lifelong fascination with the natural world, it seems appropriate that his final film Requiem (2019)— made when he was ninety-six, now installed in this deconsecrated seventeenth-century church—should be an observation and …
Chantal Akerman’s “Travelling”
Max Levin
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.” Akerman’s first major retrospective in her native Brussels showcases the breadth of her time-based achievements across an art-deco labyrinth one could spend days within. The exhibition opens with digital restorations of four 8mm films submitted with Akerman’s 1967 application to art school. Projected alongside each other asynchronously, the silent snapshots drift between frenetic observation and acted scenes with Akerman’s mother and friends. These are the earliest examples of Akerman’s radical filmmaking that she would go on to call “documentary bordering on fiction.” A cinema of ethically crossing thresholds.
“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. Les Rendez-vous D’Anna (1978), Akerman’s first film with major distribution, is almost entirely composed from travel passages. Not screened in …
Nina Sanadze
Lauren O’Neill-Butler
How should a monument be? Who deserves one? And who decides? One response pertinent to Nina Sanadze’s engrossing survey exhibition in her homebase of Melbourne occurred in January 2024, on the eve of Australia Day. Activists there removed a sculpture of Captain Cook and left behind the spray-painted words “The colony will fall” on the plinth. When authorities announced that the statue would be reinstated, the sense was of history reasserting itself. Sanadze’s show, which features installations and sculptures that repurpose fragments of historic statues, explores the way monuments—from sculptures to photographs—shore up particular versions of history, apparently doomed to reoccur.
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 its independence from the Soviet Union in April …
Wu Tsang and Moved by the Motion’s Carmen
John Douglas Millar
Discussing her mode of collaboration, Wu Tsang has remarked that “I always feel the collaboration mandate is: if you’re going to do this, you have to fuck it up. You can’t do it respectfully, you have to almost disrespect it. You have to take it, change it, transform it, make it yours. Do to it what it does to you.” Strange then that Tsang and her collaborative band Moved by the Motion’s version of—intervention into, exploration through—Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera Carmen at the Royal Theatre Carré is so respectful at every level; benign, in fact, to the point of offensive.
There are two narrative lines: Bizet’s operatic rendering of the tragic story of the passionate Roma cigarette factory worker Carmen murdered by a former lover, the soldier Don José, after leaving him for a toreador is the first. The second follows a single-minded forensic archaeologist, played by Perle Palombe, in her attempt to have a Spanish Civil War grave opened. In this grave is said to be the body of the Red Paloma, a flamenco singer forced to perform in front of Franco before being executed. The archaeologist’s attempts are thwarted by a senior figure in the institution where she …
Gabriel Chaile’s “Los jóvenes olvidaron sus canciones o Tierra de Fuego”
Filipa Ramos
Humans became human by representing themselves and others. By painting images on cave walls of animals that mimicked those they chased, early humans produced the imaginaries and traditions that define us as a species. With their drawings, they invented past and future and connected memory to desire, remembrance to anticipation, trauma to anxiety. The images on those walls might be still, but the stories they told were in motion, animated by the light cast by flickering fires. As such, it could be said that the history of cinema predates written history. Cinema emerged from the animals whose images, engraved in their own blood and hair, expressed motion through time and space, and moved their audiences.
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 figures for which he is best known. Born in San Miguel de Tucumán in 1985, the Lisbon-based artist has often sought inspiration in land and kin. His characteristic anthropomorphic sculptures—whose aesthetics echo the precolonial creations of his birthplace—are both private and public. Connected to …
Rossella Biscotti’s “Title One, I dreamt, Clara and other stories”
Sean O’Toole
The earliest work in Rossella Biscotti’s first institutional survey predates her training at the Naples Academy of Fine Arts by a decade. 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,” also adding a fence, its central feature identified in Italian with the word cancello, or gate.
Displayed in the first of six rooms devoted to Biscotti’s thematically fluid and research-intensive work, this untitled photo highlights the importance of the sea in the artist’s work. Far from being a hackneyed subject, the sea emerges—episodically rather than serially—as a space that has enabled Biscotti to develop and refine her central artistic gesture: the recovery and visualization of “untold stories and unrepresented people”. Take Clara (2016), a sculptural installation …
Biennale Gherdëina 9, “The Parliament of Marmots”
Novuyo Moyo
The ninth Biennale Gherdëina takes its title from a Ladin myth that is, in part, a cautionary tale. It narrates the series of tragedies that follows when the Fanes—the indigenous people of the Dolomites—betray a pact with their animal allies, the marmots. The Kingdom of Fanes—a national epic that roams across Mediterranean, North Africa, and the Middle East—informs an exhibition that dwells on themes of interspecies relations, communal identity, and collaboration. As a place where people, cultures, and languages meet (German, Italian, and to a lesser extent, Ladin—the language of the Fanes—are used interchangeably), the Dolomite mountains on the border of Italy and Austria provide the ideal backdrop for these reflections.
In the darkened theater of Cësa di Ladins Museum, a bird’s song plays over speakers. Starting off with sweet melodious notes, Ruth Beraha’s Il cielo è deI violenti (The sky belongs to the violent, 2024) soon multiplies and swells, converging in discordant screeches that remind us that nature can be comforting and accommodating but also menacing and overwhelming—like the marmot, a cute-looking ground squirrel which has, reasonably, been described as “vicious.” The song loops back to the beginning, maintaining the tension between calm and panic. Beraha picks up the …
Rahima Gambo’s “Alternative Central Area Locations”
Michael Kurtz
When the Nigerian government confirmed its plan to construct a new capital in the seventies, it was intended to be a glorious symbol of a prosperous independent nation. Situated in the middle of the country, Abuja would unify the federation’s distinct ethnic groups, redistribute its growing population, and give concrete form to its booming oil revenue. But, mired by decades of political maneuvering and mismanagement, the city instead became a notorious example of the government’s neglect of its people in favor of ruling elites and foreign partners. The contract for the masterplan was won by a consortium of American firms and Japanese architect Kenzō Tange was hired to design the Central Business District. Over 800 villages were dispossessed of their ancestral lands to make way for the city, where insufficient housing stock later forced many into slums on the outskirts. The new capital had been dreamed up in corporate boardrooms around the world. In Rahima Gambo’s exhibition at Gasworks, a site-specific installation informed by archival research on Abuja’s development, it is as if things in one such boardroom have gone awry.
Two projectors play helicopter footage of Abuja, after its inauguration in 1991 but seemingly still under construction, on opposite …
Glasgow International
Daisy Hildyard
At the end of the first day of Glasgow International I sat on a straw bale at Tramway to watch Delaine Le Bas dancing on a white boxing ring that had been surfaced with eggshells. The performance, and the maximal neon and sequin installation of inked and embroidered sheets and bottled urine that environed it, made an emphatic point about life as a traveller now: “WE’RE NOT WALKING ON EGGSHELLS ANY MORE,” Le Bas shouted.
I was thinking about the hens. I wondered how long it had taken them to lay so many, many eggs, and whether each shell was from a different chicken, or some of them contributed multiple eggs as a durational project. Were the eggs free-range, or repurposed byproducts of the omelette industry? Around me the performers stamped and shouted; the audience watched, whispered, and sipped white wine. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the hens were roosting, having contributed time and body so that we could do… this.
I’m not taking any moral high ground here (I eat eggs for breakfast) but the warm, feathery, apparently collateral bodies intruded on my experience of the performance and I was unable to watch it on its own terms. I suspect this is …
Miranda July’s “New Society”
Wendy Vogel
“Do you love me, even though I’m sometimes irritating and a little bit selfish?” Miranda July asks in the brief audio recording The Crowd (2004). I wasn’t sure. I had spent nearly three hours in July’s solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio—the first major retrospective of her performance and visual art—and I was getting tired. Her voice echoed off the walls of the bathroom where the piece had been installed.
“That’s a good thing, because I love you too. I’m just not very good at it! But I’m trying to change,” she responds. A recorded audience cheers. “This song is for you and it’s a love song,” July concludes, her voice fading to the sounds of a band tuning up. As I washed and dried my hands, I warmed back up at the cheerful resolution. As though anticipating my grumpiness, the artist had assured me of her affection.
The Crowd is a succinct example of July’s signature performance move: vulnerability, bordering on neurosis, giving way to sentimental declarations that secure her power. She has a gift for connecting with an audience, cutting through the noise of a large group to create intimacy with individuals. Organized by Mia Locks, “New Society” …
Jordan Strafer’s “DECADENCE”
Stephanie Bailey
“The Kennedys. Palm Beach. A charge of rape. It all made for a real-life soap opera in May 1991 that resulted in an arrest, a trial, and non-stop cable TV coverage.” So reads a recent Miami Herald summary of William Kennedy Smith’s trial, when John F. Kennedy’s nephew was acquitted of raping a twenty-nine-year-old woman. New York-based artist Jordan Strafer fictionalizes that case in “DECADENCE,” an exhibition at the Renaissance Society showing two films back-to-back on a large standing screen, starting with LOOPHOLE (2023). Clocking in at twenty-four minutes (the standard runtime of a TV episode), and filmed in the style of a 1980s soap crossed with a true crime reconstruction, LOOPHOLE draws on sociolinguist Gregory Matoesian’s observations on the “matrix of language, law, and society” that he saw mobilized in Smith’s court proceedings “to create and recreate cultural hegemony”—which Matoesian found to be inextricable with patriarchy. Echoing Matoesian’s findings, Strafer zooms in on what Matoesian described as the poetic, aesthetic, and “persuasive rhythms of trial talk” designed to “organize and intensify the inconsistencies in the victim’s account and shape them into a cumulative web of reasonable doubt.”
LOOPHOLE plays with that doubt by embellishing proceedings with a Lynchian surreality …
Tolia Astakhishvili’s “between father and mother”
Chris Murtha
Built from conventional architectural materials including drywall and cement, and later stained with coffee, dirt, and pigment to mimic the wear and tear of time, Tolia Astakhishvili’s installations hover between construction and destruction. SculptureCenter’s brick and cast-iron building, initially designed for repairing trolleys and later used to manufacture derricks, hoists, and cranes, proves a fitting host for the Georgian artist’s first exhibition in the United States. Having previously explored the mutability of domestic spaces, and how they accumulate the marks and alterations of their inhabitants, Astakhishvili here contends with a formerly industrial site, while still remaining focused on what spaces tell us about humans come and gone.
As she did with two recent exhibitions in Germany, Astakhishvili incorporates collaborative projects and works by peers into her installation—an extension of, rather than challenge to, authorship. A microcosm of the exhibiting institution, her fabricated environments become fleeting hosts for her own and others’ artworks. The first sculpture visitors encounter is Astakhishvili’s The endless House (all works 2024 unless otherwise stated), a freestanding cement and particleboard wall modeled on those found in the building’s basement. The structure’s narrow cavities harbor a sculpture and photograph by Katinka Bock and reverberate with the sound of …
“Patterns of (In)Security II”
Nina Chkareuli-Mdivani
Taking its name from Michel Houellebecq’s 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island, this artist-run space in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood hosts the second iteration of a dual exhibition that hints at the possibility of establishing a space of refuge between divergent positions. Extending a collaboration that began in Tbilisi last year, Sabine Hornig and Tamuna Chabashvili seek to establish some common ground between idealism and pragmatism, collective and individual, order and freedom.
Hornig presents a sculpture and photograph engaging with the sustainability of democracy as it is accosted on all sides by populism, chauvinism, and realpolitik. Wahlkabine (2024) is a freestanding metal structure, the grids of which are patterned like bricks, inspired by Tbilisi balconies. In Georgia, these private-turned-public structures are markers of the turbulent 1990s, when citizens of a fledgling democracy were trying to carve out spaces for themselves in the new post-socialist reality. The architectural structure creates two small rooms that can only be entered from different sides.
Translating as “voting booth,” the sculpture observes you as you observe it. There are small mirrored tables in each of the divided sections, reminding the visitor of their personal responsibilities. In its evocation of the wall that once stood …
Lala Rukh’s “In the Round”
Murtaza Vali
Widely recognized as a committed activist and an influential educator and mentor, Lala Rukh, who passed away at the age of 69 in 2017, was notoriously reticent about sharing her own art practice, its rigorous conceptualism, minimalist precision, and commitment to drawing placing her firmly at odds with prevailing trends in Pakistan. As the first major retrospective of her work, “In the Round” attempts to reconcile the fiercely embodied immanence of her politics and pedagogy and the transcendence of her art, which approaches the mystical through breathtaking formal economy.
Lala co-founded the Women’s Action Forum in 1981, a grassroots feminist organization established to challenge misogynist laws and policies introduced by the military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. This, and Lala’s other political activism, is presented at Sharjah Art Foundation through extensive archival displays that include photographs and videos from protests and conferences, testimonies from comrades, students, and friends, posters Lala designed and produced herself, and a screen-printing manual for activists (titled In our own Backyard) that she published in 1987 to counter the regime’s ban on independent printing presses. As the leader of a novel Master’s program at Lahore’s National College of Arts, Lala also introduced a curriculum that encouraged experimentation …
“Expeditionary Botanics”
Hindley Wang
Drawing connections between botany and colonial conquest through the model of the botanical garden, this exhibition reflects on the migration of materials, ideas, and cultures through case studies of eight plant species found in Southern Yunnan: cinchona, horsfieldia, konjac, nutmeg, rhododendron, rubber, tobacco, and turmeric. Artworks are positioned like roadblocks in this large, ex-industrial white cube, so that the visitor must meander around them and, like these migratory species, chart unpredictable courses.
At the entrance, a TV screen supported by two metal poles shows mosquitos drawing blood from human skin, then copulating. Isadora Neves Marques’s hyper-realistic digital animation Aedes aegypti (2017) depicts, as the exhibition text explains, a particular type of mosquito subject to genetic modification by biotechnology company Oxitec. To combat the diffusion of malaria (traditionally treated by quinine derived from cinchona), a “self-limiting” gene is injected into male mosquitos, meaning that their offspring don’t survive into adulthood. An alternative antidote is disclosed on the wall behind the viewer: a botanical illustration of quinine from the Illustrated Manual of Chinese Trees and Shrubs (1937), printed in blue.
A trail of black particles leads across the floor to a metal trolley marked with letters in Mandarin “勘界” (Boundary Survey), repeated …
Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s “Āmantēcayōtl”
Xenia Benivolski
When I first visited the wall between Mexico and the US in Patagonia, Arizona, in 2017, the town was celebrating: the redevelopment of a large patch of agricultural land had been halted due to the discovery of traces left by a jaguar. In one dramatic appearance, the endangered animal had accomplished what land activists had been trying to do for years. In this same spirit, Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s work plays on the symbiotic relationship between nature and technology, hinting at the possibility of alliance between animals, machines, and humans in the interest of anti-capitalist resistance. Rodríguez is an artist trained as a mechanical engineer whose 1994 robotic installation, Greetings, Zapata Moles—sewing machines adorned with traditional Mexican wrestling masks—responded to the industrialization of his hometown. Rodríguez’s latest robotic work likewise anthropomorphizes technological objects while extending the definition of technology to include unspoken, embodied forms of knowledge that sustain the living practices of Mesoamerican cultures, with particular reference to the Nahua cosmology.
At Canal Projects, Rodríguez draws parallels between the energetic currents that power physical, electronic, and metaphysical grids, and the cosmogenic principles that tie humans to the earth. “Āmantēcayōtl: And When it Disappears, it is Said, the Moon has Died” tells …
Sukaina Kubba’s “Turn Me Into A Flower”
Crystal Bennes
Textiles are at once commodities, expressers of identity, carriers of stories and of memories. Like photographs, they are images inseparable from their materiality. Sukaina Kubba’s first major UK show centers the artist’s obsessive questioning of how far the recognizable elements of Persian rugs—traditionally based on floral or geometric motifs and textured wool—can reasonably be stretched while maintaining their identity. Crafted from a host of industrially derived materials, using an equally wide range of tools, these works trace paths many degrees removed from their design inspirations.
A chance encounter with an Iranian Senneh carpet while on residency in the Atacama Desert in Chile provides one point of departure, prompting Kubba to connect the carpet’s floral pattern to its function in nomadic cultures. “Rugs are gardens in the desert,” Kubba says in the exhibition’s accompanying short film, referencing the way carpets are often the first objects to be set up in a new camp. Kubba spent the entirety of her Atacama residency carefully copying the carpet’s design with pen on tracing paper. The resulting work, Corners of Your Sky, Alula (2022), is as delicate as tissue but speaks of Kubba’s determined persistence to complete the tracing. Hyper-detailed in the lower left corner, …
8th Yokohama Triennale, “Wild Grass: Our Lives”
Jörg Heiser
Crossing the street on my way to the Yokohama Museum of Art, the phrase “Wild Grass” flashed through my mind. Suddenly, I stumbled and fell. I was back on my feet quite quickly, but not before a passerby had asked in English whether I needed help. I had tripped over a ground reflector, as if being penalized for straying too far off course, and the warning—catastrophe can strike at any time—set the tone for the exhibition ahead. With a sting in my right hand and left knee, I entered the central venue of the Yokohama Triennale.
It’s fortunate that this year’s Triennale has coincided with the reopening of Kenzō Tange’s refurbished Museum of Art, its postmodernist spirit measured by his trademark modularity. The grand entrance gallery is an architectural gem: as you enter at its transverse middle, a series of tiered platforms rises gently to the left and right, spanned by a gabled glass roof with adjustable light slats. The curators of this edition, Carol Yinghua Lu and Liu Ding, have turned this theatrical space into the multi-sensory set of a dystopian scenario. Hovering overhead are three skeletal metal frameworks covered in crisscross vermilion textile strips, like the shed shells …
Marwan Rechmaoui’s “Chasing the Sun”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Marwan Rechmaoui’s latest body of work includes paintings of popsicles and bags of pink cotton candy. There are poppies, fluffy clouds, a pretty sun, and a full moon. The perfectly green crowns of seven parasol pine trees fill one robust frame while the bushy derrieres of three sheep fill another. Among the objects scattered throughout “Chasing the Sun,” on view in the Sfeir-Semler Gallery’s newish project space located in Downtown Beirut near the mouth of the port, are streamers, a kite, marbles, the outlines of a hopscotch game, and boards for checkers and tic-tac-toe. Knowing the artist’s previous work, one could be forgiven for thinking he’d lost the plot here, or at least wandered off toward divertissement. And yet the toys and games of the current show clarify the importance of play and playfulness in Rechmaoui’s larger project. Taken in their imaginative spirit, they question whether the very concept of play—as expressed in art or set against ideas about work, leisure, care for others, and the waging of war—should ever be considered a distraction, a digression, or a detour from the serious stuff.
Born in Beirut in 1964, Rechmaoui lived in Abu Dhabi before moving to Boston, where he became …
Po Po’s “Ascending Primeval Codes”
Adeline Chia
Po Po is fascinated by how alphabets, when stripped back to their most abstract forms, can still convey meaning. In an exhibition inspired by sources including Burmese scripts, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Futhark runes, viewers encounter the artist’s own eclectic symbology. These combinations of shaped canvases stretched on round, triangular, rectangular, or square frames exist at the edge of legibility. The color palette is exclusively black and red, painted in solid blocks or subtle gradations of tone.
At first glance, due to the stark shapes and austere colors, the twelve works on show could be read as a part of a conversation about geometric abstraction in 1970s Minimalism. But the curatorial essay tells us that Po Po, whose output includes paintings, performances, and installations, conceived of these works in the 1980s when Myanmar was under military rule and isolated from the wider world. He didn’t execute them then for reasons including disillusion after the bloody student protests of 1988, which resulted in his hiatus from artmaking in the 1990s. So despite the works’ outward resemblance to “contentless” abstraction in the Western tradition, they are better understood as part of the artist’s longstanding investigation into signs, symbols, and codes, with meanings that …
Arthur Jafa’s “BLACK POWER TOOL AND DIE TRYNIG”
Travis Diehl
With the subtlety of a revolver, Arthur Jafa’s merciless ***** distilled the racial psychopathy of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) by replacing the white characters in its climactic bloodbath with Black ones. Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster still play Vietnam vet Travis Bickle and the pubescent sex worker he thinks he’s saving but—by recording new performances and stitching them into the original footage—Jafa transformed the white pimp Sport into the Black Scar, the bouncer and the john were made Black, and so too the horrified cops who edge in after Bickle has emptied his guns. This wasn’t so much a subversion as a restoration: the script had called for a Black body count, but was recast to avoid inflaming audiences. Critics of Jafa’s redux—recently screened at Gladstone Gallery—have complained that Taxi Driver was already about race. But Jafa’s grim snuff film takes that fact to be obvious, then warps it, repeating his revised climax with small differences and new surprises, for seventy-three minutes.
Jafa’s show of sculptures at 52 Walker carries the same themes of Blackness, erasure, violence, and moving images, but in a more damning, paranoid register. A walkthrough structure, studded with extruded aluminum sculptures like bisected window …
“Fugas de lo nuestro. Visualidades indígenas de sur a norte”
Juan José Santos
A detail in a painting by Venuca Evanán says it all. Tabla Apaykuy y las delicias de Villa (2019/24) depicts a scene typical of the artist’s Peruvian Sarhua community—several members in traditional clothing stand beneath an anthropomorphic sun and against sinuous hills—but, among the mountains, there are pylons. This exhibition—curated by Cristian Vargas Paillahueque and featuring Marilyn Boror Bor, Evanán, and Pablo Lincura—foregrounds aesthetic and thematic deviations from traditional depictions of Indigenous life. Its title, which translates as “Leaks of our own. Indigenous visualities from south to north,” promises escape from the obligation to explore ancestral themes or work within the supposed conventions of an Indigenous tradition, as if it had remained unchanged since pre-Hispanic times.
Marilyn Boror Bor is from San Juan Sacatepéquez, a municipality that has suffered water shortages since the completion in 2018, against the wishes of the local Indigenous community, of Cementos Progreso’s San Gabriel cement plant. In Monumento vivo [Living monument] (2021–ongoing), a documented performance, the Mayan Kaqchikel artist stands on a plinth and covers her ankles with cement, merging with it in an action that seeks to commemorate the struggles of Indigenous peoples and defenders of the land, as well as referring to the …
Moyra Davey’s “Forks & Spoons”
Maddie Hampton
Moyra Davey’s latest film, Forks & Spoons (2024), studies the work of five photographers: Francesca Woodman, Carla Williams, Alix Cléo Roubaud, Justine Kurland, and Shala Miller. In her characteristic, essayistic style, Davey weaves together footage of herself pacing between moss-covered tree trunks to a voiceover narration that contextualizes the work of each artist within their respective biographies. Reprising a handful of motifs—close-ups of dog-eared book pages, sunlit corners, long shots of her hands methodically turning through photobooks, and other symbols of the daily and domestic—the film is screened alongside a curated selection of prints and photo books by each artist, so that it functions as a kind of coda for the wider exhibition. Though Davey maintains a porous boundary between cinematic and physical space, she accentuates the varying capacities of moving, still, and published images throughout the show, highlighting how each of these forms carries and conveys distinct meanings. Davey’s subject never shifts, but by translating it across forms, she successfully presents something closer to its totality.
Davey’s primary interest here is in many ways a style. Each of her chosen image-makers was or remains attuned to a particular pitch of self-capture: a feminized portraiture of long exposures, blurred movement, …
1st Klima Biennale Wien
Aoife Rosenmeyer
When the factory at Untere Weißgerberstraße 13 in Vienna was converted into a museum, in keeping with artist and designer Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s colorful and sustainable aesthetic and design principles, straight lines were bent, more light was allowed in, and the façade was adorned with mosaics and pierced with plants. What opened as Museum Hundertwasser in 1991, now KunstHausWien, positions itself as an ecological museum and is the center of an exhibition styling itself as the first “climate biennial.”
There “Into the Woods,” curated by Sophie Haslinger—one of many programmed or affiliated exhibitions and projects—arranges works by nineteen artists into thematic areas that cover, amongst others, the effects of monoculture, felling and deforestation, and how climate change is impacting forests in a survey of an environment we depend upon yet routinely destroy. Richard Mosse’s multispectral drone-camera shots illustrate deforestation in pointed pinks; Susanne Kriemann’s screenprints reflect on the poetry and exploitation of woods in ink generated from discarded cheap timber furniture; Eline Benjaminsen and Elias Kimaiyo follow the trail of carbon offsetting to land evictions in Kenya in order that trees can be planted for consumers elsewhere (and intrinsic knowledge of the place and its native fauna lost). Information on all …
24th Biennale of Sydney, “Ten Thousand Suns”
Harry Burke
If “Ten Thousand Suns” has a patron saint, it’s Malcolm Cole, an Aboriginal and South Sea Islander dancer who died from HIV/AIDS in 1995. On view at Chau Chak Wing Museum—one of six venues across the city—Sydney-based photographer William Yang’s documentary portraits of Cole and the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre in the 1970s gleam with the young man’s grace. Next to them, paintings by Martin Wong, who died from the same illness in San Francisco in 1999, venerate working and incarcerated peoples in the artist’s trademark gravelly facture. The biennial probes the interconnectedness of different liberation movements—as spotlighted in the affinities shared by two Chinese diasporic portraitists, for instance, or personified within lives such as Cole’s.
In 1988, during the nationwide bicentennial of the First Fleet’s landing on the Eora land that they named Sydney, Cole helped to design the first Aboriginal float at the city’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, in which he paraded in drag as British naval officer Captain Cook. Yuwi, Torres Strait, and South Sea Islander artist Dylan Mooney’s mural Malcolm Cole – larger than life (2024) at White Bay Power Station memorializes the jubilant dancer, his face painted with ochre, in a sassy, wide-brimmed Royal …
Vija Celmins’s “Winter”
R.H. Lossin
Vija Celmins’s latest show is at once an invitation to marvel at the perfect copy and to contemplate copying itself. The heavy rope that seems to hang down from the gallery ceiling is, in reality, a stainless-steel sculpture extending up from the ground (Ladder, 2021–22). Its adjunct, another piece of painted steel, Rope #2 (2022—24) sits coiled on the floor, playing its role as a fiber weave with equal conviction. The ropes, along with two other sculptures of exquisite verisimilitude, are enthralling in their own right. They also remind visitors that the surrounding paintings, which can easily register as minimal abstractions, are exercises in illusion and replication as well.
Umberto Eco once declared the United States to be a country “obsessed with realism, where, if a reconstruction is to be credible, it must be […] a perfect likeness, a ‘real’ copy of the reality being represented.” This cultural propensity for real fakes, Eco suggests, is at odds with the “cultured” America that produced Abstract Expressionism and modernist architecture. Celmins seems to think otherwise. “Winter” is full of Eco’s real copies, and Ladder may even be a reference to the “Indian Rope Trick” popular in magic shows. On the other hand, …
60th Venice Biennale, National Pavilions
Jörg Heiser
The transformation of the Polish Pavilion from a horror show into something closer to a miracle is one of the most remarkable stories of the 60th Venice Biennale. Last year, a jury predominantly aligned with the country’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party selected painter Ignacy Czwartos, whose nationalist-realist paintings support the right-wing narrative of Poland as a martyr of German and Soviet occupation absolved of complicity in Nazi-era crimes, to represent the country. After the Polish public voted out PiS last October, the decision was reversed. Curated by Marta Czyż, the pavilion now centers instead on an absorbing and poignant video installation by Open Group, an artistic collective from Ukraine.
The group (consisting of Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga) has installed a double video projection onto opposing walls. One video, shot in 2022, features eastern Ukrainian refugees who had fled to Lviv. Each briefly tells their story before imitating a war sound with their voice: the rattling of a machine gun (ratatatatatatatat), or the sound of artillery shelling (rrrhzzzzzzzzzzz-boom). A short text panel explains the military use of the respective weapon in the current war. Then they say the titular phrase “repeat after me” in Ukrainian while …
60th Venice Biennale, National Pavilions
Kim Córdova
In contrast to ruangrupa’s challenge to basic capitalist imperatives at Documenta 15—notably time as a measure of productive activity, individual authorship, and curatorial labor—the international exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, failed to match an inclusive selection of artists with a comparable reimagination of the structural framing, critique, or tools of the format in which they are exhibited. By importing the Global South to Venice on terms set by the Global North, it leaves the task of a radical intellectual response to the overarching theme of “Foreigners Everywhere” to the pavilions, collateral shows, and pro-Palestine protests that surround it.
One throughline among the national pavilions was an emphasis on how the past is asserting itself on the present, a resonant theme as conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine, and tensions between the west and China, reinscribe power dynamics rooted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At the Egyptian Pavilion, Wael Shawky presents a forty-nine-minute musical theater film Drama 1882 (2024) about the Urabi Revolution. Divided into eight acts, the film installation focuses on pivotal moments in the “scramble for Africa” that, by the end of World War I, had redrawn the map of Africa and the Middle …
18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, “Inner Sanctum”
Vivian Ziherl
In his writings on late modernity, Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm skewers art as the complicit refuge of the soul under capitalism, arguing that it’s impossible to understand nineteenth-century Western arts “without a sense of this social demand that they should act as all-purpose suppliers of spiritual contents to the most materialist of civilizations.” More recently, a claim to the spiritual and the numinous in art has also been levied by radical and anti-colonial agendas. As the European bias of art institutions has been challenged, so too has its relation to a secular and materialist world.
Opening on March 1 and on Kaurna Yerta, the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art patiently and deftly explores this paradox. The exhibition is far from polemical: its emphasis lies squarely on artistic practice and the interior lives of artists. Through unexpected choices and combinations, in a presentation that spans two levels of the gallery and incorporates a number of collection interventions and public space projects, curator José Da Silva brings together works from vastly disparate traditions under the unifying thematic “Inner Sanctum.”
The biennial’s far-reaching ambitions were marked from the start. At the show’s opening, viewers crowded into the Art Gallery of South Australia’s …
Xiyadie’s “Butterfly Dream”
Stephanie Bailey
There’s a mythological aura to Xiyadie, who learned the ancient matrilineal folk art of paper-cutting from his mother while growing up in China’s Shaanxi province. The artist’s name means “Siberian Butterfly,” an insect known for its beauty and resilience. He gave it to himself in 2010, when the Beijing LGBT Center invited him to show his work to the public for the first time, five years after he moved to the Chinese capital as a migrant worker to support his family. Before that 2010 show, the artist’s paper-cuts, created using Xuan paper and luminously pigmented with natural dyes, were private portals into a closeted world: an entanglement of diaristic records of clandestine gay affairs and fantasies of living a freely queer life. Since then, he has exhibited internationally (notably in the curated exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale) but less so domestically, making this exhibition in Hong Kong—the artist’s largest to date—an important milestone.
Among the earliest papercuts in “Butterfly Dream” is Train (1985–86), which recounts one of Xiyadie’s first sexual encounters with a train attendant while en route to Xi’an. Mounted on black velvet, a large, square image plane is defined by a central train carriage in which an …
Grace Wales Bonner’s “Artist’s Choice: Spirit Movers”
Osman Can Yerebakan
Rhythm gives form to Grace Wales Bonner’s contribution to the Artist’s Choice series of exhibitions showcasing the “creative response of artists to the works of their peers and predecessors.” Not in the sense of a soundtrack or score, but rather in the British fashion designer’s focus on the different ways in which “sound, movement, performance, and style in the African diaspora” is translated into the works in MoMA’s collection. Tucked away in the more intimate first floor gallery, Wales Bonner’s exhibition offers a space of tranquility.
Terry Adkins’s Synapse (1992) hovers close to the ceiling, a yellow enamel-painted drum skin as perfectly rounded as the July sun. Beneath it is Adkins’s Last Trumpet (1995), a quartet of eighteen-foot-long horns crafted by attaching used trombone or sousaphone bells to brass cones. Standing like the enduring towers of an ancient civilization, the musical instrument-cum-sculpture resonates with the potential of its own activation (Adkins would play the instrument from its first presentation in 1996 through to his passing in 2014).
Earthy tones, dense textures, and subtle connections are the main ingredients in Wales Bonner’s alchemy. She has painted the gallery in tones of rusting metal, crystalizing sugar, and sanguine resin, lending the gallery …
Raven Chacon’s “A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”
Rômulo Moraes
The flag-score that opens composer and sound-artist Raven Chacon’s exhibition at Swiss Institute—featuring work made over the past twenty-five years alongside a new sound and video installation—is a miniature portrait of his career. American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket) (2020), a graphic history of the United States in the form of an army blanket, is embossed with icons of waves, flames, police whistles, wood-chopping axes, and a fractured city skyline. Chacon’s main interests are all there: notation in the expanded field, the interplay of various mediums, the embeddedness of sound and landscape, and the malleability of map and territory. Working with post-Cagean aesthetics yet advancing them within a Diné/Navajo context, Chacon’s work suggests that notation is an imposition onto sound comparable to colonialism’s imposition onto the land.
The opening room contains the installation Still Life No. 3 (2015), in which a series of glass panels mounted onto the walls and engraved with white fonts tell the Diné Bahane’ creation myth, which describes the birth of light and color in worlds below ours, the raising of the waters, and the formation of mountains and celestial bodies. The transparent and reflective surface makes the glossy text intentionally difficult to read, as though …
Gervane de Paula’s “como é bom viver em Mato Grosso”
Oliver Basciano
I entered Gervane de Paula’s three-room retrospective by the wrong door, meaning that I saw this chronological survey in reverse order. By the time I came to view the works with which the exhibition is supposed to open—the artist’s earliest paintings, from the 1970s, show sunny scenes of life in his home state of Mato Grosso, in the Central-West Region of Brazil—I was aware of the dark clouds that would gather over his vivid later canvases and Arte Popular-inspired sculptures.
This knowledge of the artist’s development heightened my sensitivity to the uneasy details that creep into even the most bucolic of de Paula’s first works and foreshadow his later career. Barro Araés (1977), for example, makes plain the artist’s deep affection for his local neighborhood in Cuiabá, the capital city of Mato Grosso: in the foreground, children play with kites in front of their single-story homes while, further back, their mothers hang washing on lines strung across the communal grassy ground, the brightly colored clothes matched by the palette of the airborne stick and paper toys. You can almost smell the Sunday pamonha boiling in the food cart a man pushes past the houses. Yet my eyes were drawn to …
60th Venice Biennale, “Foreigners Everywhere”
Ben Eastham
The title “Foreigners Everywhere,” derived from the neon text works by Claire Fontaine that hang over the entrances to both sites of the international exhibition at the Venice Biennale, holds out the promise of a productive confusion. In the Italian expression visible on the reverse of the English, stranieri ovunque, the phrase carries a more overt implication of strangeness with the same edge of hostility, so that the visitor might brace themselves for a series of encounters that are—like the experience of foreignness itself—bewildering, unsettling, and fundamentally unsafe.
But there is no need to do so. Because while the adoption of a bilingual sign as motto for the Biennale’s centerpiece exhibition suggests that its curator, Adriano Pedrosa, will embrace the miscomprehensions that are commensurate with translation, the reality is that everything will be explained to you. No space will be left for misunderstanding or its correlate, interpretation. The frustration of this exhibition is not that of the exile who, in a strange land, is unable to make sense of their surroundings but rather that of the tourist who is prevented from straying beyond the Potemkin village in which everything has been arranged to illustrate a point.
This is not to …
“Tongues of Fire”
Daisy Hildyard
From Grenfell Tower to the clothing factory fires of Gujarat, the wildfires of Sicily to those in California or New South Wales, the great fires of the past decade have all seemed to reveal something about the place that they destroyed. Caused by different circumstances, and burning on distant parts of the planet, what the fires share is this quality of revelation: each one shed light on the slower but relentless systems that made its devastation possible.
You don’t need to contemplate the geopolitical causes of disaster, though, to know that fire compels attention. Its mesmerizing quality is everywhere in this group exhibition, shown over two floors in a former fire station, that places nineteen local civic relics and documents beside twenty-six international contemporary and modern works. Lungiswa Gqunta’s Feet Under Fire (2017) plays hypnotically slow video footage of bare feet, with scrubbing brushes strapped onto them, swinging over a rubble of charcoal and matches. Noémie Goudal’s film Below the Deep South (2021) sees flames licking and consuming a tropical forest, set to a soundtrack of distant bird calls. In John Gerrard’s CGI Flare (Oceania) (2022) a flag of pure flame waves over an unending stretch of water. In Tell …
“Day Jobs”
Tausif Noor
On the Reddit page for Contemporary Art last year, an anonymous 24-year-old, freshly armed with a BFA, poignantly asked for guidance on their career. Bemoaning their decision to take on a role producing marketing content—a shift in direction from days typically spent “reading art theory, reading different art journals online, making drawings and applying to open calls”—the ingenue expressed guilt for shirking their career while trying to save money for graduate education as an international student. The replies are overwhelmingly supportive, with most respondents reassuring the anonymous poster that they were far from alone, that they could find something relevant to their creative practice and still feel fulfilled, that there are tricks to live cheaply and work efficiently.
One especially astute reply linked to a review of an exhibition that spoke to OP’s very question. Aptly titled “Day Jobs” and debuting at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, the exhibition, organized by Veronica Roberts, gathers some thirty-nine artists working in the United States between World War II and the present day, including some blockbuster stars whose career trajectories were part of their mythologies, like Andy Warhol (commercial illustrator and window display designer for Bonwit …
Joan Jonas’s “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral”
Filipa Ramos
Arranged into families following a meticulous taxonomic logic, the almost 300 drawings presented at Drawing Center reveal the extraordinary bestiary that Joan Jonas has been compiling over five decades. Jonas has a unique capacity to traverse and merge artistic fields as varied as performance, sculpture, environment, and video installation, but what is illuminated by this exhibition, carefully curated by Laura Hoptman with Rebecca DiGiovanna, is how drawing runs through, across, and within every means of her expression, accompanying the development of her career from the 1960s to the present.
The show also demonstrates how the artist has been bringing these disciplines together through drawing, as it becomes a practice akin to performing and editing, in a do-repeat-redo-repeat-erase-do-repeat method that connects the mind, body, and hand until the form emerges. Two drawings flank the entrance to the show (all works are untitled but classified by a reference number, in this case JJ084, circa late 1990s, and JJ085, from 2012), which also becomes its exit. These are two naked female torsos, as imposing and as head-, arm- and feet-less as the Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BCE), made in the context of two live performances.
In parallel to this, Jonas has blurred …
Emanuel Proweller’s “Un souvenir de soleil”
Ren Ebel
Having survived first the Holocaust and then three years’ conscription in the Red Army, the Jewish-Polish painter Emanuel Proweller later said of his identity that it felt like “a jacket with a reversible lining.” The same analogy might be applied to Proweller’s paintings which, though unmistakably his own, routinely dress up in the various styles the artist encountered after moving to Paris at the end of the 1940s. Pilfering and distilling motifs of Fauvist landscape, Cubism, Hard-edge abstraction and proto-Pop appropriations of commercial graphic design, Proweller pursued striking, radioactive syncopations of color.
Taken together, the paintings in this survey map a progression from strict geometrical abstraction to a more confident and eclectic mode in which Proweller’s dynamic planes of color begin to serve as set pieces for more recognizable forms. Often, these are laconic bodies or quotidian objects, sights from Proweller’s home in Créteil, on the outskirts of Paris, or his countryside studio in Ardèche. But the artist’s move toward figuration was less a means of representing his world than an opportunity for his colors to encounter one another at increasingly complex and unexpected boundaries. In Au bois de Chaville [In the woods of Chaville] (1974), sky blue and viridian …
Tina Girouard’s “SIGN-IN”
Cat Kron
Performance art offers its viewer what other visual forms can’t: a direct address in real time. Yet in the years that follow its realization, the medium is susceptible to misremembering, or worse, indifference; its curators frequently resort to displaying a work’s discards in an effort to recreate the experience of its unfolding after the original audience has, quite literally, moved on.
When it comes to Louisianian artist Tina Girouard, much of the imagined audience was never there in the first place. Girouard’s difficult-to-classify performance work—she remains best known within the art world for her collaboration with Carol Goodden and Gordon Matta-Clark on the restaurant-cum-happening FOOD—transpired primarily in downtown New York in the 1970s, and until recently almost none of it trickled down to the Bayou, an unfortunate fact given how prominently the region figured in her own artistic mythology. The artist’s method of repurposing the same materials in performance after performance inadvertently complicated the task of future curators and archivists who might hope to recreate specific iterations.
Foremost among her props were eight twelve-foot lengths of floral-printed silk, on which she bestowed the typically mythical-sounding name “Solomon’s Lot,” and which she used in many of her performances throughout the 1970s. …
Eva Gold’s “Shadow Lands”
Jenny Wu
The critique in London-based artist Eva Gold’s first US solo exhibition is spare and subtle. Consisting of six works on paper and two sculptural installations, the show conveys, in meticulous details and material choices, a message about the coercive economic power embedded in everyday cultural transactions. At the heart of the exhibition is “Pilot and Passengers” (all works 2024), a series of colored-pencil drawings of stills from Benny’s Video, Michael Haneke’s 1992 film about a violence-obsessed teenager disenchanted by his affluent upbringing, who murders a stranger in his parents’ home.
Gold’s understated drawings, hung in identical, nineteen-by-twenty-six-inch frames, line three of the gallery’s walls. In Haneke’s film, a low tracking shot follows several pairs of hands as Benny, the teenager, covertly collects money for a pyramid scheme called Pilot and Passengers that he introduced to his friends during school choir practice. Gold’s lighter, less saturated images emphasize general forms over details. From afar, viewers might mistakenly believe that they are spying on people holding hands. Up close, one still feels like a voyeur, since Gold’s static renderings allow the eye to linger on the creases in the fabric of the boys’ jeans, the threaded borders of their back pockets, the …
81st Whitney Biennial, “Even Better Than the Real Thing”
Ben Eastham
Walking through this survey of American art in the age of anger and anxiety, I kept returning to the curatorial statement’s seemingly innocuous proposal that new technologies are “complicating our understanding of what is real.” Are our horizons now so narrow, it occurred to me, that an algorithm’s ability to generate a derivative image is really more consciousness-expanding than such longstanding preoccupations of art as spiritual experience or the natural world? Or might the title’s appeal to something “better” serve to distract us from the already complicated and unarguably real events playing out beyond the walls of the museum, with which this biennial can seem reluctant to engage?
A generation of artists are, on the show’s evidence, retreating from a hostile public sphere into their own carefully cultivated worlds. This tendency manifests both in the valorization of marginalized identities through the adaptation of folk traditions to the present—notably ektor garcia’s use of crochet to articulate a nomadic cross-border experience—and in the tendency towards opacity, most explicitly in the panels of smoked black glass suspended precariously over the audience’s heads by Charisse Pearlina Weston (of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust, 2022). Many of the realities …
Issam Kourbaj
Tom Denman
These twinned exhibitions span Issam Kourbaj’s responses to the civil war that has carried on in his home country since the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in March 2011, expanding to consider related conflicts in the Middle East and the broader plight of refugees. Trained in Damascus, Leningrad, and London, Kourbaj moved to Cambridge in 1990 and has over the past thirteen years harnessed metaphor’s literal Greek meaning—“to carry across”—to the archival impulse to catalogue and connect.
Inspired by prisoners who smuggled their names out of a Syrian jail to let their families know they were alive, Urgent Archives, written in blood (2019) consists of disbound books and papers—perhaps the dead stock of an antiquarian bookshop or college library—loosely gridded on the floor, some “hovering” on blocks. In black, blue, and blood-red ink, Kourbaj has marked them with erratic lines and handwritten Arabic script. One book is stamped with the (English) words LEAVE TO REMAIN, signifying a refugee’s permission to stay in the UK—the granting of which is unguaranteed, racially biased, and often long-awaited in one of the country’s prisonlike detention centers.
Every day since the uprising, Kourbaj has sewn a date stone into a tent fabric to create Our exile …
Angela Tiatia’s “The Dark Current”
Stephanie Bailey
Angela Tiatia’s single-channel moving image work The Dark Current (2023), projected onto one wall in a darkened room, opens with a body-as-landscape. A cropped, lateral view of a floral appliqued fuchsia dress follows the concave slope from breast to waist as dark waters lap in the background, like an island. The camera slowly pans to the side, following the cleavage’s arc until it reaches the face of a woman with a pearl perched delicately at one tear duct. The lens then rises over her to gaze down at her from above. Lying in black water atop a magenta panel, her arms move slowly to create a frame of rippling waves around her.
The pearl is a portal to The Pearl (2022), an earlier immersive video installation not shown here, which was commissioned for “Matisse Alive” at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (2021–22), reflecting on Henri Matisse’s travels to the Pacific Islands through juxtapositions of his works with tivaevae quilts and commissions by artists Nina Chanel Abney, Sally Smart, Robin White, and Tiatia. Departing from Venus in a Shell (1930), a bronze sculpture that Matisse made the year he visited Tahiti, Tiatia composed The Pearl as a digital tapa, …
noé olivas’s “Gilded Dreams”
Suzanne Hudson
With Patrisse Cullors and alexandre ali reza dorriz, noé olivas is a co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, a collective and gallery with adjacent studio space dedicated, in their words, “to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice, bridging cultural work and advocacy, and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its community.” For a not-inconsequential time after its March 2020 opening and near-simultaneous pandemic-shuttering, it also served as the locus of art supply and food distribution—the latter in collaboration with Lauren Halsey’s Summaeverythang—extending the site’s history as a functioning convenience store. That it sits right under the flight path for Los Angeles International Airport provoked reckoning, from the first, with its imagined audiences alongside those more proximate. The group’s exhibition made in response to the virus, “CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic,” lived online; olivas’s mural spelling out the same sentiment blanketed the parking lot as a horizontal billboard visible from above, coming into focus on a jet’s descent. The words function as an incantation but also an indictment, denouncing racial capitalism and the twinning of epidemiological and carceral disaster that the disease exacerbated but did not need to produce.
“Gilded Dreams” follows this initial mandate, …
Saskia Noor van Imhoff’s “Mineral Lick”
Tom Jeffreys
In 2021, Saskia Noor van Imhoff purchased a dairy farm amid the polder landscapes of Friesland in the Netherlands. The farm had been active for some four hundred years, but derelict for the past fifteen. van Imhoff approaches the site as a research project, entitled Rest, with the implication that the land, exhausted after centuries of extractive management, now finally has the chance to recover. With the land recuperating, the artist set to work: reactivating the farm not only as a site of agricultural production (prioritizing a certain conception of environmental responsibility over a profit motive) but also as a place for workshops, symposia, and other interdisciplinary activity. Meanwhile, van Imhoff has also reoriented her practice in response to the land, its historic uses and possible futures.
“Mineral Lick” is the first UK solo show for van Imhoff, whose previous work has focused on hierarchies of value within collecting institutions such as museums and archives. Here, she foregrounds unexpected material combinations underpinned by a fascination with grafting, hybridity, and the recontextualizing of materials. GRIMM’s street-level windows have been washed with white shading paint and the interior glows with pink-red light—both echoes of the forced growing conditions of commercial greenhouse production. …
“El fin de lo maravilloso. Cyberpop en México”
Gaby Cepeda
In her curatorial text for this group exhibition of Mexican artists mostly born in the nineties, Karol Woller Reyes defines a “generational imagination.” It belongs to artists who have “naturally incorporated some creative strategies” such as digital montage and circuit bending into the production of paintings and sculptures that also abound with references to pop-cultural figures from Pokémon to Pepe the Frog. The implication is that the art of today is shaped by the technologies and media environment of its makers’ adolescence. Shared access to cable TV and computers during childhood does not, however, a generation make.
One of the narrow aisles that encircles the warehouse-like main gallery at Museo El Chopo housed the first, smaller part of “El Fin de lo Maravilloso.” Tucked to the side of the glass-walled gift shop were pieces by YOPE Projects collective crowded into a scaffold structure resembling an open-air market; a very early José Eduardo Barajas painting of cloudy emoji-like figures (Cirrus, Socrates, particle, decimal, hurricane, dolphin, tulip, Monica, 2018) in a freestanding wooden frame; and ¿Estamos, Kimosabe? (2020) a much-exhibited soft sculpture of a Mexican Bugs Bunny by Paloma Contreras Lomas—which judging by the dirt on its paws, has seen better days. …
Mary Helena Clark’s “Conveyor”
Chris Murtha
There’s a card trick midway through Mary Helena Clark’s Neighboring Animals (all works 2024 unless otherwise stated), a two-channel video projected into a darkened corner. While an elderly orangutan watches from the other side of his enclosure’s window, two human hands press a single playing card against the thick safety glass. Holding a stick in one hand, the ape nimbly picks up the card, now (miraculously!) on his side of the barrier. After giving it a sniff and twirling it around in his hands, he places it back on the glass, tapping it a few times with his makeshift wand—perhaps his attempt to send it back through the seemingly porous window. Clark edited this video—a zoo’s promotional clip gone viral—to preserve some mystery on behalf of the orangutan, cutting the ending so that the card, instead of falling to the ground, remains affixed to the glass.
A collage of sampled footage, still pictures, medical scans, and her own camerawork, Neighboring Animals scrutinizes the thresholds between inside and outside, human and beast. The left channel consists solely of yellow subtitles with no corresponding voice, a pastiche of quotations on the topic of disgust. Alongside illustrations of chained and leashed animals from …
Esther Mahlangu’s “Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting”
Ben Eastham
This retrospective of the Ndebele painter and unofficial artist laureate of post-Apartheid South Africa presents two origin stories. The first, from which its title derives, tells of how Esther Mahlangu first identified as an artist when, having been reprimanded for daubing the walls of her family home as a child, she persevered until she was good enough to be permitted by her mother to paint its façade. The second, taking place several decades later, arrived when a group of European researchers came to her village to seek out the woman responsible for decorating the house in their photograph. “We want you,” they said, “to come to Paris.”
The invitation was to participate in the 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la Terre” at the Centre Pompidou, a show that continues to cast a long shadow over attempts to decenter or decolonize the representation in western institutions of global visual culture. Mahlangu contributed a reproduction of her own painted Ndebele house (reproduced in miniature in this exhibition), setting in train a career so prolific that her vivid polychromatic designs now serve as visual shorthand for Nelson Mandela’s vision of South Africa as a comparably vibrant and harmonious “rainbow nation.” These instantly recognizable patterns—since …
Catherine Opie’s “Walls, Windows, and Blood”
Sylvie Fortin
They say ghosts, vampires, and the soulless cast no shadows. Shot in a Vatican City emptied of visitors during the pandemic summer of 2021, Catherine Opie’s new photographs provocatively reshuffle different threads of her longstanding inquiries—the spectrum from transparency to opacity; communal spaces; the body as/and architecture; queerness and institutions. With its succinct, descriptive enumeration, the exhibition’s trinitarian title “Walls, Windows, and Blood” implies unsettling visual conversations to which she gives form with a selection of images from three new series (all works 2023), clustered in grids, lined up along walls, and proceeding in colonnades.
No Apology (June 5, 2021), a large photograph of Pope Francis delivering a speech from a top-floor window of his residence overlooking St. Peter’s Square, greets visitors. A lone white man dwarfed by statuary and muffled by the resounding whiteness of the colonnaded plaza, he floats above a blood-red banner bearing his coat of arms. In his short allocution, uttered in the wake of the traumatic discovery of unmarked graves at the former Church-run Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, the pontiff acknowledged (apologies would have to wait) the Catholic Church’s complicity in both the colonial dispossession of Canada’s Aboriginal communities and the accompanying systematic …
Amalia Pica’s “Aula Expandida”
Noah Simblist
How might our understanding of education better incorporate communication, participation, and play? And what would be the consequences of that expanded approach? Such questions have been at the center of Amalia Pica’s work for many years, drawing partially on her early experience as a primary school teacher. Her first solo exhibition in New York attends to the manifold aspects of learning across a group of collages, sculptures, and video works organized around a new interactive installation.
Two understated large-scale graphite and watercolor drawings, School sheets in adjusted scale (or an exercise in how to go back to all the things I hadn’t thought of yet) #1 and #2 (both 2011), are based on notebook paper with “Rivadavia” printed in an elegant cursive in the margin. This references Bernardino Rivadavia, the first president of the London-based artist’s birth country of Argentina, using a font based on his signature. The stamping of state power into the very books in which young people learn how to write signals the reproduction of the ideological subject through a form of repeated inscription. This has chilling implications in the context of the military dictatorship (1976–83) into which Pica was born.
Her 2008 video On Education depicts …
“Fokus: Hamed Abdalla”
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
The Egyptian artist Hamed Abdalla painted mothers and farmers and letters and landscapes but the subjects he returned to most often, in each of the many disparate phases of his career, were lovers. This jewel box-sized exhibition devoted to Abdalla’s work, organized by Morad Montazami and Madeleine de Colnet of the Paris-based publishing and curatorial project Zamân, features six of his amorous pairings. The earliest lovers in the show are Les Amants de Shemm Ennessim [The Lovers of Shemm Ennessim], from 1953, a sweet gouache on silk paper showing a couple in traditional dress, facing each other demurely in profile but slyly extending their arms to embrace. The figures appear stylized and flattened, and clearly, Abdalla was inspired by a celebrated genre of hand-painting on glass depicting Antar and Abla. Those two are the hero and heroine of pre-Islamic poetry (composed by Antar himself, full name Antarah Ibn Shaddad) relating the episodic adventures of a black warrior poet who was born a slave but became a knight and the smart, beautiful woman who defied her family to be with him.
The last of Abdalla’s lovers, in a show conceived as part of a series and wedged into the museum’s permanent …
“Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists”
Vanessa Holyoak
The Chinese term gūanxi describes a web of relations between friends, family, lovers, co-workers, even corrupt politicians. It evokes a sense of community and belonging that can prove elusive for the diverse group of people commonly referred to as “Chinese American.” A moniker that points to allegiances, however fraught, to the two countries it references, “Chinese American” is a one-size-fits-all label that attempts to forge a singular identity out of a heterogeneous array of diasporic experiences shaped by displacement, immigration, and cross-cultural translation.
Curated by Dr. Jenny Lin, “Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists” hinges on another transcultural exchange. Drawing connections between gūanxi and French-Martinican philosopher of opacity Édouard Glissant’s notion of a “poetics of relation,” the exhibition posits relationality over identity as an alternate cornerstone of contemporary Chinese Americanness. Referenced in an introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue written by Dr. Lin, Glissant’s emphasis on diasporic relation is espoused throughout the show—which includes areas for repose and relation amongst exhibition-goers—and enacted through real and speculative social encounters between family, friends, and strangers staged within the works themselves. Drawing its title from the Chinese word for America, 美國/měiguó, which translates literally to “beautiful country,” along with the …
Tania Bruguera’s “Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism)”
Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung
In Germany’s increasingly censorious intellectual climate, Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof staged the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera’s “Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism)” inside its main hall. This participatory public reading of—and discussion around—Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was spread across four days, featuring the artist alongside writers such as Masha Gessen and Deborah Feldman, prominent artists in Berlin including Candice Breitz, and people from “the museum’s neighborhood.”
Speakers—mostly solo, sometimes in a trio, and even as a chorus—addressed the audience amid a spare scenography: a single rattan-upholstered rocking chair, illuminated from above by a beam of golden light. Hospital-gray bean bags and cardboard stools were strewn before it, stretching out towards the entrance of the museum and luring visitors into a collectivized consideration of “power and violence, plurality and morality, politics and truth.”
Microphones were connected to a sound system scattered haphazardly around the space, and synchronized with speakers outside the institution facing Invalidenstraße, a thoroughfare leading to Berlin’s central station, a few hundred meters away. Like the work’s title, Bruguera’s sonic gesture felt prescriptive—as if it were the artist’s duty to break Arendt out of the institution and onto the …
Madeline Hollander’s “Entanglement”
Maddie Hampton
In profile, the six rounded disks at the center of Madeline Hollander’s latest exhibition appear glamorously extraterrestrial, the bright bulbs of the track lighting glinting in their polished chrome surfaces. Arranged in a grid on curved, white pedestals, the satellite-shaped objects are constructed from parabolic mirrors, a hole cut at the top of each to reveal a sinewy figure cast in aluminum, revolving atop a bifurcated circle of colored glass. Based on Hollander’s personalized notation system, specific silhouettes and colors correspond to a precise movement so that, taken in concert, the six figures play out an entire choreography, spinning perpetually in place.
Viewed at the right angle, the maquette doubles, ascending out of the mirror like a ballerina from a jewelry box to create the illusion of a perfect pas de deux—not a limb out of place, nor a posture skipped, as both “dancers” rotate in flawless synchronicity. Titled Entanglement Choreography I-VI (all works 2023), the objects are designed as miniaturized visualizations of quantum entanglement, the theory that two particles can be interdependent, mimicking one another across both space and time, the action of one entirely conditional on that of its partner. Quick and loose with her interpretations of the …
Suneil Sanzgiri’s “Here the Earth Grows Gold”
Phil Coldiron
Go past the Tiffany glass, the inventory of deco design and the wing of feminist art that still bears the name Sackler, and finally, tucked away, you’ll find a small enclave of two rooms comprising Suneil Sanzgiri’s solo institutional debut, “Here the Earth Grows Gold.” The smaller of these galleries contains: a sculpture, Red Clay, Stretched Water (Return to the Source) (all works 2023), a kind of provisional hut built of black bamboo and printed images; a minute-long loop of 16mm film, My Memory Is Again in the Way of Your History (After Agha Shahid Ali), in which a digitally-animated banner reading “Your History Gets In The Way Of My Memory” flutters atop waves; and quite a lot of wall text (the one written by the artist himself, demanding that the Brooklyn Museum divest itself of various ill-gotten items in its collection, might reasonably be taken as the show’s fourth work). Moving through a curtain to the centerpiece, the digital double-projection Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), maybe the first thing you notice is the gap between its screens: each canted slightly off an unseen wall, they funnel vision to the six inches or so of space between them.
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Jane Jin Kaisen’s “Halmang”
Dylan Huw
A group of elderly women labor silently, weaving and draping long sheets of white cotton around an islet of black volcanic rock. The twelve-minute film installation’s supplementary materials explain that these women have spent much of their lives working together as haenyeo—an occupation dating back centuries, in which women freedive to harvest seafood for their families on Jeju Island, south of the Korean Peninsula—and that this precise setting is one of shamanic significance, associated with the goddess of wind who gives the film its title, Halmang (2023). The Jeju-born, Denmark-based artist’s patiently observational study of these “women of the sea” emphasizes their status as workers by foregrounding, in lingering close-ups, their aged, scarred faces and hands as continuous with the aged, scarred rock. A soundtrack of crushing waves lulls the viewer, until the film’s confronting climactic image: the islet depeopled and draped in the white cotton. This land, born from geological shock and host to centuries of politically contested narrative, will outlive us all.
Halmang gives this tightly focused exhibition at Manchester’s esea contemporary its title and centerpiece. With a refreshing formal lucidity, it literalizes themes of familial and geopolitical ties that have been central to Kaisen’s work in film …
Ho Tzu Nyen’s “Time & the Tiger”
Adeline Chia
Meditations on the nature of temporality abound in Ho Tzu Nyen’s latest video work, T for Time (2023–). We have explainers on timekeeping traditions in the East and West; a vignette about a man who maintains Singapore’s oldest public clock; the origins of Greenwich Mean Time; metaphysical musings on non-linear time (“time conceived as a viscous fluid… it does not pass and has no rim… it pools”). Accompanying most of these are digital animations that sometimes illustrate the concepts—like imagery of a molting ouroboros—and visuals with less obvious connections to the theme, such as recurring scenes of political protest and incarceration. Most of the text is sung by a male narrator in seemingly improvised melodies. Content, which is shuffled by an algorithm, starts to repeat only about seventy-five edifying minutes in. I was intrigued, stimulated and entertained, but couldn’t escape the feeling of being lectured to. This has something to do with the video’s heavy reliance on text: this work narrates itself.
Ho’s self-narrating, self-theorizing, and sometimes even self-interpreting practice involves a thorough immersion in a range of research topics, resulting in a cathartic showing and telling that has become his signature style. “Time & the Tiger”, a mid-career survey …
Pedro Lasch’s “Entre líneas / Between the Lines”
Mariana Fernández
Pedro Lasch’s mid-career survey at Laboratorio Arte Alameda begins with a painting—the ultra-deadpan McSickle, grande no. 1 (2003)—depicting a yellow hammer and sickle fusing with the “M” of McDonald’s on a red background. These two colors also happen to make up the Chinese flag. The painting exemplifies the multiple layers of Lasch’s practice: the artist is best known not so much for making things as for creating opportunities for social encounter and collaboration through his roles as an activist, educator (he teaches at Duke and is the director of its FHI Social Practice Lab), and cultural organizer (with the collective 16 Beaver). Yet the thematic survey “Pedro Lasch: Entre líneas / Between the Lines” manages to avoid the document-heavy trappings into which displays of socially engaged art sometimes fall because of how well Lasch’s social practice translates into objecthood. The survey shows that whether in the form of painting, installation, props, performance scores, or game instructions, Lasch has long been thinking about the tensions between colonialism and cultural exchange, and using art as an entry point into public engagement with a decolonial agenda.
These themes are on full display in the mural painted on the back wall of the main …
Hanan Benammar’s “The Soil Is Fertile But For A Distant Seed”
Natasha Marie Llorens
Here lies idealism. This my first impression of a marble tombstone that marks the entrance to the second floor of Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall. Instead of a name or a set of dates, it bears the words awareness, insight, and knowledge in Norwegian. Hanan Benammar’s sculpture ERKJENNELSE, INNSIKT, KUNNSKAP (2020), re-stages a comment by an established historian on NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation) regarding a previous work by the artist, Antiphony (2019), in which Benammar set up a calling service that put visitors in touch with strangers to discuss a range of concepts, such as emptiness, chaos, silence, violence, boundaries, and doubt, staging exploratory and open-ended one-on-one discussions. The art historian cited in the more recent sculpture dismissed Antiphony as lacking any significant “awareness, insight, or knowledge.” Those qualities were properly represented by figurative marble sculpture, in this historian’s view, because “marble is art with a capital A.”
It is tempting to dismiss the notion that art must be made in marble to represent insight as reactionary provincialism, an inconsequential view in the broader context of geo-political crisis. Yet such dismissals echo the ways in which the conspiratorial claims emanating from what Naomi Klein, in her 2023 book Doppelganger, dubbed the “Mirror World” …
Kwan Sheung Chi’s “Not retrospective”
Stephanie Bailey
Everything about Kwan Sheung Chi feels elusive, even when he’s telling you about himself. Take the artist’s press release for “Not retrospective,” which includes “less [sic] than 40 recent and previous sculptures, photographs and videos.” A biography cites two solo shows Kwan staged in 2002, one year before he graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and one year after his joint funeral-as-exhibition with artist Chow Chun Fai, when they burned their art. The first is “A Retrospective of Kwan Sheung Chi” at Hong Kong’s 1a space, for which there is scant online record. The second is “Kwan Sheung Chi Touring Series Exhibitions,” described as ten “major” exhibitions at different Hong Kong venues that apparently involved Kwan photographing himself in each site.
Kwan has long resisted the market’s tendency to commodify artists by leaning into commodification as a systematic process that resonates with the conceptual grid—an approach that couches critical gestures within layers of satire. Divided into three sections, “Not retrospective” stages this sleight of hand. It begins with a small white cube crudely built from wooden boards like a stage set, where a trio of pennant banners strung up at the entrance made from dust jackets for Marx’s …
Astrid Klein
Xenia Benivolski
Astrid Klein’s photowork Untitled (Je ne parle pas,…) (1979) presents two cut-out images of Brigitte Bardot—posing in a baby doll dress and, again, coquettishly looking back over her shoulder. In broken, typewritten French and English are the words “je ne parle pas, je ne pense rien” (“I don’t speak, I don’t think”) and “to paint my life, to paint my life, so many ways.” It’s a fitting prelude to this exhibition, which is something of a house of mirrors. Trapped behind the museum glass, like sexy cats in apartment windows, large photographic works fill the walls, each featuring a beautiful woman while slyly reflecting the viewer. In Untitled (la sans couleur…) (1979), a reclining woman awkwardly turns her head to look at me with an enigmatic smile. Loosely draped in a sheet on an unmade bed in the dark, she is a body in waiting. These gazes are not exactly inviting; if anything, they somehow lack emotion, as the title reflects: “masks without color.” But there is something cool, even powerful, about their magnetic resignation. Like several in the show, the image is arranged with visible marker framing and taped sections, giving the impression that this composition sets the stage …
Alfredo Jaar’s “El Lado Oscuro de la Luna”
Juan José Santos
Is that hysterical laughter? And are those accelerated heartbeats the phantasmagoric echoes of Chile, circa 1973? These sounds are not leaking into the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes but are rather the reverberations of an album released that same year: Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, which plays on a loop in this exhibition of works made by Alfredo Jaar between 1974 and ’81. Jaar was seventeen when General Pinochet’s coup d’état tore his country apart, and the young artist sought refuge in this soundtrack of madness and despair.
Pink Floyd’s front-man and lyricist Roger Waters last year released The Dark Side of the Moon Redux, a “reimagining” of the album from which this retrospective takes its title. Where he chose to replace David Gilmour’s guitar solos with homiletic spoken word, curator Pablo Chiuminatto has gone the other way. Rather than over-explain, Chiuminatto’s approach offers little contextualization or research for Jaar’s early works, which mark a turning point in the career of one of Latin America’s most significant artists.
The restrained curation lends the show a provisional feel, an analysis of sketches by an obsessive apprentice. These range from Jaar’s initial experiments with dry-transfer lettering methods, such …
Deimantas Narkevičius’s “The Fifer”
Michael Kurtz
The centerpiece of Deimantas Narkevičius’s current exhibition at Maureen Paley is a holographic screen—a small block of glass on a sleek metal shelf. A nightingale appears in the glass and lands on a branch that hangs there, while audio plays of a flute mimicking birdsong in sync with the movements of its beak. It flies out of view again and then returns, left and right, left and right. On an adjacent wall is another branch of sorts—a bark-like bronze cast of the cavities inside a flute—and nearby hang two small black-and-white images: a 1920s photograph from the Lithuanian State Archive of a soldier playing the flute by a window and a digital recreation of the same scene from directly outside the building. This perplexing constellation of objects is named after the shadowy figure in the photograph, The Fifer (2019).
Holography represents the height of illusionism, elaborately conjuring animated three-dimensional images. But the nightingale’s restless movement in and out of frame continually calls attention to the screen’s edges, where the projection falters and the empty glass block becomes visible. The illusion is further ruptured by the flutist’s birdsong which, isolated from any ambient sound, is unconvincing. Each item here performs a …
Naoki Sutter-Shudo’s “End of Thinking Capacity”
Gracie Hadland
Naoki Sutter-Shudo addresses the current critical landscape with a series of seven “Critical Figures” and twelve paintings. Installed in only one half of the gallery, the audience of figurative sculptures faces a wall on which is hung a row of large graphic canvasses. Each is adorned with a formal accessory made of flimsy material: a wire twist-tie shaped into a tie, a fake lettuce hat, a shirt made of bubble wrap or a plastic bag. The figures’ apparent attempts to present as professional are rendered ridiculous by the nature of their clothing. They look as though they’re dressed for a nineteenth-century salon—complete with bonnets, big collars, and ties—rather than a contemporary art gallery. Each figure’s body has an intricately constructed apparatus holding a wind-up metronome with a bell (some in 3/4 time, others in 1/4 time) and has a unique look, height, and facial expression tending towards the bizarre—one has three heads, for example.
The viewer is able to wind up the “critics,” letting them spin their wheels while looking around the show. The result is a rhythmic kind of chatter punctuated with the ding of a bell, as if to signal a lightbulb moment. Sitting atop stacks of white …
Jan Van Imschoot’s “The End Is Never Near”
Jörg Heiser
Belgian painter Jan Van Imschoot’s first major retrospective—the show that should gain him the belated international recognition his work deserves—spans four decades, seven rooms, more than eighty paintings, a bar, and a small cinema. And it starts with a landscape-format painting sitting smack across the entrance. A cherub or cupid, though with no wings, painted much larger than life, reclines against an indistinct, darkly looming background. The little big fellow has apparently nodded off, his nipples, shiny belly bottom, and tiny weenie standing out like bumps and craters on the surface of a full moon. The motif and the title Amore Dormiente (2018) pay direct homage to Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid (1608), a small painting at home in the Uffizi.
But homage immediately turns into, well, what? Parody? Grotesque exaggeration? In this adaptation, cupid’s face is wreathed by a shock of auburn hair, a rather adult skyward nose, sagging cheeks, and eyes swollen half-shut, like an old drunk’s. Instead of a bow and arrow in his left hand, in his right he holds a handwritten letter in French, signed by van Imschoot, which translates as: “Aposematism in painting: on linguistic confusions and the mimesis of lies, or the challenge of the …
“As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories”
Olexii Kuchanskyi
Against a backdrop of constant territorial changes in the former Soviet countries and the ongoing war in Ukraine, “As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories” explores the “geopoetics of North Eurasia.” The term denotes heterogeneous, yet tightly interconnected, political and cultural contexts under oppressive regimes, ranging from the Russian Empire to contemporary Russian imperialism via Soviet colonialism. Framed in the handout by HKW’s director, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, as a way of “being and seeing the world through the prism of the Global East,” the show tries to avoid any “totalizing vision” in favor of multiple subjectivities and geographies.
To achieve this, the show’s curators—Cosmin Costinaș, Iaroslav Volovod, Nikolay Karabinovych, Saodat Ismailova, and Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon—have scattered the artworks across the museum in a way that foregrounds their discreteness, each piece separately lit and surrounded by empty space. Stories of colonialism, resistance, and artistic experimentation are encapsulated in these “monads,” yet the aversion to a “totalizing vision” extends to the bewildering absence of wall texts from the galleries (viewers hoping for context must flip through the handbook, which lacks a general plan of the show, to find a work description).
The exhibition’s main space is filled …
“Self-Determination: A Global Perspective”
Judith Wilkinson
“Everyone has the right to a nationality,” states article 15 of the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (1948) and “no one shall be deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.” As part of “Self-Determination: A Global Perspective,” Banu Çennetoğlu has filled the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s East Wing Gallery with three gigantic bouquets of gold helium letter balloons. Each bouquet, a mass of oversized jumbled letters, spells out a different article from the declaration. Throughout the course of the exhibition the balloons that make up right? (2022–ongoing) will deflate, lowering to the ground, until nothing remains but their empty carcasses.
An initiative of Annie Fletcher, IMMA’s director since 2019, “Self-Determination” explores the establishment of new post-World War I nation-states—including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey, Egypt, and Ireland itself—focusing on the role that art and artists played in statecraft and the formation of the national imagination. The site of the exhibition, the Royal Hospital Kilmainham (built in 1684 as a home for retired British soldiers), holds significance in the construction of the Irish nation. It was considered as a potential headquarters for Oíreachtas Shaorstát Éireann, the newly established government of the Irish Free State …
Shubigi Rao’s “These Petrified Paths”
Katherine C. M. Adams
In Shubigi Rao’s new film These Petrified Paths (2023), censorship is always tied to the threat of repressive territorialization. Early on, we are introduced to a “former professor of Russian literature, now beekeeper on the side of the road to Daliyan” in Turkey, who embodies a theme of the exhibition at large: how a struggle over literature and written culture has led to a fight over ecology, terrain, and the right to live freely on one’s Indigenous land. In the film, this process is inflected by the historical function of Armenian literature as a tool of nation-building, forging claims to place for a people often on the verge of statelessness. As one featured subject remarks of the region’s history, the Armenian genocide is also “cultural genocide.”
These Petrified Paths details (among other threads) the lengths to which Armenian intellectuals have gone to preserve their heritage: one participant describes how an elder member of the community buried his books in the ground, with the intent that they be dug up only upon the retreat of repressive state forces. Toward the end of the film, an interlocutor alludes pessimistically to the contemporary Armenian government’s attempts to “sell off” part of the country …
“Intimate confession is a project”
Valentin Diaconov
Curated by Houston-born curator Jennifer Teets, “Intimate confession is a project” looks at what her academic inspirations—Lauren Berlant, Ara Wilson, Kai Bosworth—have called “affective infrastructures.” Here, the phrase denotes a way of thinking through how infrastructures, designed to facilitate the movement of goods and people with maximum efficiency, can produce varied emotional affects. In a catalogue essay, Teets writes that this group exhibition is “informed” by Houston. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in America, infrastructure is the city: the crumbling roads, the non-existent sidewalks, and the looming if stealthy presence of oil refinement and finance.
The show opens with model houses made from old Bible covers by Chiffon Thomas. Attached to the ceiling over the staircase to the exhibition floor, they hover like ghosts. Thomas was inspired by the neighborhoods of his Chicago childhood, but the shaky silhouettes of these model houses could be Houston’s Third Ward, or any poor community where a church promises a better life perspective than the current economy and policy.
In a transgenerational dialogue the curator’s great-grandmother, Josie Ann Teets, an amateur songwriter, meets a young French artist. Josie Ann wrote and published The Oil King Buggie in 1975. The show contains a notation …
An-My Lê’s “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières”
Jacinda S. Tran
In 1968, army photographer Ron Haeberle shot Vietnamese civilians indiscriminately massacred by US ground forces in the hamlet of Mỹ Lai. His photographs circulated widely—including a color photo of corpses strewn across a road featured in LIFE magazine that, in 1970, with support from the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Workers Coalition incorporated into an antiwar poster overlaid, in blood red, with the text “Q. And babies? A. And babies.” When MoMA withdrew its support for the poster, AWC staged a protest to illuminate board members’ tacit support of the war in Vietnam. The museum promptly assimilated AWC’s poster into their own collections, institutionalizing institutional critique.
Half a century later, MoMA exhibits “Between Two Rivers/Giữa hai giòng sông/Entre deux rivières,” a survey of multimedia works by Vietnam-born An-My Lê, whose large-format photographs are known for their staging and depictions of militarized landscapes. Lê focuses on what the visual reveals and obscures; how a range of quotidian landscapes may be conceived as “always already military.” Though Lê left Vietnam as a teenager after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the specter of war and its spectacularization informs her approaches to representation. In “Viêt Nam” (1994–98), Lê returns to her birth …
“Green Snake: women-centred ecologies”
Stephanie Bailey
Of all the works in this gathering of cosmological and ecological perspectives, one is anchored directly to the exhibition title. Two moon gates open up the wooden frame enclosing Candice Lin’s Kiss under the tail (all works 2023 unless otherwise stated), where floorspace padded with tatami mats hosts ceramic cats, one with a house for a head, and an indigo-dyed carpet whose patterning replicates a nineteenth-century diagram of a castration by a western missionary who studied eunuchs in China. These gates, and the transformational space they envelope, reference a central location in Tsui Hark’s 1993 movie, Green Snake, a retelling of an ancient Chinese folktale about two female snake demons who endeavored to become human. In the film, the single-minded White Snake pursues the love of a studious male, while the free-wheeling, shapeshifting Green Snake tries to understand the desire that drives her centuries-long companion to her doom. In the end, Green Snake rejects the human world with its apocalyptically heteronormative devotions and questionably immutable morals, realizing she had known love as an affirmation of life all along. So she returns to the water, or rather to nature; an idea that runs through this show.
Projected onto a massive wall …
35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, “from the void came gifts of the cosmos”
Kate Sutton
When Ibrahim Mahama agreed to serve as artistic director of the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, he sought inspiration on a domestic scale. The simple conceptual sketch he prepared for this edition—titled “from the void came gifts of the cosmos”—shows a rudimentary bedframe, with a few unidentified objects stashed underneath. This curatorial approach attempts to reclaim an everyday architectural recess from the realm of monsters and recognize it instead as a space of potential. But dark things come from under the bed, the darkest of which may be nothing at all.
Mahama applies the metaphor of the void not only to architectural and ideological infrastructures, but also to emancipatory movements that operate within structures of colonial domination. Chief among these is the Non-Aligned Movement: a political experiment that rejected the either/or imperialism of the Cold War era in favor of a multilateral understanding of the world. Its foundations were laid at the Bandung Conference in 1955, the same year that the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts launched. Fresh from its split and subsequent rapprochement with the USSR, Yugoslavia offered a meeting ground for representatives from both sides of the Iron Curtain, and the biennial was expressly crafted to strengthen …
Pacita Abad
Tausif Noor
To discuss the life of Pacita Abad is to enumerate the diverse places to which she traveled (some sixty countries across six continents), her expansive artistic output (nearly 5000 large-scale works), and the litany of materials and techniques she applied to the surfaces of her signature stuffed-and-quilted canvases, or trapuntos (sequins, beads, batik prints, and phulkari embroidery, to name just a few). Over a thirty-two-year career—she died of cancer in Singapore in 2004—Abad sidestepped hierarchies between craft and high art and unraveled received notions of the local, national, and global, pursuing instead a vibrant eclecticism that was often at odds with the dominant artistic movements of her time.
The retrospective at SFMOMA—arriving from the Walker Art Center before stops at New York’s MoMA PS1 and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto—follows Abad’s artistic career as it was shaped by global postwar politics from the aftermath of national decolonization movements in Asia and Africa in the 1960s, through the humanitarianism of the 1970s and ’80s, and the heyday of multiculturalism in the US in the 1990s and early 2000s. In this, Abad’s trapuntos in particular function as what the curator Shabbir Hussain Mustafa has aptly termed an “archive of the …
Andrea Bowers’s “Joy is an Act of Resistance”
R.H. Lossin
The first work that one encounters on entering Andrew Kreps’s gallery might be mistaken for an extension of the gallery’s commercial operations. Trans Bills (2023) consists of fifty-four black ring binders, arrayed on a shelf to the left of the front desk, labeled with the names of states that have passed legislation restricting the rights of trans citizens. The work’s blandness is perhaps the point. Quietly running in the background of clownish Republican performances of parental rights and viral videos of religious zealots is a legislative machine producing the reams of paper progressively restricting the rights of trans people to work, receive medical care, and live basic social lives. In a mere two years, 1,006 anti-trans bills have been introduced by state legislatures. An additional sixty-three have been introduced at the federal level.
At the back of the first-floor gallery is a 47-minute single-channel video of a trans prom organized by four teenagers as both an adolescent rite of passage and a protest—two things that are, for many trans youth, inseparable. The footage is visible from the gallery’s entrance, and the contrast between the young faces and the scale of adult animosity ranged against them is the show’s most valuable …
Mit Jai Inn
Jenny Wu
In Shirley Jackson’s allegorical short story “The Lottery” (1948), villagers gather for a game of chance in which they draw slips of paper, all blank but one, from an old black box. Children, adults, and elders alike, accustomed to the tradition, participate with a mixture of anticipation and boredom. The ending reveals that the prize, known to them all along, is the stoning of an unlucky villager. Mit Jai Inn’s first US solo exhibition also features a large quantity of “stones” and a lottery that, in subtler ways, uncovers a set of human behaviors integral to the functioning of society and politics. Here, the Chiang Mai-based artist, whose work is often framed as a form of social practice infused with Buddhist teachings, sets up a participatory piece titled after a recent sculpture series, Marking Stones (2022). Visitors are invited to submit pledges for “positive action” for a chance to win one of these sculptures.
The title of the series is a tenuous reference to the bai sema stones used by Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia to mark their territory: the sculptures are, in fact, fully functional baskets, lamps, and stools. Around two dozen of these candy-colored wares occupy a room …
Paul Pfeiffer’s “Prologue to the Story of the Birth of Freedom”
Juliana Halpert
Trying to find a critical entry point into—or exit from—Paul Pfeiffer’s retrospective is not unlike the challenge of navigating its labyrinthine layout of walls, ramps, and rooms within rooms. An architecture designed by the artist with Hollywood sound stages in mind slowly unveils a spectacle of spectacles, showcasing over thirty works spanning the past twenty-five years and dizzying ranges of scale, duration, material, and method. Pfeiffer is best known for his bite-sized video works, which sit here alongside extra-large installations, miniature dioramas, full-scale sculptures, room-wide projections, and expansive photo series. Video durations range from four seconds to ninety days. Most of his moving-image works have no sound, but the space hums with the distant, ambient clamor of a crowd. Michael Jackson’s voice has been replaced by that of a Filipino choir. The Stanley Cup levitates in mid-air. Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali have been scrubbed out of their respective beaches and boxing ring. Raucous activity and haunting absence somehow go hand-in-hand.
If there’s a true North to Pfeiffer’s practice, it might be mass media’s protean relationship to consumer technology, how the latter shapes the former and vice versa. It’s a marvel to witness the artist’s use and abuse of both, …
Delcy Morelos’s “El abrazo”
Michael Kurtz
Here lie the ruins of the American avant-garde. Wood salvaged from an installation by Dan Graham, offcuts from a felt piece by Robert Morris, and scraps of flooring from a Dorothea Rockburne display. Mounds of soil recall Robert Smithson’s geological samples and rows of pipe echo Walter de Maria’s Broken Kilometer (1979) of brass rods lined up on the floor. These fragments now sit in darkness, illuminated only by four shaded skylights. They are arranged across the space along with sheets of corrugated metal, parallel stacks of wooden planks, and hundreds of small pieces of Colombian pottery. Everything is dark brown and sitting on a crust of mud which rises up the walls to a high-water mark, I later read, left after the gallery flooded during Hurricane Sandy.
Despite their simple forms and materials, the objects become mirage-like in this dimly lit monochrome expanse. Walking down the pier of clean floor that stretches into the room, I try to perceive the scale and texture of the things around me, but they evade my grasp. The light fades and they retreat further. Cielo terrenal [Earthly heaven] (2023), the first of two installations by Colombian artist Delcy Morelos at Dia Chelsea, is …
Henry Taylor’s “From Sugar to Shit”
Novuyo Moyo
The people in Henry Taylor’s paintings are usually surrounded by slabs of color, a graphic sensibility he shares with his high school peers and alternative comic book artists Los Bros Hernandez, whom he credits with setting the bar for his work. “I always thought, ‘Damn, they draw so much better than I.’ So I started just practicing my draftsmanship because of them. They intimidated me.” Taylor worked for ten years as a technician at Camarillo State Mental Hospital while studying at CalArts, providing assistance to some of the area’s most vulnerable people and at times featuring them in his drawings and paintings, developing the empathetic lens through which he would continue to frame his subjects.
Set in Hauser and Wirth’s Parisian multi-story outpost, and consisting of works made between 2015 and 2023 (the most recent made during a stay in Paris over the summer), “From Sugar to Shit” connects past and present, interior and exterior, public and private. Taylor’s subjects range from famous faces to personal acquaintances, but his frank, inquisitive approach sees both groups as equally worthy of commemoration. It’s not always clear whether he works from memory, archival materials, a live sitting, or a combination of these, but …
Sanya Kantarovsky’s “The Prison” with Yasuo Kuroda’s “The Last Butoh”
Jennifer Piejko
Tatsumi Hijikata spoke with his entire body. At Nonaka-Hill, Yasuo Kuroda’s photographs of his performances of Butoh—the form of dance theatre he founded in postwar Tokyo—are displayed alongside new paintings by Sanya Kantarovsky, advancing the latter’s interest in Japanese folklore and traditions. The subjects on the canvases resemble the dancers in the photographs, as if painted from hazy memories or fever dreams. Though not directly depicting the same figures or moments, the two approaches to image-making are complementary: both capture the depths of estrangement, enveloped dislocations, and solitary sorcery of performance.
Each lone figure in Kantarovsky’s paintings expresses a different facet of pain. No Longer a Dog and I am a Body Shop (all Kantarovsky’s works are dated 2023) show figures who mirror traditional Butoh performers, turned away and covered in the Japanese white paint of mourning over their faces and limbs, ribs visible through their nearly translucent skin. In Bleeding Nature, the dancer suffers from the kind of wound that a Butoh dancer might feel in phantom form: an open gash over a bloody heart. Their bottom half disintegrates into ribbons, dangling from their fingertips and torso into a swirl of entrails that fertilizes a surrounding field of flowers …
2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial, “The Beauty of Impermanence: An Architecture of Adaptability”
Nick Axel
The second Sharjah Architecture Triennial—featuring twenty-nine architects, artists, and designers across two main venues (the Al Qasimiyah School and Old Al Jubail Vegetable Market) and a handful of off-site locations—reckons with the cultural and ecological legacies of colonialism and modernity. The work shown does not, in the words of its curator, the Nigerian architect Tosin Oshinowo, simply acknowledge a wrong or apologize for the past. Instead, the contributions demonstrate modes of practice that build new worlds from the ruins of the present. Ideas of “impermanence” and “adaptability” here describe creative responses to conditions of scarcity that draw on ancestral ways of knowing and resourceful forms of making, and “beauty” as a celebration of survivance.
This triennial is in many ways a spiritual successor to Lesley Lokko’s international exhibition at the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale, “The Laboratory of the Future.” Beyond the handful of contributors to appear in both, in these exhibitions architecture is often a starting point, theme, and subject more than an end with pre-defined means. This approach liberates the exhibition from the representational conventions of architectural media (drawings, diagrams, models, maps, and photographs) in favor of immersive installations, sculptural works, films, and more that overcome the alienating …
Shilpa Gupta
Paul Stephens
Recent New York Times headlines point to American perceptions of India’s increasingly prominent role in global affairs. “Can India Challenge China for Leadership of the ‘Global South’?” “Will This Be the ‘Indian Century’?” “The Illusion of a US-India Partnership.” “US Seeks Closer Ties With India as Tension With China and Russia Builds.” “US Says Indian Official Directed Assassination Plot in New York.” “An Indian Artist Questions Borders and the Limits on Free Speech.”
The last headline refers to Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta, whose work obliquely explores the emergent global polycrisis (a term popularized by Adam Tooze) in which India plays a central part. Although Gupta’s art is deeply engaged with contemporary political events, it is not headline-driven. It resists didacticism, in part, through being polyvocal, as exemplified in her standout installation Listening Air (2019–23). Defying simple description and rewarding patient immersion, Listening Air consists of multiple microphones-turned-speakers that play songs of labor and resistance from around the world. As the songs fade in and out, listener-viewers in the dimly lit room slowly begin to perceive themselves as members of a temporary community. The effect is ethereal and meditative.
Gupta’s two concurrent New York exhibitions, at Amant and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, accord …
Lisa Brice’s “LIVES and WORKS”
Louise Darblay
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,” goes John Berger in his classic BBC show Ways of Seeing (1972), his big blue eyes staring intently at the viewer while he demonstrates the impact of centuries of male gaze—from canonical paintings to contemporary advertising—on the way women perceive themselves. “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.” In Lisa Brice’s paintings, which wander the corridors of western art history, women look at themselves, but no longer through this mediated perspective: the muses, models, and mistresses come to life, turning from passive objects into active subjects, becoming the authors and surveyors of their own image.
This new series by the South African artist, presented on the ground floor of Ropac’s Marais space, bristles with punkish energy. Two large, cinematic canvases mirror each other on opposite walls, their horizontal compositions drawn from Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882). In the most obvious riff on his work, Untitled (after Manet & Degas) (all works mentioned 2023), the Folies-Bergère has turned into a women-only cabaret, populated by sexy and brazen dancers (including Manet’s sad-looking barmaid, …
12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, “THIS TOO, IS A MAP”
Jason Waite
“THIS TOO, IS A MAP” questions the conventional relationship of map to territory, looking “to model multi-spatial and multi-subjective histories and knowledge.” Directed by Rachael Rakes with associate curator Sofia Dourron, the show features works by sixty-five artists chosen not as representatives of particular nations but for their embrace of transnational approaches. The diasporic bent of this list reflects an expansion of (and alternative approach to) cartography to articulate myriad overlapping personal roots and routes.
One example is Tibetan-American artist Tenzin Phuntsog, whose video Pure Land (2022) attempts to trace landscapes across the American West that look similar to images of a homeland he’s never visited. In the film, he messages these images to his mother to comment on or verify their similitude. In the construction of these unknown nostalgic landscapes, the images Phuntsog takes are uncannily similar to their Tibetan counterparts. The comparison highlights the possibility that any space can be made into a home. At the same time, it floats subtle questions of what defines any given place.
What lies underneath a landscape was the focus of one of the more unique venues of the biennale: an emergency bunker built for the former military dictator Park Chung …
“Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969”
Alan Gilbert
In November 1969, a group of Native activists sailed across San Francisco Bay and occupied Alcatraz Island, home to the infamous prison that had closed in 1963. The occupation lasted until the summer of 1971, when federal authorities besieged the island by cutting off the electricity and water supply before government agents and local police removed the dozen or so remaining inhabitants. The year 1969 also saw the publication of the pamphlet “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process,” written collaboratively by Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee), Rolland Meinholtz (Cherokee), and students at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It called for the combination of contemporary theater practices with performative and ritual aspects of Native societies in an effort to bring marginalized Native stories and cultural forms to a reimagined stage.
The large survey exhibition “Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969,” curated by Candice Hopkins (Carcross / Tagish First Nation) at the Hessel Museum of Art, opens with archival documents in vitrines highlighting these two historical moments. Pages of “Indian Theatre: An Artistic Experiment in Process” are given pride of place at the entrance next to undated, grainy black-and-white videos of Native performances …
Neïla Czermak Ichti’s “J’adore vous faire rire”
Natasha Marie Llorens
A diminutive and oddly classical homage to the eponymous character in Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic horror film Alien, entitled Bolaji resting between two takes (2023), is tucked into one corner of the front room of Anne Barrault’s gallery in Paris. The painting is small, the facture thick, with a palette in shades of white. The composition’s contrast is rendered in a warm maroon tone that reminds me of blood coagulating at the edges of a flesh wound. Despite this latent suggestion of violence, Franco-Tunisian artist Neïla Czermak Ichti’s portrait of the infamous being eschews the sexualized viciousness of its on-screen presence. Seated on a cheap plywood block, visibly marked by use, with its massive head resting on long, thin forearms, the alien just looks tired, like a construction worker on a fifteen-minute break.
Czermak Ichti became obsessed with Bolaji Badejo, the twenty-five-year-old Nigerian art student inside Ridley’s oppressive latex costume. She based the painting on one of only a handful of production photographs of the costumed actor between shots. Badejo was born in Lagos in 1953, immigrated to Ethiopia with his family in the aftermath of the Nigerian civil war (1967–70) and then to the UK. The one-time movie star …
Jessica Segall’s “Human Energy”
Cassie Packard
Jessica Segall’s transgressive exploration of desire and petroleum unfolds to the beat of a mechanical soundtrack. The work of Berghain resident DJ Steffi, building on Segall’s own recordings of active oil fields, the piston-like pulsations fuse petro-extraction and the nightclub. Desire—for dominion, capital, commodities, relations—has always powered industry; here, industry clearly powers desire, too. Petroleum’s libidinal imaginary encompasses everything from imagery of women virtually fornicating with automobiles to the more abstract seductions of movement, convenience, ease, and accumulation. In Human Energy (2023), a dispersed four-channel video installation with sculptural elements (titled after Chevron’s slogan), Segall renders these fetishizations with erotic effect.
On one channel, the scantily clad, gloved artist climbs and mounts a pumpjack. She rides it as if it were a mechanical bull, moving her hands back and forth to steady herself while the machine repeatedly plunges into the earth. The video was shot in Kern County, California, which is responsible for the vast majority of the state’s oil and fracked gas production and boasts some of the worst air pollution in the country, a burden disproportionately borne by the region’s most vulnerable communities. Panoramic open sky, mountain range, sunset: our petro-cowgirl deploys the tropes that have characterized fantasies …
Ali Cherri’s “Dreamless Night”
Cathryn Drake
Ali Cherri’s The Watchman [Nöbetçi] (all works 2023) follows a young Turkish Cypriot officer stationed at a watchtower in Akincilar, a district encircled by the meandering border drawn across Cyprus after the Turkish invasion of 1974. Adjacent to the closely patrolled United Nations Buffer Zone, it is a desolate, transitory place where nothing really happens. On the horizon are the crumbling ruins of a village abandoned by Greek Cypriots. When the loudspeaker announces the end of his shift, Sergeant Bulut doesn’t move, his bloodshot eyes staring into the camera as if hypnotized by the drone of cicadas. The soldier’s routine is occasionally interrupted by a robin crashing into the dusty glass, leaving a splotch of blood and feathers; Bulut dutifully retrieves each body and records the collateral casualty with another tick on the wall.
This film is not about a particular place: Cyprus, a geopolitically strategic territory that has passed from empire to empire since antiquity, here stands for the postcolonial state of the world and, with much of its population exiled within their own country, the existential condition of so many in contemporary society. On the southern coast lies the British Overseas Territory, a legacy of colonial rule. Turkish …
Lisa Tan’s “Dodge and/or Burn”
James Taylor-Foster
Slicing through subterranean exhibition halls that were previously university laboratories for research in accelerator physics, Lisa Tan’s first institutional show in Sweden tenders its own spatial logic through the metaphor of neurological disorders. Visitors are received by an ink-drawn diagram based on Oliver Sacks’s 1970 sketch of “migraine and neighboring disorders” (from a book said to have been written over just nine days, aided by an undisclosed psychoactive substance). Here, the diagram is superimposed on a detailed schematic of the galleries: I enter the exhibition through “protracted vegetative reactions.”
Tan treats Sacks’s diagram as a tool, scaling it up to a dizzying and dysfunctional domestic space by way of partial walls which operate as spatial dividers, passages, atmospheric zones, and display environments. Rhythmic and austere, this site-specific installation of previous works lays bare the delicate negotiation between control and collapse on which our lives depend. As an organizing principle, Promise or Threat (2023) reveals how rooms are diagrams that shape the ways in which we interface with the world. We move like ghosts, seen and unseen, between spaces that give form to the inner self: the anxiety of a family dinner, the pressure of a deadline, the monotony of a …
22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, “Memory is an Editing Station”
Oliver Basciano
If the Global South is itself an imagined community then, this edition of Videobrasil suggests, therein might lie its emancipatory power. Exhibitions focused on the Global South are in welcome vogue, from the current Bienal de São Paulo to next year’s Venice Biennale, but Videobrasil has been ploughing the furrow for thirty of its forty years now. While curators Raphael Fonseca and Renée Akitelek Mboya took a line by poet Waly Salomão as their guide to select sixty artists from thirty-eight countries out of 2,300 open submissions, this edition is most effective as a snapshot of the conscious and unconscious preoccupations of a constructed region. One that, for the curators, stretches from South and Central America, to Africa, Asia, and former Soviet states (as well as Indigenous artists from any continent). This region, the curators suggest, is “a plural and fertile accumulation of visions.”
What binds this imagined community together? On a series of plinths, Ali Cherri has placed what seem like stone monuments of antiquity—which they are, in part. The scrunched, snarling face and neat mane of Lion (2022) is a historic architectural fragment that the Lebanese artist found in a Beirut antique shop. The bulky clay body, however, …
Meredith Monk’s “Calling”
Patrick Langley
Oude Kerk is a fittingly resonant venue for Meredith Monk’s first—long overdue—retrospective in Europe. This massive thirteenth-century church houses highlights from a polymathic six-decade career that respond to (and echo in) its cavernous nave, with its vaulted wooden ceilings and looming pulpits, its high choir and chapels. To visitors (such as myself) who have only previously encountered Monk’s work via recordings, “Calling,” curated by Beatrix Ruf of the Hartwig Art Foundation, is a revelation. It brings together hypnotic video installations, sculptures, and archival material, yet the result is cohesive, not cacophonous. Each work has space to breathe. Together, they form a harmonious whole.
Several pieces have been revised or reimagined for this show. Amsterdam Archaeology (2023), an iteration of a work first shown in 1998 and the first viewers see upon entering, is one example: a red ziggurat for the display of objects donated by city residents and dipped in beeswax (or “Beuys wax,” as it risks being known in art contexts). These yellowish, translucent cauls point to the union, evident across this exhibition, of industrious and protective instincts. Monk has for decades sought the holistic union of art and healing.
Installations housed in freestanding (and judiciously soundproofed) rooms extend …
Lutz Bacher’s “AYE!”
Michael Kurtz
The first room of “AYE!” is carpeted with fine sand. Audio from Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation of The Unbearable Lightness of Being fills the air. “Tomas,” a woman asks between kisses, “what are you thinking?” To which Tomas replies: “I’m thinking how happy I am.” The clip loops—the lovers locked in this tender moment, accompanied by piano music and the thrum of rain and windscreen wipers—and with every repeat becomes more cloying and meaningless. Four television screens in a row to one side emit a white glow which fades each time the loop ends, an electronic sunset on the beach. There is a formal resonance between the artificially uniform texture of the sand, the blank monochrome screens, and the eternally recurring sweet nothings. In these elements—nature, entertainment, love—we seek comfort, but here find them in a state of entropy: metronomic, sterile, vacuous.
A child in red dungarees arrives at the door and points at me. “There’s a big man in the sandpit,” she announces to her father, getting his reassurance before dancing freely across the room. She writes her name in the sand, and in doing so shares something that the pseudonymous Lutz Bacher, who died in 2019, never …
New Red Order’s “The World’s UnFair”
Stephanie Bailey
Occupying a pocket of undeveloped land in Long Island City, “The World’s UnFair” is a principled riot. Created by New Red Order (NRO), a “public secret society” facilitated by artists Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, and Adam Khalil, this carnivalesque fairground, supported by Creative Time, is presided over by Ash and Bruno, a sixteen-foot animatronic tree with LED screens nestled in cellular tower branches and a furry five-foot tall beaver, respectively. The pair talk about the legacies of settler colonialism on the land where they stand, Lenapehoking—a forest, they say, the last time they met. America’s original multi-millionaire John Astor is mentioned: he made his fortune in the fur trade that all but decimated beaver populations, before acquiring land in Manahatta and making “a killing off renting to incoming settlers.”
The politics of land is at the heart of this roadshow. Staked into the earth is New Red Right to Return (2023), a wooden post with directional markers naming Lenape diasporic nations displaced by settlers due to the fundamental difference between the colonial European treatment of land as a commodity and the Indigenous American understanding of it as a communal resource. That discrepancy complicates the narrative that the Lenape sold Manahatta …
Jo Ractliffe’s “Landscaping”
Sean O’Toole
Jo Ractliffe has for decades been photographing the charged and ravaged landscapes of her native South Africa. For nearly as long, she has bristled at the insufficiency of the art-historical term “landscape” in encapsulating her interest in terrains where histories of occupation, use, conflict, and violence do not obviously declare themselves. Sometimes, and only partly in jest, she has used the term “blandscape” to characterize her abstruse images of nothing much in particular, be it a locked gate to an Apartheid-era torture site or desert landscape linked to a forgotten Cold War battleground. Last year, when Ractliffe was shortlisted for the 2022 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, she repeated this dislike, describing landscape as a “difficult term,” more descriptive of an outlook or prospect than a space or place. “I think of [landscape] less as a ‘subject’, or genre,” she adds, “than the medium through which I can explore questions of violence, conflict, and memory.”
Ractliffe’s new exhibition “Landscaping,” her first major statement since her 2020 survey exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, extends her interest in land as tangible fact and immanent subject. It is a remarkable career statement. Her thirty-four black-and-white photos, the majority taken over the …
Candice Lin’s “Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory”
Jonathan Griffin
The story, as literary theorist Peter Brooks has observed, is today’s dominant cultural form. To Brooks, this “overabundance” of narrative is worrying: he criticizes the deference of virtually all strands of culture (not only literature, TV, and movies but art, museology, and—especially—news media) to the persuasive rhetorical power of the story. I share many of his concerns. “The universe is not our stories about the universe,” he writes, “even if those stories are all we have.”
In the artwork of Candice Lin, however—an artist who nests stories inside stories, who researches, remembers, speculates, and concocts in equal measure, all at once, without hope or intent to persuade—the story becomes a lubricative medium that enables the destabilizing of sense, the de-centering of singular subjectivities, and the unpicking of neatly tied conclusions.
“Lithium Sex Demons in the Factory,” the Los Angeles-based artist’s multimedia exhibition at the non-profit Canal Projects in New York, is near-impossible to summarize, except by telling stories. Let me start with one. In the 1970s, female workers at Japanese-operated factories in rural Malaysia experienced demonic possessions and spirit attacks. Workers at these factories hailed not just from Malaysia but China and India too, so bomohs (Malay shamans) and healers …
Coco Fusco’s “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island”
JS Tennant
It comes as no surprise that “Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island” opens with documentation of Coco Fusco’s Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992–94): her justly famous performance with Guillermo Gómez-Peña, staged at the moment the world was tussling over how best to commemorate, or denigrate, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s so-called “discovery” of the Americas. A prime benefit of the Cuban-American artist’s first major retrospective—curated by Léon Kruijswijk and Anna Gritz—is to be able to trace the arc of suggestive continuities within her impressive thirty-year body of work.
In Two Undiscovered Amerindians, Fusco and Gómez-Peña toured the world in a cage where they were displayed as “natives” of a recently discovered Caribbean island. A subsequent film, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey (1993), captures this performance and reactions from the public, its footage intercut with a montage of real-life circus sideshows, world fairs, and racist “ethnographic” dioramas. Attendants, acting as ringmasters, invite passersby to interact with the couple, who speak no English. Bananas are fed to them through the bars; the “female” can be made to dance; five dollars grants a titillating fondle of the “male specimen’s” genitalia. The island’s name, Guatinau, would be pronounced, in …
Lin May Saeed’s “The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise”
Jesi Khadivi
In What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari write that “art is continually haunted by the animal.” Looking back through millennia of artistic production, we see representations of our beastly counterparts everywhere: as companions, deities, workers, or raw material. Likewise, John Berger has argued that “the parallelism of their similar/dissimilar lives allowed animals to provoke some of the first questions and offer answers.” Yet a life in common, and the reciprocal gaze that humans and animals once shared, was lost in the West with the development of nineteenth-century capitalism. The practice of German-Iraqi artist Lin May Saeed brings the image of the animal from the periphery back to the center.
Saeed devoted her life, sadly cut short by brain cancer at the age of fifty last month, to the cause of animal liberation. Her work avoids agit-prop depictions of animal suffering and instead draws on myths, stories, and fables so that we might “imagine a kind of time travel with a focus on the human-animal relationship” and “think about our common future” by looking at the past. “The Snow Falls Slowly in Paradise,” in which Styrofoam sculptures and reliefs, figurative wall works, drawings, and videos are shown alongside animal sculptures …
Steirischer Herbst ’23, “Humans and Demons”
Joshua Simon
In the opening speech for “Humans and Demons,” her sixth edition as curator of Europe’s longest-standing annual contemporary art festival, Ekaterina Degot stated that the exhibition “is not about good and evil” but “status quo and evil.” This distinction informs the four main exhibition sites and programs deployed through the city, organized according to the trajectories of three historical figures—and one object—to live or pass through Graz during or after World War II. These are represented in each venue by a curatorial research installation: a collection of records owned by Nazi officer and jazz enthusiast Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, alias Dr. Jazz (1912–99); the personal archive of physicist Stefan Marinov (1931–97); an AI rendering of the Zürich-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–88); and a copy of a 1925 postcard showing pacifists holding a banner on which the word “Friede” (Peace) was later changed to “Frieda” to avoid Nazi persecution.
This year’s Steirischer herbst takes place against the backdrop of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, among the many lessons of which is that we never really left the twentieth century. In that context, and in such a historically saturated exhibition, the above installations are a brilliant move. They free participating artists from archival …
Jota Mombaça’s “A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP”
Harry Burke
In the final chapter of her 2016 book In the Wake, Christina Sharpe meditates on the weather, which for her signifies the “pervasive climate” of antiblackness in the modern world. Her argument is shaped by the insight that “new modes of writing, new modes of making-sensible” are needed to account for the quotidian violence of the colonial present. Jota Mombaça’s “A CERTAIN DEATH/THE SWAMP” builds on these contentions through a series of artworks that address the weather and, when viewed together, make up an atmosphere.
While preparing for the show, Mombaça researched the disastrous flash floods that struck western Germany and neighboring countries in 2021, as well as Berlin’s origins as swampland, drained in the 1700s. What would it mean, the artist asked herself, for cities to turn back into swamps? until the last morning (2023), made in collaboration with Anti Ribeiro, Darwin Marinho, and Luana Peixe, is her oblique answer to this. The looping, fourteen-minute video studies the mangroves and marshlands of Pará in her native Brazil. Its long, pensive shots of clouds recall John Constable’s cloud studies of the 1820s. For the Romantic painter, clouds exteriorized emotions and symbolized modernity’s scientific advances. To today’s eye, they also refract …
“Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism”
Matt Shaw
In March 1949, the cover of Popular Science magazine featured Ray Pioch’s brightly colored drawing of architect Eleanor Raymond’s Dover Sun House, a Massachusetts home developed with solar engineer Maria Telkes and heated exclusively by solar energy. Part Rockwell painting, part architectural section, and part science diagram, the illustration drew on Pioch’s experience drawing instruction manuals for the U.S. Navy during World War II. It shows an idyllic family in their well-tempered living room, kept warm by the energy captured through south-facing windows and stored in canisters of mirabilite, or Glauber’s salt, a mineral well suited to storing solar heat in the day and releasing it after dark. The cover represents the best image of post-war Pax Americana, but with a twist: a bright optimism that the sun was the future source of America’s energy needs, not oil.
The cover serves as a lively introduction to “Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism,” the inaugural presentation by the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment. Curated by Carson Chan, the show attempts to draw lines in the sand about what “ecology” and “the environment” mean in architecture from the 1930s to the …
Michael Rakowitz’s “The Monument, the Monster, and the Maquette”
Rachel Valinsky
The exhibition’s title, alliteration and all, has the ring of an Aesopian fable. The Latin etymology of monument, Michael Rakowitz spells out on the edges of a sculpture, are trifold: caution (to remind, to advise, to warn), protest (demonstrate, remonstrate), monstrosity (monster). And indeed, around the gallery, the monstrous is everywhere in sight. Its forms are many: to the right, Behemoth (all works 2022), a colossal black plastic tarp obscuring the suggestion of an equestrian figure below rises tall only to fall to the ground as the fan powering its ascent clocks out. At the center, American Golem, poised on a decorative white wooden tabletop, an assemblage of found antiques and papier mâché sculptures (a strategy the artist has previously used for reproducing objects looted from Iraqi museums, highlighting the calls for their repatriation). The central figure, which stands on a stack of marble slabs, greets the viewer from the top of its bell-mold body and fired-clay mask—a copy of the Babylonian monster Humbaba. Gazing out at the viewer, its composite arms outstretched, it recalls Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), but even more grotesque. It doesn’t just stand on the wreckage of the past, propelled toward the future: it is …
40th EVA International, “The Gleaners Society”
Ben Eastham
In Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), a lost tourist complains that the maps are much better in his homeland. So advanced are the cartographers there, he boasts, that they long since moved beyond puny pocket-maps to execute a map of the country “on the scale of a mile to the mile.” It hasn’t yet been spread out, he concedes, because “the farmers objected.” Yet on realizing that this perfect map very closely resembled the territory, his compatriots instead learned to navigate “using the country itself.” So now they have no need of maps.
This parable is used to support Stephen Wright’s proposal, cited by Sebastian Cichocki in his curatorial statement for an exhibition program scattered across Limerick, that art should also operate “on a 1:1 scale.” By a logic that might seem strained even to Alice, Wright suggests that artists take their cues from Carroll’s cartographers and make art that is coextensive with reality. This seems spectacularly to miss the point of the joke: if you don’t need maps, then you don’t need cartographers; if reality is its own representation, then you don’t need artists. If you want to intervene directly in the existing systems, you need …
Billy Bultheel and James Richards’s “Workers in Song”
Kirsty Bell
“Workers in Song” inverts the current artworld logic of exhibitions augmented by performance programs, and instead positions the live event as the centerpiece and the exhibition its supplement (some of the performance elements, along with a soundtrack, remain on show at WIELS until October 8.) Borrowing their title from a Leonard Cohen song, Belgian composer Billy Bultheel and Welsh artist James Richards staged a collaboration that examines the elasticity of such live events, questioning the relations of appropriated artifacts (poems, films, artworks) to newly constructed material (collaborative videos, sound, banners), of spoken word to music or imagery, and of live performance to pre-recording, thus the very nature of liveness itself.
It takes place in an exhibition room sparsely adorned with banners, rudimentary props (folding chairs, desk, piano), and two large screens hanging opposite each other. Four angled bleachers sit the audience “in-the-round.” A reperformance of Ian White’s Ibiza (2010) is the first of a nine-part program that is dense, heady, jarring, tender, anxiety-inducing, and shot through with moments of beauty and pathos. Liveness was central to the late artist and curator White’s thinking: he saw the rehearsed gesture and performer’s presence as a “false promise” of the live, finding liveness …
“The Weight of Words”
Caleb Klaces
Here are some of the phrases the visitor will encounter at “The Weight of Words,” a group show featuring eighteen living artists and writers working across sculpture and poetry: “WHAT IF NOT EVERY WORD IN YOUR SENTENCE;” “Traducing Ruddle;” “as you wlak [sic] the distance changes; ” “stilllife;” “EFEND DIGNITY COPY AND ORIGINAL.” Out of context, these formulations sound more like material gathered by a lexicographer or anthropologist than lines composed by a poet. Yet the works that feature them are poetic in the best of senses: distilled and suggestive, affecting in ways I can’t quite explain and yet will remember.
The curators, Clare O’Dowd and Nick Thurston, argue that the works on display represent the meeting of two traditions that have been artificially separated and codified. Sculpture and poetry are taught and interpreted as distinct disciplines, when they are in fact intimately connected by purpose and technique. Several of the artists here point to literature in their work: Joo Yeon Park’s kit-like engraved aluminum is a fragment of potentially infinite architecture such as that imagined in Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” (1941); a commissioned text by poet Anthony (Vahni) Capildeo, swimming amongst fish in a blue vinyl …
35th Bienal de São Paulo, “choreographies of the impossible”
Kevin McGarry
The Oscar Niemeyer building that houses “choreographies of the impossible,” the 35th edition of the Global South’s oldest biennial, is as much protagonist as background. Located in the bustling urban park of Ibirapuera, the art inside this architectural leviathan is only separated from the city’s greenery by glass walls, and its entrances are open six days a week. There is no charge to enter, monetary or otherwise: visitors needn’t reserve, wait, or check in with personal data like email addresses or postal codes, but can glide in and out as if the show were an extension of public space. This allows for viewing at a leisurely pace—important, given that there’s no quick way to tour 270,000 square feet of impossible choreographies.
A short wall text jointly attributed to the curators (Diane Lima, Grada Kilomba, Hélio Menezes, and Manuel Borja-Villel) touches on the subversion of temporal structures in a selection of works “based on cosmologies and models of governance where time is conceived as a spiral, without the rigidity of established structures and chronologies”—although a spiral is a type of structure, too. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that the curators attempted to eschew linearity. While they have successfully …
“Elusive Edge: Philippine Abstract Forms”
Carlos Quijon, Jr.
While framed as a non-survey exhibition, “Elusive Edge: Philippine Abstract Forms” presents a compelling cross-section of geometric abstraction in the Philippines, from its postwar formation to postmedia experiments that extend its legacies. Featuring the Cubist impulses of Vicente Manansala’s 1960 still life featuring the titular mango and papaya, the linear flourishes of Fernando Zobel’s Castilla XXII (1957), Leo Valledor’s color field appropriation of the Philippine flag (1981), and more contemporary brick paintings by Maria Taniguchi (2018), the exhibition makes a worthwhile attempt to revisit this particular visual idiom and to renew the stakes for thinking about it both in and beyond its art-historical, stylistic, and disciplinary contexts.
The exhibition, curated by Patrick D. Flores, accomplishes this by a broadening of categorical parameters: “abstract forms,” rather than “abstraction”—as evidenced in this show, the former is less burdened by modernist influence than in fleshing out these forms’ own tendencies. True to its title, “Elusive Edge” emphasizes how gestures of abstraction overlap with forms and disciplines beyond visual art, such as architecture and design.
The dense hang of “Elusive Edge,” which features more than sixty artists and eighty works, foregrounds differences in the works’ stylistic intentions while allowing points of commonality to emerge. …
Liverpool Biennial, “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things”
Novuyo Moyo
Given Liverpool’s role as a major hub for the slave trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it’s surprising that past editions of the city’s biennial have not engaged more directly with this subject. The legacy of slavery haunts the port city: it can be seen in the many warehouses by the docks, the streets named after slave traders, and the monuments addressing it. This year’s biennial dives fully into that history, guided by Cape Town-based curator Khanyisile Mbongwa’s approach, rooted in remembrance but also in the seeking of potential avenues to healing. “uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things” featured over thirty artists finding ways to engage with a city whose links to slavery and its legacies are inextricable, in a way that manages to look to the future as well as the past.
In the Tobacco Warehouse, Albert Ibokwe Khoza’s multimedia installation and performance piece The Black Circus of the Republic of Bantu (2022) goes back to questions of bodily autonomy, mining the histories of human zoos and exhibitions by examining their performance practice. As a South African artist whose work is sometimes staged in the west, they question the relationship between themselves and their audience, …
Niklas Taleb’s “Solo Yolo”
Marcus Verhagen
The photographs in the first UK show of the Essen-based artist Niklas Taleb describe intervals and cadences rather than people or events. In particular, they outline the rhythms of the home: most of them show the artist’s apartment, where, it would seem, time passes slowly. Arranged in a spare hang across the gallery’s two small-ish spaces, these are reserved images in which rooms feature more prominently than the family inhabiting them. Often untitled yet all dated 2023, they are populated by toys and crockery, computer screens, flowers, and mementos. The remains of a snack sit on a carpet, multicolored building blocks are balanced on the rim of a drawer, snapshots of relatives are tucked in the gilt frame of an old print. In their reticence, these glimpses into the day-to-day life of a household leave viewers to establish what narrative and thematic continuities they can.
The family itself is largely offstage. The shadow above the building blocks may be the artist in silhouette. Elsewhere, a woman, his partner perhaps, files an infant’s fingernails, but only their hands are visible. Social life makes a marginal appearance in two pictures of visitors absorbed in their own thoughts. In the liveliest scene here, …
Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Ambience of Sound, Sound of Ambience”
Sam Thorne
While the artist and pioneering ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura was recording his debut album, in 1982, he visited the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, which had opened a few years before. Struck by how this curving Art Deco building framed a series of views onto tree-lined gardens, he approached a curator about the possibility of playing his record in the galleries. They agreed, and so Yoshimura’s first album—titled Music for Nine Post Cards—also became his first public commission. Made in a home studio on a Fender Rhodes electric piano, this collection of glistening vignettes is one of my favorite albums, nine sketches of a museum informed not by its artworks but by glimpses through its windows.
The track titles—“Clouds,” “Blink,” “Dream”—read like a list of the motifs and compositional approaches that would preoccupy Yoshimura for the rest of his life. Over the course of the next three decades, he produced dozens of acoustic soundscapes, meditative site-specific compositions for locations all over Japan: shopping malls; a subway line; even a funicular, the written score climbing at the same twenty-two-degree incline as the actual mountainside. Yoshimura’s was an unusual mode of public art. Small-scale but also spacious, it had nothing in …
Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “Radiant Remembrance”
Murtaza Vali
In Ken McMullen’s experimental film Ghost Dance (1983), Jacques Derrida proclaims that “Cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms. It’s the art of allowing ghosts to come back.” This assertion of film’s proximity to the spectral plays out across Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s video installations, three of which anchor “Radiant Remembrance.” Blending animist beliefs held by Indigenous communities across Southeast Asia with the importance given to reincarnation within Buddhist theology, Nguyen uses film as a medium, not just as the material form of his art practice but as a channel through which to conjure forgotten pasts, narrate counter-memories, and confront historical violence and ecological destruction. After all, what are ghosts, if not simply our ancestors, and our memories of them, continuing to radiate their presence to us? What is remembrance if not simply a form of reincarnation?
These capacities are most clearly articulated in The Specter of Ancestors Becoming (2019), an immersive four-channel video installation about the descendants of the tirailleurs sénégalais—Senegalese soldiers conscripted to fight for the colonial French army in the First Indochina War who fathered children with Vietnamese women. That conflict ended a year before the 1955 Bandung Conference, which sought to build cooperation …
Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s “FOR REAL”
Ann Mbuti
If history is written by the victors, asks Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s exhibition, is reality a construct of the dominant narrative? What then does it mean to write a history of the defeated? The artist’s work starts from the struggle for Tamil independence during the 1983–2009 civil war and its aftermath, and moves onto the larger questions that arise from its failure. Reflecting on the ethnic oppression that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and forced his family to flee the country, Kulendran Thomas’s collaborations with Annika Kuhlmann suggest that art can influence our perception of not only history but reality itself. Mixing historical facts, storytelling, fiction, and deepfakes, his work offers a glimpse into a reality that exposes the dominant one as just one well-told version of many.
The two previous iterations of this exhibition—at London’s ICA and Berlin’s KW—opened with the struggle for utopia before moving on to contemporary art: at Kunsthalle Zürich, the order is reversed. The looping twenty-four-minute video Being Human (2019), installed within a plywood construction, is the first video to encounter when visiting the exhibition and it reflects on the relationship between the end of the war and the flourishing of contemporary art in Sri Lanka. …
“Everybody Talks About the Weather” and “Thus waves come in pairs”
Laura McLean-Ferris
One of the most remarkable things about living through a permacrisis is how much seems to go on as normal. Art exhibitions, for example, continue to get organized amid deranging heat, the lurid smoke of forest fires, and the wet wreckage of floods. In Venice, the precarious lagoon city now heavily reliant on a high-tech flood barrier system, two shows are currently on view that propose methods for curating art in this atmosphere of environmental collapse and change.
Weather as metaphor, weather as context, weather as catalyst and catastrophe. There are a lot of exhibition-making strategies being tested in Dieter Roelstraete’s rangy “Everybody Talks About the Weather” at Fondazione Prada, but the show bears some relationship to the “report.” An LED screen with a grid of television weather forecasts from around the world is installed in the foyer, where a collection of glossy professionals with blow-dried hair gesture in front of colorful maps. This motif—newsy, mediatic, even a little silly—is echoed in the exhibition’s information panels, which resemble newspaper front pages with headlines, data, and “stories” about the artworks on show. This is the third in a series of major exhibitions across Prada’s venues that have marked a turn towards …
“Substitutes”
Eliel Jones
In light of the ongoing conservative backlash against legislative advances for trans rights in Spain, the UK, and Germany, trans visibility remains paradoxically both a requirement for survival and the greatest threat to trans people’s safety. In a first for the artist-run space W139, which for its forty-four years has focused on the production and presentation of new work, a recent exhibition combined historical and contemporary artworks to create a dialogue between past and present experiences of bodily and gender autonomy. “Substitutes” brought together artists who have subjected their bodies to abstractions, disguises, and transformations to find ways to be both present and absent, visible and invisible. At stake is a desire to refuse the logics that demand proof or validity of one’s existence, and to fight back against requirements that are deemed necessary for the recognizing of unruly bodies as legitimate.
Johannes Büttner’s sculptures of loaves of bread pierced with flesh-tunnel holes were hung on the wall and propped on shelves at the entrance and in the gallery’s reading room. Recalling the literal and symbolic body of Christ, the works invoke St. Thomas the Apostle’s insistence on probing Christ’s flesh—not satisfied with seeing and smelling his wounds—to satisfy his …
Martine Syms’s “Loser Back Home”
Juliana Halpert
In an early scene of The African Desperate (2022), Martine Syms’s first feature film, her protagonist, a Master of Fine Arts candidate named Palace, hosts four professors in her studio for a final review. In turn, each teacher performs their own version of art pedagogy in Palace’s general direction, lobbing vague questions and cloudy critiques her way. “It’s all just so figurative,” comments Rose, the snidest, and most overtly racist, of the bunch (played perfectly by Syms’s longtime gallerist, Bridget Donahue). She gestures at the work: “It’s just a family, right?” Palace, skeptical and evasive up until this point, finally shoots back: “Haven’t you read Saidiya Hartman? Of course I’m responding to the African desperate. Staking my claim to opacity.”
Opacity is the name of Syms’s game in “Loser Back Home,” the artist’s first exhibition with Sprüth Magers, in her native Los Angeles. That scene was at the front of my mind as I toured the two floors, attempting to parse the show’s manifold logics, feeling a bit rebuffed at every turn. Opacity—and the right to stake one’s claim to it—was a concept crafted by Édouard Glissant in his Poetics of Relation (1990) as a means of protecting and preserving …
“Repetitions”
Cathryn Drake
To the extent that repetition signifies a failure to progress, it is anathema to our industrious modern society. Yet the word embodies a paradox: in every iteration there is a difference, if only because it occurs in a different moment, a movement forward in time and space. Repetition gives us another chance. The group show “Repetitions”—featuring artworks by Nikos Alexiou, Beppe Caturegli, Panos Charalambous, Thalia Chioti, Maria Ikonomopoulou, Alekos Kyrarinis, Christina Mitrentse, Nina Papaconstantinou, Nikos Podias, Efi Spyrou, and Myrto Xanthopoulou—presents meditations on the theme.
The repetetive manual processes involved in the making of some of these works seem to express transformations more spiritual than physical, detected visually, if at all, in barely perceptible marks on the surfaces or slight irregularities in form. Nikos Podias’s Fragment (2022) is a delicate lattice constructed of fragile found papers such as teabags, with stains derived from rose petals and black tea evoking the “blood, sweat, and tears” commonly attributed to acts of painstaking creation. The even more ephemeral Black Curtain (2007–8), a delicate structure of reeds, paper, and string by the late Nikos Alexiou suspended on the wall nearby, is a tense yet tenuous membrane that seems to hover on the thresholds of …
Aziz Hazara’s “No Dress Code”
Edwin Nasr
“How then can we clean centuries’ worth of waste?” asks Françoise Vergès, reflecting on the devastation wrought by imperial conquests in the Global South. The question hangs over “No Dress Code,” artist Aziz Hazara’s affronting solo exhibition at Berlin’s PSM Gallery, which reflects upon the US military occupation of his native Afghanistan through the prism of trash.
Speakers housed in four modified, bright yellow–plastic jerrycans play soundscapes recorded by the artist over the past decade across Kabul. The title of this sound installation, Bushka Bazi (2023), is the Afghani name for these containers; together with the soundscapes, they conjure a distinct sense of place, but also of context. Introduced to the country through international aid cargos, they have been put to numerous uses since—from water carriers in peri-urban areas suffering from poor infrastructure to petrol-filled explosive devices used by the Taliban.
I am looking for you like a drone, my love (2021–22) is a large-scale photograph of colossal heaps of discarded material, sweepingly installed in a panoramic layout so as to cover the walls of the gallery’s central space. At first glance indistinguishable from the type of imagery disseminated by climate advocates to draw attention to environmental degradation, the …
“O Quilombismo”
Jesi Khadivi
The reopening of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt was marked by three days of performances, concerts, lectures, readings, rituals, and blessings under the banner “Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality.” Those familiar with incoming director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s program at Savvy Contemporary, which he founded in 2009 and quickly established as a forum for deliberation, experimentation, and sociability, will recognize a continuation of its ethos of conviviality and hospitality as an integral aspect of institution-building. Yet how might such values transition to the larger scale of a bureaucratic German institution, which operates according to different metrics than more fluidly structured art spaces? How does a curatorial stance of cultivating intimate spaces within institutions ultimately expand the channels through which we can engage with art and with each other? How does an invisible curatorial material like intimacy manifest itself within an exhibition? And finally, how might such a politics of conviviality be enacted within what Ndikung has referred to as “the belly of the beast”? These questions pervaded my thinking about “O Quilombismo,” a show whose concept and content are entirely entangled with the act of thinking how to “institute.”
The inaugural exhibition in HKW’s new program …
Gelare Khoshgozaran’s “To Be The Author of One’s Own Travels”
Dylan Huw
Gelare Khoshgozaran describes herself as an “undisciplinary artist and writer.” Across her work, she harnesses the capaciousness and flexibility of the essay form to articulate the possibilities inherent in exile. Her 2022 essay “The Too Many and No Homes of Exile,” for example, articulates the “limbo” of a life marked by latency and anticipation. While it draws on the artist’s personal memories, its emphasis—as in much of her work—is on forming associations and fostering solidarity across contexts of displacement. “You look at the map of Los Angeles,” she writes of the city in which she now lives, “and identify a map of exile.”
Her first solo exhibition in Europe, curated by Eliel Jones at Delfina Foundation’s cavernous central London space, features three moving-image works that reflect the lyricism and political intentionality of her written work. Born in Tehran in 1986, during the Iran-Iraq War, Khoshgozaran is particularly invested in making way for alternative, affirmative practices of living. She channels this wide-ranging understanding of exile into a methodology—and something approaching a narrative—in The Retreat (2023), the exhibition’s longest, loosest work.
Described in the press materials as “visual expansion” of Khoshgozaran’s 2022 essay, the film stems from an “exile retreat” organized by …
Momentum 12, “Together as to gather”
Novuyo Moyo
The twelfth edition of Momentum, held on Jeløya island in the coastal town of Moss, is an experiment in non-hierarchical models for curating biennials, with Tenthaus at the helm. As part of its open, participatory process with an emphasis on local contexts, members of the collective invited an artist or collective each and worked in reverse from there to find points of intersection and connecting threads between the participants.
Most of the works are contained in Gallery F 15’s main space, a few spilling out onto the farm grounds outside. Inside, the educational platform and art collective Gudskul—formed of the three Jakarta-based collectives Grafis Huru Hara, ruangrupa, and Serrum—have expanded on the collaborative vision of the curators with Stitching Ecosystems: GUDHAUS (all works 2023). The “work” functions as a space where visitors are invited to engage in knowledge-sharing and communal processes. It’s also a semi-archive of the collective’s interventions and projects driven by these same notions. Outside, an extension of a project staged also in ruangrupa’s Documenta 15, Stitching Ecosystems: Gudkitchen-Tentskul, was only partially activated at the opening as the kitchen wasn’t yet functional. Placed for now under a banner by Nayara Leite that reads “I AM GLAD WE …
“Schema: World as Diagram”
Paul Stephens
This exhibition of diagrammatic works juggles some of the most contested categories in contemporary art—and manages to keep all its curatorial balls in the air. Despite the broad sweep of its title, the show is tightly curated and requires multiple viewings for its full scope to set in. With an emphasis on painting, this meticulous grouping of fifty-plus artists undermines simplistic, outmoded art-historical binaries that oppose figuration and abstraction, conceptualism and expressionism, scientism and humanism. To call it expansive feels like an understatement.
The show takes its title from Thomas Hirschhorn’s Schema: Art and Public Space (2016–22), an exuberant multimedia collage-manifesto. Rudimentary and improvisational, Hirschhorn’s patchwork of ideas and contexts places the works in the show under a utopian-communitarian umbrella—exemplifying David Joselit’s claim in his 2005 essay “Dada’s Diagrams” that “the diagram constitutes an embodied utopianism.” Hirschhorn’s Schema might usefully be juxtaposed with Dan Graham’s 1966 work of the same name—sometimes taken to represent the apex of early informatic anti-figural conceptualism. (A show devoted to Graham’s Schema at 3A Gallery closed, coincidentally, several weeks before this exhibition opened.) Graham intended his work to be “completely self-referential” and meant to define “itself in place only as information.” Simply a text without …