ArtReview May 2021

Offering a reptilian stare since 1949

Meriem Bennani

New Worlds, Old Problems

Sean Scully Entre ciel et terre Paris Marais May—June 2021

Thaddaeus Ropac London Paris Salzburg

Male Nudes: a salon from 1800 to 2021 Maaike Schoorel Varda Caivano April – May 2021 Mendes Wood DM São Paulo Antonio Obá April – June 2021 Mendes Wood DM Brussels Matthew Lutz-Kinoy May – July 2021 Mendes Wood DM at Villa Era

Mend e s Wood DM São Paulo | New York | Brussels + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com @mendeswooddm

‘At the Luss House’ May – July 2021 Mendes Wood DM New York

Image: Marina Perez Simão, Untitled, 2021, oil on canvas, 200 × 160 cm

LUC TUYMANS SECONDS

May 12 - June 26, 2021

ZENO X GALLERY GODTSSTRAAT

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ArtReview vol 73 no 3 May 2021

My skin, my ass It may be too early to talk about an artworld emerging from the hibernation of the pandemic era, but it’s not too soon to speculate about what that world might look like. Perhaps a butterfly, perhaps a moth, perhaps an entity more alien still.

And although it hopes for a little of the last, not, ArtReview likes to think, an nft.

That’s already sooo last issue. Not, to say it again, that ArtReview isn’t up for change.

In fact, it’s gagging for it.

You’ll find a little of that looking-forward-to-change business in this issue: as artist Jamian Juliano-Villani discusses her plans for a new type of gallery where no one’s ‘ass’ gets ‘puppet-mastered’, with Ross Simonini (whose voice, by the way, is as sweet as his words – check out the latest edition of his monthly podcast at artreview.com if you don’t believe ArtReview, and even if you do); or as Rodney LaTourelle checks in on Qaumajuq, the new centre for Inuit art in Winnipeg, aimed again at ensuring that no one’s ass gets puppet-mastered. And while we’re at it, the puppet-mastery of gallery captions and press releases have got Martin Herbert’s goat this month. If not his ass.

But looking forward is not only about speculation (ArtReview already told you that nfts were sooo last month). The time for theory is over; the time for practice is upon us. As ArtReview’s dentist is so fond of telling it, every time they need to make a quick buck. With that in mind (the practice, not the quick bucks), Sarah Jilani looks back on the long life of the late Egyptian physician, writer and activist

Theory

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Nawal El Saadawi. One of the most inspiring, if controversial, figures in Arabic literature and feminism of the past century, who survived death threats and all the obstacles society could throw in her path in order to speak out about patriarchy, sexual repression, colonialism, religious fundamentalism and the status of women in Arab society. An active example of the positive power of dissidence. (And yes, she’s one of ArtReview’s heroes, and ArtReview is holding her up as a kind of role model, albeit not in a way that should be slavishly copied, but that’s one of the important lessons of dissidence and something you’ll all need to work out for yourselves. ArtReview’s not here to puppet-master your ass either. It’s barely out of quarantine.) And you’ll find some of El Saadawi’s attitudes and concerns echoed in Poulomi Basu’s photographic portfolio, which focuses on the violence perpetrated against women in rural Nepal.

Taking things a step further, En Liang Khong talks to Marxist climate-scholar Andreas Malm about reaching the point where words are no substitute for action in the matter of climate change, and what form, what form of violence even (Malm’s new book is titled How to Blow Up a Pipeline), such action might need to take. And taking things back more directly to the picket-fenced (that’s got to go, btw) world of art, Cat Kron takes a look at how the lockdown work of Meriem Bennani is focused on shifting the focus from the artworld’s (or the financial world’s – same difference most of the time) centres to its peripheries and undermining the prevailing sense that art from certain geographic contexts necessarily occupies a subaltern state.

Which brings us to the reviews section, which is beginning a slow transition of its own, from being a record of what was briefly accessible this past month to, bit-by-lockdown-ending-bit, the pick of some of the more intriguing shows around the world. It’s nice to have choices again. You should treasure that if you have it.

And fight for it if you don’t. ArtReview is always glad that you choose it. ArtReview

Practice

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The Genealogy of the Supermarket (detail), 2005– © Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian Cumulus May 14 – June 26, 2021 New York

@ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

Art Observed

The Interview Jamian Juliano-Villani

by Ross Simonini 20

Nawal El Saadawi

by Sarah Jilani 35 The Critic, Unplugged

by Martin Herbert 38

A Naked Art History

by Louise Darblay 30 Brazil’s Pandemic Politics

by Oliver Basciano 32

Official Fashion

by Clara Young 40

page 30 Look but Don’t Touch (still), 2021, web series directed by Cecilia de Arce and presented by Hortense Belhôte. © Kazak Productions

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Art Featured

Qaumajuq

by Rodney LaTourelle 46

Andreas Malm Interview by En Liang Khong 60

Meriem Bennani

by Cat Kron 52

Poulomi Basu

by Fi Churchman 64

page 46 Napachie Pootoogook, Namonai's Vision of the Future, 1995–96, black felt-tip pen, coloured pencil on paper.

Collection Winnipeg Art Gallery

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Since 1992, ART TAIPEI is the Landmark of Contemporary Art Fair in Asia

21 - 25 October, 2021 Taipei World Trade Center Hall 1, Taiwan art-taipei.com info@art-taipei.com

Art Reviewed

comment, exhibitions & books 79 Lorraine O’Grady, by Dina A. Ramadan Ready\Set\Fulfill, by Aaina Bhargava Alvaro Barrington, by Tomas Weber Migrant Workers Community Museum, by Adeline Chia Tammy Nguyen & Thad Higa, by Megan N. Liberty Rachel Whiteread, by Fi Churchman Bernadette Corporation and Milagros Rojas, by Gaby Cepeda Farideh Sakhaeifar, by Yinka Elujoba Navid Nuur, by John Quin Between the Living and the Archive, by Adeline Chia Luke Fowler’s Patrick, by Pádraic E. Moore Sun Rise / Sun Set, by Martin Herbert Noor Riyadh Festival, by Rahel Aima Vanessa Baird, by Jennifer Thatcher

Cover to Cover, by Michael Snow, reviewed

by Chris Fite-Wassilak Oriental Silk, by Xiaowen Zhu, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today,

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr, reviewed by David Terrien A Burning, by Megha Majumdar, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, by Joseph Andras, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The House of Illnesses, by Unica Zürn, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Intertitles, edited by Jess Chandler, Aimee Selby, Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot, reviewed by Ben Eastham Terminus, by John Divola, reviewed by Fi Churchman

page 96 Sun Rise / Sun Set, 2021 (installation view).

Photo: Andrea Rossetti.

Courtesy Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin

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Art Observed

With patience, ever since sand 19

Jamian Juliano-Villani.

Photo: Musacchio Ianniello. Courtesy Fondazione maxxi, Rome and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

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ArtReview

The Interview

by Ross Simonini

Jamian Juliano-Villani

“Art is the one place where you should not censor anything”

I met Jamian Juliano-Villani around the time she was showing some of her first paintings, about eight or nine years ago. She was like a character from my childhood fantasy of the East Coast: the loud and proud Italian from New Jersey, acting and doing as she pleased. She smoked and drank with gusto, cursed in nearly every sentence and seemed to pay no attention to the social graces of artworld etiquette.

In the next few years, I watched her career explode in a furious entrepreneurial streak.

While her early paintings were modestly sized appropriations of comics, her new work expanded in scale and content, collaging a potpourri of styles and disparate subject matter in a single canvas. Her popularity bloomed. Meanwhile, it was clear that she was less concerned with

painting and more with the curating of imagery. Her focus was on culling familiar ideas from the collective brain – the internet, old books – and jamming them together until they cancelled any possibility of meaning, which is a recipe for humour.

During these years, the culture had grown increasingly sensitive to the political implications of language, but Juliano-Villani, almost in defiance, has settled deeper in her ways.

She refuses such niceties, both in her life and work. She sometimes takes to social media to speak about the issues of the moment, or about her self-tanning lotion, or about herself.

Whatever the topic, she is always toeing the boundary of good taste – that charged, liminal zone where art thrives.

May 2021

In 2020, right at the onset of the pandemic, Juliano-Villani curated a show at Massimo Di Carlo in London, and this seemed to whet her appetite for curating. So, for the next year or so, she will focus her attention on building a new gallery in New York. She describes her vision to me as an exterior like an IrishAmerican bar – its name will be O’Flannery’s – with an interior like a sober insurance office.

She plans to do a series of two-person mashup shows including artists, designers and illustrators not usually seen in galleries – “but no friends”, she tells me. In other words, the same disorienting clashes that play out across her canvases will now take place in a physical space with real people in the middle of Manhattan.

Her expansion continues.

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ArtRank Is Evil ross simonini This gallery idea you have – are you funding the whole thing yourself?

rs Yeah. It ranks artists’ work: ‘buy now’, ‘sell now’, ‘peaking’. jjv So if you’re an artist who survived ArtRank, you understand what I’m saying. Anyone that hasn’t survived ArtRank, fuck off.

jamian juliano-villani Yeah. I just don’t want someone like fucking puppet-mastering my ass, you know? Like that’s the thing, once you do something with someone else, they think they have a say. But I don’t want anyone else to have a say. I just want to be able to do what I want. And it’s going to be really, really fucking expensive. I know I’m going to lose money and that’s fine. Like I’m not trying to make money. I’m just trying to do cool shows that are fun and weird and smart, you know?

And that’s it.

jjv I totally sold out like a bunch of times, please.

rs Have you been puppet-mastered before?

rs No, I said sell ‘now’ not ‘out’.

jjv All the time, all the time. I mean, dude, think about it? Like, you know what kind of things I make, right. So lately I’ve been doing weirder and weirder shit, and people just want the same fucking thing from me, you know?

And I can’t really like argue with them because that pays my fucking bills and shit. And also like, I’m good at making whatever the fuck I make, but certain collectors don’t want to buy something from you if it’s like different, especially at the same price point. I mean, do you remember that website ArtRank?

jjv Oh, yeah, I was on ‘peaking’ first and then I bounced around the whole site. Bullshit. But that’s funny though… selling out.

rs Is that still going on? jjv It stopped because someone saw it was like really fucking evil, which it is. It’s like high school shit, you know? Also like, as a painter, you already feel like a cheeseball, you know, cause like most painting sucks, and then you have to go through that. rs Were you in the ‘sell now’ category?

rs Well, by all means, let’s talk about selling out. jjv So to me, the sellout thing is for people that don’t have a long-term goal. You know, this is my opinion. I think people that sell out don’t have a long-term goal. So you can do like really rude shit or something really stupid. That’s fine.

You’re supposed to be fucking up all the time.

Like, that’s the cool thing about like making

The Talking, Feeling, and Doing Game (detail), 2021, acrylic on canvas, 101 × 101 cm. Photo: Charles Benton.

Courtesy the artist, jtt, New York, and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

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ArtReview

art and being an artist. But I think like once people lose vision of what the fuck they’re doing, that’s when you feel like a sellout. And I felt like that a bunch of times. I’ve been in shows where someone’s telling me what to make, or asked to do like an editorial for a magazine. Like, what am I? An illustrator? But, actually, fuck it, I don’t think I’ve ever really sold out, even though my work looks cheeseball. But I mean, we’re both already selling out, we’re making art! rs It’s funny because I grew up in the punk scene and every band was obsessed with the refusal of selling out. jjv Totally dude, and me too, but then like you think about really good albums that are based on selling out like the Residents or that Frank Zappa album Cruising with Ruben & the Jets. Like you could sell out in a smart way. Instead of just like getting money and looking dumb, you can make everyone else look dumb.

Jokes Are the Only Thing I Take Seriously rs Do you fold the selling into the art? jjv Definitely, dude. I mean like, listen, I’ve said this a million times: I think my work is ugly. I don’t care about that. I don’t think it looks nice.

It’s like a car accident. I would never put the shit

Replace Phosphates Without Compromising Functionality, a Relief, 2020, acrylic on canvas, step stool, 240 × 178 × 70 cm. Photo: Charles Benton.

Courtesy the artist, jtt, New York, and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

May 2021

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in my house, blah, blah, blah. Right? It makes you question your taste because I don’t even like them. I don’t care about tastes when I’m making them. I’m caring about presenting an idea. Like, I think it’s cool when someone makes something and you’re almost disgusted by what you made.

Like, what the fuck did I do? That’s the exciting part. And I think a lot of people aren’t prepared to do that ’cause they don’t want to embarrass themselves publicly. rs Do you see your paintings as jokes? jjv I mean, they are jokes, but also, if I took the time to paint all this little bullshit, I clearly am taking this seriously. I mean, sometimes I think jokes are the only thing I take seriously. rs Your ideas come from notes you write down, sentences which are basically jokes, but the paintings seem almost nonverbal, almost too specific to describe. jjv It’s like sometimes I like making things that are so aggressively stupid, you can’t even talk about them. So then they negate themselves.

Like I painted a stoplight that says ‘shut up’.

So the whole point is like, there’s nothing to talk about. Like, come on, man, leave it. You know what I mean? It’s like, that’s how dumb this thing is. Like, you can’t even like – there’s no conversation around it! I like that, where it almost leaves you speechless.

rs Would you say that you dislike your work, or is that different from its ugliness? jjv I mean, I like the intent. But I don’t care.

Like, just because it’s painting doesn’t mean I give a fuck about the way it looks, you know what I mean? That’s a fantasy about painting.

It’s so lame to me that people care about the way something looks like historically or whatever.

I think it’s cool when something has no history or is just immediately garbage. That at least like catches people. Does that make sense?

Do I sound crazy? rs So if you don’t care about the way it looks, what is it that you care about? jjv Emotional quality. Just like, whoa, that thing’s something I just saw on tv yesterday because it’s fresh to me. You know what I mean?

And then I’m going to put this with some other thing and it’s like fucking funny. I had this idea for a painting where it’s an Aboriginal tribe in a circle, but in the middle of it, it’s like a Ferrari doing a doughnut. And like that’s trashy as fuck, but I haven’t seen that shit yet… rs Have you – jjv Whenever I talk to you like this, not in like real life, it’s a different tone. You know what I mean?

Shut Up, the Painting, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 101 × 122 cm. Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist, jtt, New York, and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

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ArtReview

rs How so? jjv You’re not laughing. rs You want me to laugh more? jjv Yeah, maybe just fake laugh a little bit more on the phone with me and then we’re good for now. ’Cause I’m like sweating bullets right now.

Everyone’s Terrified the Fuck Up rs You obviously have ideas about bad art. Do you have criteria for good art? jjv Good art is doing what you want, you know? And like not thinking about what someone else is going to see. That’s selling out, actually. It’s literally caring too much about other people’s thinking – how it can be read and interpreted – and not doing what you really want to do. That’s when art starts to suck.

And that’s why art has been so bad for the past couple of years. ’Cause everyone’s terrified the fuck up, and just doing things for other people. rs Maybe this is why people don’t care about selling out anymore. In pop music, selling out is good now. jjv Well, the whole thing is, people think that artists create culture. But now we’re just fucking

Sincerely, Tony, 2017 (installation view, Massimo De Carlo, Milan, 2017).

Photo: Roberto Marossi. Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan

May 2021

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Give It To Someone Else, 2020, acrylic on canvas, 152 × 122 cm.

Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist, jtt, New York, and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

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ArtReview

using culture, you know? We don’t create shit anymore. We’re just like copying it, like, “Look at pizza, dude!” The fuck is pizza? You know what I mean? So like everyone needs to chill the fuck out.

It sucks the way that things are going right now because I’ve not seen one goddamn thing I thought was really cool recently.

Maybe because it’s coronavirus, maybe because everyone’s a pussy – who the fuck knows! But like, I want to see someone really go crazy and fucking like unwind. Like look at Bjarne Melgaard when he was like being bankrolled by the fucking Norwegian people: that shit banged! You know why? Because he was being a fucking brat. But no one’s allowed to be a brat right now, which sucks.

Like, why can’t you be snarky? Why can’t you be an asshole? You have to be like soft all the time now? You’re supposed to be thinking all the time. Like questioning shit. I sound like a crazy person, I know. But now it seems like I’m supposed to be making art to make people think about themselves, you know? And, I mean, the shit I make, it’s like, I’m thinking about myself the whole time! So I’m like, what the fuck is this? Is something wrong with me?

You’re allowed to have fucked-up thoughts and you’re allowed to fuck up. You’re allowed to do whatever you want, but now like everything’s fucking like whiplash. It sucks. And that’s why I want to do this gallery, because it’s like, everything sucks so bad.

You know, I was watching South Park the other day. Did you see the, um, the pc baby episode? The Caitlyn Jenner episode? It is so fucking funny, dude. Like this guy’s getting ostracised by the whole town because he won’t say, “Caitlyn Jenner is a hero”. He goes to this bar and it’s all white bros and they’re all saying, “Caitlyn Jenner is beautiful and she deserves everything that she gets!” And it’s like, shut the fuck up, you know? rs At this moment, I think people aren’t even aware of the ways we are censoring our own thinking. jjv Yeah. And it sucks. Like literally I was watching this Frank Zappa interview around the censorship and all the ‘parental advisory’ bullshit with Tipper Gore. And it’s like, this is such bullshit! Like Gore’s argument was basically about this one Prince album with one stupid reference to incest, and the interviewer asks Zappa, “Do you think that incest

is ok?” How the fuck is anyone going to have an opinion on that? I got so emotional watching this thing because it’s like 30 years old and it’s way more fresh than every other piece of shit I’ve seen on tv. rs At the moment, it’s almost like acknowledging or talking about something is considered a form of endorsing it, or even identifying with it. But if you put something into a museum, for example, it’s not because you are worshipping it; it’s because you want to direct people’s attention to it. jjv Yeah, exactly. I’m presenting something.

You can figure this out. It’s not dictating something. And that’s the great thing about making art. But now it sucks because artists are supposed to have opinions on everything.

It just drives me fucking nuts. This is the one thing I get so pissed off about: art is the one place you should not censor anything. So that’s why I’m starting this gallery. I want to show art that is not afraid of itself. And it could be old or new or dumb, who cares, but it’s not afraid of itself.

Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

Two Adaptable Utensils, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 76 × 102 cm.

Photo: Charles Benton. Courtesy the artist, jtt, New York, and Massimo De Carlo, Milan

May 2021

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Applications Now Open

Image by anothermountainman

Participating Galleries # 10 Chancery Lane 47 Canal A Alisan Antenna Space Arario Alfonso Artiaco B Balice Hertling Beijing Commune Blindspot Ben Brown C Cardi Carlos/Ishikawa Ceysson & Bénétière Yumiko Chiba Clearing Commonwealth and Council Continua Pilar Corrias D Massimo De Carlo de Sarthe Dirimart du Monde E Empty Gallery Gallery Exit F Stephen Friedman

G Gagosian Gajah François Ghebaly Gladstone Gray Grotto H Hanart TZ Hauser & Wirth Hive I Ink Studio Taka Ishii K Kaikai Kiki Karma Tina Keng David Kordansky Kukje Kwai Fung Hin L Pearl Lam Lehmann Maupin Lévy Gorvy Liang Lin & Lin M Edouard Malingue Maggiore Mayoral Mazzoleni Urs Meile kamel mennour Meyer Riegger Mind Set

N Nanzuka Taro Nasu neugerriemschneider Anna Ning Franco Noero O One and J. Ora-Ora Ota P P.P.O.W Pace Peres Projects Perrotin Pi Artworks PKM Proyectos Monclova R Almine Rech ROH Projects Rossi & Rossi S Esther Schipper Sies + Höke Silverlens Soka STPI T Take Ninagawa Tang TKG+ Tokyo Gallery + BTAP

May 21–23, 2021

V Vitamin W White Cube Y Yavuz Z David Zwirner Insights Asia Art Center Baton Flowers Johyun Kogure Leo Nukaga Shibunkaku Axel Vervoordt Wooson Discoveries Bangkok CityCity Capsule CLC Gallery Venture Don Anat Ebgi High Art P21 Vanguard

In the introduction to John Berger’s eyeopening bbc series Ways of Seeing (1972), the critic argues that for art to remain relevant to us it needs to be “stripped of the false mystery and false religiosity which surrounds it” – in other words, of so much of the obscuring art-historical discourse produced by scholars, critics and institutions alike. A lot of said stripping happens in Look but Don’t Touch (2020), a web series streaming on Arte tv, which could well be the zany, mischievous offspring of Berger’s series on how to look at art. In ten short episodes directed by Cecilia

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Fig Leaves

Louise Darblay sees the art-historical canon stripped naked

ArtReview

de Arce, the French actress and (who knew?) art-history professor Hortense Belhôte undresses ten classics from the history of painting with irreverence and offbeat humour, offering up takes informed by queer and feminist perspectives: how Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus (1647–51) might be hiding her true sexuality, or how Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and her ‘servant’ might in fact depict a bourgeois lesbian couple in their suburban home. But don’t be fooled by her foolish airs.

Each of her interpretations is backed by solid art-historical knowledge and research, and fleshed out through a lively narration that highlights the works’ political, cultural and economic contexts of production, as well as their religious, mythological or mundane subjects.

The setup is reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s three-part documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), in which the philosopher deconstructs depictions of desire in classic films from a psychoanalytical perspective, except here they are played short and sweet (the episodes clock in at around three minutes apiece) and way more pop (thanks to de Arce’s zesty, 1980sstyled cinematography). They also share a sense of humour, throwing themselves into their analyses to antic effect – be it Žižek discussing Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) from Norman’s basement or Belhôte setting Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866) in a waxing salon.

Behind these mise-en-scènes lies the attempt to break the spell of an artform’s history by appropriating it. This is particularly obvious in Look but Don’t Touch, where each instalment concludes with a live reenactment of the painted scene, one in which (mostly) white, straight

characters are replaced by people from across the colour and gender spectrum – a simple but effective strategy to bring chronologically and culturally distant tales to life. Žižek’s ‘perverted’ outlook on cinema is matched by Belhôte’s proclivity for sensual readings of art history. (Look but Don’t Touch, it turns out, was conceived as a performancelecture of sorts and presented at an erotic film festival in France before being adapted to the screen.) Indeed, if we’re to believe our unconventional professor, these paintings are rife with sexual innuendo and erotic tension: a look at Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas interrogates Jesus’s “ambiguous virile friendships” against his complete indifference to Mary Magdalene; an episode staged in a forested gay cruising spot considers Perugino’s Saint Sebastian (c. 1495) as a bdsm icon; while Johannes Vermeer’s Milkmaid (c. 1660) is more an eroticfantasy painting than some domestic scene.

A most enlightening episode in that respect is Belhôte’s reading of Paolo Veronese’s Leda and the Swan (c. 1585), in which, as she puts it to us, “Leda fucks Jupiter who has turned into a Swan”. After her usual succinct description guided by closeup views of the canvas, Belhôte proceeds to compare it to another, well, rape scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in Tintoretto’s Danaë (c. 1570) (the Roman poet’s text, we’re told, is essentially a pretext for Renaissance painters to indulge in representations that in a religious

all images Look but Don’t Touch (stills), 2021, a web series directed by Cecilia de Arce and presented by Hortense Belhôte. © Kazak Productions

May 2021

context would be deemed profane). You might conclude at this point that our host’s use for Leda and the Swan is in demonstrating the violence, especially violence against women, in Western art-history (and in a way you would be right); but here comes the twist: “What if Jupiter’s love stories, visiting naked, lascivious young women in the guise of various objects, were less allegories of female conquest than of masturbation,” she asks, whispering asmr-style into a studio microphone as sexual popup ads burst onto the screen of her computer. For extra credit on the subject of this painting, continues Belhôte, now holding what looks like a rubberduck sex toy, we should consult Google on François Boucher’s far more graphic take…

Rather than a ‘new’ art history (the series is way too short and the episodes too disconnected), the episodes of Look but Don’t Touch are exercises in seeing that ultimately – coming back to Berger – seek to empower viewers’ personal critical perspectives. Berger argued that art-historical jargon is partly what inhibits us from having a spontaneous relationship with artworks; by deconstructing these narratives and reappropriating the paintings for herself and marginalised groups with humour, imagination – and yes, research – Belhôte reminds us that there is more than one way to look at a painting, and that it’s that multiplicity of perspectives – as opposed to adoration and deference – that will keep art relevant.

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On the screen of Leonardo Finotti’s control pad the graves captured by his drone camera seem to go on forever. We are standing on a scrubby patch of grass that acts as the car park for the Cemitério da Vila Formosa, on the eastern periphery of São Paulo, about an hour from the centre of the city. This is, as evidenced by the footage gliding past, the largest burial site in Latin America. Finotti, who before the pandemic worked primarily as an architectural photographer, flying around the world to document high-profile design projects, has been mapping the burial ground since covid-19 hit Brazil with force a year ago. His aim, he says, is to build up a comprehensive map – probably to be published in book form eventually, though more immediately made available to the media for free – of a geography in flux. Through this portrait, one that encompasses both space and time but is shot at a distance so as not to feel mawkish or intrusive, the horrific human cost of the pandemic is made clear, however jaded the viewer may have become.

At the time of writing, it’s hard to imagine how the public-health situation in Brazil could get worse: the country is experiencing over 4,000 covid-19 deaths per day, of which

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Strategic Density

What lies beneath Brazil’s pandemic politics, asks Oliver Basciano

above Aerial view of Cemitério da Vila Formosa, São Paulo, from Leonardo Finotti’s ongoing Necropoli[s]tics series, 2020–. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

São Paulo state accounts for a quarter; a few weeks ago Brazil slipped past 300,000 deaths since the onset of the pandemic. And yet all predictions are that it will get worse. The hospitals are in a state of collapse, even in the country’s richest city; icu capacity is at 90 percent in the majority of states. Finotti’s recent images – aerial shots in which neat grids of the dead laid to rest sit at odds with the chaotic urban sprawl visible beyond the cemetery’s border – demonstrate a surge in activity when examined side-by-side with earlier photographs he took of the same site.

The photographer has come here at least once a week over the past year, often more frequently, and as work continues to exhume old graves (the bones are removed to an elegant ossuary or to one of four ‘overflow’ shipping containers parked next to it), the newly dug holes are never vacant for long. The landscape shown in Finotti’s pictures has got progressively less green as established graves are cleared, the cemetery’s 78 hectares turning brown with freshly turned earth. As the death rate soars, the topography changes.

In acknowledgement of Achille Mbembe’s 2003 essay ‘Necropolitics’, Finotti has titled his

project Necropoli[s]tics. Mbembe’s text is increasingly referenced in Brazil, and far beyond the circles of those who might previously have been interested in the Cameroonian philosopher’s work. His claim, that the necropolitical state is one that has jurisdiction over individual life and death, has been used by journalists and writers in mainstream newspapers and journals as they struggle to comprehend the enormity of Brazil’s ‘new’ normal. Various countries around the world have fared better or worse in their response to covid-19, and many avoidable deaths have occurred globally due to political incompetence or an imbalance between economic and social concerns. In Brazil, however, a far darker narrative is emerging, with increasing evidence – which is used as the basis for legal cases being brought to the International Criminal Court in The Hague – that the country’s far-right president’s actions constitute something worse than negligence. Jair Bolsonaro’s dismissal of the virus, his promotion of quack remedies and his initial rejection of vaccines surely qualify as crimes, for having, in the language of the Brazilian constitution, put ‘the life or health of others to direct and imminent danger’.

top Leonardo Finotti, pelada#594, 2012, from the series Futebol: Urban Euphoria in Brazil, 2007–14. Collection Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge. Courtesy the artist above Aerial view of Cemitério da Vila Formosa, São Paulo, from Leonardo Finotti’s ongoing Necropoli[s]tics series, 2020–. Courtesy the artist

May 2021

And Bolsonaro’s efforts to end or undermine lockdowns – instituted only in extremis by state governors, and nowhere nearly as restrictively as in most other countries – is clearly a case, again set out as criminal by the constitution, of ‘violating determination of public authorities, to prevent introduction or spread of contagious disease’. Instead, the president appears to relish what Mbembe describes as ‘dividing people into those who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the dead.’ Dimas Covas, head of Butantan, the São Paulo medical institution producing Brazil’s CoronaVac vaccine, was making the same point when he stated recently: ‘The president is practising social Darwinism. [He] exposes people to the virus: the strong survive and the rest die.’ In reality, under Bolsonaro, strength isn’t just measured in terms of physical health, but of economic viability: the well-off work from the relative safety of home, while the 40 percent of the workforce that is part of the informal economy or lower-paid retail and hospitality industries must crowd onto the streets to earn hand-to-mouth wages.

With little in the way of emergency economic aid coming from the government (an initial limited

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scheme, made more generous by Congress, ran its course in December, and a new one is only now coming into effect), these workers are vulnerable to a bolsonarismo politics that operates in lockstep with neoliberalism to extend the colonial practice of building economies through mass exploitation and slavery, however subtle their forms.

Finotti brings his drone back to rest and packs it away. Together we head into the cemetery on foot. In the distance a small group has gathered around a grave to say final farewells, while gravediggers dressed in disposable overalls continue their work nearby, the space between the holes diminishing as the grid expands. In the leadup to the 2014 World Cup, Finotti produced a far most optimistic series of photographs, also taken from the air, of favela football pitches, rare open spaces that contrasted with the tightly packed ad hoc housing surrounding them. There is a cruel irony in considering these two projects side-by-side, the environmental density forced on the living now replicated in the spaces reserved for the dead.

Behind every crime is a motive. Bolsonaro’s rationale goes further than a simple calculation that preventing an economic downturn is worth the loss of life (though Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s poem about the ‘nobodies’ who ‘are not human beings, but human resources… who are not worth the bullet that kills them’ is certainly relevant to this way of thinking). Instead, it is another part of Mbembe’s text that provides the answer to what is going on. Under necropolitics, the philosopher argues, the state initiates a ‘war without end’. Conflict has been the bolsonarismo

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above Jair Bolsonaro, April 2021.

Photo: Alan Santos/pr

ArtReview

strategy from the beginning. The president, a former army captain after all, knows no other way by which to keep his political stock high.

In the early days of his rule, combat came from fomenting a furious culture war between his supporters and detractors in which the arts often became the target: plays and exhibitions were closed down, and mobs whipped up by the president’s rhetoric forced artists and actors into hiding. At other times the targets have been gay and trans communities; women; seemingly randomly picked international foes such as China. Now his battle is with the medical establishment, scientists and state governors who beg for a positive pandemic strategy. These wars have victims beyond the odd cancelled exhibition or play, and it’s a modus operandi he’s never hidden. As far back as 1999, when, as a little-known federal deputy for Rio de Janeiro, he made an appearance on a talkshow, he announced, “You won’t change anything in this country through voting – nothing, absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, you’ll only change things by having a civil war, and doing the job that the military regime did not do. By killing about 30,000… If a few innocent people die, that’s alright.” By June last year Bolsonaro had hit his target.

The leader’s support is slipping (in recent days he’s lost his defence minister and three heads of the armed forces, all of whom resigned after publicly affirming loyalty to the constitution rather than to Bolsonaro personally), and if it was measured according to the volume and frequency of pot-bashing protests that take place throughout the county, one might say he was done for. The reverberations of wood spoon against iron that bounce off the concrete blocks of my downtown neighbourhood are now joined by cries of “Genicida!” Yet for many Bolsonaro represents strength, the embodiment of machismo, a figure not frightened by a ‘little flu’. A day after joining Finotti in the cemetery, I pass the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, in the centre of the city, where a crowd of the president’s diehard supporters have gathered under the building’s pillars (a popular protest spot), their banners criticising the statewide lockdown.

The museum is closed, part of the local measures condemned by the president, but somewhere inside hangs a painting from 1966 titled O Heroi (The Hero), by Anna Maria Maiolino. It shows a grinning skeleton dressed in a heavily decorated military uniform, a symbol of Brazil’s dictatorship years. Its sunken eyes recall the current president: a hero to those demonstrating below, his heroism built on the graves of Vila Formosa.

‘If I don’t tell the truth, I don’t deserve to be called a writer,’ declared Nawal El Saadawi in an interview from 2008. The feminist author and activist, who passed away on 21 March at the age of eighty-nine, can lie at rest knowing that she lived up to that exacting standard, despite near constant pressure to compromise or back away from it.

Patriarchy, sexuality, nationalism, religious fundamentalisms, the status of women in Arab societies: El Saadawi wrote and spoke unflinchingly about all this and more, within a wider context of human emancipation. Being the object of the anger of the powerful – from former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia – would only have confirmed to her that she was on the right track. ‘Maybe people are angry with me, but I’m not angry with myself,’ El Saadawi said.

El Saadawi was born in 1931 in Kafr Tahla, a village north of Cairo, to an upper-middleclass household. Unusual for the time, her parents sent all nine of their children to school, girls included. However, they also abided by some traditions: El Saadawi suffered female genital mutilation (fgm) at the age of six, which she narrativised in her 1977 novel The Hidden Face of Eve. As a trained physician,

An Appreciation

Sarah Jilani measures the life of Nawal El Saadawi, Egyptian author, activist, physician

she worked as a doctor for decades, all the while criticising the role of misinterpreted Islam and religious dogma in perpetuating the oppression of women in her society. Her first nonfiction work, Women and Sex (1969), was banned in Egypt for its anti-fgm stance; when its English translation came out in 1972, it cost her the position to which she had risen in the Egyptian health service: director-general of public health.

El Saadawi’s first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor (1958), drew from her own life. It features a girl who is constantly pressured to accept that her destiny is to serve men, as El Saadawi was (the first attempt to marry her off came at the age of ten). The novel’s bright protagonist is urged away from her studies and into the kitchen, until she ‘could not hear the word marriage without having a mental picture of a man with a big see-through belly with a table of food inside it’. The simmering rage in El Saadawi’s writing, especially in Woman at Point Zero (1983), her most popular novel in the West, has drawn the label of ‘nihilistic’ from the Syrian writer Georges Tarabichi and been described as ‘devastatingly pessimistic’ by the literary scholar Susan Arndt. But El Saadawi’s range is startling – her Love in the Kingdom of Oil

above Nawal El Saadawi, 1991

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(1992) and The Innocence of the Devil (1998) are semisurrealist – and it is animated by a fierce hope that justice can and will prevail.

Under President Sadat, El Saadawi began a period of ‘self-exile’, from 1978 to 1980, working as un adviser on women’s development in Africa and the Middle East. Already under the Egyptian government’s watch for her writings on women’s sexual health, she was welcomed back to Egypt in 1981 with detention for criticising Sadat’s government. In a twist of fate, she was held at Qanater Women’s Prison, nine years after she had first gone there as a practising psychiatrist and met the prisoner who would later inspire Woman at Point Zero.

El Saadawi gives a vivid account of her experience of incarceration in Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983), which she wrote, clandestinely, on a roll of toilet paper with an eyebrow pencil. Her real ‘crime’, of course, was revealing how patriarchy intersected with religious fundamentalisms in Egypt.

Her anti-theist pronouncements, however, have all too often been fixated on at the expense of her anticolonial message. In fact, El Saadawi was vocal about the neocolonial and capitalist scaffolding that, in her view, kept patriarchy and religious fundamentalisms alive and kicking. She frequently discussed how neocolonialism – the securing of

top Stencilled graffiti likeness of Nawal El Saadawi, 2011.

Photo: Flickr / AshtonPal above left Cover of Nawal El Saadawi’s 1983 novel, Woman at Point Zero

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ArtReview

Western economic interests at the expense of the poor of the Global South – nurtured local patriarchal systems in Africa and the Arab world. She often bookended her selfidentification as a feminist writer with: ‘I do not hate men’ – indeed, her third marriage, to Sherif Hatata, an Egyptian doctor and writer who translated most of her works into English, lasted four decades – but that she was ‘against the patriarchal capitalist system that creates inequality and a permanent underclass’. El Saadawi understood the oppression of women as an integral part of the political, economic and cultural systems in most of the world, ‘whether backward and feudal, or modern and industrial’.

Whether or not one agrees with El Saadawi’s analysis, history contains examples of such across Africa and Asia since independence from colonial rule. Her disapproval of the modernisation process carried out in the Arab world under the aegis of the West, with its frequent claim to ‘saving’ Muslim women, can be understood within this framework. El Saadawi saw firsthand that this allowed only a handful of upper- or middle-class Arab women to be economically strong or socially prominent, leaving their sisters exactly where they are: in poverty.

Her novels God Dies by the Nile (1985) and

The Fall of the Imam (1987) reflect this, drawing attention to how many women uphold patriarchy out of fear, internalisation or class loyalties.

As such, El Saadawi’s feminism was also a challenge to the West’s self-conception of being at the forefront of some sort of civilisational timeline in terms of women’s liberation. As tragic events like Sarah Everard’s murder in the uk has recently shown, this has no basis in reality: patriarchy unfolds everywhere in different ways.

Decentring the West in people’s subjectivities – or ‘decolonising the mind’, as the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o put it – was in El Saadawi’s thoughts. ‘I am an African from Egypt, not the Middle East. The Middle East is a term used relative to London,’ she would assert. She refused the notion that Eastern and Western are natural categories about some fundamental difference in the ‘essence’ of people, as peddled today by Islamists and white supremacists alike.

In 1992, El Saadawi’s name appeared on a death list in Saudi Arabia and she decided

to leave Egypt again. Teaching at Duke University, North Carolina, she wrote two memoirs: A Daughter of Isis (1999) and Walking Through Fire (2002). Court cases troubled her throughout the last two decades of her life: first in 2001 for alleged apostasy, then in 2008 for her banned play, God Resigns at the Summit Meeting.

It features a gathering of the prophets of the Abrahamic religions, great women from history, God, Satan and Bill Clinton, resulting in the titular resignation. The by-then septuagenarian also joined the anti-Mubarak protesters in Tahrir Square during the 2011 Arab Spring.

Through both activism and literature, El Saadawi tirelessly revealed linkages between the oppression of women; religious fundamentalisms; and a neocolonial system that needs Global South economies to remain underdeveloped. Her views are not above criticism, but she was living proof of her belief that, as a writer, ‘you cannot be creative in a system that is unjust, unless you are a dissident.’

above Nawal El Saadawi speaks at the site of the Occupy London camp, 2011

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Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. The other day, I went into a big-box diy emporium fully intending to buy some screws, but in the maze of strip-lit aisles I entered some kind of fugue state and emerged screwless, somewhat unscrewed and toting a bagful of off-brand paints, pencils, sketchbooks and readymade canvases. Back home shortly after, and for the first time in a couple of decades, I was making ‘art’. Inevitably, it was crap. But one thing made me happy about the improvisatory, beanstalklike things I drew: I didn’t have to explain them using words.

Unlike at art school, where in paranoid preparation for studio crits I, like many of my coursemates, had made the mistake of filling notebooks with airless explanations of what my artworks ‘did’ before I’d even executed them – and suffocated whatever was there in the process, allowing for no spontaneity or surprise – there was no pedagogical judge standing in my studio, or rather over the dining table. And, needless to say, no gallery needing a press release.

In other, um, words: no requirement to do what the artworld is currently set up to do, ie filter the numinous experience of art through language. Yes, I am a critic. I derive my livelihood from pasting words onto art.

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Unmediated

Words fail me, writes Martin Herbert

above Visitor to Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, 2014.

Photo: Chris Cheadle / Alamy facing page bank, Fax-Back (London: The Approach), 1998.

Courtesy Simon Bedwell / bank

ArtReview

I see the potential contradiction. But I’m not arguing against interpretation; just against the prison of priming.

Here’s an extremist case (and stop me if you’ve heard, or seen, this one before): in a Berlin gallery a few years back, this fly on the wall saw a bunch of art students walk in. Almost without exception they picked up the handout at the door and scanned it, got the gist, without even glancing up at the show; next, they walked round the gallery holding up their phones, photographing each work in turn, and left. ok, maybe they were on assignment, criticalwriting practice; maybe it was their ninth exhibit of the day. But, crucially, at no point did they have a remotely unmediated experience of art. They’d been prepared to think in a certain way by anxiety-defusing interpretation present at the outset of the show, and then they saw what the work looked like through their screens, adding diminishment to self-inflicted confirmation bias. And this is the cartoonish version of what most of us do when we look at art.

I’m not enough of an art historian to know when exhibitions began to be accompanied by explanations. I suspect that the intersection of ‘this is what this is’ and ‘this is what it means’

dates back to first-wave Conceptualism and the very notion that art was up for being grasped by means of the intellect alone. In recent times, the inevitability of an accompanying crib sheet – or, more highmindedly, ‘textual supplement’ – has reshaped and distorted art itself: codified works featuring nested allusions just wouldn’t perform without an unpacking of their cleverness. When an artist gets away with presenting an unadorned experience, it’s rare; it takes work, stratagems. A friend told me about watching Trisha Donnelly install a show, and her technique in getting what she wanted. The gallery

wished to add labels identifying the works, which for the American artist was already too much breeching of speechless sanctity, never mind a press text. Faced with that, Donnelly dejectedly said: ‘You’re just going to make me take them down again’.

It’s not necessary to recap the comedic, pretentious side of the language around art, or the double bind for writers and audiences per se. Some critics I know make a point of never reading the press materials, or at least they assert as much; but some artists nowadays are banking on your doing so. The least-worst strategy is to look at them last. The smartest response to the tyranny of the handout I’ve seen – ironically, I can’t remember who did this – was a show that ended with one a4 sheet pasted to the wall, upside down. Until then, you were travelling via your own lights. Getting used to that is almost a form of detoxing, because language can become a form of addiction, one you might recognise if the first thing you do each day is reach for your phone, scan your socials or the news. It’s a way around the effort of having to think for yourself, or simply be alone with your thoughts, your guesswork, your raw experience.

I own a lot of digital music, more than I’ve ever familiarised myself with, which means that if I throw my iTunes on shuffle there’s a chance it’ll bring up something I don’t know. Sometimes, that what-the-hell-is-this space of unanswered doubt can be downright thrilling; I’m not hearing sonics through genre, or through my prior associations with the artist, or through the cult of personality that has its own distorting effects on art. I’m – almost – just hearing sound, tailored broadly to my tastes but beginning to escape them, and it’s richer. Almost inevitably, if I check who it is, there’s a vague sense of reduced bandwidth, of things snapping to the grid of categorisation, different aspects foregrounding themselves.

Without it, conversely, there’s something akin to the child’s preverbal apprehension of the world, direct engagement. Visual art can be a space for that too, if you’re lucky enough to find something genuinely exploratory and if you don’t allow yourself to be spoon-fed from the get-go. Art is already a speech act. Let it be untagged. At least for a while.

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It’s a rare thing to see puffer jackets rub shoulders with multilateralism. Or to put on a hat festooned with intergovernmental references. But it seems that the world of fashion, ruled by Beauty and Commerce, has turned to thoughts not of love but global governance. How else to explain the deeply unsexy suits at Balenciaga last year, purposefully ill-fitting and satin-sheened, solely accessorised with a security badge around the neck? This is the stuff of delegates and analysts, junior ministers and security personnel. It is what you see at conferences on steel tariffs. At Balenciaga, the runway for the spring 2020 collection show at La Cité du Cinéma in Saint-Denis, north of Paris, was laid out like an international conference, or rather, like a general assembly of the sort the un runs. The walls and floors were upholstered in a dour shade of statecraft blue, and the silhouettes were occasionally hegemonic, from the ape-shaped puffer jackets that mass atop the shoulders like tiny hillocks to monochrome turtlenecks that swell into skirts the size of church bells.

Dress Codes

In a time of disorder, fashion yearns for global order, writes Clara Young

above Models present creations by designer Craig Green as part of his fall /winter 2020 / 2021 collection show during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, 19 January 2020. Photo: Reuters / Charles Platiau

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ArtReview

Underpinning the musical proceedings was a two-note motif – the shark theme in Jaws – foretelling the disaster of pandemic and other high-stakes geopolitics.

Current events sometimes do penetrate the dreamworld of fashion: yesterday we lived in the rigid dichotomy of spring/ summer and fall/winter collections; last year, abruptly, that calendrical corset was gone. We have the virus to thank for that.

The pandemonium today of refugees, climate change, pandemic and cyberwar has even effected an interest in international cooperation among the well-dressed. There was a little, let us say, Woodrow Wilson wafting over the catwalks even if not in the actual corridors of power we so desperately need now. A whisper of it reached milliner Stephen Jones, who responded with a felt beret in pale United Nations blue, crowned with olive branches. He named it Pax. “I just thought about the unity of the world and the un when I made this hat,” says Jones, “and at the time this was the beginning of Brexit as well. Why was the eu created? It was the

above Balenciaga: Runway at Paris Fashion Week, presenting Womenswear spring/summer 2020.

Photo: Victor Virgile / Getty Images following page ‘Pax’: A Laurel Leaf Pillbox,

by Stephen Jones. Photo: Peter Ashworth

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were sartorial odes to workers of the world.

Like the spoofed MasterCard logos on the breast pockets of last spring’s Balenciaga button-up and the staging of his last Vetements show at a McDonald’s franchise, they’re appropriative fuck-yous to neo-lib globalisation – Gvasalia grew up in Soviet-era Georgia, after all.

Gvasalia has meta-national mayhem on his mind too. During Balenciaga’s fall collection, models trawled through flood waters under a hell-and-brimstone sky. It was climate apocalypse at its most photogenic. That same week, the house aired a four-minute ‘evening news’ segment to coincide with the arrival of the spring collection in shops. It has the cheap, meme-ish look of ai-enabled deepfake. “The video is maybe spooky or scary, but I don’t see any of that,” says Will Benedict, the artist behind it. “It’s the realism of the uncanny, but it’s also so normal. It’s so conventional, it’s its own genre. What I may be trying to get at is something very strong, something close to essential, and basic. I’m talking about water, plastic, the sun.” The news presenters mouth their lines, the people move like robots, the headlines are maddeningly mysterious. It’s all a wink and a nudge at another burgeoning headache for heads of state – synthetic media, which authorities fear will run roughshod over global security, truth, trust and democracy.

Cross-border chaos and multinational capitalism are standard fare in Gvasalia’s runway commentary, no matter how neutral or ironic that commentary is, and so is multilateralism. Hence his United Nations World Food Programme hoodies (with proceeds donated) and the Security Council feel of that spring show.

As political leaders grow isolationist, the arts, not just fashion, are getting multilateralist. Taryn Simon sensed the shift: Paperwork and the Will of Capital are photographed recreations of flower bouquets that decorated the tables on which multilateral agreements like Bretton Woods and the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation were signed. Having come out five years ago, Paperwork does not include flowers from a signing ceremony at the cop24 in Katowice in 2018 of the United Nations charter on sustainable fashion, spearheaded by Stella McCartney. Global cooperation is trending high in fashion; perhaps those less stylish will catch on.

aftermath of the Second World War, it’s what the Commonwealth’s about – the unity of nations. So, in my own slightly stupid way, un peacekeepers wear a blue beret and I did my fancy haute couture version of it.” The clothing designer Craig Green produced utility sportswear that looks like lifeboats.

They remind us of those who squeeze themselves onto such rafts in the hopes of more hospitable shores across the Mediterranean.

Balenciaga’s Demna Gvasalia, who also founded the clothing brand Vetements, which he has now left, has been discoursing about global forces for a long time. The yellow dhl T-shirts that made Vetement’s name in 2016

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ArtReview

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Art Featured

Has been trickling through the letter box 45

Historical Revisionism

by Rodney LaTourelle

David Ruben Piqtoukun, Airplane, 1995, Brazilian soapstone, African wonderstone.

Collection Winnipeg Art Gallery

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ArtReview

How Qaumajuq, a new centre for Inuit art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, challenges the notion of museum as neutral space

Pudlo Pudlat, Women at the Fish Lakes, 1977, lithograph on paper, 37 × 47 cm.

Collection Government of Nunavut Fine Art Collection

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Qilak, Main Inuit Gallery, Qaumajuq, the Inuit Art Centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Photo: Lindsay Reid

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ArtReview

Hosting the largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art in the conversation with a call not to return to normal. If museums have only world, the recently opened Qaumajuq – a museum connected to the recently been more widely considered as primary locations for the Winnipeg Art Gallery – is a groundbreaking step in the indigenisa- maintenance of colonial ideology, and thus sites for activism towards tion and decolonisation process of cultural institutions in Canada and transforming the hegemonic sociopolitical values they embody, the beyond. Pronounced ‘kow-ma-yourk’, Qaumajuq means ‘it is bright, colonial structure of the museum as an ‘othering-machine’ demands it is lit’ in the Inuktitut language, and the reference to light is apt for systemic rethinking. Its fundamental pretence as a democratic, neuthe 3,700sqm building, designed with wide expanses of glass to illu- tral space can no longer be upheld; the museum must always be considminate a three-storey ‘visible vault’ that presents approximately 5,000 ered as a partisan extension of power relations. Yet while it is well Inuit carvings, best seen in natural light. The vault display is organised known how artworks and artefacts function to articulate dominant by community of origin, with up to three generations of related artists historical narratives (usually white and patriarchal) and dismiss, shown together, emphasising regional differences between local mate- obscure or rewrite others (usually bipoc), the strategies for museologrials. By night, the glass vault lights up ical revision have for the most part been Qaumajuq like a lantern. limited in scope. In contrast, the develAmid radically disrupted ‘normal’ opment of Qaumajuq by the Winnipeg Above it, the scalloped white limestone facade of the building’s exteArt Gallery (wag) has addressed these practices worldwide over the past year rior undulates like a calved iceberg, structural challenges explicitly. come calls not to return to normal giving the white-walled main gallery Some history: when wag Director inside an organic sensibility. Circular Stephen Borys arrived in 2008, he recogskylights bring daylight into this expansive space, recalling perhaps nised that the wag’s Inuit art collection, which had grown steadily seal holes cut in the ice or the ceiling of an igloo. While Michael since the 1950s, was the world’s largest. Four years later, he initiMaltzan’s architecture pays tribute to the epic qualities of Arctic light, ated an Inuit taskforce to guide the development of an Inuit Art and where some communities experience extended periods of sunlight Learning Centre. This taskforce evolved into the Indigenous Advisory and darkness, the museum was developed in a reconciliatory and Circle, which has led the decision-making process to ensure that the hopeful spirit to publicly shine a light of acknowledgement and then provisionally named Centre for Inuit Art truly empowered the education on Inuit and Indigenous life in the context of the devas- Indigenous communities involved. The project took on new urgency when the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission published tating legacy of colonial contact.

In recent times and especially over the past year, during which a list of calls to action in 2015, aimed at reconciling Indigenous and ‘normal’ practices have been radically disrupted worldwide, questions non-Indigenous peoples and supporting Indigenous cultural practice of justice and decolonisation have come to the forefront of the cultural and languages, many of them on the verge of extinction.

Visible Vault, Qaumajuq, the Inuit Art Centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Photo: Lindsay Reid

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At this time, Winnipeg-based Anishinaabe artist and curator step of naming all the centre’s public spaces, often relating them to Jaimie Isaac joined the wag, creating exhibitions that examined social and natural features, which simultaneously shut out corporate Indigenous questions from a contemporary perspective. Her 2015 sponsors. The names were given in the following languages: Inuktitut show, We Are On Treaty Land, addressed the fundamental but often (Inuit), Inuvialuktun (Inuit), Anishinaabemowin (Anishinaabe/ overlooked fact that Winnipeg is on Treaty 1 territory, presenting Ojibway), Nêhiyawêwin (Ininiwak/Cree), Dakota (Dakota) and Michif artists from this region and, significantly, following Indigenous (Métis). This sacred act of identity formation was empowering in protocol for Treaty land acknowledgement. Boarder X (2016) fea- performative ways and is critical to institutional trust. tured a functioning skateboard ramp Qaumajuq opened in March with built in the wag’s expansive groundinua (‘life force’ or ‘spirit’ in numerThe colonial structure of the level hall, attracting Indigenous youth ous Arctic dialects), which features an who would likely never have visited intergenerational and intersectional museum as an ‘othering-machine’ the wag otherwise. Such work built (with 2slgbtq+ artists represented) demands systemic rethinking trust and partnerships with local diversity of artists and over 100 artworks Indigenous communities and organiacross a range of media, communities sations, raising issues heard nationally and internationally, and led and scales. The importance of Inuit lineage and continuity is made to insurgence / resurgence (2017), the largest Indigenous-led powerfully clear by the introduction to the exhibition via four exhibition the wag has ever produced. The following year, construc- artworks, one each from the curators – Heather Igloliorte, Kablusiak, tion began on the new building, and in 2020, after virtual consulta- Asinnajaq and Krista Ulujuk Zawadski – who come from the four tions between Indigenous language-keepers and elders from both the Inuit regions of the Arctic. Innovatively, the exhibition steers away Inuit and the First Nations and Métis from the Winnipeg area, the from received notions of Inuit art and display formats. It is without group decided on Qaumajuq for the centre’s name. It took the further walls, but structured by the informal architectures of the Arctic,

Elisapee Ishulutaq, Yesterday and Today, 2014, oil stick, graphite on Stonehenge paper.

Collection Winnipeg Art Gallery

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including a shipping container (or ‘sea can’), a grandmother’s kitchen urgency above and beyond incremental reforms to fundamentally and a hunting shack, and presents an image of the north from the transform or replace old institutional frameworks (of representaInuit perspective. While respectful of historical work, with displays tion) that were established when colonial forces were at their peak. of prints and carvings up to 80 years old, the exhibition’s focus is on In this context, Qaumajuq is a unique and encouraging approach, future-forward visions: such as Glenn Gear’s immersive video instal- in which Indigenous voices are not only responding to but leading lation Iluani/Silami (It’s Full of Stars) (2021) and Jesse Tungilik’s Seal the conversation. As curator Jaimie Isaac noted in the opening cereSkin Spacesuit (2019). The future is in fact a perennial theme in Inuit mony, what is critical is ‘making space’: safe space, for the inclusion art, and inua is also an acronym for of more voices. The spaces of Qaumajuq ‘Inuit Moving Forward Together’, yet were built for this reconciliation, What does ‘decolonisation’ actually the visionary impulse always remains not just as an archive and display but intimately interconnected across time, as a ‘working’ structure, facilitating mean? Isn’t the ideal a return of lands research, production, education, exhiland and community. and territory to ancestral peoples? bitions and, importantly, ceremony.

Qaumajuq reflects this hopeful, In fact, Qaumajuq opened in March grounding force amidst the legacy of colonial brutality, suppression and violence. As Omaskêko Cree artist with a ceremony by the Seven Nations of Manitoba involving spirit Duane Linklater asked during a discussion titled ‘Decolonizing purification and protection rituals, an unprecedented acknowledgethe Collection’ at The Graduate Center, cuny: what does decoloni- ment and blessing from Indigenous elders for this institution, which sation actually mean? Words such as decolonisation and justice are might be called revolutionary in many ways. ar often instrumentalised by conservative structures seeking a progressive image. Isn’t the ideal, conversely, a return of lands and territory inua is on show at Qaumajuq, the Inuit Art Centre at the Winnipeg Art to ancestral peoples? If this sounds radical, it nonetheless reflects the Gallery, until December

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Structural Violence Meriem Bennani’s response to lockdown has been to expand her exploration of ‘the caps’, a speculative island space located somewhere in the Atlantic

by Cat Kron

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Lost at sea. A sea of information. The deep sea calls to mind both an abyss anxiety and ennui that engulfed the city. The series was subsequently and an infinitely generative expanse, a biosphere teeming with life acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. exceeding that which any David Attenborough documentary could In addition to her collaboration with Barki, she created the solo capture. As human engagements were shunted online in March 2020, videowork Guided Tour of a Spill (caps Interlude) (2021), which comes the Moroccan-born artist Meriem Bennani found herself stranded in between the first and second instalments of her planned video trilogy New York, where she’d lived since 2009. With the city on lockdown and documenting the inhabitants of a fictional community located on an the public transit residents rely on to move about suddenly deemed island called caps somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. unsafe, Bennani, like many, holed up in her apartment. There, brows- (The second instalment, commissioned by Chicago’s Renaissance ing YouTube channels from her home country, she began to consider Society and Nottingham Contemporary in the uk, will open at the the poetic resonance between internet Renaissance Society next January.) cables buried deep beneath the ocean Guided Tour of a Spill debuted at The caps is an invisibly domed defloor and the endless streams of content François Ghebaly in Los Angeles this tention centre from the near future, they distribute across continents.

March. The 16-minute video follows the a holding zone for would-be immiDuring this surreal gap year, in inhabitants of the Moroccan quarter which it felt like work had been placed grants attempting to teleport to the us of caps, last seen in Party on the caps indefinitely on hold, Bennani managed (2018–19). caps (short for ‘capsule’) is to be impressively productive. She collaborated with the Israeli-born, an invisibly domed dystopian detention centre from the near New York-based filmmaker Orian Barki to make the video series future – à la Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985) or the film The Truman 2 Lizards (2020), instalments of which were periodically released on Show (1998) – a holding zone for would-be immigrants who, while attempting to teleport to the United States, Bennani’s Instagram feed. The eight-part sepreceding pages Party on the caps, 2018 (installation view). have been intercepted by American armed ries, in which the two artists voice animatPhoto: Mathilda Olmi. Courtesy the artist, Biennale of ed lizards meandering through eerie video Moving Image, Geneva, and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles forces, an ominous military group referred footage of a metropolis turned ghost town – a to as ‘Troopers’. Indefinitely detained on this above Party on the caps (still), 2018–19, Manhattan-facing rooftop, a bodega, Times isolated, swamp-rimmed island, refugees eight-channel video installation, 30 min.

Square – encapsulated the cultural vertigo, have built homes and established businesses Courtesy the artist and Clearing, New York & Brussels

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as well as a mythology based around the ‘Croco’, an animated reptile online audiovisual content sourced from Moroccan and other who serves at once as idol, mascot and brand (its motif, per Bennani, Middle Eastern channels Bennani watched, and spliced with Getty footage and her own archives to create an admixture described, per is loosely based on the Lacoste logo) for caps inhabitants.

Party on the caps was shot on location in Rabat and Casablanca the show’s press release, as a ‘YouTube soup’. It’s a mashup of handusing Bennani’s friends and family as performers. The video depicts held amateur video and the animated style of 2010s-era electronica residents at a banquet hall, festively clad in the island’s ubiquitous music-videos – perhaps most explicitly the 2011 animated video for ‘crocodile green’. The initial impression one gets from this work is dj Fatima Al Qadiri’s Vatican Vibes, in which various images of ambigthat of a celebration captured by the roving eye of a travel-show video uously futurist revelry are undercut by ‘loading’ notifications, alerts -grapher, intercut with the artist’s signature playful animations star- and other reminders that we are in a cyberspace of sorts. ring anthropomorphised cgi creatures.

Necessity aside, there is something However, Bennani further alters her defiant in Bennani’s choice to lean on The refugees have built homes human subjects, including their faces, sampled material. She was frustrated and established businesses, as well with distortions superimposed directly by the volume of requests from galleries as a mythology based around an on the video footage. Revellers’ pupils and museums to generate new content are enlarged, the frames of their glasses to fill the void left when they closed animated reptile, the ‘Croco’ made eerily sparkly, the cusps of their their physical doors – what her friend ears outlined with neon bands. All of this serves to underscore the caps the artist Neïl Beloufa characterised to her as ‘artists being asked to be influencers’. Bennani describes her project thus: “I wanted residents’ place, or displacement, within the world they inhabit.

Like so much of this past year, this interim work was unplanned. Guided Tour of a Spill to be about a new space, and I thought, ‘What Unlike Party on the caps, Guided Tour of a Spill was composed almost if the documented space is the digital space’. I was interested in the entirely from repurposed footage and animations. The video takes sci-fi device as a different methodology for documentary. The island the artist’s strategy of revisitation and reuse to an endpoint whose of the caps allows me to make a sort of documentary about Morocco, logic resonates among viewers who experibut exploring it in a more speculative way. above Guided Tour of a Spill (caps Interlude) (still), 2021, That space is rarely given to any story that is enced a vacuum year in quarantine. Guided 4k single-channel digital video, 15 min 49 sec.

Tour of a Spill was born of deep dives into not at the centre.”

Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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preceding pages Siham & Hafida, 2017 (installation view, The Kitchen, New York, 2017).

Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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above Mission Teens, 2019 (installation view, Open Space #6: Meriem Bennani, 2019, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris).

Photo: Marc Domage. Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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She continues, “I was thinking about Disney’s Fantasia. The film Bennani casts with a dark humour as the us Troopers, threatening was clearly a display of groundbreaking animation techniques his homeland. “I gave him a budget, some prompts and a shot list. He paired with some of the most famous European classical music. You brought in five friends and they put together almost a paramilitary watch it and you know this music is hegemonic, but the film is also group – a militia called the Croco Gang. But for me it was especially very magical. It made me want to try and extract the magic and put cool to see them play. I asked them to film the moments in between it in the service of a different function with a different score – to see the ‘action scenes’ that he doesn’t usually show in his videos. They’re what would happen, if it would survive. If the imperialism embed- still little boys, arguing over how to hang the Croco flag. I wanted to ded in the reference would die in the process of being repurposed or show both sides: them as little boys and them as warriors.” The teens and the militia they’ve constructed to combat an enemy registers at live on in a sneaky way. It’s an experiment.”

Guided Tour of a Spill’s musical segments – among them the sam- once as charmingly fabricated (in one shot some of the boys pose as Americans skirmishing with the Croco pled introductory track by Cheb Hicham Sghir, Nmout Wast Lebhar (2020), whose Gang, scribbled cardboard signs bearing “It made me want to see if the impesubtitled lyrics describe a youth who has the word ‘troopers’ taped to their rialism embedded in the reference left his home to find work and is now backs) and all too real. stranded at sea, and which (re)introduces The remix process suits Bennani. would die in the process of being reIts efficacy hinges on her ability as a us to the plight of the caps’s residents – purposed or live on in a sneaky way” director to distil the melange of digital are intercut by the piece’s most resonant content we’ve been stewing in, this year components, for which Bennani enlisted Azzddin Tbakhi, a teenage star of Moroccan YouTube. Explaining more than ever, and pull out a reminder of our humanity, whether their collaboration, she recounts, “I found this boy in Agadir, Morocco, the community depicted looks familiar or not. To render it both who has a great YouTube channel and makes action movies. Azzddin commemorative of a year lived online and specific to her distinct is so prolific. He’ll film himself in training and then go into a mono- experience as a homesick citizen of this planet. ar logue about how he’s going to protect his country. I thought it was interesting because the ‘enemy’ he wants to fight is kind of abstract, Meriem Bennani’s exhibition Guided Tour of a Spill is on view a bit like a Hollywood villain. I thought maybe he could replace at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, through 1 May Morocco with the caps in his monologues.” Bennani asked Tbakhi and friends to act out skirmishes with imaginary entities, which Cat Kron is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles

above Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki, 2 Lizards (still), 2020, digital video, eight-episode series, 22 min 28 sec.

Courtesy the artists and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles

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Fancy a Spot of Eco-Terrorism?

Marxist climate-scholar Andreas Malm argues that the time for peaceful protest has passed Interview by En Liang Khong

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Over the past decade, the artworld’s carbon footprint has come under increasingly heavy scrutiny, from its encouragement of frictionless travel between international biennials and art fairs, and museums’ uncritical acceptance of Big Oil’s corporate sponsorship, through to – most recently – the ecologically disastrous consequences of the crypto-art boom. In his latest book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021), academic and activist Andreas Malm suggests that the climate movement should be paying greater attention to the baubles and lifestyles – the ‘luxury emissions’ – of the jetsetting one-percenters.

Malm voices great frustration with the powers that be. Despite an escalating planetary crisis, ‘The commitment to the endless accumulation of capital wins out every time,’ he writes. ‘After the past three decades, there can be no doubt that the ruling classes are constitutionally incapable of responding to the catastrophe in any other way than by expediting it; of their own accord, under their inner compulsion, they can do nothing but burn their way to the end’. Meanwhile, climate activists march, hold pieces of street theatre, deliver demands to ministers – and yet business continues. Is absolute nonviolence fated forever to be the sole tactic in the battle to abolish fossil fuels, Malm wonders. Is there another phase for the climate movement that extends beyond peaceful protest?

How to Blow Up a Pipeline draws an important distinction between property destruction and violence against people – it is to the former that Malm directs his attention, advocating for a new wave of strategic violence that ranges from the deflation of suv tyres to the sabotage of key fossil-fuel infrastructure. And yet Malm’s diagnosis and suggested cure for the paralysis in contemporary activism leaves me with serious reservations: the heavy risks that any social movement incurs with the escalation of direct action, both in terms of popular perception, and its physical and legal implications. Can the climate movement afford to engage in such a tactics of violent confrontation? ‘Property will cost us the earth,’ Malm insists. ‘Fear for the loss of property is a categorically distinct fear. It pertains to the balance sheet and budget, not the body.’ artreview How to Blow Up a Pipeline argues that the deficit of action in response to climate breakdown mirrors a mode of inaction within activism itself. It’s an interesting suggestion, and one that reminded me of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’s work on folk-politics – that the recent cycle of struggles often manifests in immediate actions and transient, almost ritualistic gestures, the people and police fated to act out their assigned roles. What did you mean

by inaction, in an age – at least prepandemic – of school strikes, Extinction Rebellion and other mass movements around the climate crisis? What is missing in these protests? andreas malm The primary feeling I had about the protests in 2019 – and this book is a product of that moment, which came to such an abrupt end when the pandemic broke out – was excitement. But also frustration, that after all these years – after so many climate disasters, deeply entrenched ‘business as usual’, steeply rising emissions – we are still doing the same thing. Although the protests were on a much

“The violence of fossil-fuel combustion is not interpersonal, it is not face-to-face, it is mediated through the atmosphere. But it really is a form of violence” larger scale than previously, we were still marching, rallying, petitioning, gently blocking roads and squares. What I saw missing was a more confrontational approach to fossil-fuel infrastructure, and the machines that are destroying the planet.

If you look at the climate movement in the global north, which is what I am primarily concerned with in the book, the contrast between that movement and other social movements which have made a big splash in the global north in recent years is quite extraordinary. I am thinking in particular of the Yellow

“There is the potential for winning mass support if you combine ecological rage and class hatred that is out there in society, but very rarely articulated politically” Vests and Black Lives Matter. There, you’ve seen a very different approach to the police, and to violence and confrontational tactics, and diversity of tactics. There is much to say when you compare the movement for Black Lives and the climate movement. ar So you’re arguing that a doctrine rules the climate movement, that of absolute pacifism. Can you describe how that has taken hold? It’s a balance of moralism and tactics – one informed by a reading of the history of struggles as fuelled by nonviolent protest. facing page Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd, May 2020

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am How to explain that contrast with other protest movements? One would need to do a piece of sociological research into movements to tease this out. But I do have a hunch that it is linked to a particular Anglo-American, white middle-class, intellectual, progressive demography that has developed a certain way of thinking about how to effect social change through grassroots movements and has tied itself very firmly to this very pacifistic conception of change. Both the Yellow Vests and blm have another kind of class basis. The Yellow Vests was generally a working-class uprising in France. blm comes from young, working Black people with various degrees of dispossession. That might to some extent explain a difference in attitudes.

But that’s probably not sufficient – historically, if you look back at the 1970s and 80s, clearly you can find lots of instances of enraged white people from middle-class backgrounds in Europe or the us who would venture into very militant tactics. So it also has to do with a historical moment: the way that the left and radical social movements have been cut off from a century of experience of how to wage social struggle. In the post-1989, postsocialist – whatever you want to call it – conjuncture, the political models, icons and imaginaries that people in social movements work with do not retain a living memory of intense social struggle that might also include more militant tactics.

If the climate crisis had blown up in the 1960s or 70s, I’m sure that the movement would have developed more radical tactics than what we see now, because at that moment you had a whole galaxy of everything from the Black Panthers to Palestinian resistance to all the anticolonial struggles that pushed people into a more antagonistic and confrontational way of doing things. But we do not have access to that as a living heritage on the left. It’s something that needs to be reinvented. ar You propose sabotage, specifically the deployment of property destruction, as a ‘logical, justifiable and effective form of resistance’. What exactly would such resistance consist of; what would it achieve? The deployment of violence is a serious question for all social movements – the escalation of violence within the 2019 wave of protests in Hong Kong, for instance, has not led to a breakthrough for pro-democracy protesters there. am Hong Kong is an instance where you have a real contrast between a social movement that exploded in 2019 that took a completely different approach, that acted in total contravention to the model of strategic pacifism. That same year, you saw the same contrast with the uprising in Chile, which started with people smashing the pay machines in subways, or the uprisings

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against various forms of corrupt neoliberalism in Iraq and Lebanon. Obviously, moving from strictly peaceful protest to more militant tactics does not guarantee that you win. Just as staying with peaceful means is no guarantee either. This all depends on the balance of forces. I’m not saying that I am certain that through shifting to the militancy of property destruction we will win. What I’m saying is that the time has come to consider diversifying our tactics. Because the stakes are too high.

What could potentially be achieved? One, is to try to establish a kind of deterrent against investors: if you continue banking on machines and infrastructure that destroys the planet, you risk finding these wrecked. Though I don’t know how much action you need to establish that as a deterrent; how many refineries you would have to blow up to make that a credible threat. Secondly, it’s important to up the ante through pressure from below on states to adopt the necessary policies – something like going after suvs or other forms of indefensible luxury emissions would, I imagine, potentially have the effect of placing a stigma on these things, of establishing concretely that this is not an uncontroversial thing to do – that it is not uncontroversial to burn an insane amount of fossil fuels for no good reason at all. These consumption practices would be put into question by our destruction of these machines.

With the blm movement, from the very beginning, you had an element of property destruction – the whole movement after the murder of George Floyd really took off when people entered the police station in the third precinct of Minneapolis, stormed it and burned it to the ground. That showed people that this kind of violence people are suffering is not their fate, is not beyond the law, beyond

their influence – it is something we can enter and put an end to. That worked as a catalyst – it highlighted the sense of paralysis around the constant violence that Black people in the us have been facing for so long. You see a similar paralysis in the climate crisis, where people feel that this infrastructure that is expanding is beyond our influence, is our fate. Militant action on fossil-fuel installations could have a similar effect of puncturing that paralysis – it is not our natural, biological, law-bound fate. Property destruction – targeting the most egregious forms of luxury emissions and other kinds of fossil-fuel infrastructure – could potentially contribute to building popular pressure and delegitimise these practices, pressuring various

levels of the state apparatus to start closing these emissions sources down.

There are many differences of course.

The murder of George Floyd and its eightminute film of a cop choking someone to death – now, you will never see a fossil-fuel executive strangling a farmer in Mozambique or a fisherman in Bangladesh, because the violence of fossil-fuel combustion is not interpersonal, it is not face-to-face, it is mediated through the atmosphere. But it really is a form of violence. And it is getting worse, day by day.

One thing that separates the climate struggle from many other struggles is that we know that things will get worse. There is no equilibrium

Champs Élysée facade, Paris, following 18 consecutive weekend protests by the Yellow Vests, March 2019

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or stable baseline of climate breakdown.

It is inherent in the problem that it is deteriorating. It is not akin to police violence or social inequality and other problems that can fester for a very long time around an average level that is just about bearable. With the climate crisis, because of how the natural systems work, things are deteriorating rapidly.

The climate movement needs to think about its tactics and strategies in relation to that temporal curve, and try to intervene and make use of the moment of intense climate disaster to strike in a more offensive, less defensive manner. ar Wouldn’t the introduction of violence – despite being confined to property, not other people – receive popular pushback and end up limiting the movement’s ability to raise consciousness?

Can the climate movement risk peaceful acts of civil disobedience being tainted with hardline extremism?

How do you win mass support when people are broadly unwilling to see themselves as sympathetic to anything that disrupts the social order, especially when property is destroyed? am The risk is big.

I would never deny that risk is very serious. If someone conducts unintelligent sabotage, that executes an action that cannot be explained as credible, you will face a popular backlash.

We saw that with Extinction Rebellion protesting the Underground trains in London, which surely cost it a lot of support. If you go after working-class people and their consumption, or if you attack a power plant that leads to massive blackouts – there are all manner of ways in which this could go wrong.

If we are going to do this, we need to be careful, cautious and smart about it. And I think there are a lot of different principles we should abide by: try to do as little damage as possible to the material interests of working people.

If you are going to seriously disrupt someone’s

consumption patterns, that should target the richest people, who are guilty of the most insane emissions. If you do that, you have the potential to tap into reservoirs of popular anger about how rich people rule our societies. There is the potential for winning mass support if you combine ecological rage and class hatred that is out there in society, but very rarely articulated politically because our societies are so insanely unequal.

You have to be clever about the timing.

At this stage it is important for the climate movement – if it considers property destruction of a more high-profile kind – to time this to events when the more catastrophic consequences of global warming are visible to people. It would be a bad idea to choose a cold winter, which people might unscientifically associate with the opposite of global warming, for instance. You should rather time these highprofile actions to wildfires in Oregon or California or Australia, hurricanes in the us south or the Caribbean, or flooding in the uk. The link to visible climate disaster provides the chance to say: unless we take this infrastructure down, we will see more of these events coming our way.

I think the strategic pacifists are wrong in saying that it is a law that as soon as you engage in property destruction, and more militant tactics that involve violence, you alienate the masses. Look again at what happened after the protests for George Floyd, the amounts drawn into the blm movement, the historic numbers of who have joined the rallies. But you need to do this in a smart way. ar Does the argument – perhaps rather provocative, given the climate movement’s shift to focus public attention on the production of fossil fuels rather

than ‘personal responsibility’ – that consumption remains part of the problem, invite the depoliticisation of this struggle? In the book, you recount an action in Stockholm in which you joined activists in deflating the tyres of suvs (the second largest contributor to increasing global co2 emissions in the last decade, you note). Should protesters be going after the jetsetting yacht-class too? What exactly would such actions entail? am It makes sense for the climate movement to retain a focus on fossil-fuel production, where it exists – in the uk, this new deep coalmine planned in Cumbria should be a focus for action.

But I think that going after the richest people and their consumption is a way of saying this entire

class is ruining the planet, with the lifestyle it has adopted and champions, and how it relates to the accumulation of capital and investment that produces their wealth. Questioning the consumption patterns of the ultrarich is not a matter of ‘personal’ responsibility.

The first country this book came out in was France, and apparently inspired by it, a group called La Ronce (which means ‘bramble’) called for actions, including the deflation of suv tyres as described in the book, tinkering with Total gas stations, as well as unscrewing Coca-Cola bottles in supermarkets. Now, the latter is the kind of action that will piss off more people

than required – randomly destroying cola bottles is a rather diffuse form of protest. If you want to go after consumer goods, you need to be very selective. You can have a campaign that says, two years from now, no suvs will be sold in France, so we will start with neutralising all suvs we can lay our hands on, starting with the richest neighbourhoods.

There was another action where an xr group went into a wealthy neighbourhood in Bordeaux and deflated 230 suvs. If you did this consistently on a large scale, you might establish as fact for the richest consumers that if you buy these machines, you will find them deflated. If states will not enact legislation to ban them, we will do it ourselves. But you need to be precise.

If you want to achieve something politically, it is precisely on that selectivity that the achievement will be based. If you target everything, you will not get that effect.

There is a temptation when environmentalists start thinking in terms of sabotage that we are against the entire industrial civilisation; all of it is wrong and destructive. The result is that you go against nothing because nothing has been singled out. You need to think about this as a tree where you start by picking the lowest fruits, you start with the most obvious, blatant targets: the commodities owned by the richest people. That said, I still think it is preferable that property destruction would target the suv producers and sellers or corporations that sell super-yachts and private jets. They have no reason to exist. ar Andreas Malm is senior lecturer in human ecology at Lund University. His next book, with the Zetkin Collective, is White Skin, Black Fuel (Verso, May 2021)

Extinction Rebellion action, Trafalgar Square, London, August 2020. Courtesy Extinction Rebellion

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Poulomi Basu

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Blood Speaks

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A photographer’s campaign to end the monthly exile of chhaupadi takes aim at the violence surrounding the practice

by Fi Churchman

“I’m identified as a ‘period activist’. It’s nothing to be ashamed and clean water are hard to access. Women who are on their period, of,” says Indian artist Poulomi Basu. Basu’s ongoing multimedia or who have just given birth, are exiled to huts and sheds (chhau project Blood Speaks (2013–) has been presented via different plat- goths) until they stop bleeding. Strict observance of chhaupadi means forms including editorial pieces for National Geographic and The New that a woman cannot enter the house, she is prevented from looking York Times, photobooks, exhibitions (from mainstream photog- at the sun, she must not drink dairy products or interact with liveraphy festivals like Cortona On The Move, 2018, to a fundraiser for stock or men, and she cannot touch fruit trees or collect water from Human Rights Watch in Sydney, 2016), as well as charity campaigns a well. It’s believed that breaking chhaupadi will bring catastrophe with Water Aid and Action Aid, but it first took shape as a series of to the community. photographs made during a trek through Nepal. “I’d met Emily Despite being outlawed in 2005, the practice continues to be perGraham, who was the photography manager at Water Aid at that formed and women continue to suffer from poor menstruation time, and we’d been discussing stories that were water- and hygiene- hygiene resulting in infections, are subjected to mental and physical related. We were thinking about how water affects status, dignity abuse, and are fearful of rape while exiled. They (and in some cases and violence against women,” she says. The resulting photographs young children who stay with them) continue to die from exposure, were published by Water Aid and subsequently distributed by main- snake bites or carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by the fires they stream media outlets like Time. “I grew up in a home with all kinds of build inside poorly ventilated huts. taboos, and it was an extremely violent, patriarchal and misogynistic In 2017 Basu developed Blood Speaks into a virtual-reality instalenvironment. I saw how these things were related and became inter- lation titled A Ritual of Exile. She calls it an “expanded form of storyested in exploring the complex web of patriarchy. It was disturbing to telling”, with the intention of creating a more visceral experience see how menstruation – the only thing that moves the human species that makes a connection between the audience and the women.

At Cortona On The Move Blood Speaks was installed in two rooms: forward – forces women into exile.”

The practice of chhaupadi, the Nepalese-Hindu tradition of in the first room, a dimly lit exhibition space with photos in lightisolating women during their menstruation cycle, is born of shame boxes forged intimacy; in the second, videos were projected across and superstition. While there is no single source for this, it is often walls showing the Nepalese women in their chhaupadi environtied to the story of Indra’s execution of his guru Vishvarupa and the ments looking directly at the camera, and by extension the viewer. curse that resulted from it. To alleviate his curse, Indra (the king of In the middle of the room was the vr experience. Created by placing heaven) distributed it among four entities: the land, the trees, the cameras inside various chhau goths and the surrounding environrivers and women. In women, it was said to manifest as the menstrual ment (sometimes near the family home, sometimes kilometres away cycle, with the blood releasing the sin and therefore rendering the in a forest), the installation is an immersive and interactive expewomen and everything they touch or come into contact with impure. rience, wherein the women undergoing chhaupadi are able to tell Another form of the ‘untouchability’ that characterises India’s perni- visitors about their own stories of isolation and ritualised violence.

At a conference during the 2019 South by Southwest cious caste system. all images Film Festival in Austin, Texas, Basu describes vr as A centuries-old custom, chhaupadi is particuBlood Speaks (2013–), a “triadic model that embraces the photographer, larly common in the rural Western regions of Nepal, photographs and vr installation. the photographed subject and the spectators as parsuch as Karnali, where reproductive health education Courtesy the artist

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ticipants [and] reconfigures the condition of ‘untouchability’ within the first-world space of the white cube”.

Though she remains sceptical of vr as a means to foster empathy with any given audience, whether film festival-goers or art gallery visitors, Basu believes that “it can break the power dynamic and shift the agency towards the women who came forward to tell us about their experiences. Women who are menstruating are seen as polluting agents: untouchable. Growing up, our bodies were exposed to a lot of injury and pain, and so the storytelling had to come from within the house. I wanted to make people understand what shame felt like. Photographs can do that too – they can show what shame looks like. It can show how, by the time you reach menopausal age, your self-esteem is completely broken. This was the reality for most of the women I met for Blood Speaks.”

Since beginning the project, Basu has worked with activists in Nepal and on charity campaigns including Water Aid’s ‘To Be A Girl’ and Action Aid’s ‘#MyBodyIsMine’. She calls them her coalitions, and alongside these allies Blood Speaks helps chip away at the stigma attached to, and violence perpetrated upon women who menstruate.

But Basu’s work also highlights the difficulty of breaking the cycles of abuse that occur under the guise of tradition: “Both my mother and I went through profound abuse, and my mother continues to live in a house of domestic violence. We were beaten up. There’s a codependency between the victim and the perpetrator that’s difficult to separate. I’ve seen how normalised violence is, even for my mother.

She keeps thinking it’ll get better, but it will never get better. I had been able to run away and make a life for myself, but she couldn’t. And I see that in a lot of the women I work with. So it’s important to create a space for women to be able to talk about and share their stories.

It’s about bringing visibility and some form of dignity and empowerment back into their lives.”

“The story of menstruation is linked to the story of domestic violence. If you’re a South Asian woman, you will know the kind of violence women go through in this part of the world. Blood Speaks is

about passing the agency back into the hands of these women who are exiled for menstruating, to make their voices heard in their own way.”

Collectively, campaigns by the Nepalese government and ngos, both of which Basu has contributed her work to, have shed light on the physical and mental dangers of chhaupadi, resulting in the 2017 strengthening of laws prohibiting the practice, including sanctions of three months in prison and a fine of 3,000 Nepalese rupees for those who would enforce the exile. Despite these penalties and efforts of the Nepalese government to physically demolish the chhaupadi huts, there is a reluctance to change such deep-rooted traditions and superstitions. Chhaupadi and the menstrual taboo are reinforced by religious events like Rishi Panchami, which takes place in the autumn and requires women of menstruating age, who can be identified by red or pink garments worn during the festival, to purify themselves by carrying out rituals that include bathing in cow dung, urine and milk, washing their genitals 365 times, brushing their teeth with a Datiwan stem and fasting.

In 2020 the first person to be convicted for the death of a woman forced to practise chhaupadi was able to cut his prison sentence short by paying an extra fine. “Fines and arrests have only now just started happening,” says Basu, “but it doesn’t change hearts and minds.” So she continues to work on Blood Speaks, believing that art – in different forms – can access different audiences to get them thinking about why taboos and policies have not already changed. Basu is currently in the process of creating an animation, with plans for a graphic novel (which she hopes to publish cheaply, for distribution among the rural Nepalese communities she works with) following close behind. And looking beyond that? “I’d like to be able to take Blood Speaks to the World Economic Forum,” the artist declares. ar

May 2021

Poulomi Basu has been nominated for the 2021 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, for her recent photobook titled Centralia (2020). Her work will be on show at The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 25 June – 26 September

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Lorraine O’Grady Both/And Brooklyn Museum, New York 5 March – 18 July In September 1981 Lorraine O’Grady crashed the opening of Persona, a group exhibition at the New Museum featuring only white artists.

Dressed as her alter ego, beauty pageant-winner Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (mbn, ‘Miss Black Middle-Class’), she wore an elaborate gown and cape fashioned from white gloves, a sash and crown, and carried ‘the whip-that-madeplantations-move’. Equally critical of Black artists and white art institutions, mbn gave out flowers and whipped herself before delivering a challenge to the crowd: “Now is the time for an invasion!” Four decades on, mbn’s rebuke continues to resonate, but it is only now, at eighty-six, that this pioneering artist is receiving her first retrospective.

Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And, curated by the Brooklyn Museum’s Catherine Morris and critic Aruna D’Souza, brings together 12 major works

spanning O’Grady’s career and introduces us to her latest avatar (featuring a suit of mediaeval armour topped by ‘headdresses emblematic of the Global South’) in Announcement of a New Persona (Performances to Come!) (2020).

The exhibition title gestures towards the artist’s investment in destabilising binaries and her commitment to the diptych as her weapon of choice. Moreover, in challenging binary thinking, she simultaneously explodes the finality of her own work: as the titling and dating of many of the works implies, O’Grady is never completely satisfied with her own answers but instead frequently returns to her pieces to revise, reinterpret or make new critical interventions.

Throughout the exhibition, O’Grady’s treatment of the relationship between text and image, content and form, questions false

dichotomies and hierarchies to produce a ‘visual literature’. The poems she ‘wrote’ in Cutting Out the New York Times (1977), formed of clippings from the paper’s Sunday edition, use text as image in diptych collages that are performed throughout the museum. Mounted at different angles, the cuttings move across the panels with humour, a series of juxtapositions that seek coherence, in contrast to the Surrealists’ chaos, but without succumbing to a need for closure. O’Grady returned to these collages in 2017, editing the 221 original panels down to 25 diptych haiku.

Another of O’Grady’s critiques of the artworld during the early 1980s was Rivers, First Draft, or The Woman in Red (1982/2015).

Photographic documentation, framed with provocative captions, recreates the Central Park performance, a ‘collage in

Miscegenated Family Album (Sisters I), L: Nerfnefruaten Nefertiti; R: Devonia Evangeline O’Grady, 1980–94, Cibachrome photographs, 66 × 94 cm. © the artist/Artists Rights Society (ars), New York.

Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

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space’ in which the artist chronicles her personal, political and artistic journey.

Characters identified only through their vibrant, colour-coded costumes chart O’Grady’s passage from Little Girl (in white dress with a pink sash) to the Teenager (in a magenta jumpsuit), to the mature and self-assured Woman in Red. The mythical/ dreamlike quality of the narrative is further dramatised through the obstacles the artist encounters and ultimately overcomes: the ‘Art Snobs’, the ‘Debauchees’, the ‘Black Male Artists’. Aloof but ever-present is the Woman in White, the maternal figure whose expectations O’Grady also rejects through her rebellious spraypainting of a white stove red.

Both/And mostly occupies the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art but also spills out into the museum’s other floors, a curatorial

gesture that echoes the inability to contain O’Grady within the confines of traditional ‘segregated’ spaces and the way in which her work is instinctively conversant with other parts of the art-historical narrative. While conceptually provoking, this strategy risks compromising the integrity of the exhibition through its dispersion. The interspersal of Miscegenated Family Album (1980/1994) throughout the Ancient Egyptian collection is perhaps the most effective articulation of this strategy.

The 16 photo-diptychs combine photographs of the artist’s late older sister, Devonia Evangeline, and her family alongside images of sculptures of Nefertiti and her ancestors.

The series, which predates both academic and popular interest in the African origins of Pharaonic Egypt, creates a dialogue between O’Grady’s personal history and the narrative

of Ancient Egypt produced through Western museological practices that have de-Africanised this heritage and rendered it European. While the diptychs contrast an intimate family album with stone sculptures intended to memorialise dead royalty, what is most striking about these works are the similarities that extend across centuries and continents.

Both/And presents an artist whose oeuvre remains both vibrant and timely. The energy and expanse of the work are undergirded by a wealth of archival material. A testament to the artist’s diligent recordkeeping, this archive reflects O’Grady’s explicit awareness of the need, as a Black woman in the face of limited and limiting art institutions, to maintain a command over the (re)presentation of her work. Dina A. Ramadan

Rivers, First Draft: The Woman in Red starts painting the stove her own color, 1982/2015, digital c-print from Kodachrome 35mm slides in 48 parts, 41 × 51 cm. © the artist/Artists Rights Society (ars), New York.

Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

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Ready\Set\Fulfill de Sarthe, Hong Kong 13 March – 8 May Drones are priority visitors at de Sarthe gallery, where artists Andrew Luk and Samuel Swope have collaborated to create a full-fledged obstacle course for first-person-view (fpv) drone racing.

Ready\Set\Fulfill highlights the correlation between speed and advancement. Experienced fpv pilots – who view their flights as though from inside the drone, via a video feed to goggles, dissipating the line between human and machine – were invited to participate in the races. Though they were only present during the opening and on a few other occasions, their efforts are showcased on screens interspersed throughout the space. The format evokes an intrinsic competitive drive, deploying a sense of urgency in addressing our obsession with acceleration and the ways in which technology enables it.

As the drones take flight, they first encounter the neon-lit inverted arches of As hangs the flexible light rope (all works 2021), a visual reference to the catenary curve used by Antoni Gaudí to form the signature shapes of his buildings (itself adapted from a technique bees use to create the contour of the outer walls of their

hives). Reflected over a mirrored surface installed in the floor, the arcs, composed of led light ropes, are visually imposed upon Inverted Fulfillment, a vinyl-cut recreation of Amazon’s 2017 patent for ‘beehive’ drone-delivery fulfilment centres imprinted on the wall behind.

The convergence of art, architecture, technology and the digitalisation of the human experience is literally reflected in the abovementioned works, bringing visions of a future utopia closer to the present. The Amazon patent’s technical rendering relies upon the beehive in both form and function. Consisting of a tower with openings across several levels, through which drones can rapidly enter and exit, the model appears designed to promote efficiency, velocity, productivity and, ultimately, profitability.

The hive is continually referenced here, an acknowledgement of its enduring prominence in architectural and social thinking. Glass Curtain Dive (22.248808,114.1630336), a video installation showcasing the drone’s perspective as it streams down the surface of the glass-walled skyscraper housing the gallery, simultaneously alludes to

Ready\Set\Fulfill, 2021 (installation view).

Courtesy the artists and de Sarthe, Hong Kong

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the structural concept pioneered by Mies van der Rohe, to workforce visibility and to drone-based surveillance. Perhaps unintentionally, it also highlights the ambiguous nature of seemingly interchangeable glass walls and digital surfaces.

The pitfalls of illusion in this densely layered exhibition culminate in Honeycomb Accelerator, an impressive installation implying an elongated portal to a digital beehive. Lit with led light strips and lined with reflective surfaces mirroring and mimicking the interior of a beehive (with a technological twist), it features drones whirring through the surface’s deceptive multiplicity. But again, it is an illusion that challenges perceived reality.

A year in the making, the show has a topical resonance. Rapid digital development driving the discourse surrounding the convergence of art and technology is seemingly filled with new potential. Most effectively Ready\Set\Fulfill explores how psychology and behaviour are conditioned by environment – both physical and digital – in the process revealing the latest iteration of the persistent exchange between nature and technology. Aaina Bhargava

Alvaro Barrington You don’t do it for the man, men never notice. You just do it for yourself, you’re the fucking coldest Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris 2 March – 17 April What Alvaro Barrington loves becomes the work. In 2019 the Venezuela-born, Londonbased artist displayed the work of 49 artists in Ely House, the site of Ropac’s uk gallery, in an exhibition titled Artists I Steal From (cocurated with Julia Peyton-Jones). For his first show in France, though, it is music that takes the stage. The presentation has the frank sensuality, and vintage physicality, of a mixtape: the title of the exhibition is from Drake’s Fancy (2011), Notorious b.i.g. lyrics are carved in concrete (When I was just trying to feed my daughter / Coogi, all works 2021) and the show’s largest and most prominent work features Rihanna in the bath (The Bather Rio/Ro/St).

On the ground and first floors are paintings on burlap paper with hefty, brutalist concrete frames and plush fabric mounting, usually velvet but also carpet, each in its own block

colour. The paintings rest on the bottom of their frames, as if displayed on a mantelpiece, sometimes in the middle, sometimes to one side. They are painterly renderings of silhouetted figures in a handful of colours – people stretching, reclining, standing. One is dancing, another is painting, a third is masturbating.

Back that azz up (Black dress) is a painting of a figure in orange silhouette wearing a black dress, against a heavily piled pink velvet backdrop. In m § m (Matisse § Meg), a silhouetted body in, as per the title, Blue Nude blue, surrounded by cloudy, transparent red, is placed against a rich yellow velvet. Each work is organised around a few tones, with bodily and spatial possibilities seeming to flow from juxtaposed blocks of colour. Barrington’s breadth, and his candour as an artist, should not be taken for looseness – these works are

tightly structured and controlled, verging on overly restrained. But these cool études are effectively set off against more unruly bricolage: When I was just trying to feed my daughter / Coogi is an exuberant hymn to 1990s Brooklyn in yarn, spraypaint, concrete, Biggie lyrics and a cardboard box. It ties the show together.

In 2017 Barrington shipped his studio of Post-its and works-in-progress to New York, where it was exhibited at ps1. He designed a float, in Pan-African colours, for the 2019 Notting Hill Carnival. He is an open, expansive sort of artist, and while these works recognise twentieth-century painting as an imposing and formative presence – like the concrete blocks – his effortless pilfering of the history of painting expresses a relationship to his forebears animated more by desire and playfulness than by the anxiety of influence. Tomas Weber

Back that azz up (Black dress), 2021, velvet, concrete, wood, mixed media on burlap paper, 143 × 143 × 8 cm. © the artist. Photo: Charles Duprat.

Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac, London, Paris & Salzburg

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Migrant Workers Community Museum The Substation, Singapore 18–28 March Three floorplans are taped to a wall, each with a yellow Post-it stuck on it. The caption reads: ‘In these floor plans, domestic workers indicated the areas where they would go to sleep’.

One Post-it indicates a small hallway, about 2 × 2 metres, bounded by three bedroom doors – a throughway, basically. Nearby, in contrast to this understated exhibit, is a hyperrealistic mockup of a double-decker bed in a workers’ dormitory. Because each worker is given such a small space, every nook and cranny is maximised. Drying sarongs, draped over bed rails, double as privacy screens, and under the bed is the ‘kitchen’, furnished with a kettle, eggs and instant noodles. The bed itself is spartan, covered with no more than a mattress topper: a thin pad with an undulating surface for Singapore’s hot weather.

Sleeping arrangements and other lived realities are front and centre in this groundbreaking exhibition dedicated to Singapore’s migrant-worker community. A diverse group of about one million, or near a fifth of the total local population, these workers are embedded in various industries, including shipping, transport, construction and domestic labour.

Despite their numbers, their visibility remains low; they are a largely uncredited, faceless workforce. And it’s to this that the show, described as a ‘community museum’, seeks to provide a much-belated corrective.

It is initiated and facilitated by Singaporean playwright Alfian Sa’at, with six migrant workers giving their input via workshops and credited as curators. A moving and democratising effort, the museum prioritises the experiences of migrant workers as they labour, live and play. As such, it dignifies and celebrates

a community marginalised not only in terms of museum representation but also from public life in general. Indirectly it makes claims for their rights, welfare and protection.

This exhibition is styled as a ‘museum’ but is in fact more a hybrid entity that combines various narrative strategies. These include classic museological displays of donated artefacts, old-fashioned dioramas and other reproduction objects, as well as the extensive use of direct quotes in captions. This last device is reminiscent of Alfian’s issue-driven documentary plays, for which he constructs speeches out of interviews with ‘real-life’ people. In this exhibition, the verbatim quotes, unattributed to any specific person but collected from the six migrant-worker consultants, add a poignant personal dimension to the material culture on show. For example, accompanying a selection of passports is the quote: ‘Some domestic workers who are too young, when they take their photo, they try not to smile. They think if they look angry they will look more mature.’

The museum also gives an alternative account of the history of migrant-worker flashpoints in Singapore, which is sadly the most typical way they make the news. The central aisle of objects on plinths, each representing a significant incident, provides a counterpoint to racist stereotypes. For example, the ‘Little India Riots’, deliberately put in quotation marks in the wall text, is represented by a black-and-white portrait of the Indian worker Sakthivel Kumaravelu, who was run over and crushed by a bus in Little India.

Besides emphasising human tragedy, the exhibit explains the incident from the point of view of the ‘rioters’, who were painted

as drunken and disorderly by the press. In the caption, we are told the men had felt that the emergency vehicles arrived too late and that there was unjust preferential treatment of the bus driver and his assistant, who were escorted away by police personnel.

Other aspects of social justice are also touched upon. A wall of photographs of warning signs put up in places where migrant workers gather on their off days (for example, ‘No waiting, sitting or gathering’, with crossedout images of people sitting on picnic mats) makes a point about the right to access public spaces. Next to this display are posters made by migrant workers articulating their hopes and dreams: ‘Freedom to switch sectors’, ‘Pathway to citizenship’, ‘I want to go home’.

Given the museum’s modest scale and threeweek run, these are only temporary openings to larger, more enduring conversations, which could possibly be explored in future iterations and expansions. Certainly, the organisers hope this is not the end, indicating in the wall text that they hope that this museum can ‘provide a prototype for one with a permanent home in the future’.

On the theme of endings and possible new beginnings, this show also happens to be one of the last hosted by The Substation, Singapore’s oldest independent arts centre, which at the time of writing is closing shop after 30 years.

Perhaps a new version will yet live again under another guise. In any case, Migrant Workers Community Museum, giving voice to the underdogs of underdogs and nurturing a critical civic culture, is both a worthy point on which to end and a hopeful note on which to start anew.

Adeline Chia

Migrant Workers Community Museum, 2021 (installation views).

Photos: James Ng. Courtesy the artists and The Substation, Singapore

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Thad Higa, Tammy Nguyen O, Five Myles, Brooklyn 6 March – 11 April With a title that references an exhalation or sound from the back of the throat as much as it does the circular nature of being, O, takes as its subject the collective archive, formed of social, political and individual histories. The centrepieces of this two-person show are a suite of four leatherbound collaged, letterpress and digitally printed artist books by Tammy Nguyen, Four Ways Through A Cave (all works 2021), suspended from the ceiling at waist-height on floating platforms; and two 4m-long typewritten paper scrolls by Thad Higa, titled Murmurate and Jokes c. 2016– 202(?), both hung, hammocklike, from above.

To read these works we must lean our bodies over the pages, the bright overhead lights of the gallery casting our shadows across their surfaces in a visual reminder of what each of us brings to the creation of stories.

Each artist’s work draws on political myths and personal narratives. Nguyen’s thick books convey her travels through the Phong Nha Cave in Vietnam, a reference perhaps to Plato’s allegory of the cave and the distinctions

between perception and reason in the pursuit of knowledge. The books mimic the experience of moving through a cave: gold metal leaf suggests the sun as glimpsed from darkness, and a circular cutout shifts as the pages turn, creating a cave-shaped void within the stacked pages. According to exhibition materials, the work makes use of memories from a charismatic uncle who served in the South Vietnamese military, and incorporates sheet music for the South Vietnamese national anthem and slices from the Marvel comic series The ’Nam (1986–93), all markers of a conflict shaped by perception whose narrative has subsequently been rewritten. Weaving together the personal and the political, the discovered and the institutionalised, the books show the collective archive to be malleable and evolving, requiring participation. On the other side of the gallery, Higa’s scrolls show black-and-white abstract swirls, patches and grids, a closer look revealing text typed in columns and zigzags. Scrolls make physical reference both to the circular nature

O,, 2021 (installation view).

Courtesy Marine Cornuet and Five Myles, Brooklyn

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of history and to our bodies, particularly when, as here, they are unrolled and hung from above. Legible sections read across and vertically: ‘breath’, corrupted by repetition, time and typing errors, becomes ‘break’; horizontally, we read, ‘breath is the o o object’. Elsewhere the language is overtly political: ‘americaiscommittingwar crimes’. Other works by Higa include an unfolding booklike cube titled Inhale/Point/ Flex/Exhale and a collection of miniature zines containing fragments from manifestos and speeches. As with the scrolls, the spoken, embodied aspects of language are as important as the written.

To decipher Higa’s scrolls requires sounding out the words letter by letter, while Nguyen’s work presents the discovery process as moving from darkness to light. In both cases, the words and histories are abstracted, forcing us to decipher and contribute meaning, making us active participants in the creation and sharing of these circular histories. Megan N. Liberty

Rachel Whiteread Internal Objects Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London 12 April – 6 June By now, most of us will think we know what Rachel Whiteread does: monolithic casts of negative spaces. A series of stacked plasterpanels that form the inside of a Victorian living-room in Ghost (1990); her Turner Prizewinning House (1993), for which she cast the entire inside space of a dwelling scheduled for demolition; the Holocaust Memorial installed at Vienna’s Judenplatz in 2000. Internal Objects may well change that assumption. Though the ideas of ghosts, memory and the tension between absence and presence remain the threads that bind her oeuvre, the works on show here offer a counterpoint to what has, inevitably, become the Whiteread cliché. Executed over the past five years, these new works, mostly untitled and comprising various casts (made of papiermâché, resin, bronze), works on paper and sculpture, are not so much about absence as they are about the beginnings of presence: outlines, edges – the emerging shape of things.

Internal Objects provokes conflict in the visitor.

The materiality of the works draws you into the casts and sculptures, but they nevertheless exude an unsettling aura (enhanced in some works by titles such as Poltergeist and Doppelgänger) that pushes you away. This is activated by two

untitled series of wall-mounted casts that seem to exchange between them the idea of permanence and impermanence: in the first gallery space are what appear to be disassembled pieces of cardboard packaging (Untitled (Pink Relief ), (Yellow Relief ) and (Pink and Yellow Relief ), all 2020–21); past the corridor in the second room are what looks like pieces of cast concrete (Untitled, 2018) or tarmac (Untitled (Night Drawing), 2018). But the pieces of cardboard are made of bronze and the stone aggregates are papiermâché; in turn the edges of the unfolded packaging are too smooth and the gravelly bits of ‘stone’ are given away by their fibrous texture.

One of the dangers of looking at art (particularly after a period of confinement) is that you can read too much into things. This exhibition, however, encourages us to do just that: to pay close attention to and explore the dissonance between what appears to be and what actually is. The exhortation is made most obvious by a dusty pink translucent resin and steel work, Untitled (Pinboard) (2019), in which the cabinet doors behind which announcements would be pinned have been cast in the negative, and through which the viewer can see a series of blank pieces of paper ‘thumbtacked’ to a noticeboard.

A functional object emptied of meaning. There’s a void in these works that’s both like and unlike the literal cavities of spaces that Whiteread has previously cast in order to preserve: those notices without messages, or the circular indentations pressed into the cardboard packaging by objects that (presumably) no longer need its protection.

Or whatever incident may have smashed up the two largest sculptures on show here: sheds, titled Poltergeist (2020) and Doppelgänger (2020–21), made with wooden slats, bits of trellis, corrugated iron and wire mesh, strewn with tree branches that puncture and splinter the flimsy structures – and painted entirely white, giving them a timeless quality. They look as though a hurricane has just torn through them, or they might have fallen into their dilapidated states over a period of time.

Or the broken structures could allude to some psychological anguish wherein the titular spirit is also the metaphorical destructive force. Placed in the centre of each of the two main gallery spaces, the sheds and the unexplained circumstances that led them to be this way dominate the room. They are a manifestation of the uncanny: familiar in form, but rendered in a stark whiteness that erases any further information, like a traumatic memory suppressed. Fi Churchman

Internal Objects, 2021 (installation view).

Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian

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Bernadette Corporation I Accept House of Gaga, Mexico City 25 February – 3 April Milagros Rojas Que el día se convierta en noche Salón Silicón, Mexico City 11 March – 3 April ‘I try to picture my brain… While something destroys the world and fills it with bubbles.’

These are the first words you encounter at Bernadette Corporation’s exhibition at House of Gaga. The show is composed of a dozen posters: many of them featuring photographs of Meetka Otto, a young New York model wearing a modest Victorian-style collared shirt and a blue denim midiskirt; some displaying kitschy works by other artists (named in the text that accompanies the show as Joseph Tidwell, Cecilia Fraher and Jennifer Lacy); all sprinkled with cryptic writing. Sentences like, ‘Instead of form, we say, “for me”’, ‘A blob is something that comes and is for you’, ‘The blob… intentionally built by someone or something’. There’s a list of words (listed again in the accompanying text) purposefully removed from these phrases that includes ‘quarantine, avatar, covid, 5g, prisoner’. In a row of six nearly identical images printed as three posters (Bubbles, 2021), Otto looks softly at the viewer while standing with her hands behind her back at the corner of a white-brick building. In a new twist to Bernadette Corporation’s interest in identity dissolution – such as their explorations of anonymous collectivity in Black Bloc riots in the film Get Rid of Yourself (2002), or the dilution of authorship in the multiple writers of their novel Reena Spaulings (2004) – the idea on which this show is centred is blobs; more precisely, ‘a writing mechanism which led to the discovery of blobs’. We are not told what the mechanism is, or how it works, but that blobs are, among other things, ‘not text’, that Otto is the embodiment of the blob and that the posters are portals to go inside it. Some of the posters are plastered on doors hung flat and vertically against the wall, one is on a door hung horizontally and slightly askew, and others are on doors that rest on the floor and lean against the wall, which makes them literal portals.

It brings to mind the use of poststructuralist critique by Rosalind Krauss and her contemporaries to pick apart concepts that had long held some of art’s most sturdy structures in place, medium-specificity and authorship among them. The October crop of critics of the 1980s would seem like the primordial soup from which the primarily New York-based Bernadette Corporation

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emerges fully formed during the early 90s: a somewhat anonymous collective completely obsessed with French theory and rebuffing whatever was left of discrete cultural mediums by working in fashion, film, literature and visual arts. Back then, Jacques Derrida’s questioning of language and its universality paved the way for so much postmodernist critique, but in today’s atomised world it feels hard to locate a totalising discourse against which to revolt in the first place. Now that the logic of capital and monetisation has infiltrated every possible form of communication, is it possible to enunciate our collective desire in non-presanctioned political language?

The covid-19 crisis has shown us not only that state structures and institutions are simply dysfunctional fictions in this part of the world – one in which poststructuralism was widely embraced by art discourses and the academy – but it has also made it easier for us to be pitted against each other by the mediums we use to communicate and the very concepts through which we are supposed to be emancipated. In our ‘new normal’, we are all too often confined to tiny bubbles on a Zoom call and by the networks of our social-media feeds. And we seem to be adapting to that environment far too quickly and unthinkingly. It’s as if the conversations we are used to having for all kinds of reasons – work, school, friendship – are now so intensely mediated by digital media that we are starting to take after its logic. Social media does not reward nuanced exchange nor detailed exegesis; rather it boosts distanced but easily communicable clichés and buzzy keywords thrown around under the assumption that everyone conceives of them in the same way and that they are not worth unpacking. Moreover, we’re all starting to sound and read like this beyond the bubbles of our Twitter feeds or our too-long Instagram captions. Perhaps October and the intellectual niche it engaged with was already its own kind of bubble, as most art communities tend to be, with their own jargon and feuds, but it was one with a passion for discourse, even if that meant relentlessly picking it apart.

To go back to blobs, these manifest today in Mexico City as a tendency to erode the discourse-oriented political art practices that have dominated ‘young Mexican Art’

ArtReview

for decades. Generation after generation tries to pull away from them only to end up discussing priismo and Mexican modernism over and over. Yet in our current chaos, which I argue is tinted by a general distrust of all kinds of discourse, including its political and arthistorical incarnations, there are artists pushing back with a wariness of language as material.

Milagros Rojas, an Argentinian-born, Mexico City-based artist, presents Que el día se convierta en noche (That the day may turn to night) at Salón Silicón. For this show she has covered the walls of the small gallery in tie-dyed dark aquamarine fabric, a deep, nonneutral background atop of which hang canvases stretched over with the same material and populated by stitched-in blobs. Rojas’s blobs are a lot more defined than Bernadette Corporation’s, and a lot more recognisable as such: rounded and soft, shadowlike, although some of them could also pass for squiggles. They are pitch-black shapes, all irregular edges, like a drop of crude oil that fell from too high up or the shadow of a prehistoric amoeba cast on moving water.

For her, the black blobs are attempts at a new material medium of communication, a mutant alphabet. Rojas is thinking of the dysfunctionality of language and what she considers to be its excessive specificity. Even within the various but still finite meanings Derrida would argue every word or sentence represents, she finds constriction and obstruction, a predetermined mode of existence, an inescapable logic.

On that note, another excerpt from Bernadette Corporation’s show states: ‘As the blob grows, we realize that it’s our brain… and some years later we realize other people are there too…’ The blob appears then as our own personal bubble, our personalised brain-echo chamber, atomised as it now is by the customised content furiously funnelled into our minds at all times.

For Rojas those self-exile bubbles are made even more inescapable by our irredeemably rigid language, for which she suggests a malleable, inchoate alternative, one that could follow Bernadette Corporation’s repeated slogan: ‘Instead of form, we say, “for me”’. What would a blob that is ‘for us’ behave like, then? A good starting point appears in the second part of that assertion: ‘I want you to give me this power to you’. Gaby Cepeda

top Bernadette Corporation, I Accept, 2021 (installation view).Courtesy the artists and House of Gaga, Mexico City

above Milagros Rojas, Que el día se convierta en noche, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Jordán Rodríguez.

Courtesy the artist and Salón Silicon, Mexico City

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Farideh Sakhaeifar You are in the war zone.

Trotter & Sholer (with koda), New York 18 March – 17 April Responding to a question in an interview from 2020, the New York-based Iranian artist Farideh Sakhaeifar said, ‘My generation, those born in the 80s, lived our whole lives in fear of the U.S. attacking Iran. I don’t remember a day I woke up, and it didn’t cross my mind; this nightmare is an undeniable companion of us.’ This tone sets the mood for You are in the war zone. Images bleed into each other – whether in the exhibition’s title work, her series of 2016–17 gelatin silver prints depicting everyday New York, onto which she has inscribed drawings of scenes from the Syrian civil war, or in When pulling down a statue, a chain works better than a rope, a 2021 collage of destroyed statues around the world.

One gets the sense that Sakhaeifar’s intent is to show, through intense layers, the effects

of conflict and, in turn, violence. The small, everyday lives of people living through violence are enlarged and centred, giving space to a forced reckoning for all encountering the work. The careful, circular arrangement of the work creates a narrative force that maximises the gallery’s only room, and it is surprising how much ground – both in range and media – the show covers in eight sets of artwork.

Sakhaeifar’s striking video Halabja, 1988 (2018) energises the room. Through a screen installed on a seemingly rough black wall with a powdery white feel and illustrations of bodies in lifeless positions that together mirror scenes from the desert in some of the photographs in the show, the film shows a choreographed dancer whose movements animate the space in the video, her flowing dress creating a

Mute, 2019, Chemetal metal laminate, soil, digital print on rebound carpet, 183 × 244 cm.

Courtesy the artist

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trajectory that draws the viewer in as much as does the voiceover.

The star of the show is surely Mute (2019) – an eight-by-six-foot digital print under glass set on rebound carpet that, like the wall, has illustrations of dead bodies on it and acts like a coffin carrying a corpse. Placed at the centre of the room, the print depicts concentric rectangles filled with repeated shapes of war symbols – soldiers holding guns, warplanes, missiles – surrounding a collage of images with dead bodies, some in an arid land, some by a wall, some of animals even. There are drawings on the glass as well, and the way it reflects light constantly pushes away while drawing one in.

This is how Sakhaeifar, while employing mute horror as artistic strategy, is able to speak loudly.

Yinka Elujoba

Navid Nuur Apart from the secret that it holds Galerie Max Hetzler, London 12–28 April To see ourselves as others see us: Navid Nuur gives us the gift to do precisely that with In Your Face (2007–08). We check out how we really look in a nonreversed mirror. You know it because that facial asymmetry you’ve got used to over the years is actually on the other side. Beholder beware!

Maybe you’ll think the transformation makes you look better, maybe not. Nuur values such subtle metamorphoses: his work revels in alchemic change in materials, textures and appearances over time; time that works on everything.

On a white plinth at chest height we see, as if displayed in a museum of archaeology, three vases of different shapes and glazed colours. Each has a line of various small objects – shards from pots (perhaps), tiny figurines, bisected dice, a rolledup banknote, a bottle cap – laid in front of it. The title of the work is as gnomic as these fragments: “ ”, (Archean – 2020). The information sheet gives the materials as ‘heat, time, minerals, patience, luck’. It’s a neat gag: found objects placed side by side for the viewer to compare, admire or make up stories about. The Archean Eon occurred 2.5 to 4 billion years ago, one of the earliest geological ages, and a time of great volcanic activity, when plutonic masses of granite were formed. Which

item dates from back then, which from now?

Nuur’s placement of these individually attractive items asks us to invent or imagine connections, mineral affinities; he’s like a Romantic poet identifying with the mutely inanimate, the inorganic. Nuur seems blithely unconcerned by any critique of the pathetic fallacy.

Using serpentine rock or the aforementioned granite, Hope (2012–20) is a series of small dark blocks beautifully imprinted with gold leaf. Nuur is originally from Tehran, and these exquisite pieces might point us back to the ancient Persian imagery of the lion and sun. Is that ‘hope’ an exile’s desire for a return to the sun of the motherland? His light-inspired materials can be more prosaic, as with Untitled (2010–19), in which crushed vitamin D tablets and binder are stained onto canvas. Vitamin D is synthesised in the body following the effects of light on the skin, but Nuur’s images here look neither sunny nor healthy. They are more like a textured desert landscape recalling the scraped surface of a Jules Olitski abstraction or one of Andy Warhol’s oxidation paintings. Other experiments in staining are shown with two examples from the Untitled (2004–20) series.

Nuur uses home-brewed ink and ‘artist bath water’ (!) on filter paper to give us hotly coloured Helen Frankenthaler-like washes and smears that radiate a coal-fire warmth. More modern forms of light are used in the neon Mindmap (2013), a Venn diagram of blue neon and argon gas, where the words ‘power’, ‘future’, ‘spirit’ and ‘world’ intersect around a targeted ‘you’.

Further reference to mark-making by the Abstract Expressionists occurs in The Tuners (2005–20), a giant (200 × 514 cm) linen canvas featuring a riot of anonymous doodles. Nuur has appropriated these from stationery stores he’s visited by picking up the scraps buyers have left after trying out new pens. The multicoloured squiggles variously suggest Arabic script, rivers, spring coils and waves, but also imply a secret, albeit indecipherable, universal language we all use on testing felt-tips and biros.

We leave with a gift from a machine.

Untitled (1976–13) is a penny press in which a steering-wheel device powers cogs that compress a coin into a new artefact, a flat shape containing the fingerprint of the artist: a neatly generous gesture to round out a generous show.

John Quin

The Tuners, 2005–20. Photo: Jack Hems. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, Paris & London

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Between the Living and the Archive 9 Lock Road, 03–22, Gillman Barracks, Singapore 9–28 March In certain circles, telling someone to ‘grow a pair’ is a chastisement so last-century that you can turn it into something ambiguous and, in that sense, contemporary. Which is the case in Aki Hassan’s new series of three sculptures, titled Growing a Pair (all works 2021), where the exhortation loses its gendered toxicity and turns into an exploration of the process of growth and becoming. In one work, two bars form a tall inverted V, and joined at the bottom of one is a shorter curved bar, extending further to reach over a small mirror on the ground – a young appendage shyly examining its own reflection.

In another work, a pair of balls look like they are literally being grown. Three skinny bars meet at a point, resembling a tripod pulled to its tallest height. Sitting in the crook where the bars meet is a white fleshy, sluglike form suggesting the titular pair, incubated in the airiest and most provisional of structures.

Knowing that Aki identifies as nonbinary and uses a gender-neutral pronoun makes it tempting to read the series autobiographically, as, for example, an extended metaphor for transition. But the openness of its compositions, comprising elements that are joined in unexpected ways yet somehow balance, points to a more general and creative mode of being.

The relaxed vulnerability of this work is consistent with the atmosphere of this group show curated by Fajrina Razak and Syaheedah Iskandar. According to the wall text, the exhibition is about ‘the imprint of knowledge(s) on our bodies’, especially ones that can’t be easily codified and transmitted via ‘mainstream pedagogical systems’. This exhibition seeks to provide such a nonmainstream space. Of course, you could argue that art in general is open to other dimensions of knowledge, like the emotional, experiential and intuitive. The difference here is that besides prioritising these ways of knowing, the show also deals exclusively with experiences from minority identities, such as queerness and brownness, as well as fringe experiences such as the paranormal and grief.

facing page, top Alysha Rahmat Shah, The Asli and Bunian of Tangkak, 2021, mixed-media installation.

Courtesy Syaheedah Iskandar and Fajrina Razak

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In Singapore, the art scene is seen as a liberal and progressive space – lgbtq themes and identities are embraced, for example – but in my experience, racism and misogyny are less visible evils. This show, put together by brown women curators and featuring mostly brown women, is a welcome affirmative gesture. As a ciswoman of the majority race in Singapore, I found the show gently instructive and occasionally humbling, with places where I felt included (as a woman) and excluded (in the untranslated Malay in some works and titles).

Besides resembling a collegiate ‘safe space’ for marginal communities, the exhibition also feels like a homely gathering point for women of different generations. The minishowcase of work by senior artist and traditional healer Hamidah Jalil features four vibrant paintings of cultural artefacts she collected around Southeast Asia, as well as one of those artefacts itself: a measuring cup. As an addendum, the curators pinned up a text elucidating three Malay terms they learned from the artist.

One of them is sengkak, a traditional wombrepositioning treatment that promotes health and fertility.

This goes to show that there are things that can be gleaned only from elders, not books.

Where the stakes get higher is when the show deals with embodied and othered knowledge, which by definition is difficult or impossible to put across. The relevant artworks demonstrate various degrees of communicability. In the ‘take it or leave it’ camp is Priyageetha Dia’s oblique video installation, a ‘digital archive for the future’ featuring a series of movingimage impressions of Tamil identity, heritage and lived experience (Rite of the Time Teller).

The work consists of unspecified footage shot in India, family photos, domestic rituals and a gold-painted, Madonna-like figure played by the artist. In contrast to this opacity is the exhaustive self-narration of ila’s videowork lupa. Among several things, the voiceover details a family story about the artist not

facing page, middle Zarina Muhammad, Talismans for Peculiar Habitats, 2019, mixed installation.

Courtesy Syaheedah Iskandar and Fajrina Razak

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knowing who her maternal grandfather is, a creation myth and the sensuous entanglement of all life. Accompanying this are illustrative shots of the forest and water, with the artist’s nude body embedded in those environments.

What both works have in common, though, is a certain temperate disposition: they talk about cognitive shifts without upsetting artworld tropes, touching on weird stuff without being particularly weird. For real mischief, look to Alysha Rahmat Shah’s The Asli and Bunian of Tangkak, a haunted-house installation about two forest-dwelling communities in Malaysia: orang asli (indigenous people) and orang bunian (whistling or hidden people). A preliminary Google search yields sensational stories of men being seduced and hikers led off their trails by orang bunian, who are described as fairies and elves living with their own social structures in remote forested areas.

A weak beam of light picks out painted trees covering the walls of the installation, and among the leaves and branches, the occasional ghoul hanging upside down or playing peekaboo. On a table are three books with cutout pages forming sculptural reliefs of ghosts and trees. The books are about forests, plantations and Mount Ophir (a popular local setting for ghost stories).

Like a wonky horror-comedy, the tone here is hard to read. But it is worth noting that neither horror nor comedy are genres commonly associated with narratives about the orang asli. News about them tends generally to be sombre, centring around displacement and marginalisation from mainstream society.

Here, Alysha leaves open who is haunting the forest, and more interestingly suggests that the bunian could be a sideshow designed by the asli to scare the living daylights out of trespassers. In the best way possible, the experience reminds me of a haunted house in a school carnival – made with sincerity rather than for professional impact, creepy in places and surprisingly touching. Adeline Chia

facing page, bottom Priyageetha Dia, Rite of the Time Teller, 2021, mixed-media installation.

Courtesy Syaheedah Iskandar and Fajrina Razak

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Luke Fowler’s Patrick tracks a sound and culture, and the fleeting lives of a generation

By Pádraic E. Moore Since early in his career, Luke Fowler has created docuportraits of musicmakers that provide glimpses into the social and physical milieus in which they operate. His 2020 film of musician/ producer Patrick Cowley (1950–82) follows on from Electro-Pythagorus (2017), which looks at Martin Bartlett, and Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006), nominally about Cornelius Cardew.

That Fowler himself is also a musician (with a penchant for analogue synths) gives him a natural sympathy for his subjects. His films touch upon the experimental and collaborative aspects of creating music, indirectly highlighting its unique qualities as an artform – its capacity to engage audiences in ways that are particularly direct and visceral. And while they are produced and disseminated via the conduits of contemporary art, they underscore the veracity of the assertion Dan Graham makes in his 1984 video essay Rock My Religion: “Music expresses a more communal transcendental emotion, which art now denies”.

Fowler’s portraits are impressionistic, capturing the essence of a subject rather than presenting a forensic profile. The 21-minute Patrick was shot exclusively on 16mm film, and the visual characteristics of the medium (such as light leaks and textural imperfections) befit what is essentially a paean to analogue technology. The film begins with a dreamlike twilight scene of surfers in the Pacific, their bodies lifted in unison by rolling waves. The otherworldly atmosphere is heightened by a soundscape of plunging breakers and seagulls that one might assume was recorded concurrently to the visual footage but is in fact the track Sea of China, by Cowley, dating from the late 1970s. As Cowley’s trademark spacey synths kick in, Fowler’s focus moves further inland, inspecting the dramatic terrain of the Bay Area.

There is a lush fecundity to this landscape, and our gaze is directed towards details such as gigantic furry, phallic cacti; pink prickly pears and splurs of viscid resin that ooze down tree boughs and glisten in the sunlight. The latent eroticism of this imagery is amplified by the accompanying Cowley track, itself originally composed for inclusion in a gay skin-flick.

The constructed landscape also features prominently in this film, and Fowler lingers on two sites associated with significant episodes of Cowley’s life. One is The EndUp, a renowned nightclub in which Cowley hosted events and frequently dj’d. The other is the City College of San Francisco, which houses the Electronic Music Lab, where Cowley worked and conceived his earliest electronic compositions. Shots of this International Style campus, with its striking mosaics, frame the voice of Maurice Tani – a friend and collaborator of Cowley’s. Tani’s contribution is vital to this film: he speaks with warmth and admiration, emphasising Cowley’s technical skill and visionary, intuitive approach to working with analogue synthesisers. As Tani highlights, the freeform experimental music Cowley made early in his career was abstract, “more akin to something that [Brian] Eno might have been doing”, and contrasts with the dance material for which he became renowned.

Disco was a transformative catalyst in latetwentieth-century culture and had a significant and far-reaching impact on artistic and social levels. While heralding a widespread adoption of technological instruments (like drum machines and synthesisers), it was also an agent for social change, contributing to the formation of gay identities and promoting queer culture.

As demonstrated by tracks such as Kickin’ In (1978), which is featured in this film and borrows heavily from Cerrone’s 1977 anthem Supernature, Cowley’s early club music was initially rooted firmly in disco. By the end of the 70s the musical trappings of the genre had become ubiquitous, having been absorbed fully by the mainstream.

And this saturation was one of the factors contributing to an antidisco backlash. But a more malevolent motivation was disco’s identification with homosexuality. Eager to evolve new sounds, a wave of musicians for whom Cowley was a pioneer sparked Hi-nrg, essentially a splinter of disco that broke with its antecedents in key ways, such as increasing the bpm and eliminating the trademark layered strings. As the genre evolved it became almost exclusively electronic, and in retrospect can be seen as forming a crucial building block of house and techno.

Hi-nrg was initially particularly popular with gay audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. The label most affiliated with the genre in the us was Megatone Records, which was founded by Cowley and his business partner Marty Blecman in 1981 and released music by artists such as Sylvester and Paul Parker that same year. Patrick includes an array of material relating to Megatone, all filmed at the archive of the glbt Historical Society in San Francisco. Pathos surrounds these press clippings and signed photos of artists represented by the label, most of which document beautiful men in the prime of youth, their talents only just beginning to flourish. Cowley himself succumbed to aids-related complications just one year after Megatone was established, and an alarming number of those affiliated with it were dead by the mid-90s, when the label was dissolved and its back catalogue sold off.

There have been more opportunities to view Patrick online over the past year than would have been the case prepandemic.

Aside from being included in film festivals readapted for internet audiences, it was featured in screening programmes conceived specifically for the digital domain. Perhaps inevitably, this means the majority of viewers experienced the film via a computer screen in what was likely a rather atomised setting.

Yet the optimum context in which to see it would be with others in a darkened space equipped with a powerful sound system.

For as anyone who has listened or danced to Cowley’s music will know, it possesses somatic sensorial-affective properties, the lower frequencies of which permeate one’s body and brain. Similarly, there is a hypnagogic aspect to Fowler’s films, the mesmeric effects of which are maximised when one is fully immersed in their flicker. If I have any quibble with this celebratory vignette, it is that I wanted it to be longer. But as Fowler has pointed out, the “incomplete, transient and contingent nature” of Patrick is entirely apposite, echoing an intense and prolific life that ended all too soon.

facing page, both Luke Fowler, Patrick (stills), 2020, 16mm film transferred to digital / 35mm print, colour, stereo sound, 20 min.

Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow

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Sun Rise / Sun Set Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin 26 February – 25 July Sometimes it can feel more impressive to see a familiar rubric redesigned than an unfamiliar one offered up, and Sun Rise / Sun Set is such an occasion. I can’t remember when I first saw an exhibition concerned with humanity’s tricky relationship to the natural world, but it’s a couple of decades ago at least; and I saw many others between then and this 19-artist colloquy, which weaves together works by figures as diverse as Max Ernst, Monira Al Qadiri and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto in what amounts less to an intellectual curatorial argument concerning how we live on this fragile planet than to something bodily, kinaesthetic. The show, in its leftfield juxtapositions, glancing interplays and near-theatrical scenography – which extends into a catacomb of annexes and corridors – all but injects a mixed sense of geophysical precarity, wonder and inexorable cycles into the viewer’s veins.

The tenor is established upfront, in the first of several darkened, softly spotlit rooms.

We’re both confronted with Henri Rousseau’s gorgeously faded 1908 painting of animalistic ravishment, La belle et la bête, and invited to look through it – since for atmospheric reasons it’s suspended in a vitrine – at Pamela Rosenkranz’s huge, conical indoor earthwork Infection (Calvin Klein Obsession for Men) (2021), its peak glowing green via concentrated coloured lighting. The Swiss artist has impregnated several cubic metres of rich primordial compost, containing everything from charcoal to human faeces to animal bones, with the eponymous designer perfume – which, in turn, contains artificial cat pheromones. All this loops back to Rosenkranz’s interest in toxoplasmosis, which cats gift to swathes of humanity: if you like this mound’s aroma, a cat may have given you a neuroparasite.

Our relation to nature, we’re reminded, is a complex and sometimes gnarly symbiosis.

Meanwhile, off to one side of this blackand-green hill, Pierre Huyghe’s Cerro Indio Muerto, a 2016 photograph of a human skeleton

Torbjørn Rødland, Frost no. 4, 2001, framed c-print on aluminium, 45 × 57 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen

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he found in the Atacama Desert, gives the lie to mortal mastery of the planet, parts of which are uninhabitable – all we can do there is rot back into the land – and the aforementioned Sakamoto’s reverberant sound installation Zure (2017), a grand piano that survived the 2011 Japanese tsunami retrofitted to ‘play’ seismic data collected worldwide, underlines the tenuousness of our grip on this big floating marble. These parts address each other but don’t quite fit together, rather fibrously entangle, as you try to navigate unresolved oppositions: rich loamy scents and death, painterly beauty and violence – what is beauty and what is beast?

In the next room Huyghe reappears, his Circadian Dilemma (Dia del Ojo) (2017) comprising an aquarium of blind, translucent cave fish that darkens and lightens according to the atmosphere outdoors. A Torbjørn Rødland photograph, Frost no. 4 (2001), from his well-known sequence of images featuring black-metallers hanging out in Norwegian woodland, offers

a parallel equipoise of dark and light, with modern musical subculture turning out to have much in common with Caspar David Friedrich’s nature worship. Across the room, tightly lit in the gloaming, an Emma Kunz crayon work, Work No. 25 – undated, but after the Swiss artist/healer started making geometric drawings using a pendulum, during the late 1930s – covertly attests to yet another kind of cycling: the artworld’s own, given that Kunz’s work is fashionable again, as are spiritually minded art and, indeed, the kind of plantbased holistic medicine the artist favoured.

That fact transitions us neatly towards a suite of Karl Blossfeldt’s vintage, still-sparkling architectonic photogravures of plant life; a small, antibucolic painterly nocturne by Anj Smith featuring creatures caught in a diaphanous web (Nächträglichkeit, 2010); and the bleeding-edge science of Neri Oxman’s grid of test tubes, Melanin Library (2020), reflecting research into incorporating human skin

pigment in architecture in order to – don’t ask me how – perform tasks such as recycling and energy production. The latter is one of several pivot points in the show where matters move into a major key – from sunset to sunrise, if you will – tracking the progress of scientific knowledge, what might be possible if we act inventively before one large force or other wipes us out. It’s quickly and neatly followed by indigenous Australian group Karrabing Film Collective’s hallucinatory postapocalyptic film Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland (2018), set in a future Northern Territories where climate change has rendered it impossible for people lacking melatonin – ie whites – to go outdoors.

Looking for a bridge between human and nonhuman perspectives, the show’s curators close out with a one-two of works themed around octopi, some of the smartest organisms on the planet. Monica Al Qadiri’s Divine Memory (2019) digitally merges footage of cavorting eight-legged beings with hot pink distortion,

Islamic poetry and videogame bloops, as if seeking a language to cut across cultures, generations and species. And venerated French underwater filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s The Love Life of the Octopus (1967), not unlike last year’s Netflix film My Octopus Teacher, is a creature feature that dwells on its nest-building, its cascades of eggs. Octopi, with their three hearts and with brains situated all over their bodies, ought to feel alien to us and in some ways they do – but their intelligence and tenacity might also have an affective appeal, make us alien cousins, albeit ones now menaced by climate change and oceanic pollution. If they need us to stop despoiling their habitats, we might need them as a way of personifying and even intellectualising the natural. The last thing you see in the show, accordingly, is a long-dead mollusc, making surreal curtains of eggs in its nest, labouring to ensure the survival of the next generation. It tugs, with eight legs, at the heart.

Martin Herbert

Monira Al Qadiri, Divine Memory, 2019, video, 4 min 30 sec.

Courtesy the artist

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Noor Riyadh Various venues, Riyadh 18 March – 3 April Light comes at you fast. In Rashed AlShashai’s kinetic sculpture Searching for Darkness (2021), crazily spinning lights describe a disarticulated conifer, a whirling dancer. In Abdullah AlOthman’s Casino AlRiyadh (2021), neon signage harkens back to a popular 1960s dinner spot in the Saudi capital as well as the embarrassment of creative, rather kooky signage that lights up the city. And in Ahmed Mater’s unshowy Antenna (Green) (2010), a neon aerial casts an acid-green glow. It’s a remembrance of the artist’s childhood in the southwestern mountain city of Abha, fiddling with the tv aerial to receive signals from nearby Yemen or Sudan, but it feels more like an antenna broadcasting the New Saudi Arabia to the world.

This is Light Upon Light: Light Art since the 1960s (running through 12 June), part of the inaugural Noor Riyadh festival, which is in turn part of a recursive series of blueprints for the city’s and country’s future. There’s a heavy reliance on infinity mirrors in the exhibition too – including a Kusama room – most notably in Nasser Al Salem’s God Is Alive, He Shall Not Die (2012), in which a calligraphic ‘Allah’ is articulated in lights and reflected to repeat ad infinitum. I’m oddly moved. There are some of the Western greats of Light art too, including James Turrell, Mary Corse, Lucio Fontana, Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin. But the rather cramped temporary venue erected in a financial-district conference-centre largely dulls their effect, making the exhibition feel more like a glancing survey of ‘Light and No Space’ artists.

Outside, there’s a cluster of the monumental and light-based works that make up the citywide installations portion of the programme.

Mostly bombastic and spectacular, they function as interactive entertainment and as an indexical map of Riyadh. Here is where you make money, here is a star precipitously suspended from the tallest building in the city, here’s an upscale megamall, here’s the tech hub, here’s the charming historical centre. Especially pointed is a Robert Wilson work that projects crashing waves onto the wind-eroded but magnificently conserved At-Turaif, a unesco World Heritage

Site and – lest anyone forget – the birthplace of the House of Saud.

The light festival, which ended on 3 April, attracted some 310,000 visitors over its shortened two-week run – a smashing success in that respect. You might call the exhibition lacklustre and the light festival overproduced and a little corny – both criticisms are fair – but that’s beside the point. It did exactly what it set out to do: amuse, entertain and maybe even educate locals after a difficult year, with a little bonus razzledazzle for international viewers along the way.

I was scandalised to find myself having fun at some installations, an all-too-rare experience.

Attracting tourists? Maybe next year when borders are open and international travel is a go again. Artwashing? Most definitely, though none of the international participants seemed to care; one senses that that particular moment of sniffily performed refusal has given way to avarice-as-usual.

“What brings you here? Why are you interested in Saudi?” artist Muhannad Shono asks when I meet him one day. He’s one of scores of artists who have returned to Saudi in recent years, buoyed by the radical transformation of their country. He tells me about the whiplash cognitive dissonance of seeing these shifts happen nearly overnight, and after we speak I notice it too, the young Saudis dating, holding hands on the streets, things not coming to a standstill during the call to prayer. And he tells me about an unnamed French curator who remarked, in peevish response to the changes, “What will we write about now? It will be boring if it becomes normal like Europe.”

As for his question, I still don’t know how to respond. In my hometown of Dubai, to which I’ve just returned, the answer would be easy: following the money. Noor Riyadh comes under the umbrella of Riyadh Art, whose mandate includes ten ‘pillars’ (or artistic programmes) and a thousand works of public sculpture across the city’s parks, squares and under-construction public transit system; gallerists are expanding their programmes accordingly. The numbers seem designed to scale, from consultant-

facing page, top Aleksandra Stratimirovic, Northern Lights, 2015, programmed led, 5000 cm. Photo: Riyadh Art. Courtesy the artist and Light Art Collection

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produced PowerPoint to press release. It has also been retrofitted to include the city’s annual sculpture symposium, now in its third year.

Riyadh Art is itself a pillar – a favourite word there – of the Royal Commission of Riyadh under ‘Vision 2030’, mbs’s blueprint to diversify the economy away from oil (one wonders about the energy consumption of all this lighting), attract tourists and improve the quality of life, mostly through 'gigaprojects'.

Outside this structure, the Diriyah Gate Development Authority has turned an industrial area into the art-and-culture district jax, which hosts some of the Noor Riyadh installations – among them Shono’s sprawling light and disconcertingly mossy steel-wool affair – artist studios and the kinds of shops and restaurants that lure people who self-identify as ‘creatives’.

The artist adopted a stray dog he found in the area and named it Jax; Vice Arabia is already set to move in. In December, jax will host the first iteration of a contemporary art biennial curated by ucca’s Beijing-based Philip Tinari and featuring around 70 mostly non-Saudi artists.

Double digits of heritage and art museums, and an intersection-of-art-and-tech oasis, are on their way. The Misk Art Institute is in the mix too. Whereas Misk once used to function like Mater’s Antenna, amplifying Saudi art in the wider world as an extension of the Edge of Arabia initiative (launched in 2003 to foster cultural dialogue between Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world), it has now shifted focus to emphasise programming, pedagogy and artist development, including generous grants and residency programmes. And that’s to say nothing of developments in other cities like Dhahran and Jeddah.

The most interesting part of all of this cultural infrastructure is that they aren’t merely trying to turn out artists and curators – or worse, critics – but fabricators, lighting technicians and art handlers too. “You’ll never see an Emirati or a Qatari working as a mover,” one of the festival directors explains, emphasising ksa’s demographics. Unlike its neighbours, the population of Saudi Arabia is majority Saudi

facing page, bottom Saeed Gamhawi, My Mother’s Rug (Unique Edition), 2021, projectors, sand, sound tracks, steel frames, 1600 × 1500 × 400 cm.

Photo: Riyadh Art. Courtesy the artist

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and doesn’t have the luxury of reserving the prestige jobs for its own citizens while importing foreign labour to pick up the more menial slack.

Equally encouraging is hearing that these foreign executives and consultants on the Gulf art circuit – most initially landed in Doha, with stints in the uae before moving to Saudi – expect to be in Riyadh for only three to five years before moving on and handing the reins over to local teams, unlike somewhere like Dubai where they might expect to be installed for life.

Riyadh confuses me. Though it is my first visit, everything about it feels so familiar, too familiar. But instead of the ever-present humidity and coastal tang that inextricably denote a Khaleeji city for me, the air is dry enough to give you razor burn. The sevenmillion-strong capital has a much more robust public life, despite the even hotter climes, and a dynamic – if rough around the edges – big-city

energy. A major plank of future development is aggressive greening, but the water table has been exhausted, so seawater is currently piped from the Arabian Gulf inland to Riyadh, where it is desalinated. When I visit the wadis (the rivers, as opposed to dry beds, on whose banks the city developed) on the outskirts of the city, where ducks have adopted a UxU Studio installation as a potential nesting ground, seeing these water bodies where settlements originally sprung up makes the land make more sense, though it still feels like an ecological disaster in the making. Everything is under construction, and the traffic barriers are draped with strip lights that look like illuminated ice cream drips.

The atmosphere feels so electric – a wild energy that has nothing to do with the installations – that I find myself thinking I could move there.

I find myself thinking about this when I return to visit some of my favourite works,

which are all clustered around a lovely old park.

I find myself again unexpectedly moved by the way that residents seem to find both pleasure and solace under and around the installations.

Quietly stunning is a vouw work that shows the spatial expansion, and by extension increased light pollution, of the city itself. Suspended above a patch of grass, it’s a time-lapsed map of Riyadh that begins with a single lit-up square, the historical centre where it’s installed, and expands outwards as the city sprawls. I’m surprised to hear Urdu, then Tagalog, in Marwah Almugait’s video, projected onto a mist-andwater screen, and delight in the simple pleasure of Saeed Gamhawi’s carpets projected onto sand to form a plan of his mother’s house. And in Ayman Zedani’s trio of carmine-tinted climatefiction films, the near future that plays out on each screen is obstructed by date palm trunks and, fittingly, pillars. Rahel Aima

vouw, City Gazing Riyadh, 2021, led strips, abs squared tubes, abs connection points, truss system, electric components, computer, sound system, cables, cloth, 1500 × 1500 × 800 cm. Courtesy the artists and Light Art Collection

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ArtReview

Vanessa Baird If ever there were an end to a story that had no beginning Drawing Room, London 1 March – 9 May Like an overgrown Cinderella, a woman in a girlish puff-sleeved dress sweeps up the detritus of contemporary homelife: Coke cans, wine bottles, shoes. Her horror-stricken face, in this watercolour painting (Stuck in Gens and Affection, 2019), is an unmistakable quotation from fellow Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, whose aesthetic Vanessa Baird frequently borrows as a shorthand for existential despair. A recent Baird series, the ironically titled There’s no place like home (2019–20), and a number of small works on paper made during the covid-19 pandemic chronicle the endlessness of domestic demands; meanwhile her kids glue themselves to their phones and her ancient mother lies bedridden. The works turn Baird’s world into a nightmarish fairytale, in which she herself is the protagonist, middleaged and exhausted by her responsibilities.

As the exhibition title indicates, the stories Baird creates have neither a beginning nor an end but instead represent a continuous oppressive present from which there is no magical escape.

If Baird can’t escape her burdens, she can at least take out her revenge in art, often with grotesque humour. In a particularly vicious example, Love you to the stars and back (2020), Baird celebrates the mother-daughter bond by depicting a woman farting over a cowering elderly woman. Baird is equally unsentimental about herself. A suite of watercolour self-portraits acts as a visual diary of the harrowing side effects of the medication she takes for a chronic condition: swelling, pain, dissolution. This sense of dissolution is carried over to a vast Hokusai-inspired seascape that

wraps across two gallery walls, a watery hell in which drowning figures swirl among the waves and flotsam.

Perhaps it is because I saw the exhibition alone (due to covid-19 restrictions, the show hasn’t opened to the public) or because I am a middle-aged mother, but in some works I felt as if Baird were looking directly at me, entreating a sense of complicity. In Living with teenagers (2019), she stares, hollow-eyed, out of the picture, while in the background her teenagers flaunt their seminaked sexuality. Baird’s T-shirt sports Picasso’s sensual portrait of his young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, The Dream (1932), poignantly highlighting the contrast between the seemingly inexhaustible artistic virility of the male artist and society’s denigration of older women artists’ sexuality. Jennifer Thatcher

Love you to the stars and back, 2020, watercolour on paper, 75 × 50 cm.

Courtesy the artist and osl Contemporary, Oslo

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Books Cover to Cover

by Michael Snow Primary Information/Light Industry, $30 (2020 softcover facsimile reprint of 1975 original) A man walks into a room and puts a vinyl record on a turntable. He goes outside, gets into his car, drives to a gallery and picks up a book. That, on one level, is what happens in Michael Snow’s photobook Cover to Cover.

It’s also a meta-book that makes unique use of the medium. And it can be read backwards or forwards.

Books these days have a varied half-life: hyperlinked ebooks, audiobooks that can be heard at 1.5x speed, ar story-maps. Cover to Cover is a time-capsule reminder of the uncanny properties of the printed page. Canadian artist Snow, a veteran filmmaker now in his nineties, made Cover to Cover as a book artwork in 1975, shortly after his film Two Sides to Every Story (1974), the product of two cameramen filming each other from opposite sides of a room, was completed. In the resulting two-part projection (each part projected onto opposite sides of the same aluminium sheet) we can choose to watch, from either of the camera’s perspectives, a woman walk between them and, at one point, spraypaint a green circle onto a piece of clear Perspex. The technique gives a materiality to the projected image, as if trapping it within the plates of a microscope slide ready for

examination. Cover to Cover deploys a similar conceit: the actions described are photographed simultaneously from two opposing angles, so that on one side of the page we see, for example, a door, and on the other the back of the man standing just on the other side of that door.

The back-to-back setup gives flipping through the book a physical playfulness: at one point, facing off from two sides of a typewriter, the page you’re holding becomes a doubled embodiment of a blank page (both representationally and literally); at another, we see the corner of a sitting room, the opposite side facing in towards the ivy-tangled outside of that part of the house, the page somehow becoming a brick wall. The book makes no bones about disclosing the process of its making; at several points the photographers capture each other from across a room or a street. It all might sound like a neat little spiral snake eating its own tail, a conceptual gotcha, but as soon as you begin to recognise and settle into a pattern, the book shifts again, turning what you think you’re seeing inside out. Cover to Cover instructs you in how to read it as you go, asking you to digest inversions and sly twists, as well as literally turning the book upside down. Images you

thought were simply showing you what was going on become photographs that get folded up or enclosed into a book within the book.

Reading Cover to Cover is much like watching one of Snow’s films: visually quite mundane, where what happens isn’t as important as how it’s being shown to you, with a sustained focus that sits with a relatively simple idea for longer than you might think. Accordioned depictions of sitting, walking, even doing nothing, become extended meditations on how we experience the world. Underwriting the intensity of Snow’s work is a consistent sense of his wry smile, being quietly profound with a casual shrug.

Snow is a rare beast: a structuralist with a sense of humour, a filmmaker who recognised that tinkering around with the limitations of the medium was also a way to rewire our sense of everyday perception – using art as a means to capture and crystallise the whatthefuckness of strolling around with a thinking, feeling body. Here he uses the means of a photobook to trace the contours of his body, his house and the existential possibilities of a book itself.

Books, those weighty space-fillers, can turn your brain inside out; the means to reconfigure reality are right at our fingertips. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Oriental Silk

by Xiaowen Zhu Hatje Cantz, €40 (hardcover) Having described how Madonna’s designer had come to his store to buy some fabric to make pyjamas for the popstar’s daughter Lourdes, and then an encounter with a solo embroiderer working on a large piece in China with nothing but a naked lightbulb to illuminate her project, Kenneth Wong, the proprietor of Oriental Silk Importers in Los Angeles mournfully declares that ‘silk is a very labour-intensive industry and there are not a lot of people who want to do that kind of work anymore’. There are no longer any government factories in China, he says, only private companies; and they can’t be bothered with the time and expense of high-end silk embroidery. Oriental Silk is the print incarnation of Berlin-based artist Xiaowen Zhu’s long-term eponymous multimedia project (which takes

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the form of single- and two-channel videoworks, garments and photographs) that tells a story of family bonds, East–West migration, imagined homelands, transformation and change by way of a California silk shop that is now somewhat out of time and place.

The book is a beautiful and seductive object, designed to mimic something of a visit to the store: plain grey cover (the store is curtained to protect fabrics from sunlight), pages decorated by what look like cutting guides and embroidery patterns, and coloured-paper sections for documents and photographs that approximate the experience of faded silk. Threading through (on cut-down white pages) is Zhu’s account of her first (chance) encounter with Kenneth and his store and his recounting of the story

ArtReview

of the Wong family, from Kenneth’s father’s journey from Guangdong province to Los Angeles, the elder Wong’s time spent serving in the us armed forces during the Second World War, his arranging for his family to leave China and join him in the us, to the establishment of what would become the family store during the early 1970s. Along the way there are tales of slavery, celebrity glamour, assimilation and alienation, duty, nostalgia, orientalism and changing times.

And while it may take the form of an artist’s book, it’s Wong’s history that comes to the fore, while Zhu’s artwork takes something of a backseat. But perhaps that is her point: Oriental Silk Importers is an artwork in itself.

Nirmala Devi

May 2021

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Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Today

by Eddie S. Glaude Jr Chatto & Windus, £16.99 (hardcover) Begin Again represents a search for hope written from inside the despair felt by its author, a professor of American studies at Princeton, at what turned out to be the midway point of the Trump presidency. The resulting book was published in the us two years later, just as George Floyd’s death beneath the knee of a Minneapolis policeman ignited national and international protests, fuelled the Black Lives Matter movement and brought the American president’s white supremacist beliefs, policies and – implicitly or explicitly – voters into their sharpest focus yet, all this heading into the cauldron of the 2020 presidential election season. Published in the uk in 2021, with an introduction written on the eve of the us election, without foreknowledge, but surely a feeling in the bones, of Trump’s subsequent attempts to overturn the results of that election by discarding ballots cast by Black voters in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit, and by summoning a militia of white men (and a few women) bearing symbols of the Confederacy and shouting the ugliest of racist language as they stormed the Capitol nine weeks later, Begin Again affords the reader the opportunity to experience its resonances in several temporal dimensions at once.

Overlayering periods in American history in order to highlight the cyclical nature of its racial conflicts and to glean insight from earlier Black artists, intellectuals and leaders into managing the despair engendered by the most recent conflagration is what structures Eddie Glaude’s powerful, genre-defying work. Nominally a

study of James Baldwin, and specifically the period between the publication of Baldwin’s nonfiction essay collections The Fire Next Time (1963) and No Name in the Street (1972), Begin Again (which takes its title from a line in Baldwin’s final novel, Just Above My Head, 1979) builds towards the conclusion that the us is facing its third moral reckoning, as consequential as its two previous reckonings, the Civil War/ Reconstruction of the 1860s–70s and the Black freedom struggle of the mid-twentieth century.

Using the phrase ‘the after times’ to describe periods during which ‘the lie’ – the ‘broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions’ required to disregard overwhelming evidence that American white lives matter more than all others – is once again embraced, inevitably in reaction to political change benefiting Black lives, Glaude picks out the parallels between the rise of Reaganism in the wake of the civil-rights movement and Johnson’s Great Society legislation, and Trumpism following ‘the illusion of safety’ of the Obama administration, to classify the present as another moment of almost unimaginably profound disillusionment for Black Americans.

Drawing on W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Eldridge Cleaver and many, many other figures to identify degrees of hope and despair, and possible paths through both, Glaude pinpoints Baldwin – frequently referred to here, with tenderness and intimacy, as Jimmy – as an exemplar, if not an avatar, and one in need

of being understood more fully. Redeeming Baldwin from a narrative that says he gave up art for politics, which is perhaps another way of saying that he succumbed to rage and despair, and became a lesser figure for it (Baldwin died in 1987, by which time he had witnessed the full betrayal of the civil rights movement under the Reagan administration), Glaude, through a blend of memoir, biography, history, literary criticism and incantatory repetition of themes, identifies the writer’s ideological shifts, the nonlinear, folding-back-on-itself recursiveness of his texts, speeches and film and tv appearances, his insistence on radical honesty, particularly towards one’s own deepest flaws, the huge strength required just to keep going – and the model his life offers to those still in the struggle.

The third reckoning of the present moment, Glaude concludes, offers, once more, the possibility for what Baldwin called a New Jerusalem, a third founding of the country, a chance to begin again that, in Glaude’s persuasive scholarship, Baldwin never entirely abandoned – though, invoking Dubois, this possibility is ‘[a] hope not hopeless but unhopeful’. Trump’s defeat at the polls would be (and presumably is) cold comfort, he continues, particularly where accompanied by the perception that Trump was an aberration. He is us, writes Glaude, he is who we are, and to say otherwise, to breathe a sigh of relief that he is gone, to define him as other in order to protect our image of ourselves, will get us nowhere. David Terrien

A Burning

by Megha Majumdar Scribner, £14.99 (hardcover) A Burning (originally published in the us last year) comes to the uk on a wave of high praise.

And it deserves it. Yet, on a superficial level, it would be easy to file Megha Majumdar’s debut novel in the ever-expanding folder of works that probe the disappointments that have followed India’s independence and the inherent injustice and unfairness of the world’s largest democracy today. The novel follows three main characters, whose lives are interconnected, but who exist on the fringes of society in a variety of ways: Jivan, a slum-dwelling young Muslim woman arrested and convicted on terrorism charges following the blowing up of a train in Kolkata; Lovely, a hijra and aspiring actress to whom

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Jivan has been teaching English and who can potentially provide an alibi; and pt Sir, Jivan’s school pe teacher, who looked out for his impoverished student during her studies and can now attest to her good character in court, but who also finds himself accidentally involved in state politics and on the up. In the end, this is a novel about the push and pull of desire and its frustration, and the price people will pay to live their dreams. The lives of all three are propelled by a combination of corruption, public opinion and its manipulation (by, among other things, social media), a patriarchal society and various forms of exploitation. ‘Jivan and I are no more than insects… grasshoppers whose

ArtReview

wings are being plucked,’ Lovely reflects as the novel approaches its climax. No one can help them, she continues; broken wings or not, the only people who can help them are themselves.

Yet the more Lovely and pt Sir progress in life (Lovely towards an acting career; pt Sir towards political office and the wealth that comes with it), the more their individual agency becomes compromised. And that agency is precisely what Jivan requires of the pair as she seeks their testimony to avoid death. A thriller, a social commentary and a story about people who are silenced and yet struggle to be heard, this is a novel of relevance far beyond the borders of the subcontinent in which it is set. Mark Rappolt

Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us

by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Lester Verso, £8.99 (softcover)

Joseph Andras’s debut novel won the Prix Goncourt back in 2016. But prizes are no reason to pick up a book. Its plot follows the final months in the life of Fernand Iveton, a (reallife) Communist member of Algeria’s National Liberation Front (fln), from his arrest in November 1956, following a thwarted bombing attempt, to his execution by guillotine on 11 February 1957. Iveton is also a pied-noir, the term used to describe French nationals who were born in Algeria between 1830 and 1962, the period of French colonial rule; indeed, he holds the distinction of being the only such member of the fln to be executed by the French state (as opposed to being killed in combat) during the Algerian War. He is between identities: traitor and liberator; colonised and coloniser; oppressor and oppressed. The French keep wanting to render his name more French, as ‘Yveton’; while, as the novel progresses, the number of phrases rendered in Arabic script increases. And as for Iveton himself, he loves France, he declares during his trial, but hates colonialists. And while he is adamant that none of his actions should result in the death of a person (the only thing his bomb was intended to harm was machinery), he believes that it’s only through action that Algeria can achieve independence. ‘The [Communist] Party… couldn’t decide what to do: it was for independence, but not armed struggle,’ says Iveton while justifying his decision to join the fln. ‘But how else could independence be won, in this context?’

In Andras’s telling, he’s a remarkably complex man. But one whose dilemmas – judging how far one should go to achieve change being just one of them – find a clear resonance in the issues we face in struggles for justice of all sorts today. Then, as now, the function of justice is as much about giving ‘the people’ what they want (Iveton was described as a killer in the French press, despite the fact that his bomb didn’t go off and no one had died), as it is a matter of what is right. While Iveton is imprisoned, random Arabs, in the wrong place at the wrong time, are lynched following bomb attacks in Algiers; just as Iveton’s lawyers explain that his legally persuasive appeals for clemency have come at the ‘wrong time’ for France.

Iveton’s execution was pushed by Justice Minister François Mitterand, whose catchphrase was ‘Algeria is France’, and who, ever the opportunist, abolished the death penalty once elected president of the French Republic, in 1981.

Iveton allowed him to demonstrate that French ‘traitors’ would be treated in the same way as Algerian revolutionaries (45 Algerians were executed in Mitterand’s year in charge of justice, during which he also pressed President René Coty to reject 80 percent of clemency appeals): a warped reflection of the very égalité for which Iveton was fighting. While the latter thinks he is dying for Algeria, Andras’s Coty implies that he is dying for France.

While the novel is structured around the events of a few bleak months, the circumstances,

both personal and political, that led Iveton to his predicament are revealed in flashbacks that are seamlessly inserted into the text. From the evolution of his romance with his wife, Hélène (blonde and Slavic-featured, who herself aided the Resistance during the Second World War), to his more abstract love affair with Algerian independence. Both have fumbling beginnings but concrete ends. The first a clear success; the second a foggy failure, trapped between the poles of France and Algeria, the Communist Party and the fln (the Algerian Communist Party was initially opposed to insurrection, but later allowed members to join the fln in a private capacity). Iveton has been under observation, he is captured, tortured, then tried by a military tribunal and convicted in a day.

Haunting it all (and referenced twice) is France’s most celebrated pied-noir, Albert Camus, whose background and ideological dilemmas were similar to Iveton’s and who claimed that the situation in Algeria ‘affected him like a pain in the lungs’. But Camus was opposed to independence (and later accused of implicit colonialism by critics such as Edward Said), he proposed various unworkable truces for the conflict and is believed by some to have unsuccessfully intervened for clemency on Iveton’s behalf. While Meursault, the main protagonist in Camus’s most famous work, The Outsider (1942), is condemned to death because he doesn’t feel enough, Andras’s Iveton is condemned because he feels too much. Mark Rappolt

The House of Illnesses

by Unica Zürn, translated by Malcom Green Atlas Press, £10 (hardcover) Written in 1958, during a bout of jaundice, The House of Illnesses (published here as a facsimile of her original notebook) records German artist and writer Unica Zürn’s early awareness of a mental instability that two-and-a-half years later would lead to her being committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Her life was transformed by an encounter with Hans Bellmer in 1953, after which she followed him from Berlin to Paris. Bellmer encouraged her experiments with automatic drawing and anagram poetry, and a series of international exhibitions followed. Zürn was also Bellmer’s ‘living doll’ (Bellmer is best known for works involving pubescent female

dolls), the model in a series of photographs documenting the transformations wrought upon her body when it was bound in rope. And it’s hard not to see echoes of this alienation and objectification as Zürn describes the House of Illnesses, in spidery text and intricate drawings, as a dwelling whose spaces are named for human organs, some of which are ‘safe’ to enter, some of which are ‘forbidden’. She’s creating the notebook, she realises, ‘to remain ill for a while.’

Throughout, there’s a tension between who is controlling her state of illness, herself or her doctor, her body or her mind, and a focus on the debilitating effects of love. All marked by an abiding fear of returning to the healthy

May 2021

world outside. ‘Neglecting my responsibilities’, she continues, ‘tastes like sweet cream.’

While The House of Illnesses is written in the style of a dark fairytale, it is the product of someone who is abundantly self-aware. An intriguing study of a delicate balance of body and mind, which parts of you belong to you and which you might surrender to others. ‘I need a companion to give me advice,’ Zürn complains.

‘Good advice or bad advice – he just has to say: “now you must do this and then you must do that,” and I’ll have the courage to carry on.’

Before concluding that ‘a person must believe in at least one thing in their life if they do not wish to go mad’. Nirmala Devi

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Intertitles Edited by Jess Chandler, Aimee Selby, Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot Prototype Publishing, £15 (softcover) The problem of how to reconcile formally experimental art with a progressive politics is as old as the left. Here’s the dilemma: place too much emphasis on the former and risk alienating everyone outside the ivory tower you’re supposed to be dismantling; write in a mode ‘accessible’ to wider audiences and stand accused of reproducing the hierarchies embedded in language. This anthology proposes that those working at the ‘intersection of writing and visual art’, the space of poetry, are best equipped to walk the highwire between the exclusionary and the banal. It is to be expected that some of its contributors fall in the attempt; that some succeed feels, like all good poetry, miraculous.

Among the 32 artists, theorists and poets gathered here, it’s no surprise that the last are most adept at balancing word, sound and image to complex effect. Sophie Collins’s response to Lee Bul’s sculpture combines visceral language with jarring rhythms and jagged mise-en-page, like projecting images of an intestine and a razorblade over the jangle of breaking glass.

CAConrad’s poems, by contrast, move through the combination of startling images (‘did survivors of the Black Plague / dance with their dead’) with disarming openness. Lines such as ‘argue for beauty’ might sound trite in isolation, but in the living context of these lyrics they are galvanising. Here are reminders that the meaning of words is shaped by the physical responses they provoke and the spirit in which

they are delivered and received: language is only imprisoned in definitions if you insist on deferring to dictionaries.

Conrad’s poetics demolishes the idea that high modernism’s semantic strategies – deconstruction, fragmentation, estrangement – are primary qualities of a progressive literature.

Why this faith in literary formalism persists in parts of the artworld is mysterious. Curators who wouldn’t dream of hanging geometric abstractions and calling them political will nonetheless trumpet as ‘avant-garde’ (a word that needs retiring) the reanimation of literary forms that died circa 1972. The suspicion is that an excessive attention to textual superficialities, and this extends to the artworld’s mania for jargon, is a substitute for actually doing the work of creating new meaning. Conrad’s poems don’t waste time quibbling over words like ‘beauty’ because they are secure on the ground from which they speak.

Linger at the crossroads of art and literature and you’ll learn that the insistence with which texts, artworks and people announce their radicalism rarely correlates to their practice.

You’ll sympathise with Quinn Latimer’s frustration towards artists who broadcast their politics through emails that are only ‘radical in their incoherence’, and also come to suspect that it ‘was always the most shameless and vested in power who waxed / On about healing and vulnerability / And assholes who talked

about fonts.’ It is to the editors’ credit that they largely dodge the traps of ‘art writing’ that dazzles to disguise its own vacuity in favour of work that opens up to the reader.

Latimer’s exceptional poems exemplify how the articulation of ideas and feelings naturally generates formal complexity, weaving personal and political into glowing meditations on implication, complicity and relation; Johanna Hedva’s torching of the patriarchy by means of blazing essay-memoir does the same. The most powerful contributions – including, but not limited to, Anaïs Duplan’s collages and Inua Ellams’s constellation of Clondalkin and Compton by way of Tupac – are characterised by their generosity. Rather than pin them to the page or hide them behind a screen, the authors leave their meanings vulnerable to the reader’s interpretation.

My opening dilemma was, after all, a false one. When writers really mean it, the content dictates the form and their readers will follow them through fire. Rather than establishing a new vanguard canon, this anthology is best understood as a useful introduction by editors who mean it to some writers worth following through the coming disasters. The intersection at which it stands joins past and future; its best moments look forward to what an aesthetics after the avant-garde – beyond cheap posturing and merely academic transgression – might look like. Ben Eastham

Terminus

by John Divola Mack Books, £30 (hardcover) The former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. This is the only piece of context given to the 45 black-and-white photographs, made with 4×5 film by John Divola for his latest series, which depicts corridors in the decommissioned military base. If it weren’t for the information printed at the back of the book, the photos could have been taken anywhere, in any dilapidated building. There are no glimpses of the surrounding environment; just the corridors, crumbling, with walls occasionally punched through, and empty save for the debris strewn across tiled floors.

Open doorways that line each hallway emit light, illuminating the intersecting geometries of doorframes, skirting boards and air vents;

in some photos, bright slices of sunlight cut into the shadows cast across the floors and walls. The relationship between these formal elements is interrupted by the presence of solid black circles spraypainted by Divola, recalling previous series like Vandalism (1974–75), Zuma (1979) and Black Star (2007–08), for which the artist made similar abstract marks inside abandoned buildings.

The circles painted at the ends of the corridors form the focal point of each photograph. In these black-and-white images, they are imbued with a tension that’s hard to put a finger on. As you turn the pages of the book, the position of the camera pulls the viewer closer to the ends of the passageways. The circles vary

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in size, too: at the beginning they are contained within the end wall of the corridor, then start to seep out across the doorframes on either side, eventually growing so huge that the entire end wall is engulfed by a circle. Terminus is the sort of photo series that you could return to knowing that each time those magnetic black circles will signify something different: shapes that mark an object for demolition; the cancerous effects of hazardous waste awaiting cleanup at Superfund sites like George Air Force Base; the slide towards the metaphorical dark tunnel and the doubt as to whether or not there will be a light at the end of it; or simply a series of abstract marks that a photographer chose to put there.

The meaning is yours to make. Fi Churchman

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Art credit

Text credits

on the cover Meriem Bennani, Party on the caps (still), 2018–19, eight-channel video installation, 30 min.

Courtesy the artist and Clearing, New York & Brussels

Words on the spine and on pages 19, 45 and 79 are from W.G. Sebald, ‘Dark Night Sallies Forth’, in After Nature (2002), trans Michael Hamburger

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You know Prince Charles wanted our brothers’ nuts, right? ok, he couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of catching them, finding them and snipping them off himself. He ended up supporting some scheme to force us onto an oral contraceptive programme by slipping it into Nutella, which he planned to smear all over the British countryside. That’s right, he’d have turned his own home (he does ‘own’ most of it, right?) into a shithole in order to get rid of us! And we see from the newspapers you toss all over the streets and parks (hey, at least we do something useful with ‘your’ trees) that you’re still plotting our downfall.

‘Sponsoring’ research into gene editing in order to bring impotence to our precious seed. And we thought you only did that to indigenous peoples, homosexuals and genuine nutters.

You always boast about how Britain is a country built on fairness and equality (although if you’re asking me, the whole monarchy obsession you have makes us wonder who you think you’re kidding), about how you want migrants to prosper (well, the rich ones you let in these days). We did just that!

We worked harder, bred faster and now you want to exterminate us. That’s how you always deal with the working classes. Those who you deem inferior to yourselves. Those whom you think of as other. You say you believe in fairness and opportunity, but it turns out that there’s a different kind of fairness, a different kind of opportunity depending on whether your fur is red or whether it’s grey. We’ve seen, in the 150 years that we’ve been here, that you’ve got the same double standards for migrants of the human kind. It’s in your culture, you see, your very nature. You need to take a good, hard look at yourselves.

In any case, it’s not like we came here on purpose, because we wanted to. You did that.

You made our choices for us. We believe you’d call it a forced migration. We were ripped out of our native habitat in America and transported as slaves, to be ‘pets’. Entertainment. For bored Englishmen. And when you actually got bored of us you just dumped us in your parks and gardens. Abandoned us to fend for ourselves: strangers in a strange land. In fact, one of your ‘nobility’, Herbrand Russell, whom you fools know as the 11th Duke of Bedford, was something of a superspreader in that regard, releasing our brothers and sisters all over the place.

Regent’s Park in London was one his favourite dumping grounds. And then we, the dumped, get blamed for ‘invading’ and ‘overrunning’ your precious capital. But we’ve seen, over the past 12 months, how much you’re addicted

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In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, Sciurus carolinensis takes issue with hygiene and hypocrisy

ArtReview

to war speech, we’ve scampered over the roof of Number 10 and seen your twenty-first-century Churchill blustering and blubbering. Although he was coughing a lot too, so we didn’t hang about. And you call us ‘vermin’?

You should have been looking into your own hygiene. You’re a dirty, dirty species. And you do far more harm to the world around you than we ever could. You came to America and killed off the natives with your diseases and bacteria. You bring us to Britain and blame us for doing the same to your precious reds.

You’re hypocrites too.

Prince Charles may be after our nuts, but your tourism industry still publishes lists of the best places to give them to us. That Churchill guy you all love so much was fond of giving them to us too. Some of our transported brothers and sisters from America were telling us about how the us press ‘busted’ him sneaking ‘stealthily’ out of the White House with a bag of peanuts that he was planning to donate to them when he visited our homeland back in 1942.

They’d read about it in a copy of The Examiner that someone had ‘attempted’ to toss into a bin.

They had to read about it because he didn’t get to give them the nuts in the end. Because the journalists who busted him were ‘hounding’ him about where he got his suit and what he was wearing underneath it. While millions of your brothers and sisters were dying in Europe, Africa and the Pacific! But that’s what’s important to you humans. Appearance rather than reality.

That’s what leads to your culture wars, your racism, your speciesism. You’re glued to your phones, to your televisions. You experience life from a distance, rather than getting out and about. (Although we hear you have other reasons for doing that right now.) You want to look at the world’s problems through filters. Like the art this magazine is always on about (plenty of copies of which almost made it into a park bin). You need to get real.

17–20.06.2021

July 2021