I was wrong. I walked into “Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France (1970s-1980s)” thinking the exhibition would be about “her” and “them,” and the past, only to realize that it is about “me” and “us,” right now. About sexism, silencing, inequality, discrimination, patriarchal oppression, rebellion, and about changing narrative paradigms. The show looks beyond Seyrig’s singular persona as “iconic” actress, to reconstruct, instead, a far fuller picture of her life and work as activist, feminist, director, and collaborator with a network of filmmakers who emerged from the MLF (Mouvement de libération des femmes). “Defiant Muses” revolves around the eternal question of how (and which) images are constructed and circulated, while interrogating the conflicts that emerge between acting a political position and translating it into personal action. Following Ariella Azoulay’s suggestion that archival documents “are not items of a completed past, but rather active elements of a present,” the exhibition rewrites history by reclaiming what gets suppressed. I spent hours in it, connecting the dots, shocked by how little I knew about these women’s stories, unsurprisingly, alas, themselves transmitted mostly by women. Curated by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Giovanna Zapperi, the show—which opened in July 2019 at …

“Slightly shattered shards of substance thrown within the grasp of the current of a river / Ligeramente dañados pedazos de sustancia arrojados a la merced de la corriente de un río”: you read Lawrence Weiner’s writing in English and Spanish splattered across a wall as the flow of humans drags you through the endless booths of the art fair. (Was it Galería Horrach Moya from Palma de Mallorca? The tide moved too quickly to catch it.) You’re not sure if you’re the shards or the art is or you both are, but you know that the river is ARCOmadrid 2019. Spain’s biggest art fair has distinctive qualities. The giant convention center simultaneously hosts an air-conditioning convention, a huge concentration of Latin American galleries, planeloads of VIPs flown in for private conferences, along with a scatter of curated sections trying to find distinctive voices amongst the glut all the other fairs. Frieze LA last week, Armory next. Into the limestone bench of RAPTURE (2017), Jenny Holzer carved “Rapture Screamed Toward the Clouds.” The poetic clarity and political force of Hauser & Wirth’s booth, dedicated to a survey of over 30 years of the artist’s work, set a mood. In MOVE (2015), …

Among the artifacts assembled by curators Manuel Borja-Villel and Teresa Velázquez for their illuminating survey of Dora García’s work since 1997 are nine posters detailing the program for “The Inadequate” (2011), a 26-week investigation into radicalism, dissidence, and marginality staged by the artist in the Spanish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. The “occupation,” as García has referred to her Venice exhibition, commenced with a screening of Just Because Everything Is Different It Does Not Mean That Anything Has Changed (2008), an hour-length document of actor Harli Ammouchi performing imagined material by comedian Lenny Bruce, as well as various screenings, live performances, and public conversations. Some works were repeated, but The Inadequate was largely a durational event, one that was difficult to fully experience. I felt a similar sense of insufficiency visiting García’s Madrid show. Even after two lengthy visits to the exhibition, which explores the fluid interplay between performance, film, and writing in García’s practice, there were films not fully watched, letters only parsed, and performances not wholly experienced. “Second Time Around” is a mosaic of temporalities. It invites frequent, purposeful encounters with its many and concurrently operating parts. Repetition doesn’t necessarily afford clarity. On the two days I visited, …