ArtReview February 2024 by ArtReview

Steaming ahead since 1949

Future Greats

ANNETTE KELM OBJEKTWAHL FEBRUARY 2 – MARCH 9, 2024 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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Gerhard Richter

David Zwirner

25 January–23 March 2024 24 Grafton Street, London

Gerhard Richter, 11.8.2023 (3), 2023 (detail). © Gerhard Richter 2024 (25012024)

ArtReview vol 76 no 1 February 2024

Resolve, Revolve, Unravel By the time this first issue of ArtReview’s 75th year reaches your hands, the mania of January promises and exertions – abstention from this or that; less negativity; internalising various health and aesthetic regimes; using that gym you’ve been paying for every month but only went to twice; only drinking nonalcoholic alcoholic drinks; trying to pronounce ‘Veganuary’ without making it sound like a genitourinary complaint and so on – might have faded a bit. (Having seen in the New Year at a Scottish Highlands retreat, where it was forced by its host to dance an entire cèilidh, ArtReview was then forced to abstain from returning to work, due to Britain’s admirably militant rail workers.) But once the jig is up and all the pretend-penitence has worn off, February is a better vantage point from which to survey the year to come, and to look to the future. Which is why ArtReview opens 2024 with its annual Future Greats feature: profiling the artists who are shaping things to come. Our resolution is their revolution. Or something like that. Over the years (ArtReview was born in 1948 – multiple facelifts can make it hard to tell – though it prefers to think of itself as endlessly regenerating, a bit like Doctor Who), countless resolutions have come and gone. In 1952 it was to perfecting how to craft a giant castle dessert made out of gelatine. In 1976 it was to learn to play the oud. In 1987 to eat less eggs, in 2002 to eat more eggs. In 2014: do the Shmoney dance. Things change, perspectives shift; each year demands its own response, often in reaction to what immediately preceded it. Though ‘resolution’ also implies working towards things being resolved. And if there’s one thing that ArtReview has learned through all this, it is to work

Relax!

against things being settled, fully set or determined, or resolved. Maybe just temporarily resolved, like when you think you’ve made your mind up, or you’ve found an exercise habit that works just right for you. For a time, and then it shifts again. There’s always a need for different perspectives and an attention to how what matters changes over time. If there isn’t endless debate, or contradiction, then maybe we’re doing something wrong. Of course (pull up a chair, and let an old magazine light its pipe), ArtReview has seen a lot in its time: born in the aftermath of a world war, it has lived through economic booms, recessions, financial crashes, the end of modernism, the arrival of a more global artworld and a multitude of new artistic voices, and the birth of the Butter Board. But what happens next, not even ArtReview can scry. If the year just gone has taught ArtReview anything, it’s that nothing can be taken for granted right now, and that art (and the ‘artworld’) is heading for a period in which old systems and ways of doing things will likely unravel into something (even more) unresolved, unsettled and in flux. (By the way, ArtReview doesn’t smoke anymore; that pipe it just mentioned is an e-pipe ArtReview bought in Shenzhen the last time it got stuck there. To be fair, it’s a less unpleasant vice than, say, a raging addiction to cocaine – which ArtReview never had, it should stress; though it did pretend to for a while, just so it could hang out with all the cool young gallerists at Art Basel Miami during the 2010s. And look where they are now – the losers.) Anyway. What ArtReview can promise, though, is to offer the best view of the shapes emerging out of the noise – what the Future Greats recast as art’s potential, what might be starting to ‘resolve’ itself in the art of the year to come, what its writers resolve from their various vantage points and how it might loosen, or sharpen, your own sense of resolve, as we keep revolving. Here’s to unravelling another 75 years. ArtReview

Take it easy!

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Broken Teeth No. 7, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 cm © Mao Yan

Mao Yan

New Paintings

London

pacegallery.com

To be titled (After the “Christ in the Wilderness” by Moretto da Brescia, 2023. Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 x 5 cm, 78 1/2 x 98 1/2 x 2 in

Tursic & Mille Sweet Nothings New York Upper East Side January 11- February 24, 2024

Art Observed

The Interview Jordan Wolfson by Ross Simonini 22 Autofiction by Adam Thirlwell 31

Critical Discussions by Chris Fite-Wassilak 34 Elite Trolling by Rosanna McLaughlin 38

Maison Gainsbourg by Clara Young 32

page 22 Jordan Wolfson, Colored sculpture, 2016 (installation view, Jordan Wolfson, 2016, David Zwirner, New York). Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London, and David Zwirner, New York

Future Greats

Nabil Harb, by Farah Al Qasimi Pooja Gurung & Bibhusan Basnet, by Sohrab Hura Yuli Yamagata, by Oliver Basciano Dana Kavelina, by Alexander Leissle Thaweechok Phasom, by Taiki Sakpisit Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer, by Edgar Calel Eoghan Ryan, by Mire Lee Derek Tumala, by Marv Recinto Farzaneh Forouzesh, by Shirin Neshat Hiền Hoàng, by Fi Churchman 42

page 44 Nabil Harb, Rev, 2021. Courtesy the artist

Art Reviewed

exhibitions & books 72 Guest Relations, by Yuwen Jiang Pippa Garner, by Cassie Packard Thea Djordjadze, by Martin Herbert Tropical, by Mark Rappolt Matthieu Laurette, by Louise Darblay Nora Turato, by Jasmine Reimer Erica Eyres, by Rodney LaTourelle Pope.L, by J.J. Charlesworth Laure Prouvost, by Mitch Speed Stephen Willats, by Nathalie Olah In The Offing, by Stephanie Gavan Ali Cherri, by Mariacarla Molè Shezad Dawood, by David Trigg The Reactor, by Fi Churchman Biennale Jogja, by Adeline Chia Ursula Reuter Christiansen, by Nanna Friiis Laura Langer, by Gaby Cepeda Occupied City, by Arjun Sajip Self-Determination, by Tom Denman

Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? by Rebecca Anne Proctor and Alia Al- Senussi, reviewed by Mark Rappolt The Premonition, by Banana Yoshimoto, reviewed by Fi Churchman Alphabetical Diaries, by Sheila Heti, reviewed by Celine Nguyen Poverty Creek Journal: On Life and Running, by Thomas Gardner, reviewed by Orit Gat Undiscovered, by Gabriela Wiener, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, by Takashi Homma, reviewed by Fi Churchman

page 74 Pippa Garner, Un(tit)led (Joy Joy Joy), 1978, inkjet print, 150 × 225 cm. Courtesy the artist

alien cockroach 106

َ ‫ما بعــد‬ ‫ الغـيث‬AFTER RAIN

Diriyah Contemporary Art ‫ بينــايل الدرعيـة‬Biennale 2024

‫للف ــن المعاص ــر‬ ٢٠٢٤

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20 February – 24 May 2024 JAX District, Diriyah, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

JURE KASTELIC

CAMPO DE LE GATE, VENEZIA APRIL 2024 MAREKARINA.COM

Art Observed

Won’t turn 21

Photo: Karlee Holland. Courtesy National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

ArtReview

The Interview by Ross Simonini

Jordan Wolfson

“I believe that objects can distil and be vessels for the frequency of the maker. I believe that artistic practice is also spiritual practice”

After discussing the possibility of an interview for five years, Jordan Wolfson and I eventually found our way to talking last summer. I visited him at his temporary studio, an inconspicuous, drab warehouse in an industrial corner of Los Angeles that Wolfson had acquired solely for the sake of realising Body Sculpture, his newest largescale work. The main room held the sculpture and some provisional furniture, but the building’s many office spaces were empty and darkened, giving the studio an unsettling, haunted atmosphere. This meeting was intended to be the official interview, but Wolfson had to postpone. He told me he was overwhelmed with the project’s final stages before shipping it all to the National Gallery of Australia, in Canberra, which had commissioned the work from him five years before, around the time when this interview was first discussed. This is the longest Wolfson has ever worked on a single piece (partly due to the pandemic), and during this period he created other, smaller projects. One such work, artists friends racists (2020), is a wall of holographic fans whirring through a grid of illuminated digital iconography, with the aesthetic of clip art and emojis. This piece, he told me, allowed him to work more intuitively and less pragmatically. “I want a full life of artmaking,” he said. So on that afternoon, instead of an interview, I observed as four technicians worked with Wolfson to adjust the movements on

Body Sculpture. The work appears practical and industrial, like something from a factory: a metallic, cube-shaped robot dangles over a stage by a chain, accompanied by a robotic arm. But the piece grows complicated as the cube comes to life, miming through its 30-minute choreography, slowly and purposefully, as if its artificial mind were studying human body language. At different points the robot embraced itself, beckoned to the audience and violently beat a chain against the stage. Body Sculpture is a clear continuation of Wolfson’s two previous animatronic works, (Female figure) (2014) and Colored sculpture (2016), which brought him to worldwide attention, both for their technological ambition and controversial spectacle. The former depicted a witch, erotically dancing; the latter an oversize male doll being subjected to torture – and both kept their angry, uncanny gazes fixed upon the viewer. Like those works, Body Sculpture enacts an eerie animatronic performance for the audience, but unlike them this work is mostly silent, without musical accompaniment, and despite its name does not resemble a body. For all these reasons, my experience of Body Sculpture was more abstract: free of the disturbing faces and sociocultural connotations that have defined Wolfson’s earlier works. On that day, I walked away from the studio with a lingering feeling of mystery.

February 2024

About six weeks later, Wolfson and I finally sat down to speak, his dog Broomstick at our feet. By then the warehouse was empty: the work had left on a freighter, and all but one of the roboticists had gone. It was a hot day and we talked under fluorescent lights in an old meeting room with brisk air conditioning. He sat in an ergonomic videogaming chair and wore a shirt that he described as silky and nice against his skin. I mention these details because, as I learned in our conversation, Wolfson is highly tuned to physiological sensations, and in fact prioritises these feelings in his work. Looking at Wolfson’s art, one could easily interpret his whole project as a sharp intellectual farce, but in our talk he was insistent on grounding his work in direct perception and metaphysical knowing. Much of his experience with art relates to proprioception, the kind of internal, tactile awareness that Maria Lassnig expressed in her paintings. All art, Wolfson told me, is “the validation of the expression of consciousness”. Wolfson’s coverage in the press has often been thorny, a response to his success, his boldly direct remarks and the provocative tone of his sculptures and videos; but in our talk he pushed against this villainous persona and spoke of using his achievements to help out fellow artists. “It’s so hard being an artist,” he says, “and if people didn’t help me, I wouldn’t be here talking to you.”

Witnessing the Physical Self artreview How did you arrive at the title Body Sculpture? jordan wolfson When I look at art – my art, other peoples’ art and even just objects in space – I notice that my relationship to sculpture is actually not a relationship to a sculpture but a relationship to my body in proximity to another object in space. ar The scale of it. jw Yes. For example, when you see Brancusi’s Bird in Space, what part of your body becomes activated for you?

ar So how does Brancusi feel to you?

ar This work has no eyes, only body.

jw I’m not sure. I’d just say that a successful work generally returns you to your body. I think there’s a trifecta of tension between a spiritual, intellectual and physical self, and when a sculpture becomes active, it’s able to manifest this feeling in a spectator’s body. So with Body Sculpture it’s basically about doing this over and over again.

jw Yes.

ar So the ‘Body’ in the title is the viewer’s body. jw Yes. Body Sculpture is just about witnessing the physical self, rather than witnessing a specific type of situation.

ar Maybe… the top of my head.

ar The name suggests that the work is part of a triptych with (Female figure) and Colored sculpture.

jw Interesting… your crown chakra. So looking at art is not intellectualism for me. It’s about physicality. It’s about the quality of my viewership at the moment of looking. But if the looking takes place over a gradient of time, then the quality of my viewership is based on my level of presence. When I say gradient of time, I mean, as I look at an object I move from right threequarter view to left three-quarter view, and there’s a gradation of time and physical space as I move around the object.

jw It is. But each one of these works has a different formal foundation. (Female figure) was like a portrait looking at you and away from you. Colored sculpture is about going between figuration and abstraction. And Body Sculpture is about going between personification and reification. It’s about returning the viewer to their body in a way that the other two could not do, because both of those sculptures were overridden by the fact that they could look at the viewer.

Colored sculpture, 2016 (installation view, Jordan Wolfson, 2016, David Zwirner, New York). Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London, and David Zwirner, New York

ArtReview

Stuff the Intuitive Inside of the Practical ar Is the performance of Body Sculpture telling a story? jw There’s a loose narrative about humanity. It’s not a moral message about who we are as a species, but I think all the ideas it expresses are about basic things that the human animal does. There’s sex and ritual and identification of the self and joy and shame. ar The whole spectrum. jw It just happened that way. I think of my work like… when the principal asks the ten-year-old why he threw a rock, the boy says, ‘I don’t know’. Because he doesn’t know. His situation at home, his breakfast and his genetics all informed throwing that rock. ar Did you throw rocks? jw Yes. And it’s ok not to know. ar Are you suspicious of intellectual engagement?

Body Sculpture (detail), 2023 (installation view, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra). Photo: David Sims. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian, New York, Sadie Coles hq , London, and David Zwirner, New York

February 2024

jw I am. ar Do you like any art that stimulates you intellectually? Or for you, is good art free of that? jw I believe it’s free of that. ar So you would not call yourself an intellectual. jw Not when I’m doing art. ar But with such large projects, there also needs to be some kind of high-level conceptual thinking and pragmatic decision-making. jw Being pragmatic isn’t doing art, but you can use it to set up situations where art can be made. A lot of time is dedicated to planning and organising time to be creative in, and for that to happen, technical issues have to be dealt with. ar When you are working, how much time are you spending in a purely intuitive space? jw I can do about three or four hours, but it varies, and if I’m lucky there are very brief moments of download. Mostly it’s a combination of searching and waiting. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes it’s good to give up when it’s hard. Sometimes it’s good to work when it’s easy and stop on a high note. ar How do you create a balance of the practical and the intuitive?

jw I stuff the intuitive inside of the practical. For example, if something is absolutely impossible technically or if there is a time or a financial limitation, then I accept it and find a solution intuitively, and I try to remain happy about this, not upset. ar Sounds like solid advice. Any more of that? jw If I were to give advice to another artist, I’d say that you need to have some type of technical talent, like you could be good at drawing but then you need to also have intuitive creative ability. You should try to develop both. But there’s also a third ability, that is to support and trust those other two abilities to do their work. If someone has too much technical ability, they might be cynical towards intuition. If someone is too intuitive, they might be cynical towards the technical. But you need both, and then on top of that you have to learn to trust yourself, and that isn’t something we are born with – or at least I had to learn it. So trust is the third skill I suggest the artist learn. ar How would you describe your technical talent? jw It’s not extraordinarily high but it’s above average. I was a fine draughtsman. Like, I was the second best at drawing through elementary, middle and high school. But when I got to risd

artists friends racists, 2020 (installation view, David Zwirner, Paris, 2020). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York

ArtReview

[Rhode Island School of Design, Providence] I wasn’t even close to the best. ar Do you draw now? jw Not as much. But the drawing modality translates to all sorts of things, like working with a skilled fabricator. It’s about communication. Like, if you were to direct someone to draw a face on a wall, it wouldn’t have a dissimilar result from you drawing on the wall yourself, except it might be subjectively better or worse. The problem is you need to be able to use this communication with the fabricator in replacement of the personal connection with the material, and it needs to become how you connect and reconnect with the material. It’s almost like a director and an actor in that you can allow the fabricator more or less agency in interpreting your requests. But ultimately it’s about communicating your ideas through language.

A Witness Holding an Object Up for Other Witnesses ar I’ve heard you say that you dislike interactivity in art. jw There’s different layers of interaction. I am sitting on a chair. Am I interacting with it? When

a sculpture looks at you, is it interaction? When it makes you feel your body, is that interaction? What’s the difference between talking to someone on the phone and listening into another person’s conversation? These are all the different levels I have tried to negate crossing the threshold of in the work. ar Where is that threshold? jw It’s when something becomes pedagogical or literally interactive. If you need to functionally interact with something, I think the witnessing part of your mind turns off. ar What’s an example of an interactive work? jw In the early 2000s at the Walker Art Center [in Minneapolis] they had this ai dolphin you could talk to and it could reply. I believe that in that moment of interaction the art experience becomes extinguished. You might ask, what about Felix Gonzalez-Torres? You pick up a piece of candy and you put it in your mouth. But that’s not interactive. ar Because it’s not responding to you. jw Or remember Tino Sehgal’s Guggenheim piece [This Progress, 2006, presented at the Guggenheim in 2010]. The performers ask you a question. I would say Tino Sehgal’s work

pushes interactivity more deftly than I have, in a more sophisticated, complex way. The piece allowed the viewer to stand at a passive threshold of listening and responding to the novelty of the situation. ar You seem especially interested in the viewer. If your work had no viewership, would you make it? jw No. I wouldn’t make it. I’m fine not working. I don’t need to express myself. ar So art is a communication device for you. Body Sculpture isn’t complete until people see it. jw No, it is complete because I am also the first viewer. That’s what’s ironic about it. I need the audience but I am also the central part of that audience. I am a witness holding an object up for other witnesses. ar Your animatronic works suggest a life force within them. Do you ever believe that life exists within these objects? jw No. But I believe that objects can distil and be vessels for the frequency of the maker. I believe that artistic practice is also spiritual practice. ar Is your primary spiritual practice through art? jw I think my initial motivation to have a spiritual practice was to enhance and develop

my art. When you are a professional artist it’s like being an athlete. You have to work on intuition through spiritual practice. ar Do you still consult a psychic for advice? jw Not anymore in the same way. The advice was too limited. But I’ll pursue any avenue, really. I try so many things. You just do whatever you can, out of desperation, to help the work. It’s about commitment. For Body Sculpture I went through so much choreography. I threw out so much. I follow the 90/10 rule. I edit out 90 percent of everything. But I also add things back in that had been edited out… it’s good to realise that is part of the process too. ar When you say choreography, who were you working with? Dancers? jw Well, yes. But in the end I did it all with Mark Setrakian (roboticist and artist) and the stage team (Ted Marchant and Brennan Lowe). Someone would come in with credentials and I’d trust them, and want to believe that they could solve the problems in the work, but I wasted a lot of resources that way, not trusting myself enough. That isn’t to say they didn’t add to the work, but I couldn’t solely rely on them. In some ways they were too good.

House with face, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Joshua White / JWPhotography. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles hq , London

February 2024

(Female figure), 2014 (installation view, Jordan Wolfson, 2016, David Zwirner, New York). Photo: Jonathan Smith. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Sadie Coles hq , London, and David Zwirner, New York

ArtReview

ar You seem to push yourself to your limit. When I was here before, you were exhausted. jw I’ve slept for a month since I last saw you.

An Unobstructed Distillation of Creation ar Does this piece do something different than your other work? jw I don’t think any art does anything different from any other art. The structural differences are topical, but all art attempts the same thing. It elicits us. But only if you are in the right mindset. If you’re stressed and in a bad mood and you see a wonderful artwork, you may not actually see it. ar Same with your own work, I assume. jw Yes. I make a mess of my work if I’m in a bad mood. I’ve spent so much time trying to get something back to where it was initially. ar Do you only work in a good mood? jw Yes. I won’t touch my art if I feel bad. Or I’ll get myself out of the mood by meditating or having a walk. I don’t want to look through pain to create.

ar But you’ll express pain in the work. jw Well, that’s part of the shadow that must freely express itself. ar Do you see yourself in service to other people as an artist? jw No. I do this for myself. ar Do you think your art helps others anyway? Maybe even simply by creating awe? jw What do you mean by awe? ar A sense of wonder that changes our normal perception of reality and allows us to understand ourselves and our environment in new ways. jw Yeah. It’s like you go to Big Sur and you see the landscape and it fills you with this ‘awe’ and you wouldn’t change a thing about it. Or you see a great work of art and it fills you with ‘awe’ and you wouldn’t change a thing about it. Both those things are the same. ar How so? jw They are the expression of consciousness through material. Rock, water and dirt. Canvas, paint and wood. They are both the consciousness of nature. Waves and wind and circumstance made that cliff. And when the

human being steps out of the way and lets the painting get made, you wouldn’t change a thing about it. But that’s what’s so hard as an artist. It’s about stepping out of the way. I mean, I used to think the mountain was beautiful because it was indifferent. But that’s a cynical way of looking at it. It’s beautiful because it’s an unobstructed distillation of creation. ar Consciousness seems central for you. How do you define that word? jw This is consciousness. [Gesturing to our conversation] Consciousness just blooms. It blooms in a rock or in a tree or in a lizard running over a cobblestone, or even the cobblestone itself. But I’m not the expert on this. Krishnamurti is. Ram Dass is. All I know is that when I’m looking at the mountain and when I’m looking at Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s candy, I’m looking at the same thing. Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture is on view at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, through 28 April Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, musician and dialogist

February 2024

Contemporary African Art Fair Marrakech

La Mamounia & DaDa 8–11 February 2024 1-54.com

(Detail) M’barek Bouhchichi, Untitled, 2023, Mixed media on rubber, 95 × 100 cm. Courtesy of L’Atelier 21.

At the start of 2023 I watched Barbara Loden’s movie Wanda (1970). Then, the other day, as the year ended, I read Nathalie Léger’s short and wonderful 2012 book on Wanda and Loden: Suite for Barbara Loden. Both the film and the book seemed to produce something inside me, some kind of trouble. Wanda is the story of a woman called Wanda Goronski, played by Loden: a woman who says no. It’s told in a kind of series of episodes. She leaves her marriage, she drifts around, until eventually she ends up accessory to a terrible bank heist, which she escapes from because she drives the wrong way and arrives at the bank too late. Afterwards she hitches a ride out of town, and the driver rapes her in his car. Finally, Wanda manages to get away and runs into the woods, eventually emerging at some kind of roadhouse, inside of which, in a final shot of radical ambiguity, we see Wanda for the last time: in a group, but alone and precarious. What’s strange is the way in which the film is as much a mood as it is a sequence of events; and how much, through the haunting strength of Loden’s performance as Wanda, it insists on being read as autobiographical, even though it’s a story about a person (based on a true story) who is not the maker of the movie. As Nathalie Léger puts it: ‘a miniature model of modernity, reduced to its simplest, most complex form: a woman telling her own story through that of another woman’. You know you are watching this blankly compelling story of Wanda, but, at the same time, it feels like what you’re really watching is the pure thing that is Barbara Loden, because of her performance and because of the flattened visuals she uses to convey it. (Isabelle Huppert beautifully observed that an early shot of Wanda/Loden waking up in hair curlers is more exposing and intimate than if she’d shot herself naked.) It isn’t so much the story of a woman moving through the Pennsylvania landscape as a story of Loden being filmed. That confusion of ‘I’ and ‘She’ seems to be a very contemporary problem. More than that, it seems a way of investigating another confusion: that between writing and cinema. In cinema, it comes out as this oscillation in every movie between what’s actually happening in the moment of filming and what’s happening

Writing Practice

in the fictional world of the film. There’s a certain avant-garde move that likes to collapse this oscillation as much as possible: in the way, for example, that Wanda Goronski and Barbara Loden seem about to collapse into each other. According to this logic, there’s not really a difference between documentary and fiction in film, because the material of each is filmed reality. This tends to dissolve any distinction between actors or nonactors moving and talking in a certain space. And so it’s logical for Pedro Costa to say that ‘a film is always a documentary of its own filming, of its own making’. Which, in turn, is similar to Marguerite Duras once observing that ‘the making of the film is already the film’. The closer the I and the She become, however, the closer the narrator and the character; then you get into what, in the world of

literature, it’s become common to call ‘autofiction’. I think I was thinking about this in particular because I had also recently read Lauren Elkin’s book Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art (2023), in which she makes an argument that art using the I and its experience operates in a politically subversive mode, against the hegemony of a universal, or of a voice that assumes its universal status. Instead, everything should be spiky and irreducible, disobedient to any larger meaning – and in particular, she argues, this insistence on the I is a mark of feminist art. It’s a kind of art that is deliberately excessive, oversharing, overintense, something that refuses to follow some law commanding separation of character and creator – the way Carolee Schneemann observed how ‘our best developments grow from works which initially strike us as “too much”’. Maybe, in other words, this overlap of the I and a character it describes is most multiple and complicated when the subject is the way in which a woman is forced into performance by a structure of gender and gender violence. Léger quotes something Delphine Seyrig once said about her work in Duras’s movie India Song (1975): ‘The common denominator that I share with all women is that I’m an actress. I think that every woman has to be an actress. Actresses do what all women are expected to do. We just throw ourselves into it more.’ If all women are actresses, then every film about a woman is a documentary. And every film by a woman about a woman is autofiction. I guess what still haunts me is how far that distance can go: the distance between character and narrator, or actor and director. And what that might mean for writing. The overlap of Wanda and Loden in Wanda makes me wish for that kind of artmaking to be multiplied: a way of writing where identities can be swapped in blank profusion. And also, perhaps, a way of reading literature with that model in mind: so that even the most sternly objective history or sternly fantastical story from literary history might collapse in on itself, and provoke the same hesitations and excesses as the kind that right now gets given this strange word: autofiction.

Barbara Loden as Wanda Goransky in Wanda, 1970

Adam Thirlwell is a novelist based in London

iii. autofiction

Adam Thirlwell is intrigued by the potential of autobiography that’s about someone other than oneself

February 2024

Serge Gainsbourg died in 1991 but his soul dies on at his newly opened mausoleum-home, Maison Gainsbourg. Left as the composer-singer had lived in it – minus the Klee, the Dalí and the then always-present briefcase stuffed with 500-franc bills, but still a Havishamian hodgepodge of police badges and handcuffs, winged-griffin furniture, Stimorols next to the bed, champagne flutes on the coffee table, crumpled white Repetto shoes in the closet and ashtrays loaded with Gitanes butts, all of it neatly and claustrophobically crushed inside black fabric walls and low black ceilings admitting no outdoor light – Gainsbourg’s house is a lair, a tomb of beloved objects. In the years before his heart stopped for good, Gainsbourg lived at 5 bis rue de Verneuil, alone; no more lovers or children, but cops and cab drivers who nightly hauled him home inebriated and stayed to have one

more for the road. To walk through this doll’s house with no more than a halfdozen other visitors at any time, breathily audio-guided not by Orpheus but his stand-in, Gainsbourg’s daughter Charlotte, is an up close brush with life oppressively preoccupied with death. Or, at least, abiding cynicism. The tarantula in resin on the piano and Body Worlds plastination in the living room point to the worm waiting to turn in Gainsbourg’s gold-record success, a preemptive cynicism he nursed in astringent rock beats and antithetical lyrics that countered ardently romantic melodies he so often lifted from Chopin and Brahms. Gainsbourg swooped to glory during the 1960s, then skidded in the 1980s into ‘Gainsbarre’ (‘barre’ as in ‘outta here’), his alter ego. Permanently Pastis-pissed, Gainsbarre ignited 500-franc bills on talkshows to spite the tax people, slurred

Je t’aime

As a celebrated songwriter’s house opens to the public, Clara Young finds an audioguide becomes a daughter’s whispered testament to her famous father

top Maison Gainsbourg exterior. Photo: Alexis Raimbault. Courtesy Maison Gainsbourg, Paris above left View of Maison Gainsbourg’s café and bar, Le Gainsbarre, with 1980 cover of Rock & Folk, shot by Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Photo: Alexis Raimbault. Courtesy Maison Gainsbourg, Paris above right Charlotte Gainsbourg, 2023. Photo: Jean-Baptiste Mondino. Courtesy Maison Gainsbourg, Paris

ArtReview

at Whitney Houston that he wanted to fuck her. The ‘poète maudit’ was simultaneously national embarrassment and national bulwark, the latter because he seemed immune to America’s life-grubbing, brighttoothed desperation for happy endings. Which meant, by osmosis, France was too. The copies of Huysmans, Poe and Baudelaire in his office, and the baby Steinway and Claude Lalanne’s bronze Man with a Cabbage Head (1968) in the living room all bear out the troubadour as he inventoried himself in his corpus of 485 songs: musical sophisticate, lady-killer, agent provocateur of the lyric. But Maison Gainsbourg is not just the diorama of a nihilist-cum-national treasure. Narrated from room to room with Charlotte’s small, detailed memories, Maison Gainsbourg is as much the work of Gainsbourg fille as père. From the nearly ten years she lived in the house, from birth till her mother, Jane Birkin, left in 1980, and then after that weekends, the daughter pulls out memories and sundries that she whispers into the visitor’s ear. That Jane always finished off her baths with her half-sister Kate (Barry) with clouds of talcum powder. That her father never let her play the baby grand but made her stand next to him while he did. That Serge never bathed but washed his feet in the bidet. That after they’d been tucked in, she and Kate could hear Serge and Jane talking as they got ready to go out. That after Jane moved out, Serge had the doorway to the girls’ bedroom off the kitchen bricked up. In the poignancy of Charlotte’s narration, which fades out at the end with Serge’s slightly halting playing of Chopin’s 1835 Valse de l’Adieu, and Jane in a rush, calling the girls to get into the car, reminding Serge about dinner at eight, and slamming the car door, Charlotte has brought a gentle tonic of truthfulness to her last duet with her father. After more than 30 years of mulling over how to present Serge Gainsbourg’s legacy, Charlotte Gainsbourg has decided to let his public see him dans son jus, an edgy, repellent genius framed by something of the daughter’s that Serge carefully kept buried: candidness. Clara Young is a writer based in Paris

At a panel discussion I attended in December at Accra’s Goethe-Institut, convened under the broad umbrella of ‘let’s talk about African art’, curator Nuna Adisenu-Doe decried the lack of infrastructure and support available for artists in the country, but pointed to the number of galleries opening in Ghana as a quantifiable indication of change. In 2006, he stated, the country had only five galleries showing contemporary art. Now there were over 30, evidence for how things were growing, and for the potential shifts to come. The talk’s chair, writer Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson, then posed a loaded question: “What is contemporary African art?” How to define what art these galleries are displaying proved slightly more difficult for the panel to pin down. Figurative painting might dominate the international art market’s hungry definition of current African art, with Amoako Boafo as the local poster boy of success – and, indeed, the majority of what was on display in Accra’s art spaces in early December was portraiture, or minor deviations thereon. At the Nubuke Foundation, which focuses on textile-based work, the angular brutalist building held Halimatu

Critical Discussions

In Accra, artists are shaping visions for contemporary art and its institutions in Ghana and beyond, writes Chris Fite-Wassilak

Iddrisu’s stylised portraits of young women, with blank-faced sitters posed against colourful patterned cloth backdrops; while at Worldfaze, a space opened by painter Kwesi Botchway, Daniel Tetteh Nartey had a humorous and surreal slant on the genre, strewing disembodied blue heads and limbs across domestic scenes. At the Foundation for Contemporary Art (fca), on the grounds of the w.e.b. Dubois Centre, an exhibition curated by the South African initiative Nothing Gets Organised, stood out from what else was on offer in the city by virtue of holding a range of sculpture, installation and videowork, dispersed around the grounds and museum of the worn complex. At the Goethe talk, the obvious issues inherent in trying to define ‘African art’ as any singular entity quickly erupted. As Johnson noted that “a lot of what’s making contemporary African art is not in Africa”, American artist Laurel Richardson asked from the audience if any such definition would include the African diaspora. The third panellist, Gabriel Schimmeroth, a German curator at the ethnological Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg (joining via video), raised the issue of how African artists were

Malala Andrialavidrazana, Rolling Figures, 2022, UltraChrome pigment print on Hahnemühle Ultra Smooth Cotton Rag, 152 × 800 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

often expected to perform their nationality in their work, in a way other artists might not be expected to. He pointed to a 2022 project he’d worked on with Ghanaian artist Kelvin Haizel in Hamburg, where Haizel drew on a photographic album in the museum’s archives that held nineteenth-century images from Singapore to make a body of work that, as Schimmeroth put it, “wittily avoided the framework of African art”. During my visit to Accra, Haizel was in residency in a studio in the half-empty mall that houses several of Gallery 1957’s multiple exhibition spaces, preparing new work for a show. The residency-exhibition model is common in the city, with 1957, Worldfaze, Boafo’s dot.ateliers and the Noldor Artist Residency all bringing artists from across Ghana and internationally to make work onsite for display at the end. Haizel’s work has long drawn on photographic processes, but the

top Kelvin Haizel in the studio, December 2023, Accra. Photo: Nii Odzenma. Courtesy the artist and Gallery 1957, Accra & London above left and right Halimatu Iddrisu, Shrouded Mysteries (The New Norms), 2023 (installation views, Nubuke Foundation, Accra). Photos: Isaac Gyamfi Photography

February 2024

studio was full of vibrant abstract paintings that at points resembled pink camouflage, at others dense autumnal scenes of foliage, at others still a frenetic choreography of smudged finger marks in deep blues and earthy reds. Upstairs, 1957 held a group show of 19 artists curated by British writer Ekow Eshun, where work by international-circuit names like Boafo and Zanele Muholi sat next to Malagasy-French Malala Andrialavidrazana’s expansive, eightmetre-long satirical digital collage (2022), mashing together imagery from currencies, textile patterns, cartoons and old maps, and American Kenturah Davis’s series (2023) of pencilled portraits that sat above neat swatches of woven fabric, as if encoding some hidden information about the sitter. Gallery 1957 might provide one vision of what art in Accra is currently: largely wall-based, illustrative and polite. Haizel, however, is also part of the Exit Frame Collective, which seems to be part of a broader coalition seeking a more discursive, open-ended vision of art’s possibilities in the city. Exit Frame has worked loosely as a curatorial endeavour since 2012, working for example as part of the curatorial team of the recent Ljubljana Biennale. Since 2020 it has been running the annual temporary art school experiment CritLab – which is what brought me to Accra, where I had been invited to take part as a facilitator, alongside figures like Richardson, Oyindamola Fakeye (curator of the cca Lagos) and curator Marie Hélène Pereira (formerly of raw Material Company,

Dakar, and now at hkw, Berlin). Self-described as a project that ‘strategically combines the formats of art academy, residency, workshop, laboratory, and professional development programme’, CritLab is a free two-week intensive gathering for a dozen participants, this year including artists, writers, musicians and a choreographer, all hailing from Ghana and Cameroon, as well as an Italian curator. Some had had work featured in international magazines, some had never done a public exhibition. The three days of CritLab I experienced, held in the fca, bounced between structured discussion – on Ghanaian art history, or practical tips for documenting work – and talks (via video and in person) by the range of guest facilitators. All the while, participants made multiple presentations on their own work, their ideas and the spaces they’ve worked with, drawing on feedback to hone their presentations further with each iteration, creating a condensed, repetitive loop towards some

kind of clarity. Never far from conversation were two figures, held up informally as godparents to a more Afrocentric contemporary art scene. The first was Bisi Silva, founder of both cca Lagos and the Àsìkò programme, the latter an influential six-week pan-African exchange initiative, running since 2010, that was an inspiration for CritLab and has been a meeting point for many of the people facilitating the December sessions (after Silva passed away in 2019, Fakeye has continued the project, with another iteration expected next year). The second was karî’kachä seid’ou, head of the art department of knust Kumasi, a galvanising figure in shifting the art school towards collaborative and lateral forms of

top and top right Room19isaFactory, Lounge (Verb), 2023 (installation views, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Accra). Photo: Nii Odzenma above CritLab in session, December 2023, Accra. Photo: Franklin Yohuno. Courtesy Exit Frame Collective, Accra

ArtReview

art production, and one of the driving forces behind the blaxtarlines collective of artists and curators, also based out of knust. While exhibiting the usual distractions of any art education environment – crossed wires, circular arguments, wandering attention – what emerged in my brief exposure was a sense of openness, a levelling of access and the seeding of long-term conversations. Previous participants encountered over my week in the city constantly recalled what CritLab had meant to them, giving critical discussion they hadn’t found elsewhere. At another session I took part in, several people visiting the DuBois Centre just wandered in, and became part of the conversation without a second glance. Closing off the talk at the Goethe, Johnson acknowledged that African art was having a moment internationally, but then asked, “What is the future after the trend for African art fades?” Adisenu-Doe posited that, for longterm sustainability, “the state will need to be involved”, to create institutions that would support Ghana’s artists. But as Accra’s residencyexhibitions and events such as CritLab show, in short, intense bursts, its artists are already building their own institutions.

For a while now, a video of Camille Paglia and Susan Sontag has been doing the rounds on social media. The year is 1992. Lounging on a sofa, an irritable Sontag repeatedly insists to her interviewer, Christopher Lydon, that she has no idea who Paglia is. It’s fair to assume she’s lying. Two years earlier Paglia’s debut book, Sexual Personae, an antimodernist paean to Western civilisation, became an unexpected bestseller. She quickly established herself as an arch-provocateur, arguing that feminists were ‘dramatizing the pervasiveness of rape’ and comparing Gloria Steinem to Stalin. The video cuts to the studio, where Lydon relays Sontag’s claims of ignorance to Paglia. “Oh, she is so out of it,” Paglia declares, sparkling like a switchblade. “Sontag is gone.” The popularity of the video can partly be explained as nostalgia for a time before the collapse of the public sphere left people to choose between an infantilising mainstream media and the fanatical ramblings native to social platforms. More telling, however, is the glee the video has inspired among Paglia’s newfound online fans. Twenty-twenty-three may have been the year of Barbie and Taylor Swift, but it was also the year when attitudes towards #MeToo feminism began to sour, from the scathing response to the curatorial nadir that was It’s Pablo-matic, to the continued rehabilitation of Johnny Depp, the rise of self-declared misogynist Andrew Tate and

Elite Trolling

Having almost got her cancelled, the pugnacious public-intellectualism of Camille Paglia is trending. Why? Rosanna McLaughlin has a theory, and it’s not pretty

Camille Paglia, 1999. Photo: John Voos / Alamy

ArtReview

the emergence of TradCaths and TradWifes identities. Against such a backdrop, Paglia’s criticism of censorship, her repudiation of the framing of men as uniformly bad and women as victims, and her attacks on the liberal academic establishment (which Sontag has come to represent) have made her a hero among current critics of progressive liberal culture. Paglia’s pugnacious and populist brand of intellectualism has always made for compelling viewing, as has her habit of wearing her narcissism on her sleeve. But until relatively recently her star appeared to have waned. In what has become a predictable turn of events, a sign of her return was her attempted cancellation. In 2019 students at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where Paglia has taught since 1984, tried and failed to have her fired because of her views on gender and sexual assault. Paglia, who describes herself as transgender, has said that giving children puberty blockers is ‘a crime against humanity’; she also believes that in exchange for the freedoms delivered by the sexual revolution, women should take responsibility for themselves by avoiding exposure to harm. Rather than removing her from her post, the protests effectively took a bellows to her career, placing her in the midst of campus free-speech debates. This helped return Paglia to the headlines, but her current popularity can largely be ascribed to the influential New York podcast Red Scare.

The podcast’s hosts, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, attribute their own contrarian approach to undermining progressive dogma to Paglia. A key part of their appeal is the delight they take in breaking the rules a good liberal is supposed to obey. They don’t believe in the patriarchy, they are sceptical of the ‘believe women’ mantra, they celebrate beauty and thinness and are themselves beautiful and thin, and they use ‘gay’ and ‘retarded’ as pejoratives. Khachiyan has a particular knack for dispatching lines that combine Paglia’s flair for controversy, Wildean aphorisms and the juvenile pleasures of shitposting. (‘Liberals organise their friends like their bookcases: by colour’, etc.) By frequently proselytising Paglia’s work, along with that of Friedrich Nietzsche and historian Christopher Lasch, Khachiyan and Nekrasova have established a kind of minicanon among their millennial and zoomer fanbase. Such is their popularity that they inspired the characters Olivia and Paula, the two witheringly superior girls from the first season of the television show The White Lotus (2021–). In one scene they appear poolside at a Hawaiian resort reading Paglia’s Sexual Personae and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961).

Paglia’s deep dislike of poststructuralism, and in particular the influence of Michel Foucault, has further enamoured her to critics of leftwing academia and its perceived trickledown influence on liberal identity politics. ‘Poststructualism is a corpse. Let it stink in the Parisian trash pit where it belongs!’, she wrote in 1998, arguing that the patron saint of leftwing academia is elitist and obscurantist, a false idol whose teachings are a poor replacement for religious and ethnic tradition. Like ‘postmodernism’, ‘poststructuralism’ and ‘Foucault’ have become bywords for some on the right for a nefarious ideology that brainwashes people into believing up means down and boy means girl. Yet beyond the gross simplifications that have transformed certain philosophers into

top Cover art for podcast Red Scare

bogeymen for rightwing agitators, criticisms of poststructuralism’s legacy cannot so easily be dismissed. We have become extremely adept at describing what must be dismantled, unlearned and problematised, yet almost completely useless when it comes to creating compelling visions of a better society. Barbie may evidence a mainstream climax of liberal feminism, but as the popularity of Red Scare and Paglia show, fatigue has set in. It would be easy to read Paglia’s return as part of a reactionary movement taking culture on a sharp turn to the right. But as her own slippery politics show, she has never exactly been a comfortable bedfellow for conservatism. Paglia is a feminist who believes that ‘if civilization had been left in female hands, we’d still be living in grass hut’; she is an atheist who extols the virtues of religion; a traditionalist who has said, ‘I don’t just tolerate porn and prostitution, I support them’. Her most consistent quality may well be how hard it is to pin her politics down. It is perhaps more useful to see Paglia’s popularity as an expression of frustration. Her unbridled narcissism, her unfiltered tongue and the Trumpian pleasure she takes in riling adversaries appeal to those who resent the shifting moral codes, hypersensitivities and regimented identity brackets that promise liberation but often deliver stultification. As the battle over what comes next commences, the popularity of contrarians who enjoy plunging the knife into liberal sensibilities will surely only grow. Invigorated by liberal censoriousness, and riding high on a promise to say the unsayable, figures like Paglia will continue to become the standard-bearers for a limited vision of cultural freedom that is simply elite-level trolling.

above Olivia (Sydney Sweeney) and Paula (Brittany O’Grady) in season 1 of hbo production The White Lotus, 2021–

Rosanna McLaughlin is a writer and editor based in East Sussex

February 2024

March 28-30, 2024 Zhang Ruyi, Folding the Distant – 1, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Don Gallery.

Future Greats

A lump of stone 41

Introduction In 1928 a broke Walt Disney finally got distribution for his short animated film Steamboat Willie, launching a little whistling mouse into popular culture. The river rodent went on to become a corporate icon, transposing those ears into films, television shows, videogames, amusement parks, lunchboxes, plush toys and underwear. Cast into a catchall family commodity, the mouse’s global ubiquity is one definition of success. This January, the copyright for that early version of Mickey passed into the public domain, spawning a wave of parodies, remakes and memes online. Most of these, of course, might qualify as ‘fair use’, but then the Walt Disney Company has been known to be pretty liberal with the ol’ lawsuit. But perhaps the sheer volume of vitriol, criticism and comic ripoffs are their own marker of cultural influence. Artists from Roy Lichtenstein to Raymond Pettibon to kaws have all riffed on the rodent’s overbearing presence in mass culture. Who knew a diminutive cartoon mouse (and a disputed racist stereotype) would become so ‘great’? In 2007 ArtReview launched its first Future Greats section; many of the artists featured (Thomas Houseago, Chris Evans, Thomas Zipp, Paulina Olowska) are still readily recognisable names. Tapping the biennial and art-market stars of tomorrow, though, isn’t really the point of Future Greats. In contemporary art, there’s often the impression that novelty, velocity and visibility are the markers of success. (Who would have thought, during the early 2000s, that in the 2020s artists could become overnight ‘names’ on Instagram?) A cycle of new faces, changing endlessly, some of them destined to become art ‘stars’. But new to whom, and great in what way? Sometimes it’s also about where, and how, people are paying close attention. For this year’s Future Greats, ArtReview asked its editors and a range of international artists to highlight those less-established artists who are making art that they find exciting and alluring, and who they think might be offering new definitions of what art can be. Those definitions might be contingent, temporary or only hold in particular contexts. The artists might have had more prominent exhibitions or airings, or not, but the selectors felt that these artists were deserving of more – of your – attention. These artists capture their present, whether with photography, film or puppetry, and ask about how we find the way through the mess of now to future possibilities. Of course, such an exercise is its own kind of gatekeeping, in which ArtReview gets to tell everybody that they shouldn’t be looking over there for the next big thing, they should be looking over here. But then, ArtReview thinks, every artist ever has gone through some kind of gatekeeping – the question really is, whose gate? Selection is never an innocent act, often motored by power and special interest. But in the end, once an artist is through the gate, there’s still you, the public, who finally decides. Which, ArtReview believes, means there should be as many gates opened as possible.

Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Steamboat Willie (still), 1928, animated short film (b&w, Cinephone sound), 7 min 47 sec

ArtReview

Nabil Harb selected by Farah Al Qasimi 44 Pooja Gurung & Bibhusan Basnet selected by Sohrab Hura 46 Yuli Yamagata selected by Oliver Basciano 47 Dana Kavelina selected by Alexander Leissle 50 Thaweechok Phasom selected by Taiki Sakpisit 52 Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer selected by Edgar Calel 54 Eoghan Ryan selected by Mire Lee 55 Derek Tumala selected by Marv Recinto 58 Farzaneh Forouzesh selected by Shirin Neshat 61 Hi`ên Hoàng selected by Fi Churchman 63

Nabil Harb Selected by Farah Al Qasimi, and more curious at the same time. I love all Nabil Harb is part of a new era of artists usan artist working in photography, video and performance. ing photography to tell stories that are at of his photographs of Florida, because I don’t She is based in New York and Abu Dhabi once hyperlocal and globally relevant. Often look at them so much as I experience them shooting in black-and-white, he creates images that veer between – they translate the sunlight’s persistence, the perpetual wetness moments of bucolic calm and startling intimacy. Grasshoppers (2020) of humidity, the comfort and weariness of living anywhere for long shows a fencepost holding up strands of barbed wire, the wooden enough. Backyard (2021) is a landscape dense with overgrown foliage, post spiked with a dozen sizeable examples of the insect. In J&J (2019) the broken-down cars in the next yard, just beyond the wire fence, we see the backs of two men at a drag show, one leaning into the other almost blending in with the ivy. in a quiet embrace among the crowd. Both of these are Harb’s Florida. There are countless documents of the American South that are I first met Harb in Miami in 2017; I was in graduate school and considered canon because the identities of their makers fit the criteria had driven down to Florida from Connecticut looking for people to for ‘objective looking’. In this era of divisiveness and anti-Arab sentiphotograph. He reached out via Instagram and directed me to a beau- ment, I’m more interested in seeing the pockets of Florida where tiful state park, where I took his portrait by a palm tree. We became a queer Palestinian American feels a sense of belonging. That is what friends after that, and I admire the way his work has grown sharper feels the most like the present tense.

Grasshoppers, 2020

ArtReview

Allegra, 2019

J&J, 2019

Backyard, 2021

February 2024

Pooja Gurung & Bibhusan Basnet

Dadyaa: The Woodpeckers of Rotha (still), 2016, video, 16 min 8 sec. Courtesy the artists

In a world where everything, including culture, is increasingly stream- known for producing wooden masks and effigies as a way of prelined, funnelled into and defined by specific positions that often serving the memory of whoever has left the place; only an elderly contain rather than help unpack, the Kathmandu-based Nepalese couple remains, surrounded by masks that are left scattered around filmmakers Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet are still trying to find Jumla. There are lots of similar ‘ghost villages’ in this region that have magic – both in the sense of the indefinable and the unquantifiable, seen entire populations migrate elsewhere to find jobs. At the end of and in terms of storytelling. Dadyaa, it’s almost as if the masks come alive and reinhabit the village, I recently rewatched The Big Headed Boy, Shamans and Samurais creating a looping, nonlinear narrative. (2020), which is about the filmmakers’ journey to Western Nepal (an Several of their films have been made in that region, and while area that’s extremely isolated from the rest of Nepal). However, many Gurung and Basnet’s narratives draw from local folklore, they also touch stories leak out of the supposedly main premise. Gurung and Basnet on the political – which is to say that there’s always, in the background, go in search for a ‘perfect’ boy to play the main character of their a sense of the larger world we and their subjects exist in. At times it’s next film. They come across a village that they refer to as ‘Kurosawa’s implied, as in The Big Headed Boy…, during which several village kids village’, a nod to the late filmmaker, but the film itself is quite free accuse the filmmakers of a ‘bourgeois’ practice, or made more explicit from being tethered down to film history. A film about a film, it leaves in Dadyaa, by the impacts of economic migration on rural communities. traces of the filmmakers’ awareness of the possible lopsided power I feel lucky to see a generation of artists and filmmakers like Pooja of the camera. Many children audition, including a group of girls and Bibhusan, as well as others like Maryam Tafakory, Payal Kapadia, who don’t want to be left out of the curious on-goings. They finally Subash Thebe Limbu, Rajee Samarasinghe, Suneil Sanzgiri, working meet a boy called Ghantuake (Big-Headed) who claims to have eyes with integrity not only towards their practice but towards the way at the back of his head. After a display of guessing the numbers right they exist in the world. In each of Gurung and Basnet’s films, there without looking at the gesticulations of hands behind him, they are are many different stories intertwining and moving together. And finally convinced that their search has come to an end. Until, that is, then if you zoom out, each of their films also come together as though a shaman arrives and claims the boy is fundamental to a prophecy they are a connected series. It’s almost like watching several bodies of that must be fulfilled: the boy is the key to saving the village and so water; at some point, there’s a confluence of many narratives where he must not leave. A bargain is struck: if the boy passes the shaman’s these currents embrace each other and turn the whole of Gurung and test, then he stays in the village. He passes, and the filmmakers have Basnet’s practice into something else. For me, watching their films has to continue their search. Gurung and Basnet have a habit of leaving always felt like being in the shallows of the confluence of a river and many questions unanswered, asking audiences to pull out their own a sea and feeling the different currents swirling around my feet, a tug meaning and viewers to make the film their own that way. beckoning to me in one direction and then another. I think they have Another of their films, Dadyaa: The Wooddeveloped a special kind of storytelling that Selected by Sohrab Hura, a photographer allows for leakages in narrative and subject peckers of Rotha (2016), is filmed in a village in and artist based in New Delhi, whose solo show Western Nepal called Jumla. The village is matter. The script can’t be contained. at New York’s moma ps1 opens in the autumn

ArtReview

Yuli Yamagata Selected by Oliver Basciano, After spending time in Yuli Yamagata’s studio their way of reconnecting during an ongoing editor-at-large for ArtReview argument over Bolsonaro-era politics, but for in downtown São Paulo, I’m itching to mention a painting to her, but I can’t for the life of me remember who made Yamagata the mundanity of the food imagery took on an ominous it. Walking home, I realised I was thinking of several works by the feel as it mixed with the tenseness of the situation. For the artist, Dutch seventeenth-century artist Abraham Mignon. There’s Still life the food became imbued with a sickness, reflective of the poisonous with Rotting Fruit and Nuts on a Stone Ledge (c. 1670), for example, and Still political times. Other motifs, which include snakes and eyeballs, Life with Fruits, Foliage and Insects (c. 1669). I went to send her a picture, octopi and long tentacular fingers, have a less specific origin, though with a comment about the monstrousness of the compositions – how, are rooted in her teenage cultural diet of anime and Japanese crowded together and in decay, the foodstuffs had become grimly monsters. She took to the latter, ensconced in her bedroom, as a way alien and supernatural. How, I thought, a similar macabre spirit of navigating a typically mixed-race feeling of unmoored identity: permeated her work. Yamagata however had messaged me in the not looking Japanese enough, she says, among her mother’s family, meantime. She had sent a MikuMikuDance gif, the Japanese freeware but sticking out in the south Brazilian state of Santa Catarina where program designed so users could create their own animated dances she grew up. but increasingly taken up by fetishists. In this example a giant anime Until recently, Yamagata’s textile work has been brightly schoolgirl, in the vein of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), titillates coloured, coded by the palette of the sports Lycra she invariably a city by waving her bare feet across the skyscrapers. For some this uses. As she prepares for another show at Anton Kern, this time in might be sexy, but for most it’s kind of gross and horrifying (which is the main space, in October, that is changing. She will cover the fabric where the allure might stem from of course). That Yamagata’s textile with a ghostly pale paint and will use textiles and other materials sculptures and wall assemblages can encapsulate all these references, that already have a history, either in that they are secondhand, or they yet have little in the way of forebears, is what attracts me. have a longer lineage than the engineered exercise fabric. Thinking In Moon light (2023), for example, shown at a solo exhibition at about time and death, Yamagata says she might call the show Ghosts Anton Kern’s vitrine gallery in New York last September, glazed terra- Don’t Wear Watches. cotta corn on the cob, some of the cobs fragmented, are mounted on a Having taken up art because she dreamed of working at Studio plaster backing. There’s a feeling of decomposition and mould to the Ghibli (though her teachers dismissed cartoons as unserious), she will arrangement, but the work boasts a silk tubular frame, like a sausage also make her first film: an animation featuring a tomato and lettuce in a kimono, which adds an unexpected glitz. It’s a discombobulation who, just married, are involved in a car crash. The premise sounds cute, apparent in the melancholic Corn in butter Ikebana (2023), from the but then she shows me storyboards and it’s anything but – the faceless same show, in which dead flowers emerge from the end of an intact foodstuffs get diced up into a salad as their red and green bodies hit ear of corn. Both corn and flowers sit on a resin approximation of the ground. She also makes ornate chairs, though until now they have a lump of butter, and a sad popped red balloon hangs from one of the been unusable, covered in a bricolage of corn, snakes and limbs, but stems. More obviously seedy is Noite no hotel (vigilia) (Night at the hotel Yamagata is considering creating some so that visitors to the October [surveillance]) from 2021, which I saw that year in her show Insomnia show can sit down to view the film. She talks about Brazilian superstiat Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo. It is a textile collage of Lycra tions around old furniture, how it might be inhabited by the spirit of and velvet in which a woman, with a wig of green hair, clambers over previous owners, and I remember precisely why I thought of Mignon a hotel bed, her limbs slightly out of proportion, inviting bum cheeks during our conversation. Those works were painted as reminders of defined by a thread of cotton stuck onto the canvas surface. the brevity of life, and in Yamagata’s hands mundane images, made Corn became a recurring motif for Yamagata after her parents monstrous or haunted, are likewise imbued with a slice of existenbegan, a few years ago, to send her photos of their lunches. It was tial dread.

Sushi, 2023, mixed media, 141 × 160 × 13 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy the artist and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

February 2024

Yuli Yamagata, Aranha Amarela, 2022, mixed media, 125 × 200 × 100 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy the artist and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

Yuli Yamagata, Insônia, 2021, mixed media, 110 × 106 × 8 cm. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

ArtReview

Yuli Yamagata, Ikebana balão (detail), 2023, mixed media, 140 × 30 × 30 cm. Photo: Ding Musa. Courtesy the artist and Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

February 2024

Dana Kavelina

The Lemberg Machine (still), 2023, video, 53 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

It can’t be that nothing that can be returned (still), 2022, video, 52 min. Courtesy the artist

Ukrainian artist Dana Kavelina revitalises traditional animation as visitors in this constructed position of voyeuristic power, reflect on techniques – puppetry, stop-motion, drawing on paper, masquerade, the spectacle of suffering? Elsewhere, though, her at-times-bone-dry, model sets – in order to consider future technologies. And bodies, tongue-in-cheek humour is refreshing: in a scene from the film There war and historical atrocities. Take The Lemberg Machine (2023), a stop- are no monuments to monuments (2021), the artist leans over, hinging at motion animation loosely based on the 1941 Lviv Pogroms. Kavelina the waist, and props her head between the crotch of a political statue built a collection of scale-model sets in which to shoot a series of frozen in a victorious wave; “It’s very stony,” a narrator comments vignettes that follow a cast of puppet characters. All accompanying in mockumentary style, “perhaps more stony than average.” dialogue is in Russian or Yiddish (with English subtitles). In one Kavelina’s is a decidedly communal practice, which she elevates sequence, a woman dives onto a roaring pyre – her body doesn’t ignite, in displays of her videowork by presenting photographs, prints and but silently disappears in the dancing flames of frayed orange and artefacts preserved from the work’s production phase on walls and in red cotton; a German Einsatzgruppen soldier then fires his gun into glass vitrines. A similar attitude applies to her films, which she will the air and the dusk backdrop parts, like curtains, to reveal a starry often present, and then later amend, suggesting, along the way, that night sky, while other soldiers applaud, whistle, holler. This tug-of- there is no such thing as a ‘finished’ work. One such ‘unfinished’ work, war between plaintive beauty, horror and absurdity is characteristic It can’t be that nothing that can be returned (2022), points to her ambition to carry on working with digitally modelled images. In one scene, an of Kavelina’s work. The viewer, too, must know their part, as Kavelina relates the role advertisement-style voiceover attempts to sell us on a utopian vision: of the witness to that of the perpetrator: “The camera and the torture Ukraine won the war against Russia in 2022; it is now a borderless state chamber took hands and went down one by one,” a narrator crypti- defined by its cities and governed by an ai modelled on Soviet cybercally tells us later on in the film; or in another work, Letter to a Turtledove netic scientist Victor Glushkov. Liberation here is at once euphoric (2020), which combines drawn and painted images with found docu- and disquieting: “trees migrate… the street wants to go outside and mentary footage, we can occasionally make out a naked figure looking become an animal… Sometimes everything suddenly dances.” We right at the lens, two eyes staring up through a fractured pane of explore sites of this strange fantasy: there’s a stack of eyeballs, each glass. In Kyiv she opened The Room of Lyolya Yefremova (2020), where individually frozen in glassy cubes, on a factory conveyor belt; milishe created the living space of a fictional artist who, as indicated by taristic thermal-vision clips – of bugs feeding, pigs asleep in their sty, diaries and letters, committed suicide. Only one visitor was allowed in drone shots of urban society – melt into each other like an overheatat a time, each for an unlimited duration; waiting, therefore, was part ing film reel. This is the vitality of Kavelina’s work: a tactile, almost of the experience of the work. Once you got in, the space was all yours spiritual attention paid to the coexistence of ideas, bodies and techto make sense of: artworks, poems, pictures, nologies in a world in which the worst has Selected by Alexander Leissle, a laptop, clothes on a railing. How might we, already happened. assistant digital editor of ArtReview

February 2024

Thaweechok Phasom

Spirits of the Black Leaves (still), 2023, video, 29 min 59 sec. Courtesy the artist and International Film Festival Rotterdam

In 2021, during his second year in film school, Thaweechok Phasom believe in property) without possessions. The documentary footage shared a poignant childhood memory with me. At around six years concludes (after a little over two minutes) with an image of a mother old, his mother left him after a heated argument with his father, briefly with her child strapped to her back, before transitioning to scenes of retreating to her Tai Yai family on the Myanmar border. Eventually a cornfield in which the unnamed character of the fiction film, which she returned, reconciling with his father. This pivotal incident, along ‘starts’ at this point, works. This character symbolises (for those who with two others, forms the core narrative of Thaweechok’s extraordi- know the director’s inspirations) the Mlabri mother who lost her child nary thesis film, Spirits of the Black Leaves (2023). in the cornfield. The film then unfolds the daily routine of working, A second element unfolded when he encountered the Mlabri, eating, sleeping and dreaming. a nomadic tribe in the mountains of northern Thailand. In particular Throughout Spirits of the Black Leaves the mother undergoes transhe was moved by the story of a young Mlabri mother who, immedi- formative experiences, including confronting a spider’s web filled ately after giving birth, had to venture into the fields to gather corn with wriggling bugs, consuming raw meat, crushing an eggplant, (her sole source of income), which a group of the Mlabri had been facing a loose goat in the twilight and watching national propahired to cultivate. Tragically, her child ceased breathing while cradled ganda news programmes on tv. These scenes echo the painful sense against her chest. These incidents, though disparate, resonate with of powerlessness that Thaweechok generates through (ironically) each other, reflecting the profound emotions within Thaweechok and powerful affection-images: a tamed flock of scruffy goats awaiting amid the evolving political landscape of Thailand. slaughter, a burning barn, an unwanted, unproductive eggplant tree These encounters compelled Thaweechok to confront feelings and a circular halo around the main character’s head as she fixates on of shame and guilt, acknowledging both his own impotence when it the tv. came to action and, because of that, his own complicity in allowing The director then gradually has his character break the fourth these emotions to dissipate over time. In short, he saw himself as wall and be removed from her Mlabri character role. She appears in a powerless bystander to these narratives, unable to react effectively a different, more visibly modern room. She studies herself in front of and ultimately relegating himself to their backgrounds. a mirror before walking out of shot; when she returns she’s wearing Spirits of the Black Leaves begins with a seemingly anthropological different clothes. She becomes ‘the actress’, witnessing another documentary about the Mlabri, known as ‘Phi Tong Luang’ (Yellow actress portraying the Mlabri mother. Then the screen succumbs to a Leaf Spirit) in Thai. This term refers to the Mlabri’s lifestyle – they haunting embrace, swallowed by a colony of dancing shadows, flickare hunter-gatherers who camp in huts made ering lights, electric noises, the eerie hum of Selected by Taiki Sakpisit, of yellowing banana leaves and move through television static and the whispers of nocturnal a filmmaker and artist based in Bangkok, insects – a descent into the abyss. the forest like spirits and (because they don’t whose work focuses on sociopolitical tensions in Thailand

ArtReview

Spirits of the Black Leaves (stills), 2023, video, 29 min 59 sec. Courtesy the artist and International Film Festival Rotterdam

February 2024

Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer Selected by Edgar Calel, a Maya Kaqchikel artist of art? Let’s look at Gabriel’s work with a Gabriel lives in Guatemala City and is an archibased in Guatemala, whose art explores Indigenous tree called palo de Campeche. The palo de tect and artist, a teacher, and now he has also experience through installations and other works that Campeche has an intense colour. Gabriel become involved in curating. So there is a reference cosmology, spiritual traditions and ceremonies blend of different types of information that places its bark on a linen cloth treated with he manages. We met in 2008, when we were showing work in an exhi- chlorine, and in addition to generating a weight and presence, the bition that was organised for emerging artists. He showed a work that bark leaves its colour on the cloth. The cloth enables two types of was a text on a ceiling that read: ‘The sky is yours’. This was the begin- intervention, one is the colour left behind and the other is the whitning of our dialogue, where we asked: What is the sky? Is it an inven- ening of that colour. So there is a duality of simultaneous creative tion, an abstraction and a promise too? processes, processes that have an impact as much on the canvas itself as Currently Gabriel is working on a series of drawings focusing on on people’s perceptions: at the very moment the idea goes, it’s already geometry and architecture that he began developing during a resi- coming back. dency at the Delfina Foundation in London last year. The drawings In terms of curating, Gabriel has two parallel projects: one to are based on the building where these works will be exhibited, the exhibit his work in Panama and the other to curate something there Museum of Contemporary Art, Panama, in 2024. They are drawings too. So sometimes we end up discussing how, through this process related to a sacred geometry and to angles that allow certain stimuli of curating, an artist’s works are configured alongside the curator’s to be generated. I find this work very interesting, alongside his other own research. We also found ourselves, a few days ago, talking about a project called Un viaje a Marte (A voyage to Mars). He told me that works, which have more to do with the essence of natural pigments. There is a pigment called indigo. The function of this colour within he had travelled to Mars by taking a substance. The idea behind this contexts such as the Indigenous peoples of Guatemala is related to trip was to get to Mars before Elon Musk. He went on to tell me that healing – curing headaches, for example: you take the colour and rub his idea for this project was to show it as a film, a video art piece, like it on your forehead. This relieves stress and internal pains. However, a science fiction. due to colonial processes, indigo lost its essence and is now just a So Gabriel’s works are very dynamic and diverse. And this helps pigment, without the healing function. The dialogue that I engaged me think of the diversity of needs that we have as creators. Somein with Gabriel based on these works was about how the person can be times there is a personal message. Sometimes there is a message tied the medium, and the colour the artist. It is not the artist who creates; to the community and sometimes there is a message that is connected to the situation and context in which we live. it is the colour. What other processes can we investigate that involve the material, Translated from the Spanish by ArtReview the medium and the way they collaborate in the making of a work

Oropendulos (new moon and full moon), 2023, two digital prints on cotton paper of palo de Campeche dye and clorine on linen, 22 × 27 cm each. Photo: Margo Porres. Courtesy the artist and Galería Extra, Guatemala City

ArtReview

Eoghan Ryan

Circle A, 2023, performance documentation. Photo: Alessandro Sala. Courtesy the artist and Centrale Fies, Dro

Eoghan Ryan makes works about things that break his heart. And, in an act that is cyclically repeated, with a script provided by religions and turn, his art makes my heart swell. Aesthetically it evokes extremes: governments, as well as pop culture.Eoghan is currently working on a speed, intensity and ecstasy. But it is not only about the run; it is also solo show for the Edith-Russ-Haus in Oldenburg, Germany, to be titled about the fall and everything that comes after the fall. Eoghan engages Against the Day, with a body of work that has arisen out of anarchy: as in, moving image, installation, performance, puppetry, drawing, text and what does anarchy mean, and how does it exist today? A previous perforcollage to think about emergence and provisionality: how shifting mance work, Circle A (2023), saw performers improvising stomping in states of being and new possibilities might arise from the smallest as formation around an oversize anarchy symbol on the floor; a new videomuch as the most bombastic of gestures. All of his works are infused work bearing the same title explores anarchy as language and idea, with attachment and solidarity with the marginalised, the unspeak- cutting between a fire festival in Spain and recorded interjections from able and the left-behind. Murray Bookchin, author of Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism (1995). His video A Sod State (2021–22) flips quickly between news footage, In the experience of Eoghan’s work, what I love most is a sense of interviews and newspaper clippings on The Troubles in Northern Ire- empathy and connection that is so intense that even the artist himself land, interspersed with songs and the musings of a puppet of a boy who sometimes doesn’t seem to know how to control it. I believe it is this deep closeness, and that which he shares with is wearing a pig mask. “Whatever side you’re on,” Selected by Mire Lee, an artist he taunts, “you only know half the story.” It gives the things he makes his art with, that gives the known for her large kinetic sculptures. the political struggle a sense of mythic tragedy, work its emotional power. She is based between Seoul and Amsterdam

February 2024

ArtReview

E0ghan Ryan, A Sod State (still), 2021–22, 4k /uhd video, 22 min. Courtesy the artist

February 2024

Derek Tumala

A transparent cube confining a glowing yellow orb is suspended above or very Western context,” said Tumala in the same lecture, alluding to endless sand dunes. To one side, a few green plants that sprout from how this discourse affects local perceptions. “When we experience so the sand lead to a reflective black column jutting into the ominous much heat and typhoons here, it feels like it’s normal because we’re in grey sky; just ahead, a half-buried billboard reads, in Tagalog, ang the Philippines, but it’s not true. We shouldn’t be experiencing this.” krisis ng klima ay krisis ng kultura (‘The crisis of climate is The country’s proximity to the equator, the artist is saying, can seem a crisis of culture’). This desolate environment is init (‘hot’), one of to normalise extreme heat, but in actuality the rising temperatures the seven digital biomes that comprise Derek Tumala’s web appli- are abnormal. Tumala’s artistic practice, ranging from virtual reality cation project Porensiko ng Klimang Tropikal (Tropical Climate Forensics) and video, to installation, sculpture, drawing and photography, is an (2022). In making the work, Tumala drew on meteorological and seis- attempt at articulating the effects of climate devastation in a specific mographic archives alongside current forecasts of the Philippine geographical context, advocating for a decolonial ecology. climate. As the first artist in residence at the Manila Observatory at In Kayamanan ng Pilipinas (Treasures of the Philippines, 2020–21), the Ateneo de Manila University, Tumala collaborated with scientists live atmospheric conditions of Manila are transmitted from an online to trace the climate crisis’s impact on the Philippines and visualise weather program to a digital projection of a vibrant scene of native the environmental destruction that would result. In Tropical Climate flora and fauna. Weather shifts in real life are reflected in the projecForensics the artist uses a digital-3d style to portray what he described, tion and thus illustrate the conditions of Manila’s weather to audiin a 2022 lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design ences indoors (where it was commissioned for the city’s sm Mega in Manila, as the “climate crisis in the local context”. Tower) or abroad (like in London’s Delfina Foundation). Similarly, for The landing page of Tropical Climate Forensics renders each biome the papier-mâché sculpture titled What Looks Like Burning Is Not Really as miniature icons floating on a slowly rotating white grid suspended Burnt (2023), Tumala creates a model of a mountain used for farming in the sky. Click on the swirling vortex icon and you’re dropped into in Palawan, where its bottom portion remains lush and green while the eye of a storm in bagyo (‘typhoon’), where palm trees have toppled the top portion is singed black – to represent the precolonial practice over and buildings are flooded. Entering the jiggling blue cube tubig of uphill burning called kaingin. The Spanish condemned this prac(‘water’), you encounter an audiovisual poem titled ‘Uncertain Sea tice, and to this day it is considered environmentally destructive; Without Horizon’ (2021), by Ecuadorian writer Maria Rocío Cardoso however, when controlled, it nourishes the soil for crop cultivation. Arias, which you can hear in the original Spanish, or translated into Tumala here attempts to challenge the inherently Eurocentric notion English or Tagalog, set over a dark and foreboding seascape. In of environmental care the Philippines has inherited by illustrating obserbatoryo, Tumala renders the Manila Observatory, founded the sustainability of Indigenous practices that work holistically with by the Jesuits in 1865, to remind the viewer of the institution’s colo- the land, rather than exploitatively. nial heritage and framework while simultaneously stressing its In 2016 the artist initiated a collective called steam/Projects that importance to local research. Tumala choses to focus on these biomes brings together artists who also operate in other disciplines – such as – along with komunidad (‘community’), gubat (‘forest’) and software engineering, virtual landscape design and computer science bulkan (‘volcano’) – as the key sites of environmental vulnerability in – to encourage multidisciplinary practice. Throughout Tumala’s varied practice is a series of seemingly disparate crossovers – art and the Philippines. Tumala, hailing from an archipelago that rests on the Pacific’s science, digital and organic, local and global, personal and collabotectonic ‘Ring of Fire’, challenges the seemingly ‘universal’ narra- rative. The resulting artworks are often visually elegant, playing tive of environmental devastation: “The idea of the climate crisis is between subtlety and vivacity, to draw the viewer in and inspire a always about fossil fuels, melting ice, heatbroader, geographically decentralised notion Selected by Marv Recinto, waves, which is a very Global North context of the climate catastrophe. managing editor of ArtReview

ArtReview

Kayamanan ng Filipinas (Treasures of the Philippines) (still), 2020–21, single-channel 4k video

Porensiko ng Klimang Tropikal (Tropical Climate Forensics) (stills), 2022, web application

February 2024

Derek Tumala, What Looks Like Burning Is Not Really Burnt (detail), 2023, papier-mâché, 61 × 77 × 37 cm. Courtesy the artist and Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila

Derek Tumala, Porensiko ng Klimang Tropikal (Tropical Climate Forensics) (still), 2022, web application. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Farzaneh Forouzesh Selected by Shirin Neshat, mother’s injuries are handed down to the Farzaneh Forouzesh, born in 1989, studied an artist working in film, video and photography. daughter. The mother’s failures are paid for by music at Tehran University of Arts, majoring in She lives in New York the Iranian instrument tar, but has ultimately the daughter.” Farzaneh points to the pressures turned to filmmaking while continuing her musical practice. In 2022 on generations of Iranian women to catalyse change for the better, for Farzaneh wrote, directed and produced her first work, And Her Sleeve their descendants. Wet with Tears. This 20-minute film is a beautifully shot, exquisitely Farzaneh’s unique artistic and cinematic approach is indicative of composed, layered and moving debut by a female artist who dares to a new generation of Iranian women artists and filmmakers who, while approach the womanhood of her native country across generations, fully engaged in exploring the plight of Iranian women struggling exploring the social constraints applied to women’s desires. While between traditional and religious suppressions, refuse to reiterate skilfully incorporating moments of social realism, Farzaneh seduces the stereotype about Iranian women as ‘victims’. Through thoughtus with a highly stylised and surrealistic approach to the art of story- provoking narrative and use of symbolism, Farzaneh takes us deeper telling, borrowing from her culture’s rich poetic tradition, as well as into witnessing moments of Iranian women’s states of joy, boredom, international masters of filmmaking including Ingmar Bergman and longing and sorrows.Navigating between timelessness and contempoSergei Parajanov. rary time, tradition and modernity, realism and surrealism, Farzaneh The film fits together, like a puzzle, private moments in various leans on the power of abstraction and enigma to build a narrative that women’s lives: having makeup put on, grieving over the dead, while politically charged is also deeply poetic. Ultimately we are left communing in a bathhouse, cooking. In one scene, a mother and with an impression that Iranian women’s oppression and suffering daughter sit watching Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), capturing a have led to the creation of an atmosphere that is indicative of an undestriking moment in which the character Eva tells her mother: “The niable and unstoppable force towards autonomy and emancipation.

And Her Sleeve Wet with Tears (stills), 2023, film, 20 min

February 2024

Farzaneh Forouzesh, And Her Sleeve Wet with Tears (stills), 2023, film, 20 min all images Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Hi`ên Hoàng

Hiền Hoàng, Across the Ocean, 2023 (installation view, Les Rencontres d’Arles)

Soy sauce oozes from a woman’s nipple. A pair of pinching fingers attached to her arms, torso and legs, and she begins to wet circles of guides its flow into a half-filled bottle of Kikkoman. Her pores are rice paper, wrapping the moistened semitranslucent sheets all over saturated and stained sepia by the brown liquid. If you are what you her body, and eventually around her head until it looks as though eat, then Hamburg-based Vietnamese artist Hiền Hoàng’s series Asia she’s in danger of suffocation. Bistro (2019–) cannibalises that adage, presenting photographs that These are not just straightforward erotically charged foodie images. suggest that you could also eat what you are. Other photographs in Hoàng engages in a kind of critical self-fetishisation that draws from the series include a block of firm tofu sprouting course black hairs; her experiences of racial abuse and sexual stereotyping while living in a fillet of raw salmon, the flesh of which is cut open to reveal two Germany. And though Asia Bistro and Made in Rice were created in reglaring human eyes; a pair of chopsticks gripping a disembodied sponse to her own encounters, it’s an experience shared by many women tongue that could also pass for a slab of mentaiko; and a moistened of Asian ethnicities and heritage living in the West. Hoàng uses food sheet of rice paper pulled taut over labia. items in Asia Bistro (titled after a pan-Asian restaurant in Berlin the Hoàng presented a selection of this series at the annual photog- artist visited as a student) to demonstrate the perceived interchangeraphy festival Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2023, for which she reconsti- ability of Asian cultures, as well as conflicting attitudes when it comes tuted the images as distorted rectangular sculptures made of Plexiglas to accepting the cuisines and yet not the people. She consolidates these and installed some on a wooden scaffold, others on the floor, balanced ideas with photos whose aesthetics tread a wafer-thin line between the precariously atop empty Kikkoman bottles. Crumpled and deformed, appealing and the abject, foregrounding Asian bodies as consumables the photographs are warped so that they’re sometimes pockmarked, that are at once seen as sexually desired and repulsive, and at the same and sometimes acned with variously sized plastic pustules. The result time socially rejected. In the latest iteration of Hoàng’s works at Arles, are works that simultaneously convey a sense of fragility and aggres- the twisted and distorted photographs feel angry, as though in the sion. The installation, titled Across the Ocean, also included an excerpt physical manipulation of her own prints the artist is continuing to from the video performance Made in Rice (2021) projected onto a screen: process the psychological and emotional impact of such experiences. a woman wearing an emerald-green unitard sits cross-legged in front When I look at Asia Bistro I’m reminded of the time an ex-housemate leaned over me in the kitchen and asked: “Does of a row of potted orchids, behind which is a backSelected by Fi Churchman, drop of a floating sampan boat; blobs of bao are your cunt taste like soy sauce?” And I’m angry too. senior editor of ArtReview

February 2024

Hiền Hoàng, Rhey ran’t ro rhe R! (detail), 2019, inkjet print, 45 × 30 cm, from the Asia Bistro series, 2019–ongoing

Hiền Hoàng, Rhey ran’t ro rhe R!, 2019, uv print on Plexiglas, soy sauce bottles, 60 × 40 × 15 cm, from the Asia Bistro series, 2019–ongoing

ArtReview

Hiền Hoàng, Made in Rice (still), 2021, three-channel performance video, 19 min

Hiền Hoàng, Smooth Silk, 2023, uv print on Plexiglas, soy sauce bottles, 60 × 90 × 15 cm, from the Asia Bistro series, 2019–

February 2024

Hiền Hoàng, Pink puddings or be friendly, 2021, inkjet print, 45 × 30 cm, from the Asia Bistro series, 2019– all images Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Future Greats

Nabil Harb, Dani, 2019, b/w photograph. Courtesy the artist

Yuli Yamagata, Chorume, 2021, mixed media, 37 × 164 × 168. Photo: Eduardo Ortega. Courtesy Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo & Rio de Janeiro

Thaweechok Phasom, Spirits of the Black Leaves (still), 2023, video, 29 min 59 sec. Courtesy the artist and International Film Festival Rotterdam

Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet, The Big-Headed Boy, Shamans & Samurais (still), 2020, film, 38 min. Courtesy the artists Dana Kavelina, Room of Lyolya Efremova (detail), 2020, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

Nabil Harb

Yuli Yamagata

Dana Kavelina

is a Palestinian-American artist born and raised in Central Florida. He completed his mfa in photography at Yale University, New Haven, in 2021. He won the nlgja’s Excellence in Photojournalism Award in 2023.

is a multidisciplinary artist born in São Paulo, where she continues to live and work. She obtained her bfa from the University of São Paulo in 2015. An exhibition of her work will open at Anton Kern Gallery in New York in October.

works with animation and video, installation, painting and graphics. She graduated from the Department of Graphics at the National Technical University of Ukraine in Kyiv and is now based in Berlin. Her feature film It Can’t Be That Nothing That Can Be Returned (2022) was shown at the bfi London Film Festival in 2023.

Pooja Gurung and Bibhusan Basnet are artists with a joint practice in film and visual art, based in Kathmandu. Their most recent short film, The Big Headed Boy, Shamans & Samurais (2020), was nominated by Guanajuato International Film Festival for Best Documentary Short Film in 2021.

Thaweechok Phasom is a filmmaker, photographer and film student based in Thailand. His feature film Spirits of the Black Leaves (2023) screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam at the beginning of this year.

February 2024

E0ghan Ryan, A Sod State (still), 2021–22, 4k /uhd video, 22 min. Courtesy the artist

Hiền Hoàng, Made in rice – the yellow room, 2021, still from the performance Made in rice. Performing artist: Moe Gotoda. Courtesy the artist

Farzaneh Forouzesh, And Her Sleeve Wet with Tears (still), 2023, film, 20 min. Courtesy the artist

Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer Featuring Eduardo Santiago, Drawings for the temple series, 2024, ink and colour pencil on paper, 22 × 28 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galería Extra, Guatemala City

Derek Tumala, Porensiko ng Klimang Tropikal (Tropical Climate Forensics) (still), 2022, web application. Courtesy the artist

Gabriel Rodríguez Pellecer

Derek Tumala

Farzaneh Forouzesh

is an artist, curator and educator based in Guatemala City. He trained as an architect at Universidad Rafael Landívar, Guatemala City. Later this year, mac Panamá will host Rodríguez Pellecer’s first institutional exhibition.

is a visual artist based in Manila working with emerging technologies, the moving image, industrial materials and objects. He earned his bfa from Manila’s University of Santo Tomas in 2006. He is presenting a new installation, titled a warm orange coloured liquid, in February as part of Art Fair Philippines.

is an Iranian filmmaker, film critic, translator and musician. She obtained a music degree from Tehran University of Arts. In 2022 she debuted as writer, producer and director with the short film And her sleeve wet with tears.

Eoghan Ryan

is a multimedia artist from Vietnam, currently living in Hamburg and working with photography, installation, performance, film, vr and object art. She has a master’s degree in photography and design from haw Hamburg. This year she will be included in PhotoIreland, Dublin; Fotodok, Utrecht; and Manifesta 15 Barcelona.

is an Irish artist based between Amsterdam and Brussels who works in film and video installation, performance, puppetry and collage. He earned his mfa from Goldsmiths in 2012. In 2023 he was awarded a media art grant by the Foundation of Lower Saxony.

Hiền Hoàng

ArtReview

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Into an exquisite sculpture 71

Guest Relations Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai 4 November – 28 April Comprising works by more than 30 artists and curated so as to reflect the architectural structure and layout – lobby, room and corridor – of a hotel building, Guest Relations excavates sociopolitical relations that are found in and developed alongside infrastructures of contemporary hospitality. Given this, it’s something of a shock, on entering the show, immediately to encounter an empty front desk. This vacant reception is captured in a large-format photograph from Lamya Gargash’s Familial series (2009), which documents budget hotels in Deira, these days part of Dubai’s old town. Covered in cheap marble with dusty corners, the depicted place is decorated with a sign listing emergency fire contacts, an old-fashioned five-dial world clock (alongside a single-dial local one) and a uae flag, all of it watched over by a trinity of Emirati leaders, including Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan (former president of the uae) and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum (ruler of Dubai), mounted in plastic frames. Brown, beige and slightly grubby, it’s an image that disperses the mirage of Dubai’s opulent comfort. What remains is an abject, liminal space – gesturing between arrival and departure, migration and rest, and perhaps reception and interrogation (hotels are another site at which your passport gets checked) – built to provide basic shelter rather than the type of ‘leisure’ marketed by fashionable hotels today. We are reminded that there are limits to both service and welcome. During the course of the exhibition, the hospitality industry is reconsidered as a site of modernisation, nation-building, imperial control and menial labour. It is also a space for rumination on hotels and other milieus of service – aeroplanes, cruise ships and the internet – as marginal, transitory social spaces telling stories of migration, and as precarious places of geopolitical tension. Opening less than a month after the outbreak of the Israel–Gaza war, the show and its thematics are inevitably shrouded in a layer of irony, horror and prophecy. For an exhibition about an industry supported by service and labour, human bodies feel eerily absent, and we’re reminded of that by Mati Jhurry and Nabla Yahya’s reconstruction of an empty Emirates crew-rest compartment, in which the warmth of the workers’ missing

bodies seems to linger. The installation forms a part of Jhurry’s larger performance piece Lavatory videos from the archive of ‘Emirates staff No. 460956’ (2023) – for which Jhurry worked as an Emirates crewmember on a three-year contract and secretly filmed themself in plane lavatories announcing the date, time and flight number of each flight they served. The structure – a patchy, skeletal shell of the cabin, reproduced from memory – hangs from the ceiling of the gallery like the remains of a sea creature or a lost shipping container; its monstrous size contrasts with its function – to conceal resting crew from passenger view. Perhaps a precedent to Jhurry’s performance, across the room is Sophie Calle’s The Hotel, Room 44 (1981–83). For this, Calle worked as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel, where she would rummage through each guest’s personal items – their lingerie, medicine and diaries – and document them with a voyeuristic zeal. The resulting photographic diptychs resemble forensic records and give the hotel workers the intrusive presence and agency that seem absent in Jhurry and Yahya’s work. Facing each other almost 40 years apart, the two works collectively offer up a dystopian prospect in which providers of hospitality and those receiving it are increasingly engaged in a battle of who is surveilling whom (or who is being lulled into a false sense of security). Discussing the ethics of hospitality, philosopher Jacques Derrida notes the relationship between the words hospitality and hostility – both derived from their Latin root ‘hostis’, denoting a stranger – which in turn points to the thin line between a guest and an enemy. In this vein guests are potential threats, to be kept under surveillance or hostage. Ala Younis’s new work Double-Sided Mirrors (2023) takes the shape of a chandelier found in Baghdad’s Al Rasheed Hotel – built in 1982 to host the seventh summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (later relocated to New Delhi because of the Iran–Iraq War) – which was rumoured to have two-way mirrors, among other surveillance tools, to spy on foreign journalists reporting on the Gulf War during the 1990s. Through the chandelier’s kaleidoscopic crystal prisms, fragmentary news images of the hotel’s interiors, detained journalists, countersurveillance devices and military attacks

facing page, top Sung Tieu, Moving Target Shadow Detection (still), 2022, hd animation and sound, 18 min 56 sec. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Beirut & Hamburg

appear behind this dazzling piece of modernist decor, recasting the hotel as an ideological as well as military battlefield. Sung Tieu’s video Moving Target Shadow Detection (2022) takes alternating perspectives of cctv cameras and a drone panning the corridors and rooms inside Hotel Nacional de Cuba, where us and Canadian embassy staff reported the first cases of what came to be called Havana Syndrome, a possibly psychogenic set of symptoms including dizziness, nausea and memory loss. Here hotels are claustrophobic sites of terror, international espionage and warfare, where both the guests and the hosts are in a state of mutual suspicion and paranoia. Ambiguity and unease haunt the rest of the show. With a title taken from the lyrics of a Leonard Cohen song, Michael Rakowitz’s video essay I’m good at love, I’m good at hate, it’s in between I freeze (2023) negotiates the fraught relationship of welcome and rejection. In the video, Rakowitz reads a fan letter he wrote to Cohen in 2015, in which he attempted to resolve the contradiction between Cohen’s humanistic words and his support of Israel’s military expansion (the singer performed for Israeli soldiers on various military bases during the 1973 Arab–Israeli War). And in 2009, a performance by Cohen scheduled for Ramallah was boycotted and cancelled because of the singer’s prior stance. Reflecting on family history, identities and erasure, Rakowitz asked Cohen for permission to recreate the cancelled concert. The request went unanswered, but after I’m good at love… premiered earlier in 2023, showing Rakowitz performing Cohen’s If It Be Your Will (1984) in an empty theatre, his rights to perform the song were rescinded by Cohen’s estate, presumably for the video essay’s proPalestinian position (the soundtrack of Rakowitz’s performance was subsequently removed, and replaced by the voice of artist Emily Jacir reading excerpts from Edward Said’s 1986 book, After the Last Sky). The work as a whole brings into question the ideology of ownership and sovereignty that underpins notions of universal charity and brotherhood. It’s a discussion that continues to plague the world today in contexts of occupation, genocide, forced displacement and war. Who is a host, who is a guest – and how do you tell them apart? Yuwen Jiang

facing page, bottom Ala Younis, Double-Sided Mirrors (detail), 2023, resin, glass, crystal prisms, plastic, paper and metal. Courtesy the artist

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February 2024

Pippa Garner Act Like You Know Me White Columns, New York 3 November – 16 December In 1969 Pippa Garner – then Philip Garner, a student at Los Angeles’s esteemed ArtCenter – debuted her final project for a course in transportation design. Kar-Mann (Half Human Half Car) (1969) fused the front of a model Volkswagen with a naked man’s sculpted lower half. The chimeric figure had a leg lifted as if he were preparing to mark his territory; a map of Detroit, an automobile industry hub, readied itself beneath him. Garner was promptly expelled. The delightfully irreverent sensibility, reconfiguration of human and automotive bodies, and dual eroticisation and critique of cars (and by extension, hypermasculine car culture) characterising Kar-Mann would become throughlines in Garner’s transdisciplinary art. Photographs of the sculpture – in one instance, being quizzically eyed by an elderly man on a neighbourhood stroll – are the earliest works in Act Like You Know Me, a modestly scaled but spirited survey of five decades of Garner’s photographs, drawings and ephemera. The show arrives on the heels of another survey devoted to Garner, at Art Omi in Upstate New York, and the reprint of her Better Living Catalog (1982), which advertised such fictitious ‘absolute necessities for contemporary survival’ as a shower in a can, a proto-Tamagotchi and a blender in a backpack. Garner’s mail-order catalogue pleasurably poked fun at American diy ingenuity while skewering the desire that

capitalism manufactures for nonsensical products; it was sufficiently popular to land her an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1982. Lining a gallery wall, silver gelatin prints mimic the aesthetic conventions of straight product photography with objects set against blank backdrops; each image spotlights one of Garner’s ‘inventions’, such as shoes that physically attach dance partners to one another. A copy of Better Living Catalog is also on hand, set beneath a monitor playing clips from her interview and a 2004 stint on the reality tv show Monster Garage (2002–21). Garner, whose work is embedded in mass media, popular culture and everyday life, has historically operated at the artworld’s peripheries despite her friendships with prominent West Coast artists also interested in the intersection of conceptual art and car culture, like Ed Ruscha and Chris Burden. Her zany inventor persona, and later her embodied exploration of gender, were often not understood to be artworks, and her mass media interventions did not fit neatly into gallery and museum contexts. The exhibition highlights her resourcefulness in transforming car and men’s magazines into alternative exhibition venues. Laid open on a table, Esquire’s November 1974 issue features a photograph of cars traversing a San Francisco freeway; a green Chevrolet drives the wrong way. To make Backwards Car

Un(tit)led (he 2 she), 1995, photograph. Courtesy the artist

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(Golden Gate Bridge) (1974), a kinetic sculpture that Garner convinced Esquire to bankroll, the artist flipped around a used car’s body so the vehicle appeared to drive in reverse: a puckish inversion of automobiles’ – and perhaps consumerism’s – forward flow. Sartorial creations on view include graphic T-shirts – a form of mass media that Garner began working with during the early 2000s – emblazoned with zinger slogans (‘Landfill: Born and Raised’) and Tie Skirt (c. 1980/81), a gender-bending skirt made of striped neckties, here limply encircling a column. For decades, Garner has approached gender and the body as ripe for remixing, reinvention and play, akin to her thinking on cars. ‘I could never get enough pussy so I built one in,’ reads an undated handwritten memo. She began taking black-market oestrogen during the mid-1980s, followed by prescribed hormones and multiple surgeries, which she considers as artistic collaborations. One of the later works on view, Un(tit)led (he 2 she) (1995), is a photograph of her banged-up-car’s license plate, which reads ‘he 2 she’; dmv documentation indicates that her original request for ‘sx chnge’ was rejected as ‘offensive or misleading’. An ongoing, openended project, Garner’s gender-hacking extends into her trans, genderqueer present, and a world that might finally be catching up to her. Cassie Packard

Thea Djordjadze the ceiling of a courtyard Wiels, Brussels 7 October – 7 January The 93-year-old building that houses Wiels used to be a brewery; the institution is named after a beer once brewed there, and plunger-shaped copper vats punctuate the atrium café. The galleries are high-ceilinged, whitewashed, ghosted by modernism and industrialism. That’s evidently enough of a starting point for Thea Djordjadze, whose work has often responded to the historical elements of a given space in a practice that intersects twentieth-century abstract art references and urban detritus, plangent leftovers. Here, across several rooms on one floor, the GeorgianGerman artist combines myriad untitled works into what is effectively one installation. What unites these sculptures and photographs, aside from a downbeat palette of brown, grey and white, is a sense of purposeful withholding. This is most evident in numerous pieces that recast minimalist sculpture as plinth or support. In the opening room, for example, Djordjadze installs a deep, jutting plywood shelf along the length of a big windowed wall, then leaves it empty aside from – resting at one end – an unassuming length of folded, dusty-blue tarpaulin, above which hang some flimsy, mildly bent sheets of polished steel. At the other end,

meanwhile, a small metal shelf fixed above the larger one is also empty. Moving into the room, the viewer meets a long white concrete bier, stranded somewhere between mute object of contemplation and bench; and empty, Cinemascope-dimensioned glass display cases sitting on another plywood box. When you move on to a photograph hung nearby, the pulse likely quickens, until you realise you can’t quite place the brownish elongated dome floating in its grey void: seemingly emitting light, it looks a bit like an antique sconce. The show goes on in this parsimonious, almost funny manner. One of Djordjadze’s glass cases has been roughly swiped with blue paint, as if by a window cleaner with aspirations to abstraction. Nestled under another wall-mounted metal display unit, a diagonally tilted shallow steel box that might hold a book, is a blown-up black-and-white passport-booth photo of a man in 70s-ish sunglasses and a child. Maybe the kid is Djordjadze. Certainly the image, like most everything else here, is presented as reemerging into a present where it doesn’t have much to say and that’s what it’s saying. Further photographs in the next room, framed and with a silvery

oxidised look, equalise different cloudy parts of history: some depict sparse, carefully lit arrangements of geometric objects that might be the same age as the venue (or made and staged by the artist); others antique urns and similarly archaeological-looking artefacts, no labels visible. It feels apropos that the ceiling of a courtyard – a pointed mental tickle of a title – doesn’t progress or self-explicate so much as just continue until it eventually stops, having spoken its dusty foreign language long enough. In the meantime, deeper into the show, more sculptural propositions have appeared: pastelcoloured fragments of plaster laid on the floor and protected by glass cases; three pieces of white-painted wood approximately in the shape of the letter pi, laid on a group of overlapping metal sheets and topped with a sliver of broken glass. Djordjadze arranges all this material with delicacy and a strong feel for how to punctuate yawning silence with recalcitrant event. It’s just enough to keep you moving, and to reach the inverted-modernist conclusion that the artist has prepared: that more, in this case, adds up to less. Martin Herbert

the ceiling of a courtyard, 2023 (installation view). Photo: We Document Art. Courtesy the artist

February 2024

Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America National Gallery Singapore 18 November – 24 March With over 200 works on display, spanning the course of a stuttering twentieth-century modernity, this is something of a sprawling exhibition. Like its subject: the territories that span the eastern and western extremes of the equator (depending, of course, on where you’re starting out from). Within that ambit are narratives that track resistance to European colonialisms (and a support for its opposite: traditional or Indigenous wisdom) and drive towards a form of comparative solidarity that might unite these two seemingly distant regions, an ‘attitude’ that the museum labels ‘tropical’. The ‘attitude’ manifests through three chapters: ‘The Myth of the Lazy Native’; ‘This Earth of Mankind’; and ‘The Subversive’. There’s also a ‘special zone’ called ‘The Library of The Tropics’, which includes an assemblage of books (ranging from novels by Barbara Cartland and Lonely Planet travel guides to art catalogues of work by Gaugin that promote stereotypical imaginaries of the ‘tropics’). Throughout there’s an intriguing tension

between the imagery twentieth-century artists were fighting against and the kinds of imagery they were fighting for. Underlying this is the ambition to place the holdings of a museum primarily dedicated to Southeast Asian art in conversation with the wider world. While that means ‘blockbuster’ works by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Tarsila do Amaral, Paul Gaugin, Latiff Mohidin and a series of interactive sculptures by Lygia Clark, it’s some of the less well known, almost banal-looking objects that have the most subversive edge. What look like archaeological drawings of ruins by the Dutch artist W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp turn out to record the aftermath of a mass suicide at the royal palace of Denpasar in 1906. On seeing the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army land, the men, women and children of the palace ‘charged out’, the men stabbing the women and children to death before allowing themselves to be shot by the invaders. More than 1,800 Balinese died. The aftermath in question is simply the remains of the burned palace. These remains, of course,

Latiff Mohidin, Tumbuhan Tropika (TropicalGrowth), 1968, oil on canvas, 99 × 89 cm. © the artist

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are the kind of objects that end up in European museums, where Nieuwenkamp’s extended collection of Balinese objects was frequently exhibited prior to its acquisition by the National Gallery. But it’s also in works like these, however, that the exhibition’s claim to be telling stories really, and intriguingly, comes to the fore. This focus, on the contingent (contextual) rather than necessary (depicted) histories that surround objects is later picked up in David Medalla’s annotated archive of newspapers from the Philippines, Kumbum Banners (1972), which tries to express what was really going on (behind the headlines) under the Marcos regime. (The title relates to the 108 chambers of a Buddhist Kumbum Stupa, which are arranged as a threedimensional representation of the Buddhist cosmology. There are 108 collages in the full series, 28 are displayed here.) ‘This paper [The Manila Chronicle] has been closed by marcos since martial law was declared’, reads one annotation. ‘The editor and several staff members are now in a military concentration

camp.’ Proof, if you like, that art continues to be a medium of resistance in the postcolonial era. One of the three sections of the exhibition, ‘This Earth of Mankind’, takes its heading from the title of the first volume of Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s ‘Buru Quartet’ (1980–88). In the series, which charts Indonesia’s emergence from various colonial occupations, the author discusses the debates about what language the independence movement should adopt (Malay or Javanese), which was the language of the people and which the language of the elites (more closely aligned with the colonisers). Of course, there is the issue that the texts included in the exhibition (many of a decidedly leftist bent, among them Indonesian artist-activist Semsar Siahaan’s 1988 ‘My Art, “Art of Liberation”’ and Mexican David Alfaro Siqueiros’s 1923 ‘Manifesto of the Union of Technical Workers, Painters and Sculptors’) are all presented in English (in the catalogue that accompanies the show they are presented in their original tongues as well), which is in one sense practical and another sense an indication that all museums are to some extent colonial legacies. It’s presumably to disrupt this sensation that the curators of the show have chosen to

replicate Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi’s celebrated 1968 exhibition design devised for the São Paulo Museum of Art (masp), where paintings were mounted on ‘crystal easels’ (vertical glass panels atop concrete plinths) with caption information (as well as the occasional transit or condition report) on the panel’s reverse. Bo Bardi stated that she had come up with the display ‘to destroy the aura that surrounds a museum’ and to ‘revitalise a painting, liberating it from the role of mummy’, by removing any sense of hierarchy and division in its presentation. The system was withdrawn from masp in 1996 before being reinstated for an exhibition in 2015 (by masp’s director and curator of this year’s Venice Biennale, Adriano Pedrosa). Here, while it performs something akin to Bo Bardi’s stated intentions (in this case, true to the exhibition’s premise, erasing a sense of geographic hierarchy), it comes across as a cultural or art-historical gesture and lacks the true sense of Bo Bardi’s radical ideology (which, if followed through, might logically – if admittedly impractically – require paintings from the entire National Gallery collection to be hung this way). That’s not to say that there are not radical (and humorous) works in the show. A version

of Hélio Oiticica’s take on the cliché of the tropical, Tropicália (1966–67/2023), is installed, with live plants and parrots, amid the palmfronded colonial capitals of Singapore’s former City Hall Chamber. Naeem Mohaiemen’s extraordinary three-channel film Two Meetings and a Funeral (2017), documenting the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement, features a video clip of a speech by Singapore’s first foreign minister, Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, pointing out to delegates at the movement’s 4th Summit (1973) that the only way they can communicate with each other (and thus operate as a movement) is through technologies supplied (and controlled) by aligned countries. Ultimately this exhibition never clearly demonstrates an entanglement between the art of its two geographic poles (which, at best, come across as fellow travellers, while actual entanglements, such as the fact that, during the 1960s, Israeli advisers training Singapore’s armed forces were referred to as Mexicans so as not to upset the city-state’s Islamic neighbours, are avoided), but it does convincingly demonstrate how art can be deployed to subvert and challenge received wisdoms, change narratives and use the local to address the global. In that sense, it’s a timely intervention. Mark Rappolt

Hélio Oiticica, Tropicália, 1966–67/2023 (installation view). Courtesy National Gallery Singapore

February 2024

Matthieu Laurette une rétrospective dérivée (1993–2023) mac val, Vitry-sur-Seine 21 October – 3 March Opening Matthieu Laurette’s first retrospective in his home country is a crt monitor that plays a looped excerpt of a 1990s French talkshow in which the young artist, straight out of art school, explains, straight-faced, to millions of viewers how to eat for free by taking advantage of the money-back guarantees and other marketing strategies of big brands. Titled Money-Back Products (1993–2001), the project started out as a sort of anarcho-capitalist lifestyle experiment that allowed him to survive as a young artist. It is presented here in the various guises it took over the years: a vitrine display of the eligible products that toured around France as an artwork-cuminformation stand; flyers advertising his tour stops and ‘guided tours’ of supermarkets;

a very Jeff Koons-ian hyperrealist lifesize wax sculpture of himself pushing a shopping cart filled to the brim with ‘free’ products; and a slew of press clippings from France and abroad, blown up into posters lining the wall below the monitor, with such killer headlines as ‘King of Freebies teaches canny Scots how to bid bills “au revoir”’. The project is emblematic of Laurette, who for the past 30 years has been operating between the artworld and the real world as a sort of jester figure poking at notions of fame and value (economic, identity, artistic, cultural) in the age of spectacle and unbridled neoliberalism. Laurette’s work could be the love child of conceptualism (and institutional critique), pop art and social sculpture,

The Freebie King, 2001, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Marc Domage. © Adagp, Paris 2023. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

legacies he acknowledges head-on with remakes of iconic works by Joseph Kosuth, Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys, among the many art-historical references present in the show. Infiltrating the media and tv in particular became an artistic pursuit for Laurette, sometimes as an actual guest (he famously starred in a very popular dating show, and sent out ‘vernissage’ card invitations for the show’s scheduled broadcast time), or else as a member of the audience, or as ‘wallpaper’, which involved him appearing in the background of on-theground news reports waving placards such as ‘Guy Debord is so cool!’ Part artwork, part documentation, the placards and the compiled video excerpts are accompanied here by a projection of the first episode of El Gran Trueque

(2000), a tv show he created for Basque television. For this Laurette used a part of the production budget to purchase a car as an initial prize, and invited the public to offer up one of their possessions in exchange, which would become the prize for the following episode. This bartering chain ended grotesquely (and rather quickly) with a set of drinking glasses that was too cheap to trade – an attempt to demonstrate the arbitrary value of money. For Laurette, these ‘infiltrations’ amounted to what he calls ‘irl institutional critique’, reflecting on the power dynamics of society at large by intervening directly in it. As a good jester, Laurette has turned his own retrospective into a conceptual exercise of sorts, as if observing his career from the outside: Untitled (World Map) (1993–) is a giant map on which the artist has pinned all the locations in which he’s ever exhibited; for Selected Works Currently On Display Elsewhere (1993–), he’s displayed pictures of his works in other

concurrent shows on a shelf; meanwhile, largescale views from previous exhibitions hang from the ceiling like billboards advertising his own artistic success. Its title, une rétrospective dérivée, reads as a direct nod to the Situationists’ practice of the dérive, encouraged here by the nonlinear and nonchronological staging of the show, but also to the ‘produit dérivé’, the French term for merchandising. If it is, for Laurette, a way to point to what ends up in the gallery as ‘byproducts’ of the art that happens in the real world, here it also literally translates into a display of actual merch produced for this show in collaboration with a design agency, including flipflops, umbrellas, mousepads and the like, printed with images of his media appearances. If Laurette lost some of his visibility from the 2000s, it’s perhaps to do with his turn away from the media and towards pure institutional critique, shifting his focus to the very structures that conditioned his existence as an artist. Other Countries Pavilion/Citizenship Project (2001–23),

for instance, consists of 112 printed-out letters, presented in a simple grid, sent to the countries not yet represented at the Venice Biennale, candidly offering to act as their representative in exchange for citizenship. Other projects return more directly to economic strategies of survival as an artist: for things (Purchased with funds provided by) (2010–) and demands & supplies (2012–), Laurette gets collectors to buy him stuff and cover his expenses in exchange for an a4 contract, turning the actual financial transactions into framed artworks. These form a crude, necessary commentary on the reality of being an artist in an increasingly financialised market, a reality he’s simultaneously attempting to cheat with delightful irony. Lining another wall is perhaps Laurette’s longest running series, i am an artist (1998–), consisting of the titular statement being written on hotel letterheads during his travels, each iteration reading as a sort of mantra or a ritual – to keep his eye on the prize, as it were. Louise Darblay

i am an artist (Hôtel Costes, Paris, 25 septembre 1998), 1998, pen on hotel stationery, 38 × 29 × 4 cm. © Adagp, Paris 2023. Courtesy the artist

February 2024

Nora Turato not your usual self? Sprüth Magers, Berlin 16 September – 7 November Walking through this exhibition is like thumbing a self-help book written by algorithms… in 1980. Alchemising fragments of language found in everyday experience, but specifically those that read as inner dialogue or pop psychology, the Croatia-born, Amsterdam-based artist’s show features five glossy enamel-painted multipanelled works with text in the artist’s own serif font (designed with Sam de Groot and Kia Tasbihgou) and, behind them, a sitespecific painting that covers the walls. The latter, blanked in places by the gallery windows, becomes clear with a bit of effort – ‘undefine yourself’, it reads in royal blue letters. One would never know that the phrase was handpainted using Turato’s bespoke stencils, and maybe that’s the point. As the statement suggests, this work erases any evidence of the body (and its imperfections). Hung directly on top of this matt-finish wall painting are five high-gloss enamel paintings with texts that read as either opposing or reinforcing voices. The panel nearest the entrance, not yourself? what have you done to yourself? (all works 2023), layers a fine black grid over a caramel-coloured background

with a large, cherry-red circle containing the titular text. The perspectival grid turns the circle into a globe. And as it cinches tighter at the edges, the writing appears to bulge. At the bottom and in lowercase, the answer to the question is another question, ‘what have you done to yourself?’ Here as elsewhere in her work, Turato – a trained graphic designer – uses colour and font to manipulate inflection, adopting multiple but seemingly connected voices to explore meaning and its absence. In not yourself? we are confronted by the loaded language of self-help set amid the cold vernacular of a vintage corporate tech. It’s a confounding experience. Self-help assumes an underlying confusion or suffering while, in contrast, technology positions itself to solve or answer (or at least reorganise) questions. They overlap in their shared goal of fulfilling our perceived needs. In does that make any sense?, a lime green panel with black gridded wormholes and red font, we experience the perplexing proximity of two curves meeting – the initial rounded chute in the foreground, and another tube-y orifice turning sharply off the picture plane. In this and other works, the viewer is

not yourself? what have you done to yourself?, 2023, vitreous enamel on steel (4 parts), 242 × 193 × 3 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Lambda Lambda Lambda, Pristina; Galerie Gregor Staiger, Zürich; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin

ArtReview

caught in the corridor – future fully obscured but seemingly always moving (a comment on modernism perhaps). As well as being formally similar, the five panels each present a symbolic venturing into the unknown and yet familiar depths of what could be the collective mind, but also the psychologically obscure space of an antiquated ‘deep web’. Using an aesthetic mixture of rationality, order (the grid) and high-tech sheen, in relation to somewhat probing personal questions, the artist encourages us to consider questions of where and who are we exactly? Two futile undertakings in the face of imagery that prioritises constant and uncertain transition. Whether these visual codes correspond to distinct voices or whether it’s one voice divided is unclear. Questioning and requestioning, antagonising and affirming, Turato’s words represent the pain and fear inherent to our often-dysfunctional linguistic era (think texting and Twitter/X) – the fear of meaninglessness and the constant search for value, simultaneous states of being innate to the rapidity of online life. As the artist warns at one point, ‘watch your head’. Jasmine Reimer

Erica Eyres Dancing for Dummies C’cap – Centre for Cultural and Artist Practices, Winnipeg 26 August – 8 October Tragicomic desperation underscores Erica Eyres’s paintings, ceramic sculptures and single-channel videos. Though she studied in Glasgow and continues to live there 20 years later, Eyres was born and raised in Winnipeg and often bases her artwork on images and objects from ephemera related to her coming of age during the 1980s and 90s. Her exploration of how her selfhood was constructed, then, attains particular poignancy in this hometown presentation. Vulnerable stares animate five forlorn oil portraits, some originating in ‘before’ images from a vintage beauty manual, others presenting awkward teen poses betraying the clichéd expressions of this transitional age. Based on a 1980s instructional handbook for troubled children, Elizabeth (all works 2023) concentrates pathos in its depictions of acne and oversize teeth, while On the Phone’s presentation of the eponymous adolescent preoccupation – here with corded phone – seems light-years removed from today’s nonstop digital connections. However, it is disconnection – the wistful reality-check that creates a shortfall between private desires and public ideals – that defines Eyres’s fascination with the subjective nature of identity. To this end, glazed stoneware precisely represents everyday period items such as

a signed Hallmark birthday card, an ashtray overflowing with lipstick-stained cigarettes and a bowl of leftover cereal. Well-thumbed books from the Sweet Valley High teen soap series (1994–98) – infamous for narratives of female rivalry and the pursuit of happiness – are creepily depicted. Also represented are books from the ‘For Dummies’ us media franchise, whose dumbed-down self-education manuals were wildly popular during the 1990s, and another reminder of a time when residual postwar euphoria and social mobility were being reversed by neoliberal state and corporate opportunism that flipped social welfare onto the individual. As implied by Eyres’s referencing of kinds of noninstitutional guidance for the young, the decline of civic confidence in 1980s and 90s North America was fertile ground for the hucksters of the human-potential movement and get-rich-quick schemes that entreated people to look better, be obedient, optimise production. Eyres’s focus on this era, informed by the consumerist individualism it produced, sits in an authentically weird conceptual niche that integrates homage, irony and empathy while critiquing our current moment of mainstream self-optimisation. In parts autobiography,

social observation and aesthetic fascination, the show culminates with the video Learning to Dance, a sendup of instructional videos in which Eyres plays all four female characters. Dance instructor Nicole narrates her story of self-empowerment through badly performed dance moves perfected in front of a mirror and whose life-changing qualities she gnomically exalts. As three hapless seminar participants struggle to shake off their own inhibitions and emulate her success, the results establish their own damaged psychological profiles. Informed by the semantics of self-help and the artist’s reading of Lacan for Beginners (1997), and chockful of passive aggression, Learn to Dance is a painfully hilarious performance that hijacks Jacques Lacan’s ‘mirror stage’ theory of self-representation as a cultural probe for the hollow tropes of personal self-realisation. But it is the cruel and absurd inadequacies created by psychologically savvy public relations campaigns of the period, in the video and throughout the show, that anchor these fictions. Eyres’s characters are defined by their obvious failure to conform to cultural ideals and consumerist optimisation, and it is from this very human gap that her work gathers its melodramatically affective impact. Rodney LaTourelle

Building Confidence for Dummies Ashtray (with Cigarette), 2023, glazed stoneware, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

February 2024

Pope.L Hospital South London Gallery 21 November – 11 February Abjection and disaster become a bleak sort of comedy in the hands of Pope.L. Hospital, the American artist’s first solo institutional show in the uk, should have been a (long overdue) celebration of this maverick figure. But the artist’s sudden death in late December now makes his work’s sculptural emphasis on human presence all the more charged, its humour another shade darker. Here, people are absent, and the monuments they have built are always teetering on the verge of collapse. At the South London Gallery’s second space (a converted fire station) Hospital’s apocalyptic tone starts in the wintry postindustrial gloom of the video Small Cup (2008). In some shadowy corner of an empty warehouse, lit by worksite lamps, we see a crudely rendered version of the us Capitol’s

dome, jerry-built in wood and plaster and (but for a few brief shots where we see it upright) toppled over. This symbol of American democracy seems to have been brought down by the chickens and goats that peck and chew at the dry feed with which the model has been coated. It’s a work that evades glib interpretations, even as it sets up the motifs of political, social and (here, more elliptically) racial inequalities, and of decay and entropy, that have coursed through Pope.L’s work for over four decades. They’re themes that continue in the huge sculptural work that occupies the South London Gallery’s main gallery, across the road. Against stuffy, hospital-pink walls looms Eating The Wall Street Journal (Mother Version) (2000–23), a chaotic scaffold of timber like some disintegrating helter-skelter, painted

Small Cup, 2008, video (colour, sound), 12 min 52 sec. © and courtesy the artist

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white and caked in white dust. As though a bizarre freeze-frame animation in real life, the jumble appears to describe the collapse of a tower: erect at the far end and crowned with a white toilet, then in two consecutive stages of its collapse, pitching headlong towards the gallery entrance among the debris. Draped all over this wreckage are copies of the titular mouthpiece of American capitalism, along with (perhaps to add a local reference) copies of the Financial Times. The work, remade various times over two decades (with or without Pope.L’s performance, in which he would sit on the toilet eating the wsj), is a visual poem about capitalism, venality and hubris: fishing rods are affixed to it here and there at jaunty angles, as if leisured types happened to be holidaying amid the ruins. It embodies the

artist’s razor-sharp attention to finding an iconography that might capture our era’s anxieties, without lecturing or didacticising. Race politics are regularly the subject of Pope.L’s works, but while the whiteness of white powder is a reference bound into this scatological takedown of capitalism, Pope.L’s visual absurdism allows his materials to multiply with their own allusions; the white powder of cocaine, drug of choice of the wealthy; of ash and death; even (horrifically) the powdered remains of collapsed buildings and obliterated bodies. Bowls of powder set on shelves around the gallery are labelled ‘Dust, sprinkle at will’. It’s a weird little ritual that resolves nothing, except implicating you, by dirtied fingers, in the calamity staged in the gallery. Positioned along the surrounding walls are sculptures consisting of low benches and long narrow shelves. On two shelves are rows of squarish Cactus Jack bottles, the majority of each row filled either with red or blue liquid,

the occasional bottle empty and lying, anthropomorphically, on its side (Shelf With Cactus Jack Bottles, Shoulder Position [Champ Version], and Shelf With Cactus Jack Bottles, Stomach Position [Killer Version], both 2023). Down the wall are dried stains of the emptied liquid, some pooling in saucers on the floor. Another shelf is pierced through by upturned Buckfast wine bottles, though these appear to emerge from the underside at a different angle to how they entered, as if they were passing through a prism (Shelf With Buckfast Bottles And Saucers [Bit Version], 2023). Gravity, and giving up to it, lying down, giving in, cheap alcohol, all are riddled with connotations of class and austerity. (Buckfast being the British booze of choice for working-class teenagers and broke alcoholics). These piled-up, crisscrossing visual metaphors produce something – through their comic nihilism –equivalent to the state of things today. ‘Hospital’, Pope.L suggests in the exhibition notes, has its root in the Latin for ‘stranger,

foreigner, guest’. There is a lot of physical debility on show here – leaky fluids, bowels, intoxication – but the theme seems to expand here into something bigger, about the disempowering effect of institutions, or of being institutionalised. This art is awkwardly at home here, the aesthetic that of the grimy everyday bursting in. In another unlit gallery at the Fire Station, the ‘white cube’ gives up. You’re handed a torch to go examine, as best you can, 26 framed pieces of what might be a bigger but indecipherable drawing (Space Between The Letter Drawings [slg Version], 2013), hung on a reflective metallic wall. Some are hung face-to; three have wooden stakes protruding from their taped-over fronts. Everything about the work obfuscates, obscures and rebuffs, pointing us outwards to the gallery’s context, to the ‘artworld’ and its etiquettes and protocols, its power in managing the patient known as ‘the artist’; who, in this case, has nevertheless checked out too early. J.J. Charlesworth

Eating The Wall Street Journal (Mother Version), 2000–23, installation. Photo: Andy Stagg. © and courtesy the artist

February 2024

Laure Prouvost Oma-je Remai Modern, Saskatoon 30 June – 28 January Laure Prouvost’s solo show is a selected retrospective of work from the last decade, the French artist’s largest North American show to date, and, as its title suggests, a homage to our relationships with our elders. A womblike accumulation of red curtains leads to a room containing Four For See Beauties (2022), a projected video wherein sea creatures blend, in milky transpositions, with scenes depicting a woman nursing a newborn child. Here are oral satisfactions – the mother sucking a raspberry, the child sucking on her finger like a bonbon – under a soundtrack of slurping mouths and crying string instruments. Meanwhile a cherry-coloured glow emanating from behind the screen recalls how unborn babies experience light, filtered through flesh and blood; a rendition of the reproductive interior, in the key of carnivalesque populism: “Step right in!”, I imagine a fair-barker yelling, “relive the miracle of birth!” Four For See Beauties is great art partly because it manages the improbable, juicing up the most relatable human subject with new life, without getting mired in self-seriousness. This

achievement, within the context of the show, reveals the relative thinness of affect or imagination in works like Here Her Heart Hovers (2023): a pile of sand, topped with campfire wood, accompanied by a conch and a small fertility goddess, and strobe-lit like decorations at a high-school dance. Moving Her (2023) is better. Here, assemblages of bric-a-brac hang from wires attached to a ceiling track, roughly mimicking the room’s perimeter. When an attendant periodically pulls the sculptures through the exhibition, feathers, cds, doilies, twigs, tin cans and spools of thread sparkle in the light of three other videoworks projected on hanging fabric, in which women commune with matriarchs on the rocky French coastline. Assembled en masse, the videos and the hanging sculptures meld into a swarm of deskilled creativity, suggesting that such an energetic, accessible, free-form artistic output might have as much, if not more, value than artworks that conform to traditional ideas of skill and authorship. This implication is forcefully challenged by the presence of Prouvost’s best work here,

End Her Is Story, 2017, hd video installation (colour, sound), 17 min 29 sec (installation view). Courtesy inelcom Contemporary Art Collection, Madrid

ArtReview

Grandma’s Dream (2013), wherein that free play is amplified by rigorous formal structures and singular style. The video (according to the wall label) tells the story of a grandmother who ‘explores her own creativities and desires with humour and sorrow’. It’s easy to miss this important theme in what is also very much a dreamscape of disconnected imagery, unified by pure Prouvostian reverie. With its soundtrack of maudlin whispers, the video carves crystalline art from the rough stone of sentimentality. While Grandma’s Dream plays on a monitor hung on walls painted sizzling pink, the work in the following room is partially shrouded in black; End Her Is Story (2017) pays homage to the artist John Latham, for whom Prouvost once worked. In darkness, visitors see seemingly miscellaneous plinth-borne objects only when they are sporadically illuminated by spotlights, long enough for a person to form a full thought about any one object. The effect here – one keyed to Latham’s own work – is of a mind scattered and dazzled, and dazzled by its own scatteredness. Mitch Speed

Stephen Willats Time Tumbler Victoria Miro, London 22 November – 13 January At the heart of British conceptual artist Stephen Willats’s work is a preoccupation with the networks emerging as part of the integrated global economy of the late twentieth century. There is also a question of how far that term – network – can be reconciled with the other precursory term and alternative way of conceiving of social relations: community. Visitors to this exhibition learn about a particular socially integrated approach that the artist developed and termed ‘Artwork as Social Model’. It involved gathering testimonies from local communities and presenting findings in a new visual language that combined photography, diagrammatic drawings and text. One example is The Compartmentalised Cliff (1977), in which Willats spoke directly to residents of a new tower block in the banlieues of Paris. Testimonies containing hopes, dreams and concerns are used to form an alternative cartography of experience that is superimposed onto photographs of the built environment, with an insistence on the equal significance of both. Mapping these feelings also allowed participants to arrive at possible solutions, which are recorded in the work. Willats’s belief is that art can serve as a sort of node in the wider system, or network, of behaviour. That reflecting the community’s thoughts might precipitate a change of behaviour

and an alteration to the course of history. Could people, who were being treated as economic subjects and consumers by outside forces, circumnavigate them, or at least quietly resist, to forge meaningful relationships and achieve fulfilling lives, as a result of art? The idea might seem fanciful, and the effect of time has also transformed these earlier works and meaningful enquiries into objects of nostalgic charm. This is half of the show’s appeal of course: the sentimentality with which we tend to view the utilitarian aesthetics of a bygone modernity. But observing the evolution of Willats’s career at close range also makes a strong case for a return to systems-based thinking at a smaller, more localised level. In his applied practice, there is an instructive humility and dedication to understanding people that seems to be lacking in so much contemporary art. The second part of the show might explain why. Here we see how the tendency to map behaviour and feeling has become that much more fraught in an age of information technology. In a series of mysterious works titled Omni Directional Search Engine Drawings (2018–22), Willats presents us with possible schemas of interrelationship. The small diagrammatic works of the past have evolved into complex sagas – large and kaleidoscopic, composed of lines, squares, circles, stars, crosses and arrows. These images borrow the

motifs of the office flipchart, rendered to similar effect in ink, pencil and watercolour (hand drawn and using similar materials to those of the office spaces that had also once been the focus of Willats’s work). Loosely based on the mechanisms of the search engine, and some insights into the ways in which ai algorithms function, these images are not replications, however, but more like atavistic and ritualistic mandalas. If there is a better, more accurate way of portraying the digitised web in which we live – one that was just starting to be spun during the 1970s and 80s, but whose complexity has by this point far exceeded the comprehension of normal people – then I don’t know it. In these images is a hopeful attempt to conceptualise a society in which people have become increasingly alienated from the fruits of their labour, whose economic contribution has become abstracted and whose relationships are becoming ever more dependent on communications technology. From one phase to the next, we see various attempts and failures at comprehension – an innocent curiosity in the first instance, that has defaulted to a sense of awe and confusion in the present. Amidst so much incomprehensible exploitation, the will to describe and explain, if only to reveal the irrationality of everything that surrounds us, is profound and vital. Nathalie Olah

Omni Directional Search Engine Drawing No. 9, 2020, watercolour, pencil and ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London & Venice

February 2024

In The Offing Turner Contemporary, Margate 7 October – 14 January There’s duality at the core of Mark Leckey’s latest exhibition, which is split across two of Turner Contemporary’s gallery spaces: one an eerie labyrinth of blackened rooms; the other a bright ‘white cube’ setup. In the former an airbrushed mural by Darren Horton, a local artist specialising in paintwork for cars and motorcycles, depicts a puddle lit up by custom uv lights. Much like a screen, it’s all surface. Any depth is negated by its high-gloss sheen. But as the lighting dims, a puddle becomes an ocean. The horizon, after all, is all about perspective. Inspired by Margate’s seafront, In The Offing takes its title from a nautical term referring to the state of incoming ships as they become visible on the horizon. Leckey assumes a double role as artist and ‘Guest Editor’, inviting other artists and musicians – including Iceboy Violet, Theo Ellison, Ashley Holmes + Seekersinternational, nakaya mossi, Lucy Duncombe and Charlie Osborne – to respond to the term within a sixminute limit. Continuing through the first space, a staggered loop of videos and sound swirls around the gallery’s speakers and screens as if they were fairground teacups. Leckey, who has a monthly show on nts, borrows from the dj’s toolbox, creating something reminiscent of a mixtape. Here, as video and sound lap over each other like tides, so too do feelings of hope and despair. angusraze’s video A Love So Vast It Crushes Like A Mace (2023) sees a young woman write ‘give up’ on a pebble and launch it into the ocean like some kind of magic trick, while Tracey Williams’s

ongoing Lost at Sea Project presents a slideshow of found objects, each lit and enlarged as if they were fossils from the present – a merman, a three-legged horse, a Lego dragon – plastic totems with which we choke our oceans. Hannah Rose Stewart’s miasma/Hotel (2022/23) offers a glimpse into such a future, featuring a cgi version of Blackhaine, the choreographer and rapper, who jolts, squirms and paces around a claustrophobic hotel room while flames ravage the town outside the window. The framed image of an abandoned pier haunts the hotel’s wall as a melancholic nod to futures foreclosed. Leckey’s video dazzleddark (2023), meanwhile, marks the spot where ecstasy becomes unease. It’s a dizzying assault of glitter and high-pitched squeals, as two toy unicorns spin nauseatingly fast under the hypnotic lights of Margate’s famous Dreamland amusement park. Come morning they resurface, dirt-strewn, on the shore, the shiny stars of the night before replaced by grey concrete imitations. It’s familiar territory for Leckey, who has grappled with similar tensions throughout his career: the push and pull of past and future, transcendence and entrapment. The second room stings with the lucidity of a comedown, silent and clinically white. Here a series of paintings by Alessandro Raho exposes the mechanics of desire with glossy depictions of contemporary signifiers – brand logos, streetwear and superfluous consumer goods (like novelty inflatables) – hung opposite a wall of wistful swimming-pool scenes that

In The Offing, 2023 (installation view). Photo: Reece Straw. Courtesy Turner Contemporary, Margate

ArtReview

signal a longing for escape as they look out towards the sea. While these pool paintings are subtly textured and soft in their dusky hues, others approach photorealism in their flatness, a technique used here to highlight artifice. In Raho’s Magic Box & Mickey Mouse (2020), a wizard-robed Fantasia-era Mickey points to a magic set marketed as a ‘deluxe box of tricks’, while another shows a white glove peeling back a red velvet curtain to reveal nothing but blackness. It’s an unforgiving assessment of our time, and recalls the hollow disenchantment of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which he wrote in a nearby shelter: ‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.’ With international wars and a potential recession looming, our current moment is not unlike Eliot’s. Add to this climate crisis, and it’s no wonder younger generations report increasing anxiety about the future. Where Raho’s paintings are given ample space to reverberate, Leckey’s dizzying ‘mixtape’ at times risks losing its parts to the whole, as artists’ voices are rolled into one, experienced not as separate works but as fragments of discontent, drifting together through the abyss. But in a sleight-of-hand typical of Leckey, it is also precisely this quality that captures the multiplicitous nature of the British seaside, and particularly Margate; a shapeshifting, shadowy place in which pleasure and dread are reckless lovers and time is stacked like a wedding cake. With trepidation, In The Offing gleans it all; beneath the neons, burial mounds. Stephanie Gavan

Mark Leckey, dazzleddark, 2023 (production still). © the artist. Courtesy Cabinet, London; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York; and Gladstone Gallery, New York

February 2024

Ali Cherri Dreamless Night gamec, Bergamo 8 October – 14 January At first it felt blurred. Blurred in the way you might experience a dream. ‘It’ is a largescale video installation, on show in Dreamless Night, curated by Alessandro Rabottini and Leonardo Bigazzi. It’s titled The Watchman (all works 2023) and focuses on the life of a young Turkish soldier guarding the border of the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. We watch as he works his shifts, one after another. Nothing really happens. Until a robin crashes into the guardhouse window, deceived by the apparent transparency of the glass. A series of notches on the wall indicate that it is not the first to be taken in. Generally, the distinction between fiction and reality vanishes as the video’s narrative unfolds. And as you attempt to wrap your mind around what is real and what is not, the curators’ decision to place No Man’s Land (Theater Backdrop) – a large, realistically painted fabric that represents the landscape of Cyprus, where the video was shot – at the entrance to the exhibition only adds to that sense of blurriness. The command ‘wake up soldier, open your eyes’ is carved onto the wooden wall of the guardhouse above the window. As for the protagonist, his eyes are at times red and shiny, glassy almost, and lacking focus; at other times they remain closed, sometimes for a long time, as if at rest. The video is, for the most part, shot from an aerial viewpoint, as if to surveil the desolate and dusty landscape, dotted with flat-roofed

houses and sparse vegetation; it comes across as a position of dominance over the land beneath it. We follow the soldier as he buries the robin’s corpse. Along the way we pass a row of withering prickly pear cactuses; these plants, traditionally used in the Mediterranean to delimit property boundaries and create natural barriers, are now dying out. One night the soldier sees lights on the horizon, and again the day after; then he sees a column of marching soldiers. He comes close to them, unarmed. They have gigantic, deadlooking eyes, worn uniforms and stained helmets. One of them hisses something unintelligible to the watchman, and after a couple of lines grinds his teeth into a smile, leaving us in some doubt as to how this all ends. Yet there’s something romantic in the omnipresent horizon line. It’s a place of possibilities, where sleep and wakefulness coexist, and where it is possible to produce other imaginaries, escaping from reality. A reference to earlier ideas, perhaps, such as those of the Romantic writers and artists during the late eighteenth century, for whom that line was a metaphor for the infinite nature of human desire. In the rest of the exhibition, elements of the video have been exploded into rooms that feature, for example, watercolour botanical drawings of prickly pear morphology (We Grow Thorns so Flowers Would Bloom) and an installation of the same plants made of transparent

The Watchman, 2023 (still), video, 26 min. Courtesy the artist; Fondazione In Between Art Film, Rome; and Galerie Imane Farès, Paris

ArtReview

pigmented and very fragile resin (The Prickly Pear Garden). In an enfilade of rooms are Wake up Soldiers, Open Your Eyes, two gigantic sculptures of sleeping soldiers materially worn down by violence. They follow The Seven Soldiers, an installation of seven oversize greenish heads on spikes, their eyes closed, their features lightly sketched in. They evoke war trophies or medieval children’s toy punishments. And children’s toy soldiers. But whether we are looking at plants or people, all represent the ghosts of past violence. Prickly pears were brought to the Mediterranean from South America during the colonial era, while the people bear traces of wounds and trauma from past wars. Once you know that the artist grew up in the shadow of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), there are biographical connections here too, as well as to the more general power of human violence to tear people and nature apart. In this last respect, perhaps the most eloquent work on show is The Dismembered Bird, mirroring the crashed robin; it is a monumental sculptural collage featuring three mudlike sections of a bird (made of clay, sand and pigment) and the head of a stone eagle. This exhibition wants to give its audiences a harrowing sense of fragmentation and pain, and a reminder that violence of any kind inevitably leaves visible traces. You just need to look for them. Mariacarla Molè

Shezad Dawood Leviathan Salisbury Cathedral 28 November – 4 February Suspended like banners above our heads in the nave of Salisbury Cathedral are paintings from Shezad Dawood’s Labanof Cycle (2017), each one depicting the possessions of migrants who died attempting the perilous crossing between Tripoli and Lampedusa. Among the objects dredged from the seabed and catalogued at Milan’s Laboratory of Anthropological and Odontological Forensics (Labanof) are passports, photographs, money, jewellery and small cellophane wraps of soil from abandoned homelands. Screenprinted and painted onto luxurious Fortuny fabrics, Dawood’s sketchlike renderings of these items display a lightness of touch that initially belies their solemnity. Labanof Cycle protests against human indifference towards migrant lives, though in the cathedral an uneasy tension arises between the unnamed persons represented by Dawood’s series and the esteemed bishops and noblemen buried in nearby tombs. With works dispersed throughout the thirteenth-century building, Leviathan continues Dawood’s homonymous multidisciplinary project, which since 2017 has joined the dots between climate change, migration and mental health. In the north transept is AnthropoPangaea (Hapalochlaena lunulata) (2022), a colourful wall-based collage of wools and found fabrics depicting the ancient supercontinent Pangaea. Whereas this suggests an Edenic yearning for

a time before nation-states or the industrial exploitation of nature, the latest episodes of Dawood’s ten-part film series, Leviathan Cycle (2017–), propose a speculative future, considering new strategies for living and working after an unspecified ‘cataclysmic solar event’. In the Morning Chapel, Episode 7: Africana, Ken Bugul & Nemo (2022) combines narration, talking-head interviews and shots of Senegalese coastland to imagine Dakar as a model ‘postcapitalist and decolonial society’, where power has been decentralised and Indigenous values reclaimed. In the Trinity Chapel, Episode 8: Cris, Sandra, Papa & Yasmine (2023) blends lush rainforest imagery, animation and Indigenous Guarani creation narratives to envisage a spiritual and ecological journey through Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. The juxtaposition of Indigenous cosmology and the cathedral’s Christian iconography is striking, evoking the Catholic church’s role in the colonisation of South America. Installed in the magnificent Chapter House, near an original copy of Magna Carta (1215) and interpretive panels explaining the importance of this charter of rights in the evolution of contemporary human rights, is Where do we go now? (2017), a lustrous polychromatic sculpture as open to misinterpretation as the convoluted satire that inspired it. Based on John Sturt’s frontispiece to Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub (1704) – the story itself a complex response to Thomas Hobbes’s

formulation of social-contract theory, Leviathan (1651), wherein the titular biblical beast symbolises the size and power of the state – Dawood’s tableau depicts a ferocious sea monster chasing a barrel that passengers have thrown overboard to distract it from destroying their boat. Replacing eighteenth-century sailors with refugees and a un rescue worker, the artist perplexingly suggests that their vessel represents a ‘right relationship and community’ and the barrel ‘their labour (or “capital”)’. Leviathan’s engagement with themes of migration and climate change chime with the Christian virtues of loving your neighbour and caring for the natural world. But in a society where social and climate justice remain contested notions, selfishness and indifference are stubborn sticking points. This is addressed in the exhibition guide, in which Dawood (a confessed agnostic) asks, ‘How can we find new reserves of empathy and understanding?’ This, and his desire to see ‘a new set of ethical standards established for the world’, lays bare the tensions between religious and humanistic beliefs: the former pointing to a sacred transcendence, the latter placing faith in human reason and ingenuity. With the cathedral more a grand backdrop than a space for meaningful exchange between the works and this spiritually charged context, Dawood’s questions are left hanging. David Trigg

Where do we go now?, 2017, resin and polychromatic paint, 100 × 140 × 80 cm. Photo: Gianmaria De Luca. Courtesy the artist

February 2024

The Reactor The Sunday Painter, London 24 November – 13 January In his memoir, The Reactor: A Book about Grief and Repair (2022), psychoanalyst and author Nick Blackburn writes, ‘I have dreaded to look at the pieces or see how many there are because I know they don’t join up.’ The subject of this memoir is Blackburn’s grief for the death of his father, and the ‘pieces’, here, are presumably a reference to the fragmented structure of his book, begun as a series of notes, which see Blackburn working through his grief via thoughts on literature, art, pop culture and film, all of which are held together by his obsession with watching YouTube videos about the aftereffects of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. The book is the catalyst for this five-artist exhibition. But there are no great public displays of grief here. Instead, visitors move among

works that are more quietly suggestive of those psycho-emotional and physical fragments that are left for the living to make sense of following a death. And, like Blackburn’s memoir, they appear to present methods of processing grief, of the putting back together of pieces. Some of the works, such as Rachel Crowther’s wall-mounted photograph Headquarters ii (all works 2023), depicting locks of brown hair in a sealed plastic bag attached to an aged compliment slip of a hair salon hand-dated ‘27th May ‘93’, obliquely reference acts of mourning. Just as a parent might sentimentally keep a curl of hair from their child’s first haircut, locks might also be saved from the body of a loved one. Preserved in this photograph and with no discernible context given, the wisps of hair

Georges Binda Celeste Alexandrino Ferreira Da Silva, De kære børn (The dear children), 2023, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist

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may or may not be both – an ambiguous marker of a beginning and an end. Sometimes there is an expectation to mourn in a certain way. Facial expressions can be tricky, particularly when shock or extreme emotions manifest as numbness. (In The Reactor, Blackburn notes that it can be ‘much easier not to write about a feeling that feels like nothing’.) Six paintings by Beatrice Lettice Boyle hang in the gallery’s basement space; three portraits (according to their titles) are of footballers Raheem Sterling and Jadon Sancho, and actor Shelley Duvall. Their faces are contorted in anguish, exhaustion or surprise, and read like a visual guide to performing certain emotions when none might be felt at all. Boyle’s other paintings – of worn sneakers

titled Dad (Nike Waffle Racer i, ii and iii) – are also, in a sense, portraits, though pictured in isolation the trainers more keenly mark their wearer’s absence. Amanda Moström’s two sculptures provide unexpected levity. Dangling from the doubleheight ceiling, from a length of wool rope, is what appears to be a giant scrotum made of hundreds of dried dates. Sweetmeat makes me want to laugh, but such humour is simultaneously tamped down by feelings of guilt – a pretty accurate simulation of the conflicting emotions felt during periods of grief – and the work exploits the otherwise solemn context of the exhibition to earn its laughs. Meanwhile, arranged on the floor to the side are four stools, the Sucking Ice series. Each is formed from filled two-litre water bottles zip-tied together and topped with a silverplated bronze seat. Though the stools are unstable and uncomfortable-looking, visitors are invited to perch on them. While, initially,

there’s a visual heavy-handedness to Moström’s sculptures, the impact of these works lies in their ability to evoke grief’s indeterminacies. Moving closer towards a sense of repair, or at least an acknowledgment of its process, George Binda Celeste Alexandrino Ferreira Da Silva’s De kære børn (The dear children) is a small room-shaped installation, the contents of which are almost entirely covered in brown packing tape. It looks like it’s recently housed a hurricane. (Blackburn’s text for the exhibition reads much the same way – a disconnected, flurrying stream-of-consciousness that’s hard to make sense of, save the partial thought: ‘the gale as originating from a conspiracy of household items rattling amongst themselves’). Debris is strewn across the floor, but as it’s all made of cardboard, there isn’t anything of material value here: drawers, clothes, a clock, a vase, picture frames. Partially hidden in one corner, a television set plays footage of a person dragging a cardboard model of a house down various

streets; the model house sits among the ruins of this room. Despite its haphazard appearance, the installation is shrinelike, and the care taken in the making and wrapping of the objects is palpable, as if the painstaking putting-backtogether of the deceased via their belongings were keeping part of them alive. Hung opposite Da Silva’s installation is Patrick H. Jones’s series of ten mixed-media portraits, Self. Each depicts the same figure in three-quarter profile drawn in black, and each is overlaid with a gauze, under and over which have been painted skin-pinks, greys and vibrant blues of varying thickness and intensity, so that in some the figure is only just visible. It’s as though, through iteration, Jones is engaged in a study of rebuilding the self – trying out different shades and hues to see what might most outwardly resemble ‘feeling ok’. Because, after all, the best that can be hoped for is finding a way to patch together the pieces of ourselves – even if they don’t quite join up. Fi Churchman

Patrick H. Jones, Self 9, 2023, acrylic, ink and mixed media on paper, 29 × 23 cm (framed); Self 2, 2023, acrylic, ink and mixed media on paper, 29 × 23 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist

February 2024

Biennale Jogja 17 Titen: Embodied Knowledges, Shifting Grounds Various venues, Yogyakarta 6 October – 25 November Biennale Jogja 17 is spread out over 14 spaces, with major exhibition sites, including village halls, a waste disposal centre and farmland, located around two villages outside of central Yogyakarta, most of which have no climatecontrolled rooms. Navigating this, to put it mildly, is a demanding experience (though I speak as a writer from Singapore, the ‘airconditioned nation’.) On the flipside, the lack of those rarefied comfort-zones of art viewing to which someone like me has become used prioritises bodily modes of knowledge and experience – what can be seen, smelled, heard and felt. At times, though, it’s only the effect of heat on your body that you can feel. To get to this biennial’s more remote locations, we travel in style: a kereta kelinci (‘rabbit train’), a rickety open-air tram typically used for children’s parties. Hopping on and off, we check out artworks scattered around

Bangunjiwo, on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. So far I’ve seen a huge outdoor installation with baskets (Dan Vezentan’s The Rice Collector, 2023) and a restored Javanese house inside which Serbian architect Jelica Jovanović is slapping around some grey paste in a pail. Next, there’s an aerobics performance by village women playing out to an infectious pop song. Written and composed by Arum Dayu in collaboration with these women, it is also the biennial’s earworm of a theme song (Nguri-uri Lemah, whose opening lines translate as ‘Taking care of the land, taking care of the earth’), which will subsequently be played at several official events. After that it’s on to the Bibis Monument, a building originally used by Suharto as his headquarters while fighting Dutch colonial forces (1948–49) and expanded during his brutal New Order dictatorship (1967–98) into a museum celebrating himself. Now it has fallen into disrepair. One of the artworks,

Dan Vezentan, The Rice Collector, 2023, bamboo sticks and found bamboo baskets, 450 × 470 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

After Museum, After History (2023) by Unhistoried, artist-researcher duo Arif Furqan and Reza Kutjh, is a haunting installation bringing together the items – kitchen utensils, table and chairs, a helmet, an old radio, a bicycle – Suharto and his soldiers used into one room and covering them with a thin white cloth. Half-hidden, the objects seem somewhat more… malevolent? At that point there’s a small commotion outside: one of the visitors has sunstroke and is calling a taxi back to the hotel. This edition of the Biennale Jogja has the theme of Titen, a Javanese word for the art (or science?) of reading nature’s signs in order to predict natural disasters. This chimes with the event’s overarching goal to explore forms of knowledge othered by Western methodologies. Another continuous thread of the biennial is the established strategy of forging southto-south alliances to explore affinities and common strategies of artmaking, activism

and community-building. Since 2011, Biennale Jogja’s Equator Project had committed to collaborating with another country located between latitudes 23° n to 23° s, over five editions. In 2023 the project’s definition has moved away from that strict form of geography to mean ‘a point of departure and common platform for “re-reading” the world’, with Eastern Europe and South Asia coming under the spotlight. Despite the former not being part of the Global South, the curators attempt to draw affinities between postsocialist and postcolonial contexts. Just as this comparison has a tendency to feel more or less of a stretch through the course of the biennial, the show as a whole inspires both hope and melancholy. It is filled with inspiring social collectives who operate on the principles of resource-building: from Romania there is an ‘Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life’; from Kathmandu an lgbtq safe space called the DankiniResting Room, set up by Untamable Dankini like a cosy reading room with texts and materials from the actual space; from Jakarta a research group exclusively studying Indonesian

women writers called Ruang Perempuan dan Tulisan; to name but a few. There is a strong presence of feminist voices – whether they are based on intellectual exchange or shared physical labour, fighting the patriarchy or capitalist land-grabbers. Especially moving among them is Fitri dk’s collaboration with a coalition of women from Wadas, a village in central Java, which is opposing ecologically devastating mining operations in the locality. The mixed-media installation, Wadas Lestari (2023), incorporates various elements of the villagers’ ongoing protests. For example, Fitri created a piece of hanging tapestry woven from stagen cloth, fabric strips that are traditionally worn around the waist as corsets. According to the wall text, the women in Wadas have wrapped these cloths around trees as a symbol of protection and to dissuade loggers from chopping them down. Next to the tapestry are batik paintings depicting women weaving – a source of livelihood and an innocuousseeming activity they perform at the village entrance while they watch out for intruders. Printed on one of these batiks is the villagers’

motto: tanah adalah daging, air adalah darah, batu adalah tulang (‘Soil is flesh, water is blood, rock is bone’). But as much as such practices are highlighted, the exhibition is also clear-eyed about the forces such groups are resisting. In Mekh Limbu’s video essay, Mangdem’ma: an invocation for the healing of Adivasi spirits and lands (2022), the mesmerising chants of the scripture of the Yakthung people in Nepal are called upon to repair intergenerational traumas of cultural fragmentation and displacement. But it is a prayer of the broken. The video explores the plight of the Nepali diaspora working as low-wage migrant workers abroad and features protest rallies for Indigenous land rights. Also included are shamanic rituals that culminate in a long invocation for strength and wisdom, among which lines are: “Hey my grandmother God! Give wisdom and knowledge to fight with colonialism, globalisation, capitalism, Brahminism, casteism, sexism, classism, becoming as lightning and earthquake, punish those who encroached and did injustice to the earth.” To that, I add a wistful “Amen”. Adeline Chia

Arum Dayu in collaboration with Kring Ngentak mothers in Bangunjiwo, Asolola (detail), 2023, exercise song and video. Courtesy the artists

February 2024

Ursula Reuter Christiansen Rose Thorn Von Bartha, Copenhagen 4 November – 22 December In Copenhagen’s increasingly shiny Carlsberg City District, German-Danish artist Ursula Reuter Christiansen’s exhibition offers a gladelike pause. While five of the eight paintings hanging in the narrow room feature forest motifs, a handful of ceramic sculptures are installed as abstract (and slightly superfluous) windowsill decorations. Meanwhile, thorny rose branches, painted red and placed like bars in the gallery’s deep-set windows, underline the narrative implications. Sleeping Beauty seems to be the show’s protagonist, and though she’s never unambiguously present as a figure in the paintings here (which appear surprisingly consistent given that they were painted over a 40-year interval), her story pulses through them like blood through a vein. She is named but not seen in Sleeping Beauty (2018), a large, gaudy and unpopulated diptych of majestic cathedrallike architecture overgrown by foliage (as distinct from rosebushes) that might depict her sanctuary. She could be implied by the seemingly female figures recurring in several of the works; she could be the cowled individual hiding – or caught –

in bare thickets amid deep shades of pink, burgundy and purplish dark (Die Träne [The Tear], 2023), or be trapped in the chaotic blackness surrounding a castle-shaped house (Sie will mich zurückhalten [She Wants to Restrain Me], 1983). The Sleeping Beauty in Reuter Christiansen’s work is not adorable, objectified or pacified; princes are pointedly excluded – so emphasises the artist herself in the accompanying text sheet – and nowhere in the painted woods is romance or a saviour suggested; figures, when they appear, are solitary. Redemption or liberation don’t occur by way of a kiss. Rather, redemption and liberation seem to emanate from the persistent act of painting through decades of underrecognition, and the dimensions of Rose Thorn itself suggest as much: even though this is a four-decade show by an octogenarian artist, it’s very small. Now, as with so many other recent and overdue ‘breakthroughs’ bestowed on ageing or even recently deceased female artists, Reuter Christiansen’s practice is finally being more widely celebrated – though the admittedly small selection of

works presented here isn’t the most representative presentation of her pioneering legacy. One could look up her first videowork, 1971’s The Executioner, seen as a key work in early Danish feminist art, for a more hardcore example of her efficiently flipping seemingly idyllic realms of flowers and dresses and feminine caretaking into critique. In Rose Thorn the impression is prettier, appealing to collectors – good-looking paintings neatly framed – but the blushing canvases retain an elevated tone of subversion. Insisting on making roses and dusks and Sleeping Beauties the leading characters in a modest yet appetising gallery show comes off as a confident exclamation point – it’s not unimaginable that the rosy fairytale aesthetic saturating most of the canvases could have been reduced to unambiguous femme romance inclinations by viewers not too long ago. Instead, Reuter Christiansen seems to suggest that when you own and amplify the unthreatening loveliness, poetic melancholy or trivial domestication assigned to you and your gender, it ceases to be a destiny you’ve arrived at passively. Nanna Friis

Rose Thorn – Die Träne, 2023, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 90 × 60 cm. Photo: Davy Denke. Courtesy the artist and Von Bartha, Basel & Copenhagen

ArtReview

Laura Langer Execution / Ejecución Lodos, Mexico City 30 November – 27 January This is a rare painting show for Lodos, a gallery beloved locally for its cerebral and often Germanic offerings usually favouring a more conceptual, oblique approach to art production. Execution / Ejecución, by Buenos Aires-born, Berlin-based Laura Langer, is both her first show at the gallery and in Mexico, and it doesn’t stray far from Lodos’s programme. Only five paintings hang in the tall, narrow gallery. At its centre are the works Execution i–iii (2021–23), hung as a triptych of horizontal large-format canvases covering an entire wall. These are mostly white, vacuum-dotted with glued-on canvas rectangles of oil-painted remains. They are at once depictions of decayed, oxide brown human bones, and also what is left from Homesick, a show presented in 2021 at The Wig in Berlin. That show had three elements: two massive, near-identical paintings of skeletons and a lifesize cardboard labyrinth. Here, Langer has broken up the once orderly bones, cut them into pieces and put them back together; the remnants now pasted on fresh canvas are fairly unrecognisable as objects, put together like non sequiturs – a haphazard logic that soaks through the rest of the show.

On either side of Execution i–iii are presented variations on a prosaic theme: Pee & Glass and Untitled (both 2023). The former is the more complex one: a clear jar half-full of yellow liquid sits atop a white radiator, next to an amber glass sphere filled with air bubbles. The latter is simple emptiness, the same partially yellow jar floating at the centre of a white canvas, slightly askew, its perspective a little wobbly. While bones and skulls can easily lead us to reflections on memento mori, what contemplation might pee in a jar provoke? What is in it for the painter herself? Experimenting with contrasting whites? Variations on golden hues? The intricacies of representing transparency? The works are at once juvenile and completely disorienting – weirdly satisfying, like the easy release they depict. The show’s two highlights hang in odd places. Discharge Painting i (2023) is tucked in a corner, at the very back end of the gallery. This colourful abstract composition is divided horizontally into zones of lilac-white and blurry grey, overlaid with circular gestures in gold, brown, yellow, peach. The canvas was a cleaning rag for Langer, onto which she would wipe off excess oil while painting her ‘proper’ canvases.

In its humble confidence the piece is compelling, the colours working together, its performative half-doneness evocative of its process. The apex of the show (in both senses) is A Violent World (2023), a huge painting hanging above the main entrance door, facing the viewer as one walks out of the gallery. It is a closeup of a rooster, from the chest up, staring from behind chain-link fence with the voided gaze of poultry – menacing and idiotic. The fleshy red folds of his comb and wattle are lovingly rendered, his gold feathers so airy, and yet he appears humanised, able to reflect the dull powerlessness of a trapped existence. In online parlance, ‘he just like me fr’. Langer’s work is obsessive and perplexing: how does it manage to be both literal and cryptic? What is one to do about this group of paintings? A syncopated sentence, put together out of a capricious yet cerebral attitude; an acute awareness of space, both within the paintings and, with her attentive hanging of the pieces, around them; and disparate images sharing only their self-referentiality — picture-making as paint marks on a surface. What is so roiling about them? Is it a rejection of obviousness in a world that prizes relatability and easy translation? How do they puzzle so? Gaby Cepeda

A Violent World, 2023, oil on canvas, 150 × 210 cm. Photo: Ramiro Chaves. Courtesy the artist and Lodos, Mexico City & Cologne

February 2024

Steve McQueen Occupied City Documentary film on general release Memory has been preoccupying Steve McQueen of late. Most of the filmmaker’s work has been set in the past or has explored specific historical events, but the last couple of years have seen him experiment, in several distinct and fascinating ways, with the act of remembering itself. In Sunshine State, a two-screen installation first exhibited at Milan’s Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in 2022, McQueen narrated the story of his father’s narrow escape from murderous racists in Florida during the 1970s, over manipulated footage from 1927’s The Jazz Singer and shots of the active surface of the sun – a half-hour film that played on a loop but with subtle changes to his word choices and delivery each time, gesturing at the instability of secondhand memory. Grenfell (2023), also around 30 minutes long, saw the director’s airborne camera orbit the blackened husk of the titular council block, in which 72 people died in a catastrophic fire in 2017. A lapelgrabbing piece of filmmaking that played like a rhetorical question to British politicians (despite being entirely wordless), it was also an act of commemoration: viewers leaving the auditorium at London’s Serpentine Gallery (where the film was first presented) exited into

a room with the names of the victims inscribed on the wall. Occupied City combines elements of both works – Sunshine State’s disjuncture between soundtrack and image, and Grenfell’s insistence on remembering victims by name – but to less obvious effect. The movie comprises four hours of footage of contemporary Amsterdam accompanied by narrator Melanie Hyams dryly detailing tales of the city and the individuals who lived in it under Nazi occupation – stories that generally end in murder. McQueen clearly intends for us to draw parallels between the two time-periods, especially in terms of state power and how citizens respond to it; to make this easier he sets granular specifics from the past against a generalised present: the shots of Amsterdam are presented without context (though they generally correspond to the places being mentioned in the voiceover), while the narration never deviates from cataloguing the personalised horrors endured during the Occupation, mostly by the city’s Jewish residents. Like the year’s other major Holocaust film – Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which presents the uncanny spectacle of a Nazi family

Steve McQueen, Occupied City (still), 2023, documentary film. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

living next to Auschwitz, going about their lives and ignoring the screams and gunshots that are piercing the air around them – it sets up incongruities between what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing, then demands that we use both senses to actively construe meaning. But where Glazer’s film appears tightly controlled, the presentation of information in Occupied City seems at once impartial – the movie’s sheer length implies countless individual stories, rather than an edited selection – and arbitrary. The visuals leapfrog around the city in apparent random order, the narration jumps backwards and forwards in time, and the sites being spoken of don’t always match the places we’re seeing onscreen. It’s up to us to join the dots. The film’s method is clear from the first scene: footage of someone’s home in Amsterdam, in which a woman goes up and down the stairs to her cellar, is accompanied by Hyams relating how one young Jewish fugitive hid for days on top of a lift, presumably at the same address. This kind of half-rhyme between the narration and the quotidian activity happening onscreen puts a productive twist on Hannah Arendt’s

oft-cited phrase ‘the banality of evil’: here, it’s not so much that evil itself is taking a banal form, but that evil exists amid banal surroundings – surroundings that could easily be our own. This lack of handholding primes us to seek comparisons between our own turbulent era and 1940s Amsterdam – and indeed, some discomfiting parallels are implied, particularly in terms of state power. Even to a viewer accustomed to reports of law-enforcement violence, it’s a shock to watch covid-era scenes of police on horseback dispersing peaceful protesters by threatening, “You are urged to leave the premises… or violence will be used”. Even some of the more benign phenomena that arose out of 2020 pandemic restrictions find antecedents in occupied Amsterdam: the closure of one of the central parks in the 1940s, for instance, led to the oriole and the cuckoo making a reappearance in the city’s ecosystem, while the blackouts and curfews led to a huge spike in general interest in astronomy, the stars being more visible than ever under Occupation. Such grace notes suggest McQueen’s eye is more a poet’s than a philosopher’s: after all, beyond the observation that reduced human activity causes pollution to drop and nature to thrive, how useful is it to compare pandemic lockdowns with the brutalising restrictions of a Nazi occupation? Several stretches of the narration, particularly in the second half, have

to do with resistance to the Nazis; onscreen we variously see Extinction Rebellion demonstrators, antifascist protesters and antilockdown crowds. Under his own self-imposed rubric of impartiality, from behind a camera that appears to document everything, McQueen recuses himself not only from passing judgement on these causes or comparing their legitimacy, but from exploring how, or whether, they relate to each other – let alone to 1940s resistance movements in Western Europe, which, unlike today’s, were conducted at risk of death. The director courts further charges of glibness with some of his editorial choices, several of which involve animal clips. As we hear about German officers disappearing after setting fire to workers’ barracks, we watch a duck vanishing into the water. We hear about a pregnant Jewish woman in hiding; we watch an apparently pregnant cat walking about. We hear about how 50 hungry people broke into a bakery and desperately stole hundreds of loaves; onscreen, pigeons peck mindlessly at a piece of bread. If such shots risk taking the film into John Wilson territory, McQueen flexes his filmmaking muscle shortly after the one-hour mark: accompanied by a wash of Oliver Coates’s haunting score, the camera begins slowly cartwheeling through the empty nighttime streets of central Amsterdam. It’s a purely sensory interlude that, over nearly five minutes,

imparts a genuine feeling of weightlessness, breaking free of the affectless capture of street scenes and the strictures of listing the barbarities of Occupation. An abstract scene similarly devoid of incident or characters serves as an overture to The Zone of Interest: several minutes of discordant, unnerving sound design with no accompanying visuals appear to be Glazer’s way of acknowledging the presence of unspeakable horrors, before he deliberately leaves them offscreen. But the nocturnal interlude in Occupied City is harder to make sense of. It’s McQueen’s most active intervention in the material, yet it seems to come out of nowhere and has no clear relation to subsequent scenes. Unlike the film’s baked-in intermission, it doesn’t function as a carved-out space for reflection: it’s too engrossing, too sensual. But it does find an echo in a more contemplative segment near the end, in which the camera sits for several minutes in an empty tram that glides through the city and ends up going through an industrial wash. This, in its quiet, unassuming way, is disturbingly equivocal imagery – a reminder, after all we’ve heard, that cleansing can take many forms: moral, spiritual, ethnic. It’s in these moments of restraint, and not when McQueen is shooting the citizens of Amsterdam like they’re in a formicarium, that the film truly begins to haunt. Arjun Sajip

Steve McQueen, Occupied City (still), 2023, documentary film. Courtesy the artist

February 2024

Self-Determination: A Global Perspective Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin 28 October – 21 April After the First World War, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian empires, and the incipient breakup of the British Empire produced several new states in Europe and the Middle East. This ambitious exhibition marks the centenary of the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922, deprovincialising the history of Ireland’s decolonisation by presenting it as part of an international movement – thus doubly distinguishing the country as free from the dominance of the uk, and spiritually closer to mainland Europe. Favouring a revisionist approach to history over a triumphalist one, this show is less a celebration of independence than an exploration of the troubled aftermaths of colonialism. The term ‘global’, though, seems a bit of a stretch. The 200-odd works consist primarily of paintings and archival material from the 1920s and 30s, interspersed with contemporary videos, installations and sculptures reflecting on the legacies of this period, but almost all of the paintings are from countries in Europe (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland and Ukraine, among others), with just one work from Turkey, while Egypt features only via a photograph of Mahmoud Mokhtar’s 1928 allegorical statue Egypt’s Renaissance, pasted on a wall. The exhibition is framed as a study of ‘selfdetermination’, and the term is here largely synonymous with nation-building. Sometimes the art can feel shoehorned into the show’s didactic clusters, which range thematically from monuments and industry to print, language and education. The section titled ‘The Builders’, for example, asks us to compare paintings of labourers from Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Slovenia and Ukraine, interpreting the images as metaphorically constructing those nation-states; yet it’s unclear that the original intention of the works was always so nationalistic. In the Ukrainian painter Onufriy Biziukov’s Sawmills (1930–31) and On the Raft (1932–33), and the Estonian Kuno

Veeber’s Sepad (Blacksmiths, 1926), nationbuilding is evoked in the idealistic merging of labouring bodies with progressive cubist forms. Yet Ukraine was already part of the Soviet Union when Biziukov and most of the other Ukrainian artists included in the exhibition were painting; in the accompanying ‘reader’ we are told that most of these artists were suppressed by ‘Stalinist crackdowns on expressions of Ukrainian identity’. How this might nuance the narrative of the ‘construction of the new state’ in Biziukov’s possibly statecensored paintings is unanswered. The show gives equal if not greater attention to the bleaker aspects of this history. Two clusters – ‘Dividing Lines’ and ‘Out of the Ruins’ – highlight the violence that preceded the formation of the new states and the devastation from which they emerged. The trauma of war is remembered in works such as the Slovenian painter Tone Kralj’s By the Sweat of Thy Brow (1919), in which dejected naked figures, appearing barely alive, crawl abjectly amid thorny roots. With hindsight, some of the most optimistic images now seem the saddest, the Ukrainian paintings especially poignant in the present context: it’s hard to look at Antonina Ivanova’s rendering of cabbage harvesters in Work in the Field (1920s), already emotive in their barefoot, dignified poverty, without imagining the state of that field now. On the whole, the contemporary artworks are deployed to reframe past hopes. Niamh McCann pokes fun at nationalist hero-worship with Stream of Consciousness (2022) – its title referring to Ireland’s giants of modernist literature – which consists of a bronze cast supposedly of the republican revolutionary Michael Collins’s nose, supported by Malacca canes ‘streaming’ from his nostrils. Array Collective’s embossed prints, Modern Church Design – a cross centring on an egglike form – and Bed Design (both 2023) – a template of harder-to-define, possibly foldable triangles –

facing page, top Alan Phelan, Mosquito Man Arthur, 2007, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Dublin City University

we’re told symbolise the marginalisation of women in the Irish Free State. Their ghostly, avoidant blankness could recall the Catholic idealisation of women as ‘immaculate’ and politically invisible, perhaps also hinting at Ireland’s history of hiding injustice; for instance, the abuse experienced at the Magdalene asylums for ‘fallen women’ was long ignored, until their dissolution in 1996. The persistence of such misogyny goes unmentioned in this show, though; with abortion only legalised in Ireland in 2019, it took almost a century for Irish women to have ‘self-determination’ of their own bodies. In her wall piece, After (2016–23), Iz Öztat incorporates a black square that Zis‚an – her ‘alter ego’ – is said to have designed in 1923, the year the Turkish Republic was founded. The square appears on a framed sheet of paper with the caption Felaket, Turkish for ‘Catastrophe’, in Arabic script (echoing the Arabic word with the same meaning, nakba, synonymous with the dispossession of Palestinians after the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948). It recurs, without the caption, within a pattern of red triangles, in reference to the ‘Saturday Mothers’ who, since 1995, have been gathering in Istanbul to protest against the state abduction of mainly Kurdish individuals during the 1980s and 90s (the protesters tend to be dressed in black, carrying red flowers and black-and-red placards). In this context, the void of the square and the work’s opacity could signify the impossibility of mourning the unaccounted-for, implicating the catastrophic displacement of marginalised peoples at the hands of the ‘modern’ republic. Equally, as Zis‚an’s own ink-on-paper answer to Malevich, the shape could refer to the Middle East’s overlooked output of modernist art. Throughout this show, such scepticism among the contemporary artists is less directed at self-determination as an ideal in itself than the realities of its lastingly unequal consequences. Tom Denman

facing page, bottom Banu Cennetoğlu, right?, 2022 (installation view, 58th Carnegie International, 2022, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

February 2024

Books Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? by Rebecca Anne Proctor with Alia Al-Senussi Lund Humphries in association with Sotheby’s Institute of Art, £19.99 (hardcover) If you haven’t been living under a rock during these postpandemic times, you’ll likely have heard about a string of public art projects, Desert Xs and biennials popping up in Saudi Arabia, as well as a string of the type of curators (the Iwona Blazwicks, Phil Tinaris, Neville Wakefields, Uta Meta Bauers) that are running them. This slim book promises some explanation of what’s going on. At the heart of it all is Saudi Crown Prince (and Prime Minister) Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz’s Vision 2030 ‘reform agenda’. He’s popularly known as mbs, but best known for orchestrating a job of human butchery (acknowledged, briefly, here). His vision encompasses top-down investment with the aim of creating social and economic diversification away from the tyranny of oil and into sports, arts and other things that people like, rather than dislike. Although, to be fair, we all continue to consume a lot of oil even while we decry its environmental costs. In any case, the mbs we meet here is a freedom fighter if you like (not just from the nation’s slavish dependence on the black gold, but also, when it comes to art, the authors tell us, from a conservative public created by Conservative Islam, who, and I’m going to shock you here,

don’t like or connect to contemporary art). He’s just trying to get people to relax. And create a favourable environment for local and international investment. Some of it in art. mbs himself is investing in The Line, a 170km-long ‘linear city’ (comprising a single continuous structure). The Line, as others have pointed out, looks like Italian collective Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (shown at moma in 1972), which was intended as a commentary on the uniformity and lack of freedom brought about by an overinvestment in capitalism; but in its Saudi incarnation, it is a monument to freedom (for the reasons given previously). To be fair, the authors of this book have a keen sense of irony/hypocrisy themselves, rightly finding it in many of the (Western) criticisms of Saudi’s arts policy. Those criticisms centre around the fact that the Gulf State is creating an arts infrastructure based on the belief that art is an investment, where it is the case that institutions in, say, the uk deploy the same terminology when faced with government budget cuts. Yet this is not a publication with any real kind of argument, in the sense that those

opposed to the 2030 scheme are not really represented here. The fact of dissent (generally) is acknowledged from time to time, but dissent itself is never given a voice on these pages. Instead there are anonymous voices from Art Basel (criticising Saudi artists who spoke out) and commentary from curators (see above) already on the Saudi payroll. There’s a comparative study of regional competitors (Qatar – for whose museums this reviewer occasionally curates – and the United Arab Emirates) that declares it’s going to make the case for why Saudi is different, but merely concludes that Saudi is focused on its own artists and cultural resources (rather than foreign imports), which are more bountiful than those across its borders as a result of statistical probability: it has a larger population than its neighbours. Disappointingly, then, the brief but not uninteresting chapter on Saudi’s contemporary art history doesn’t go deep enough to really back this verdict up (which is most likely correct). Indeed, given all that, it’s bizarre that this book has come out in a series that aspires to be (under the auspices of the Sotheby’s Institute) academic publishing. It falls far short of that. Mark Rappolt

The Premonition by Banana Yoshimoto Faber, £12.99 (softcover) It’s unsurprising, by now, that in Japanese author Banana Yoshimoto’s latest novella, The Premonition, nothing much happens. It’s like this with most of her stories. (Still, the most heartbreaking is her first, Moonlight Shadow, 1986 – about coming to terms with a world in which a soul has to move on without its mate.) But that’s also where a lot of the beauty of her writing lies – in these short crystalline narratives that follow anomalous characters who find themselves having to navigate ordinary Japanese society and its expectations (be a good child, study hard, enter a steady job, marry well, raise a family, rinse and repeat) into which they don’t ever quite fit. The Premonition’s protagonist is nineteenyear-old Yayoi. She has a loving family, they’ve

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moved into a newly renovated house, and they’re about to buy a puppy – ‘We were the picture of a happy middle-class family, like in that Spielberg movie.’ But if a Spielberg film is one to measure a family by, then it’s safe to assume that something is amiss. Yayoi discovers that she is missing some of her childhood memories, and, as forewarned by the novella’s title, she has the gift of premonition. This ability lies dormant following a tragedy while Yayoi is very young, save for certain conditions. ‘When I was outdoors, on nights the moon shone especially bright, things often felt unbearable.’ Looking for answers, Yayoi reconnects with her estranged aunt Yukino, and finds that their relationship contains the missing pieces of her life. When

ArtReview

Yukino suddenly ups and leaves without a word (a trait that Yayoi shares), Yayoi is accompanied by her brother Tetsuo in her quest to find her aunt and the answers she holds. As truths and revelations are quietly admitted to one another under a dusk-touched tree, their relationship deepens. Yoshimoto has always had this extraordinary ability to convey the ephemeral natures of her main characters in plain yet diaphanous language: ‘she harboured something vast, lost, and familiar, and it was like a siren call to those of us who were missing parts of our childhoods. It was something deeper than night, longer than eternity, out of reach.’ Yoshimoto’s writing could be described the same way. Fi Churchman

February 2024

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Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99 (softcover) Autofiction, done well, disguises its own artificiality. Novels where the first-person ‘I’ resembles the writer – in gender, race or other biographical details – have a diaristic quality to them. Often that’s the goal. Sheila Heti, the Canadian writer known for her relentlessly self-disclosing novels, suggested that one of ‘most vital things in literature today… is to be so close to life that we almost don’t understand what the difference is between the invention and life’. But if a work of autofiction appears to be an unmediated reflection of the writer’s actual life, the reality is anything but. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle (2009–11), for example, appears to be the result of an extraordinarily precise memory, where minor events are recalled in perfect detail. In Heti’s review of volume ii, she described meeting Knausgaard and asking about a scene from his childhood, where he watched his mother peel potatoes on New Year’s Eve. ‘Was that a real memory?’ Heti asked. It wasn’t. Knausgaard had made it up. Why resist the idea that writers of fiction are, well, writing – constructing, arranging, fictionalising? Even Heti is susceptible to this; she admitted that she was disappointed by Knausgaard’s revelation. But she’s a novelist with a conflicted relationship to fiction. In Alphabetical Diaries, constructed from over ten years of her journals, she tells herself: ‘Don’t

make up stories. Don’t make yourself a god.’ Still, she frets about her poor memory and the limitations this creates. ‘What’, Heti asks herself, ‘can a person accomplish in fiction without a memory?’ The answer, for Heti, is to record exhaustively and rely on interlocutors – sometimes people, sometimes technology. In the 2010 novel How Should a Person Be?, Heti used emails and a tape recorder to reconstruct her conversations with other artists and writers. In Motherhood (2018), Heti used coinflips to carry on a conversation, inspired by the I Ching. More recently, Heti has staged conversations between herself and ai chatbots, which became a short story, ‘According to Alice’, published by The New Yorker in 2023. Alphabetical Diaries continues this longrunning interrogation. Heti entered over 500,000 words of her diaries into Excel, then sorted the sentences in alphabetical order. In an approach that merges autofiction with self-quantification, she has turned her interior thoughts into a dataset and then edited the result into 26 brief chapters, from A to Z. The constraint of alphabetisation could easily become tiresome, but Heti’s editing makes this experimental text compelling. It creates distinctive character portraits, like the two pages of sentences prefixed with Claire: ‘Claire is a great artist… Claire said that love has

never been a problem for her… Claire’s choices in life are like strokes on a canvas, decisive.’ The most memorable effect of alphabetisation is to reveal how Heti’s diaries function as a space to construct the self. She writes herself didactic instructions on how to be: ‘Be bald-faced and strange… Be patient and hold on to your vision and integrity.’ Similarly, sentences beginning with Do (or Don’t), Keep and No read like personal commandments: ‘No checking email on a Sunday… No more mysticism, or not so much.’ These instructions soon give way to the searching, existential scrutiny of What and Why: ‘What do I have to be so afraid of? What do I want to do this year?’ The answer follows alphabetically: Write. ‘Write about people slowly… Write by hand.’ And more forcefully: ‘Write your book, you self-indulgent fool. Writing your damn books is the only thing that makes anything worthwhile.’ Heti’s use of alphabetisation, along with her interest in mystical, mathematical and technological processes, might place her in a different lineage of artists and writers than autofiction: less Knausgaard, more Oulipo and Brian Eno (whose Oblique Strategies cards were also inspired by the I Ching). Alphabetical Diaries shows how a simple sorting technique helps Heti get at the truth of her own life, even without a memory. Celine Nguyen

Poverty Creek Journal: On Life and Running by Thomas Gardner Daunt Books, £8.99 (softcover) In 2012 Thomas Gardner kept a journal chronicling 52 runs across Poverty Creek Trail in Virginia. In this small volume, spring is ‘thicker’, the world ‘streaming towards’ him ‘like figures in a silent movie’. Gardner, a literary critic and poet who taught English at Virginia Tech University, works between genres: it is nature prose and a diary; fragmented, it is close to experimental literature and poetry. But mainly it is a work of detailed attention – to the pond he circles, the fog lifting on some days, a snake on the trail, the rain, the temperature. Gardner is incredibly specific (‘steady light rain, 54 degrees’) and time is measurable and quantifiable (a sub-eight-minute mile). But running is also a time when thoughts wander, and on the

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trail everything reminds Gardner of culture: from movies to Virginia Woolf, but especially poetry. He thinks about Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, an American canon of poets who described similar landscapes to the one he is in. He details a sunrise and cites artist Robert Irwin, ‘gradually eliminating line and colour and even the play of light’ from his work. It is also a book about grief. On 29 February 2012, Gardner writes directly, shockingly: ‘My brother John died yesterday, of a heart attack in his sleep. He was fifty-eight.’ After that, Gardner’s life and thoughts are shaped by loss. There is the first run with friends after the funeral (he doesn’t speak of it). There are multiple times when, out on the trail, he

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remembers competing against his brother. There is magical thinking, where Gardner sprints alongside his brother in his mind – racing absence – and finds a kind of presence, a coming together. I run every day over a decommissioned canal turned into a park, a deurbanised part of South London: the result of shut-down factories, bomb damage in the war, housing blocks that were abandoned. Reading Gardner describing the fog, the paths, the woods, I think of a city park, a trail carved out of a former life. In these different landscapes is an analogous motion forward. ‘It’s the dailiness of these runs I like,’ Gardner says in the last entry. This small book, an account of paying attention to the world, is an exercise in how to keep going. Orit Gat

Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, translated by Julia Sanches Pushkin Press, £14.99 (hardcover) Recent postcolonial debates tend to focus on the distant past, in the tracing of the origins of wrongs that, it is often argued, still drive and underwrite the (mostly racial) injustices and inequalities of today. The events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – of slavery, colonial plunder, economic domination and the emergence of racist ideology in the West – loom large in these accounts. One of the consequences of the retracing and rewriting of this long-range history is that lineages, ancestries and descendances have acquired their own charged cultural politics. It is this preoccupation with the moral stain of your forbears that also sets the scene of the Lima-born author and journalist Gabriela Wiener’s partly autofictional memoir. While it is ostensibly about Wiener returning to the story of her feted ancestor, the nineteenth-century explorer Charles, it’s triggered by the death of her father, a lifelong Peruvian leftist. The significance of racial division and mixing, of parentage and bloodlines, in societies divided according to racial difference is what forms the book’s centre of gravity: ‘My father was the only Wiener who didn’t marry a white mestiza,’ Wiener writes. ‘My mom married a white mestizo. But my dad married a chola.’ And Undiscovered is as much about sex and desire as it is the bonds of families. Bisexual, living in a polyamorous threesome with Roci, her ‘white’ Spanish girlfriend, and her ‘cholo’ husband

and their daughter in Madrid, Wiener’s life is a living experiment in transcending the racial and social legacies of the past. Wiener’s struggle throughout is with a desire for rootedness and a terror of inauthenticity, of being an ‘impostor’. Charles was the huaquero, an adventurer who was less an archaeologist than a ‘grave robber’, the selfpromoting, self-aggrandising author of Peru and Bolivia (1880). Wiener’s confrontation with her past, though, is riven with other impostures: there is her father’s peculiar philandering, maintaining a lifelong affair with another woman (even having a daughter with her), creating and maintaining two separate lives. But at heart of it is Charles’s own repudiation of his Jewish roots. Born in Vienna as Karl, he later moved with his family to France at sixteen, where he did everything to evade the era’s pervasive antisemitism, changing his name and converting to Catholicism and finally achieving the ultimate accolade (France’s Légion d’Honneur); in the book’s more fictional moments, Wiener imagines Charles making his speech at the Exposition Universelle of 1878, taking a breath, exhaling and releasing ‘an ancient tension, a rage beyond all comprehension, the pain of not being, being’. A dialectic caused by the guilt of roots and the fear of rootlessness starts to prey on Wiener, who, for all her disgust at what Charles

represents, inexplicably begins to panic when she discovers that, due to an ambiguous Peruvian birth certificate, the family line from Charles to her may be in question. It’s in these contradictions, where the personalisation of the political becomes acute, that the book is most moving. A self-destructive affair while in Lima destabilises the apparent harmony of her family back home; a crisis that leads her to ‘Decolonize My Desire’ sessions with other women of colour, who discuss ‘white people overcome with white guilt who only go near our bodies to fetishize us’. Roci, she decides, ‘wants me because I help her wash some part of the stain of colonialism from her dna’. Wiener’s emotional resolution is found, eventually, through Roci’s unexpected pregnancy; Weiner becoming the other mother to Roci’s son seals their unconventional family unit, in which the ties of blood, patrilineage and even maternal claim are dissolved, or reinvented. Without quite resolving it, Undiscovered captures much of the trouble that comes from decolonisation’s demand that individuals take responsibility for their past, and the strain this poses on one’s sense of identity, especially when one embodies, in one’s genes, both oppressor and oppressed. Though Wiener might not agree, it’s the oppressive burden of a politics that casts people – by the accident of their history – as living representatives of the injustices perpetrated by the dead. J.J. Charlesworth

Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji by Takashi Homma Mack, £35 (softcover) It’s actually really hard to see all of Mount Fuji. Most of the time its peak is shrouded in clouds. Or the entire thing is hidden by a general atmospheric mist, even on a sunny day. The best time to catch a glimpse of the mountain is between November and February at around 8am – if the conditions are clear. Or you could content yourself with taking it in via ThirtySix Views of Mount Fuji, Takashi Homma’s photobook dedicated to Japan’s iconic volcano. It seems important, here, to note that in this book there are in fact 56 photographs of the mountain – but it’s not immediately clear why Homma didn’t stick to the number of images in the title. The title and series of photos is an homage to Hokusai’s famed set of ukiyo-e

prints (c. 1830–32, of which the best known is probably The Great Wave off Kanagawa), the title also later used by Hiroshige for two series of prints, made in 1852 and 1858. Shot using a pinhole camera from various vantage points and distances, Homma’s grainy photos capture Mount Fuji’s elusiveness in a twilight palette of pinks, purples and blues, as well as black-and-white. There’s a vaporosity to the images that situates them within a kind of dreamlike realm, a quality that’s heightened by Homma’s occasional sequencing of two of the same views side-by-side; one pair includes buildings in the foreground, where the sunlight seems to shift so subtly that at first it’s easy to miss that one is shot during sunrise and the

February 2024

other in the gloaming. Another pair, where one image is saturated in a deep Prussian blue reminiscent of Hokusai’s prints and speckled with blurred, multicoloured beads of light from a nearby town, and the other is developed in high-contrast black-and-white, somehow feels evocative of the seconds between being awake and falling asleep. Homma’s photos join the lineage of Thirty-Six Views – the Hokusais and Hiroshiges that have contributed to casting the mountain as an immovable, recognisable and commercially reproduced feature of Japan’s landscape. But in capturing its indefinable and transient qualities, Homma’s photographs allow Mount Fuji to gently unfurl in the haze of the everyday. Fi Churchman

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On the cover Adaptation of a poster for Steamboat Willie, 1928, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the debut of Mickey Mouse

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 41 and 71 are by Lao She, Cat Country, 1932 (trans William A. Lyell, 1970)

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